In Edo-period castle towns the machi was not a block but a stretch of street together with the houses facing each other across it, and it was the working unit of urban self-government: townsmen appointed officers, kept the gates and fire-watch, maintained the roadway and wells, settled disputes, and wrote their own machi regulations while paying collective dues to the samurai administration. The street rather than the abstract parcel was the frame of community and of obligation. The Meiji and then the wartime state reorganised such bodies into chonaikai and the five-to-ten-household tonarigumi beneath them, made compulsory by Home Ministry instruction in September 1940 for rationing, information and civil defence; the occupation banned them, and they revived voluntarily after 1951. Most Japanese cities still run festivals, waste separation, disaster drills and machizukuri consultation through them.
It is a spatial concept of community defined by the street and by mutual obligation rather than by ownership, catchment or planner's radius, and it survived industrial modernisation largely intact. Postwar machizukuri, Kobe's post-earthquake reconstruction and Japan's district planning system all operate through these associations, which is why participation in Japan looks nothing like an Anglo-American public hearing.
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