JAPAN: Life with a Key

Only 800 could crowd into the great public hall in Tokyo where the lottery took place last week, but 28,000 on the outside were waiting to hear the results. The lottery was no ordinary one, and its prize was precious indeed. It offered nothing less than a place in one of Tokyo’s streamlined new apartment houses.

The apartment house is a postwar phenomenon in Japan, and the old country will never be the same. During the war 4,000,000 families saw their delicate paper houses go up in smoke, and the ramshackle wooden shacks that the government hastily threw together afterward have been destroyed, at the rate of 30,000 a year, by fire and typhoon. To take care of the millions of homeless, the government picked a go-getting, 72-year-old banker named Hisaakira Kano, a former viscount. Kano’s philosophy was simple but radical: “With too many people and too little land and with millions still needing homes, there is only one way to build in Japan today—up.”

Houses with Shoes. In three years, Kano’s Japan Housing Corp. has built in Tokyo alone “six new cities, each with 30,000 people.” The “cities” are four-story apartment houses run either by the government corporation or by private companies that bought them for their employees. One building is filled with the families of 900 ragpickers who pay $1 a month in rent. In construction is a twelve-story building for the rich (monthly rent: up to $350), which will have a roof garden, Turkish baths, a nightclub, bowling alley and a parking lot for 250 automobiles. For the middle class there are the geta-baki (“houses wearing wooden shoes”), which stand on stilts and have shops underneath. But whether for the rich or the poor, each apartment house has become not only a place to live, but also a new way of life.

The cliff dwellers still roll out their gaily colored futons (quilts) at night, and drape them over balcony railings to air during the day. But the traditional toko-noma, the alcove in which the family displayed its scrolls and flower arrangements, has given way to built-in cupboards. Central heating has taken the place of the hibachi (brazier) and of the kotatsu, the hole in the floor filled with hot coals to keep the family feet warm.

Tables with Legs. At a time when American decorators are taking up Japanese-style sliding doors and silk screens, many Tokyo housewives now cook with gas, wash dishes in stainless steel sinks, and serve meals, not to a family sitting cross-legged on straw mats, but at Western tables. By 1993—”in time for my 107th birthday”—Kano hopes that Tokyo will be a city of skyscrapers, is even planning to build one 20 stories high.*

One gadget—the simplest of them all in Western eyes—has already made its mark. “One of the first things I did, before we built a single apartment house,” says Kano, “was to order thousands of Yale-type keys. The result has been staggering. Getting keys to their own front doors has done more to Westernize many Japanese than any other single factor.” Kano’s tenants agree. “Formerly,” said one last week, “either my wife or myself or one of the children simply had to stay home when the rest were out: Japanese houses are quite open and there is no way of keeping anything safe in a house that does not lock. Now we all go out together and no one worries. This little flat piece of metal is wonderful. It gives us privacy and security.” Adds waspish Banker Kano: “The key will emancipate wives. Their husbands will now have no good excuse for leaving them at home and going off alone to the geisha houses.”

*Tokyo laws now permit only twelve-story buildings, which must have special earthquake-proof foundations.