The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home

2017

Low-seated chairs for tatami mats that are characteristic of Japanese-style interior appeared after late 1940s. This article focuses on the ambivalence between Western lifestyles and Japanese lifestyles by tracing the comments of designers, critics, magazines, and so forth to clarify a background of them. The introduction of chairs in Japan was actually involved, by definition, in a dichotomy between sitting on the floor and in chairs, which therefore was far from the domestic practicality of lifestyles among the public. Then we have to observe the two points for the introduction of chairs to break through this rigid situation: (1) how did the public establish definition of chairs outside the Westernization? This article grasps the fact that the artisans and early designers accumulated their experience of producing chairs from scratch, through trial and error. (2) How did the relation between sitting on the floor and in chairs break out of the dichotomy, through ambivalence? This article focuses on the fact that the public enjoyed the physical relaxation offered by the mix of sitting on the floor and in chairs. This constituted the domestic practicality of chairs for the Japanese. Therefore, such experiences of making and using chairs can be summarized as the awakening of a universe in the distance between the floor and the seat-height of Western chairs. It was a new frontier for Japanese designers, and low-seated chairs were born in this space. This article concludes that it marked the transition from Westernization to Japanese modern design.

Journal of Material Culture, 2001

This article uses the analysis of sets of contemporary Japanese cultural materials in order to explore the dynamics of the significant process of making and marking of the ‘Japanese’ and the ‘Western’ in contemporary Japanese culture. Through the observation of material culture - mainly food and clothing - in its public presentational arenas, it aims at reaching a better understanding of the processes in which the foreign and the local interact in this so-called era of globalization. Both the ‘Western’ and the ‘Japanese’ are illustrated as cultural constructs. The distinction between them is not based on objective classification. Their cultural making and marking is described on the background of the formation of the modern Japanese culture and cultural identity.

Conference proceedings, "Why Does Modernism Refuse to Die?", 2002

Any discussion of the survival and re-birth of Modern architecture begs the question “what is Modernism?”, a question problematic enough in itself. Yet when we consider Modernism’s pervasiveness in non-Western countries the question becomes much more challenging. It demands consideration of its social corollary: the more fundamental query of “what is Modernity?” This paper will attempt to illustrate, with reference to traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, how a number of qualities of Japanese society and culture problematize our definitions of these terms. A rethinking of our preconceptions of Modernity and Modernism can suggest how it might be that Modernism is still with us when so many of the values on which it is based – values of Modernity – have been called into question.

The 16 th International Docomomo Conference -Inheritable Resilience -13. HOME AND SOCIAL CHANGE, 2021

The post-war years in Japan brought unprecedented cultural transformations with the perception of a newly democratic state. Amid these changes, architecture also experienced a groundbreaking social revolution throughout the 20th century, incorporating women into professional practice. It was likewise when progressive architects saw the private home as an urgent topic of debate. Houses were examined as the locus of power relations informed by the spatial organization. Motivated by reformist rhetoric, the new post-war dwelling incorporated the gendered behavioural norms of the modern nuclear family. However, architects like Miho Hamaguchi (1915-1988) believed that rethinking domestic space would help move toward an ideal society: classless and genderless. When she published "The Feudalism of Japanese Houses" (Nihon jūtaku no hôkensei) in 1949, it was only two years after Japanese women, after decades of struggle, gained universal suffrage as a result of the new constitution. This article examines her profile in dialogue with another prominent architect, Masako Hayashi (1928- 2001). From each, a representative house of the early fifties, Kurita and the O House is chosen to discuss how their designs proposed innovative ideas while recording the ordinary life of the inhabitants in the architectural approach. These houses not only challenged conventional notions of domesticity of the time but included pioneering women – and one of the most important Japanese architects of the last century – as their designers. They act as vectors of change in the modern family unit by altering the Japanese house's normative assumptions, suggesting new ways of living, diversifying and advancing architectural practice.

Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities , 2022

Class distinction lies at the core of peoples' preferences in interior design and home decoration. This paper attempts to understand the growing popularity of minimalist interior designs as a part of the social study of architecture in Thailand. Qualitative content analysis of YouTube videos about Japanese minimalist home décor is used to gain an understanding of capital accumulation and the distinctive social status of Thai minimalist houseowners. This paper begins with an attempt to understand the growing popularity of interior designs of Japanese minimalism in relation to the minimalist style home decoration trend in Thailand. This study suggests that the aesthetics of Japanese minimalism are accepted as representing good taste and promoting the distinctiveness of Thai middle-class people. The cultural and economic capital of houseowners encourage the taste of Japanese minimalist interior design. With restricted income, time, and space, the houseowners apply do-it-yourself home decoration in combination with affordability and functionality principles.

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2020

Japanese Gulch Village was home to a community of Japanese millworkers and their families between 1903 and 1930. During this time, village residents pursued a wide range of options for acquiring goods. This article uses a consumption framework and archaeological Japanese ceramics to explore the ways that village residents negotiated among purchasing options to increase communal wellbeing and express individual agency. As a case study, Japanese Gulch Village highlights the complexities of consumption in transpacific contexts and the importance of drawing connections between the Japanese ceramics industry and its Japanese diaspora customers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

2019

of Chapter IV. which will be presented on Thursday, June 27 Big-House, No-House Towards a New Non-Typological Architecture(s) Through architectural drawings the design thesis will, on one hand, problematise non-typological housing and thinking in architecture, in that it enacts and indicates a withholding of any ‘shelter’, reference or stability. In this emptiness Capital is able to dominate nervous liberated energies through other more abstract and illegible legal and financial mechanisms for dispossession, production and accumulation. On the other hand, the design thesis will argue that the destructive character of nontypological thinking must in fact go much further in a denaturalisation and destruction of sedimented layers of historical hierarchy, programming, and symbolism. This becomes especially urgent when we recognise that there is a tendency for typological thinking to be constantly reanimated from the grave as artificial, ‘familiar’ territorialities that in their seeming ...

In 1922, Bunkamura (" Culture Village "), modern Japan's first model house exhibition, was held in Ueno Park in conjunction with the national Tôkyô Peace Commemoration Exhibition. The purpose of the exhibition was to suggest both an ideal domestic environment for the new urban middle class and, by extension, an ideal modern identity for those who might dwell in the spaces designed. As such, the fourteen " culture houses " that composed Culture Village are a concrete example of the Taishô-era belief in the power of design to shape identity through spectacle and prescriptive design, and of reformist desires to create a new " modern Japan " by remaking the spaces and practices of daily life. Working from the assumptions that style functions as a language to construct and convey meaning or identity and that the built environment both reflects and shapes culture, this paper analyzes how the stylistic rhetoric of Culture House interiors translated and rearranged a pre-set vocabulary of functional and aesthetic forms – classified as " Western " and " Japanese " , " traditional " and " modern " – into uncanny hybrids that made the familiar strangely new, and the new oddly comfortable. But as model homes, the resulting spaces reflect less the actual conditions of modern metropolitan Japan in the early 1920s than they do designers' desires for the new hybrid, modern residents who were to populate it.

Published alongside an exhibition of the same name at the British Museum (open July 19, 2007 to October 21, 2007), Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan highlights a selection of art crafts submitted to the annual Japan Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition over the past 50 years by members of the Japan Art Craft Association. Presented in large 9 X 11 inch format and replete with over 150 stunning color photographs, the catalogue follows the categories used to organize the Art Crafts Exhibition, with sections on ceramics, textiles, lacquer, metal, wood and bamboo, and “other crafts” (dolls, cut metal foil, and glass). Included in the introductory section are essays by Kenji Kaneko (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), the book’s editor Nicole Rousmaniere (Guest Curator and Director of the Sainsbury Institute), and Takeo Uchiyama (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto).

Japanstudien 13, 2001

In 1922, Bunkamura ("Culture Village"), modern Japan's first model house exhibition, was held in Ueno Park in conjunction with the national Tôkyô Peace Commemoration Exhibition. The purpose of the exhibition was to suggest both an ideal domestic environment for the new urban middle class and, by extension, an ideal modern identity for those who might dwell in the spaces designed. As such, the fourteen "culture houses" that composed Culture Village are a concrete example of the Taishô-era belief in the power of design to shape identity through spectacle and prescriptive design, and of reformist desires to create a new "modern Japan" by remaking the spaces and practices of daily life.