The present work is a much awaited study of the architect Kunio Maekawa (1905-86), one of the three principal Japanese who worked with Le Corbusier (from April 1928 to April 1930). Maekawa has long been recognized both in Japan and the West as a key figure in the evolution of Japanese modernism. While Maekawa himself published accounts of his work (from the 1930s through the late 1960s), his writings are not numerous if judged by the standard of his peers nor by those of later contemporaries. In 1930 he was the Japanese translator of Le Corbusier’s important early text “L’art décoratif d’aujourd’hui.” In addition, there are eight published interviews with Maekawa in Japanese, ranging from 1969 through the early 1980s.

Jonathan Reynolds’s book, Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture, is solid, workman-like, but essentially overlong scholarship. Neither the period nor the architect really comes alive. Maekawa’s own pronouncements have always been recognized as mask-like and paradoxical, reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s flamboyant, yet painstakingly adroit, lifelong attempt to edit the facts of his own formation, career, and oeuvre.

Reynolds’s attempt to dissect the myth of modernism and its heroes does not help the situation. Although this myth is dying a hard death in Asia, its meaning in Japan is ambiguous. The author seems aware of this, and accordingly strives to lay hold of social context and linguistic nuance. Yet his strength as a Japanologist fails him in this enterprise, and one is tempted to query whether, in the end, Maekawa Kunio was really an interesting personality.

Indeed, Maekawa’s fabled integrity may have got the better of him as a competent and intriguing architectural figure. Reynolds’s careful look at the documentation doesn’t uncover many answers to questions about Maekawa’s actual political and architectural intentions. Moreover, the analysis of Maekawa’s family background, and of the Tokyo University milieu, seems inadequate for a proper assessment of the architect’s youth and adolescence, about which we are not well informed. As Reynolds points out, it is significant that Maekawa’s maternal uncle was secretary of the Japanese delegation to the League of Nations, and eventually ambassador to both France and the Soviet Union. His father was an engineering official in the Home Ministry. At least two other uncles were in Manchuria at a time when Maekawa traveled to Paris; one of them worked for the South Manchurian Railway. These details speak volumes, but do not speak to the myth of modernism directly, nor to its undoing.

As for Maekawa’s two years spent at Le Corbusier’s studio on the rue de Sevres, Reynolds does well to point out the scarcity of personnel in the office at the time of Maekawa’s arrival (mainly it was only Albert Roth there at first, with visits by Charlotte Perriand). Nevertheless, more should have been added about Maekawa’s later friendship with both Sakakura Junzo and Perriand, to whom only an allusion is made. The projects and realization mentioned here do add up—the League of Nations, Centrosoyuz, Maisons Loucher, and Mudaneum—providing a coherent take on the office during this period. Reynolds’s treatment of Le Corbusier’s politics—a thorny topic—is too limited. The discussion of “regionalism” is anachronistic, as Maekawa himself would have known, since the French prewar regionalism of Le Corbusier’s day was a rearguard movement against which the great internationalist had firmly set his sights.

Reynolds demonstrates an almost de rigueur skepticism with regard to Le Corbusier, but at the same time seems unwilling to admit the young Maekawa’s ample capacity as a Tokyo University graduate from a family of bureaucrats to come to terms with Le Corbusier’s admittedly obscure blend of politicization and opportunism. Trendy art-historical iconoclasm and slightly undiscriminating Japanology are here mutually self-defeating. Nonetheless, Reynolds provides as much detailed information as has ever been gathered in English. A truly adequate interpretation, however, may never appear. No one in Japan has ever seen fit to provide it, for heuristically, it is a nonentity.

Reynolds is not unaware of what he refers to as “tensions” in his account. He quotes from a fan letter of 1930 from Maekawa to Neutra (originally published by Tom Hines); it refers to a lecture given by Neutra in Tokyo shortly after Maekawa’s repatriation. Similarly, Reynolds is informative about the foundation and collapse of the “left-leaning” New Architects’ League in 1930. Maekawa participated in what Reynolds terms a “call to depoliticize architecture,” asserted at a symposium held in conjunction with the final Sousha exhibition; the Sousha organization’s earlier history is well interpreted by Reynolds. Unfortunately, these two discussions are separated by some fifty pages, and so their connection might elude the conventional historian unfamiliar with Japan.

To some extent this lack of continuity is inherent to the events of the period, exacerbated for the purposes of coherent narrative by Maekawa’s two-year absence in Paris. After his Paris stint, Maekawa was in the Tokyo office of the Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond. Reynolds doesn’t mention the upcoming publication of Kurt Helfrich’s extremely comprehensive dissertation, completed at the University of Virginia, on Raymond’s career. Instead, Reynolds tells us a good deal about Raymond, but not much about Maekawa during the five years he was employed by Raymond.

Blow-by-blow consideration is given to the prewar and wartime competitions (twenty-one according to Reynolds’s count), for which Maekawa’s modernist entries consistently disobeyed the expectation that submissions be in what has been called the Imperial Crown Style. The Maekawa office was established in 1935. Competition entries were interspersed with actual work, much of which Reynolds specifies as being derived from Maekawa’s mainland Asian connections—by way of his family, ministerial contacts, as well as a brother at the Bank of Japan. Notably, Tange Kenzo was employed by Maekawa between 1938 and 1941.

Probably as much data as will ever be known about the Maekawa office during these years is here cited, partially translated, and to some extent explicated. Yet, near the end of this discussion, Reynolds states, disingenuously, that “an almost surreal disconnection between [wartime] architectural work and chilling political realities.” Wasn’t much of contemporary Surrealism itself inspired by this very disjunction? The war itself is sometimes treated almost as an adjunct scenario, distracting Maekawa from getting on with his high-level, high-minded career. This indeed may have been his view, or perhaps he was simply a stoic. No Japanese account has ever told us this explicitly, and Reynolds, though sympathetic, does not either.

The last 100 pages are devoted to Maekawa’s postwar oeuvre, the period when the architect came into his own. Prior to this section, Reynolds’s approach has been, perhaps necessarily, impersonal; we remain in the dark, for example, as to Maekawa’s relations with the elder Yamaguchi Bunzo, with his “rival” Sakakura Junzo, and with the younger Tange. In 1947, Maekawa conceived the idea of MID, a publishing arm of his firm that allowed him to speak “anonymously” behind a logo of his own devising. In the years following the war a great deal of civic amenity building was undertaken in Japan, whereby Maekawa’s voice became one of the most resonant. In a sense, this “people’s architecture,” as Reynolds refers to it, was a realization of Le Corbusier’s prewar syndicalist dream of a corporate state that came to be known as Japan, Inc. I find it misleading that the author segregates an arbitrary portion of Maekawa’s work under the rubric “Tradition Redux.” This category includes several residential commissions heavily influenced by Raymond’s neo-traditionalism, as well as the celebrated Harumi Apartments (1956-58) that, tatami apart, seem mainly to foretell Metabolism. Nevertheless, Reynolds provides a welcome presentation of Maekawa’s now largely forgotten Japan Pavilion for Brussels of the same date. He concludes with an ample discussion of the debate on traditionalism as it resurfaced after World War II, illustrated by several amusing Osbert Lancaster-like cartoons— unknown to me—of the early 1960s drawn by Professor Hozumi for Kenchiku bunka.

In his final chapter Reynolds defends Maekawa’s well behaved, if largely boring, public buildings that appeared from the mid-1960s. Even before Maekawa’s death in the mid-1980s, these structures were overtaken by the reality of near-chaotic urban density and scale, a situation that the Metabolists got right early on (one need not agree with their solutions to admit this). We are driven, I think, to the conclusion that, unlike Le Corbusier, Maekawa functioned in the long run as a 1930s-style “corporatist.” Reynolds notes, for example, the firm’s affinity for the designs of public halls, or kaikan.