Culture, Community and Change in a Sapporo Neighborhood, 1925-1988: Hanayama
By John Mock
The Edwin Mellen Press, (1999)
ISBN 0-7734-7974-0
Review by Sean Curtin
Less than half a century ago, a powerful sense of local identity was an integral part of Japanese life. Today, the basic composition of most communities has been significantly altered by seismic population shifts, relentless urban expansion and vastly improved transportation networks. By blending contemporary ethnography with accounts of local history, John Mock's new book attempts to convey some of the massive social changes which occurred in local Japanese living patterns over a period of six decades. The mighty northern island of Hokkaido forms the dramatic backdrop for Mock's research.
Hokkaido already boasts an excellent body of English language material on its indigenous Ainu people, who shaped the island's landscape and history long before the arrival of Japanese colonists. However, until the last decade, there has been a definite deficit of research written in English on the lives of the territory's non-Ainu, 'ordinary' citizens. One of Mock's declared aims is to help redress this imbalance by presenting the ethnographic history of Hanayama, a small district of Hokkaido's bustling capital city, Sapporo.
Mock conducted his main research in Sapporo between 1975 and 1976, continuing intermittently up until about 1988. During this period the social fabric of the Hanayama neighbourhood underwent several metamorphoses. Mock has gathered a solid body of oral history on the neighbourhood, but does not give us any precise details about how many interviews were conducted. He claims that as an outsider, his local informants tended to be more open with him than they would be with an insider. This outsider status apparently made him a safe person to confide in. He divides his analysis of Hanayama into three phases, spanning 1925 to 1945, 1945 to 1965 and 1965 to 1988. Each of these forms a separate and lengthy chapter.
To place Hanayama and Sapporo in their correct Japanese context, it is necessary to know something about the history of Hokkaido itself. Mock supplies the background in his first main chapter, concentrating on the period up until 1925. Present day Hokkaido retains its image of a peripheral frontier territory, with many Japanese still regarding it as a somewhat 'backward' and 'underdeveloped' region. Its geographical separation from the rest of Japan enhances the belief that it is somehow outside the orbit of mainstream Japanese life. This physical isolation consolidates Sapporo's stature as the territory's premier city, strengthening its claim to be the true capital of the North. This regional dominance makes it a powerful magnet for rural migrants. Comparisons with other provincial capitals are difficult as Sapporo occupies a unique position amongst major Japanese cities.
In the chapters on Hanayama, Mock gives us an even mix of history and contemporary ethnography, revealing the enormous amounts of variation and complexity in over half a century of community life. He takes us from Hanayama's genesis as a small farming settlement, through its gradual absorption into the nascent Sapporo. What was once a hardy outpost was slowly transformed into a pleasant neighbourhood of the new city. As the juggernaut of urbanization relentlessly picked up momentum, the social identity of the community continually mutated, creating fresh social networks as newcomers were assimilated.
Due to non-stop population influxes, the absorption process became dysfunctional and the once unique local character was slowly submerged under the ever-increasing weight of migration into the area. Finally, Hanayama lost its cohesion as a social entity. In many respects, Hanayama's own local history reflects some of the broader historical forces that have shaped the rest of Hokkaido and Japan.
If there is one constant in the Hanayama story, it is that of continual population expansion. It started life as part of a sparsely manned five-farm settlement run by early colonial militia. When Mock's account begins in 1925, the little outpost had evolved into a small community comprising about 200 people. This grew to about 550 by 1965, and to 1,100 by 1975. By the end of Mock's research in 1988, the population had increased by another 500. This kind of spectacular growth has been replicated throughout Japan, reminding us of the humble origins of many modern Japanese cities.
Categorizing his subjects by age, gender and occupation, Mock brings more clearly into focus some of the major social changes that have occurred in Hanayama, Sapporo and Hokkaido. This helps the reader to better interpret the complex socio-economic forces that have shaped community development on the island. As a by-product of faithfully recording Hanayama's past, Mock's research can also be used to construct some possible evolutionary trajectories for social life in districts of Hokkaido that currently retain their rural character. Some of Hanayama's extinct social practices, such as the custom of neighbourhood introductions by new arrivals, are still to be found in many rural areas. Hanayama's developmental path indicates that such aspects of village life may not survive the ravages of modernization.
Mock explains Hanayama's decline as a distinctive social entity in terms of continuous migratory waves that eroded the pre-existent social patterns and customs.
Although outside the scope of Mock's thesis, this analysis also offers several enlightening contrasts to the present depopulation trends witnessed in most of Hokkaido's rural towns. The voices of several rural migrants in the chorus of Hanayama's oral history provide crucial insights into their reasoning. Most complain of the socially restrictive life of rural hamlets, which offer few opportunities. The lack of privacy in rural life and the lure of the more impersonal city encourages many to leave their native towns and villages. Ironically, it is the desire of those coming from closely-knit communities to live less socially restrictive lives that eventually leads to the decline of Hanayama's own social cohesiveness. Conversely, many countryside communities have become more socially interdependent as a result of massive population exodus.
The testimony of Hanayama's rural newcomers is extremely useful as studies on rural depopulation generally tend to lack the views of those who have already left.
As a countermeasure designed to staunch the rural people-flow, many of Hokkaido's towns and villages launched aggressive, and occasionally notorious, campaigns to stabilize their populations and attract young women for local bachelors to marry. This effort was also assisted by the national government, which pumped millions of yen into countryside development schemes. The testimony of Hanayama's rural migrants gives us an insight into why such efforts were generally unsuccessful. This book sheds a little light on the complex dynamics that inextricably span the rural-urban divide. Researchers studying contemporary rural Japan will find this an excellent source of comparative material.
The present-day Hanayama is located near the entertainment district of Susukino, which is (in)famous for its lively nightlife scene. This proximity was one of the factors that brought about rapid social change in this once tightly woven community. A large influx of transitory workers involved in the entertainment business accelerated the ongoing destruction of the community's social networks. Because of the neighbourhood's nearness to the Susukino district, Mock also includes some interesting material on the bar hostess residents of Hanayama. This complements some of his earlier work on these women, making Mock somewhat of an authority on such workers.
Mock's account of Hanayama only goes up to the end of the eighties, which was a relatively prosperous time for the territory. Many of the island's chronic social and economic ailments were hidden by the glare of the bubble economy period. This explains why we hear very little of these issues in the testimony presented in this book.
For well over a decade, however, the exceptionally precarious state of the regional economy has been exposed by a string of devastating financial calamities. The most spectacular was the 1997 collapse of Hokkaido Takushoku Bank, which was the prefecture's largest bank. This failure shook the island economy to its core and led to an island-wide chain reaction of bankruptcies from which Hokkaido is still only partially recovered. The 2002 closure of the Taiheiyo Coal Mine in Kushiro also represented a severe setback for the entire region as well as a social disaster for the mining community.
Sapporo has weathered the long economic downturn surprisingly well, retaining the vibrant metropolitan aura described in Mock's book. Today, the city is home to over a third of the island's population. Practically everyone has a relative or two living somewhere within its ever-expanding boundaries. Over the last decade the city's position as the locus of Hokkaido's socio-economic life has been strengthened, making Mock's research even more valuable.
Despite the many good features of this work, there are several areas that need improvement. The most serious weaknesses are the lack of detail about the methodology behind the study and of a comprehensive explanation of the theory underpinning the book's basic structure. Apart from a very brief paragraph at the end of the introduction, Mock reveals almost nothing about his research techniques. This constantly leaves the reader wondering exactly what information-gathering methods were used. Did the author use questionnaires or surveys, for instance? Some of his conclusions would seem to imply he might have, but the reader is just left guessing.
As mentioned, the basic structure of the analysis divides Hanayama into three time phases, spanning 1925 to 1945, 1945 to 1965 and 1965 to 1988. It is not explained at the outset why these parameters are established. Instead, explanations are scattered around the various chapters on each of the separate phases. Explaining coherently the reasoning behind the delineation of each of these time periods would have given the work much better clarity and greatly enhanced the overall analysis.
Data presentation could also have been better. Of the 39 tables in the book, only six have sources and four of these are from an earlier work by another scholar. The layout of some of the tables is poor, making it rather difficult to read the figures correctly. Tables 24 and 25 are good examples of this problem. A few maps to illustrate the development of Hanayama between 1965 and 1988 would also have made it easier to understand how the district grew. None of the oral accounts given by the subjects has the date when it was recorded, which makes it difficult to put the comments into a clear context for historical analysis. This problem could easily have been rectified with footnotes, which are absent from the entire work.
Mock may have felt that footnotes might distract the reader, but a few would certainly have helped. Some of the general information is completely out of date and needs to be revised. For example, Russia is continually referred to as the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist in 1991. Since there are references up to 1996, this oversight should have been rectified. A reference to a shinkansen station in Sapporo (p. 3) are mystifying.
Editing and proofreading are other areas that need more attention. There are inconsistencies in the spelling of Japanese names, for example "Asahikawa" and "Asahigawa" are alternated throughout the book. Better proofreading would have eliminated most of the numerous typos which pepper the text. A few typing errors even sneak into the final paragraph of the conclusion, distracting attention from the author's summation.
Despite these various shortcomings, this book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of non-Ainu-related English language research literature on Japan's most northerly prefecture. It is certainly one of the most comprehensive English language ethnographic studies on Hokkaido to appear in recent years, offering an excellent introduction to the dynamics that have shaped urban living patterns in Sapporo and many other cities.
For those more familiar with Sapporo, Mock also sheds some light on the little known lifestyles of workers in the entertainment district. After reading this book, visiting the city's Susukino area will never feel quite the same. With this work and his earlier research on Sapporo bar hostesses, Mock has additionally made a major contribution to illuminating the lives of women engaged in the murky entertainment world.