Review: International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku, by Ken Tadashi Oshima

Abstract

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, …