155.1
Housing Estates As Experimental Fields of Social Research
The Japanese housing policy system was quickly established in the early 1950s, and the reinforced concrete housing complexes stimulated journalistic interest. Most influential researchers in postwar Japanese sociology began studying these housing estates during the mid- 1950s and 1960s. One reason was that social surveys involving random distribution of standardized questionnaires to individual respondents were compatible with the new housing form. Housing estates became experimental fields of social policy and social research.
Urban sociologists attempted to comprehensively grasp the lifestyles and social consciousness of housing estate residents. Social psychologists introduced sociometry to describe social relations evident in these housing estates. Researchers often referred to the seminal text “Organization Man” by William Whyte (1956), with a Japanese translation published in 1959. According to Whyte, white-collar residents in the newly developed suburban residential areas formed active neighbor relationships. Kokichi Masuda, a family sociologist, emphasized the contrast of the rarity of neighbor relationships in Japanese housing estates with what was the norm in the United States.
The image of housing estates as pictured by social researchers transformed around 1960. Studies of residents’ associations showed that housing estate communities were being formed through cooperative solutions found for residents’ common problems. Whether or not a housing estate was formed as a “community” depended on how the residents related to the space. This change was also reflected in the relationships between the researchers and the respondents in that the distance between them when using the standardized attitude and opinion survey was lost. The change in the image of housing estates in the 1960s can be said to overlap with a turning point in social research.