Noda Manabu    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Arts and Letters    Position   Professor
Date	2010/02/27
Presentation Theme	Seen from a Distance: Shibuya, Tokyo, as a Bubble Downtown
Conference	Creating Cities: Culture, Space and Sustainability (February 25-28, 2010)
Promoters	Japan Center of Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) Munich
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Individual
Venue	Munich, Germany
Details	Shibuya is a downtown area symbolic of the 80s' economic boom in Japan. From the 90s on, however, the town came to attract people of the lower age bands. Unlike those who congregated in the 60s Shinjuku, most of the young in Shibuya in their teens and 20s belong to the second and third generations of mega-Tokyoites coming from Shibuya's suburban hinterland along the private-run railways which pass the Shibuya terminal station. These are the so-called "Ice-age" generations who had to face the tough job market in the late 90s and early noughties, the decade starting from the year 2000. Toshiki Okada's Five Days in March and Ryo Iwamatsu's Far Away from Shibuya both portray these generations against the backdrop of Shibuya as the symbolic town of the 80s' economic boom. They feature Maruyama-cho, a district at the periphery of Shibuya's downtown area rife with hotels exclusively for sex (Far Away from Shibuya is set in the adjacent residential area called Nampeidai-cho, but the play's heroine, Marie, is a prostitute in Maruyama-cho). They are the plays about these marginalized generations viewing from geographical peripheries the boom-symbolic Shibuya as something which is indeed remote from them.