Competing futures: War narratives in postwar Japanese architecture, 1945-1970

UnrestrictedThis dissertation examines the trajectory of postwar Japanese architecture from 1945 to 1970 as a process of overcoming the nation’s war legacy. The task of overcoming the war was not restricted to the physical recovery from wartime destruction and postwar ruins but also included the psychological and symbolic process of coming to terms with the recurring memories of this troubled past. Drawing on memory and trauma studies which have emerged as a crucial element in narrating postwar history, this study traces the progression of war narratives in Japanese architecture against the backdrop of Japan’s socio-political complexity and the global Cold War context. This dissertation focuses on the tropes of the future which prevailed in Japanese architecture and urbanism during the 1960s because these products of futuristic imagination serve as a rich text through which to discuss the dialectic between forgetting and remembering the war. The dissertation’s central argument is that visionary designs for future cities, which accommodated the postwar society’s progressive aspirations to build a brave new world, were deeply infiltrated by the traumatic memories of wartime past and a persistent anxiety over nuclear war.; In contrast to previous accounts which placed Japan’s futuristic projects in tandem with an international context of utopian urbanism and the megastructure movement, this dissertation situates these visionary designs within Japan’s changing urban and social landscape and considers them as architects’ belated response to Japan’s tragic past. One of the objectives of this study is to address the disagreements among key figures in Japanese architecture, including Tange Kenzō, Isozaki Arata, and the Metabolists, in their envisioning of the city of the future. I argue that their diverse and even competing visions of the future, which range from a technocratic utopia (Tange Kenzō) to a ruined future (Isozaki Arata) and the post-apocalyptic world (the Metabolists), resulted from the architects’ disparate relationships with the troubled wartime past and continuing Cold War conflict. This dissertation ends with a discussion of Expo’70, commonly known as the “grand swansong” of the modern movement and its utopian projects. It posits Expo’70 as the end of postwar architecture, architecture defined by a physical and psychological overcoming of the war legacy, and the beginning of post-postwar architecture, a new paradigm of architecture in an information and postindustrial society