After the Disaster: Architecture and Ruination in Twentieth-Century Japan

Abstract

Focusing on the compounding concerns of ruination between the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the postwar redevelopment of urban Japan, this dissertation examines Japan’s twentieth-century history through mapping, architectural experimentation, critical visual media and architectural writing to detail a narrative of evolving architectural theory and practice and its lasting consequences on Japan’s urban environment. The findings of this dissertation elucidate the reciprocal (and occasionally competing) advances in architectural thinking, technological culture, and governmental practice deployed in disaster’s wake. Chapter One details a heretofore unknown history of Japanese architectural experimentation, a line of inquiry which contributes to the ‘promise’ of residential reconstruction after the earlier disaster of the 1923 earthquake that subsequently contributes to the destructive power of aerial bombardment during the Pacific War when the results of this experimentation are collected by American and British war planners and utilized to perfect their incendiary campaigns. A ‘bridge’ chapter follows that documents the ways in which the experimental approach to protection in Japan is confounded by the experiments in architectural aggression and bombardment by allied forces that subsequently decimated urban Japan. Chapter Two compares American and Japanese government mapping and evaluation projects conducted at the end of 1945, viewed through concerns about anomaly and scientific vision to argue for the mapping and visualization of wartime disaster as an extended encounter with the sublime. The chapter examines specific photographic representations and documentation of urban disaster and the ways in which this informs a critical appreciation of the ruin. The ‘bridge’ chapter after this exploration juxtaposes postwar documentation with the literary writings of Ishikawa Jun, Sakaguchi Ango, and Sata Ineko (all writing in 1945) as a pre-amble to the critical architectural writing on ruins of Isozaki Arata alongside the critical conceptualization of ruins by Hino Keizō that form the focus of Chapter Three. Through extensive engagement with the writings of Isozaki and Hino, this final chapter elaborates the transitions of a focus on the ruin as an object of study in the 1920s through its manifestation as experience in the postwar 1940s and finally into a productive hermeneutic and lasting ontology in the form of ruination.