Furnishing the Modern Metropolitan: Moriya Nobuo's Designs for Domestic Interiors, 1922–1927

Abstract

Introduction Once Japan began intensive diplomatic and trade relations with Euro-American powers after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, engaging with modernity meant reordering all spaces, objects, and practices in a dualistic schema of either imported “Western” or vernacular “Japanese” ones, in which the imported most often was associated with modernity, and the vernacular with tradition and the past. While both terms were, in practice, hybrids influenced by and bleeding each other, and “Chinese” as well as other Asian styles formed an ambiguous third sphere, this dualism would regulate material culture, the visual and performing arts, and greater social structures for the next century, and to a great extent continues to do so today. The furniture and interior design industries were no exception, and public spaces including schools, government facilities, offices, and public transportation had been refitted with chairs and desks by the late-nineteenth century. Domestic interiors also could be furnished in either “Japanese” or “Western” style, determining the clothing and manners of its occupants. And the Western-style interiors omnipresent in department store displays and the new media of photography and cinema were a key part of new urban visual and consumer culture. This article introduces two of Tokyo-based furniture designer and interior decorator Moriya Nobuo’s (1893–1927) prescriptions for the domestic spaces of modern Japan: “Small Interior Art” (Chiisaki shitsunai soshoku), a 1925 design manifesto in the form of model rooms, and a line of inexpensive mass-produced furniture by the furniture design group Kinome-sha, which Moriya co-founded in 1927. Radically different in target, style, expense, and degree of sophistication, both “Small Interior Art” and the Kinome-sha furniture were responses to the hybrid conditions of modern urban Japan. Both projects were a challenge to the furniture industry, and a sign of the direction in which Moriya hoped the environment and practices of daily life in Tokyo would move. With a retooled furniture industry allowing all Tokyoites to enjoy modern Japanese interiors at home, albeit ones which recognized and reaffirmed new class divisions, Footnotes begin on page 68.