The ‘Place’ of Land in Japan's Postwar Development, and the Dynamic of the 1980s Real-Estate ‘Bubble’ and 1990s Banking Crisis

Abstract

In this paper I seek to unfold the place of landed property within Japan's postwar uneven development and the way in which this found expression in the 1980s real-estate ‘bubble’ and subsequent 1990s banking crisis. I argue that landed property was both internal to and constitutive of the social relations that marked the specificity of Japan's postwar capitalism. As a national state within the accumulation of global capital, however, Japan's specificity only existed as ‘difference-in-unity’. Furthermore, I suggest that the 1980s real-estate ‘bubble’ and 1990s banking crisis were specific and culminating expressions of changes within the form of those social relations, as mediated by Japan's changing position within the process of global uneven development. Important in this respect was the way in which credit, fictitious capital, and spatial restructuring became precarious expressions of attempts to achieve a temporal and spatial displacement of crisis.