National spaces and identity practices

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The political geography of any modern nation-state (or state-nation) larger than, say, Hong Kong or Singapore, often reveals a logic of centrality, unless there is historically a conscious program of decentralization. Almost all countries today are less “leveled” in their political geography than they are in economic and cultural geographies. Even so, there are some states where the political geography is so completely centralized that the national capital is a virtual (not just metaphorical) synecdoche for the nation. France is the usual example with Paris as the dominant space for the nation. Decades of state-nationality made Moscow the dominant city for the entire Soviet Union. In much the same way, but perhaps to an even greater degree, Tokyo dominates the state-nation of Japan. One feeder to this central-place logic is an older logic that Kyoto knows very well: proximity to the emperor.