No one knew their names
The heat soon started taking its toll. By midsummer, two bodies were discovered in the complex － victims, it seemed, of the early heat wave. The first death occurred in Mrs. Ito’s section, where a woman detected the smell from the apartment below. Initially, she thought somebody had gotten a delivery of dried fish called kusaya. Then the stench intensified, especially on the balcony where she hung her laundry. None of the dead man’s neighbors knew him, though he had lived there for years. He was 67.
The second man’s body was found two days later. Again, the smell had become so intense that it had kept his next-door neighbor awake for three nights. The man was elderly, had lived there for years, and chatted about the cherry blossoms with his neighbors, but they didn't know his name. The inside of his apartment, visible through a small ventilation window, was covered in trash. Green bottle flies hovered around the vent.
The building management tried to contain the smell, taping over every crevice － the edges of men’s front doors, their letter flaps, even locks. It was futile. The stench seeped out, filling hallways, stairways and homes.
Mrs. Ito kept busy, trying not to think about it. She took long walks outside the complex, which stretches across a Tokyo suburb for more than a mile, spreading out in the shape of a giant fan. She kept track of her steps on her cellphone, spent an hour every morning writing Buddhist sutras to her daughter and husband, and helped keep local forests clean with a volunteer group.
Every month, she attended the lunches that residents organized to keep the isolation at bay and reduce the risk of lonely deaths. At the gatherings, she had settled into a routine, always sitting at a table across from a man with wobbly legs and a big appetite, Yoshikazu Kinoshita. The two could hardly have been more different － her days were organized to the minute; he got out of bed only when he felt like it. But their conversations, which some might have dismissed as small talk, had acquired deep meaning.
“That’s the way I manage,” she said of her activities.
She spoke rapidly, in long sentences, with an unusual directness for someone of her generation. Even in uncomfortable moments, she never sought refuge in the vagueness of the Japanese language. For the rare occasions that words failed her, she kept voluminous proof of the life she had lived, cataloged exhaustively by year and subject. The photo books in her apartment were filled with black-and-white images of young families like hers. And bound in yellow covers, with titles in Mrs. Ito’s elegant calligraphy, were the books she had written, including the two-volume collection on her life in the housing complex: Tokiwadaira.
In the 1960s, the Japanese government built huge housing developments outside Tokyo and other cities, each holding thousands of young “salarymen” entrusted with rebuilding Japan’s postwar economy. The complexes － sprawling collections of buildings called danchi － introduced Japan to a Western structure of life centered on nuclear family, breaking from the traditional multigenerational homes. The new apartments, seen as essential to Japan’s rebirth, had? strict requirements. The monthly wages of tenants in Tokiwadaira had to be at least 5.5 times the rent, ensuring that only the most successful people got in.
Mrs. Ito’s husband, Eizo, worked at a top advertising agency. But competition to enter one of the danchi was so fierce that the couple had given up after 13 tries. Then a relative secretly submitted an application in their name for a place still under construction, on farmland an hour east of Tokyo.
Even before Shinto priests purified the soil and construction workers broke ground, Tokiwadaira was already drawing interest nationwide. The Japanese had never seen anything quite like it: around 4,800 apartments devouring a space so large that it was serviced by two train stations on the same line.
The Itos arrived in mid-December 1960, on the very first day that tenants were allowed in. It was a clear day, full of promise, with Mount Fuji visible in the distance from their third-floor balcony. Her 4-year-old stepdaughter, Mrs. Ito wrote in her autobiography, was “so happy that she ran around the apartment, drawing a complaint from their second-floor neighbor.”
Their new home was called a “3K” － three small rooms and a kitchen, with a bathroom and toilet. What struck Mrs. Ito wasn't only the modern efficiency of the place, the concrete sturdiness that seemed capable of withstanding the strongest earthquakes, or the sun that came into every room. Peeking into the kitchen for the first time, she found the item that had, perhaps more than anything else, caused housewives to dream of life in the danchi: a sink, no longer made of tiles, but of sparkling stainless steel.
“We were happy,” Mrs. Ito said.
After Mrs. Ito gave birth to a daughter a couple of years later, everything was settled. Her husband rode the packed train six days a week to Tokyo. She taught at a nursery school inside the complex, in charge of the Tulip Group. The danchi’s population of children swelled, just as it did all over Japan. In a few years, there were so many children that they? collectively became known as Japan’s Second Baby Boom generation.
Mrs. Ito used to stand at her window, the one with paper screen, and look down at the playground and sandboxes below. The children of nearby buildings played there together, their shouts loudest during the summer. Now, no one played there. The children had mostly vanished, their jubilant cries replaced by the frequent annoying sirens of ambulances
The fading danchi are no longer a symbol of the young families rebuilding Japan. Nearly half of Tokiwadaira’s residents are over 65. During a midsummer walk, Mrs. Ito pointed to wading pool captured in her pictures decades ago. It was empty: a large circle, with fallen twigs and dirt littering its faded pale blue bottom.
“This is the pool, where my children used to swim,” Mrs. Ito said, suddenly growing quiet.
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