‘Beautiful Town’: the discovery of the suburbs and the vision of the garden city in late Meiji and Taishō literature

Abstract

In the Taishō period (1912–26), a number of planned residential towns burgeoned on the outskirts of Tokyo, commonly called garden cities (den'en toshi) because of the term's idyllic, modern and Western connotations. The first part of this article argues that the suburb was in part precipitated by literary works that contributed significantly to the discovery of the aesthetic and poetic qualities of the suburb through an interpretation of Western romantic literature. The focus of analysis is Kunikida Doppo's Musashino (1898), with reference to related works by Kōtoku Shūsui, Tokutomi Roka, Tayama Katai and Yanagita Kunio. The second part of this article will focus on the works of Satō Haruo to examine the literary representation of the garden city in its early stage of development. Equipped with an architectural and town planning vision as well as an understanding of the West (or at least a fictional West), romanticism, cosmopolitanism and modernism, Satō created a diorama in his work to serve as a poetic response to existing suburban communities and an inspiration for garden cities. This article examines both actual and fictional suburban garden cities and thus blends historical and social data with literary analysis to explore how literature intersects with urban/suburban development.