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

The full significance of the period that saw the appearance of the Shrine and Temple style can only be understood, however, by looking beyond stylistic history and beyond the usual focus on such architect-designed new construction. Many of the same men who originated this first self-consciously national style also designed and built State Shinto shrines, recreated long-lost monuments from antiquity, and were instrumental in Japan's nascent architectural preservation program. They supervised the first restorations of historic buildings and wrote some of the first modern histories of Japanese architecture. All of these activities required a knowledge of traditional timber construction methods and of the dimensioning system called kiwariho. (11) Significantly, they involved the collaboration of both master carpenters and academy-trained architects.

The contact of young architects with master builders in the Imperial University began as part of a curriculum change in the late 1880s. Until that time, architectural education had focused on courses in modern construction technology and Western-style design. Ito Chuta (18671954), Sekino Tadashi (1869-1938), Oe Shintaro (18791935), and Takeda Goichi (1872-1938) are among those architects now associated with the Shrine and Temple style. Not coincidentally they were also students of Kigo Kiyoyoshi (d. 1915), an influential master carpenter employed by the Imperial Household, who taught the first courses in Japanese architecture at the Imperial University beginning in 1889. The scope of Kigo's activities as builder, educator, and scholar is remarkable, and his name is associated with a long list of important projects. His present obscurity is perhaps due to his status as master builder rather than architect.(12)

Kigo was no ordinary carpenter: his family had long served as master builders for the Imperial Household, acting as designers and general contractors for the palace. In true Meiji antiquarian fashion, the Kigo family claimed association with the Imperial Household as far back as the Heian period (794-1185). During the Edo period, the Kigo family seems to have taken a subsidiary role to the ruling Tokugawa clan's own carpenters, the Nakai family based in Kyoto. The Kigo were responsible for repair, maintenance, and minor construction at the Imperial Palace, but it was the Nakai who supervised the 1790 reconstruction of the palace, and, after a fire, the reconstruction of the same buildings in 1855. The extant mid-nineteenth-century buildings are thought to be similar to the designs of 1790, which were based on available documentary and pictorial evidence of the original Heian buildings.(13) This project shows that a historicist awareness in architectural design was not an innovation of the late nineteenth century, but was present in the elite projects of master builders early as the eighteenth century.

The Kigo family moved with the Imperial Household to Tokyo after 1868. As imperial carpenters their identity naturally centered on their involvement with palace-building and the style of the Kyoto palace. From the early Meiji period, the Kigo family also built shrines and other structures in Tokyo, including the early buildings at Kuniyoshi Shrine in 1872. Their most significant Tokyo project started in 1873 after a fire destroyed most of the structures on the shogun's Edo (now Tokyo) castle site that had served as the imperial palace after the restoration. Kigo Kiyoyoshi completed the Kari Kyuden (temporary palace) of timber at Akasaka by 1881. Its style was based on the reconstructed Kyoto palace with the addition of cusped entrance gables characteristic of grand Edo residences, but with hybrid interiors to accommodate Western furniture and decoration.(14) The construction of a permanent Imperial Palace became the subject of heated debate between state architects and carpenters associated with the imperial Household into the late 1880s. Josiah Conder, Tatsuno Kingo (1854-1911), and other prominent architects submitted a series of designs for reception halls based on European palace models. All were separate pavilions intended to connect--as shown in the proposal by Josiah Conder (fig. 2)--to a residential palace in wood with tatami floors, to be designed by Kigo's staff.(15)