Akira Tamura

Akira Tamura (田村明, 1926–2010) was a city planner in postwar Japan.

He is notable for two phases of his career: one as the chief city planner of the Yokohama city government and the other as an evangelist of machi-zukuri (town-making) among local movements.

Under Japan's then-highly centralized government system, Tamura advocated for the importance of local awareness and initiatives; this led to the strengthening of local government as an institution to achieve a quality environment for all residents.

Akira Tamura was born in 1926 into a Christian middle-class family in Tokyo.

As a child, he attended a primary school attached to Aoyama Teachers’ College (now a primary school attached to Tokyo Teachers’ University) and proceeded to the Municipal First Junior High School (now Hibiya High School), both of which remain prestigious schools in Tokyo.

Tamura did not advance to Tokyo's First High School (the premier high school in Japan for the elite before the war).

Instead, during the Second World War (1941–1945) he attended Shizuoka High School in 1944, which was several hours away by train from Tokyo.

He later explained that he wanted to live outside Tokyo to "broaden his horizons."

Tamura entered Tokyo University in 1945, enrolling in the Department of Architecture in the Faculty of Engineering because he thought that architecture would be a broad field, encompassing both arts and social science.

His graduation thesis was titled A Study of the Change of Structure in a Big City.

His dissertation adviser, a young associate professor named Kenzo Tange, went on to become a world-famous architect.

During his studies, Tamura met Takashi Asada, a senior staff member in Tange's office at that time, who exerted a strong influence on Tamura.

Asada was seven years older than Tamura and also intended to become a city planner.

After his graduation, Tamura worked for one and a half years as an official in the Ministry of Transportation in charge of inbound travel planning.

In addition, he studied in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo and earned a bachelor's degree in law.

After he left the Ministry of Transportation, he continued to seek a post in other ministries.

After several challenging positions in various ministries, he moved to Osaka.

Real estate was regarded as a good investment when the Japanese economy was recovering in the 1950s.

Nissay Life Insurance Mutual Company, the country's biggest life insurance firm, needed a specialist in real estate development, and Tamura seemed eminently qualified for this position.

Tamura spent nine years in this position.

During this time, married Makiko Saito, who was from the same Christian nonchurch movement (initiated by Kanzo Uchimura) as Tamura.

However, Tamura was not satisfied with his life as a salaried worker in a big company, and he wondered whether his vocation lay elsewhere.

He recognized that his work in estate development only benefited his firm and was not his calling.

He visited Tange to discuss his future; at that time, he again met Asada, who was now the facilitator of the "metabolism" architecture.

Asada subsequently started Japan's first city-planning consulting firm in 1961.

Tamura began working as a part-time employee, returning to Tokyo every weekend.

In January 1963, he returned to Tokyo to join the Environmental Development Center, Asada's planning firm, as one of only three staff members.

Before starting there, Tamura wrote a proposal paper entitled Positioning of Regional Planning Machinery, emphasizing the importance of expert planners and urban designers.

Tamura initially proposed major projects, called the "Six Spine Projects", to transform the structure of Yokohama in 1964, at the request of the newly elected socialist mayor Ichio Asukata.

Although he stayed in Yokohama for a relatively brief period, from 1968 to 1981, he achieved some of the most innovative results in Japan's postwar town planning history.

His influence on Yokohama's city planning, as well as on local residents throughout Japan, remains visible and notable to this day.

After becoming Yokohama's chief planner at the invitation of Asukata in 1968, Tamura introduced two additional planning measures: building and land control measures and urban design.

As a new mechanism to reform the old administrative system, Tamura created the Bureau of Planning and Coordination, which linked the separate bureaus and forged a united entity of city government with a wider mandate.

In 2000, the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ), the country's supreme academic institution concerned with architecture and town planning, awarded Tamura its Grand Prize for "the establishment of a theory or technique and its implementation in city planning" (AIJ, 2000), for his work in Yokohama.

Tamura remains the only practical planner in the field of city planning to have won the AIJ's Grand Prize; other recipients have all been academics or architects.

Tamura consistently endeavored to educate young planners by assigning them important works.

Though he worked in Yokohama for only a short time, those young planners became his followers and passed on his concepts and style of work.

This contributed to the success and continuation of projects, land control measures, and urban design.

It is said that Tamura was initially not a master planner but gradually learned by listening to the opinions of others.

His motto was "amorphous fluidity": he never remained in one place long and was always moving, searching for solutions.