American Dreams in the Japanese Home: Occupation Housing Design and the Postwar Kitchen and Bath

A decade before the newly-established Japan Housing Corporation (JHC) embarked on a project to construct mass-housing estates (danchi) as a remedy to the nation’s severe postwar housing shortage, the Allied Occupation of Japan undertook its own building project amidst Tokyo’s scorched landscape. Starting in 1945, the engineering division of the US military commenced the construction of dependents’ housing for military personnel and their families, otherwise known as “Little America.” The dwellings designed for Little America centered around American lifestyle norms, particularly in water-related domestic spaces: plumbed-in kitchens were enviably equipped while tiled bathrooms furnished oblong tubs in the same room as seated, flush toilets. These homes modeled a version of the American dream characterized by what architectural historian Kitagawa Keiko describes as “abundance and rationality,” but thanks to the involvement of Japanese design professionals, also showcased the possibilities of hybridity and served as a vector between the American and Japanese design communities. Drawing upon primary source documents housed at Harvard and the University of Maryland’s Prange Collection, this paper examines the design of water-related spaces in occupation-era dependents’ housing, considering how infrastructure, construction, and cultural practice converged to produce them. It traces the impact of this project on postwar Japanese housing more broadly not only through the designs themselves, but through the Japanese maids who were trained in their management and the magazines that publicized the lifestyle associated with them. As comparison with apartment prototypes produced by the JHC from 1955 onward demonstrate, the impact of Little America on postwar residential design was often indirect and aspirational rather than overt, channeled through conceptual, material, and technological inspiration that was always in conversation with the existing social norms and household economics that delineated which new technologies and design practices would take root in the Japanese home and which would not.