Author: Kon Wajiro & Yoshida Kenkichi.
Title: [Moderunorojio - Kogengaku]. (Modernologio on the cover).
Description: Tokyo, Shun'yudo 1930 (Showa 5). 26x20cm, publisher's decorated cloth blocked in white, red and black; 361pp, profusely illustrated throughout, a few photo or colour plates. Light browning, much less than usual; a remarkably good copy of a book that invites continual thumbing. ¶ First printing. This is an extraordinary book; the gospel of Modernology. Kon and Yoshida have compiled an encyclopaedia, surely unsurpassed, of the apparently ordinary, of the people of Tokyo, fit to provoke unseemly enthusiasm in theoreticians and urban planners ever since. I gather that Kon's thesis - born out of watching the people of Tokyo begin to rebuild after the 1923 earthquake and fire - is that those who do the planning, designing and official building know nothing of what people actually do, what they own and how they use those things - how they live and who they are.

Keywords: architecture town planning urbanism ethnology modernology c20th theory Japan modernism reform progress meiji