Architecture of Japan – Meiji Period
Authors: Mullane Matthew 
Published: July 2024

The Meiji period (1868–1912) marks the beginning of Japan’s existence as a modern nation. Following increased pressure from Western powers and a violent civil war, the so-called Meiji Restoration reinstated the emperor system and established a powerful state apparatus. The Meiji state quickly instituted sweeping reforms, sending students to compulsory schooling, creating courts and legislatures, organizing armies, and encouraging the development of a capitalist economy. What we call “architecture” was a key part of this multifaceted state project. New schools, courthouses, banks, offices, hotels, palaces, factories, and much more were quickly built around the country to signal to citizens and to the world that Japan had moved beyond its former military rule. Architecture both facilitated modernization and provided a technical, historical, and philosophical means of exploring what a new Japan could and should be. In other words, architecture provided both means and meaning. Studying Meiji period architecture therefore offers a crucial perspective onto a momentous cultural and political transformation of world historical importance. The central question that propelled architectural discourse in Meiji Japan would have been familiar to any architect around the world in the nineteenth century: “in what style should we build?” Should architects represent the country’s new modernity with Western styles like Neoclassicism and Gothic revival or should they embrace older Japanese forms? What resulted from these debates was, in fact, a complicated mixture of import, revival, and invention. Guiding this mixing were the desires of the new Meiji emperor (the period’s namesake) and a dense imperial bureaucracy that wanted to project an image of Japan that was both internationally modern and uniquely Japanese. While carpenters and engineers devised new ways of building these structures, architecture historians endeavored to define the very idea of “Japanese architecture.” They studied old buildings, initiated preservation campaigns, and even traveled around Asia to delineate “Japanese” from “Asian” styles. Scholars began historicizing the Meiji period immediately after it ended in 1912. Japan’s unique imperial calendar prompted architects and historians to immediately look back on the previous period, and many agreed it marked the beginning of “modern” architecture in the country. Given its profound importance as an “origin,” the Meiji period has been continuously rehistoricized by interested parties. During wartime, it was celebrated as the dawning of a new civilization, but, following World War II, the significance of the Meiji period was confused and contested. Architecture historians in the 1950s and 1960s looked to a deeper prehistoric past to bracket the difficult confrontations with militarism and colonialism. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars looked again to the Meiji period to answer how and why modern architecture and modern empire were intertwined. “Meiji architecture” continues to be rediscovered and reinvented by scholars today. Important new works have revealed the global contingencies of Meiji architecture beyond an “East/West” dichotomy, the deleterious environmental impact of Japanese architecture, and the key importance of colonialism in defining modern architecture.