Why Your Home Has No Kamidana: The Answer Was Drawn on a Blueprint in 1951

01The place was never designed in

Picture your home. Is there a kamidana? Where is the butsudan? For most people the answer is that there is neither, and the explanation has been something vague: no particular faith, or living in an apartment.

I think the reason is far more material. The place for them was never designed in. Who decided that, and when? This series goes back to a single blueprint. But first, the Japan of today.

02The year living alone overtook living with children

The 2020 census recorded a reversal that has drawn little attention. Among ordinary households classified by family type, the largest group was "single-person households" at 38.1 percent. "Married couple with children" (25.1 percent), "mother with children" (7.7 percent) and "father with children" (1.3 percent) together made up only 34.1 percent. It was the first time in the history of the census that single-person households outnumbered parent-and-child households¹.

Households keep shrinking. The average number of people per ordinary household fell from 2.33 in 2015 to 2.21 in 2020². In the Japan of earlier generations, three generations under one roof was nothing unusual. That gave way to the nuclear family of a couple and their children, and now households are dividing down to one person. This is usually explained as "the tide of the times" or "diversifying values."

I have long felt uneasy with that explanation. For the shape of the family to change this much in a few decades is too abrupt to be called a natural phenomenon. Living in groups, a practice thousands of years old, was rearranged in two generations. When I looked into it, I found an explicit set of plans: a floor plan, a law and economic figures, all very concrete.

03The first force: a blueprint called 51C

For fiscal 1951, the Ministry of Construction adopted as its standard design for public housing a floor plan by the laboratory of Yasumi Yoshitake at the University of Tokyo. "51" stands for fiscal 1951 and "C" for the 12-tsubo type; the actual dwelling is generally described as about 35 square meters. Japan was in a period of extreme housing shortage, and the government even imposed limits on floor area. Within those constraints, the 51C plan was devised as a unit suited to modern reinforced-concrete apartment blocks³.

At its core was the simultaneous achievement of "shokushin bunri" (separating the place for eating from the place for sleeping) and "shushin bunri" (separating the parents' and children's bedrooms). To make both possible in a small area, the kitchen was enlarged to serve as a dining space. The layout of an eat-in kitchen plus two tatami bedrooms was conceived as a minimum standard for the nuclear family. This was the birth of the Japanese dining kitchen, the DK, a form the country would use for more than half a century³.

In 1955 the Japan Housing Corporation was founded. It used 51C as the prototype for mass-produced danchi (public apartment estates) and labeled the plan "2DK"³. Identical boxes lined up in suburbs across the nation. The postwar housing shortage was that severe. The country was rebuilding from burnt ruins while people poured from the countryside into the cities. Homes had to be provided fast, cheaply and in quantity. The standard design was a rational answer to that demand, and it spread so widely precisely because it was rational.

One thing needs confirming here. Two bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen. In that space there is no place for grandparents. Three generations living together was physically impossible. Furthermore, the plan contained no tokonoma (alcove), no kamidana and no place for a butsudan from the very start.

In fairness, the designers did not intend to create nuclear families. What they faced was the harsh reality of the postwar housing shortage and the pressing task of raising the quality of life within a limited area. Shigefumi Suzuki, who worked on the 51C design, later joined architects and sociologists, from his standpoint as a designer, in debating whether 51C had determined the shape of postwar Japanese housing, and left both a record of that debate and his own recollections⁴⁷.

But a structure works beyond its designers' intentions. People adapt the way they live to the shape of the box they are given, and once the way of living changes, it becomes "normal" for the next generation.

04The second force: when households divide, goods sell

The dividing of households was a powerful detonator for the economy. In a large family, one refrigerator, one washing machine and one television per house are enough. But when a young couple leaves the parental home and forms a new household, new goods are needed for every new household. That is how domestic demand swells. Growth in the number of households feeds consumption more directly than growth in population.

Life in the danchi was also an object of strong longing for the young of the day. Eating at a table in a wooden-floored dining kitchen, running an electric washer instead of scrubbing on a washboard: this was the symbol of "advanced living" and a graduation from the lives of one's parents.

The numbers show the explosion. According to the Cabinet Office's Consumer Confidence Survey, among urban households in 1957 the diffusion rates were 7.8 percent for black-and-white televisions, 20.2 percent for electric washing machines and 2.8 percent for electric refrigerators. The survey's coverage changed from 1964, so the figures cannot be compared directly, but by 1965 the rates had reached 90.0, 68.5 and 51.4 percent respectively⁵. In roughly eight years, the television had reached nine households in ten, and the refrigerator half of all households.

These three products were given a name at the time: the Sanshu no Jingi, the "Three Sacred Treasures." The Yata no Kagami (mirror), the Kusanagi no Tsurugi (sword) and the Yasakani no Magatama (jewel): the words this country has long held most sacred were repurposed as an advertising slogan for appliances.

I do not regard this as merely clever copy. Japan has an ancient belief that words carry power. What a society calls something reflects what it holds sacred, and not only reflects it but works upon people's hearts. The original treasures were sacred objects outside the home, which no one was permitted to see or touch. They became things one could buy on installment and place in the living room. When what is called a sacred treasure was swapped, was it only the word that was swapped? I will take up this question in the second installment.

05The third force: dismantling the "ie" system

In 1947 the Civil Code was revised. The prewar "ie" system, under which the head of the house held authority over the family and the headship passed in principle to the eldest son, was abolished, and the revised code took effect on January 1, 1948⁶. Inheritance was divided equally among the children, and the family unit shifted from the "ie" to the married couple.

The revision was carried out under the Occupation. One cannot say there was no intention of restructuring Japanese society. But I see no need to read a conspiracy into it. What can be confirmed as fact is that the law changed and the definition of the family's smallest unit changed. That alone was a very large event.

The dignity of the individual and the essential equality of the sexes were the ideals of the revision, and I have no intention of denying them. The disadvantages borne by those born as younger sons, or born as women, were real. But every change of institution has side effects. When the "ie" vanished as a legal unit, something faded with it: the awareness of a vertical axis of time, receiving from ancestors and passing on to descendants.

06Three forces pointing the same way

To summarize: the legal system shrank the family unit from the "ie" to the couple. Housing policy supplied the nation with boxes that fit exactly a couple and their children. And the economy had a structure that grew the more households divided.

No one plotted this in a back room. Each party acted according to its own sense of what was right: solve the housing shortage, root a democratic view of the family, rebuild the economy. But the three forces happened to point in the same direction. A resultant force is far greater than any single one. Japan's shift to the nuclear family was the product of that resultant force, not a gentle change of values. That is my view.

So far, these are the facts on record. What I really want to write about is the question that follows: what did we lose in the process?

The problem of the nuclear family is usually described as isolation. Solo parenting, the elderly caring for the elderly, dying alone. No adult nearby to turn to in trouble. These are serious problems, to be met with public support and local ties. But I do not think the essence of what was lost is horizontal connection.

Nuclearization is described as households dividing sideways: separated from grandparents, estranged from relatives, not knowing the neighbors. All true. But space was not the only thing severed.

Recall the floor plan once more. Two bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen. No place for a kamidana, no place for a butsudan. In other words, that home had no place, from the outset, for those who had already left this world.

It was not that grandparents disappeared from the home. The grandparents' grandparents disappeared too. What was lost is the vertical axis.