<Articles>Japan's School Architecture as Mixture between the West and the East

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider, through the spatial dimensionality of education, how education in Japan made its transition since its contact with the West, with a special focus on school architecture. School architecture is a valuable object to examine through which the process of modernization in the field of education. School architecture and its constituents provide us with keys to analyze 'cultural unconsciousness'. At present, we can admit two main positions in interpreting such dynamisms of the 'space' of schools. One is a position in which we comprehend the history of school architecture as a process of modernization (= closed nature) and the protest against it (= openness). Another standpoint is to understand the history of school architecture as a process of 'compensation' (between closed nature an openness) to modernization. As explained below, the difference between the two positions relates not only deeply to the assessment of school architecture, but also to the understanding of the modernization of education itself.