Waswo - Housing in Postwar Japan - A Social History

Housing in Postwar Japan

Housing in Postwar Japan

A Social History

Ann Waswo

First published 2002

by RoutledgeCurzon

Published 2013 by Routledge

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2002 Ann Waswo

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ISBN 13: 978-0-700-71517-6 (hbk)

Domestic well-being is too important to be left to experts We must discover for ourselves the mystery of comfort, for without it, our dwellings will indeed be machines instead of homes.

Witold Rybczynski
Home: A Short History of an Idea

Contents

As usual, it has taken me a rather long time to complete this book, and I have received a great deal of invaluable advice and assistance along the way. In roughly chronological order I would like to thank Shirai Takako, Ohkawa Taketsugu and Honma Toshio for their help more than a decade ago when I first became interested in the topic of housing in postwar Japan; the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo for providing me with funding and facilities to acquire material on the subject during the spring and summer of 1995; all of my colleagues at the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, Oxford for their willingness to answer questions of one sort or another about issues related to my research; Louella Matsunaga, Catherine Forsyth, Diana Dick and Roger Goodman for their useful comments on one or more draft chapters; Tomaru Junko and Nishida Yoshiaki for the provision of vital bits of information and urgently needed sources; Louise Allison of Oxford Art and Design for her incredible patience in dealing with my first-ever foray into the use of illustrations in my published work; and the staff of the Bodleian Japanese Library, Oxford for their efficiency in handling my sometimes frantic requests for bibliographic and other data. Thanks are due, too, to the Japanese friends who have invited me into their homes over the years, allowing me to conduct a bit of research while enjoying their hospitality and company. I am inclined to extend thanks as well to the City of Oxford Charities, originally provider of rental housing to the deserving poor, which a little more than a century ago constructed the fairly typical Victorian terraced house I now own in St Clements, Oxford that stands on a plot of land equivalent to about 30 tsubo in Japanese measurement and provides an interior floor space roughly 15 per cent below the average for owner-occupied accommodation in Japan as of the early 1990s. My adjustment from the American standards of housing I had experienced during the first 40 or so years of my life to European standards had a lot to do with the kindling of my interest in the subject of this book.

Finally I wish to acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

: from Sasaki Kyko, Taiken toshite no jtaku nan, in Sat Takeo and Sat Tetsur, eds, Gendai no jtakutochi mondai (Kyoto and Tokyo: Chbunsha, 1971), reproduced by kind permission of Chbunsha, which also granted permission to translate the text;

: from Nishiyama Uz, Sumai no kkongaku: gendai Nihon jtakushi (Tokyo: Shkokusha, 1989), reproduced by kind permission of Shkokusha and the Nishiyama Uz Memorial Library on Housing and Community Actions/NPO;

: from Nishiyama Uz, Nihon no sumai II (Tokyo: Keis Shob, 1976), reproduced by kind permission of Keis Shob;

: from Nishiyama Uz, Sumai no kkongaku: gendai Nihon jtakushi (Tokyo: Shkokusha, 1989), reproduced by kind permission of Shkokusha;

: from Suzuki Shigebumi, Sumai o yomu: gendai Nihon kyoj ron (Tokyo: Kenchiku Shiry Kenkysha, 1999), reproduced by kind permission of Suzuki Shigebumi and Kenchiku Shiry Kenkysha.

Introduction

The living space in the house I bought in Oxford, England in 1984 is roughly one-third the living space in the house I bought in Lawrenceville, New Jersey in 1980, when I was teaching at Princeton University. I paid about the same amount for each of these houses, in terms both of dollars and income multiples, and although I do not know for certain, I suspect that each is worth about the same, substantially higher, amount today. A housing dollar buys a lot of space in the United States, so much so that comparisons with virtually any other advanced industrial country are bound to make the latter look inferior. Comparisons between the United States and Japan certainly yield this result. In this book, I intend to treat the United States as the exceptional case that it is and to base any comparisons I make on Britain and the rest of Western Europe. I also intend to consider Japan as a whole, rather than concentrating as so much recent journalism and not a little scholarship have done on Tokyo.

I like Tokyo a lot. Most of my Japanese friends live in Tokyo or in the surrounding metropolitan area. In terms only of housing and its cost, with no consideration of the many tangible and intangible benefits of life in or near the capital city, they do not live very well, not even by the Western European standards for which I have opted. But just as London is not typical of the housing conditions of Britain, nor Paris of France, so too Tokyo is not typical of Japan. Many people in Japan, including much of the urban population of non-Tokyo Japan, now live in reasonably affordable housing that is in overall size and other quantitative measures roughly comparable to the housing prevailing in Western Europe. Just as America is the exception as far as the rest of the developed world is concerned, so too is Tokyo the exception as far as the rest of Japan is concerned. I will devote a separate chapter to Tokyo, rather than allowing its peculiar circumstances on the housing front to dominate, and skew, the discussion.

Although rural Japan will figure in the discussion from time to time, my main focus will be on the changes in urban (and suburban) housing that have occurred since the end of the Second World War. As in Western (and Eastern) Europe, that conflict caused considerable damage to the existing housing stock, especially in urban areas. Dwellings that were not destroyed in air raids might well have been razed to create air raid defenses. Materials for construction and repair were in increasingly short supply and ultimately ran out. Widespread homelessness, flimsy shantytowns and overcrowding in dilapidated prewar dwellings were the result. Rebuilding the urban housing stock became a major focus of postwar reconstruction, involving both public and private efforts, and as in Europe taking far longer than anticipated. Not until 1968 was the goal of one dwelling per household nationwide achieved, and it would be a further five years, until 1973, before that target was reached in prefectures containing the largest cities. The housing crisis (