Developmental state planning, sub-national nestedness, and reflexive public policymaking: Keys to employment growth in Saitama City, Japan

Outside of central Tokyo, too little has been written about Japanese municipalities regardless of their economic performance or problems. One area that currently deserves greater attention is the recently amalgamated City of Saitama, the area that experienced the largest employment increase of any municipality in Japan (42,783) during Japan’s lost decade. What factors allowed it to counteract prevailing trends? This article examined this question and found that Saitama’s 1990s employment growth was spurred by: (1) its spatial nestedness within the National Capital Region (NCR); (2) its status in Japan’s and its prefecture’s urban hierarchy; (3) its embeddedness in the Japanese Developmental State; and (4) the reflexive policymaking of the cities of Urawa, Omiya, and Yono, and Saitama Prefecture. The final two factors were part of a shared intergovernmental vision to transform the area into a Business Core City in the NCR and into the new locus of central government activities in the North Kanto-Koshin’etsu Area. The implementation of this led to the development of the Saitama Shin Toshin Project, the transferring of more than 6000 national bureau workers to the site, the merger of the three cities to create Saitama City, and private employment growth.Overall, the findings of this article were consistent with Hill and Fujita’s [Hill, R. C. and Fujita, K (2003) The nested city: introduction. Urban Studies 40 (2), 207–217.] Nested Cities thesis, which argued that urban growth trajectories in Japan, similar to that in other parts of the world, remain deeply nested within multi-layered spatial and institutional contexts. The article also provides a window into how local, in addition to national bureaucracies and politicians have shaped urban change in Japan.