Ann Waswo [Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, Oxford and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, April-October 1995] recently gave a staff seminar on her new research project, the social history of urban housing in postwar Japan. The main topics she is investigating are:

1) the development and characteristics of postwar housing policy,

2) the development and characteristics of the private-sector housing industry,

3) regional and class differences in urban housing conditions,

4) popular attitudes toward housing and the home, with particular attention to the emerging role of urban housewives in determining where and how their families live, and

5) the origins and implications of the widespread shift from Japanese to Western-style interior design and furnishings in urban housing of all sorts - rental apartments and manshon, as well as detached, single-family dwellings.

In the realm of postwar urban housing as in other facets of Japan's postwar experience, there have been notable continuities with the country's prewar past.
At the policy level, where they have been most pronounced, these continuities have included a marked tendency among bureaucrats and politicians to regard cities as instruments for and emblems of the achievement of national goals, and a bias in [comparatively modest] state spending on housing toward the developmentally 'useful' new urban middle class. Only recently, and at much greater cost to taxpayers than would have been the case a few decades earlier, has much official attention been paid to the quality of urban life so far as ordinary urban residents are concerned - that is, to the city as an environment for people. Even had the Occupation authorities not dissolved the Home Ministry in 1947, it is unlikely that a radically different set of urban land or housing policies would have been achieved.

What is striking is the degree to which the urban public has accepted the state's urban housing policies and the relatively costly, cramped living space available to most of them throughout most of the long postwar period. Some observers attribute this to Japan's temperate climate and to a Buddhism-inspired disposition to transcend the trifling inconveniences of mundane existence, but it seems likely that other factors have played a greater role, chief among them the availability of inexpensive company housing for a small but potentially vocal minority of urban/industrial employees, fairly widespread faith in the notion that hard work and assiduous saving would lead to realization of the new, postwar home ownership dream and an automatic betterment in living conditions, and - more generally - the possibility of 'denying' the city and its problems by moving to the suburbs. While the first of these factors continues to operate in somewhat attenuated form, the second and third reached an impasse in major metropolitan areas during the mid- to late 1980s, owing principally to massive increases in urban and suburban land prices. Not even middle-class Japanese wives in these regions, who had hitherto been remarkably successful in rationalizing the long commuting distances their husbands had to endure for the sake of a 'proper' family home, or Japanese politicians, many of whom used to be able to sway public opinion, have yet found a way of coping with this new situation. The elderly and the poorly paid, who form the majority of those who inhabit substandard public and private housing in Japan's inner cities, have yet to find anyone to champion their cause, much less an effective means of championing it themselves.

Comments welcome, especially from those working on the same or related topics.