Houses and Apartment Blocks

T He housing needs of the Japanese urban population during the period of industrialization and urban growth have never been adequately met. Nor, on the other hand, have they been so completely disregarded by State authority as was the case during the growth of the industrial towns of the north of England in the early nineteenth century. Mid-Meiji descriptions of the slum quarters of the growing industrial cities can be found to parallel anything in the Western literature, ¹³ but even from early times there was a certain amount of municipal control in the interests of public health, and although it was not until the nineteen-twenties that the government began tentatively to take positive measures to improve housing, negative controls had for some time been universal, if enforced with by no means uniform thoroughness. It seems that the squalor, disease, feckless irresponsibility and human degradation generally associated with slums remained a feature of relatively limited areas of Japanese industrial cities and never came to characterize the working classes as a whole.