Situated Research Progress

The purpose of our project is to get a better understanding of urbanization by studying the impacts of urban intensification in the cities of Japan. Urbanization has occurred across the globe for the purpose of advancing industry and modernizing a nation. Like most of the world, Japan’s urbanization has taken place within the last century. Most of Japan’s urbanization took place after the Second World War. As Japan regrew, following their losses in the war, they sought to further modernize, which included an increase in industry resulting in a restructuring of the stratification of their population. Our project seeks to study the impact urbanization has on environmental health, and more specifically the impacts of Japanese cities post-WWII.

As we have been working on our situated research on urbanization of Japan, we have encountered questions that will spur the direction of our research. We have solidified that we will examine the “urban-ocene” in Japan as the golden spike that defines the new era in Japan. We recognize people have been living in Japan for a very long time so the anthropocene is not the best term to distinguish the recent changes in Japan. And the capitalocene implies a shift once the Japanese adopted capitalism, which although is relevant, does not represent the truest story of the change in Japan. But urbanization, as it should be for this project, is a very multifaceted change that affects more than just what one might expect. Our concept map process helped us sift through all these actors and processes that are contained within urbanization. This concept map proved helpful for us for positioning the various factors we learned about in our scholarship. Though the concept map leaves us thinking of where we might take the direction of this project. It is important to deal with all the factors and processes included in urbanization, but it is possible that we might be drawn to a more specific direction of the project. This is the current stage of our project, and is still subject to change in specificity.