20th Century Japan in 20 Buildings

By John Barr

There is a long history in the West of viewing Japan through the twin lenses of orientalism and exoticism. This book argues that Japanese modern architecture emerged from identifiable events: political, social, economic, historical events, and is as susceptible as any other architecture to analysis and criticism in these terms. Episodic rather than encyclopaedic, it does not describe every twist and turn in the development of modern Japanese architecture, but rather, it examines twenty buildings spanning the 20th century and places them in the context of the political, social and economic, as well as the historical and cultural factors that shaped both them and modern Japan. Each building has been chosen because it reflects a major event in the development of modern Japan and its architecture. In this way, the author provides a more rounded understanding of the development of modern architecture in Japan and the circumstances from which it emerged and offers lessons that are still of relevance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781848225749

Book preview

1Movements and Manifestos

Koide House: Sutemi Horiguchi 1925

Sutemi Horiguchi was one of the first architects to attempt to reconcile the competing requirements for a modern architecture that was based on Japanese values. His early attempts involved a fusing together of Japanese and Western elements to create a kind of schizophrenic architecture. It was as if someone had taken the two images of the Meiji Emperor, one in Japanese dress the other in Western dress, torn them both in half and then pieced together a new image using half of each. In Horiguchi’s early attempts you can see the join. The first built project using this technique was the Koide House, constructed in Nishikata, Tokyo in 1925 and later moved to the Edo Tokyo Open Air Museum, where it stands today. The design can be interpreted either as an overly simplistic attempt to resolve the issue of a modern architecture based on Japanese values or as a candid statement of the predicament.

The Koide House, although the first built example of a Japanese architect attempting to create a distinctly Japanese modernism, is not the first modernist building designed by a Japanese architect. That title, writes Hiroyasu Fujioka, Professor of Architectural History at Tokyo Institute of Technology, belongs to the Tokyo Central Post Office, which he has described as the ‘first genuine example of modernism in Japanese architecture’.¹ Although not completed until 1931, after the Koide House, the Tokyo Central Post Office was designed in 1922. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 that destroyed much of Tokyo delayed the start of construction until 1927 with final completion in 1931. It was designed by Tetsurō Yoshida, at that time principal architect at the Ministry of Communications [1.2].

The Ministry of Communications would become an institutional patron of modern architecture, and amongst the first in Japan to adopt the rational functionalism coming out of Germany in the 1920s, particularly the ideas emanating from Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus School.² The architects working at the ministry would go on to produce a series of rigorously rational designs for Post Office buildings throughout Japan, but there was no attempt to modify the imported modernism to include ‘Japanese values’. As a group, they were committed to the architectural and social ideals of international modernism and, following the earthquake and destruction of 1923, some of them formed the Sō-u-sha (Creation of the Universe Society) that promoted architecture as a means of social reform.³ The members of Sō-u-sha were mostly junior architects, architectural technicians, draughtsmen and engineers, who had attended vocational training colleges and worked as public employees.

In contrast, Horiguchi was the product of an elite education, having graduated from Tokyo’s Imperial University in 1920. By that time an argument had been underway for several years between those Japanese architects and academics who supported a rational-structuralist view of architecture as a discipline that was engaged solely in the efficient and truthful resolution of function and mechanics, and those who argued that architecture should also consciously embrace art and beauty. The arguments were often quite subtle, with advocates on both sides stating, for example, that the efficient and truthful expression of function and mechanics could, in and of itself, be beautiful. The dispute arose around whether or not the architect should actively and consciously seek beauty, and around the validity of self, feeling and instinct as drivers of architectural design. The arguments and their principal advocates are described in detail in Daiki Amanai’s paper, ‘The Founding of Bunriha Kenchiku Kai: Art and Expression in Early Japanese Architectural Circle [sic], 1888–1920’.⁴

1.1 Koide House, Sutemi Horiguchi, 1925. Entrance Porch.

The Bunriha Kenchiku Kai (Secessionist Architectural Society) was formed in 1920 by Horiguchi and a group of his fellow students at Tokyo’s Imperial University. It consisted of Mamoru Yamada, Mayumi Takizawa, Keiichi Morita, Shigeru Yada, Kikuji Ishimoto and Horiguchi. The group took a stance opposed to the rational-structuralist view and advocated an architecture that explicitly encompassed art and expression. For, despite its name, the Secessionist Architectural Society’s real interest and influences lay in German Expressionism. Its members intended the term ‘secessionist’ to be interpreted more widely than a specific reference to the Viennese group, and emphasised that their aim was to ‘secede’ from ‘the realm of past architecture’. They wished to break from an architecture that was based on the manipulation of a fixed repertoire of stylistic elements and to encourage individual expression.⁵

The freedom of our inner lives can be obtained only when we stand independent of others and form a style that is most appropriate to ourselves as individuals …⁶

In 1920 Ishimoto travelled to Germany and spent two years studying at the Bauhaus under Gropius, after which the group maintained contact with German architects and continued to look to Germany for its inspiration. Although the core values of the Bauhaus were in part a reaction against Expressionism, during the eight years that it was in existence, from 1920 to 1928, the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai continued to produce and exhibit designs that resembled those being produced by the German Expressionists. One of Horiguchi’s earliest built projects, the Memorial Tower constructed for the Peace Exhibition held in Tokyo’s Ueno Park in 1922, was based on Joseph Maria Olbrich’s design for the exhibition buildings at the Mathildenhöhe Artists’ Colony near Darmstadt in 1908.⁷

According to Amanai, the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai was the first architectural movement in Japan. The group produced a manifesto, translated and reproduced in Jonathan Reynolds’s, Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture, which declared:

We arise!

We break away from the realm of past architecture so that we might create a new architectural realm where all of the architecture that we produce is given genuine significance.

We arise!

In order to awaken all that is sleeping in the realm of past architecture.

In order to rescue all that is in the process of drowning.

In a state of joy, we dedicate everything that we have to the attainment of this ideal and we will wait expectantly for it until we collapse and die. In unison we declare this to the world! ⁸

It seems that the introduction of Western modernism brought with it a proclivity for the formation of movements and the production of manifestos.

The formation of the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai in 1920 was soon followed by the formation of the previously mentioned Sō-u-sha in 1923. Then, in 1930, the members of Sō-u-sha joined with others of similar background who had formed the AS Kenchiku-kai (AS Architectural Society – AS denoting Architecture School, as the members were graduates of vocational colleges not elite universities) and together with like-minded architects, university researchers and government technical experts, they combined to form Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei (the League of New Architects).⁹

1.2 Tokyo Central Post Office, Tetsurō Yoshida, 1931.

Both Sō-u-sha and AS Kenchiku-kai had begun life being influenced by Bunriha Kenchiku Kai but moved towards a more functionalist and socialist approach. By the time they joined forces to form Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei they had adopted an openly Marxist stance, that paralleled the agenda adopted by the Bauhaus under the leadership of Hannes Meyer when he succeeded Gropius in 1928. In 1930 Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei published ‘The 1930 Declaration’, which stated that:

We stand together on a scientific social consciousness for the theoretical and technical apprehension of architecture. In order to rectify tomorrow’s architecture to be justly powerful, and to liberate architecture from the nexus of today’s relations of social production, which are at an impasse, we will carry this out through scientific investigation of reality and an understanding of the laws of the inevitability of historical development. We will destroy all reactionary tendencies in contemporary architecture by internal adjustment and shared efforts.¹⁰

Within a month an article headed ‘Red Propaganda in Architecture’ appeared in the Yomiuri Shinbun, a major national newspaper. In the closing years of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries Japan had been involved in a number of tussles with Russia to establish dominance in East Asia and the two had fought a war in 1904–05, which Japan had won decisively. However, that had not resolved the tension between the two countries as they continued to jockey for power. Hostility and suspicion only increased following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the communist Soviet Union in 1922.

In a climate of growing Japanese nationalism and anti-communist sentiment, and as a result of the newspaper article, Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei came under police scrutiny. A number of members who worked for public institutions were instructed by their employers to resign their membership. Others, fearful of arrest or other repercussions, chose to leave. The League had formed in October 1930 and was disbanded in December.¹¹ The Bunriha Kenchiku Kai established by Horiguchi and his colleagues had already disbanded in 1928, not through any political pressure but simply due to its handful of members moving on with their individual careers. The members of Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei, not being graduates of elite universities, and in the strictly hierarchical system that then existed, had little prospect of individual careers. And so, within a period of ten years, the initial era of architectural movements in Japan had come and gone. The next ‘movement’ to emerge with a clear ideology was the Nihon Kosaku Bunka Renmei (Japan Arts and Culture Association) formed in 1936. It had a quite different agenda to the earlier movements, and I will return to it in a later chapter.

Those early movements seem to have been part of an initial, enthusiastic adoption of Western modernism, and it is noticeable that their areas of concern revisit Western discussions about the course of modernism there. There is no hint of the protagonists seeking a radically different course from the West that might result in a different outcome or in a distinct Japanese modernism, grown entirely from Japanese roots. The manifestos issued by the socialist groups could have been written in the Bauhaus, whilst the themes developed by Horiguchi and his colleagues are similar to those promoted by William Lethaby and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Compare Horiguchi and Lethaby on the subject of utility for example. Horiguchi insisted that architects should base their designs on utilitarian needs but that these must not be defined narrowly: ‘Naturally utilitarian needs do not consist solely of material needs – one must include spiritual aspiration as well.’¹² Meanwhile Lethaby stated that:

It may be objected that bare utility and convenience are not enough if bare utility is interpreted in a mean and skimpy and profiteering way. We confuse ourselves with these unreal and destructive oppositions between the serviceable and the aesthetic, between science and art.¹³

The similarities in theme and argument indicate that Japanese architects seeking a way into modernism looked to the West for inspiration and tended to follow Western examples, based on Western precedents, which left unanswered the question of developing a Japanese modernism based on Japanese values.

Horiguchi was perhaps the first architect to try introducing Japanese elements into a modernist design, albeit through the use of traditional motifs rather than the invention of new ones. Despite the rallying call of the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai manifesto, to ‘break away from the realm of past architecture’, Horiguchi spoke of the undesirability, even the impossibility, of seeking a complete break with the past. When he attempted a tangible, as opposed to a theoretical, answer to the problem of creating a Japanese modernism he did so by proposing a fusion of elements taken from Western modernism and traditional Japanese architecture.

Shortly after Ishimoto had visited Germany and met Gropius, Horiguchi also travelled to Europe and visited Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and the Weimar Bauhaus.¹⁴ During the trip he encountered, and was inspired by, the work of the De Stijl group in the Netherlands and published a book on modern Dutch architecture when he returned to Japan in 1924, around the same time he designed the Koide House. This appears to be his first attempt to create a Japanese modernism and the Dutch influence is evident in a design that uses an eclectic mix of Western elements, Japanese elements and elements that are ambiguous in origin.

Houses that exhibited both Japanese and Western parts were produced by a number of architects around this time, including Horiguchi’s colleagues Yamada and Ishimoto. A name was coined for this phenomenon: wayō-kongō-jutaku (Combined-Japanese-and-Western-Style-House). These houses were designed for wealthy middle-class clients who might live part of their lives, or might entertain guests, in Western fashion. A number of examples of these houses can be found in Stewart’s The Making of a Modern Japanese Architecture.¹⁵

But these other examples came after Horiguchi’s Koide House and typically expressed the distinction between Western and Japanese through the plan, with the Western part often forming a separate wing or annexe comprised of Western-style rooms whilst the main house consisted of Japanese rooms.

The Koide House, rather than separating out the different parts, mashes them together in a single, compact plan, the internal character of which is difficult to interpret from the external form. From the outside the house might be interpreted as typically Japanese, with a steep, tiled roof, onto which is grafted a glass-fronted, flat-roofed, Western-style, modernist appendage that would not look out of place in a northern European building of the time. The two parts collide rather than blend into each other [1.3]. However, such a clear-cut division of the external form offers no guide to internal function.

The externally ‘Japanese’ part contains the main entrance, a hallway flanked by two Western-style rooms, and a variety of utility spaces. The room to the left of the entrance hall is set up as a kind of salon for entertainment, with Western furniture and a deep bay window housing a piano. A grid of dark timber battens runs over the walls and ceiling and the panels between the battens create an abstract arrangement of muted brown, cream and silver-foil rectangles. The inspiration for the overall pattern clearly seems to come from the De Stijl group and in particular the paintings of Piet Mondrian and the interiors of Gerrit Rietveld but, in place of the primary colours used by the Dutch, the muted colour scheme and silver foil used by Horiguchi speak to Japanese taste [1.5].

The externally ‘Western’ part is built over two floors, each of which houses a pair of Japanese rooms in traditional style, with tatami mats, fusuma sliding screens, and tokonoma alcoves, but the wall colours are brighter and more vibrant than traditional muted tones [1.6].

The room to the right of the entrance hall, like that to the left, is located in the ‘Japanese’ part of the house but is Western in style. It sits enfilade with the two Japanese-style rooms on the ground floor of the ‘Western’ part of the house, and all three rooms are the same width and are connected by fusuma sliding screens. Looking at a plan of the house one would assume that these three rooms form a set, and modernist dogma would usually determine that they should be similarly expressed in the outward form and appearance of the building. But the Western-style room is located in the part of the house that appears ‘Japanese’ from the outside, whilst the Japanese-style rooms are located in the part that appears ‘Western’ from the outside [1.4].

At every level of the design we can find a free and eclectic mixing of ideas and influences from both cultures. As suggested earlier, the Koide House can be seen either as a clumsy attempt to resolve the question of how to combine Western modernism with Japanese values, or as a provocative statement of the predicament. However we choose to interpret it, the Koide House exhibits an eclectic ambiguity, and ambiguity was something that would shortly be forced out of Japanese architecture as the situation became highly politicised.

1.3 Koide House, Sutemi Horiguchi, 1925. A collision of Japanese and Western styles.

1. Entrance Hall

2. Western Salon

3. Western Room

4. Japanese Room

5. Japanese Room

1.4 Koide House, Sutemi Horiguchi, 1925. Plan, ground floor.

1.5 Koide House, Sutemi Horiguchi, 1925. Western-style salon.

1.6 Koide House, Sutemi Horiguchi, 1925. Japanese-style room.

2The Finance Minister and the Colonel

Osaka Gas Building: Takeo Yasui 1933

Gunboat diplomacy had forced Japan to open its ports and enter into unequal trade agreements with the West, and successive governments were determined that this should never happen again. Japan made it a priority to become a world power capable of resisting and competing with the West technologically, commercially and militarily.

Japan is a relatively small island nation that is relatively poor in natural resources, certainly when compared to the U.S. or Russia. How then was it to compete with these larger powers? A model was not hard to find. Britain was also a small island nation, with the necessary mineral resources to drive its industrial revolution but little else to account for its vast wealth and power. But Britain had the huge resources of an empire to draw on. It was not long before the Japanese government’s thoughts turned in the direction of empire building.

The situation took on extra urgency in the early 1900s, as the population of Japan expanded and the government could no longer guarantee a sufficient supply of food from within its borders. Jansen noted that Japan’s national output rose by a factor of six between 1868 and 1920, but population growth meant that per capita productivity rose at a rate of only 1.8 per cent per annum.¹ In order to grow its economy to match the Western powers Japan needed to secure territory, partly to allow it to export some of its own population and partly to gain access to a substantially greater amount of natural resources.

The economic situation was further exacerbated by the Great Depression of the 1930s and its effects on Japan’s overseas markets, especially in the U.S., where the government introduced protectionist tariffs on imported goods in a bid to stimulate purchases of domestic goods.

However, whilst the Great Depression signalled a dramatic slowdown in Western economies through the 1930s, the Japanese economy experienced a speeding up during the same period. Having enjoyed a boom during the First World War of 1914-18 the Japanese economy stalled and remained lacklustre throughout the 1920s in what some commentators have called a period of ‘chronic recession’. A stock market plunge in 1920 was followed by runs on several banks, leading to operations at 21 banks being suspended (some permanently), a financial panic in 1922 led to suspension of operations at a further 15 banks, and the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 damaged the financial and physical assets of many banks and corporations.²

Failure to deal with the root causes and legacy of these events led to a full-blown financial crisis in 1927, known as the Showa Financial Crisis. Finally the government was forced to act and to put in place the structural reforms necessary to address the malaise at the heart of the Japanese financial system. Then, having restored stability domestically, the government took the decision to return the Japanese yen to the international gold standard in January 1930, just as the Great Depression began to bite around the world. The effects were abrupt deflation and a severe contraction of the economy in 1930 and 1931 in what has been called the Showa Depression.³ Paradoxically though, Japan’s chronic recession through the 1920s and the steps that had been taken to address it put the country in a better position than many others to deal with the international depression when it hit.

2.1 Osaka Gas Building, Takeo Yasui, 1933.

Korekiyo Takahashi, a former prime minister and minister of finance, returned to the latter role in 1931. He immediately withdrew Japan from the gold standard and allowed the yen to depreciate sharply against the U.S. dollar and the British pound, making Japanese goods more competitive internationally. He further implemented a large-scale fiscal stimulus through public spending on projects that provided jobs for the population and orders for Japanese companies.⁴

Takahashi’s package of fiscal and monetary policies and the concurrent government policy of empire building were not unrelated. The depreciation of the yen made Japanese manufactured goods attractive internationally, but also made the import of raw materials more expensive. Japan needed to secure its own sources of raw materials. A well-funded military was able to undertake the task of empire building, whilst the countries it occupied provided a cheap source of raw materials for Japan’s growing industries. The military became a major recipient of funding, which, in turn, provided jobs for Japanese companies producing arms and other military supplies.

Takahashi’s policies were so successful that, by 1934, the Japanese economy began to overheat. The government attempted to redress this situation by curbing expenditure, which, amongst other things, would have resulted in a reduction in military spending. Factions within the army were opposed to any such move and on 26 February 1936 a number of senior government officials, including Takahashi, were assassinated in an attempted coup led by a group of junior army officers in what is known as the 2.26 Incident (referring to the date of the coup attempt). The coup was crushed, but only through the intervention of rival factions within the military, emphasising the power it had to control events.⁵

The disaffected army officers were drawn largely from units that had served in Manchuria, the collective name for a number of regions in northern China. It is not coincidental that in 1931, the second consecutive year of double-digit deflation under the Showa Depression,⁶ Japanese forces became more active overseas. One of the assets that Japan had acquired from its victory over Russia in the 1904–05 Russo–Japan War was control of the South Manchurian Railroad. Much as the British East India Company had done for the British in India, the South Manchurian Railroad Company exploited Manchuria for natural resources, wealth and career opportunities for Japanese citizens. Some, particularly in the army, wanted to further strengthen Japanese control in the area.

In 1931 Japanese army units in Manchuria, under the control of Lt Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, contrived a small explosion on a section of South Manchurian Railroad track as a pretext for military action against regular Chinese troops in the region. This became known as the Manchurian Incident and it resulted in Japan tightening its grip on that part of China.

Ishiwara was an army officer and religious/military zealot with an apocalyptic vision of a series of ever-larger wars that would culminate in a final war between Japan and the