| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Jeffrey E. Hanes. The City as Subject: Seki Hajime and the Reinvention of Modern Osaka. (Twentieth-Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 348. $45.00.

Seki Hajime (1873–1935) served the city of Osaka as deputy mayor from 1914 until his death in 1935. As a municipal official, he vowed to transform the city from a "Capital of Smoke" to a "Livable City." He presided over the expansion of the city boundaries in 1925 and the completion of the first subway in 1933. In contrast to landowners and bureaucrats who treated urban areas as economic objects, Seki viewed cities as "social subjects" (p. 174), "vital organs" of the people's national economy (p. 175). In the title of the book, then, the word city refers not to the actual Osaka but to Seki's ideal of the city as a living organism. Although Jeffrey E. Hanes privileges the city in his title and relegates Seki to the subtitle, this book is not about either the particular city of Osaka or even the abstract idea of cities. Rather, it is a thoughtful, carefully researched intellectual biography of Seki. 1

For his sketch of Seki's early years, Hanes makes imaginative use of family photographs. By taking into account the conventions of portraiture in Meiji Japan, he teases out an image of a young man forced by his father's early death to take responsibility for his mother and brothers. Surviving photographs provide visual traces of Seki's education at Tokyo Commercial College (from which he graduated in 1893), his career in business education, and his trip abroad under the sponsorship of the Education Ministry. Seki married in 1902, the year after he returned from Europe via America. Through the camera lens we see him as the head of a three-generation family, his mother holding the first of his seven children. . . .

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