Into the Woods: Meiji Jingu and the Hunger for Modernity

November 25, 2025.Reading time 38 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is our final entry in The Metropole theme for November 2025, Metropolitan Consumption. To see additional posts on the theme from November, see here. By Emi Higashiyama Tokyo epitomizes hunger. A metropolis spanning 2,195 square kilometers and home to 14 million people, the city operates less like an organism and more like […]

The Tokyo Moment: What Developing Cities Can Learn from the Postwar Japanese Capital

February 25, 2021.Reading time 18 minutes.

By Ben Bansal Tokyo is Asia’s first megacity: its urban agglomeration topped the symbolic ten million inhabitants marker sometime after World War II. While it had been one of the world’s largest cities for centuries, arguably its most relevant growth spurt took place between 1950 and 1970. It was during this period that the already […]

Member of the Week: Eric Häusler

August 6, 2019.Reading time 9 minutes.

Eric Häusler Ph.D. student, Department of History, University of Bern Researcher, Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia-Project Doing House and Family. Material Culture, Social Space and Knowledge in Transition (1700-1850) @lurker85 Describe your dissertation research. What about it drew your interest? Thanks to the existence of thousands of bankruptcy records, a fascinating institutional arrangement, the […]