JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up · FY2026 – FY2027
Photo: “Seoul Apartment Buildings” by Francisco Anzola, CC BY 2.0.
Overview
Housing has become one of the main channels through which finance enters everyday life. Mortgages, rental deposits, and cooperative and alternative forms of finance shape not only where people live, but how they plan their lives, relate to family and work, and come to understand themselves. This project asks what kind of subject financialization produces, by tracing a genealogy of practices around “home” in Tokyo and Seoul.
The two cities offer contrasting yet entangled trajectories. Seoul’s jeonse deposit system and its debt-driven housing ladder sit alongside cooperative experiments such as the community bank Bin-Go. In Tokyo, housing is shaped by other arrangements of loans, rent and inheritance. Combining archival research with residential life-history interviews, the project follows where people lived, how they obtained each home and raised the money, and where they moved next. It reads these housing histories alongside work and family histories to show how financial devices and everyday practices co-produce subjectivity.
Team
Principal Investigator: Didi Kyoung-ae Han (Saitama University)
with a team of research assistants in Seoul and Tokyo
Updates
- 2026 — Project started; interview design and ethics review underway
