Ann Waswo – författare

The last 120 years have seen great social change and development in Japan. In the early 1870s Japan was still a third world country - a newly unified island nation with a highly agrarian economy and an insecure and weak government. By 1914 Japan has progressed towards the beginnings of an industrial economy, it had established a small empire for itself and the government had gained full and effective control over the entire country. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, Japan is an economic giant, with a massive export economy and considerable clout in the international world community.Ann Waswo outlines the role of the 'ordinary' Japanese citizen in this extraordinary history. One of the continuous themes in this history has been the steady relationship which the state has had with the people since the late nineteenth century, but this relationship has not been without change. Waswo focuses attention upon these developments, together with the many historical explanations for events in Japanese history - events which have too often been explained by the 'unique and enduring' quality of Japanese cultural traditions.

Radical changes in the design of housing in post-war Japan had numerous effects on the Japanese people. Public policy toward housing provision and the effects of escalating land prices in Tokyo and a few other very large cities in the country from the mid- to late 1970s onward are examined, but it is dwellings themselves and the slow but steady shift from a floor-sitting to a chair-sitting housing culture in urban and suburban parts of the country that figure most prominently in the discussion.Central to the book is the author's translation of an account written by Kyoko Sasaki, an observant wife and mother, about the housing she and her growing family experienced during the 1960s, and subsequent chapters explore some of the issues that flow from her account. Chief among these are the small size and generally poor quality of the private-sector housing that Japanese of fairly ordinary means could afford to occupy in the early postwar years, the new design initiatives undertaken at about that time by public-sector housing providers and the diffusion of at least some of their initiatives to the housing sector as a whole, and the adjustments that the occupants of housing had to, or chose to, make as the dwellings available to them as renters or as owners changed in character. Attention is also paid to the structural requirements of dwellings and attitudes toward dwellings of diverse types in a country prone to earthquakes.