Whatever other ideas he may have had, Inoue is best remembered for conceiving of the Rokumeikan. The charm of the place, in addition to the bustles and flounces, lies largely in an element of fantasy. What politician, one asks, could possibly have thought that such a hardheaded person as the British minister would be so moved by a few Westernized balls at the Rokumeikan that he would recommend treaty revision to the home office? Yet that is what the Rokumeikan was about. In the episode is all the eagerness and wishfulness of young Meiji.
Records are not consistent as to the number of guests invited by Inoue for his opening night. There may have been upwards of a thousand, with several hundred foreigners among them. The facade was a great expanse of branches and flowers, dotted with flags and the royal crest. The garden glittered rather than blazed, with myriads of little lights, each shining chiefly upon a miniature stag. In the hallway were two stags formed from leafy branches. The great staircase was solidly embanked with chrysanthemums. Wishing to seem European in every respect possible, Inoue had the orchestra play to what would have been a fashionable hour in a European capital, but well beyond the hour when the son of Edo would have headed for home or settled in for the night. Accordingly, there was a special train to accommodate guests from Yokohama.
Almost everything for which the Rokumeikan provided the setting was new. Invitations addressed jointly to husbands and wives were an astonishing innovation—the son of Edo would not have known what to say. The Rokumeikan saw garden parties and evening receptions, and in 1884 there was a big charity bazaar. This too was very new. The old order had managed charities differently; it might have been thought proper to give largesse of some sort to a deserving individual who was personally known to the donor, but the trouble of a bazaar to benefit faceless strangers would have seemed purposeless. The 1884 bazaar lasted three days, and ten thousand tickets were sold. At the end of it all, the head of the Mitsubishi enterprises bought the unsold wares. The chief organizer was a princess (by marriage) belonging to a cadet branch of the royal family, and many another great lady of the land was on the committee.
Whether done easily or not, dancing was the main thing to do at the Rokumeikan. Ladies and gentlemen were expected to appear in foreign dress, so much less constricting than Japanese dress, and so flattering to the foreigner. Beginning late in 1884, ladies and gentlemen gathered for regular and studiously organized practice in the waltz, the quadrille, and the like. Two noble Japanese ladies were the organizers, and the teachers were of foreign extraction.
The grand climax of the Rokumeikan era did not occur at the Rokumeikan itself, but serves well by way of summing up. In 1885 Itō Hirobumi, still prime minister, gave a huge masked ball at his Western mansion. Again, reports on the number of guests vary widely, ranging from four hundred to over a thousand. Foreign dress was not required, and numbers of eminent Japanese guests took advantage of this fact. Itō himself was a Venetian nobleman, but Inoue was a Japanese buffoon, and the Home Minister a Japanese horseman. The president of the university came as the poet Saigyō, who had lived some seven centuries earlier.
Itō was involved shortly afterwards in an amorous scandal, an affair with a noble lady who was another man’s wife. The Itō cabinet became known—and the appellation is no more flattering in Japanese than in English—as “the dancing cabinet.” Itō held on as prime minister until 1888, but the fresh bloom of the Rokumeikan was passing. The antiquarian example of the university president seems to suggest that not everyone who went there was enthusiastic.
Strongly elitist from the outset, the Rokumeikan became the target of growing criticism, some of it spiteful and emotional, some of it soundly realistic. There were incidents, the Normanton incident of 1886 most prominent among them. The Normanton was a British freighter that sank off the Japanese coast. All the survivors were British, and all twenty-three Japanese passengers drowned. The captain was tried by consular court in Kobe and acquitted. He was later sentenced to a short prison term by the Yokohama consulate, but the sentence did not still public outrage. Extra-territoriality was becoming intolerable. The Rokumeikan and all its assemblies were accomplishing nothing towards the necessary goal.
The end of the decade approached, and it came to seem that the Rokumeikan had no friends anywhere. Itō’s political career did not end with the scandal and his resignation, but Inoue never really came into his own. Demagogues of the radical right and leaders of the “people’s rights” movement on the left were at one in thinking that the Rokumeikan must go. In 1889 it was sold to the Peers Club, and so began the way into obscurity and extinction that has been described. The name will not be forgotten. During its brief period of prominence the Rokumeikan was among the genuinely interesting curiosities the city contained. It has fascinated such disparate writers as Akutagawa Ryunosuke and Mishima Yukio.
Though the enthusiasm with which the grand men of the land went out courting Europe and America had passed, the vogue for big parties did not pass. Three thousand five hundred guests were present at a party given by a shipowner in 1908, at what had been the Korakuen estate of the Mito Tokugawa family. Another shipowner gave a remarkable party in 1917, by which time the art of party-giving had advanced beyond mere imitation of the West. He had been tigerhunting in Korea, and his two hundred guests, assembled at the Imperial Hotel, were invited to sample tiger meat.
Government offices were first provided with chairs in 1871. Later that year it became unnecessary to remove the shoes before gaining admission. Shoes were quickly popular with both sexes. Schoolgirls in full Japanese dress except for what appear to be buttoned shoes are common in Meiji prints. Clara Whitney, an American girl who lived in Tokyo from 1875, was distressed to see, at the funeral in 1877 of the widow of the fourteenth shogun, a band of professional mourners in traditional dress and foreign shoes. In early Meiji there was a vogue for squeaky shoes. To produce a happy effect, strips of “singing leather” could be purchased and inserted into the shoes.
Student uniforms of the Western style were adopted for men in mid-Meiji, and so came the choke collars and the blackness relieved only by brass buttons that prevailed through the Second World War. At the outset, school uniforms were not compulsory. Rowdiness was given as the reason for the change. Curiously, there had been a period earlier in Meiji when students were forbidden to wear foreign dress. Rowdyism seems to have been the reason then too, and the fact that foreigners were distressed to see students wandering about in foreign underwear.
It was not until the Taishō Period that the masses of students, young and older, changed to Western dress. A graduation picture for a well-known private elementary school shows all pupils in Japanese dress at the end of Meiji. A picture for the same school at the beginning of Shōwa (the present reign) shows most of the boys and about half the girls in Western dress. The middy blouse that continues to be a standard for girl students on the lower levels did not come into vogue until after the earthquake.
At the end of Meiji, the old way of dress yet prevailed among students, though the enlightened view held that it was constricting and inconsistent with modern individualism. When male students chose Western costume, they often wore it with a difference. A flamboyant messiness became the mark of the elite, and a word was coined for it, a hybrid. The first syllable of bankara is taken from a Chinese word connoting barbarity, and the remainder from “high-collar,” signifying the up-to-date and cosmopolitan. The expression, still used though uniforms have virtually disappeared from higher education, means something like sloppily modern.
High-collar aspects of food had been present since early Meiji, especially the eating of meat, a practice frowned upon by Buddhist orthodoxy. It is recorded that Sumō wrestlers of the Tokugawa Period ate all manner of strange things,