ABSTRACT
At the end of World War II, modern Japan was not even a century old yet the rebuilding of the country socially, politically, economically and physically required such extensive change that a severance from the Imperial past was inevitable and, for many, necessary. Whereas the war in Europe had left many cities, such as Coventry, Dresden and Berlin devastated, their ruins were, to some extent, inhabitable. In Japan the situation was rather different. The timber construction which characterised the domestic housing stock had laid the cities open to total conflagration by incendiary and, ultimately, atomic bombing. Nagaoka was razed in less than three hours on the night of 1 August 1945; Hiroshima in less than three minutes barely five days later.1 Indeed, the Ministry of Construction estimated that, nationwide, 2.1 million dwellings had been lost and a further 55,000 pulled down to create firebreaks.2
