“Western-style Japanese Furniture: The Modernization of Japan”

Teasley, Sarah. “Furnishing the Modern Metropolitan: Moriya Nobuo’s Designs for Domestic Interiors”.  Design Issues, Autumn, 2003, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 57-71. The MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1512092. Accessed 24 Oct. 2021

“Furnishing the Modern Metropolitan: Moriya Nobuo’s Designs for Domestic Interiors” describes the attempts of Moriya Nobuo to modernize Japan through interior design. Sarah Teasley explains that Japan strived to be seen as a modern power in the eyes of other foreign powers. After their victory in the Russo-Japanese war, other countries began to see Japan as such. However, Moriya along with many others thought that Japan needed to adopt Western styles in order to have its place in the world. Moriya argued that interior design would help the country modernize; instead of a floor focus design, it would rather be a chair-focused design. Moriya traveled to Europe and the US to learn more about their process of making chairs and other pieces of furniture to bring back to Japan. He founded a company with his younger brother and peers called Kinome-sha to design and produce Western-style Japanese affordable furniture.

Teasley explains some of the designs and displays that Moriya and his company organized. She, also, provided clear images of some of the tamai chair designs. However, instead of focusing on the designs, she focuses on Moriya and the westernization of Japan through furniture. The change from tamai floor living to chair living does attempt to keep some Japanese influence, however, the visuals and descriptions do have a lot of western influence. Teasley and Moriya argue that the westernization of Japanese furniture allows Japan to become modern through the Western viewpoint. I have to agree with them because the West eventually did see Japan, but they probably would not if they did not become more western. They would only see a country as modern if they had more western designs.