contractors were called to the section chief’s office of the Metropolitan Police Department, where a meeting was held to organize the union. It has been stated that many members of the Metropolitan Police Department and senior military personnel were present in the forum. The administration thought that the demolition contractors would demolish buildings as roughly as the construction laborers and manual laborers. To prove that this was not the case, the contractors demolished the Metropolitan Police Department’s Chief’s office, which was the meeting place. They then immediately reassembled it. Impressed by the dexterity and carefulness of their work, the army decided that the original Japanese word for demolition contractors wouldn’t fit their description and sought another title. The colonel of the military named the current Japanese word “解体(Kaitai)” for demolition contractors. Currently, two characters represent the word “解体(Kaitai)” in Japanese: one with the meaning “to disassemble”, “解(Kai)” in Japanese, and the other, “the body”, “体(Tai)” in Japanese. After this forum, a union of the contractors was established under the title “Tokyo Demolition (Kaitai) Cooperative.”Since the Tokyo Demolition Cooperative’s inauguration, the demolition industry has also worked under the military’s jurisdiction. There is such a story in that the records show: when asked to demolish a building, an angry soldier who was upset that the demolition wouldn’t succeed on the exterior tried to smash the structure with an armored vehicle. The armored vehicle was utterly stuck in the construction and could not move, which only led to the process slowing down. This story highlights a lesson that many contractors can learn from: even if you try to dismantle a building with force, it will never go well and there are consequences to dismantling it this way. Taking this case as an example, if you demolish the building from the top of the wall, the broken wall will accumulate at your feet, and you will not be able to dismantle the lower part of the wall. Therefore, when demolishing a wall, it is a rule of thumb to dismantle it from below.The technology of demolition results from the accumulation of the inherited technology based on many years of experience: efficient demolition requires the technology, knowledge, and expertise passed down from many years ago.Contracts to demolish wooden buildings have dropped sharply in Tokyo, which became a burnt field due to the Great Tokyo Air Raid in 1945. Instead, contractors temporarily started to demolish steel-frame building warehouses that escaped air raids. During this time, steel was a valuable resource, and if a contractor had one or two jobs like this a year, they had a steady annual income. Records state that the demolition industry stayed in business by doing such work for about ten years after the war.As the economy gradually improved, contractors resumed demolition of wooden structures. In this era, wood, roof tiles, and corrugated sheet iron were demolished and resold. Tiles were demolished by hand in assembly line work, and corrugated sheet irons were sold after filling the nail holes with solder.The number of steel construction jobs had increased over time, but the plan to demolish materials and resell remained. The thick iron plate that was demolished and taken out was thinly stretched and sold as a reinforcing bar. This work was called “伸鉄取(Shin-Tetsu-Tori: Strech-Iron-Getting).”As shown in Fig. 4, in the Mid-Showa era, reinforced 2.5 Post-War Days and Demolition Industry─ 45 ─Fig. 4 Yuraku-cho Pikaderie Theater Demolition （1956） Provided by Asahi Shimbun
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