20th Century Japan in 20 Buildings

John Barr

• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781848225749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'architecture

There is a long history in the West of viewing Japan through the twin lenses of orientalism and exoticism. This book argues that Japanese modern architecture emerged from identifiable events: political, social, economic, historical events, and is as susceptible as any other architecture to analysis and criticism in these terms. Episodic rather than encyclopaedic, it does not describe every twist and turn in the development of modern Japanese architecture, but rather, it examines twenty buildings spanning the 20th century and places them in the context of the political, social and economic, as well as the historical and cultural factors that shaped both them and modern Japan. Each building has been chosen because it reflects a major event in the development of modern Japan and its architecture. In this way, the author provides a more rounded understanding of the development of modern architecture in Japan and the circumstances from which it emerged and offers lessons that are still of relevance.

1 Movements and Manifestos

Koide House: Sutemi Horiguchi 1925

Sutemi Horiguchi was one of the first architects to attempt to reconcile the competing requirements for a modern architecture that was based on Japanese values. His early attempts involved a fusing together of Japanese and Western elements to create a kind of schizophrenic architecture. It was as if someone had taken the two images of the Meiji Emperor, one in Japanese dress the other in Western dress, torn them both in half and then pieced together a new image using half of each. In Horiguchi’s early attempts you can see the join. The first built project using this technique was the Koide House, constructed in Nishikata, Tokyo in 1925 and later moved to the Edo Tokyo Open Air Museum, where it stands today. The design can be interpreted either as an overly simplistic attempt to resolve the issue of a modern architecture based on Japanese values or as a candid statement of the predicament.

The Koide House, although the first built example of a Japanese architect attempting to create a distinctly Japanese modernism, is not the first modernist building designed by a Japanese architect. That title, writes Hiroyasu Fujioka, Professor of Architectural History at Tokyo Institute of Technology, belongs to the Tokyo Central Post Office, which he has described as the ‘first genuine example of modernism in Japanese architecture’.¹ Although not completed until 1931, after the Koide House, the Tokyo Central Post Office was designed in 1922. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 that destroyed much of Tokyo delayed the start of construction until 1927 with final completion in 1931. It was designed by Tetsurō Yoshida, at that time principal architect at the Ministry of Communications [1.2].

The Ministry of Communications would become an institutional patron of modern architecture, and amongst the first in Japan to adopt the rational functionalism coming out of Germany in the 1920s, particularly the ideas emanating from Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus School.² The architects working at the ministry would go on to produce a series of rigorously rational designs for Post Office buildings throughout Japan, but there was no attempt to modify the imported modernism to include ‘Japanese values’. As a group, they were committed to the architectural and social ideals of international modernism and, following the earthquake and destruction of 1923, some of them formed the Sō-u-sha (Creation of the Universe Society) that promoted architecture as a means of social reform.³ The members of Sō-u-sha were mostly junior architects, architectural technicians, draughtsmen and engineers, who had attended vocational training colleges and worked as public employees.

In contrast, Horiguchi was the product of an elite education, having graduated from Tokyo’s Imperial University in 1920. By that time an argument had been underway for several years between those Japanese architects and academics who supported a rational-structuralist view of architecture as a discipline that was engaged solely in the efficient and truthful resolution of function and mechanics, and those who argued that architecture should also consciously embrace art and beauty. The arguments were often quite subtle, with advocates on both sides stating, for example, that the efficient and truthful expression of function and mechanics could, in and of itself, be beautiful. The dispute arose around whether or not the architect should actively and consciously seek beauty, and around the validity of self, feeling and instinct as drivers of architectural design. The arguments and their principal advocates are described in detail in Daiki Amanai’s paper, ‘The Founding of Bunriha Kenchiku Kai: Art and Expression in Early Japanese Architectural Circle [sic], 1888–1920’.⁴

1.1 Koide House, Sutemi Horiguchi, 1925. Entrance Porch.

The Bunriha Kenchiku Kai (Secessionist Architectural Society) was formed in 1920 by Horiguchi and a group of his fellow students at Tokyo’s Imperial University. It consisted of Mamoru Yamada, Mayumi Takizawa, Keiichi Morita, Shigeru Yada, Kikuji Ishimoto and Horiguchi. The group took a stance opposed to the rational-structuralist view and advocated an architecture that explicitly encompassed art and expression. For, despite its name, the Secessionist Architectural Society’s real interest and influences lay in German Expressionism. Its members intended the term ‘secessionist’ to be interpreted more widely than a specific reference to the Viennese group, and emphasised that their aim was to ‘secede’ from ‘the realm of past architecture’. They wished to break from an architecture that was based on the manipulation of a fixed repertoire of stylistic elements and to encourage individual expression.⁵

The freedom of our inner lives can be obtained only when we stand independent of others and form a style that is most appropriate to ourselves as individuals …⁶

In 1920 Ishimoto travelled to Germany and spent two years studying at the Bauhaus under Gropius, after which the group maintained contact with German architects and continued to look to Germany for its inspiration. Although the core values of the Bauhaus were in part a reaction against Expressionism, during the eight years that it was in existence, from 1920 to 1928, the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai continued to produce and exhibit designs that resembled those being produced by the German Expressionists. One of Horiguchi’s earliest built projects, the Memorial Tower constructed for the Peace Exhibition held in Tokyo’s Ueno Park in 1922, was based on Joseph Maria Olbrich’s design for the exhibition buildings at the Mathildenhöhe Artists’ Colony near Darmstadt in 1908.⁷

According to Amanai, the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai was the first architectural movement in Japan. The group produced a manifesto, translated and reproduced in Jonathan Reynolds’s, Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture, which declared:

We arise!

We break away from the realm of past architecture so that we might create a new architectural realm where all of the architecture that we produce is given genuine significance.

We arise!

In order to awaken all that is sleeping in the realm of past architecture.

In order to rescue all that is in the process of drowning.

In a state of joy, we dedicate everything that we have to the attainment of this ideal and we will wait expectantly for it until we collapse and die. In unison we declare this to the world! ⁸

It seems that the introduction of Western modernism brought with it a proclivity for the formation of movements and the production of manifestos.

The formation of the Bunriha Kenchiku Kai in 1920 was soon followed by the formation of the previously mentioned Sō-u-sha in 1923. Then, in 1930, the members of Sō-u-sha joined with others of similar background who had formed the AS Kenchiku-kai (AS Architectural Society – AS denoting Architecture School, as the members were graduates of vocational colleges not elite universities) and together with like-minded architects, university researchers and government technical experts, they combined to form Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei (the League of New Architects).⁹

1.2 Tokyo Central Post Office, Tetsurō Yoshida, 1931.

Both Sō-u-sha and AS Kenchiku-kai had begun life being influenced by Bunriha Kenchiku Kai but moved towards a more functionalist and socialist approach. By the time they joined forces to form Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei they had adopted an openly Marxist stance, that paralleled the agenda adopted by the Bauhaus under the leadership of Hannes Meyer when he succeeded Gropius in 1928. In 1930 Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei published ‘The 1930 Declaration’, which stated that:

We stand together on a scientific social consciousness for the theoretical and technical apprehension of architecture. In order to rectify tomorrow’s architecture to be justly powerful, and to liberate architecture from the nexus of today’s relations of social production, which are at an impasse, we will carry this out through scientific investigation of reality and an understanding of the laws of the inevitability of historical development. We will destroy all reactionary tendencies in contemporary architecture by internal adjustment and shared efforts.¹⁰

Within a month an article headed ‘Red Propaganda in Architecture’ appeared in the Yomiuri Shinbun, a major national newspaper. In the closing years of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries Japan had been involved in a number of tussles with Russia to establish dominance in East Asia and the two had fought a war in 1904–05, which Japan had won decisively. However, that had not resolved the tension between the two countries as they continued to jockey for power. Hostility and suspicion only increased following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the communist Soviet Union in 1922.

In a climate of growing Japanese nationalism and anti-communist sentiment, and as a result of the newspaper article, Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei came under police scrutiny. A number of members who worked for public institutions were instructed by their employers to resign their membership. Others, fearful of arrest or other repercussions, chose to leave. The League had formed in October 1930 and was disbanded in December.¹¹ The Bunriha Kenchiku Kai established by Horiguchi and his colleagues had already disbanded in 1928, not through any political pressure but simply due to its handful of members moving on with their individual careers. The members of Shinko Kenchikuka Renmei, not being graduates of elite universities, and in the strictly hierarchical system that then existed, had little prospect of individual careers. And so, within a period of ten years, the initial era of architectural movements in Japan had come and gone. The next ‘movement’ to emerge with a clear ideology was the Nihon Kosaku Bunka Renmei (Japan Arts and Culture Association) formed in 1936. It had a quite different agenda to the earlier movements, and I will return to it in a later chapter.

Those early movements seem to have been part of an initial, enthusiastic adoption of Western modernism, and it is noticeable that their areas of concern revisit Western discussions about the course of modernism there. There is no hint of the protagonists seeking a radically different course from the West that might result in a different outcome or in a distinct Japanese modernism, grown entirely from Japanese roots. The manifestos issued by the socialist groups could have been written in the Bauhaus, whilst the themes developed by Horiguchi and his colleagues are similar to those promoted by William Lethaby and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Compare Horiguchi and Lethaby on the subject of utility for example. Horiguchi insisted that architects should base their designs on utilitarian needs but that these must not be defined narrowly: ‘Naturally utilitarian needs do not consist solely of material needs – one must include spiritual aspiration as well.’¹² Meanwhile Lethaby sta...