Danchi

About 2 pages (727 words)

Danchi

During the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japanese cities rapidly industrialized, bringing large numbers of people from rural areas to urban centers. Some neighborhoods in Tokyo became virtual tenements, with almost 200 percent occupancy in some dwellings. However, the situation in Japan never approximated the slum conditions of industrializing urban areas in America and Europe due to the nature of labor migration. Most early factory workers lived in dormitory-like accommodations, established by factories for dekasegi rodo—young people (especially women) brought for a contracted term to live in the cities but to return to the rural areas after a fixed period, with their wages sent home to the countryside, and their housing and food provided by the employers. Thus a permanent urban working class was slow to form in Japan, compared to the earlier industrializing nations. However, with the devastation of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, many workers needed housing, and danchi—large-scale apartment dwellings— were constructed to meet these needs. Some of these complexes were envisioned by their developers as communities, with a central plaza or square in the center of the surrounding buildings, and with facilities for residents held in common. In general, these large buildings were relatively clean and hygienic and provided reasonable accommodations in close quarters. Construction was suspended in wartime, when bombings and fire destroyed many homes.

In postwar Japan, the remaining housing was over-crowded and lacked amenities. Many families doubled or tripled up, sleeping took places in shifts, and workers sometimes stayed at their place of employment rather than return "home." The enormous apartment complexes built on city fringes since the war also create bedroom towns in suburban areas. These danchi may contain as many as 400 or more units. They were first built in the late 1950s to accommodate workers migrating to urban industrial areas, and workers displaced from war industries or from former colonies. Soon, burgeoning white-collar workplaces brought more educated young people from the countryside and provincial cities to the capital. The residents of danchi were often young couples living on their own, away from their rural or provincial extended households. During this period very few of these young wives worked outside the home, though some older wives and mothers did naishoku (take-home employment ) as piecework for small-scale enterprises contracting out light manufacturing or assembly work. Because of the isolation from their natal families, young women with small children and little contact with adults during the day, sometimes fell victim to danchibyoo, or "apartment complex sickness," a syndrome characterized by depression and neurasthenic symptoms—similar to suburban housewives' depression-related symptoms in postwar America.

Some danchi are private apartments and some are rented at highly subsidized rents to workers, with most of the cost covered by the employer. Danchi continue to be built, some resembling small towns, with community services, shopping, and day-care centers included. Some danchi now are specially built to accommodate the increasing number of elderly, who living alone or in couples, away from caregiving children or other relatives, are provided with some assistance, such as visiting home aides, meals on wheels, and telephone chain contact.

A typical danchi apartment is known as a "2LDK," because it has two "living areas" and a kitchen-dining room, along with a separate toilet and a bathroom. It is also likely to have a small balcony with a washing machine and clothes drying lines. Such an apartment may have one large Western style room with a carpeted floor. Frequently, the other "living" area will be tatami matted. New buildings may have no tatamimatted rooms at all. These two large rooms will have large closets on one side where futons (sleeping mats, mattresses, etc.) are kept during the day, and brought out at night. Most families with young children tend now to have a designated "children's room" once the children are of kindergarten age (before that age, children tend to sleep next to their parents on futons), and there may be bunk beds or fixed furnishings, less flexible than the older style of mobile bedding.