The design of Japanese houses is explored here as a series of inquiries and arguments as to how life may be defined or transformed by the space of the home.

It’s not, however, the story of how the majority of Japanese people live. One of the main objectives of the exhibition is to celebrate the awkward and contrary, the exceptions that collectively provide an inverse image of postwar mass society in Japan. As MOMAT curator Kenjiro Hosaka puts it in his catalogue essay “On the Geneologies of the Japanese House after 1945,” “Japanese houses criticize.” Taking the term “geneology” from Michel Foucault, who in turn took it from Friedrich Nietzsche’s dismantling of Christian morality and Western philosophy, the exhibition as a whole is presented as an extended exploration of the house as a form of discourse, with propositions, rebuttals, anecdotes and jokes.

The first section, “Japaneseness,” offers visitors examples of Japanese modern, such as Kenzo Tange’s 1953 house, which was laid out in shinden-zukuri style, an aristocratic Heian Period (794- 1185) design. Seiichi Shirai’s single-story estate featured borrowed scenery through the opening of shoji, a library with tokonoma (a built-in recessed space in a reception room) and a gatehouse. Black-and-white photography and the ordered minimalism of these hybrid traditional/modern spaces is a match made in utopia, giving us a vision of paradisiacal social organization in harmony with nature. However, the text that introduces the section provides a lively demolition of “Japaneseness” as a normative term.

The story of Bruno Taut coming to Japan in 1933 and lauding the austere rectilinear spaces of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto is not retold, although several stunning images of the villa by Japanese-American photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto do appear in this section. “There’s no such thing as the Japanese house,” the introductory text panel states, pulling the tatami out from under our feet.