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Japan­ness 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).

David V. Tucker

The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 67 / Issue 03 / August 2008, pp 1091 ­ 1093DOI: 10.1017/S0021911808001496, Published online: 23 July 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911808001496

How to cite this article:David V. Tucker (2008). The Journal of Asian Studies, 67, pp 1091­1093 doi:10.1017/S0021911808001496

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from private correspondences and memoirs to scientific articles and publishedsocial 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 fieldis in need of more studies like Low’s that investigate the social, economic, andpolitical developments of other sciences and technology.

However, Low’s thesis regarding the influence of the samurai ideal can bequestioned. While it may be useful to consider the relationship between the con-struct of samurai identity in the modern period and the scientists’ convictions ofpublic duty, the evidence presented is problematic. While it is true that the stateused the image of the self-sacrificing, duty-bound samurai to motivate soldiersand civilians during the war, the image itself needs critical examination. Inaddition, Low does not present any direct evidence that these scientists wereinfluenced by a samurai esprit. His study shows that several physicists camefrom samurai backgrounds and that they became publicly active. However, heoffers no proof that samurai lineage led to their public convictions. Finally, wecan find many cases of Western physicists, including Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein,and J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose social and political consciousness did notstem from samurai values.

Despite these reservations, Science and the Building of a New Japan will beof 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 JACKSONAdrian 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 avariety of architectural topics. This book is a translation of a collection of essayswritten largely in the 1980s and 1990s (most originally intended for American pub-lication) and published in 2003 in Japan as Kenchiku ni okeru “Nihonteki namono”—a reference to a 1934 article with the same title by the architectHoriguchiSutemi. Isozaki here considers buildings not just as objects but as what he calls“events” and “textual spaces”—their historical contexts and what has beenwritten 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 problematicthat appears during times of strong outside pressure and social turmoil, followedby the assimilation of foreign influence of wayô-ka, “cultural Japanization”

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(p. 168), which brings social stability. This pattern has been repeated manytimes—a “mechanism of cultural production” that is “destined to become clichéor 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 ‘Japanesetaste,’” Japan produced connoisseurs who found qualities of Japan-ness in suchitems, which have now become art (p. 4). Architecture as profession andconcept was likewise introduced to Japan in the nineteenth century, and as Japa-nese became trained architects and architectural historians, they came to see pastJapanese building as architecture. Architectural interest in the qualities of Japan-ness, however, was a twentieth-century phenomenon that developed as Japanesearchitects took up Western modernism and social turmoil increased. Modernityand tradition were “split down the middle” (p. 28) for architects, as for others inthe 1930s, but the “overarching objective” of architects was to bridge “modernand ‘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 orethos” 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 ofwhich to critique both at the same time,” and so laid the foundations for the manyaccomplishments of postwar Japanese architects (p. 21). But the 1930s are alsoIsozaki’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 Germanrefugee architect Bruno Taut. On arrival in Japan in 1933, Taut declared thenew Tokyo Central Post Office the most modern building in the world. (WhichWestern modernist then would have so approved any other Japanese endeavor?)Then, in a 1935 lecture given semiofficial validation by its publication by theKokusai Bunka Shinkokai, he explained that Japanese architectural history hadtwo courses, a positive line of authenticity and rationality running from Isethrough Katsura to modern quality, and a negative degenerative line marred bynon-Japanese decorativeness that ran through shogunal Nikko to modernkitsch. Rather than question or affirm Taut’s theory, Isozaki emphasizes howthe interaction of Japanese architects with Taut’s ideas established (the imperialsites of) Ise and Katsura as iconic modernist prototypes, imbued with imperialauthenticity, tenôteki honmono. Taut’s emphasis on the rationality and simplicityof Japanese building increased the international prestige of Japanese modernarchitecture and helped give it, as well as Western modern architecture,a Japanese history, while the link with the imperial building tradition reinforcedmodernist design’s Japan-ness.

From that vantage point, Isozaki looks back to the events of the constructionof Ise and Katsura, which remained modernist icons into the postwar period. As iswidely known, Ise’s main sanctuary is rebuilt and slightly relocated every twentyyears. The significance of this for Isozaki is that it obscures the origins of both theshrine and the state that built it and replaces them with a perpetual process ofbeginning. Ise’s design was not a natural “unmotivated evolution,” expressing

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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 theimportation of continental culture (p. 167). It was, he says, the earliestsymptom of Japanization after the political turmoil of the seventh century. The1930s question of Japan-ness merely repeated this pattern. Turning to Katsura,Isozaki follows the development of its postwar modernist reading. This restedin part on an austere monochromatic photographic interpretation, which madeKatsura seem Mondrian-esque. As modernism faded, a different view ofKatsura emerged, one more ambiguous, a mixture of patterns, styles, and literaryquotations, one that emphasized Katsura’s origins in the struggle between theimperial family and the bakufu. This Katsura, Isozaki says, was well-suited forthe architecture after modernism, which also looked to such “heterogeneousquotation” (p. 290). However, he also locates Katsura’s pattern of quotation aspart of the cycle of inescapable reproduction that will eventually becomecliché, and he pessimistically sees this pattern of Taut-like devolution intokitsch as almost inescapable in Japan. Isozaki implies that these two ambiguousicons, Ise and Katsura, irreversibly dominate Japanese architecture and havebecome impossible to criticize.

He does find one alternative remaining masterpiece, however: the SouthernGate of Todaiji. Unlike Ise and Katsura, Nandai-mon, sitting squarely on theroad, 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 Sungconstruction, which remained heroically immune to Japanization—it has “allthe uprightness and integrity of a will to construct later nullified by wayo-ka.”But for him, Nandai-mon is a singular event, one ignored and “rejected asforeign, karagokoro (p. 239), and has no descendents.

There is another alternative that he does not praise—the negative line ofkitsch that Taut dismissed, even as he treated it heroically by seeing it in sho-gunal Nikko. Isozaki criticizes the kitsch that devolves from heightenedstylization, but he has little to say about the continuing vigor of very impurepopular building.

DAVID V. TUCKER

University of Iowa

JAPANimals: History and Culture in Japan’s Animal Life. Edited byGREGORY M. PFLUGFELDER and BRETT L. WALKER. Ann Arbor: Centerfor 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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