Urban Japan: The Benefits of Neighborhood Factories. Really.

This illustrated essay is part of a series on Why Urban Japan is So Good. Is it really? If you are just joining us, it might be a good idea to start with the introduction first. You can also sign up to get this column delivered to your inbox every week.

I wake up late morning on a Saturday, my mind aroused by the scent of tea being roasted. There is a small roasting factory just on the other side of the block and they mainly roast on Saturday mornings. When I’ve had a long week, this heavenly scent has always been my weekend wake up call. Later in the day we meet our neighbor who runs a handmade glasses shop and take a picnic to the park on the outskirts of the neighborhood. We eat onigiri and sweets on a grassy hill, while a handful of young kids kick around a soccer ball, and some older kids nearby hit a shuttlecock in between sessions of batting eyelashes at each other. Beside them, a mom and her son picnic next to their bicycle.

Across the way, the grassy hill slopes down under the cherry trees to a bike trail, beyond which we can hear the sound of a long siren rise and fall. Lunch time. Soon the factory workers will join us on the grassy hill. They must be working overtime at the soap factory this week.

These sights and sounds are all part of what feels like a completely natural — and surprisingly comfortable — way of life here, one that lends itself to connections between people from different walks of life.

This sort of scene is admittedly difficult to find in North American cities. The United States of course has many mixed-use neighborhoods with various shapes and sizes of homes sitting above or alongside cafes and pubs, clothing shops and salons. This American ‘new urbanism’ can certainly feel vibrant. Yet there is a critical ingredient — one that exists in our Osaka neighborhood — which is missing in most North American developments.

CONSUMPTION, WITHOUT ITS COUNTERPART

You could say vaguely that the missing factor is “jobs,” but this is not quite accurate. Jobs do exist in new urban neighborhoods, but they are often limited to service jobs. Cooking food. Dry-cleaning clothes. Spa treatments.

Those are all fine, but they are only a slice of a balanced local economy. There's another ingredient that we rarely talk about—one that’s often missing from both old and new neighborhoods alike in the States. Some urbanists even think that this missing ingredient is a bad word, but I am going to say it here anyway.

Production.

You can not have a chef without farmers, nor dry-cleaning shops without fabric and clothing producers, nor a day spa without the towels, soaps, scented oils, and all of the products that are essential to providing the service.

On the national stage, America is recently remembering that a balanced economy produces things. I would argue that a balanced neighborhood should produce things too. Within reason of course.

The contemporary urban neighborhood, in its quest to be a place for living and shopping and playing — and sometimes office work — forgot that a complete neighborhood where everyone has the capacity to participate in consumption, should also help people produce something of value for the world.

You might know that there are good historical reasons for why production is absent from Western urban neighborhoods. It mostly has to do with the pollution that cities faced during the early industrial revolution. Thank goodness we got that out of cities. Yet the laws formed in these times — which separated residential from industrial from commercial activities — are outdated and not quite fitting with much of what we call ‘industry’ today.

In its own way, Japan found somewhat more innovative ways to make zoning a far more relevant to how life actually works, and these laws tend to be permissive to certain non-polluting industries, rather than restrictive. You can read a bit more about that in 20 Meters of Street.

LOCAL FACTORIES - NEIGHBORHOOD INDUSTRY IN OSAKA

So what is the result of allowing production inside of a neighborhood?

Step into a shotengai (shopping street) in Osaka and you are likely to find a place that is filled with shops that do not just sell things, but that make the things they sell. Want tofu? Visit the shop where the nutty scent of of freshly made tofu wafts into the alley every day. Need a notebook? Go see the old woman who hand binds notebooks and sells them for reasonable prices. Sometimes she even uses paper from the paper maker a few blocks away. Needs nice shoes? Visit the shop where an actual real-life shoemaker pulls out a measuring tape, drafts designs with you, and hand-makes your shoes.

These examples are one type of neighborhood production. But in Osaka, production goes far beyond even this. Real domestic and international industries exist in or adjacent to the neighborhoods where people live too. Within a few minute’s walk from our urban Osaka neighborhood, you will find a:

— Wood-finishing shop
— Furniture maker
— Tea roasting factory
— Handmade glasses craftsperson
— Fabric weaving and dyeing factory
— Design-build architecture firm with a production warehouse
— Metal fabrication facility
— Nut and bolt manufacturer
— Several large-scale art and design production facilities

That is just off the top of my head. There are several dozen more industries here too — some boutique and some larger scale.

Thanks in part to a domestic market that supports small producers in the face of unfair competition — another topic in and of itself — these numerous small industries provide good, steady jobs for a large number of locals. They also provide locals with reasonably-priced, high-quality goods, made right in their backyard so to speak.

Things sometimes even get strangely interconnected and innovative. Goat lawn mowers cutting back grass while contributing to the production of local goat ice cream anyone? I have seen and tasted it in Japan, and can assure you, it is delicious.

If you want a truly well-off neighborhood, an ecological neighborhood, an exciting neighborhood where people stand to encounter the process of production in their daily lives, you probably want more locally-owned and operated businesses, and you probably want a good portion of those businesses to actually be producing something of value in the local, regional, or even international market. Not only does this bring people, activity, and amazing things into a neighborhood, it also brings economic vitality so that all the restaurants and pubs and saunas and dry cleaners better off too.

Does an industrial worker relax in a sauna here?

You bet they do. Right next to me, in a hot bath where it always seems to feel like people are welcomed as part of the community, no matter what job we do, or what kind of collar we wear. Perhaps having industry folded into this neighborhood helps that process along? What I can say for sure, is that being close to the means of production reminds me that we are all working hard in our own way, part of a cycle that supports each other.

That is positive in all the ways outlined above. It is also incredibly good medicine for a divided world.

Questions: What kinds of local industries might make your own neighborhood more vibrant? What are the kinds of things you like to (or want to) engage in making, and can you imagine these in a neighborhood setting?

Next Week: This series continues with another deep dive into the urban Japanese neighborhood.

Read Another Story: Given where we ended here, it might be fun to dive into a story from last year about the Japanese sent (bathhouse)…

SHORT #28: Peace of Steam - The Japanese Sento

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