Nakatani is a professor in the Department of Architecture at Waseda University. As an architectural historian, he is noted for a his range of specialized activity, including research on the writings of early-modern-era carpentry, and the continuity of land characteristics and their influence on the present day, or the theory of pre-existence. He is overseeing a project to document change by revisiting the houses that the Japanese “modernologist” Kon Wajiro visited in the early 20 th century, and published his findings in A Survey Revisiting the Anonymous Houses from Wajiro Kon’s Nihon no Minka. More recently, Nakatani has been travelling along the edge of Eurasia plate, researching villages that have existed for a thousand years (http://mille-vill.org). Additionally, he has established Acetate, an editing and publishing organization devoted to printing books by both little-known and popular authors.