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The tectonics of Japanese style: architect and carpenter in the late Meiji period - Japan 1868-1945: Art, Architecture, and National Identity
Art Journal, Fall, 1996 by Cherie Wendelken
Until recently, the wooden architecture of the modern period and the role of the carpenter in the development of modern Japanese architecture have not been carefully studied.(1) The literature on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture has tended to emphasize two important concerns: first, the genesis of a newly imported Western architectural profession and its developmental progress on Japanese soil; and second, the transformative effects of this new profession that involved the mastery of Western building technology and what has been called "the problem of style."(2) However, in the broader built environment of Meiji Japan, there was no abrupt break with the building practices of premodern Japan. Meiji-era construction was overwhelmingly executed by carpenters using methods and materials not unlike those used in the late Edo period (1600-1868). In both public and private sectors during the first half of the Meiji period, the master carpenter and the architect were parallel and even rival professionals working in similar capacities but in different materials. Traditionally trained master carpenters acted not only as craftsmen, but as design professionals and the equivalent of structural engineers. They continued to have an important role even in the construction of national monuments as long as the Meiji government's Kobusho, or Department of Construction, sponsored traditional wood construction.
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In this context changes in education, building technology, and the political climate during late Meiji period, from the 1890s into the twentieth century, constitute an important transitional period when architects acquired some of the traditional builders' technical expertise in the use of wood. Thus they were the first who had not only the desire but the skill to manipulate the traditional building vocabulary to create a new Japanese architecture that was both national and modern. The wide range of activities engaged in by academy-trained architects beginning in the 1890s marks an important time of contact between the traditional master builder and the academy that was critical to the modernization and integration of the building industries. That contact temporarily blurred the boundaries between architect, engineer, and master builder and had lasting consequences for the definition of Japanese national identity in architecture.
Collaboration between building professionals also raised questions of professional identity. In Europe and the United States, as in Japan, debates about styles, their associated meanings, and their relative quality were part of the discourse of nineteenth-century historicism, but in Japan the self-conscious questioning of stylistic and formal convention was accompanied by discussion of the nature of architecture as distinct from mere building. The somewhat naive-sounding debates in the late Meiji period over the role of the architect--was he engineer or artist?--can also be understood as early modern Japanese architects' attempts at self-definition vis-a-vis past building traditions.(3) The new profession saw its expertise and its role as distinct not only from that of the engineer but also from the tradition-bound world of the master carpenter. Within Japan, the differences in working methods and technical expertise between architect and carpenter were as significant as the differences between Japan and the West.
Today the architectural symbol of the cultural climate of the late Meiji era is the Shrine and Temple style, or shajiyo, which appeared in the 1890s. It is conventionally understood as the reflection of a heightened awareness of national identity. However, buildings like the Nihon Kangyo Bank (fig. 1) were not new in the landscape in the 1890s, but were new as products of the architectural profession. They were different because they were understood not simply as Japanese buildings but as a self-consciously Japanese style of architecture in an increasingly eclectic age.
[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
During the early years of the Meiji Restoration, foreign institutional programs, construction technologies, and architectural styles had been imported together as part of the nation-building program of the new regime. Since many of the newly created public and commercial institutions had been based on European models, it is not surprising that many of the buildings that housed these institutions--post offices, palaces, ministries, and schools--were modeled on European designs.(4) European engineers and architects had been invited to practice the modern building professions and to help establish them in Japan. By the early 1880s Japanese architects trained by foreign teachers were being retained by the Meiji government to design versions of the eclectic revival styles popular in Europe. These, employing stone or brick masonry technology, represented a fundamental departure from the timber-based building practices of pre-Meiji Japan.(5)
In the late 1880s a newly reorganized central government called for an ideological return to Japanese antiquity (as opposed to modeling the West) as a guide to remaking Japan's institutions and strengthening its national identity. During this same period from the end of the 1880s to the turn of the century, a new, self-consciously Japanese style of architecture appeared. The Shrine and Temple style (shajiyo) was the creation of a new generation of architects, the first to be trained in Japan by Japanese teachers.(6) As the name suggests, these buildings took their formal inspiration from premodern shrines and temples. The upturned eaves, cusped gables, and tiled roofs that characterized the Shrine and Temple style were intended to resemble those of ancient religious monuments.
