Dōjunkai (shinjitai: 同潤会, kyūjitai: 同潤會) was a corporation set up a year after the 1923 Kantō earthquake to provide reinforced concrete (and thus earthquake- and fire-resistant) collective housing in the Tokyo area. Its formal name was Zaidan-hōjin Dōjunkai (財団法人同潤会), i.e. the Dōjunkai corporation. The suffix kai means organization, and dōjun was a term coined to suggest the spread of the nutritious benefit of the water of river and sea. It was overseen by the Home Ministry.
The corporation was in existence from 1924 through 1941; it was involved in construction between 1926 and 1934, primarily 1926–30, building 16 complexes. As of 2012, only one complex remains; it is mostly unoccupied, and expected to be demolished when the remaining residents accept buyouts from developers.
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Source : Wikipedia
Resident of last Dōjunkai laments passing of '20s icons
By EDAN CORKILL
"One of the members of the residents association once told me that we
shouldn't talk to journalists, but I have nothing to lose now."
Helmut Rudolph was sitting on a low couch, surveying the interior of his
tiny, 20-sq.-meter apartment. It seemed as though the lanky
self-described German-New Zealander could reach out and touch the walls
on all sides.
Despite these modest circumstances — and that warning about members of
the fourth estate — Rudolph had invited The Japan Times to view his
abode because it is in the last remaining example of a series of
residential buildings that were once the pride of Japan's architectural
fraternity: the Dojunkai apartments.
...
Consequently, the Dojunkai apartments — named
after the public entity responsible for their construction — were made
to last. They tended to be no more than four or five stories high, and
comprised of "family-size" apartments like the one Rudolph rents — and,
astonishing by today's standards, even smaller single-person units on
the top floors.
The blocks were all of steel-and-concrete
construction, and were often designed as quadrangles around a central
courtyard or in U-shaped formations that gave them increased resistance
to lateral shaking from earthquakes.
Yet, although the 15 buildings survived
subsequent natural and man-made disasters (including the carpet- and
fire-bombing during World War II), they have over the last few decades
proved no match for a far more tenacious phenomenon: the economics of
property development.
The most famous Dojunkai building of them all was
located in Tokyo's swish central Shibuya Ward, where it once presented
its low-rise, ivy-covered facade to a long stretch of leafy Omotesando
boulevard. However, that iconic structure was demolished in 2003 to make
way for a mega-development in the shape of Mori Building's Omotesando
Hills.
By then, though, many of the other Dojunkai
apartments had already succumbed to wrecking balls and, come 2009, the
second-last of them — in the Nippori district of Tokyo's eastern Arakawa
Ward — was leveled to make way for a high-rise apartment block.
And then there was one.
Source : The Japan Times Online
Other source : Death of the Dojunkai apartments
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