JAPAN: Life with a Key

Only 800 could crowd into the great public hall in Tokyo where the lottery took place last week, but 28,000 on the outside were waiting to hear the results. The lottery was no ordinary one, and its prize was precious indeed. It offered nothing less than a place in one of Tokyo's streamlined new apartment houses.

The apartment house is a postwar phenomenon in Japan, and the old country will never be the same. During the war 4,000,000 families saw their delicate paper houses go up in smoke, and the ramshackle wooden shacks that the government hastily threw together afterward...

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