There are certain elements and spatial characteristics which distinguish Japanese domestic units from European ones. One of the most fundamental of these characteristics is the existence of unfloored areas in the Japanese house, which relate to the custom of removing one's shoes shoes when entering the raised floor living rooms. Japanese traditional houses -whether farmhouses (including fisherman's houses) or tradesman's houses, have without exception an unfloored area or 'doma' which accounts for a considerable proportion of the floored area. This was an important living space with a variety of functions and purposes. It was also important as a buffer space providing access to different living spaces according to the status of visitors and the intimacy of their relationship with the family -ie. Strangers, neighbors, visitors, employees, relatives etc. It plays a significant role too as a means of changing the way the house is used at different times of the day. However, in modern housing-development apartments, an unfloored area is regarded as an uneconomical and wasteful space indoors, and it has been squeezed out by living rooms with straightforward and easily definable functions. Only a minimal unfloored area is left as a place for changing shoes.

By contrast, without an unfloored area a traditional Japanese tenement house or tradesman's house, could not have functioned satisfactorily.

Traditional houses were incomplete as residential units without the space under the eaves, a shop stall outside and a narrow alley running past the front. Compared with modern housing corporation apartment buildings, the early apartment hoses on Gunkanjima are generously endowed with multi-purpose space. As mentioned above, the reason for this is that apartment houses on Gunkanjima were in effect traditional rows of tenements piled up one upon another, including not only an unfloored area in each flat but also the traditional alley providing access and containing communal service facilities. This was very different from the stack of self contained residential units which comprises the typical apartment house in Europe and America. Inclusion of an unfloored area in an apartment house not only provided a convenient area for cooking and multifarious activities within the private realm, it had other advantages as well.

1) Owing to the ease of communications -and the resulting mutual relationship- between unfloored areas, that portion of the public corridor immediately in front of each flat was to a certain degree appropriated by the flat in question and acquired a semi-public character thus helping to foster a spirit of togetherness in the community.

2) Over the years, technical developments led to great changes in the provision of almost every service and utility: fuel for cooking and heating changed from coal and firewood to propane gases; water supply changed from jars for each apartment to piped water supply for groups, and latterly piped water supply for each apartment; drainage changed from a drain set in the unfloored area to a concrete sink and finally a stainless steel kitchen sink unit; and food storage changed from wooden shelves to a refrigerator.

The unfloored area of the kitchen was easily adaptable to suit the individual tastes, lifestyle and composition of the family living in each apartment as the changes listed above took place. In some cases people extended their raised floor living room area with tatami mats, into the kitchen, or made an extra storage closet, or installed a dining corner with boarded floor, in order to separate eating and sleeping areas. Incidentally, a comparative study of the survey drawings clearly reveals that the proportion of unfloored area in the apartments on Gunkanjima gradually decreased as times changed. In recent years, the public corridors in front of the apartments tended to lose their semi-public character and ultimately to function solely as passages, reflecting a growing sense of individual exclusiveness among the residents which is corroborated by what individuals told us in interviews. It is our belief that it is the special factors described above which caused the former residents of Gunkanjima to describe it as “a good place to live”. The so-called rationalisation of design, conversely, impoverishes the life of a community and reduces its unity and this is surely one of the fundamental contradictions of modern society.