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

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In 1887 it was decided to give Kigo responsibility for the entire palace, which was to be built of wood in the familiar palace style. The date certainly suggests a connection between Kigo's commission and a political change, since this was the year of Inoue Kaoru's resignation as foreign minister and the end of the Rokumeikan era of headlong westernization. The recorded reason for the decision cited the technical superiority and safety of traditional wood construction in times of earthquake, and Kigo's privileged knowledge of palace architecture as a master builder associated with the imperial family. Ostensibly practical, this reasoning also served the new political program.(16)

Differences between the palace designs submitted by architects and by the Imperial Household carpenters underscore the divergences, not only in style but in planning and building methods, between architect and carpenter. The plans submitted by Conder and other European architects were symmetrical, with carefully designed facades that produced a monumental frontality. Their schemes displayed a comprehensive spatial geometry and subjected the program to an overall organizational logic. In contrast, Kigo and his staff of master builders laid out spaces and circulation based on adjacencies of use and structural exigency--a series of local decisions resulting in an irregular plan (fig. 3). Their organizational logic was not overall geometry but north-south orientation and the relationship of interior rooms to outside courtyard and garden spaces, a mode typical of residential planning in the premodern era.(17)

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In the end, the residential section of the palace was tatami-floored and contiguous to the public halls, as it had been in the Kyoto palace and in the residential quarters of the great castles of the Momoyama and Edo periods (1568-1868). The public halls of the new palace were like the earlier ones at the Kari Kyuden, with parquet-floored interiors to support Western furniture. The interior was to be decorated by the head of the newly created Imperial Museum, who was to choose important objects of art from the full span of Japanese history for placement in the reception rooms. This recapitulative historical program recalls the interior decoration of another building created as a national symbol, the Ho-O-Den designed by Kuru Masamichi for the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893.(18) Like the eclectic architecture of the day, such comprehensive interiors not only encapsulated but appropriated history, legitimizing and authenticating the Meiji regime by presenting it as the inevitable culmination of Japan's past. Although the Meiji Palace did not survive World War II, its creation marks an occasion when the tide of change was temporarily reversed: prominent state architects negotiated design decisions with master carpenters, who finally prevailed.

In 1889, the year after the completion of the Meiji Palace buildings, Kigo offered the first course in Japanese architecture at the Imperial University. Tatsuno Kingo, one of the participants in the Meiji Palace project and later the head of the Department of Architecture at the Imperial University, explained why these courses began then with the following story. During Tatsuno's stay in England his mentor, architect Anthony Burges, asked him about the ancient architectural monuments of Japan. Tatsuno, ashamed that he was unable to answer, decided to institute courses on the history of Japanese architecture upon his return to Japan. Architectural historian Inaba Nobuko has recently pointed out, however, that Tatsuno's meeting with Burges took place almost four years before Kigo began teaching at the university, and that Kigo's appointment was more likely owing to his triumph in the Meiji Palace project.(19) The final design of the palace signals the beginning of the movement to educate architects in the history and practice of Japanese construction.