was a Japanese

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

, designer, and educator. He is renowned as the father of "modernology" (''kogengaku''), a branch of

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...

which studied the changes in cityscape and people which emerged as a consequence of

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

becoming a modern metropolis in the early Showa Era. Born in

Hirosaki is a city located in western Aomori Prefecture, Japan. On 1 April 2020, the city had an estimated population of 168,739 in 71,716 households, and a population density of . The total area of the city is . Hirosaki developed as a castle town fo ...

, Kon studied graphic design at Tokyo University of the Arts, where he collaborated with artists and ethnographers. He then became a professor at Waseda University in the Department of Architecture. In the 1920s he studied rural Japan with the ethnographer Kunio Yanagita. After the

1923 Great Kantō earthquake The struck the Kantō Plain on the main Japanese island of Honshū at 11:58:44 JST (02:58:44 UTC) on Saturday, September 1, 1923. Varied accounts indicate the duration of the earthquake was between four and ten minutes. Extensive firestorms an ...

he turned his attention to urban life, recording post-disaster conditions in Tokyo. In 1927, borrowing from the Esperanto term ''modernologio'', he wrote the manifesto "What is Modernology?", where he presented his scientific method for analyzing the material culture of urban citizens throughout Japan and its colonies, with a particular focus on the lifestyles and habits of "cultured peoples" (''bunkajin'').

References

1888 births 1973 deaths Tokyo University of the Arts alumni Japanese sociologists Japanese architects {{Asia-sociologist-stub