Modernity of Electric Light and Shadow: Japanese Domestic Architecture from the Late 1910s to the Early 1930s

Abstract

Electric light became popular as a source of illumination in Japan between the late 1910s and the early 1930s. It created novel sensory spaces that made the former darkness of domestic architecture a thing of the past. This article explores the ways in which domestic spaces became overwhelmingly lit by electric lights and how the architect Fujii Koji reacted to them in lighting and architectural design. The shift from embedded local illumination to general lighting entailed changing perceptions about indoor light conditions and how the light-body-space triad revolved around the rejection of interior darkness by electricity-related businesses, manufacturers, and academia. From the mid-1920s onward, this process was further enhanced by the Domestic Electricity Promotion Association, whose illumination planning, exhibitions, and model houses manifested its functionalist approach to effectively distributing light throughout the house, an approach subtly underpinned by a romantic vision of the domestic use of electric light. Functionalism in interior lighting, and the excessive brightness of electric light in domestic spaces, meanwhile, were questioned by Fujii and some lighting engineers. The disharmony between the glare of electric light and the Japanese style of rooms led him to create distinctive papered light fittings installed in his experimental houses, including Chōchikukyo. Fujii’s endeavours to scientifically understand and architecturalise diffused light through washi (Japanese paper) are conceptually similar to cultural critic Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s In Praise of Shadows, an essay that rediscovered the systematically manipulable agents that produced Japaneseness: shadows in response to aesthetic discord caused by the emergence of electric light.