The Background

Abstract

In Japan the situation of the great cities is uniquely difficult for a number of reasons. In the first place they have exceptionally large populations, even exceeding the Indian cities. Tokyo, the largest city in the world, has 11.4 million inhabitants. Seven Japanese cities each have more than one million inhabitants, apart from a daily influx of commuters. (In Osaka the net day population is 3.85 million compared with a night population of 2.98 million, a net influx of 29.4 per cent.¹) The most intractable Japanese problems are concentrated in the three giant cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, and it is mainly with these that I shall be concerned. The Tokyo figure mentioned above referred to the Metropolitan area, as of September 1970 (the census month). It is doubtless larger now. Completely contiguous with it but politically separated by a prefectural boundary is Yokohama, with a 2.2 million population. Osaka has as yet no formal Metro organisation but in addition to its own population of nearly three million there are 5.3 million in the surrounding areas, who on tests both of propinquity and work belong to the city.