Laura Neitzel’s The Life We Longed For: Danchi Housing and the Middle Class Dream in Postwar Japan is, as its title makes clear, a study of how the large, government-sponsored multifamily housing projects known in contemporary Japan as danchi were connected with images of what it meant to aspire to the middle class in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of its careful survey of sources ranging from government white papers to women’s magazines and novels written about “danchi life,” The Life We Longed For is more than simply a study of danchi projects and their social meaning. The book is also a through-going examination of diverse aspects of what “ middle class” meant in the high-growth decades in postwar Japan, examining urbanization, the emerging nuclear family, gender roles, material culture, and even “democracy.” As such, the book pulls together the work of social scientists and historians who have traced aspects of Japan’s famous middle-mass consciousness in a myriad of different subfi elds. If I had to pick a single English-language book with which to teach about Japanese society in the postwar years, The Life We Longed For would be it. Neitzel explains at the outset that her intention is not to chronicle how life in danchi was actually lived. As she points out, only a small minority of Japanese families ever lived in danchi, and they were statistically distinct from the average. Rather, Neitzel seeks to give us a rich picture of how “danchi life” was understood in the public imagination, where these state-sponsored housing projects came to stand for all that was possible and, eventually, much that was wrong in Japan as the country changed dramatically between the 1950s and 1970s. The vast majority of danchi were built during an era of housing crisis, as the effects of the destruction of enormous residential areas during World War II were worsened by rapid urbanization and a growing population in the early postwar years. As Neitzel explains, at the end of 1945, Japan faced a loss of 4.2 million housing units (p. 4). Yet danchi were never intended to house the most needy. Rather, from the outset, the danchi were understood to be spaces for a new middle class that would model virtues of modern living in clear contradistinction to what was seen as the unsanitary and feudal daily life of the prewar era. A requirement that prospective renters make an income fi ve times the monthly rent eliminated most of the Japanese working class from

中文翻译：

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我们向往的生活：丹池住宅和战后日本的中产阶级梦想，劳拉·奈策尔 (Laura Neitzel)

劳拉·奈策尔 (Laura Neitzel) 的《我们渴望的生活：战后日本的团契住房和中产阶级梦想》，正如其标题所表明的，是一项研究，研究了在当代日本被称为团契的大型政府资助的多户住宅项目如何与在 1950 年代和 1960 年代渴望成为日本的中产阶级意味着什么。由于对从政府白皮书到女性杂志以及关于“团地生活”的小说等资源进行了仔细调查，《我们渴望的生活》不仅仅是对团地项目及其社会意义的研究。这本书还对战后日本高速增长的几十年中“中产阶级”的含义的各个方面进行了全面考察，考察了城市化、新兴的核心家庭、性别角色、物质文化，甚至“民主”。因此，这本书汇集了社会科学家和历史学家的工作，他们在无数不同的子领域追踪了日本著名的中等大众意识的各个方面。如果我必须选择一本英语书来教授战后日本的社会，那么我们渴望的生活就是它。内策尔一开始就解释说，她的目的不是记录团地的生活实际上是如何生活的。正如她指出的那样，只有一小部分日本家庭曾经住在团地，而且他们在统计上与平均水平不同。相反，奈策尔试图向我们展示公众想象中如何理解“团契生活”，这些国家资助的住房项目代表着一切可能，最终，日本在 1950 年代和 1970 年代之间发生了巨大变化，因此在日本发生了很多错误。绝大多数团地建于住房危机时期，二战期间巨大住宅区遭到破坏的影响因战后早期的快速城市化和人口增长而恶化。正如 Neitzel 解释的那样，到 1945 年底，日本面临着 420 万套住房的损失（第 4 页）。然而，团契从未打算安置最需要帮助的人。相反，从一开始，团地就被理解为新中产阶级的空间，它将塑造现代生活的美德，与战前时代被视为不卫生和封建的日常生活形成鲜明对比。要求未来租房者的收入是月租金的五倍，这使大多数日本工人阶级无法