THE CONSUMABLE CITY

[It] blows fire, breaking the darkness
The super city flies up into the sky

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TOKIO TOKIO flies in the night

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You can obtain whatever you want from A to Z
The super city works miracles for the dreaming lovers
— Sawada Kenji

"TOKIO," a song about two lovers in a futuristic city, was released on January 1, 1980, at a time when Japan's "economic miracle" was in full force. Sung by the androgynous male vocalist Sawada Kenji, it became an instant hit, selling more than three hundred thousand copies. Kenji envisioned "TOKIO," spelled as English speakers pronounce it, as a "super city" — a place where everything is obtainable and anything is possible. The song's fantasy was not so farfetched. Having fully recovered from the devastation of World War II, Japan's export-based economy was flooding global markets with high-quality, low-cost industrial goods, while its competitors were still shaking off the previous decade's oil shocks. In the 1980s, Tokyo underwent massive restructuring and achieved great prosperity. Reflecting the lyrics of the song, the city soared into the night sky and turned "into a star" — a global city.

Of course, the miracle was not just a gift of economic globalization. Tokyo has been one of the most populated cities in the world since the premodern period when it was called Edo and served as the political capital of the Tokugawa shogunate. Since then, Tokyo has reached prominence for hosting the 1964 Olympics and showcasing Japan's economic miracle for Western audiences. During the 1980s, Tokyo was reimagined as a global city that would attract greater foreign investment. The results have had far-reaching ramifications. Tokyo today is a "hyper" urban stage, where actors ranging from political leaders to pop stars to consumers project politico-economic interests and sociocultural fantasies. Indeed, the city itself has been rendered into an object of consumption.

This chapter traces the historical development and transformation of Tokyo's futuristic cityscape since the 1980s, as the city became a target of state-led neoliberal restructuring. Commerce-centered planning further shaped the production of the city, while consumers were given the keys to the new and exciting wonderland. A flexible labor force rapidly assembled to produce and respond to the resulting demands and desires. I show how Tokyo has shaped such a phenomenal world, an affective cityscape, in which young people visualize and experience their hopes and dreams, as well as despair, as they seek upward social mobility in Japan's service economy. I trace the unprecedented changes in the city's topography and its symbolic meanings before and after Japan's bubble economy in the late 1980s and then during the prolonged post-bubble era. In the face of these socioeconomic shifts, I argue that political and cultural visions of a city as a site where individuals can fulfill their hopes and dreams have not only remained consistent; they have ideologically intensified as a pressing national project.

This imagined space, in turn, evokes an array of emotional and interpretational responses, which shape and fuel what I call "affect economies." These marketplaces — where feelings, emotions, and lifestyles are bought and sold in the form of labor and/or consumption — construct the affective cityscape of Tokyo. Among the most visible sites are Japan's host clubs, located in Tokyo's red-light districts.

Promise of Tokyo

By itself, Tokyo is an economic juggernaut. The metropolis generates more than $1.616 trillion annually, more than a third of Japan's total GDP. Its GDP is equivalent to that of Canada and Australia, the world's eleventh- and twelfth-largest economies, respectively. The annual budget of Tokyo's metropolitan government alone is equal to the size of South Korea's national budget. It is the world's largest metropolitan economy.

Tokyo's global economic strength is the result of multiple state-led negotiations and private-sector projects initiated in the early and mid1980s. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro (1982–1987) introduced many of these initiatives. Responding to and manipulating business demand for office space and residential demands for affordable housing, Nakasone ardently promoted deregulation of the city's zoning laws and the privatization of government land to build office towers. A year following his election, Japan's Ministry of Construction relaxed building codes, as well as restrictions on commercial zoning and urban fringe land development. The result was an enormous increase in high-rise buildings and city subcenters.

That same year, Nakasone's cabinet also promoted private investment in urban development. This eventually led to the breakup and privatization of Japan Railways, which sold off a number of its underperforming assets in Tokyo. The "Urban Renaissance," driven by the mutual interests of state leaders and corporate investors, was becoming a well-orchestrated national project.

The burst of urban development that followed fueled an unprecedented boom in the real estate market. In tandem with the strengthening of the Japanese yen and low interest rates that followed the 1985 Plaza Accord, Tokyo's real estate prices increased to the point that the total value of the city's land was purportedly worth as much as all the land in the United States. With neoliberal reforms enabling extensive deregulation in construction and advanced architectural engineering, skyscrapers in business and commercial areas embodied these lofty visions. The fantastic fevered imaginations of "TOKIO," the metonym of the Japanese nation-state, seemed to have come true.

Nakasone's initiatives also pressured the metropolitan administration and the central government to accelerate politico-economic reforms and transition Japan from an export-oriented model to one based on domestic consumption. Tokyo metropolitan governor Suzuki Shunichi announced Tokyo's future as his main goal in the 1986 Long Term Plan of the Tokyo Metropolis: "Ongoing internationalization has opened the possibility of creating a glorious future for Tokyo with the approach of the 21st century. We must make the most of this golden opportunity to build Tokyo into an attractive international city of which our descendants, let alone ourselves, can be proud." The announcement was made shortly after the relocation of the metropolitan government to Shinjuku, one of Tokyo's gleaming new subcenters. Tokyo residents were attracted to Suzuki's promise of furthering economic possibilities and prosperity. They elected him to a second term in 1987.

While public support for Suzuki's futuristic vision heralded the flourishing of urban redevelopment projects for the rest of the decade, the significance of Tokyo's ascent in the global order was not fully understood at that time. Investments in these development projects were still considered highly...