As part of its WW II incendiary weapons development program, the United States designed and built test structures to use in weapons performance trials. The most well-known of these might be the German and Japanese tenement housing at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. This presentation compares the design processes of the Japanese and German test structures, and locates the Japanese structures among late 19th and 20th century practices of modeling Japanese material culture and “Japanicizing” spaces. 

David Tucker has a PhD in Japanese History from the University of Iowa. He has taught Japanese History and Japan-U.S. Relations at several universities in the U.S., and has published on Japanese colonial urban planning and construction, Japanese colonial labor management, and Japanese n planning and construction, Japanese colonial labor management, and Japanese attempts to Japanicize occupied areas through spatial aestheticization.