Nakatani is an architectural historian noted for a variety of unique activities. These include studying the writings of early-modern-era carpentry, and the continuity of land characteristics and their influence on the present day (theory of pre-existing characteristics); overseeing a project to document change by revisiting the houses that the Japanese “modernologist” Kon Wajiro visited in the early 20th century; and more recently, researching villages that have existed for a thousand years. He has also established Acetate, an editing / publishing organization devoted to putting out books by rare and ubiquitous people. His own books include Revisiting Kon Wajiro’s “Japanese Houses” (as part of the Rekiseikai group, Heibonsha, 2012), Severalness : The Cycle of Things and Human Beings (Kajima Shuppankai, 2011), and The Study of Classical Literature, the Meiji Period, and Architects (Ikki Shuppan, 1993). In 2013, Nakatani received the Kon Wajiro Award by the Japan Society of Lifology and the Writer’s Award by the Architectural Institute of Japan.
