Land, Lumber, Labor, and Excrement: A Slumlord’s View of Tokyo at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The expansion of Tokyo’s periphery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was led by builder-managers who built simple wooden tenements on former farmland. These tenements provided no more than minimal shelter. In the early years of industrialization, migrants from the countryside joining the new urban proletariat established their foothold in the city in these dwellings. Although the tenement builders were responsible for the majority of the city’s housing, they left almost no trace in the historical record. One exception is Ōsaki Tatsugorō, an illiterate carpenter turned landlord who built thousands of houses between 1885 and 1903, when he dictated his autobiography. This essay uses Ōsaki’s autobiography, together with data on building materials and land prices, rents, and wages, to examine at the micro level the social context and the economic calculus underlying the early construction of the city’s sprawling working-class periphery. The Ōsaki case reveals a transitional moment before a land-centered real estate market governed by contracts and planning regulations redefined the economics of housing.