East-West: Interactions between the United States and Japan and their Effect on Utopian Realism

Abstract

This article sheds light on the creative interaction between East and West in the emergence of a counter hegemonic globalism and a new planning paradigm. Arguably this imminent, global counterculture represents a dynamic synthesis of Eastern and Western versions of an image of utopia as the ideal decentralized community, based on cooperation and in harmony with nature. The formation of this syncretic set of Eastern and Western social-aesthetic ideals coincides with the participatory line of planning thought. It examines these ideas by tracing their origins, transmission, and transformation along lines that become increasingly interconnected with the rise of a global system leading to the emergence of modernism in the West by World War I and the formation of a global consensus on the concept of sustainable development in the 1970s and 1980s. The formation, transmission, and transformation processes involved leading Western and Eastern intellectuals whose ideas on community planning evidenced strong influences from Asia (and Japan in particular).