House and Home in Modern Japan

by Sand, Jordan

• ISBN13: 9780674012189
• ISBN10: 0674012186
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-01-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

A house is a site, the bounds and focus of a community. It is also an artifact, a material extension of its occupants' lives. This book takes the Japanese house in both senses, as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era. As Japan modernized, the principles that had traditionally related house and family began to break down. Even where the traditional class markers surrounding the house persisted, they became vessels for new meanings, as housing was resituated in a new nexus of relations. The house as artifact and the artifacts it housed were affected in turn. The construction and ornament of houses ceased to be stable indications of their occupants' social status, the home became a means of personal expression, and the act of dwelling was reconceived in terms of consumption. Amid the breakdown of inherited meanings and the fluidity of modern society, not only did the increased diversity of commodities lead to material elaboration of dwellings, but home itself became an object of special attention, its importance emphasized in writing, invoked in politics, and articulated in architectural design. The aim of this book is to show the features of this culture of the home as it took shape in Japan.

Author Biography

Jordan Sand is Assistant Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

Figures	xv
Introduction: Dwelling and the Space of Modern Japan	1	(2)
Home as a Modern Space	3	(2)
The International Discourse of Domesticity	5	(4)
Middle-Class Rhetoric and Bourgeois Culture	9	(5)
Translated Modernity and the Mass Market	14	(2)
Reforming Everyday Life	16	(5)
Domesticating Domesticity	21	(34)
An Abstract Space	21	(4)
An Audience for the Home	25	(4)
Family Performance	29	(4)
Family Meals	33	(6)
A Land of Duties and a Land of Beauty	39	(6)
Architecture and Manners	45	(8)
The Common Ground of Domesticity	53	(2)
The Housewife's Laboratory	55	(40)
Domestic Knowledge in the Schools	55	(7)
Reforming Kitchens	62	(6)
Hygiene and the Bounded Space of the Home	68	(5)
Home Cooking and the Market	73	(5)
Gas Cooking and Civilization	78	(3)
Economy, Efficiency, and the Body	81	(14)
Domestic Interiors and National Style	95	(37)
Mass Marketing and the Idea of Taste	95	(5)
Recoding Interiors	100	(7)
A National Style in Interiors	107	(4)
Architects and Style	111	(7)
Furniture as a New System of Goods	118	(2)
Art and Decor	120	(6)
Style in the Creation of a Furniture Market	126	(4)
Liberated Taste	130	(2)
Landscapes of Domesticity	132	(30)
The Railroad Company as Cultural Entrepreneur	132	(5)
A Class-Based ``Tokyo Style''	137	(4)
Healthy Areas	141	(7)
A Taste for the Country	148	(2)
Selling Domesticity	150	(8)
The Economy of Domesticity and Desire	158	(4)
Middle-Classness and the Reform of Everyday Life	162	(41)
Emergence of a Mass Society	162	(2)
The Nation, the State, and the Middle-Class Home	164	(6)
The Housing Problem and the Definition of Middle-Classness	170	(4)
The Social Turn in Architecture	174	(5)
``Reconstruction'' and Postwar Social Policy	179	(2)
The Everyday Life Reform Movement	181	(3)
Critics of the League	184	(3)
Varying Constructions of Everyday Life Reform	187	(7)
The Culture Life	194	(4)
Between Science and Social Norms	198	(5)
Cosmopolitanism and Anxiety: Consumers of the Culture Life	203	(25)
The Dream of Cosmopolitan Modernity	203	(3)
The Culture Consumer's Cosmopolitanism	206	(6)
Cosmopolitanism and Empire	212	(5)
The Threat of Cosmopolitanism	217	(4)
Class Anxieties	221	(5)
Dream and Reality	226	(2)
Culture Villages: Inscribing Cosmopolitanism in the Landscape	228	(35)
Summer 1922, a Point of Arrival and a Point of Departure	228	(5)
Culture in the Landscape	233	(13)
Modern Conveniences	246	(3)
An American Suburban Idyll	249	(4)
Tokyo's New Suburbanites	253	(5)
Suburban Neighborhood Sketches	258	(2)
Summer 1922: Commodification and Utopia	260	(3)
House Design and the Mass Market	263	(25)
The Architect as Intermediary	263	(8)
State Institutions and the Mediation of Architects in Vernacular Building	271	(5)
Sources of Culture House Design	276	(7)
A Native Textual Tradition Responds	283	(4)
A Changed Field of Production	287	(1)
Domestic Modernism	288	(34)
The Visibility of the Culture House	289	(5)
Homeownership and Personal Expression	294	(4)
The Utopian Everyday	298	(6)
Fusing East and West	304	(3)
Material Metaphors	307	(7)
Native Style	314	(4)
Universalism and Pastiche	318	(4)
The Culture Life as Contested Space	322	(31)
The Depreciation of Culture	322	(5)
House Design as a Field of Cultural Competition	327	(6)
Practical Settings	333	(2)
Artist, Reformer, Cultural Intermediary	335	(4)
The Dangerous Seductions of the Culture Life	339	(5)
Feminine Taste and the Culture Life Contest	344	(6)
Everyday Life in Question	350	(3)
Conclusion: Inventing Everyday Life	353	(28)
The Site of Seikatsu	353	(4)
A Domesticity Built of Goods and Practices	357	(3)
Reform Discourse as Cultural Capital	360	(3)
Cultural Intermediaries	363	(2)
The Problem of Borrowing	365	(3)
Consumer Education	368	(1)
The Settling of Modern Forms	369	(3)
Postwar Homes	372	(3)
Postwar Houses	375	(6)
Reference Matter
Notes	381	(54)
Bibliography	435	(34)
Index	469