Not really.

Not to get into too much detail, but the growth of cities happened relatively late in Japan. Kyoto had been a sizable city for centuries, of course, but otherwise, at least as of the beginning of the Sengoku (Warring States) period, there were only a handful of other "cities" (large towns, really) in the country. Under the Ashikaga shogunate, the provincial military governors (shugo; the predecessors of what would become the daimyo) were largely expected to reside in Kyoto rather than in their provinces as a security measure. Since Kyoto was the center of Japanese political and cultural life and the samurai elite didn't have longstanding ties to their provinces, this wasn't a great hardship.

It was only with the decline of the shogunate and Kyoto-based political authority with the beginning of the Sengoku period that cities began to grow across the country. The governors returned to their provinces and began consolidating their local control (becoming what are now called the sengoku daimyo). Cities sprang up around the castle strongholds of the more powerful daimyo to serve as de facto capitals, but even these were significantly smaller than the Italian city states.

Cities grew rapidly following the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate and the return of central government, particularly because the new shogunate required samurai to reside in their lord's capital (thereby severing them from the land and any independent power base) and limited each daimyo to only a single castle. It was also only at this time that a powerful merchant class developed.

Anyway, to sum up, while the Italian cities had existed for many centuries and had time to develop a sense of identity, that wasn't the case in Japan.