ABSTRACT
Prior to the end of the American occupation of Japan, the United States military controlled over 100 facilities in the Kanto Plain – ranging from bases to ammunition depots to dependent housing areas to milk processing facilities – that together required a tremendous amount of land in a region of the country that included the nation’s capital. The Kanto area maintained a strong military presence even after 1952, which unsurprisingly became an issue as the metropolis of Tokyo rapidly expanded. Planners regularly found themselves wanting for space, and the U.S. military controlled thousands of acres in prime development zones. Thinking about this issue of land use, I will draw reference to Mark Gillem’s discussion of the imperial design and function of American military outposts, in which he asserts that since most military maps show little detail outside of the base itself, it is not uncommon for American military planners in foreign countries to view that land as a blank slate upon which a spacious American model of design can be imposed. (See Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, p. 124, p. 128.) This presentation will examine the tabula rasa phenomenon from the opposite perspective. For Japanese land use planners the space within the base boundaries represented the blank slate upon which new plans could be drawn once the United States ceded control back to Japan. I will discuss how Japan regained control of land occupied by American forces in the Kanto Plain and then the transformation of those militarized landscapes into new urban green spaces. I will explore the rationale of the new land use plans and the degree to which the footprint of occupation was erased by the new landscape design.
