ABSTRACT
As she attempted to cope with the diverse needs of her family and “that vinyl floor” in the kitchen of her second “modern,” Sasaki-san found herself musing about the ingenuity of the traditional Japanese style of living in making the best of little space. One tatami-matted room could be made to serve multiple purposes simply by changing the few furnishings it contained: a low table and cushions at mealtimes or when guests dropped by, nothing at all when the children wanted to play, futon laid out on the tatami for sleeping at night. The multi-functionality of rooms in traditional Japanese dwellings was to appeal to Walter Gropius and other exponents of modern architecture in the West, as were the scarcity of furniture within the home and the standardized parts – tatami mats, sliding panels, cupboards, and so forth – with which the domestic interior was put together. To most professional architects and social reformers in early postwar Japan, however, that multifunctionality was evidence of Japan’s backwardness, a “remnant of feudalism” that must be eliminated if democracy was to flourish at long last. Eating and sleeping in the same room was unhygienic. Co-sleeping – that is, the bedding down of family members in the same room – was an infringement of personal privacy. Constantly changing the furnishings to suit the next purpose to which the room would be put was an irrational and therefore demeaning use of the housewife’s labor.
