An Aftermath of Globalisation? East Asian Economic Turmoil and Japanese Cities Adrift

Abstract

City-regions in Japan, along with its national economy at large, suffered a long lasting recession in the 1990s. In retrospect, this recession was a precedent of or a prelude to the east Asian economic crisis of 1997. The sequence of financial crashes and subsequent recessions that swept over east Asian economies in the past decade is recognisable as an aftermath of economic globalisation since the 1980s in this region. The urban economic malaise in major Japanese cities, Tokyo and Osaka in particular, can be explained by contradictory relations between two major dimensions of globalisation: globalisation of goods-producing/trading activities and that of financial trades. After describing what happened in the Tokyo and Osaka economies in the 1990s, the paper attempts to explain why it happened, applying the two-dimensional model of globalisation.