Modernology, Kon Wajiro’s Science of Everyday Observation

Ginza, May 1925. On the avenue that links Kyobashi and Nihonbashi Bridge, a group, dispersed in the crowd with pencils and pre-filled plans in hand, notes down the different idiosyncrasies of the capital’s residents. This meticulous task was termed modernology and came from the imagination of Japanese architect and designer Kon Wajiro. The aim was to capture live, in a scientific manner, the everyday life of the residents and of this city just picking itself up after an earthquake that had hit two years previously. 

Born in 1888 in Aomori Prefecture in northern Honshu, Kon Wajiro moved to Tokyo with his family while finishing his secondary-level studies and enrolled in the Tokyo University of the Arts the following year. He then went on to work at Waseda University, where he would spend his career as a professor, alongside participating in various surveys of Japan’s rural areas. After this, he undertook his own observation of the present time in the Japanese capital.

Itemising habits

Sex, age group, makeup style, beard and moustache shape, type of kimono, length of skirt… Kon Wajiro kept a record of these details that might seem insignificant to the uninitiated. The results of this first study, which lasted four days, were published a few months later in the magazine Fujin kôron in the form of drawings, sketches, and graphics designed to offer a precise image of the Tokyoite in the spring of 1925. First termed kogengaku (science of the present), Kon Wajiro himself preferred the Esperanto term modernologio and, in 1930, wrote the manifesto What is Modernology? In this text, the architect sets out the fundamental principles of the science he sought to create, in order to note down the present and the development of the practices and lifestyles of Japanese people in the most accurate way possible.

But this was just the first step for Kon Wajiro and his associates, who soon extended the protocol outside of the Ginza district and tried to capture the spirit of the time across the whole of the city. Picnic spots in parks, cracks in bowls in low-price cafeterias, the organisation of their contemporaries’ cupboards, the shape of women’s elegant hairstyles… Any excuse to observe and collect details.

Capturing the present moment

The result is a kaleidoscopic observation where the individual, seen as the sum of details, sheds light on the period in which they live in their own way. Modernology’s aim is not really an analytical one; it sees itself more as a collection of ways of being, in a given place, at a given moment and where the collection of samples has value for what it is: a set of diverse profiles which, laid end-to-end like points on a map, have no other purpose than to offer an image of the present moment.

The sketches made from these observations are thus packed with information, the clarity of the message contesting with a certain desire for detail. As well as the sketches, the architect added measurements, materials, estimated prices, numbers… and multiplied the depth of interpretation, as if to objectify the real. Although Kon Wajiro’s modernology did not survive the 1930s as a scientific discipline, this very particular way of sketching everyday life in Japan and capturing the spirit of the time continues today, as in the work of  Florent Chavouet, author of Tokyo Sanpo.