ABSTRACT
Foreign planners and historians have long considered Japanese urban planning to be a practice and a tradition almost entirely separate from their own. Yet planning and planning history in Japan emerged in the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, thus respectively at almost the same time as planning and planning history in Europe and America. And Japanese practitioners and scholars carefully observed foreign practices, and integrated aspects of them into their own work while building on long-standing Japanese traditions of urban form, and while also exporting their experience and knowledge of the East Asian region to both colonial and postcolonial settings. But rather than engaging with this emerging parallel planning system, foreign practitioners commented on transforming Japanese cities and interpreted them for inspiration and interpretation; they often focused on visuals, examining them from their own point of view and ignoring the Japanese literature and local debates. They did not consider Japanese understanding to be a parallel interpretation of planning, based on a different earlier tradition and specific local practices. As a result, planning in Japan intersected with foreign practices in a somewhat haphazard way.
