Exploiting bright pearls hidden in the Pandoras box of Japanese urban growth

Abstract

This paper attempts to look into the growth sources of the

advanced capitalistic but idiosyncratic Japanese society. Crossurban

data sets of Japan are put on the macro-anatomical table

using both panel data of 13 largest cities covering 1994-2004 and

time-series data of 10 cities for 1984-2004 plus one additional city

Yokohama (1985-2005). Despite some mutually incongruous and

diversified data sets for those cities over years, efforts for both

congruent economic analysis and econometric experiments are

made to identify the marginal effects of theoretically relevant key

factors on the urban growth. Accounting for the urban growth

and growth source analysis using Japanese urban data conforms

fairly well to the conventional theory related to production function.

One aspect of cultural diversity, namely, the ethnic diversity

partakes to produce statistically significant contribution to the

growth of cities in Japan. But limited and internally inconsistent

data of other important cultural factors such as religion, sports,

and other cultural activities does not allow us to test their effects

on urban growth, but future supplement of these data promises

to be interesting path to explore further.