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Paper short abstract:

Japan's repeating disasters expose issues related to social support for secured and qualified housing for victims and vulnerable people. This paper examines how these issues were derived from the absence of Well-being idea in the modernization of architectural planning and design.

Paper long abstract:

Continuous natural and pandemic disasters have exposed issues related to social support for dwelling for the vulnerable, and revealed problems of Japanese housing: the lack of the idea of the quality of life and of the comprehensive idea of housing connected with community and natural environment. But the rigidity of the housing systems, concept of the functional planning and welfare role prevented their revisions.

The Japanese government-provided housing system is said to have started in the 1920s after the Great Kanto Earthquake and developed in terms of postwar financial policy but was reduced after the 1970s in accordance with the policy of New Liberalism prioritizing economic development. Historical examination of Japanese housing reveals that the above architectural issues have been resulted from the idea of “modernization” itself. The scientific idea of health and sanitation, Westernization of lifestyle, and industrial rationalization, which were promoted by the government as a new idea of the modern society and good “quality of life” from the end of the 19th century. During the World War II period, the government established its public housing system, and “modernization” was accelerated to emphasize scientific understanding of human body and technological efficiency of production apart from the local reality and shrunk house volume and quality. In the post war period, this war-oriented housing long remained as the prototype, and the issues of the quality of space and Well-being have been transferred to the number of rooms and technological elaboration in its commodification.

This paper will examine how above ideological shift of the quality of living has been processed by focusing to the minimum size housing. It was initially introduced in Japan as a symbol of European modernism, transformed to a symbol of war-time nationalism, and to a representation of Japanese aesthetics in the 21st century. I will explain how its idea was physically interpreted without its original socialist ideology, how its design was elaborated technologically, how ethical and institutional intentions were combined, how people’s spiritual sensitivities, behaviors, relationship with nature and community have been avoided, and how this process caused contradictions in formalizing a comprehensive idea of dwelling.