Some anthropologists studying the home have successfully transcended the limitations of the interview by adapting ‘traditional’ in situ fieldwork techniques to modern, urban conditions. By paying multiple follow-up visits to the same homes, or by living for extended periods of time in the particular community studied, even if not inside the participants’ homes, one may build up a relationship of trust with the people studied and gain a more profound insight into the aspects of life behind closed doors that are taken for granted. (Daniels, 2010:20)
Pink et al. also note their methodology in detail throughout their study (2017), focusing upon the ongoing nature of the making of the home: it is not a static assemblage, but a dynamic process continually producing a place. Daniels underlines trust as a major factor in the ethics of her research methodology.
The subject of the research is, after all, intimate and personal: investigating the homes of people who are by and large uncomfortable with sharing this space. In this case, Daniels lived with several of the families for around a month each, supplemented by interviews with a larger group conducted over a long period. This time period is important, and it is important not to rush the process, as building and maintaining trust requires that this time is spent.
The development of the Japanese housing market in the twentieth century eventually came to settle on promoting the LDK concept, where the home is arranged around a central Living–Dining–Kitchen area. The combination of kitchen with dining area has a living room adjacent or adjoining it, creating a central hub for the home experience. This has associations, as we have discussed earlier, with economics, mainstream media and, specific to this example, the explicit desires of governments from the Meiji era onwards.
Other external influences shifted the tastes of people from the traditional Japanese home towards a modern form quite distinct from those found in Europe or the United States.
This trajectory takes us from the model of the tatami (Figure 3.2) home which was designed around the reception of guests and towards a family- oriented, inward-looking home environment. The earlier organization was reserved for high status families, consisting of tatami matted rooms open to an ornamental garden at the front of the building, with darker, more private quarters to the rear, away from the garden. Arrangements of rooms without a separate circulation space mirrored early European models, meaning that one had to pass through spaces we would now presume to be private in passing from one space to another.
Daniels expresses the major move in this history as a deliberate shift from tatami-based to chair-based living. This is always associated with a new kind of family values ethic in the government posters of the time, as part of a deliberate move towards modernism as observed in the West. There was,
however, a long gestation period between this initial promotion in the late nineteenth century and direct government intervention in the 1920s, as only the very wealthy could afford these new modernist homes.10
Interestingly, the intercultural exchange of architects brought the influence of Japanese architecture to the West, with figures as diverse as Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruno Taut visiting Japan both to instigate a modernist revolution there, but also returning home unexpectedly influenced by the traditional forms of architecture they encountered. Such intertextuality is observed in a great many other points of contact, including literature and film. In cinema, the work of Kurosawa, as influenced by John Ford westerns initially, is instructive as his work then inspired works such as The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars based on Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, respectively. A similar reflection and re- reflection also happens in architecture.11 The LDK takes hold in the postwar period, when Japan’s economy experienced a massive upswing, particularly from the mid-1960s. The intended Westernization, however, was only partly adopted and was adapted by the Japanese people in order to maintain many of the benefits of traditional living. With LDK, the guest reception rooms were removed, and the living room was used to accommodate this function. The tradition for families sharing a bedroom and sleeping on futons was largely maintained and is one of the practices most distinctive from the Western modern model of living.
Daniels (2010:37) elaborates that there is some variation in how sleeping is arranged, and it has now become a matter of preference for Western- style arrangements or Japanese-style rooms. In many ways, this is a more open approach than in the UK, for example, where a normative notion of sleeping arrangements prevails. Other elements of the home, for example, FIGURE 3.2 Tatami dimensions and room layouts.
bathing, have a similar history and plurality of contemporary form. The move in this case is from local community bath houses which would serve an entire neighbourhood. The introduction of bathing in the home, whether Japanese style or Western style, has brought about the closure of many of these community facilities across Japan. This indicates a loss of community, as people would meet and socialize at the bath house in a manner that is impossible with the privatization of this space.
The most pertinent element of Daniels’s study is the chapter on storage, with the intriguing subtitle: the ideology of tidiness (2010:131). The flow of material items through the home is examined in this chapter. The focus is on places to tidy things away and a never-ending need for more storage. This is elevated to an ideology: an almost religious fervour surrounding neatness and cleanliness, giving everything its appropriate place in the home. One of the challenges presented to householders is the culture of gift giving and souvenir gathering in Japan. Broadly speaking, gift giving is an important theory in itself within anthropology.12 Gift giving and receiving has a strong social function in Japan, tied closely to social status and obligation.
As such, a flow of items enters a household; these are expected to be given some house-room, kept and stored carefully. This explains a preference for gifts which are edible or otherwise impermanent in certain circumstances, as they impose no obligation on the receiver to keep them. A survey of popular culture reveals television home makeover shows and interior design magazines with this very obsession: storage and an association with the efficiency of the home resulting from a good storage solution or strategy (2010:133).
One innovative example described by Daniels (2010:133) describes the kura-house, a new-build design by Misawa Homes, a volume house-builder which references the sixteenth-century typology of a masonry treasure house. The original kura-house is a separate structure designed to resist both fire and theft, whilst Misawa Homes’ reinterpretation of the form resembles a regular modern house, but with additional storage built in to the ceiling to floor void, increasing storage space significantly in order to keep seasonal homewares and clothing tidied away. The kura-house illustrates the importance of historical referencing to marketing, and the manner of promoting modern homes to the purchaser. Methodologically, Daniels uses this specific, self- contained example to direct the reader’s attention to a much larger, possibly hidden concern. By establishing that storage is important and apparent to the researcher, and finding such a clear example, Daniels affords herself the space as a writer to fully explore this relationship of gifts and homes.
A tangible, material response is made to a social constraint: a structure arranged around the ceiling to floor voids for storing seasonal or unwanted items that cannot simply be disposed of. Other solutions to the same issue
would include continually moving home, climbing up the housing ladder. The Japanese housing market encourages a different approach, whereby families build ever larger homes on the same plot: decreasing the lifespan of a building significantly but maintaining an attachment to place. Speed of construction is therefore a crucial factor. Families might also rent storage from businesses established to serve this need, compounded by the high urban density of Japan, creating an ecosystem of businesses around the issue.
The other side to this hiddenness is, of course, display. What items are chosen to be out in the open, on display or in everyday use. This is revealing a different set of choices and has some connections to the discussion of wrapping in Joy Hendry’s anthropologies of Japan. Hendry takes the idea of the furoshiki wrapping cloth to stand as a metaphor for various aspects of Japanese culture (1993, 2000:11, 12; 210). This is extended to the ways in which other cultures are packaged neatly and presented in theme parks (see Chapter 4 for more on this) and further discussed by Jean-Pierre Warnier (2006) in his material culture of containers: inside and outside. The process by which practices of wrapping and containing might begin to inform wider activities is discussed in detail by both writers. The habituation to a particular tool eventually brings that tool, however broadly sketched, into the sphere of our own bodies: an extension of the hand which begins to form our engagement with the world: furoshiki wrapping becomes a sedimented practice extended into other aspects of life.
Daniels’s study overturns conventional narratives of Japan as a throw-away consumer society, as she shows the great difficulty that her respondents go to in order to hang on to gifts and other things to give them their place and maintain an orderly existence at home. This is supported by other evidence, such as the industries of home building, external storage, television and magazine coverage. This is an example of why we must find out how people live rather than to simply make assumptions based on our own experiences of prejudices. The answers are always more complex, more interesting and more valuable to the design process than the easy assumptions we might make, whether this is eventually expressed as similarity or Otherness.
A combination of tradition and modernity co-exists in the Japanese homes described by Daniels, who makes no aesthetic or other judgements in the way that glossy magazines attempt to depict the Japanese home as either ‘exotic’
or ‘minimalist’. Indeed, one can see that a parallel of British or American or European homes would be similarly rich, differing in many ways, but the point is to maintain a methodological philistinism and not to make value judgements. These can come later, in conversation with clients about the best way to move forward as, whilst anthropology is a fundamentally descriptive discipline, architecture has, as its end product, a change in condition; a change in space; the altering or creation of a new place.
The study of home can be seen as the study of a culture in miniature, a way of drawing cross-cultural comparisons to find similarities and differences, allowing the development of a theory of dwelling as a fundamental human activity. This notion of a theory of dwelling itself is crucial for architects to both contribute to and make use of.