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Japan in der DDR - Three Japanese Houses Found in East Germany is a project composed of photographs and texts that trace a journey of discovery sparked by Tamami Iinuma's encounter with the still-standing building Interhotel Merkur, Leipzig (now The Westin) in the former East German city of Leipzig, where she unexpectedly arrived in 2008 and lived for approximately six years beginning in 2009.

Shortly after discovering the Merkur, she learned that it was the first European project undertaken by the Japanese company Kajima Corporation. The hotel was one of four large-scale turnkey projects the company carried out in the German Democratic Republic (GDR; in German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR) in the late 1970s. The other three projects were the International Trade Center in Berlin, the Interhotel Bellevue in Dresden, and the Grand Hotel in Berlin.

Following these projects, Kajima established a regional headquarters in London, offering comprehensive services--from feasibility studies to actual construction--to Japanese companies expanding into EU countries. Today, the company operates out of offices in Warsaw and Prague and continues to be involved in a wide range of construction projects across Europe.

Among these four buildings, Iinuma chose to focus on the hotels. Her interest stemmed from the theatrical quality of hotels--spaces that often serve as backdrops for films and novels. In addition, while researching materials related to the Merkur, she repeatedly encountered instances where the word "hotel" was used interchangeably with "house." Having long been drawn to the poetics of the "house," she felt an intense pull toward this linguistic and conceptual overlap.