Impact of Industrialisation on Cities in Japan: The Past and Future of Osaka

Abstract

Today, many large cities in Japan have the features of an industrial city. Following the modernisation of the Meiji period, the combination of industrialisation and urbanisation served as the engine of rapid growth in large cities across Japan. This chapter describes how a city changes when the balance of industrialisation and urbanisation changes in Japan. This chapter discusses the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation which ran in parallel in Osaka, which has been a major industrial city in Japan. Then, the issues that resulted from the parallel progress of urbanisation and industrialisation will be presented, focusing on environmental pollution in Osaka in particular. This chapter then describes how Osaka, an industrial city, changed when industrial production declined from the 1970s onwards, just as had been experienced by many industrial cities in Europe.