Leaving Home for Tokyo: Desire, Mobility, and Urban Life in Modern Japan, 1920–2000

This event will be held at Waseda University, not at the Maison franco-japonaise.

Why did so many people leave their homes for Tokyo during Japan’s modernization? This talk examines the relationship between desire, mobility, and urban life in modern Japan from the 1920s to the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on literary texts, magazines, visual media, and cultural discourses, it explores how Tokyo functioned not only as a physical destination but also as a powerful object of aspiration.

The presentation focuses on the experiences of people who moved to the capital in search of work, education, cultural opportunity, or personal freedom. While Tokyo promised social mobility and modern lifestyles, it also generated new forms of instability, alienation, and precarious belonging. By tracing representations of migration and urban life across different historical moments—from the rise of the modern metropolis in the interwar period to the transformations of postwar consumer society—the talk reveals how movement itself became a defining condition of modern Japanese life.

Rather than treating mobility simply as a demographic phenomenon, this presentation considers it as a cultural experience shaped by dreams, emotions, and everyday practices. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the formation of modern urban identities and the cultural history of Tokyo as a city of both opportunity and uncertainty.

Takane Suzuki is Professor in the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University, Tokyo. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo and specializes in modern Japanese literature and cultural history. Her research explores the relationship between literature, urban culture, modernization, and the formation of middle-class identities in modern Japan, with particular attention to representations of salarymen, labor, and everyday life. She is the author of 『〈サラリーマン〉の文化史』（青弓社：2022）A Desire for Stability: A Cultural History of the Salaryman in Modern and Contemporary Japan and has published widely on Japanese modernism, postwar culture, labor movements, and urban society. Her current projects include research on the Gordon W. Prange Collection and the cultural history of mobility and urban experience in twentieth-century Japan.

Date: July 17th, 2026 / 18:00-20:00

Venue: Waseda Univ.

Langage: English without translation