House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930"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." |
Contents
Dwelling and the Space of Modern Japan | 1 |
1 Domesticating Domesticity | 21 |
2 The Housewifes Laboratory | 55 |
3 Domestic Interiors and National Style | 95 |
4 Landscapes of Domesticity | 132 |
5 MiddleClassness and the Reform of Everyday Life | 162 |
Consumers of the Culture Life | 203 |
Inscribing Cosmopolitanism in the Landscape | 228 |
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advertising aesthetic architects architecture Art Nouveau Asahi Asahi shinbun bourgeois building built bunka Bunka seikatsu century commodities consumers cosmopolitan culture house Culture Village decoration discourse domestic dwelling reform elite everyday life reform Fujin Garden City geomancy girls guest higher schools house design household Housewife's Companion hygiene Ibid ideal ideology images interior Japa Japan Japanese Jogaku jūtaku kagu kairyō kaizen kaji katei Kazoku kenkyū kitchen Kobayashi Kōtō lifestyle living maid mass Meiji period middle-class Minami Hiroshi Mitsukoshi modern Morimoto native okeru Osaka photographs plans popular practice Press promoted published readers Reform League role salaryman Sanyō suitai Seikatsu kaizen sekkei shakai shin shinbun shoten Shufu no tomo Shumi social society space style suburban suburbs sukiya Taishō taste tatami texts tion tokonoma Tōkyō toshi traditional Uchida Seizō University urban vernacular women women's magazines Yanagita Kunio yōkan zashiki