The tectonics of Japanese style: architect and carpenter in the late Meiji period - Japan 1868-1945: Art, Architecture, and National Identity

Ironically, the skills and knowledge that Kigo imparted to his students ultimately enabled them to assume positions and responsibilities once held by state carpenters such as himself. Important Japanese architects, embracing historicist design, also applied themselves to historical study, preservation, and reconstruction. These developments of the late Meiji period not only reflected nationalist sentiment and stylistic change, but also signaled a tectonic shift-the integration and redefinition of the building professions in the course of industrialization-and the waning of the authority of the master carpenter.

Notes

I would like to thank Inaba Nobuko of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs for sharing sources on Kigo Kiyoyoshi. Prof. Hiroyuki Suzuki of Tokyo University and Master Carpenter Fumio Tanaka of Maki Construction offered valuable critical comments

(1.) Muramatsu Teijiro, in Nihon kindai kenchikushi saiko (The history of modern Japanese architecture reconsidered) (Tokyo: Shinkenchikusha, 1977), includes a historical outline and summary biographies of 101 important figures in architectural history, including only two carpenters at the very beginning of the Meiji period. Ten years later the same author turned his attention to many anonymous carpenter-built wood residences, hotels, and other buildings considered to be modern and Japanese in style (referred to as kindai wafu) in Kindai wafu kenchiku (Modern Japanese-style architecture) (Tokyo: Kajima Shuppankai, 1988). One of the best surveys of extant buildings from 1868 to World War II focuses most attention on Western-style buildings. Nihon kindai kenchiku soran: Kakuchi ni nokoru Meiji Taisho Showa no tatemono (Survey of modern Japanese architecture: Extant buildings from Meiji, Taisho, and Showa) (Tokyo: Architectural Institute of Japan, 1980).

(2.) David Stewart, The Making of Modern Japanese Architecture (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1987), 33-62.

(3.) In 1894 the architect Ito Chuta (1867-1954) wrote an essay in Kenchiku Zasshi stressing that, in Japan as in the West, architecture should be considered one of the fine arts rather than a branch of engineering. The Department of Architecture at the Imperial University had already been placed within the School of Engineering, which remains the norm in Japan today. Ito's and other early essays on the nature of architecture are collected in Fujii Shoichiro and Yamaguchi Hiroshi, eds., Nihon kenchiku sengen bunshu (Collected manifestoes in Japanese architecture) (Tokyo: Shokokusha, 1973). See also Jonathan Reynolds, "Maekawa Kunio" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan), 45-48.

(4.) Eleanor Westney documents the development of Meiji public institutions based on European models in Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

(5.) See Ardath W. Burks, The Modernizers: Overseas Students, Foreign Employees and Meiji Japan (London: Westview Replica Editions, 1985). For a recent discussion of foreign architects and engineers in early Meiji, see Dallas Finn, Meiji Revisited: The Sites of Victorian Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1995); Koshino Takeshi provides a well-illustrated survey of early Western-style Meiji architecture in Kaika no katachi (The form of the Restoration), vol. 2 of Nihon no kenchiku: Meiji, Taisho, Showa (Japanese architecture: Meiji, Taisho, Showa) (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1979).