Visual Examinations of Interior Space in Movements to Modernize Housing in Japan, c. 1920–40

Abstract

ABSTRACTBy referring to the early studies of Japanese interior spaces, such as those of Kon Wajiro, Hani Motoko, Kobayashi Takako, and Nishiyama Uzo between the 1920s and 1940s, this study attempts to explain how perspectives on interior space have historically changed and, at the same time, how the methods and techniques of description have transformed with the sense of the interior, and how the relationships between people, objects, and space have changed from ethnographic, visual, and perceptual descriptions to statistical and scientific descriptions in movements to modernize its housing. The analysis of the drawings and texts clarifies the shift of ideas and descriptive methods reflecting the change of the social paradigm in situating the elements of the memory, imagination, and the individual perception in the study of interior space, and how the interior space as the locus of one's self was targeted in the Japanese society's capitalization and the wartime threat.