Community Movement and Social Change during the 1980s Bubble Economy and its Aftermath

Abstract

This paper focuses on the local people’s reaction and community movement against the agents’ assault of buying up small plots of land around Tokyo downtown areas for consolidation and resale during the period of 1980s bubble economy in Japan. At first I describe the research method and fact-findings of our field survey we did at that time around Tokyo downtown areas. Landscape and social change of those neighborhoods was so drastic and so huge that the transformation of those neighborhoods was thought to be directly related to the fundamental industrial and cultural change toward so to speak an international and information-oriented society. In some areas local people couldn’t do anything against those agents’ working scheme, but in some other areas community people’s effort to continue living seemed to be partly successful regardless of the landscape change. So we could categorize those neighborhoods into several groups based on the location of the neighborhood in the city and community’s cooperative effort, and social effects of the urban renewal process were different from group to group. The population of those neighborhoods had continued to decrease for more than thirty years due to the so-called donut phenomenon, but since 1995 (i.e. several years after the babble economy), the population has increased there because, corresponding to people's tendency for living in city centers, conditions of the residential area have been improved and an increasing number of condominiums have been constructed. After describing the mechanism of those changes, I discuss what social meanings those changes of social atmosphere had in the long run.