the chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, was killed at the podium by a sword-wielding student.
Across from the southern end of the park and the Public Hall and Library is Hibiya City, which is similar to New York City's Rockefeller Center in that it has a large, open skating rink, fountains, and statuary within the square of shops and corporate display centers.
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 had been forced by the Western nations to grant certain extra-territorial rights to Western governments. These restrictions obviously rankled members of the Japanese government, and numerous attempts were made to remove these limitations on Japanese sovereignty so as to permit Japan in an international context 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 Kaoru Inoue, then foreign minister of Japan, had the Rokumeikan hall erected to the south of where the Imperial Hotel now stands. This Western-style, two-story brick and stucco structure designed by Josiah Conder, the British architect whose influence was so strong in Meijijapan, 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 which had French overtones of the 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, dance the popular Viennese waltzes, and enjoy one another's 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, such as invitations to gatherings that were addressed to both husbands and wives, 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 meant to serve as a state-owned guest house. The former guest house in the Hama Detached Palace in Shimbashi that 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 long by three feet wide. Unhappily, the significance of the name of the building was lost on the Westerners it was intended to impress. Rokumeikan means "House of the Cry of the Stag," a literary reference to a Chinese classic which, as any learned Japanese would have known, referred to "a place of convivial gatherings."
Alas, the Rokumeikan did not bring about the abolition of extra-territoriality. The building soon lost popularity among the Meiji era Japanese elite, and a clamor from political rightists called for its demise as "an affront to Japanese honor." Abandoned as a cultural center, it became the Peers' Club in 1889, a mere five years after it opened, and it eventually came into use as a bank and as an insurance office. In 1940 it was finally torn down. A remembrance of the Rokumeikan lingers in a most unusual location today. In a Buddhist prayer hall in Tomyoji temple at Hirai in Edogawa-ku, one of the Italian bronze chandeliers from the ballroom of the Rokumeikan. that nineteenth-century attempt at Western civilization, now adds the light of culture to the light of Buddhist faith.
The site of the Rokumeikan has with time been covered with more modern edifices. One of the more striking examples is the Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank Building across from the Hibiya Public Hall. This thirty-two-floor building was erected in 1981, and its eastern and western walls are covered with a 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 to survive, a new Western-style hotel was being planned, and it came into being as the Imperial Hotel in 1890 adjacent to the Rokumeikan just to the north on Hibiya-dori. The new hotel soon became a center for both foreigners and Japanese. A three-story wooden structure with verandas and arches and a mansard roof, it resembled its ill-fated next-door neighbor. The hotel could only accommodate two to three hundred guests. Nevertheless, 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 one hundred rooms of the Imperial Hotel proved to be inadequate as Tokyo moved into the twentieth 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" reached new proportions in Wright's edifice since he reworked an earlier design in a somewhat Mayan style that he had made for a non-Japanese client in Mexico and which had been rejected as too unusual. The design provided a building which was Western and modern in ambience but pre-Western in its architectural design. The building was under construction for seven years, with the usual recriminations since 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 boasted 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 its underground basin which he had designed for keeping the building from collapsing. A similar design had been used elsewhere in Tokyo whereby a structure would "float" on piles sunk in the mud. A number of these other buildings successfully survived the earthquake, some without the unfortunate settling which affected parts of Wright's building.
The vicissitudes of use, of uneven corridors and floors, of other evidences of the 1923 damage, of wartime neglect in the 1940s, of its use by the U.S. military authorities after 1945, and of the rise in land prices brought this self-proclaimed monument to Wright's genius to an untimely end in 1967. Then it was razed for the new high-rise Imperial Hotel and its later tower addition, both in the international style of the late twentieth 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, pond, and main lounge rooms, have been saved and scrupulously restored in Meiji-mura, the outdoor museum of Victorian architectural style in Japan near Gifu City. Again, here is one of those ironies of history since this post-Meiji era unit was built in the succeeding Taisho era and in a prehistoric Mayan architectural style, and is now saved among the Victorian architectural artifacts of Japan's early modern period which has been designated as the Meiji period (1868-1912).
The post-1968 Imperial Hotel provides the latest in luxury accommodations: it has a coffee shop and restaurants as well as an arcade of shops on the lower level. Among its unexpected amenities is a swimming pool on the nineteenth floor. It is a far cry from the original Imperial Hotel of a mere one hundred rooms. In 1983 an additional unit, the Imperial Tower, was added to the 1970s building, and its first four floors are given over to very expensive luxury shops. The later Imperial Hotel is overpowering in its attempt at grandeur and has the ambience of an international airport terminal striving for recognition.
Just to the north of the Imperial Hotel on Hibiya-dori is the 1963 Nissei-Hibiya Building which contains the 1,334-seat Nissei Theater. The theater offers ballet, opera in season, and concerts and movies at other times. It provides a rather showy theater interior with its ceiling flecked with mother-of-pearl, its walls of glass mosaics and lights flashing within the walls and ceiling. Its lobby boasts an art deco ceiling and a marble floor, making it as theatrical as some of the entertainment which appears in it.
Behind the
