Abstract
This paper examines social services between the world wars in Japan through the activities of one of the humanitarian organizations of the Tokyo Imperial University: the Tokyo Teidai Settlement (1924–1938). The objective of this paper is to give a dynamic description of what happened in Japan in ‘the social’ arena during this period.
The activities of the Teidai Settlement were based on the idea that people who were not covered by the existing system were still members of society and the architecture which created these people should be repaired. The repair of this architecture needed assistance from other organizations like the university and the regime. Pre-war social services constituted a work in transition that was trying to discover how social solidarity could be conducted when neither the provider nor the function that the provider could serve was defined or distinguished clearly.
