House and Home: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (review)

Much has been written about the homes of modern Japan—about the vaunted ie system, marriage politics, newly nuclear families, changing gender roles, family values—but only rarely have Japanese homes been examined in the material context of the houses that housed them. In this compelling study of "house and home," which works from the basic premise that societies commonly project their values into space and architecture, Jordan Sand treats the Japanese house "as site and as artifact, and explores the spaces, commodities, and conceptions of community associated with it in the modern era" (p. 1).

Sand argues that Japan witnessed some dramatic changes in residential architecture from the Meiji era forward, and that these can best be understood as manifest expressions of shifting national norms. He aptly characterizes houses as "vessels for new meaning" (p. 2) in the dynamic and destabilizing social, cultural, and ideological context of modern change. More specifically, he draws our attention to the creation of new forms of residential architecture that reflected a "modern imagining of domestic space" (p. 2). Despite the seemingly "continuous search for new forms of everyday life" that began in the Meiji era and extends to the present day, Sand argues convincingly that there has been change within continuity. If residential design continues even today to be dominated by a "bourgeois model" first articulated in the 1880s—a model that "has been stretched and strained, but never replaced" (p. 19)—bourgeois domestic space has also been imagined and designed in many different contexts and configurations over the course of the modern era.

Amid this diversity, Sand identifies two distinct imaginings of domestic space that correspond to two distinct Japanese modernities. From the 1880s to the mid-1910s, Japan found itself at "a stage of nation-building in which intellectuals constituted a modern bourgeois culture as part of their struggle to find Japan's place in the imperial order" (p. 19). But from World War I, Japan entered "a stage of global mass-mediated consumerism, in which intellectuals reconfigured that culture for a wider public as they sought to define a cosmopolitan identity and lifestyle" (p. 19). The cultural shift that Sand traces to the boom times of the mid-1910s has long since been narrated and theorized by other historians—typically, as the paradigmatic shift from bunmei (Civilization) to bunka (culture[s]) that witnessed the waning of the one-size-fits-all approach to everyday life of kindai seikatsu (The Modern Way of Life) of the Meiji era to the cosmopolitan heterogeneity of early Showa modan raifu (a modern life[style])—but Sand offers us a unique window on cultural change by tracking the changing "forms of everyday life" in house and home across this critical divide.

Sand maintains that the invention and reinvention of modern Japanese houses was propelled primarily by changing notions of home. Over ten substantive chapters, he monitors the normative shifts that triggered new designs from 1880 to 1930. He notes, for example, that the bourgeois model of domestic space first emerged in the mid-Meiji era from the new notion of "home" embodied in the neologism katei (chapter one). Even as the hegemony of the extended family was thus challenged by the novel notion of "home" as the haven of the stem family, Sand points out, architects were designing new domestic spaces for the new katei. While his book is not always successful in articulating the modern discourses that animated such normative shifts, nor in eliciting their historical significance, its conceptual fuzziness only slightly blurs the vivid portrait that Sand paints of "house and home in modern Japan." When he is focused on his subject—that is, when he is examining the "public construction of a private sphere" that embodied "middle-classness" (pp. 9–10)—he brings Japan's modern bourgeois culture to life.

Sand draws us into this dynamic bourgeois culture on the combined strength of his historical analysis...