Nouveau touches on its southern side for concerts, lectures, meetings, and other cultural activities; a public library adjacent to the Hall; a café; two restaurants; a lake, ponds, lawns, flower gardens, and tennis courts; and a tier-seated, outdoor music area where today jazz, folk, and other popular music attracts young music lovers. In 1961 a large fountain was added to the park; it can be illuminated with seven colors at night. There is even a small museum devoted to the history of the park (open daily from 11:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. except on Mondays). The park is noted for its cherry tree blossoms in April, for its wisteria and azalea blooms in May, and for its magnificent display of chrysanthemums in November, this latter a festive event that draws many visitors. The park also contains a number of dogwood trees that were a gift from the United States in appreciation of the Japanese cherry trees that were given by Tokyo to Washington, D.C. In the unhappy days of the 1930s and 1940s, the park became an artillery battery, the lawns were replaced by vegetable plots, and, after the first American air raid by General Doolittle in 1942, anti-aircraft guns were put into place.
Mention has been made of the Imperial Palace Outer Gardens as a center for public dissent in the past. In 1905 some 30,000 protesters gathered at Hibiya Park to object to the terms of the peace treaty at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and, as a result of the violence that ensued, martial law was declared by the government. In the 1950s and 1960s, protests were centered here against the Japanese government’s relations with the United States. Hibiya Public Hall, which has served as the site of political party meetings, has had its unhappy incidents as well, the most notable occurring in 1960 when Asanuma Inejiro, the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, was killed at the podium by a sword-wielding student.
5 THE IMPERIAL HOTEL
If Hibiya Park represented an early Western-style influence, there was an even earlier attempt at Westernization across Hibiya-dori on lands once held by the outside lords of Satsuma. After the nation opened its doors to the world in the 1860s, Japan was forced by the Western nations to grant certain extraterritorial rights to Western governments. These restrictions obviously bothered the members of the Japanese government, and numerous attempts were made to remove these limitations on Japanese sovereignty so as to permit Japan to assume its status as an equal with the European nations and the United States. One of the more futile of these attempts occurred in 1881 when Inoue Kaoru, the then foreign minister of Japan, had the Rokumeikan erected to the south of where the Imperial Hotel now stands. This Western-style, two-story, brick and stucco structure, designed by Josiah Condor, the British architect whose influence was so strong in Meiji Japan, was a potpourri of Western architectural styles. As Paul Waley describes it, it had Mediterranean arcades on both floors, being of a Tuscan nature on the ground floor and of a vaguely Moorish nature on the second floor. Verandas ran the length of the building, and the mix of styles was then topped with a roof that had overtones of France’s Belle Epoque. A model of the Rokumeikan can be seen in the Edo-Tokyo Museum under one of the glassed floor panels.
The Rokumeikan was meant to be a social gathering place where foreigners and the cream of Japanese society (in Western attire) could meet and dance the popular Viennese waltzes that were the ultimate in modern social life of polite society, a place where each could enjoy the others’ company. All the appurtenances of modern civilization were present: a ballroom, a reading room, a billiards lounge, and a music room. Other innovations of a Western nature occurred in these modern halls: invitations to gatherings were addressed to both husbands and wives in the European manner; there were garden parties and evening receptions. There was even a charity bazaar in 1884 that ran for three days. Surely this must have indicated to the Europeans and Americans (whom some Japanese still referred to as “red-haired barbarians”) that Japan was now an equal to the West and should be treated as an equal.
The building was also intended to serve as a state guesthouse, since the former guest-house in the Hama Detached Palace in Shimbashi, which had received American president Grant and his wife, had now fallen into disrepair. The suites for distinguished guests in the Rokumeikan could even boast an alabaster bathtub six feet (1.8 meters) long by three feet (90 centimeters) wide. Unhappily, the significance of the name of the building was lost on the Westerners it was intended to impress. Rokumeikan means “The House of the Cry of the Stag,” a literary reference to a Chinese classic that, as any learned Japanese would have known, referred to a place of convivial gatherings. Alas, the Rokumeikan did not bring about the abolition of extraterritoriality. The building soon lost popularity among the new Japanese elite of Meiji days, and a clamor from political right-ists called for its demise as “an affront to Japanese honor.” Abandoned as a cultural center, it became the Peer’s Club in 1889, a mere five years after it opened, and it eventually came into use as a bank and an insurance office. In 1940 it was finally torn down. A remembrance of the Rokumeikan lingers in a most unusual location today. A Buddhist prayer hall in the Tomyo-ji Temple at Hirai in Edogawa-ku, Tokyo, houses one of the Italian bronze chandeliers from the ballroom of the Rokumeikan: so this 19th-century attempt at Western civilization has added a lamp of culture to the light of Buddhist faith.
The site of the Rokumeikan has been covered with modern edifices. One of the more striking examples is the Mizuho Bank Building, formerly known as the Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank Building across from the Hibiya Public Hall. This 32-floor building was erected in 1981, and its eastern and western walls are covered with gray granite, while the front has a stepped, glass-curtain wall. A sunken mall is entered from a plaza with a large clock, and the lobby holds the sculpture Doppo la Danza by Giacomo Manzo. Despite the failure of the Rokumeikan, a new Western-style hotel was being planned, and it came into being as the Imperial Hotel in 1890, sited adjacent to the Rokumeikan just to the north on Hibiya-dori. The new hotel soon became a center for both foreigners and the Japanese. A three-story wooden structure with verandas and arches and a mansard roof, it resembled its ill-fated next-door neighbor. It was not a large hotel, since it could only accommodate some two hundred to three hundred guests. Never-theless, it became the center for the smart set of its day. Within a year of its opening, it came into unexpected use when the nearby Diet chambers burned to the ground, and members of the Diet had to meet in the hotel until their new legislative meeting place was available.
The Imperial Hotel (center) looms over Hibiya Park.
The 100 rooms of the Imperial Hotel proved to be inadequate as Tokyo moved into the 20th century. In 1915 Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to create a new and more modern hotel on a portion of the site of the existing Imperial Hotel. Westernization achieved a new meaning in Wright’s edifice, for in it he reworked an earlier design in a somewhat Mayan style that he had created for a client in Mexico and that the client had rejected as too unusual. The design produced a building that was Western and modern in ambience but pre-Western in its architectural conception. The building was seven years under construction, engendering the usual recriminations because it ran several times over budget as well as over its timetable for completion. Its opening occurred in 1922 just as the original Imperial Hotel in front of it burned down, and but one year before the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
Wright made great claims for the fact that his building had proved to be earthquake-proof during that 1923 disaster. He credited its underlying “dish” foundation construction, whereby the building could float on the underground basin that he had designed specifically to circumvent the building’s collapse. A similar design, in which a structure would “float” on piles sunk in the mud, had been used elsewhere in Tokyo. A number of these other buildings successfully survived the earthquake, some without the unfortunate settling that affected parts of Wright’s building.
The vicissitudes of use, the uneven corridors and floors and other evidence of the 1923 damage, wartime neglect in the 1940s, the hotel’s use by the U.S. military authorities after 1945 before its return to civilian service, and the rise in land prices that called for better use of the land on which the Imperial Hotel sat—all this brought this self-proclaimed monument to Wright’s genius to an untimely end in 1967. Then it was razed for the new skyscraper Imperial Hotel and its later tower addition, both in the international style of the late 20th century. A Society to Protect the Imperial Hotel had been organized in 1967, but the Wright hotel closed its doors forever on November 15 of that year. A portion of the original Wright Building, including the forecourt,