In-Person Panel PS2.2

City Life as Social Critique in East and Southeast Asia

Traffic Congestion and the Governance of Modern Bangkok

Samson Lim

The traffic jam is a negative condition that can affect anyone at any given time or place. But in Bangkok, not everyone is subject to it in equal measure; some people can stop traffic and others must suffer through it. City planners, engineers, traffic police, drivers, and the royal family are brought together by traffic and struggle to control it. The traffic jam, in other words, is more than a technical issue. It is a social phenomenon that reflects and produces inequality, privilege, and power. Its management is a form of politics that determines who gets to go where, when, how fast, and how comfortably. This paper traces the history of the traffic jam to analyse its socio-political effects in Bangkok. The study will focus on the period between the 1950s and 1980s, when the city expanded dramatically under the influence of international technical and financial aid. The project’s significance will be to identify and analyse the social functions of traffic jams and in so doing, provide a framework with which to understand urban dysfunction in cities of the Global South as more than a failure of modernization or poor governance.

No More Bets? Gambling, Urban Infrastructure, and Legal Reform in Early Meiji Osaka

Timothy Amos

Early Meiji reforms dramatically transformed the lives of people living across Japan. One understudied reform is the legal and social transformation that took place in relation to gambling before, during, and after the Meiji Restoration. Those caught wagering during the Tokugawa period were usually punished severely, but early Meiji authorities were tasked with reconfiguring punishments for gambling within a rapidly “modernizing” society. Osaka authorities wrestled with appropriate punishments for the considerable numbers of people being arrested and punished for gambling offenses in the early Meiji years. Diverse groups of people were caught playing distinctive card and dice games in all manner of urban locations: rental houses, burnt out storehouses, cemeteries, flop houses, and outcaste villages. Gamblers endeavoured to conceal their gambling from authorities through the architectures available to them, particularly through the utilization of the “the second floor of houses.” Yet authorities also had to reckon with betting that took place with impunity and in plain sight in foreign settlements. The development of urban infrastructures such as clubs and racecourses in foreign settlements in Osaka and Kobe and the difficulty of policing them played an important role in the local downgrading of gambling as an offense in these cities.

The Warped and the Louche: Two Narratives of a City

Scot Hislop

Terakado Seiken's Edo Hanjôki (1832-1836) describes, with a strong dose of irony, life in Japan’s largest city, focusing on specific districts that allowed him to criticize contemporary society. His work was popular but troubling to authorities who forbade further publication. He used warped humour to resist power and expose the unseemly, at the expense of his own success, leading him to call himself "a useless person." Seiken died in 1868, just before the Battle of Ueno. Hagiwara Otohiko (1826-1886), an aspiring writer, who would become useless in the late 1870s due to a sex scandal, wrote an account of that battle, movingly describing its effects on local residents. In 1874, he published Tôkyô Kaika Hanjôshi, ostensibly following in Seiken's footsteps. But this work praised the era and lacked his predecessor's sharp wit and clever blend of Classical Chinese with vernacular Japanese or even the close attention to the sufferings of the common folk that his 1868 work shows. Like Seiken, he knew the city well, but his vignettes suggest that many public intellectuals in the 1870s were supportive of or co-opted by the new oligarchy.