Last of the Dojunkai

A visual exploration of the Uenoshita Apartments – the last of the iconic Tokyo social housing buildings known as Dojunkai. A total of fifteen apartment complexes were built across Tokyo and Yokohama in the 1920s to re-home victims of the Great Kanto Quake, but since the early nineties they have been torn down and replaced with other buildings, often commercial properties.

I befriended one of the last tenants in the Uenoshita Apartments who granted me access to the entire block to document the last weeks of its standing and talk with some of the final residents to leave. I took my journalist friend Tyler Rothmar along with me who went on to write the accompanying text for an article we had published in the Japan Times about the last of the Dojunkai. You can read that article here.