ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the works of the Japanese architect Wajiro Kon, and on Japan and its colonies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kon was one of the earliest researchers to investigate the housing of ordinary Japanese citizens, and he also conducted ethnographical/anthropological surveys of Korean villages and housing in the 1920s and 1940s. The chapter examines surveys results especially houses; what effect colonial and modernizing social conditions had on that translation; and what effect the historical process of translation and practice had on architect's ideas of housing. Kon remained conscious of the fundamental meaning of the space of a house and its construction in the occupant's ontological consciousness through his studies of rural houses in Japan. He could not come to terms with the reworking of Korean house styles by the colonial government nor with the frugal simplification of house space based on the government's scientific rationalization.
