Asakusa ‘Newtown’: the transformation of outcaste space in early modern Edo/modern Tokyo

Abstract

This paper examines the historical transformation of urban outcaste areas into commoner neighbourhoods in early modern/modern Japan. Focusing on Tokyo's largest early modern outcaste community, an Asakusa area referred to as Shinchō (literally ‘Newtown’), the paper argues that a combination of factors, namely the historical processes of urbanization, status group consolidation, labour specialization, capital accumulation, and inter-status group network creation, created an elite stratum of neighbourhood residents who were reasonably well-integrated into the broader social and economic landscape of Edo by the late Tokugawa period. This movement towards desegregation in turn laid important foundations for the later administrative and conceptual incorporation of the Shinchō area into the broader metropolitan area. Wide-ranging entrepreneurial activities by members of this elite class in the early Meiji period further built on and propelled these changes although they also facilitated their eventual exodus from the community. Proto-capitalist development, however, while clearly capable of inducing an emancipatory effect for some key elites figures and while enabling the neighbourhood itself to become more closely identified with an emerging working class Asakusa, also worked to create a substratum of people subjected to a compounded form of discrimination that took place along both traditional status and newly emerging modern capitalistic lines.