The Great Kanto Earthquake on Sept. 1, 1923, devastated the capital and its vicinity, destroying 63 percent of homes in Tokyo and 72 percent in Yokohama. From the ashes of the fires that raged in the wake of the massive temblor, though, there arose a public-housing policy whose enlightenment was in many ways far more advanced than the policies that would be pursued two decades later, after World War II.
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| A unit from the demolished Dojunkai Daikanyama Apartments (Satoko Kawasaki Photo) |
Outstanding among those progressive initiatives was Dojunkai, a body incorporated in 1924 under the jurisdiction of the Home Affairs Ministry to supply public housing in Tokyo and Yokohama using donated funds from both Japan and abroad.
After initially constructing wooden houses in suburban areas to put roofs over homeless people's heads, Dojunkai began to pioneer the use of reinforced concrete to construct residences in urban areas. Altogether, from 1925 to 1934, it built some 2,500 apartment units at 13 locations in Tokyo and two in Yokohama.
Among the few Dojunkai developments still standing are the ones on Omotesando Avenue, which will be demolished from the end of March; the Edogawa Apartments built in 1934 in Shinjuku Ward; and the Otsuka Women's Apartments built in 1930 in Myogadani, Bunkyo Ward, to accommodate single female workers.
In line with its aim to rise above the merely utilitarian, Dojunkai appointed to its board Shozo Uchida, an architecture professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo, who then recruited elite graduates from his own department.
"Dojunkai's activities were an integral part of the government's social policy," said Seizo Uchida, a professor in the dwelling environment department at Bunka Women's University in Tokyo. "Its architects knew a lot about public housing abroad, and they were more concerned about the quality than the quantity of public housing.
"In short, they wanted their designs to be the model for future urban residential developments -- and that's why the Dojunkai apartment buildings are still attractive."
According to Uchida, one factor that clearly set Dojunkai's prewar design philosophy apart from that of Japan's postwar public housing was that in the postwar housing complexes, buildings were arranged in parallel rows so the front of each faced south.
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| Otsuka Women's Apartments built in Bunkyo Ward in 1930 (Toshiki Sawaguchi Photo) |
"The postwar design ideology was equality -- an equal amount of light from the sun and equal ventilation for each unit," Uchida explained. "In contrast, Dojunkai's architects usually arranged the apartment buildings around a courtyard, with some facing a main road and serving as a facade.
"Therefore, depending on its location, each apartment unit's characteristics were different from the others, since the amount of sunlight and the ventilation were not the same. This was because the designers were interested in making the apartment buildings contribute to a better overall urban landscape."
To compensate for any insufficiency in an apartment unit's lighting or ventilation, Dojunkai architects typically utilized communal spaces, such as the rooftop sunroom at Otsuka Women's Apartments, Uchida said. In addition, he pointed out that the five-story Otsuka building, comprising 157 units, also has both a communal music room and a communal living room to receive visitors (and to lessen men's temptation to enter the women's rooms).
Another of the Dojunkai planners' guiding principles, Uchida noted, was the realization that in urban life, many people move due to changes in their marital status, their income or family size. Consequently, Dojunkai apartment houses were designed with units both for married couples and single people -- and all of them only available for rent. To maximize the available living space, single occupants would typically use communal toilets and kitchens.
"Apartment houses with these common spaces could still appeal to people nowadays," Uchida said. "We could still benefit from adopting Dojunkai's approach because such spaces help residents learn how to mix together in a public space and develop a sense of community."
1934's Edogawa Apartments in Shinjuku Ward (Satoko Kawasaki Photo)
He also pointed out that by mixing together single-occupancy and family-occupancy units, the Dojunkai approach ensures an apartment building will be home to a range of generations, from infants to the elderly. This ensures a certain vitality, since it prevents situations arising where, as in many of today's condominiums, people of a similar generation buy apartment units around the same time, then all grow old together.
He added that because of Dojunkai's rental-only policy, as well as the central management of the properties, it was easier to maintain the buildings and each unit within them to a high standard.
This latter point was to be borne out clearly after the war. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Kanagawa Prefectural Government took over the Dojunkai apartment buildings from the Jutaku Eidan (Public Housing Corp.), which had been responsible for them from 1941. Soon after, apartments in most Dojunkai buildings, including the Aoyama units, began to be sold off to their residents.
"After individuals came to own the apartments, the maintenance of the buildings began to suffer," Uchida said. "If the renting system under a public entity had continued, the overall maintenance standard would have been higher."
Of the remaining Dojunkai apartment buildings, the Edogawa complex will be demolished soon and reborn as Shin Edogawa Apartments in the spring of 2005.
The fate of the Otsuka Women's Apartments is still in the balance, although its present owner, the metropolitan government, plans to demolish it on the grounds it is too old. However, a citizens' group, of which Uchida is a member, is campaigning to preserve the building, in part as a symbol of women's advancement in society in the 1930s. Indeed, from 1935 to 1945, among its residents were Anna Bubnova-Ono (1890-1979), a violin teacher from St. Petersburg (and aunt of Yoko Ono) who gave lessons to such future star players as Nejiko Suwa and Mari Iwamoto.
"As a prototype of a modern urban apartment building, and an example of such progressive thinking more than 70 years ago," Uchida said, "it is important we don't lose this wonderful example of Tokyo's urban culture."
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