which 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 (1.8 meters) long by three feet (90 centimeters) wide. Unhappily, the significance of the name of the building was lost on the Westerners it was intended to impress. Rokumeikan means “The House of the Cry of the Stag,” a literary reference to a Chinese classic that, as any learned Japanese would have known, referred to a place of convivial gatherings. Alas, the Rokumeikan did not bring about the abolition of extraterritoriality. The building soon lost popularity among the new Japanese elite of Meiji days, and a clamor from political right-ists called for its demise as “an affront to Japanese honor.” Abandoned as a cultural center, it became the Peer’s Club in 1889, a mere five years after it opened, and it eventually came into use as a bank and an insurance office. In 1940 it was finally torn down. A remembrance of the Rokumeikan lingers in a most unusual location today. A Buddhist prayer hall in the Tomyo-ji Temple at Hirai in Edogawa-ku, Tokyo, houses one of the Italian bronze chandeliers from the ballroom of the Rokumeikan: so this 19th-century attempt at Western civilization has added a lamp of culture to the light of Buddhist faith.
The site of the Rokumeikan has been covered with modern edifices. One of the more striking examples is the Mizuho Bank Building, formerly known as the Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank Building across from the Hibiya Public Hall. This 32-floor building was erected in 1981, and its eastern and western walls are covered with 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, a new Western-style hotel was being planned, and it came into being as the Imperial Hotel in 1890, sited adjacent to the Rokumeikan just to the north on Hibiya-dori. The new hotel soon became a center for both foreigners and the Japanese. A three-story wooden structure with verandas and arches and a mansard roof, it resembled its ill-fated next-door neighbor. It was not a large hotel, since it could only accommodate some two hundred to three hundred guests. Never-theless, 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 Imperial Hotel (center) looms over Hibiya Park.
The 100 rooms of the Imperial Hotel proved to be inadequate as Tokyo moved into the 20th 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 achieved a new meaning in Wright’s edifice, for in it he reworked an earlier design in a somewhat Mayan style that he had created for a client in Mexico and that the client had rejected as too unusual. The design produced a building that was Western and modern in ambience but pre-Western in its architectural conception. The building was seven years under construction, engendering the usual recriminations because 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 made great claims for the fact 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 the underground basin that he had designed specifically to circumvent the building’s collapse. A similar design, in which a structure would “float” on piles sunk in the mud, had been used elsewhere in Tokyo. A number of these other buildings successfully survived the earthquake, some without the unfortunate settling that affected parts of Wright’s building.
The vicissitudes of use, the uneven corridors and floors and other evidence of the 1923 damage, wartime neglect in the 1940s, the hotel’s use by the U.S. military authorities after 1945 before its return to civilian service, and the rise in land prices that called for better use of the land on which the Imperial Hotel sat—all this brought this self-proclaimed monument to Wright’s genius to an untimely end in 1967. Then it was razed for the new skyscraper Imperial Hotel and its later tower addition, both in the international style of the late 20th 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 Meiji period architecture near Inuyama outside of Nagoya. Again, here is one of those small ironies of history—for Wright’s Mayan-inspired building was actually built not in the Meiji period (1868–1912) but in the succeeding Taisho era.
The post-1968 Imperial Hotel, though now beginning to show its age and look somewhat lackluster against the flood of modern luxury hotels that have swept through Tokyo since 2000, is still regarded by many as one of the city’s best hotels. 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 luxury shops. It also boasts a collection of fine Japanese and international restaurants. 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 Nissei Theater (Nissei Gekijo) seating 1,334 theater-goers. The theater offers ballet and opera in season and concerts and movies at other times. It provides a 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, and it is thus as theatrical as some of the entertainment that appears on its stage or screen. Behind the Nissei-Hibiya Building is the Takarazuka Theater on the side street to the left of the Imperial Hotel. The street is now known as Theater Street; its sidewalks have been widened and its roadway narrowed in order to handle the festive crowds attending the theaters along its length. In the period of the United States military occupation of Japan after 1945, this theater served as the Ernie Pyle Theater for American troops, named for the famed World War II correspondent who was killed on Iwo Jima. Restored to civilian control as the Occupation ended, for almost a decade the Ernie Pyle had served as a movie and stage theater, its operation giving an exceedingly large Japanese staff employment that might not otherwise have been available to them in these postwar days.
The theater was eventually returned to Japanese control, and its spectacular music and dance extravaganzas, in which all the parts, male and female, are taken by young women, were resumed after a wartime and postwar hiatus. Aside from its multipurpose stage, there is a hanamichi (flower path) as in Kabuki theaters, which joins the stage at the Gin-bashi, the Silver Bridge. This obviously can bring the performers in closer contact with the audience. The Takarazuka revues are offered in the most lavish of settings and ornate of costumes, and these revues by the theater’s Osaka/Kobe-based company have an immense appeal for adolescent Japanese girls and middle-aged matrons. Their attraction can be attested to by an incident from the war years: when the theater was closed for wartime reasons on March 4, 1944, the crowd was so large and in danger of becoming unruly that the police unsheathed the swords they carried so as to maintain order.
Continuing to the east on the street that runs alongside the Imperial Hotel, one arrives at the International Arcade, which is situated under the overhead railroad right-ofway. The International Arcade extends for one street in either direction as an enclosed market with a variety of goods meant to appeal to tourists: from electronic gear to new and used kimonos to souvenir items of great diversity. (Since the shops are open from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., until 6:00 p.m. on Sundays, and some of the purchases are tax free, there is an added incentive offered to visitors.) To the north and still under the elevated structure are the yakitori stalls that are favored for snacks by both visitors and Tokyo residents.
Following the elevated tracks northwest for a hundred yards leads to Harumi-dori, where
