ABSTRACT
Understanding Tokyo and Seoul necessitates a different conception of the world system from that underlying the globalist version of the world city argument. World cities differ from one another in many salient respects because they are lodged within a non-hegemonic and interdependent world political economy divided among dif-ferently organized national systems and regional alliances. The global economy is spatially imbedded in Tokyo, to be sure, but Tokyo is not primarily a global basing-point for the operations of stateless transnational corporations (TNC). Rather, Tokyo is mainly a national basing-point for the global operations of Japanese TNCs. Tokyo offers corporations global control capability, but the primary vehicle is not private financial and producer services clus-tered into complexes by market forces. The practice of global control in Tokyo has not resulted in a social regime characterized by massive loss in manufacturing jobs, high levels of foreign immigration, extreme wealth concentration and social and spatial polarization.
