Perhaps the best notion of what it was like is to be had from a still-surviving Conder building, the Mitsui Club in Mita near Keiō University. Finished in 1915, the Mitsui Club is larger, but it is similarly provided with wide verandas and colonnades. Pictures suggest that the Rokumeikan, at least its front elevation, was more ornate—busier—than the Mitsui Club. Verandas do not run the whole length of the Mitsui Club as they apparently did that of the Rokumeikan, columns are fewer and farther apart, and the eaves and the roof do not, as with the Rokumeikan, call attention to themselves. Yet the Mitsui Club is probably of all buildings in the city the one most like the lost treasure. The first Imperial also echoed the Rokumeikan. A part of the same panorama, it must have seemed very much what it was, the work of the faithful and reverent disciple.
Conder put up many buildings, only a few of which remain. He supervised the building of the Nikolai Cathedral in Kanda, which was finished in 1891, after the design of a Russian professor. Seriously damaged in the earthquake, the Nikolai is now squatter and solider than it was before the disaster.
The Imperial and the Ryōunkaku, the “cloud scraper” of Asakusa, opened for business within a week of each other. Popularly called the Asakusa Twelve Storys, the Ryōunkaku was the building that lost its top storys in the earthquake and was then demolished by army engineers.
If the Rokumeikan was the great symbol of the Meiji elite and its cosmopolitanism, the Twelve Storys was in late Meiji the great symbol of the masses and their pleasures. Asakusa was by that time the busiest center of popular entertainment. The Twelve Storys symbolized Asakusa. Kubota Mantarō wrote:
In days of old, a queer object known as the Twelve Storys reared itself over Asakusa.
From wherever you looked, there it was, that huge, clumsy pile of red bricks. From the roof of every house, from the laundry platform, from the narrowest second floor window, there it was, waiting for you. From anywhere in the vastness of Tokyo—the embankment across the river at Mukōjima, the observation rise at Ueno, the long flight of stone steps up Atago Hill, there it was, waiting for you, whenever you wanted it.
“Look—the Twelve Storys.”
So we would say, at Mukōjima or Ueno, or on Atago Hill. There was quiet pleasure in the words, the pleasure of finding Asakusa. That was what the Twelve Storys meant to Asakusa, a new pleasure each time, the pleasure of knowing Asakusa and its temple.
And yet how clumsy, in illustrated guides, in prints of the Eastern Capital … how clumsy, above cherries fairly dripping with blossoms.
Those cheap prints bring nostalgia for Asakusa as it was, the Asakusa of memory. In memories from my childhood it is always even thus, in the bosom of spring. The rich sunlight, the gentle winds, the green willow shoots, they speak always and only of spring; and as my eyes mount in pursuit of a wavering dragonfly or a stray balloon, there it is, the Twelve Storys, dim in mists.
The Twelve Storys was built by Japanese with the advice of an Englishman named William Barton. Some sources say that it was 320 feet high, some 220. The latter figure seems the more likely. It was in any event the highest building in the city, almost twice as high (even if the lower figure is accepted) as the Nikolai Cathedral. It contained many interesting and amusing things, and, along with a tower on Atago Hill, was the place to go for a view of the city.
The Asakusa Twelve Storys
Octagonal, of red brick, the Twelve Storys had the first elevator in the land, imported from the United States; it took passengers, twenty of them at a time, to the eighth floor. The elevator was thought dangerous, and shut down after two months. On the second to eighth floors, wares from the world over were for sale. There was a Chinese shop with goods from the China of the Empress Dowager and sales girls in Chinese dress. The ninth floor contained diversions of a refined sort, such as art exhibitions. The tenth floor served as an observation lounge, with chairs scattered about. All of the floors were well lighted—the building was described as a tower of light—but the eleventh floor especially so. It had rows of arc lights inside and out. The top floor, also for observation, was provided with telescopes. For all these delights the entrance fee was a few pennies.
Panoramic photograph by Ogawa Isshin,
The Twelve Storys may have boasted the first elevator, but the first one to continue operating seems to have been in Nihombashi, some sources say in the Bank of Japan, some in the Mitsui Bank. Nihombashi was itself both progressive and conservative, enlightened and benighted. It divided cleanly in two at the main north-south street, the one that crossed the Nihombashi Bridge. In early Meiji the place for Civilization and Enlightenment would of course have been the Ginza Bricktown. At the end of Meiji it might well have been the western portions of Nihombashi. The Bank of Japan, under construction there for eight years and finished in 1896, was the grandest of piles. To the east was the Mitsui Bank, south of which lay the Mitsukoshi department store, stone-built and several floors tall by the end of Meiji.
The main Nihombashi street passed to the east of them, and across it and a few paces towards the bridge lay the fish market. The conjunction was remarkable; nowhere else in the city was the sudden leap back into the past, or, if one preferred, the leap in the other direction, into the new world, more apparent than here. (For the problem of the fish market, see below, pages 94-95.) The view eastwards from the Mitsukoshi was over an almost unbroken expanse of low wooden buildings and the dark back streets of Tanizaki’s boyhood. Change had come to them, in the form, for instance, of rickshaws, but not much else; if one did not like brick, stone, and bright lights, one could turn eastwards up one of the narrow streets and walk to the river and beyond, and be scarcely troubled at all by modern contrivances.
taken from atop the City Hall: northeast quadrant
To the west, the new Bank of Japan looked grandly towards the palace ramparts over the almost empty spaces of “Mitsubishi Meadow.” The original bank building survived the earthquake and survives today, the southwest portion of a much larger complex. A domed central hall runs east and west and two colonnaded wings extend to the south. It was to have been entirely of stone, but the Nagoya earthquake of 1891 persuaded the architect that brick would be safer. Two other buildings by the same architect survived the earthquake and down to our day—Tokyo Central Station and the Daiei Building, originally Imperial Hemp, a thin triangle somewhat reminiscent of the Flatiron Building in New York.
Southeast quadrant of panorama from City Hall
The Bank of Japan complex is held to mark the beginning of a new phase in Meiji architecture—the design and construction of buildings by Japanese architects, quite without foreign assistance, in the courtly and classical styles of Europe. This is probably true enough in a general way, though not absolutely so. There is a tiny building in front of the National Diet, put up in 1891, and thought to be the earliest stone structure designed by a Japanese. Though scarcely monumental, it is certainly classical. It is no more than four yards square, and looks like a tomb that is trying to look like a Roman temple. It houses the prime bench mark for measuring elevation,