Formation and Development of a Japanese Colonial City: Dalian from 1899 to 1945

Abstract

Japanese cities are generally characterized as residentially homogeneous. This homogeneity is primarily preserved by ethnic singularity in Japan. A few studies postulate the existence of residential segregation in Japanese cities by differences in economic and social status. This is true in some cities strongly influenced by Japanese pre-war industrialization such as Osaka and Kobe. A previous paper by the author has already pointed out three residentially segregated areas in Osaka before 1945, and assumed the existence of a concentric residential structure. But it is recognized that differences in ethnicity and religion strongly affect residential location and form tight residential structures. Because of the lack of this ethnic pluralism in Japan, the study of Japanese residential segregation has not produced fruitful results. But ethnic pluralism was clearly observed in several pre-war Japanese colonial cities. In addition, a great deal of material and information written in Japaneseis available for such cities. Regrettably, the study of pre-war Japanese colonial cities is still at the primitive stage and of course an analytical framework is hardly developed. Before 1945, Japan ruled many colonial cities. In some cities, Japanese authority was powerfully committed and altered the native urban administrative system. Dalian had at first been constructed by the Russians in 1899 and five years later was occupied by the Japanese. Unlike other Japanese colonial cities, Dalian was newly constructed on virgin land and its city form was more rigidly planned. At the end of World War II, nearly two hundred thousand Japanese lived there, 28% of the total population of Dalian. In 1940, there were eleven colonial cities whose share of foreigners were over the highest rate in Japan proper (the 13.1% of Osaka). Dalian was ranked third in percentage and ranked second in total numbers of foreign population next to Mukden. (The author lays stress on the very rapid urban population increase, ethnic-biased employment structure and male-female ratio). Three major issues stand out in colonial cities such as Dalian. First, unlike Japanese cities, urban management and planning were carried out more extensively by the central government than the local one. For example, the sphere of municipal authority in Dalian was well restricted by the central government and did not reach the level of that in Japan until the extension of civic responsibility in 1937. Instead, the South Manchurian Railway Company had greater charge of constructing urban infrastructure, acting together with the central government, and these two big powers directly administering city affairs made Dalian a forerunner in town planning especially. Second, Dalian concurrently possessed the following features of urban construction prevalent in the latter part of the nineteenth century: a well executed baroque style of town landscaping by the Russians, a suburban residential district for the Japanese middle class, housing estates for factory workers, and a grid pattern originally developed by the staff of the South Manchurian Railway Company. This kind of town landscaping, however, never fails to give rise to enforcement of acts that determine discriminative residential segregation. This is the third issue. In the process of this enforcement, the following principle was in force: that a residential ethnic zone should have boundaries which constitute barriers of a kind preventing or discouraging contact between ethnic groups and should be an ethnically homogeneous community. In fact, a small ridge running south to north was chosen to divide the Chinese residential area to the west from the foreigners' area to the east. A gentle slope up to the south guaranteed psychological dominance and other amenites on an overlocking height; this slope was monopolized by a population 90% Japanese. The existence of a high proportion of Japanese white collar residents created demand for more suburban estates, and thus even beyond the mountain area many comfortable suburban housing districts were developed whose atmosphere appeared up-to-date to Japanese at that time. In contrast, there were also residentially segregated areas of Chinese previously determined by the Russians. The share of Chinese population on the west side of the ridge was well over 90%. Outside the town planning area were scattered many spontaneous settlements mainly located on the steep slope of the mountainside. But the extreme case was found in isolated camps for port laborers and ricksha men in the city. These strict rules of residential segregation by ethnicity were not carried out in all areas in Dalian. The CBD area could not help admitting well-off Chinese merchants contributing to the economic development of Dalian. In the CBD area consisting of 18 districts, the average share of foreign population was 60.6%. In these ethnically mixed areas, some residents were segregated according to differences in social class. This means that residential segregation was determined first by ethnicity and second by social class in spite of the existence of the“Ghetto Act” mentioned above. Dalian. was rather loosely segregated compared to the cities of the Republic of South Africa after the enforcement of the Group Areas Act of 1950. © 1985, The Human Geographical Society of Japan. All rights reserved.