In agreement with Nested City theory, this paper illustrates how Japan's municipal hierarchy has evolved and remained embedded within that nation's particular historical-political-economic context. It chronicles how municipalities have attained status based upon the role they have played in the country's political, economic, and military history, and, more recently, their population size. It then shows how during the post-war period, the tiers within this urban stratification system were expanded and institutionalized by national laws governing municipalities. Drawing upon more than 100 interviews with local government officials in nine prefectures, it then reveals how a shift in national policy toward decentralization in the late-1990s sparked a race for higher municipal status in Japan's national hierarchy, during the 2000s, and thereby, local power. 1. Introduction Since the issuance of the second edition of Hall’s [1] World Cities in 1979, and the subsequent publications of Cohen [2] and Friedmann and Wolff [3], the urban scholarship has debated whether or not globalization has deterritorialized cities from their national urban systems. For the most part, there has been a fair amount of agreement that contemporary capitalism, under the direction of transnational corporations (TNCs), has disembedded and reorganized the globe’s cities into a new international division of labor or world system of cities. Only a group of scholars studying East Asian city-regions have objected to this seemingly fait accompli. These Nested City theorists have claimed that while urban areas in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have been impacted by global economic forces, the central state has retained primacy over urban growth trajectories and processes in these nations. In other words, they have maintained that East Asian cities have not been disembedded from their particular national urban hierarchies, nor have they been reterritorialized into a world city network in which their national government has had no control over. So which view best reflects the situation of Japanese cities? Concurring with Nested City scholars, and drawing upon historical changes to local government law and interviews with more than 100 nonelected officials in nine prefectures, this paper argues that Japanese cities have remained embedded within a centralized intergovernmental system which has managed their size, functions, and degree of local authority. It demonstrates this by chronicling how, over time, municipalities have attained status based upon their role in the country’s political,
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