Journal of Air Transport Management 9 (2003) 241–254 Japan’s capital T # oky # o and its airports: problems and prospects from subnational and supranational perspectives Thomas Feldhoff* Institute of Geography, Faculty of Social Sciences, Duisburg-Essen University, 47048 Duisburg, Germany Abstract This paper deals with air passenger traffic and airport competition in Japan and East and Southeast Asia. The focus is on the airports serving T # oky # o, and the question whether they will be able to meet the future transport needs of a ‘global city’. The concentration of the paper is on two topics: an analysis of the position of the capital region airports within the Japanese airport hierarchy and an examination of the competition between T # oky # o and the major metropolitan airports in East and Southeast Asia. The paper provides insights into the basic problems and perspectives of Japanese airport policies, the current conflicts concerning the goals and strategies of airport development in T # oky # o and the complex interests of key actors. r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Air transport; Airport location and competition; Metropolises in east and southeast Asia; Japan; Tokyo 1. Introduction The innovation of communication and transportation systems and the global expansion of economic activity have caused the world to ‘shrink’ both spatially and temporally. As a result of their increasing cross-border links and exchange relationships, scholars of urban systems interpret cities as part of a worldwide system of competing centers. Hence globalization means that cities, by which we mean primarily the cities of the triad with its cores, US, European Union (EU) and Japan, are exposed to supranational competition and thus need to actively develop the features that contribute to the vitality of their location (Harris, 1994; Feldhoff, 2000). This has led to a change in traditional geographical ways of looking at things, for which in urban research the slogan ‘from space to place’ has been coined (Castells, 1993). The hierarchical international city system resulting from this rivalry is discussed as part of the ‘global city’ concept (Sassen, 1991; Friedman, 1995; Knox, 1995; Hill and Kim, 2000). This concept is based on the thesis that the development of the world economy with its cross- border division of labor is reflected in a global network of cities. Sitting at the tip of the network are the ‘global cities’ where activities, functions and informations are highly concentrated. They form the nodes where production and financial flows meet and control is exercised. The complex connections between globalization and global city development have become a major topic of urban systems research. Scholars of comparative urban research or regional science analyze the highly dynamic ranking of cities on the basis of various indicators, including catalogs of centrality factors, regional eco- nomic linkages or individual internal development factors. Because these indicators are the results of analyzing highly dynamic competitive forces, lists of world cities continue to be very heterogeneous. A number of recent studies on transportation, however, have stressed the particular importance of worldwide accessibility via efficient means of air transport (Graham, 1995, 1998; Rietveld and Bruinsma, 1998; Shin and Timberlake, 2000). According to Keeling (1995) transport functions as a necessary, though not sufficient, component of global city and world economy genesis, growth, and change. Japanese transportation experts evaluating T # oky # o’s prospects for establishing itself permanently as an international financial center in East Asia increasingly view the capacity of its airports as inadequate, compared with those of its international peers (Shiomi, 1995; Shinya, 1996; Nakajima, 2001). Economically dynamic Asian metropolises, such as Hong Kong and Singapore and increasingly Bangkok, Jakarta and *Tel.: +49-203-379-2250; fax: +49-203-379-3516. E-mail address: t.feldhoff@mail.isis.de (T. Feldhoff). 0969-6997/03/$-see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0969-6997(03)00014-0