I. HOUSES OF SHEDDING SKIN

I. HOUSES OF SHEDDING SKIN

Tokyo, like the rest of Japan, is a city that has undergone a seemingly incessant cycle of creation and destruction over the centuries; it has rebuilt and recovered time and again from different calamities, ranging from natural disasters to warfare. One of the most crucial aspects of this constant change would be the dwellings, which also embodied how the city has evolved overtime in terms of its social values and international relations. These dwellings are a reflection of how Tokyo has economically and socially transformed over the years, from a hierarchal, isolated region to a centralized and economically prosperous city.

Long before becoming a worldwide economic superpower, Tokyo was a city that had a focus on hierarchy and isolation. It was founded in 1457 under the name Edo by feudal lord Ota Dokan (Sacchi, 39). In 1868, the Meiji Restoration took place, in which shogun Tokugawa Keiki removed Edo’s militaristic rule in favor of an “illuminated government” under the revived Meiji Dynasty, establishing an open dialogue with Western nations (Sacchi, 39). It was also around this time when Edo was renamed Tokyo, which literally translates to “Capital of the East” (Sacchi, 45).

Until then, the city’s dwellings showcased the region’s social hierarchy through their construction and arrangement. For an example, the wealthy and prestigious were located to the West of the castle, while the lower-class civilians resided in the East (Sacchi, 41). The quality of dwellings depended on the social hierarchy created by the Shogunate regime; as such, housings for the lower class were generally built with materials of lesser quality and abundance (Brandon, 109).

Based on this hierarchy, three types of housing construction dominated Edo during this period: the Nagaya, the Machiya, and the Nashiki (Brandon, 111). The Nagaya (長屋) are longhouses for workers and artisans, arranged in compounds along the streets of Edo, and the Machiya (町家) are townhouses combining shops and residences, made with wooden planks and clay facades (Brandon, 111). The Yashiki (屋敷), meanwhile, were mansions built for wealthy aristocrats separate from downtown, or the Shitamachi (Brandon, 112).

This is not to say Tokyo never faced hardships before or after this point, however. For an example, Edo was struck by the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657, killing approximately 100,000 residents and destroying 60% of the city’s landscape and architecture (Sacchi, 44). In response, Edo was reconstructed with less density, resulting in a 63-square-kilometer city completed in 1670 (Sacchi, 44).

Later on, another fire destroyed the central districts of Ginza and Tsukiji, as their wooden buildings were highly combustible (Sacchi, 46). Afterwards, wood was abandoned in Ginza as a building material in favor of brick masonry, resulting in what is referred to as the “Bricktown,” a project overseen by Englishman Thomas J. Waters (Sacchi, 46). It demonstrates how Japan can rebuild itself after a calamity and improve upon itself through different city developments.

These were not the only natural disasters Tokyo would recover from. The Great Earthquake of Kanto struck the city in 1923, with 150,000 people killed mainly by wooden buildings set alight by the seismic event (Sacchi, 51).

To recover, the Japanese government set up Dojunkai apartments to provide housing for victims of the natural disaster (Tewari, 469). University president, minister of internal affairs, and leader of the Architectural Institute of Japan Yoshikazu Uchida was appointed as the head of the program, joined by other architects such as Ryoichi Kawamoto, Masa Washizu and Hideo Kurosaki (Tewari, 472). Not only was this meant to serve as a relief effort, but the designers behind the project also sought to combat issues already taking place in Tokyo due to elements such as overpopulation, pollution, and lack of open spaces (Tewari, 469).

Soon afterwards, Tokyo would be devastated by the Second World War. Up to this point, Japan was enacting a brutal
military expansion throughout China and Southeast Asia, and aided Germany and Italy during aforementioned war (Sacchi, 53).Their military forces later attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, to which the United States retaliated with constant air raids on Japan, which ultimately ended with the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
(Sacchi, 56). This relentless warfare left Japan demolished and its population decimated, halved within 21 months due to starvation (Sacchi, 57). It seemed that Tokyo had hit its nadir in terms of its landscape and population as a result of the war.

Even after this devastation, however, Japan managed to rebuild itself and reach prosperity yet again. Japan’s economy began to quickly regenerate due to “the special predisposition of Japanese people in the assimilation of foreign technologies” (Pernice, 27). By the 1960’s, Tokyo had a population of over 9.6 million inhabitants as a result of the nation improving upon technologies imported from other nations (Sacchi, 60). This growth soon reached its apex through heavy industrialization and modernized technology, migration from countryside to city areas, and increasing attraction towards urban life (Pernice, 28).

Housings in Tokyo represented the city’s shift away from rigid organization and composition and towards ornamentation and a sense of privacy. To elaborate, there are four dichotomies through which houses in Edo
and those in Tokyo differed from one another (Brandon, 122):

The first polarity is how Edo’s architecture focused on organizing houses into a geometric grid, while modern housings did not have as much focus towards orderly structure (Brandon, 122).
The second dichotomy is between the openness of Edo housings and the more enclosed nature of Tokyo’s residencies (Brandon, 123).
The third polarity focuses on how housings in Edo was more open and tethered to the landscape, while Tokyo’s houses emphasized elements such as color and ornamentation (Brandon, 124).
The last one is the distinction between the “shibui” and the “hade;” respectively, Edo housings “[embody] restraint, quiet and balance,” while modern Tokyo housings “[stress] independence and exuberance, and is far more dynamic in its relationships of form and color” (Brandon, 124).

This is a culmination of the previously mentioned polarities, associating houses in 20th-century Japan with a “loss of generosity and eventual introversion compared to previous ones (Tsukamoto, 92). They demonstrate how the attitude of Tokyo’s society shifted away from geometry and order, and instead towards accommodating people’s needs and aesthetic values.

This separation would be a driving force behind Metabolism in Japanese dwelling architecture, a movement that conceptualized the urban environment as a changing and dynamic region (Tsukamoto, 90). Continuing Tokyo’s trend of cycling between creation and destruction throughout history, architectural Metabolists likened the city to an organism, one that would “grow, transform, and die [like one.]” (Lin, 16).

An example of their transformative design is the Nakagin Capsule Tower, designed by Kishi Kurokawa “to provide basic space and outﬁtting to support the lifestyle of a modern urban person in the city” (Lin, 19). Taking into account the lack of open space and high population density in Tokyo during this time, Kurokawa “envisioned the capsule building as a new prototype for prefabricated housing that would unleash the power of mass production in urban settings” (Lin, 20).

Over the course of history, Tokyo has undergone a line of systematic change and destruction followed by reconstruction and rejuvenation. Its housing systems embodied this ongoing shift, turning its focus away from hierarchy and organization based on the social status, and placed more attention towards efficient residency to create more open space within the city. Author Yoshiharu Tsukamoto labels Tokyo as “a city made of houses,
where the residential and commercial elements permeate the highly dense urban fabric as the result of the economic growth of Japan over the last half-century” (Tsukamoto, 89).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brandon, James R. Tokyo, Form and Spirit. Walker Art Center, 1986. Jinnai, Hidenobu. “Urban Regeneration in Tokyo.” Places, vol. 19, no. 1, Spring,
pp. 62-67. EBSCOhost.

Lin, Zhongjie. “Nakagin Capsule Tower: Revisiting the Future of the Recent past.” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 65, no. 1, Oct. 2011, pp. 13-32. EBSCOhost.

Pernice, Raffaele. From Tokyo Bay Planning to Urban Utopias: Metabolist Movement in the Years of Japan’s Rapid Economic Growth (1958-1964). Scholar’s Press, 2014.

Sacchi, Livio. Tokyo: City and Architecture. Universe, 2004.

Tewari, Shilpi and David Beynon. “Tokyo’s Dojunkai Experiment: Courtyard Apartment Blocks 1926-1932.” Planning Perspectives: PP, vol. 31, no. 3, 2016, pp. 469-483. EBSCOhost.

Tsukamoto, Yoshiharu. “Void Metabolism.” Architectural Design, vol. 82, no. 5, Sept. 2012, pp. 88-93. EBSCOhost.

IMAGE CREDITS

“Dojunkai Uenoshita Apartments.” Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia, 15 Mar. 2013.

“Japanese Edo Nagaya.” Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia, 9 July 2011.

“Kisho Kurokawa - Nakagin Capsule Tower.” Flickr, Flickr, 15 Oct. 2007.

Mabel, Joe. “Edo-Tokyo Museum - ‘Ginza Bricktown’ Model.” Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia, 11 Nov. 2014.

“Machiya on Alley in Edo.” Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia, 19 Sept. 2015.

“Map of Edo around 1840’s.” Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia, 23 Dec. 2007.

Nielsen, Bo. "Tokyo by Night." Just Walked By, Bo Nielsen.14 Sept. 2016.