Deconstruction: Demolishing a Showa Era House in the Neighborhood (this post is still under construction...)

I moved into my neighborhood in 2003. Most of the houses were new and very ordinary. From the outside, there was really no architectural evidence of any particular Japanese design. But there was one large, older "traditional" Japanese house with three kura (storehouses) on a large plot of land where an elderly couple lived. I only had contact with the couple once, when I was the local han-cho (block leader) out collecting the annual neighborhood association dues. The dues were 200 yen per month, 2,400 yen for the year. But this older couple always gave 10,000 yen. As the years went on the house and property became more and more unkept. Eventually the couple passed away and the house was empty.

This summer in July, the house started to be demolished. VAoJ has documented and lamented recent older house demolitions in the neighborhood. You can see previous posts on this subject here, here and here.

In place of the old homes are empty lots, new apartment complexes and new osharei (stylish, and presumably expensive) houses, all adding to the "bed-town" atmosphere of the neighborhood (where people live and sleep but work elsewhere and do not interact with neighbors).

I talked with our shi-cho (neighborhood chief), a life-long resident who happens to be a retired architect and he told me the demolished house was built in the Showa Era (1926 - 1989), post-war around 1950. At that time the rural land was mostly rice fields. The house and much of the surroundings was owned by a family by the name of Akai. There are still a few descendent Akai families living in similar large Showa Era houses in the area.

VAoJ has recenlty become interested in the history of this neighborhood, and so a future project might ensue (stay tuned).

April, 2019

I happened to take this photo in 2019, so you can get an idea of what the house was like. (I wish I had taken more photos of the house.)

September, 2024 (image taken from Google Street View)

I was able to find this photo on Google Street View from last year. Here you can see that the front kura had been demolished and replaced with a metal fence.

July 15, 2025

The demolition started in mid-July. It was a long and slow process as there were only three construction workers and two large heavy equipment earthmovers. The days were extremely hot and humid which also had to add to the slower undertaking. The demolition process was very close to my house. There were times when the ground and my house shook violently, like an earthquake or a bombing (living through this everyday from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM for over a month was psychologically distressing; I cannot imagine how people in natural disasters and wars deal with such situations). What follows is a series of 49 photos (out of 200 of so total shots) organized by dates. I usually took the shots in the early evening after the construction workers left. Most shots were from the outside, but once I was able to go inside the house before it was totally leveled.

July 18, 2025

July 19, 2025

July 24, 2025

July 25, 2025

I found this artifact in the rubble. The name "Akai" in kanji is carved in the handle. There are some worn markings on the ax head which I have not been able to decipher yet. Anaylysis continues...

July 28, 2025

July 29, 2025

August 1, 2025

August 2, 2025

August 19, 2025

August 25, 2025

And this is what is left...

...the razed ground and a tree branch and stump stuck in the fence.

At this time, it is unknown what will happen to the empty lot.

Plot map image modified from https://www.city.kadoma.osaka.jp/material/files/group/10/R7_06-03.pdf.

(More) Potato Chip Baseball Cards - 2025 Second Series

We bought three packs and got 6 cards, none of which were Hanshin Tigers... Hopefully we will have better luck next time. Especially since, as of the time of this post, the Tigers are at M4, or Magic 4. This means when the Tigers win 4 more games they will be the Central League Champs!

See also: https://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.com/2025/07/where-to-get-baseball-cards-in-japan.html

ONGOING SERIES @ ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL - JAPAN FOCUS Japan-Adjacent: In Praise of Creative Expression within Japan’s Shadow

Japan-Adjacent: In Praise of Creative Expression within Japan’s Shadow

LAURA HEIN, Series Guest Editor

One of the pleasures of Japan is the high quality of visual art and design there, even in something as mundane as food wrappers. It is hard to ignore. Indeed, many Japan Studies professionals — local and foreign — who spend their work lives explaining Japan to the English-speaking world also have a deep interest in some aspect of Japanese visual culture. Many of us get considerable enjoyment from it. Yet far fewer of us are entirely comfortable with the idea of a unified single Japanese Aesthetic Tradition, even when the case for one is made as elegantly as it was by novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in In Praise of Shadows.1 In that famous essay, Tanizaki not only mourned the retreat of shadows, allusion, and subtlety from the harsh glare of electric-light illumination, he also claimed the former as quintessentially Japanese qualities. Nearly a century later, we are still uneasy about the ways that aesthetic sensibility powered the intense spiritual mobilization that made possible an extraordinarily disastrous war. Or how much the ideology of One Japanese Aesthetic Tradition shapes cultural expression even today. I wondered how my colleagues thought about this issue, particularly when pursuing side projects, chosen for their own enjoyment. This curiosity has turned into an ongoing series: Japan-Adjacent. As it turned out, every person I asked had an entirely different set of concerns, all Japan-adjacent, but so far none fulfilling my expectation that they would speak directly to my original question. But they do cast relevant shadows…

URL: https://apjjf.org/japan-adjacent

Photography in Research and Teaching: One Thing Leading to Another
By: Timothy S. George
September 2, 2025
URL: https://apjjf.org/2025/9/george

Photographing Japan: The View from Machida
By: Bruce L. Batten
September 1, 2025
URL: https://apjjf.org/2025/9/batten

URL for Asia-Pacific Journal - Japan Focus: https://apjjf.org/

Volunteer Community Service: Master of the 水路/Canal, With His Long Pole, Battles the Weeds and Trash Heaps

There is a narrow canal (水路, suiro) behind my house that runs parellel with the Neyagawa River for several kilometers. The canal serves as the border between Neyagawa-shi and Kadoma-shi. On the Neyagawa-shi side there is a narrow road that is lined with cherry trees. In the spring, the trees seem to explode with sakura (cherry blossoms) and it is quite spectacular. In the summer, the trees explode with semi (cicada) and their buzzing and whining sounds. The canal is full of fish and turtles, and attracts various birds, cranes, dragon flies, other insects, occasional snakes, stray cats at night other other critters. It's a welcoming green space and slice of nature in the residential environment.

The canal is man-made, meaning that it is lined with cement banks. Despite that, many plants and weeds grow on the banks and river weed grows in the water. Unfortunately, some people throw bottles, cans and other trash into the water, assuming the garbage to flow away out of sight, out of mind. Most of the disposed items do flow somewhere, but a lot of them get caught in the weeds, sometimes even creating small trash heaps.

In years past, local gevernment workers would come once during the summer to cut down the weeds. But for whatever reason, no one has come this summer.

But there is a private citizen, an older man, who has a long pole with sharp blades on the end, who cuts the weeds, rakes the river weed and cleans up the banks on the Neyagawa-shi side.

It must be extremely hot and exhausting work. While he doesn't seem to smile, I imagine he none-the-less enjoys his work.

Thank you, Master of the 水路/Canal!

"Taking Pictures of Snakes at Midnight: An Anthropological Perspective" - An Anthropological Talk by Ryan Xin XIE

"Taking Pictures of Snakes at Midnight: An Anthropological Perspective" on the relation between snakes and humans, and nature and humans, in Hong Kong, by Ryan Xin Xie.
Venue: Hong Kong Museum of History on Friday, August 22, 2025 at 7:00 p.m.

For more information: https://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/~ant/hkas/current_event.htm

"Light Leak as Method: Theorizing a Photographic Accident" - Essay on American Anthropologist by Myriam Amri

ABSTRACT: This project began as a 35 mm film photography collection to document the presence of waste in the Northwest border of Tunisia, as the materiality of waste, its existence “everywhere,” has become a medium through which people in the region understand their positions at the margins of the nation-state. Yet after months, I realized that a light leak had marked all of my photographs. Taking the accident as a chance encounter, I produced a collection of images that articulate the gap between their intended effects, of visualizing waste, and their final rendering, images marked by a light leak. In this essay, I trace the project's process from my initial intentions of photographing waste to the light leak accident, to the final rendering into a visual booklet. In doing so, I foreground the light leak as an accident that became a generative method to examine the spills, leaks, and overflows of wasteful landscapes in North Africa.

Access article: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aman.28101

This article is part of the special section of American Anthropologist titled “On Vanishing Fieldsites.” The multimodal accompaniment to this article is available at https://simplebooklet.com/lightleak