This is the first book in English to examine the reconstruction of Japan's bombed cities after World War II. Five case studies (of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka, Okinawa, and Nagaoka) are framed by broader essays on the evolution of Japanese planning and architecture, Japan's urban policies in Manchuria and comparisons between Japanese and European reconstruction.

All too often, urban studies scholars have approached transnationalism as a zero-sum game in which localities, regionalities, and nationalities are suppressed in favor of a globalized set of identities. At least in the German case, however, globalization has if anything reinvigorated localism, with local and regional identities exhibiting far more continuity than the multiply disrupted national space. As this marvelously varied collection demonstrates, the urban environment has become a site of "translocal" re-territorialization in which actors do not entrench themselves in opposition to globalization, but practice a dialectical adaptation. Bringing together scholars from anthropology, architecture, cultural studies, history, and urban planning, this volume offers empirically and theoretically rich essays to help deflate myths about the presumed dissolution of the urban environment's multiple particularities. Together they conceptually reconfigure the German city to reveal a transnational set of processes intermingled within the local, regional, and national spheres.

Too often, scholars treat transnationalism as a conflict in which the local, regional, and national give way to globalized identity. As these varied studies of German cities show, though, the urban environment is actually a site of trans-localism that is not merely oppositional, but that adapts itself dialectically to the forces of globalization.

This is the first book in English to examine the reconstruction of Japan's bombed cities after World War II, and it is a must-read not only for Japan specialists but also for those interested in urban history and planing anywhere. Five case studies (of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Osaka, Okinawa and Nagaoka) are framed by broader essays on the evolution of Japanese planning and architecture, Japan's urban policies in Manchuria and comparisons between Japanese and European reconstruction.