Full color moving image 11’11”
Gen Sasaki and Keiichi Miyagawa
The song “Little Boxes” is a protest song composed by Malvina Reynolds in1962, which is a political satire about the development of suburbia and associated middle-class attitudes.
In this lyric, “Little Boxes” means suburban tract houses made out of Ticky-Tacky, cheap and shoddy materials, and look just same structure. And “Little Boxes” have different colors, pink, green, blue and yellow.
After WW2, the US government needed many cheap houses for returning veterans and their new families. Thousands of similar or identical houses were produced easily and quickly, allowing rapid recovery of costs, because of using cheap and shoddy materials. One of the large suburban developments was called “Levittwon”.
Same structure of housing development was spread out across America and around the world.
This suburban development would become a symbol of the "American Dream" as it allowed thousands of families to become home owners. But Levittown would also become a symbol of racial segregation. The discriminatory housing standards of “Levittown” were consistent with government policies of the time. The Federal Housing Association allowed developers to justify segregation within public housing. The “FHA” only offered mortgages to non-mixed developments which discouraged developers from creating racially integrated housing.
Postwar collective housing in Japan is defined by the “Danchi”, the complexes built by the government housing organization called “Nihon Jutaku Kodan”, from the 1950s to the 1980s.
They were supplied for workers and their new family.
“Kodan” modeled its housing on apartment blocks built by the Soviet government in the suburbs of Moscow and Leningrad. According to Takeshi Hara, a Japanese architect, in his book “The Age of Danchi”, the officials who brought the Soviet designs back to Japan were interested in the low-cost engineering method. “Danchi” had the same structure, and the appeal was its uniformity: concrete, gray, no higher than five floors, and all containing apartments of the exact same design. In their day, they were considered the height of modernity. Living in “Danchi” was a dream for young people and their family, even though in most cases they were much smaller.