Ken Tadashi Oshima’s International Architecture in Interwar Japan represents a new phase in English-language writing on architecture in Japan, but should be required reading for scholars and students working in modern architectural history regardless of location. As its title suggests, the book articulates how elite architects and their clients in interwar Japan combined a transnational modern subjectivity and modernist stylistic and thematic concerns with local context, in both design work and modes of practice. Oshima makes his case through close readings of the work of three architects: Horiguchi Sutemi, Antonin Raymond, and Yamada Mamoru. As a monograph on the three architects and incisive view into architectural practice in interwar Japan, the book is important for modern Japanese architectural history. But it makes an equally, if not more, significant contribution to a much larger readership as a model for recognizing and more accurately representing the simultaneously local and transnational nature of...

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