Review

Reviewed Work(s): Japan-Ness in Architecture by Arata Isozaki, David B. Stewart and Sabu
Kohso
Review by: David V. Tucker
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Aug., 2008), pp. 1091-1093
Published by: Association for Asian Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20203458
Accessed: 25-01-2018 16:54 UTC

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 Book Reviews?Japan 1091

from private correspondences and memoirs to scientific articles and published

social commentaries. The friendly letters exchanged between prominent Japa
nese and American scientists are particularly interesting, as is Low's deft histori
cal contextualization of Japanese scientists' thought and behavior. In addition,
Low provides a useful account of the institutional history of Japanese science.
Given the successes of scientific development in the postwar period, the field
is in need of more studies like Low's that investigate the social, economic, and
political developments of other sciences and technology.
However, Low's thesis regarding the influence of the samurai ideal can be
questioned. While it may be useful to consider the relationship between the con
struct of samurai identity in the modern period and the scientists' convictions of
public duty, the evidence presented is problematic. While it is true that the state
used the image of the self-sacrificing, duty-bound samurai to motivate soldiers
and civilians during the war, the image itself needs critical examination. In
addition, Low does not present any direct evidence that these scientists were
influenced by a samurai esprit. His study shows that several physicists came
from samurai backgrounds and that they became publicly active. However, he
offers no proof that samurai lineage led to their public convictions. Finally, we
can find many cases of Western physicists, including Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein,
and J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose social and political consciousness did not
stem from samurai values.
Despite these reservations, Science and the Building of a New Japan will be
of interest to Japan specialists, and Low's discussion of the significance of Japa
nese scientists as public men should be taken up by other historians.

Terrence Jackson
Adrian College

Japan-ness in Architecture. By Arata Isozaki. Edited by David B.

Stewart. Translated by Sabu Kohso. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2006. xv, 349 pp. $29.95 (cloth).
doi:10.1017/S0021911808001496

Isozaki Arata, long a major international architect, has written usefully on a

variety of architectural topics. This book is a translation of a collection of essays
written largely in the 1980s and 1990s (most originally intended for American pub
lication) and published in 2003 in Japan as Kenchiku ni okeru "Nihonteki na
mono"?a reference to a 1934 article with the same title by the architect Horiguchi
Sutemi. Isozaki here considers buildings not just as objects but as what he calls
"events" and "textual spaces"?their historical contexts and what has been
written about them (p. viii). Similarly, he treats Japan-ness, Nihonteki na mono,
not just as a collection of certain physical or aesthetic qualities but as a problematic
that appears during times of strong outside pressure and social turmoil, followed
by the assimilation of foreign influence of wayo-ka, "cultural Japanization"

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 1092 The Journal of Asian Studies

(p. 168), which brings social stability. This pattern has been repeated many
times?a "mechanism of cultural production" that is "destined to become clich?
or eventual kitsch" (p. 305).
One well-known example is the nineteenth-century Western taste for Japa
nese objects of daily life. In response, following this "Western-style Japanese
taste,'" Japan produced connoisseurs who found qualities of Japan-ness in such
items, which have now become art (p. 4). Architecture as profession and
concept was likewise introduced to Japan in the nineteenth century, and as Japa
nese became trained architects and architectural historians, they came to see past
Japanese building as architecture. Architectural interest in the qualities of Japan
ness, however, was a twentieth-century phenomenon that developed as Japanese
architects took up Western modernism and social turmoil increased. Modernity
and tradition were "split down the middle" (p. 28) for architects, as for others in
the 1930s, but the "overarching objective" of architects was to bridge "modern
and 'national'styles" (p. 261). Here Isozaki notes that the famed 1942 "Overcom
ing Modernity" symposium included no architects and no discussion of architec
ture. The symposium attendants opposed the modern to "a Japanese aesthetic or
ethos" but only rejected or praised it. Unlike them, architects "came to see mod
ernity and tradition as two sides of a single issue, articulating a stance by means of
which to critique both at the same time," and so laid the foundations for the many
accomplishments of postwar Japanese architects (p. 21). But the 1930s are also
Isozaki's entryway into Japan's architectural past.
The decade brought the conjunction of careful study of past building by Japa
nese architects such as Horiguchi with the gaze of such outsiders as German
refugee architect Bruno Taut. On arrival in Japan in 1933, Taut declared the
new Tokyo Central Post Office the most modern building in the world. (Which
Western modernist then would have so approved any other Japanese endeavor?)
Then, in a 1935 lecture given semiofficial validation by its publication by the
Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, he explained that Japanese architectural history had
two courses, a positive line of authenticity and rationality running from Ise
through Katsura to modern quality, and a negative degenerative line marred by
non-Japanese decorativeness that ran through shogunal Nikko to modern
kitsch. Rather than question or affirm Taut's theory, Isozaki emphasizes how
the interaction of Japanese architects with Taut's ideas established (the imperial
sites of) Ise and Katsura as iconic modernist prototypes, imbued with imperial
authenticity, ten?teki honmono. Taut's emphasis on the rationality and simplicity
of Japanese building increased the international prestige of Japanese modern
architecture and helped give it, as well as Western modern architecture,
a Japanese history, while the link with the imperial building tradition reinforced
modernist design's Japan-ness.
From that vantage point, Isozaki looks back to the events of the construction
of Ise and Katsura, which remained modernist icons into the postwar period. As is
widely known, Ise's main sanctuary is rebuilt and slightly relocated every twenty
years. The significance of this for Isozaki is that it obscures the origins of both the
shrine and the state that built it and replaces them with a perpetual process of
beginning. Ise's design was not a natural "unmotivated evolution," expressing

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 Book Reviews?Japan 1093

a natural essence, but a deliberate integration of existing native elements into a

"new design paradigm" that was part of an assertion of native culture after the
importation of continental culture (p. 167). It was, he says, the earliest
symptom of Japanization after the political turmoil of the seventh century. The
1930s question of Japan-ness merely repeated this pattern. Turning to Katsura,
Isozaki follows the development of its postwar modernist reading. This rested
in part on an austere monochromatic photographic interpretation, which made
Katsura seem Mondrian-esque. As modernism faded, a different view of
Katsura emerged, one more ambiguous, a mixture of patterns, styles, and literary
quotations, one that emphasized Katsura's origins in the struggle between the
imperial family and the bakufu. This Katsura, Isozaki says, was well-suited for
the architecture after modernism, which also looked to such "heterogeneous
quotation" (p. 290). However, he also locates Katsura's pattern of quotation as
part of the cycle of inescapable reproduction that will eventually become
clich?, and he pessimistically sees this pattern of Taut-like devolution into
kitsch as almost inescapable in Japan. Isozaki implies that these two ambiguous
icons, Ise and Katsura, irreversibly dominate Japanese architecture and have
become impossible to criticize.
He does find one alternative remaining masterpiece, however: the Southern
Gate of Todaiji. Unlike Ise and Katsura, Nandai-mon, sitting squarely on the
road, is fully open to view and, for Isozaki, is almost pure, unadorned construc
tivism. The appeal for him is clearly related to its almost unassimilated Sung
construction, which remained heroically immune to Japanization?it has "all
the uprightness and integrity of a will to construct later nullified by way?-ka."
But for him, Nandai-mon is a singular event, one ignored and "rejected as
foreign, karagokoro (p. 239), and has no descendents.
There is another alternative that he does not praise?the negative line of
kitsch that Taut dismissed, even as he treated it heroically by seeing it in sho
gunal Nikko. Isozaki criticizes the kitsch that devolves from heightened
stylization, but he has little to say about the continuing vigor of very impure
popular building.

David V. Tucker
University of Iowa

JAPANima?s: History and Culture in Japan's Animal Life. Edited by

Gregory M. Pflugfelder and Brett L. Walker. Ann Arbor: Center
for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2005. xix, 370 pp. $60.00
(cloth); $25.00 (paper).
doi:10.1017/S0021911808001502

"I am not, by practically anyone's definition of the term, an animal lover.

I keep no pets, eat meat with gusto, and feel no particular urge to commune

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