In looking at modernist buildings, few would be surprised to see ceramic tiles or neocrete coating punctuating the pristine white surface of a rectilinear, multi-level, reinforced concrete building. Projects realized during the interwar period in Japan, however, might also feature wooden pilotis, tatami mats, and thatched roofs. Far from assuming “a style-less style,” as the architect Horiguchi Sutemi claimed of his own creations, the residential, civic, commercial, and recreational structures designed by Horiguchi and his forward-looking peers aimed to create an international architecture, kokusai kenchiku, that expressed the new and modern with distinctive regional inflections.

International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku by Ken Tadashi Oshima leads the reader through a tour of iconic modernist buildings from the 1920s and 1930s sited in and around Tokyo. Rather than destabilize the conspicuously Euro-American-centric International Style defined by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in their exhibition and catalogue on modern architecture in 1932, Oshima fills out the contours of this international terrain by calling attention to major architects in Japan actively following and dialoguing with the great masters working in Germany, France, and the United States. His choice of three architects—Horiguchi Sutemi (1895–1984), Yamada Mamoru (1894–1966), and Antonin Raymond (1888–1976)—presents three variations on an architecture career formed in a world newly connected through accelerated, transnational travel, telecommunication, and media.

In the early twentieth century, people, ideas, and images circulated with a speed and freedom hitherto unprecedented, spawning cross-cultural hybrids such as Raymond: born in Czechoslovakia, matured professionally in the United States, thrived in private practice in Japan. Raymond’s works, like those of his cosmopolitan peers, evoked the constellation of international contacts and influences in which he inserted himself. Being and building international, however, did not desensitize Raymond, Horiguchi, or Yamada to Japan’s distinctive context and culture. Oshima argues that international participation heightened their appreciation of regional specificity, so that rather than eschewing or concealing wood, thatch, paper, and straw, they showcased innovative juxtapositions with concrete, steel, and glass. These designers challenged anyone to mistake their projects for anything but products of a specifically Japanese modernity.

Groundbreaking works such as Horiguchi’s Shiensō (1926) or Raymond’s Reinanzaka House (1926) have remained largely unacknowledged by modern architecture experts and aficionados outside of Japan due to the Euro-American bias that has dominated the historiography of interwar architecture—but also to the structures’ ephemerality. Of the sixteen major buildings examined in Oshima’s book, twelve are demolished. Nonetheless, Oshima achieves credible reconstructions of their original concept and form through the rich array of drawings, photographs, and writings he has unearthed from rare archives and publications. International Architecture in Interwar Japan brims with generously sized and dramatically angled, lit, and cropped black-and-white photographs that accentuate the crisp tones, textures, lines, and volumes envisioned by the designers. A bibliography and project list supplement the text and illustrations.

The generation of Japanese architects beginning their professional practice in the 1920s knew Japan only as an international power, not as the emerging nation-state frantically playing catch-up that their parents knew or as the closed feudal society of their grandparents. As Oshima observes, 1920 marked the beginning of a Japanese architecture that was “self-consciously independent, no longer a derivative or alternative modernism that simply followed European and American movements” (10). The same year witnessed the death of Josiah Conder, the British Victorian architect who mentored the first generation of Japanese architects, and the birth of Bunriha, the country’s first modernist architectural movement. Chapter 1 succinctly captures the confluence of factors surrounding the pursuit of a modern and international architecture in Japan: the end of Meiji-period Westernization and monumental state-sponsored projects; the rise of a new class of internationally attuned designers and businessman clients; and finally, the rapid circulation and cross-fertilization of books and journals defining the modern, epitomized by the translation in 1925 of Walter Gropius’s Internationale Architekur as Kokusai kenchiku, inspiring a Japanese journal of the same name.

Chapter 2 compares the family background and early training of Horiguchi, Yamada, and Raymond. The reader learns that they all grew up on farms, loved to paint, left for the big city for higher education, and traveled abroad to further their architectural development. Yet Oshima also presents three distinct architectural personalities and paths: Horiguchi, high-minded intellectual, worked for himself; Yamada, spirited optimist, worked for the progressive Ministry of Communications; and Raymond, cultural chameleon, worked wherever opportunities led him. Intercontinental travels augmented their comprehension of contemporaneous trends, but in the case of Horiguchi, simultaneously awoke his interest in the Japanese tea ceremony (53). As sometimes happened among Japanese modern painters, “only after seeing European architecture that evoked Japanese principles did [Horiguchi] reevaluate his own culture” (54).

Oshima introduces his sixteen key projects in chapters 3 and 4, which deal with residential and public-institutional architecture, respectively. The ten houses that represent modern living as imagined by the affluent class and their architects reflect the inevitable convergence of modern and traditional materials and habits. While concrete yielded resilience and fluency of form, wood still effected domestic comfort. But rather than polarize the two materials, Oshima emphasizes their natural intimacy: “Concrete was touted at the time as an economical and long-lasting alternative to wood (and masonry), but because it was literally formed by wooden formwork, it raised the question whether concrete and wood could be considered independent of each other” (90). Oshima documents multiple strategies for integrating the wooden house and the concrete house, encompassing the straightforward juxtaposition of two separate wings in Yamada’s Tsurumi House and Horiguchi’s Okada House; the sublime interweaving of materials, function, and logic in Raymond’s Akaboshi Tetsuma House and Horiguchi’s Kikkawa House; and the surprising synthesis of rustic farmhouse and Corbusian ramp in Raymond’s summer house in Karuizawa. All ten houses catered to clients who sought to transcend the Japan-West divide by naturalizing “an international Japanese life” (137) in the design of their own homes.

The final chapter features an exhibition pavilion, telegraph office, women’s college, golf club, hospital, and weather station—six diverse building types from the gamut of modern public institutions introduced to Japan and other advanced nations at the turn of the twentieth century. The use of concrete, steel, and glass answered the need for hygiene, efficiency, ventilation, and quake- and fire-resistance, especially in the period after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Oshima pays close attention to inventive details driven by both utilitarian and cultural-regional considerations, as when he turns to the housing units at the arid Ōshima Weather Station and focuses on the butterfly roofs that “drained internally to collect rain [water]” that was “particularly good for tea” (224). Raymond’s Women’s Christian College and Yamada’s Tokyo Teishin Hospital stand out for articulating a social agenda for architecture, addressing a complex program, and anticipating user needs. The college and hospital represent planned cities in miniature, with the nurturing of young women and hospitalized patients equally dependent upon rationally arranged floor plans and generously sized gardens and windows answering to a desire for proximity to nature inspired by both English garden cities and historical gardens within the Japanese city.

Like a patient facilitator, Oshima allows Horiguchi, Yamada, and Raymond to present and elucidate their masterpieces, rarely interjecting and never contradicting. His voice often melds with the architect’s, as Oshima resists reading against the grain of what the architects intended to project visually and ideologically. The prolific output of essays, articles, and monographs by all three architects serves as an expedient but treacherous trove to mine, and more mediation from Oshima would help to dispel a number of vague and reductive remarks made by the architects and earlier commentators about tea aesthetics, Shinto beliefs, and premodern icons such as the Hōryūji, Hōōdō at Byōdōin, and Katsura Rikyū. Conscientious readers will beg Oshima to challenge the breezy assertions that asymmetry in plan and elevation denotes indigenization (i.e., Japanization) (118, 207) or that preference for the natural finish of concrete evokes Japanese cultural reverence for organic materials (94, 206).

The great strength of this book is its fascinating and compelling examination of a short but fertile moment in architecture history through the multiple lenses of Horiguchi, Yamada, and Raymond. Both the book and its featured architects display a greater interest in and comfort with contemporaneous European developments than with historical Japanese precedents, and this generously illustrated volume vividly justifies that bias through juxtaposed images revealing indisputable visual kinships and dissonances. International Architecture in Interwar Japan is a long overdue study of the germinal stage of modernism in Japan that serves two intersecting audiences: those interested in the expansion of the international style beyond Euro-American centers and those interested in the development of modern Japanese architecture. While experts might wish that Oshima had discussed the historiography of interwar Japanese architecture and given information on the location and state of the archives currently holding these three architects’ materials, most readers will appreciate the insightful and meticulous introduction he provides. Along with Jonathan Reynold’s Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), this book is a key text for understanding the lineage of Japanese modernism in concrete and wood, extending from the interwar modernists to Kenzo Tange and Yoshio Taniguchi.