School buildings' designs reflect their cultures, constrain and enable human interactions, and mediate pedagogy. But in what ways? This dissertation analyzes key but underexamined aspects of Japanese primary and secondary school buildings to reveal their sociocultural dimensions and determinants. It focuses on features that appear to be more prevalent proportionally in Japan than in the U.S. The mixed-methods approach includes longitudinal analyses of Ministry of Education (MEXT) data, space syntax graphs of school floor plans, interviews of experts and architects, and case studies of several schools.

The study finds that single-loaded corridors have been incorporated into Japan's schools for two main reasons: to regulate daylight through an originally domestic and sacred architectural design pattern of southward facing verandas, and for social control, through cellular rooms designed into the peripheries of school buildings. In the case of single-loaded transparent corridors, control is facilitated by axial transparency of rooms to hallways and lateral opacity of rooms to each other. Traditional interior entranceways and rooms have been included in many schools to connote pre-Meiji Japan and afford certain cultural practices despite the introduction and spread of International Style-like features. Teachers' rooms facilitate control in several ways: affording exclusive teacher space, proximity and transparency to entranceways and sports grounds, incorporation into larger "control rooms," and proximity to other interconnected spaces. The use of teachers' rooms reflects administrators' management of teachers by perpendicular orientation of teachers' desks to administrators' desks. Created in response to the single-loaded model, an increasingly popular "open space" design mode facilitates arguably more control of students through total axial transparency. Borrowed from the U.S. and U.K. to facilitate "individual learning" in the 1970s, the incongruence between the intentions behind open space and its use is highlighted. Finally, the study hypothesizes the export of the single-loaded model to other parts of Asia during colonization.

The research is the first in-depth study of Japanese school buildings produced in the English language. Future research should examine more precisely the use of the features analyzed, along what lines they vary, and how frequent or infrequent they are in the United States and globally.