Abstract

Motomachi, a small shopping street on the outskirts of Yokohama’s old town, is architecturally designed with a European aesthetic and caters primarily to a clientele of women in their early twenties. This article traces the history of Motomachi’s construction as a site for feminine con- sumption. It identifies its origins in the late 1970s with three principal actors: the readers of a new genre of magazines targeting young and highly-educated women; economic planners in Yokohama concerned with preserving the traditional civic functions of shopping streets; and the businessmen in Motomachi’s shopping street association interested in remaining eco- nomically competitive. Through the pages of the magazine JJ, young women discovered in Motomachi traditional Japanese craftsmanship and “Yokohama traditional” (Hamatra) style. Concurrently, city bureaucrats encouraged Motomachi and other shopping streets to revitalize themselves by capitalizing on their heritage, prompting Motomachi’s savvy businessmen to project this demographic’s fantasies onto urban space. Through archival study of planning documents and fashion magazines combined with aesthetic analyses of Hamatra fashion and Motomachi’s architecture, this article shows how urban space can be impregnated with particular gendered and subcultural forms. It also interrogates the political, economic, and gendered origins of local history and how Occidentalism persists despite a discursive rejection of Western norms in favor of Japanese tradition. Lastly, the article argues that Motomachi’s history is also one of the development of neoliberalism in contemporary Japan, and that future research ought not to overlook neoliberalism’s gendered aspects.

Keywords

subculture - machizukuri - neoliberalism - women’s liberation - Yokohama