From the Inside Flap
A superbly researched and elegantly written study of Seki Hajime and the 'livable city' in Osaka that he envisioned, The City as Subject opens up a fascinating world of the conjunctures among commercial policy, economic thought, social reform, and urban planning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. --Takashi Fujitani, author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan
Deftly researched, this intellectual biography depicts Seki Hajime, a remarkable and influential early 20th-century figure who pursued careers in academe, policy making, and as interwar Mayor of Osaka. Hanes presents Hajime as an appealing, cosmopolitan, and iconoclastic character, noting particularly Seki's sense of social responsibility, his pragmatism, his ability to keep in mind the human scale in urban planning, and, by no means least, his aesthetic appreciation of Osaka's urban pleasures.--Laura Hein, coeditor of Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States
From the Back Cover
"A superbly researched and elegantly written study of Seki Hajime and the ‘livable city’ in Osaka that he envisioned, The City as Subject opens up a fascinating world of the conjunctures among commercial policy, economic thought, social reform, and urban planning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." ―Takashi Fujitani, author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan
"Deftly researched, this intellectual biography depicts Seki Hajime, a remarkable and influential early 20th-century figure who pursued careers in academe, policy making, and as interwar Mayor of Osaka. Hanes presents Hajime as an appealing, cosmopolitan, and iconoclastic character, noting particularly Seki's sense of social responsibility, his pragmatism, his ability to keep in mind the human scale in urban planning, and, by no means least, his aesthetic appreciation of Osaka's urban pleasures."―Laura Hein, coeditor of Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States
About the Author
Jeffrey E. Hanes is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon.
