Visions of Japan 1992

This boxed collection of Japanese graphic ephemera served as a visual accompaniment to the V&A exhibition of the same name as part of a Festival of Japan in 1992. It was encased in a card sleeve along with a hard-backed volume of observations on life in Japan and a series of extended photo essays on aspects of modern and traditional Japan, bound and stitched in a traditional Japanese style. The ephemera box was presented as a scrapbook and contained 28 A4 printed sheets featuring a wide range of visual culture from consumer products to transport, cultural events to etiquette, packaging to logistics, medicines to comic books, selected to illustrate the Japanese twin poles of contemplative elegance and impulsive exuberance. A special touch is the inclusion of tipped-in items of genuine ephemera, some wrapped in plastic envelopes, others pasted in. It’s a lavish treatment with no expense spared.  The last image reproduces the list of captions that explains the content of each of the 28 loose leaf pages. One detail not on the list is that  Raymond Loewy designed the peace symbol featured on the Peace cigarette pack (item 21).

 

Imperial Hotel Tokyo Brochures

A brief follow-up to last year’s post on the centenary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s legendary Tokyo hotel, now rapidly receding in first-hand recollection. Two brochures extolling the merits of a stay in the Imperial Hotel. No evidence to date them but the conservative graphic style suggests the immediate post-war decade before the hotel’s decline as the fabric decayed. The images, hand-drawn and photographic, indicate the grand scale of Wright’s public spaces and help to explain why the lost building still commands a retrospective glow in the collective consciousness of architectural fandom. A mark of its enduring reputation is its inclusion in the premium-priced Lego Architecture range. Now out of production but second-hand examples can be found online starting at about £150.

 

Imperial Hotel Tokyo

2024 is the centenary year of Frank Lloyd Wright’s much lamented Imperial Hotel in Tokyo - commemorative exhibitions have taken place in Tokyo and Buffalo.  The Imperial was one of the most significant commissions of Wright’s career and a validation of his lifelong passion for the art of Japan with its decisive influence on the development of his personal aesthetic.  The job came his way via a connection between a Chicago dealer in Japanese prints and the General Manager of the Imperial Hotel to whom Wright was recommended. Wright began collecting Japanese woodblock prints in the 1890s and his first trip outside the US was a 3 month visit to Japan in 1905, travelling the country by train, recording shrines, temples and domestic architecture with a four-by-five camera.

Initial development work began in 1913 when Wright was in his mid-forties and about to enter a troubled decade of personal tragedy, fire and earthquake.  In August 1914 one of the servants at Wright’s Wisconsin home and studio, Taliesin, murdered Wright’s wife, her two children, a draftsman and three workmen before setting fire to the property.  Fire would follow Wright to Japan, striking twice during the construction of the new hotel, on one occasion destroying a temporary annex of Wright’s design.  Ten days after fire claimed the old Imperial Hotel building, the new building was struck by the earthquake of April 26th. 1922 - happily for Wright, who was working there at the time, damage was minimal. The completed hotel was due to be formally opened at noon on September 1st. 1923, the Kanto earthquake struck at 11.57 and went on to devastate the city with over 100,000 lives lost in the subsequent fires.  On this occasion Wright was back home in the US - he would never return to Japan.  The new hotel sustained significant damage (accounts vary as to the full extent) Wright promoted a legend claiming his building was almost untouched due to his innovatory floating foundations.  There was little basis to this claim - true, the building escaped destruction  but the floating foundations failed to prevent sinkage though the seismic separation joints and interlocking timber beams offered some protection. 

During and immediately after the war the hotel took further battering, suffering incendiary bombing and occupation by US forces and it was 1952 before it reopened to guests.  By this time the fabric of the building was in poor condition, some of Wright’s design features made updating almost impossible and the number of rooms was inadequate to cope with demand.  Its days were numbered, it was demolished in 1967 to be replaced with a modernist tower block. By this time Wright’s building was so compromised that there was no great agitation to retain it. The only portion to survive is a recreation of the main entrance and reflecting pool in the Meiji-Mura open air architectural museum near Nagoya.

 

Mitsukoshi Department Store

This is a 1930 pocket-size visitor guide to the Mitsukoshi department store. The Japanese were slow to develop the idea of the department store but when they did they proved to be innovative and ambitious. In these pages, designed for the western visitor, they promoted a series of refinements not often seen elsewhere. These included a roof garden, a courtesy bus service and an automatic store directory. The business can trace its origin back to 1673 and continues to trade extensively in Japan though its international presence has declined in the last few decades. The colour postcard shows the great atrium at the flagship Tokyo store at Nihonbashi.

Great Railway Stations Number 12: Tokyo

In 1880 the 26 year old Tatsuno Kingo was working as a student in the architectural practice of William Burges, master of the Gothic Revival. Returning to Japan after Burges’s death in 1881, he established himself as an educationalist and architect in the Western style. Banks and institutions formed the majority of his clients. Later he was appointed architect of Tokyo Station on which work began in 1908. Completion was in 1914 – it opened for business on December 20th. The original 4 platforms have expanded to more than 20 today. A three-storey extended red brick façade with two ribbed domes was designed to impress. A massive steel frame enabled the building to survive earthquake damage in 1923 but US bombing in 1945 greatly diminished it – post-war repairs saw the station reduced to two-storeys while the ruined domes were replaced by simplified angular structures as shown in the last two cards below. A threatened demolition was resisted by the public and a five-year renovation completed in 2012 restored the station to its 1914 splendour. With the singular difference that the present building must compete for attention with the enormous office blocks that tower over it.

Streetcar Propaganda

At first glance these postcards seem to be an expression of an aesthetic impulse to embellish the harsh rectilinear forms of a streetcar with the soft and organic forms of floral decoration. Japanese visual culture places the highest value on refinement but something else appears to be going on here. More sinister and militaristic imagery appears on closer inspection, alongside a profusion of national flags and naval ensigns. Airplane cut-outs could be taken as celebrations of technology but there’s no ambiguity about the slender forms of falling bombs. A formidable armoury has been deployed in floral disguise including aircraft propellers, torpedoes and artillery. The best guess is that this is a souvenir of a morale-raising street procession to remind the local populace of their patriotic duty to submit to the war effort. Which would date these postcards to the early 1940s.

Postcard of the Day No. 84 - Uchikoshi-bashi Bridge, Yokohama

The foreground figure could be the elderly Matisse although his presence in Kanagawa Prefecture can’t be easily explained. Utilitarian streetcars ghost by in the roadway. Up above, an observer looks down from the iron bridge in the early Spring sunshine. Only 5 minutes walk away is the famous Street of Many Temples. The bridge was built in 1928 when the road connecting Yamate and Tokyo was extended through the cutting – all evidence of a rapidly westernising infrastructure. Judging by this Panoramio photo from 2014 the scene is little changed, though the trams stopped running in 1972. A few more vintage postcards of trams in Japan below – two each from Yokohama and Tokyo and one from Nagoya.