John Barr
 

Toyoda Hall, Fumihiko Maki's debut project, contains the seeds of ideas that he has continued to develop throughout his career...

The design of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building represents a time when modernism was concerned with social issues.

Togo Murano is one of the most popular 20th century architects amongst Japanese, and yet he is not widely known outside Japan...

The Ura House, designed by Takamasa Yoshizaka in 1956, is influenced by Corbusian ideas but also anticipates Japanese Metabolism.

The Naka Incineration Plant Hiroshima illustrates Japan's movement from a pre-modern, feudal, society to a post-modern, consumer society.

The Osaka Gas Building, designed by Takeo Yasui and completed in 1933, reflects Osaka's optimistic embrace of the future at that time.

Between 1932 and 1962 Yasujiro Ozu made a series of films that provide a slice of Tokyo life during the arrival of Modernism in Japan.

The Kagawa Prefectural Government Offices (1958) offered a radical new vision of what Japanese public buildings might be.

The background to the Hiroshima Peace Centre hardly needs to be explained: the first use of the Atomic Bomb and the deaths of over 200,000.

The International House of Japan reflects the changed realities for Japan after WWII.

The real value of Tokyo's Dojunkai Apartments has been ignored in the rush to maximise economic gain from the land that they occupied.

Tokyo Women's Christian University is Antonin Raymond's first major building in Japan.

In the 1951 film, The Man in the White Suit, chemist Sidney Stratton invents a fabric that will never crease or get dirty or wear out.

The widow of Japanese Architect Kiyonori Kikutake has described different facets of her husband's personality, one gentle and reflective.

In the 20th century Katsura Imperial Villa became a kind of touchstone for the essence of Japanese architecture.

Tadao Ando is possibly the most famous Japanese architect of the modern era. But Ando's work is neither modern nor Japanese.

One of the qualities of traditional Japanese architecture rarely acknowledged is that, for the most part, it was built cheaply.

The Golden Temple in Kyoto is viewed through the eyes of the psychopathic arsonist of Yushio Mishima's novel.

Dark spaces exist in both Japan and the West but the responses have been different.

An examination of Jun'Ichiro Tanizaki's essay In'ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows).