Instant Communities, Machines for Living: Danchi Apartments and the Production of Public Housing in Postwar Japan

This dissertation examines the development of public apartment complexes built by municipal authorities and the Japan Housing Corporation after World War II. It begins with the dehousing of urban areas in Japan by the United States Army Airforces during 1945 in which wooden domiciles of the working population were decimated. After the war, the Japanese government acted to coordinate the production and financing of houses to shelter surviving citizens. In the late 1940s, experimental multistory concrete apartments were developed at Takanawa and Toyamagahara in Tokyo. During this period, municipalities throughout the archipelago began to develop residential danchi—large-scale housing tracts administered as single sites. From 1947-1954, the construction of concrete apartment danchi was driven by municipalities supported by local taxes and state-aid. When the Japan Housing Corporation (JHC) was formed in 1955 it constructed three basic types of apartments (star house, terrace house, and flat) in large numbers throughout the archipelago. The image that the Japan Housing Corporation worked to build was one in which danchi apartments were presented as modernized dwelling environments and crucibles for the postwar community, places to raise educated children who would be tomorrow’s citizens. As instant communities and machines for living, danchi apartments were geared toward the rational management of everyday life and the biological reproduction of nuclear families. Overall, this study is positioned within a global comparative register that considers architectural and urban planning discourse as it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Public housing in Japan responded to modern economic conditions, as well as the effects of war. Danchi apartments were modern projects that represented the state’s attempt to reshape national everyday life and encourage the production of preferential publics—those who would live economically and be seen as the model citizens of Japan after 1945. Danchi apartments cemented a nation-wide trend toward high-rise living and the partitioning of people through the space of the apartment. A trend that began after World War II and has not yet ended