Japanese Architecture

Japanese architecture has long had varying expressions and historical interpretations both inside and outside the geographic boundaries of the island nation. While the earliest structures date back to the Jōmon period (c. 14,000 bce to c. 300 bce), the profession of the architect as a specialist in designing buildings using Western building construction did not emerge until the Meiji period (b. 1868–d. 1912). Up until this time, the master carpenter was both the designer and builder, and was particularly well versed in wood-frame construction. The discipline of architectural history within Japan also developed during this time, led by Itō Chūta (b. 1867–d. 1954), whose study of Hōryūji temple in contrast to the Parthenon situated the Japanese architectural canon within an international context. While studies of Japanese architectural history have focused on the religious structures of Buddhism and Shinto, foreign observers and specialists such as Edward Morse (b. 1838–d. 1925), author of Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (originally published in 1886), documented the vernacular built environment. Domestic architecture has subsequently been the subject of a wide range of studies in its premodern and modern incarnations. Moreover, the ravages of earthquakes, fires, wars, and developers have exacerbated the rapid transformation of the Japanese built environment from the 19th century to the present. The history of modern Japanese architecture is thus presented through the historical periods from the opening of Japan to the West, post–World War II development, and contemporary trajectories. In addition to a bibliography of individual architects, urbanism, and Japanese gardens have been included in this article to present the broader Japanese architecture integrally with the built and natural environments. The bibliography of Japanese architecture reflects this great variety through time and differing domestic and international contexts. English-language scholarship has long relied on visual interpretation, shaped by the subjectivity of historical periods and personal interests and expertise. While comprehensive in-depth English accounts covering the earliest periods to the present are limited, with most recent scholarship focusing on the modern period (1868–), the following provides a framework of themes and typologies within historical contexts that may serve as a starting point for inquiry and further research. For clarity, all names are listed following English convention, with given name first and family name second; macrons are used for long vowels. Some Japanese names have multiple spellings in English.

Reviewed by: The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation Don Choi The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation. By Alice Y. Tseng. University of Washington Press, 2008. 285 pages. Hardcover $60.00. Interest in the architecture of modern Japan has never been greater. In 2010, for instance, Sejima Kazuyo and Nishizawa Ryūe won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field's most prestigious award. In fact, since the Pritzker's founding in 1979, more Japanese architects have been recipients of these prizes than their counterparts [End Page 227] in any other nation except the United States. Monographs and coffee-table books on Andō Tadao, Maki Fumihiko, Shigeru Ban, and other Japanese architects continue to multiply. From the point of view of academic scholars, however, the English-language literature on modern Japanese architecture has long suffered from two faults. First, until fairly recently, many writers on the subject were trained as architects or critics rather than as historians or Japan specialists. As a result, many works treated contemporary topics for a professional audience rather than historical ones for academic readers. Second, the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods have received considerably less attention than the decades from 1950 to the present. These two circumstances are linked: researching historical subjects involves different skills and goals than writing on contemporary topics. In the past decade, though, scholars have begun to craft a distinct body of English-language scholarship. In 2001, Jonathan Reynolds published Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture, arguably the first scholarly monograph in English on a Japanese architect. Jordan Sand's House and Home in Modern Japan appeared in 2003, and Gregory Clancey's Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1968-1930 in 2006. In their reliance on Japanese-language sources and archival research, these books set new standards for English-language scholarship on modern Japanese architecture. In addition, the authors' willingness to tie together themes from diverse fields distinguish these works from much of the scholarship that has been published in Japanese. Clancey's Earthquake Nation, for example, investigates architecture not as an a priori discipline but as something that interweaves technical, social, political, and aesthetic issues. Alice Tseng's The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation is a worthy addition to this small but provocative collection of books. During the Meiji period, museums in Tokyo, Nara, and Kyoto were among the most ambitious architectural projects undertaken by the government. Josiah Conder, the designer of the first of these buildings—the museum in Ueno Park that was the forerunner of what is now the Tokyo National Museum—influenced Meiji architecture as much as anyone. As a practitioner, he designed the iconic Rokumeikan. As the first professor of architecture at the Kōbudaigakkō, or Imperial College of Engineering, he trained the Japanese students who would dominate the teaching and practice of monumental Western-style architecture throughout the Meiji period. Katayama Tōkuma, one of his first pupils, designed the other three museums at the core of Tseng's book: the Imperial Kyoto Museum, the Imperial Nara Museum, and the Hyōkeikan (the structure to the west in the present trio of main buildings in the Tokyo National Museum complex). Chapter 1 of Imperial Museums examines the origins of the terms most fundamental to Tseng's study: hakubutsukan (museum) and bijutsu (art). Both words were created in the early Meiji period to represent concepts from the West. Tseng explores the ambiguities and complexities of these terms, explaining them not as simple translations but as concepts birthed from governmental desires to create and control the roles of art. Chapter 2 presents Josiah Conder's museum as a Meiji version of London's South Kensington Museum. As one of the landmark buildings of the early Meiji period, the Ueno museum has received considerable attention from Japanese scholars, but mainly for its technical and formal innovations. Tseng's contribution is to examine the building as the material manifestation of the Home Ministry's desire to "enrich the minds [End Page 228] of the general public and educate designers and manufacturers...

Traditional Japanese domestic architecture is epitomized in the minka: the houses of the common people built during the feudal age that preceded Japan's entry into the modern world in the late nineteenth century. Of the many forms in which the Japanese architectural genius has expressed itself, probably none has more immediate appeal for the Westerner than these commoners' dwellings in country and in town. Their functional beauty and quiet understatement reflect a tradition of design and craftsmanship that commands the admiration of professional architect and layman alike. In fact, modern architects, both Japanese and Western, have found in the minka a source of inspiration for new concepts of design and the effective use of space. These venerable houses play no less important a part in Japan's long and imposing. architectural tradition than the temples and shrines, the mansions of the medieval aristocracy, and the castles of the daimyo, for they embody the ideals of Japanese domestic architecture in their most vital form. In a word, the minka is the essential Japanese house. In this engagingly written and generously illustrated book, the reader is introduced to the minka in all its significant aspects: its place in Japanese architectural history and in the social scene of the feudal age, its structural variety, its adaptation to environmental conditions, its role as a symbol of social status, and its functional· and aesthetic values. At the same time, the book gives appropriate attention to the people who built these houses and lived in them-the farmers, the townsmen, the merchants, the lower-level government officials, the innkeepers, the less affluent samurai-and to the variations in structure and style determined by the occupations and preferences of the owners. Of particular interest is the wealth of detail in which the distinguishing features of the minka style are presented and discussed. The abundant photographs (19 in full color and well over 100 in black and white), drawings, and other illustrations cover the full range of achievement in the minka form during some three centuries. Teiji Itoh, architectural historian and critic, is well known among Western readers for his writing in The Roots of Japanese Architecture, The Essential Japanese House, The Elegant Japanese House, and Imperial Gardens of Japan. He obtained his doctor's degree at Tokyo University, where he majored in architecture, and, from 1947 to 1965, held the position of Associate Research Fellow in the Institute of Industrial Science at that university. In 1965, after two years as visiting professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, he returned to Japan to devote full time to the profession of architectural writer and critic. This book is one of the 30-odd volumes in the famous series recently completed by Heibonsha, Tokyo. The complete series, covering the entire range of Japanese art and including volumes on painting, sculpture, calligraphy, woodblock prints, architecture, gardens, costume and textile arts, folk art, and tea-ceremony art, is now being made available in English translations of the original Japanese volumes.

In traditional Japanese buildings, carpenters retained traditional ways of construction; once clients and a master carpenter decided the size and Kiwari of the project, almost all other design and structural systems were automatically fixed. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, master carpenter and mathematician Heinouchi Masaomi wrote theories of Kikujutu (Architectural Stereotomy), and used his knowledge of Japanese historical mathematics, Wasan, as well as Western mathematics to analyze the technology of carpentry. However, as the nature of Wasan is very different from Western mathematics, the role of geometry and algebra in the carpenters’ knowledge to create Japanese historical architecture was reinterpreted in Heinouchi’s text. This study explains the varieties and subtleties in the creation of architectural forms with Wasan before Heinouchi, and how and why they were transformed by him.

The review provides an analysis of the development of Japanese ornamental gardening from the Meiji period to the present. In historical terms, this short period of time of about 155 years originates in the restoration of the imperial power of Japan after the last shogun resigned his authority to govern the country. It is characterized by high rates of industrialization of the economy, which could not but affect the development of many traditional arts, including gardening. It was during this period that Japanese traditions were imported to the countries of the Old and New World, Japanese gardens were built outside the country. At the same time, European art, technology and traditions are penetrating Japan and have a strong influence on the culture of the country. The influence of Western art led to the emergence of eclectic gardens, but brought a certain fresh stream to modern decorative gardening. The complex, but always recognizable structure and appearance of the Japanese garden are gradually giving way to simplified forms of European-American design, while outside Japan interest in Japanese gardens is not decreasing and more and more Japanese architects are building traditional Japanese gardens in other countries.

Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue

History is the study of the past described in written documents. Prehistory is the history of human culture prior to written documents and post-history is the period in which the end of human development is reached. Contemporary history, a subset of modern history, describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. Although the term 'contemporary history' has been in use since at least the early nineteenth century, its usage changed in the twentieth century. The continuous subduction process causes frequent earthquakes in Japan. The Japanese islands are also affected by typhoons and global warming. Although a country affected by numerous natural disasters, it recovers relatively quickly and is considered safe. The history of contemporary architecture is not related to natural disasters in the West. In Japan, however, it is related to earthquakes. The history of contemporary architecture in Japan should be written taking into account the phenomenon of earthquakes or at least the way in which contemporary architects have addressed this issue. After the peak of postmodernism and deconstructivism, some Japanese architects started holding traditional culture and nature in high regard, while discontinuing postmodern classicism. It is meaningful to pay attention to the history and geography of the contemporary architecture in Japan from this perspective.

It is time to look back on postmodernism

This study explored the transformation of tradition in contemporary Japanese architecture, with a focus on Kenzo Tange’s works as a potential solution to the lack of national identity in modern urban spaces, particularly prevalent in post-socialist countries. Such homogenisation, as established by previous research, has negative implications for human psychology. The purpose of this study was to identify K. Tange’s creative approach to the use of tradition in the context of modernity. Ukrainian, Japanese, English, American, and other sources on the history of traditional and modern architecture in Japan, including the theoretical achievements of K. Tange himself and several sources on the architect’s works, were used in the study. A considerable amount of photographic material was also collected for the study. The paper described certain types of traditional religious architecture in Japan. The architecture of Shinto and Buddhism were considered as prototypes. Accordingly, the following objects of K. Tange were analysed: The Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, in comparison with the Ise Shrine Complex; Kurashiki Town Hall in comparison with the main pavilion of the Buddhist temple complex; the Kagawa Prefecture Government Office Building in Takamatsu in comparison with the Buddhist wooden pagoda. As a result, it was found that the transformation of tradition in K. Tange’s works can occur at four levels: the organisation of the master plan, the formation of the interior space of the building, the formation of its overall structure, and at the level of semantics. For each example of transformation, appropriate references were made to certain features of Japanese architecture or traditional Japanese worldview that were discovered during the study. In addition, an algorithm for introducing traditional features into modern architecture was presented, which, given the need to rebuild Ukrainian cities destroyed as of 2023, could help revive them while avoiding the architectural shortcomings of the past

During the early Meiji Period, Kigo Kiyoyoshi was a central figure in the architectural world, noted for his comprehensive expertise on traditional Japanese architecture ; he was active not only in the field of professional design but also in the academic community and in government-supported historical preservation projects. Kigo was unique in having come from a background in the Master Carpenter tradition to achieve a leading role in the architectural mainstream as a specialist in traditional architecture. The study of Kigo's works and teachings can provide meaningful information on the transition from traditional to modern Japanese architecture. This paper deals with Kigo's investigations of thirty-eight traditional temples and shrines, an intensive effort carried out between the 22nd and 24th year of the Meiji Period (1889-91). The focus here is on the purpose, process, and results of these investigations.

This paper is the first part of a study of discourses by Makino Masami (1903-1983) in modern Japan, and is based on a study presented at Architectural Institute of Japan Kinki Branch research report (Planning system) in 2010 and 2015. The purpose of this paper is to clarify and to examine his theory of architectural evolution and the controversy over it. After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University (present the University of Tokyo) in 1927, Makino was employed at the Okura-doboku Corporation (present Taisei Corporation). He went to France, and became a disciple of Le Corbusier in 1928. After he returned to Japan in 1929, he was widely active as a writer, a lecturer and an architect, and then a treatise called “Kenchiku-shicho o kataru (On the architectural theory)”, in which he pointed out the laws concerning architectural evolution. In the second chapter, some historians presented the view that Makino did not give a lecture titled “Kenchiku-shicho o kataru” with the same name as his treatise, but the author clarified Makino gave the lecture from some articles of academic journal “Architecture Journal” and other journals of architecture published. In the third chapter, the author digested the treatise “Kenchiku-shicho o kataru”, consisting of 4 chapters. The points of these chapters are as follows: 1) There is a nature that exists constantly inside an architecture, called “Idenshitsu (gene)”, “Kenchiku no honshitsu (the essence of architecture)”, or “Kenchiku-shicho (architectural thought)”. 2) The essence of Japanese architecture is discussed by applying the theory of architectural evolution to Japanese architecture. The points concerning it are as follows: the Japanese mind who love nature, simplicity, implicity, and neatness. 3) Modern architectural thought focuses on functionalism and efficiency including economy. International architecture especially attaches more importance to the economy than a straight external appearance. 4) The similarities between Japanese and modern architectural thoughts is discussed, and proposes a future course that Japanese architecture should take in response to it. In the fourth chapter, the author ascertained the various responses which the “Kenchiku-shicho o kataru” evoked. Particularly the controversy over the theory of architectural evolution, between Makino and Magara Tozo (1904-1985), held in “Architecture Journal” in 1930 were intense. In the fifth chapter, the author chronologically summarized the developments and points of the controversy. Magara criticized the ideal side of the theory of architectural evolution from the historical materialism point of view. He claimed that the essence of architecture did not a priori exist, scientifically derived from experiment and observation of social and economic facts rather than idea. Makino objected that the thought which emphasizes economic factor was a biased view. The theory of architectural evolution was metaphorically explained by the evolution of a biological species, then the gene, called “Idenshitsu”, “Kenchiku no honshitsu” or “Kenchiku-shicho”, did not exist outside the architecture but inside one. A form exposed from it and kept in step with the times, thus he did not attach importance to an old form. Magara's criticisms, however, were very severe and based on a Marxist point of view. In the 1920s, Marxism rapidly spread among the students in higher schools of the old system and imperial universities as the socialist movement became more popular and some books about Marxism based upon historical materialism were published. Then the architectural histories and theories based on historical materialism was published. The controversy over Makino's theory reflected the intellects and students class spirit during the Taisho era.

Now as before, Japanese architecture is very popular in Europe and the western world. This publication provides an overview of its many design concepts and cross-references. Using design examples and interviews, the book presents thirteen current positions.The publication focuses on young architects who take up extremely independent positions within Japanese architecture, as well as on Pritzker Prize winners Toyo Ito and Fumihiko Maki. Six essays by European specialists on Japan provide supplementary insights into the aesthetics and space concepts of Japanese architecture, making cross-references to Japan's architectural history, and explaining current lines of development. The book thus combines a self-reflective approach with an outsider's analytical view.

Ken Tadashi Oshima. International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku . Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2010, 320 pp., 20 color and 220 b/w illus. $60 (cloth), ISBN 97802959899440. Ken Tadashi Oshima’s International Architecture in Interwar Japan represents a new phase in English-language writing on architecture in Japan, but should be required reading for scholars and students working in modern architectural history regardless of location. As its title suggests, the book articulates how elite architects and their clients in interwar Japan combined a transnational modern subjectivity and modernist stylistic and thematic concerns with local context, in both design work and modes of practice. Oshima makes his case through close readings of the work of three architects: Horiguchi Sutemi, Antonin Raymond, and Yamada Mamoru. As a monograph on the three architects and incisive view into architectural practice in interwar Japan, the book is important for modern Japanese architectural history. But it makes an equally, if not more, significant contribution to a much larger readership as a model for recognizing and more accurately representing the simultaneously local and transnational nature of self-consciously modernist architectural practice anywhere in the twentieth century. Global history approaches—examining the transborder flows of ideas, forms and materials or their synchronous implementation and transformation in different locales, for example—are one way to overcome the overdetermined and inherited emphasis on national borders that stubbornly refuses to relinquish its hold on architectural history (including the particularly insidious substrain, “the uniqueness of Japan”); so is showing how a specific set of practices can be both international and locally specific. This is precisely Oshima’s project. The book’s subtitle, Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku, introduces the argument. As Oshima explains, modernist Japanese architects active in the interwar period understood their work as part of a transnational continuum and had personal and professional ties with colleagues in Europe, but expressed this condition in a specifically local language, in reference to the history, …

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life Jane Garrity Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. Victoria Rosner . New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 219. $27.50 (cloth). Victoria Rosner's fascinating new study proposes that the spaces of private life are a generative and influential site for our understanding of literary modernism. She observes that a preoccupation with domestic interiors is central to many British modernist texts, persuasively arguing that the confluence between private space, architectural history, psychic life, and modernist literature has gone largely unremarked by critics (8), and demonstrating how the modernist novel "draws a conceptual vocabulary from the lexicons on domestic architecture and interior design, elaborating a notion of psychic interiority … that rests on specific ideas about architectural interiors" (2). Rosner seeks to go beyond the cliché of "modernist interiority" (12) by observing that that interiority has a spatial as well as a cognitive dimension. The strength of this book lies in its productive juxtaposition of engaging close readings and an informed understanding of the influence that architectural history and the structure and functioning of domestic spaces have had upon the development of literary modernism. Rosner's study resembles other recent work in modernist studies that puts material culture and history in conversation with literature, but its distinctive contribution is its placement of British modernist writers in dialogue with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists, designers, and architects. The book begins with a compelling introduction, entitled "Kitchen Table Modernism," that succinctly addresses the values and hierarchies implicit in the design of living spaces, offering readers a concise historical overview of the role that domestic architecture and British design history have played in the formation of both modernist literary aesthetics and middle-class private life. Rosner tells us early on that Virginia Woolf is the "guiding spirit" of her study because she "stands at the center of any account of modernist literature that is organized around the radicalization of domestic space" (15). As a result, Woolf figures prominently in discussions that attempt to foreground the gendered dimensions of architectural spaces dedicated to reading and writing. The book is divided into four chapters that are intriguingly titled "Frames," "Thresholds," "Studies," and "Interiors." These chapters are organized according to the logic of what Rosner calls an "extrotropic scheme" (16), that is to say, an interest in looking in several different directions simultaneously. Toward this end, each of the book's chapters are designated by a term that "contains two histories, one a history of design and the other a history of modernist literary aesthetics" (16). For example, the chapter on "Studies" narrows the focus to a single room in the private home, one that has historically been associated with masculinity. Rosner traces the history of the study and, through an examination of texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, Radclyffe Hall, and Woolf, asks what role the study has had in the construction of modern female authorship. The books she examines depict the study as "the crucible of a masculinity that is linked to secrecy and authorship, even as they show how women attempt to usurp the study's privileges by prying masculinity away from biological maleness" (17). In her discussion of Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, Rosner associates the secret of Stephen Gordon's inversion with her father's private study, the masculine space which stores the foundational sexological texts by Krafft-Ebbing and Ellis that Stephen discovers. Rosner reasonably argues that Stephen's emulation of her father—and in particular her strong identification with his study—is what launches her career as a writer. The chapter successfully couches Stephen's preoccupation with Sir Phillip's study within a larger discussion of nineteenth-century British home design. We learn, for example, that highly gender-differentiated spaces in the home were the norm, and that even though the house itself was considered a feminine space, the study served as a nucleus for the governance of the household. Rosner's analysis is enhanced [End Page 165] by illustrations and photographs of domestic interiors, as well as reproductions of architectural plans from Robert Kerr's home-design book, The Gentleman's House (1871), which shows...

Japan has developed its own idea of modernity outside of the Western model. To talk about contemporary Japanese architecture is like talking about domestic architecture. Based on this architecture with popular origin, Kazuo Shinohara will set a critical differentiation from the idea of space that prevailed in modern western architecture. We owe Shinohara the denial of the idea of space understood as an architectural substance and raw material, overall, not comparable to the idea of emptiness typical of Japanese culture. This would explain, in our opinion, not only the conception of the relationship between structure, form and space, but also a way of drawing architecture in Japan. In our judgement, the way in which specific contemporary Japanese architects draw, such as Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima or Atelier Bow-Wow, has its origin in the way of drawing of Shinohara, whose teaching, based on his conception of the idea of space and its relation to matter, extends up today.