New Books from Japan #16: "National Policy and Architecture: Architectural Technocrats and the Planning Imagination in Wartime Japan"

Presenter: 常松祐介 (Tsunematsu Yūsuke, Assistant Professor, School of Science and Engineering, Meiji University)

Discussant: Katja Schmidtpott (Professor of Japanese History, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)

Moderator: Tadashi Ishikawa (Associate Professor of History, University of Central Florida)

This book argues that the achievements of the architectural profession in modern Japan lay not only in the creation of outstanding buildings but also in the formulation of policy visions for a new social order. It further contends that this capacity for institutional and social imagination reached its height during the Second World War. Rather than focusing on architects who designed buildings, the book examines “architectural administrators,” officials who regulated building activity through laws and administrative institutions. It traces how they expanded their influence as technocrats through collaboration with universities and the military. From the interwar period onward, architectural administrators sought to move beyond the regulation of individual buildings and to establish themselves as planners of cities and the national territory. By the wartime period, they had entered a wide range of national policy fields, including urban air defense, housing provision, and national land planning. Through a close reading of their extensive writings, this book explores how they drew upon professional expertise to formulate projects of social transformation. It thereby reinterprets the wartime regime not simply as a system imposed from above, but as one sustained by the active participation of reform-minded professional groups. Finally, by tracing how their ideals of social reform were reconfigured into rationales for the execution of war and the expansion of state control, the book reconsiders the deep entanglement of expert knowledge and state governance in modern Japan.

近代日本の建築界の業績とは、優れた建築デザインを生み出したことだけではなく、新たな社会のありかたを示す政策構想を打ち出したことにあり、とりわけ第二次世界大戦期にこうした構想力が最高潮に達していた、というのが本書の主張である。本書では建築物を設計する建築家ではなく、法に則り建築行為を統御する「建築行政官」に光を当て、彼らが大学や軍部と連携しながら、テクノクラートとしての影響力を拡張していった過程を検証する。戦間期以降、諸官庁に加わった建築行政官たちは、個々の建築物を規制する立場から、都市や国土全体を計画する立場への進出を企て、戦時期には都市防空・住宅供給・国土計画といった広範な国策領域に参画するに至っていた。本書では、建築行政官たちによって残された膨大な論考を読み解くことで、彼らが自身の専門知を足掛かりとして、いかなる社会革新を構想したのかを明らかにする。こうした検討を通して、戦時体制を単純な上意下達の体制と理解するのではなく、革新を志向する専門家集団の主体的な参画によって支えられたものとして捉え直す。さらに、彼らの掲げる社会改良の理念が、戦争遂行や国家統制を支える論理へと組み替えられていく道筋を跡づけることで、近代日本における専門知と国家統治との深い結びつきを問い直す。