ABSTRACT
Sasaki-san and her family moved to the capital district in 1972, when her husband secured a teaching position at a university in the western extremity of Tokyo Metropolitan Prefecture. They rented a house in Fussa City which had been built in 1950 for the express purpose of rental to U.S. military personnel at a nearby airbase. The house consisted of five western-style rooms, one of them in a separate prefabricated structure erected in the front yard, plus a small kitchen, bath and toilet. The total living space, including the kitchen, was equivalent to 32 mats, for which they originally paid 23,000 yen per month rent. Here they were to remain for the next twenty-seven years, until just after her husband’s retirement from the university in 1999, when they purchased a 4DK manshon for 50 million yen (about $467,000 at the then-exchange rate of 107 yen to the dollar) in a newly completed building in the adjacent city of Tachikawa.
