Research Trends in Japanese Urban Geography since 1980

Abstract

Already more than 30 years have passed since the IGC was held in Tokyo. In that time, Japan's cities have gone through major transformations, but that is in large part due to having experienced the appreciation of land values during the bubble economy of the late 1980s. In urban cores during the bubble, land rushes drove prices to appreciate, and that spilled over into the suburbs as well. The supply of residences in suburbs grew, and this facilitated the expansion of business and commercial functions into the suburbs. However, the drop in and stabilisation of land prices following the collapse of the bubble prompted the supply of tower type condominiums in the surrounding areas of CBDs and also had a tremendous impact on the expansion of business function and retail sites. This paper tackles what urban geography involves and what it explains about environmental changes in urban areas of Japan. After the collapse of the bubble, people were impacted on a global scale by synchronised terrorist attacks, the Lehman Shock and other events. The various activities of people living and working in cities often became the focus of urban geographical studies, and that continues to this day. This paper sheds light on that trend in Japan's geography circles.