Sustainability, embodied in the local context: A study on the cultural aspects of environmentally symbiotic housing in Japan

Post-war housing policies had always been one of major drive of improving social welfare and the economic growth of Japan through building industry. I belong to the baby-boomer generation, observing and enjoying the tremendous change and development during the last five decades. For us, one of the most impressive cultural transitions of built environment has been experienced in the housing. Although our ancestor created most sensitive and environmentally responsive housing culture of wood, earth and paper, general attitude of post-war Japanese put it lower value, in comparison with occidental image of houses, which seemed to us much more advanced culturally. This attitude was based somehow on a sense of shame deriving from the materialization gap between the winners and the loser. To catch up this materialized level, therefore, became the clearest and simplest goal as political and social propaganda. But this catching-up efforts have been more or less concentrated on massproduction industries of textile, electric appliances, automobiles and the like, or on the construction of infrastructures such as roads, railways, bridges, dams and etc. Housing had been left behind except the mass supply by the public sectors according to the critical demand of postwar homeless people in urban areas destroyed during the war.