THE PUBLIC INTEREST: UNDERSTANDING THE STATE AND CITY PLANNING IN JAPAN

Abstract

The recent development of civil society in Japan has created an increased demand for accountability of public policy. An important outcome of this development is that it has led to an intense exploration of the concept of the public interest in planning processes. Having said so, a comprehensive analysis of the public interest in the development of Japanese planning is absent from the literature. This absence is particularly noteworthy as discourses of the public interest are central in understanding the development of the modern state and public policy. The purpose of this paper is to address the current gap in the literature, by deconstructing the origins and developments of the public interest in Japan’s process of modernisation and analysing how the concept has contributed to planning policy development. The analysis shows that the nation-state has been and continues to be identified as the centre of both public and private domains. Although the boundaries between the state and the market have become increasingly blurred, the role of civil society has remained severely conditioned. Moreover, the concept of ‘public’ as sociability is non-existent and the mould of gender roles have been fixated by public policy. As a result, the concept of the public interest has not led to improved accountability in planning to Japanese citizens.

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