Kon Wajiro (1888 – 1973) was a Japanese architectural scholar and folklorist who pioneered the sociological field of what he called ‘modernology’ – the study of how people and their environments change and adapt in response to the processes of modernisation.

Kon was already well established in his study of rural farmhouses and folklore by the 1920s; his research into their urban equivalents was spurred by the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, which laid bare the lives of Tokyoites in a very literal way and allowed him to observe how they lived and sheltered themselves among the ruins.

Kon often made use of the term fudo (風土) in his writings, which literally translated means “wind and earth” but is usually defined as something like ‘the natural conditions and social customs of a place’. Kon took the term to encompass the totality of the ‘folk environment’- not just conditions and customs of a particular human environment, but also the physical objects: the clothes, tools, utensils, furniture, and so on. He regarded the house, its occupants, and its objects, contained by the house and used by the occupants, as parts of a single holistic system in which all these elements interacted.

Kon would probably be less well-known today were it not for the thousands of charming drawings and diagrams he produced over the course of his career, examples of which I have included below.