Wajiro Kon

Life

He was born on July 10, 1888, in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture. He graduated from the Department of Design at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1912, and after serving as assistant, lecturer, and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Waseda University, became a professor in 1920, a post he held until 1959. He died on October 27, 1973. The medical scientist Yutaka Kon was his uncle, and the copperplate engraver Junzo Kon was his younger brother.

Research on folk houses

In 1917 he joined the Hakubokai, a group for the study of folk houses, and was involved in producing the first report of a folk house survey, Minka Zushu, Vol. 1: Saitama Prefecture (1918). The results of his walking surveys of folk houses around the country are collected in Nihon no Minka: Den'en Seikatsusha no Sumika (Japanese Folk Houses: Dwellings of Rural Dwellers, 1922).

Modernology

After the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, he founded the Barrack Decoration Company in Ginza. In 1925, together with Kenkichi Yoshida and others, he carried out the first modernology survey on the streets of Ginza and published the results as "A Record of Street Customs in Tokyo's Ginza, Early Summer 1925" in the July issue of Fujin Koron. He went on to study the manners and customs of the day from many angles, including records of the behavior of young women shopping at the Marunouchi Building and a survey of the complete household goods of a newly married couple. He proposed "modernology" in 1927 and published Modernologio (Kogengaku) in 1930.

Lifology and his papers

In his later years he advocated lifology, the study of people's everyday lives. On September 29, 1972, together with Yoshitaro Takeuchi, Tadao Umesao, Noboru Kawazoe, Takamasa Yoshizaka, Hidetoshi Kato, Tsuneichi Miyamoto, Yujiro Hayashi, and others, he founded the Japan Society of Lifology and became its first president.

The papers and books left in the study of his home (about 6,000 items) have been held by the Kogakuin University Library since 1984.