The Space Between

Any discussion of cities in Japan usually begins with Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto – and with good reason: these are the most important administrative, commercial, and historic centres in this country. Unfortunately, the discussion usually stops with these three places, and there is no good reason for this short of ignorance or inattention. Until about five years ago, I doubt if the name ‘Fukuoka’ had ever come near my consciousness, so my recent research into Fukuoka’s history and its place in the world hopes to correct my own inattention and ignorance. This is a surprisingly rich area, both historically and on the contemporary scene. In another essay on this site, I mention that I am fond of seeing big things in small places; in the case of Fukuoka, I prefer to say that I see big things in a moderately sized place. No one should call an urban area with nearly five million residents ‘small’ – Tokyo and Osaka are usually seen as Japan’s ‘big cities’ but really they are unreasonably large. I will leave further statistics and superlatives to the prefectural and city governments – both represented by web sites partially translated into English – and move on to geography and history.

There is another ‘Fukuoka’ on the other side of Japan, in Okayama prefecture. This was the birthplace of Kuroda Nagamasa, an ally of the first Tokugawa shogun, and he brought the name with him when he came to this area at the beginning of the seventeenth century to build a castle here and set up shop as lord of the district. The Kuroda family supplied the daimyo of Chikushû – as this region was known in the Edo period (1600-1868) – and the area around their castle developed as a ‘castle town’ called Fukuoka. Before they arrived, a ‘merchant town’ called Hakata already existed here; the two cities developed side by side, roughly divided by the Nakagawa river, rather like Buda and Pest. The two areas – Fukuoka and Hakata – developed distinct characters, due in part to the Edo period’s attempt to segregate the merchant class (in Hakata) and the samurai class (in Fukuoka). In addition, Hakata people always retained a sense of themselves as heirs to a long tradition of local settlement, and the Fukuoka side continues to be seen as the city of newcomers. Political power was solidly on the Fukuoka side, and when the cities merged in 1889, the name ‘Fukuoka’ came to be applied to the whole area.

It is important to keep this historical dynamic in mind, because we need to use both names to talk about the city, depending on the context. If we are to speak of political arrangements, such as local government and planning, we must use ‘Fukuoka’. But if the topic turns to transportation and trade, we must use ‘Hakata’: the port and the principal train station are both still called ‘Hakata’ and not ‘Fukuoka’. Local foods and crafts are identified with ‘Hakata’, as is the local dialect. This is the first lesson Fukuoka offers about Japanese culture in general: local autonomy has always been a powerful force in this country’s history, even when it comes to be submerged in a national polity.

Hakata port was historically one of the principal entry points of continental culture to Japan, making this a particularly rich area for contemporary archaeology. Several roughly successive ‘gateways’ were built here by the central government, beginning in the seventh century. Hakata continued as a port of foreign trade until the Edo government proscribed Nagasaki as the sole port in Japan with this function. We should not assume, however, that this resulted in Hakata losing a role in the international movement of goods and ideas. The Kuroda clan was among the daimyo families charged with guarding Nagasaki, and foreign goods in trade continued to move through Hakata throughout the Edo period. Chinese and Korean influences on food, festivals, and popular culture are strong in north Kyushu, and this was also the area most powerfully influenced by Christianity before the Edo period. We can sense from the historical record that the central government always had its hands full keeping Kyushu in line.

Movements of goods and people have shaped Fukuoka’s settlement patterns and function as an urban area. In the distant past, our region saw some of the earliest wet rice cultivation in Japan, and with it came new ideas about community organization and political systems from Korea and China. Contemporary Fukuoka has developed in a context of shifting regional priorities in trade and transportation – with heavy industries based in and around northeast Kyushu giving way to service industries based in Fukuoka itself. This city continues to be a ‘space between’ – it is a transit point and a place of translation from one people to another. It is a place at once confident and unsure of itself – long established and locally proud, as well as transient and uncertain.

2002/05/29

Date posted: 2003-09-01