Encountering Japan: Burges and the London International Exhibition of 1862

Burges was a japoniste avant la lettre. His interest in Japan predated by more than ten years the creation of the word japonisme by the French critic Philippe Burty in 1872. The pivotal moment in his ongoing fascination was the London International Exhibition of 1862, which was the first time that Japan was represented in an event of this kind. As is well known, Japan was forced to open its borders to foreign trade in 1853, after centuries of comparative isolation. Shortly after that date, a number of European diplomatic missions were sent to Japan, including that of Lord Elgin, son of the Elgin of the Parthenon Marbles. Elgin was accompanied by his private secretary Laurence Oliphant who published a two-volume account of their expedition to China and Japan in 1859.² Following these initial political exchanges, Japanese arts and crafts started to circulate in the West, attracting the attention of artists and collectors both because of their exotic appeal and high level of finish, and because of the fact that, compared to European artefacts, they could be purchased at extremely affordable prices. Reflecting this growing interest, the International Exhibition of 1862 featured a large public display of Japanese objects, which up to that point had circulated only through the closed networks of private collections. The display included over six hundred objects, the vast majority of which came from the collection of lacquer, bronze, and porcelain of Sir Rutherford Alcock, another British diplomat. A detailed description of these eclectic items can be found in Alcock’s own Catalogue of Works of Industry and Art, which, undoing Western fine-art hierarchies, lists ‘specimens of straw basket work’ alongside ‘textile fabrics’, ‘lithochrome prints’, and ‘educational works and appliances’.³

Burges was so struck by the Japanese Court that he wrote an essay about it in the Gentleman’s Magazine. His essay was, in fact, one of the first extensive pieces written in Europe about Japanese art. Drawing extensively on Oliphant’s narrative of Elgin’s mission to Japan, Burges notes that the display was arranged by Captain Vyse, consul at Yokohama, Dr Barton, and the Shanghai-based merchants Remi Schmidt & Co.⁴ It is highly probable that Burges was so well informed about the Japanese Court because of his involvement in the International Exhibition itself: he had been asked by the Ecclesiological Society to design the Medieval Court, which marked a breakthrough in his public career. The newly created firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company exhibited their work in this section, which was conceived as a colourful tribute to the rich material culture of the Middle Ages. One of Burges’s major innovations in comparison to A. W. N. Pugin’s Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was his introduction of painted furniture — including his own Great Bookcase. And yet, despite his love for thirteenth-century French art, which the bookcase exemplifies, Burges argued that the true Medieval Court of the exhibition was not his own, but the Japanese section. His article on the Japanese Court thus opens with the following striking statement:

Of all the dreams of archaeologists there is none more frequent than that of endeavouring to transport oneself into the domestic life of any given period. In some cases it is not a very difficult thing to do, for the materials exist and are easily attainable. Thus, with regard to Roman life, we have the many hints given us by such authors as Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter, we have the costume from statues and gems, and lastly, there are the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where we can stand at the very counters where the garum was sold, tread the very pavements, look at the very pictures on the walls, and, in fact, spend a day thoroughly with the ancients. With regard to the mediæval times, the antiquary finds the materials for his dream far more difficult to attain. It is true that we have the literature, the costume, and to a certain extent the buildings; but there is no Pompeii to give us an insight into the domestic life; and our only resource is to study Eastern nations who, less changeable than those of the West, still keep up the manners and costumes of the times of the Crusades. (JC, p. 243)

Burges’s point is that studying the ‘domestic life’ of Japan through the objects that made their way to Europe was like being transported back to the Middle Ages. This is because the Japanese decorative arts displayed a care for the beauty of everyday life that had been unknown in Europe since medieval times. This passage reveals Burges’s ideologically charged approach to japonisme in relation to revivalism, shedding light at the same time on how his fascination with Japan complemented his conception of the medieval illustrated by the Great Bookcase. The eight panels of this remarkable piece of furniture, painted by no fewer than thirteen of Burges’s artist friends, tell the story of the origins of the fine arts, including the non-visual art of poetry. This polychrome chef-d’œuvre of High Victorian eclecticism fuses Byzantine gold, Florentine pietra dura, and Della Robbia blues with motifs inspired by Egyptian and Pompeian artefacts, Greek sculptural bodies, and medieval effigies, all set within an overall cathedral-like, Gothicizing composition. But alongside the Pompeian domestic wares which Frederick Smallfield carefully copied at Burges’s request for the panel dedicated to the pagan origins of painting, it is also possible to spot several Japanese motifs, in particular carps reminiscent of katagami stencils (Fig. 1). Some of the bird figures on the bookcase also evoke contemporary zukushi prints by the Japanese artist Utagawa Yoshikazu, representing an ‘enumeration’ of animals or insects. Burges was most probably attracted to the bold use of colour and ways of drawing nature in these ephemeral charts of flowers, fish, and other animals, which were not of high artistic quality but rather intended for everyday use. He may have been aware that the anthropomorphizing of animal figures was a favourite motif of artists such as Utagawa Yoshitora (Fig. 2). The humorous cats and coloured fan in Edward Poynter’s illustration of Madame d’Aulnoy’s fairytale The White Cat (La Chatte Blanche, 1697) for the Great Bookcase strongly reflect this Japanese influence (Fig. 3). In fact, as Burges and his friends worked on this polychrome piece of furniture from 1859 to 1862, when it was publicly displayed for the first time, the inclusion of such motifs and iconographical details suggests that Burges’s interest in Japan predates the watershed moment of the 1862 International Exhibition.

Fig. 1: Carps, detail from William Burges’s Great Bookcase (1859–62), pine, carved, painted, and gilded, 317.5 × 173.9 × 49.5 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Fig. 2: Utagawa Yoshitora, Japanese zukushi print divided into thirty vertical rectangles depicting human characters with the heads of cats (c. 1858), from William Burges’s ‘Polychromy Album’. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (93E5, f54).

Fig. 3: Edward John Poynter, Scene from Madame d’Aulnoy’s The White Cat, detail from William Burges’s Great Bookcase (1859–62). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Burges indeed collected together several Japanese prints (primarily aimed at children) in an album entitled ‘Polychromy, 18 October 1858’. In this colourful scrapbook, he also compiled his own watercolours of polychrome details on French, English, and Italian Gothic edifices and ecclesiastical vestments alongside various press cuttings and copies of Pompeian frescoes and medieval manuscripts. It remains unclear where Burges had acquired these prints. An exhibition of Japanese applied arts had taken place at the Old Watercolour Society in 1854 but Burges spent most of that year in Italy, returning to London in November only. He paid, however, several visits to Paris in 1856 and may have seen there some of the Hokusai prints collected by the French engraver Félix Bracquemond, possibly even with Whistler, whose name is mentioned in Burges’s diary for that year. Whistler would soon become a very active Japanophile, using the simplified forms and two-dimensional space of Japanese ukiyo-e prints to push against Western ideas and conventions. Following in Bracquemond’s footsteps, Daniel Lee from Manchester started producing and marketing roller-printed cottons with designs lifted directly from Japanese woodblock prints in 1858.⁵

While Burges may have been one of the first artists in Europe to collect works by Utagawa Yoshitora or Utagawa Kunisada (Fig. 4), he only mentions woodblock prints in passing in his essay on the Japanese Court. However, his friend Frederic Leighton, whom the architect had helped with details of medieval fabrics in his painting of Cimabue’s Madonna in the mid-1850s, seems to have been particularly fascinated by the colours of the woodblocks in the 1862 display. In his autobiographical account of his time in Japan, The Capital of the Tycoon (1863), Alcock reports that

Fig. 4: Utagawa Kunisada, Female figure on a veranda holding a sword (c. 1852), ukiyo-e woodblock print, from William Burges’s ‘Polychromy Album’. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (93E5, f51).

[The Japanese] have been familiar with the art of printing in various colours by blocks of wood — a process similar to our lately discovered art of lithochrome printing — from an unknown date, — similar, at least, so far as the employment of several blocks in the same design for different colours. They do not seem, however, to print one colour over another to produce depth or richness, as we do. Mr. Leighton, an artist himself, who saw some of these colour prints in the Japan Court at the Exhibition, informs me he has discovered, upon close examination, ‘that they have the power of reducing their prints by some process, as doubtless of enlarging also, — a thing patented by us some few years since, and used by Mr. Leech in his enlarged pictures from “Punch.”’ If this be true, it is only one more instance in which by their own unaided genius and ingenuity they have anticipated by centuries some of the most recent inventions and discoveries of Europe.⁶

As opposed to Burges, Alcock and Leighton here connect Japanese crafts with modernity rather than with an idealized past. These two contrasting visions of Japanese art as either embodying a timeless tradition or pointing forwards to the future persisted in tandem throughout the late nineteenth century.

In one of his letters to Alcock, Leighton also links the picturesque quality of woodblock prints, which would soon become the focus of most European collections, to Japan’s unique architecture:

The quaintly-picturesque seems to govern all in Japan — harmony of colour with extraordinary finish, avoiding symmetry and delighting in sharp angles — just the reverse of all other nations. They have many things in common with the Chinese, but a far finer touch. A great deal of this comes, I think, of their buildings being of wood, having a wooden architecture rather than an enduring one in stone; — had they been masons, then would they have worked on a grander scale. They seem fond of sensations — the sweet, the soft and pretty, is heightened by the grotesque, yet all is in harmony.⁷

Strikingly, Burges does not mention Japanese architecture in his piece on the International Exhibition displays and he only devotes one sentence at the end of his essay to the beauty of Japanese ‘books with their woodcuts and coloured printing’ (JC, p. 254). However, the architect was deeply impressed by the colour harmonies of the objects in Alcock’s collection. As with his own Great Bookcase, colour is everywhere to be found in this essay on Japan’s ‘domestic art’ (JC, p. 244). His descriptions give us a good idea of just how eclectic the 1862 display was, and of the sense of almost childlike curiosity with which Japanese artefacts were approached by European viewers: the objects he writes about range from swords to armours, carpenter’s tools, surgical tools, woodwork cabinets, waterproof clothing and a uniform of the fire brigade, netsuke, different types of paper, and lacquer decorated with silver and gold leaf. Like most British visitors, Burges was enthused: in his view, the craftsmanship of some of the objects even outshone some of ‘best products in Europe’.⁸

Some Japanese commentators, however, seem to have been more sceptical about the actual value of the artistic objects on show. The diplomat Fuchibe Tokuzō, who had accompanied Alcock on his way back from Japan, complained in his Oko Nikki (Diary of Travel to Europe) that

there were many objects that had been sent by merchants in Yokohama who were trying to attract customers. These included women’s second-hand clothes, swords of crude workmanship, and such items as bows and arrows, armour, lacquerware, pottery and — worst of all — paper lanterns, clogs, bowls, wooden pillows, and so on, a collection of odds and ends that looked exactly like a junk shop. They didn’t bear looking at.⁹

Burges’s enthusiasm for the display appears uncritical and lacking in specialized knowledge when compared to the trained, aristocratic taste of the Japanese diplomat. But the comparison reveals that his appreciation for a broad range of Japanese visual culture, typical of European japonisme, breaks down class-based hierarchies of taste. The first section of his essay is dedicated to metalwork and notably the bronzes which the architect particularly admired:

They are coloured, like our own, with various tints, and occasionally also, like our own, they shew the natural colour of the metal on the exposed parts; but more frequently these exposed parts are actually gilded, so that it gives the idea of a gold article which by some accident has got bronzed. (JC, pp. 246–47)

The comparison with British art here creates unexpected aesthetic connections between traditional Japan and modern Europe despite differences in style and material. This passage is followed by discussion of ivory carvings (netsuke) and a more detailed section on the ‘diversity’ of woodwork displayed in numerous cabinets on show (JC, p. 250). Burges was also very impressed by the Japanese mastery of the art of lacquerware which he illustrates with a long description of a large wooden bowl said to have belonged to a daimyo (feudal lord) — a term which the architect does not translate as if he expected this to be common knowledge to his readers (JC, p. 251). Burges then alludes to the exquisite quality of Japanese paper and some other objects he does not discuss in detail for lack of space, ranging from egg-shell china to bamboo boxes. Most of the ideas presented in this essay were later repeated in a series of lectures entitled Art Applied to Industry, published in 1865.

In addition to his fascination for the wide range of Japanese material culture, Burges admired the Japanese love of the natural world — from butterflies to peacocks — as well as other figurative and even grotesque elements in Japanese artefacts, which he preferred to the way natural designs were being taught and practised in European design schools:

It is exceedingly difficult to reduce the disposition of the ornament to anything like rule, but it invariably does one thing, it satisfies the eye. […] There is no end of the theories to be drawn from each specimen, but unfortunately none of them would apply universally, and, after all, the enquirer has to fall back on the reflection that those gifts of God, a correct eye and a good taste, are better than all the rules of all the schools of design in the world. (JC, pp. 252–53)

As both the essay and the Great Bookcase show, the encounter with Japan energized Burges’s medievalism, opening it to new creative possibilities. His insistence on the Japanese ‘horror of regularity’ is even somewhat reminiscent of John Ruskin’s praise of the ‘irregularity [and] variation[s]’ of Gothic art in his seminal chapter of Stones of Venice, ‘The Nature of the Gothic’, and of course chimed with his own architectural principles (JC, p. 250). Ruskin also scorned the chromatic rules devised by the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, whose Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors was translated into English in 1854. That same year, in his own ‘Addresses on Decorative Colour’, Ruskin pointedly asserted: ‘A man of no talent, a bad colourist, would be ready to give you mathematical reasons for every colour he put on the canvas.’¹⁰ For the same reasons, Ruskin was also sceptical of Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856), a book with which Burges was familiar as he held a copy of it in his library. Burges would later purchase Albert Racinet’s L’Ornement polychrome (1869) in which a whole section is devoted to the rich colours of Japanese ornaments which Jones had overlooked in his own Grammar.¹¹ By then, japonisme was becoming a trend, especially in France, following the success of the Japanese Pavilion of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867. This exhibition, which Burges visited twice according to his abstract of diaries, was the first that displayed a genuine example of Japanese architecture in Europe.¹² Just as Burges’s love of the Middle Ages stemmed from the art of thirteenth-century France, it was most certainly in Paris — the international epicentre of japonisme according to Sophie Basch — that he later nurtured his fascination with Japanese crafts.¹³ But as early as 1862, if not before, Burges had already intuited that Japan would become extremely important to English and European designers and artists in the following decades.

In Britain the 1862 exhibition paved the way for a form of commercial and fashion-driven japonisme embraced by the Aesthetic Movement. Elizabeth Aslin notes that ‘some of the [1862] exhibits were disposed of by Messrs. Farmer and Rogers’ Oriental Warehouse, of which the young Mr. Lasenby Liberty became manager in [1863]’.¹⁴ Ten years later, in 1874, Liberty started his own business and founded the luxury Aesthetic department store Liberty’s, which first specialized in selling ornaments and objets d’art from Japan. Burges’s own japonisme seems to have evolved alongside the growth of this ever more popular interest in Japan. His early fascination with the highly figurative and narrative dimension of traditional Japanese arts and crafts which so reminded him of the ‘historiated’ furniture of the Middle Ages gave way to more simplified forms, possibly under the influence of his architect friend E. W. Godwin.¹⁵ As Susan Weber notes in this issue of 19, Godwin, whom Burges had met around 1858, had been equally enthused by the Japanese Court and both men regarded themselves as ‘art-architects’. But Godwin soon moved away from more charged iconography to the abstract forms that would come to characterize the Anglo-Japanese style which he helped to popularize. This new phase reached its peak in 1878 with his furniture contributions to the William Watt & Co. stand of the Paris Exposition Universelle, which notably included the ‘Butterfly Cabinet’ painted by Whistler. That same year, Burges’s Great Bookcase fell apart (a diary entry mentions the accident) possibly following the architect’s move from Buckingham Road to his new medievalizing Tower House. As Matthew Winterbottom has shown, the restoration of the bookcase was an opportunity for Burges to simplify some of its decoration, ‘perhaps in response to Aesthetic taste of the 1870s’.¹⁶ Many of the painted Gothic details on the pediment and on the vertical and horizontal elements of the bookcase were thus removed in favour of simple gilded lines. These changes also made the piece appear more japoniste in keeping with the fashion of the day.

Burges would continue to nurture the ideal of Japan as a medium towards a perfectly preserved past. The catalogue of the 1918 sale of his library holdings reveals that he owned A. B. Mitford’s two-volume Tales of Old Japan (1871), Isabella Bird’s 800-page travelogue Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, and F. V. Dickins’s illustrated book on Hokusai’s A Hundred Views of Fuji, both published in 1880, just one year before his death.¹⁷ Mitford, who was the cousin of Burges’s friend, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (see Catherine Maxwell’s article in this issue of 19), first travelled to Japan in 1866 as second secretary to the British Legation, just before the Meiji Restoration opened the country’s doors to Western businessmen, professionals, and, in time, artists. Alongside his diplomatic memoirs, Mitford published his Tales of Old Japan, illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of woodblock prints by Japanese artists, which made such Japanese classics as ‘The Forty-Seven Ronin’ first known to a Western public. Writing at a key moment when Japan was rapidly changing under European influence, Mitford hoped these stories, which he translated himself, would help to preserve ‘the Spirit of Old Japan’:

The feudal system has passed away like a dissolving view before the eyes of those who have lived in Japan during the last few years. But when they arrived there it was in full force, and there is not an incident narrated in the following pages, however strange it may appear to Europeans, for the possibility and probability of which those most competent to judge will not vouch. Nor, as many a recent event can prove, have heroism, chivalry, and devotion gone out of the land altogether.¹⁸

Mitford shared Burges’s fascination with pre-industrial Japan, which he saw as akin to medieval England. According to his great-grandson, Jonathan Guinness, going to Japan was for Mitford ‘as if he had taken a time machine back to his favourite period’.¹⁹ Even the illustrations in the book were engraved ‘after the manner of Albert Dürer’ who was one of Burges’s favourite medieval artists whose prints he collected.²⁰ Thinking of Burges reading Mitford, it is tempting to suppose that Burges’s imagination would have been captured by the anthropomorphizing story of ‘The Foxes’ Wedding’, which Mitford illustrated with an image not unlike Burges’s cats on the Great Bookcase (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5: ‘The Foxes’ Wedding’, engraved plate from A. B. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, 3rd edn (Macmillan, 1876), p. 187.

Burges’s distant legacy: in Japan with Josiah Conder

As we have seen with Fuchibe Tokuzō’s cool reception of the 1862 display, world fairs looked very different from the point of view of the Japanese cultural elites. On the occasion of the 1893 Chicago Exposition, where Japan had its own dedicated pavilion, the Japanese minister at Washington DC, Tateno Gōzō, looked back to Japan’s participation in such events over the last twenty years and welcomed any occasion ‘which will bring Japan into closer touch with other nations’. But he also offered a pragmatic commentary that reads like a sobering riposte to Burges’s romantic conjectures in 1862:

The experience of a nation suddenly emerging from the isolation of centuries into the noonday glare of the nineteenth century undoubtedly presents picturesque features. To a people so situated, however, ambitious and self-respecting, not ashamed of their ancient civilization, but eager to secure the benefits of modern progress, and, above all, determined to maintain their national prestige, the situation is one of stern reality. They cannot live in the past, and, if they have a high ideal, they must perform in decades what it has taken other nations centuries to accomplish.²¹

The ‘stern reality’ to which Tateno refers is the double process of modernization and internationalization of Japan that the Japanese government promoted with unfaltering alacrity after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The introduction of Western-style architecture was one of the innovations that were designed to bring the nation out of the past that Burges romanticized and make it competitive on the world stage. It is perhaps ironic that the task of leading this ambitious programme fell on one of Burges’s pupils: the British architect Josiah Conder.

It is possible that Conder’s interest in Japan was first awakened when he joined Burges’s practice in 1874 (he was one of the assistants Burges took on in order to work on the design for Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut).²² What is certain is that he carried over Burges’s teaching to Japan, where he arrived in 1877 on the Japanese government’s invitation just as japonisme gripped the art world in Europe. Conder was one of the many foreign professionals who were officially ‘imported’ into the country to provide much needed specialized technical knowledge in a number of vital fields that went from engineering to medicine and the military. However, unlike most o-yatoi (as these foreign employees were called), who were very explicitly encouraged to leave after the end of their contract, Conder stayed on until his death, laying down deep personal as well as professional roots in the country, where his legacy is still very much alive to this day.

In Tokyo Conder initially taught at the Imperial College of Engineering, where he trained the first generation of Western-style Japanese architects; then he practised as a private architect. Throughout this time, he carried out a number of major public and private commissions that changed the face, and taste, of the country in this important moment of transition. As Toshio Watanabe points out, Conder’s practical achievement is inseparable from his profile as an educator and theorist who worked hard to promote the idea that architecture should be seen as an art — a new concept for Japan at the time, where architecture was regarded, in practical terms, as an adjunct to engineering.²³ Here too he acted as a conduit for Burges’s legacy: for Art Applied to Industry was one of the prescribed books on which his Japanese students were examined as part of their university training.²⁴ We also know that Conder kept in touch with his former teacher. Mordaunt Crook relates that in 1878 he sent Burges some china (p. 68). Most significantly, in 1880 he also sent Burges one of his own pupils, Tatsuno Kingo, who was destined to become one of the leading Japanese architects of his generation.

Before looking in detail at some of his Japanese works, it is important to stress that Conder acted simultaneously as importer of Western architecture into Japan and exporter of Japanese architecture into Britain — a process that created productive tensions in his work. In nineteenth-century Britain, the very concept of a Japanese architecture was far from being a straightforward proposition. Even an enthusiast such as Burges, as we have seen, looked at prints and the decorative arts for inspiration, rather than at Japanese buildings. In a pioneering 1876 book on Japanese art and aesthetics published just months before Conder arrived in Japan, the American critic James Jackson Jarves claimed that architecture, ‘in its noblest condition’, was unknown in Japan. Jarves was full of enthusiasm and praise for Japanese arts but, when it came to buildings, he noted that the Japanese

erect temporary homes or shrines, tent-like in principle, bizarre in construction, mostly of wood or frailer material, and in nowise responding to that fine instinct of immortality which materializes itself in our finest religious edifices, or even those aspirations which find vent in our ambitious palaces and public buildings.²⁵

According to this widespread view, the cause for this surprising lack of ambition in an otherwise refined aesthetic culture was to be found in the frequent earthquakes to which the country is prone, which defeat the effort of making durable constructions.

Conder fought to correct this misconception. Already in March 1878, when he had been in Japan for little over a year, he sent back to England a detailed paper on Japanese architecture that was read out at a meeting of the Society of British Architects by his other former teacher, T. Roger Smith.²⁶ Among those present was Narinori Okoshi, attaché of the Japanese Legation. First of all, Conder noted that Japanese architecture was not a topic on which ‘very much has been written especially from a professional point of view’ — a likely jibe at amateur critics like Jarves. He then went on to provide a comprehensive survey of Japanese domestic and religious architecture, as well as tea houses and hotels. Conder concedes that in Japan, because of the destruction caused by earthquakes and fires, ‘the ordinary domestic and street architecture is of comparatively modern erection’, but he is nonetheless full of admiration both for the simple artfulness of Japanese homes and for the decoration in religious buildings.²⁷ Echoing Burges in 1862, he compares the colouring of the temples at Shiba (Tokyo) to European medieval features.²⁸ And in the buildings marking the approach to a daimyo’s dwelling he finds

a simple grandeur of line of proportion and balance of parts, reminding one as much of the repose and beauty of Greek architecture, as the Japanese decorative ornament in many of its forms, and in the beauty of its execution, reminds one of Grecian art.²⁹

Far from being accidental, such comparisons to Gothic and classical canons are very deliberate attempts to validate and elevate Japanese architecture by reference to foundational periods of European architectural history, which provided the basis for revivalist movements in the nineteenth century. Such remarks not only made an indirect plea for including Japan in a truly global vision of architecture; they also asked British architects to reflect on how they defined architecture in the first place. It was a provocative stance, as can be seen from the reaction of one of the most eminent members of the audience to which Conder’s talk was first delivered: the influential architect Richard Phené Spiers, who had also worked for Burges, tersely pointed out that ‘whatever there may be in decoration, in dress, in objects of art, and in other works in Japan, from the architecture of the country we shall learn scarcely anything’.³⁰

Over the next decade Conder continued to disseminate his knowledge of Japanese architecture in specialized periodicals such as The Builder and Building News, as well as the Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects, where the lecture above and its second instalment were targeted at a broader professional readership. He also wrote books on Japanese garden design aimed at a non-specialist public, in which he pushed the point that Japan had much to teach the West — this time in the field of garden landscaping which was of course closely related to domestic architecture. Rejecting a nativist approach, which holds ‘the servile imitation of a foreign style as unnatural and purposeless’, he argued that

robbed of its local garb and mannerisms, the Japanese method reveals aesthetic principles applicable to the gardens of any country, teaching, as it does, how to convert into a poem or picture a composition, which, with all its variety of detail, otherwise lacks unity or intent.³¹

Extrapolated from the narrow context of garden design, this statement reveals an important principle behind Conder’s aesthetic theory: that every art form, whether Japanese garden landscaping or the neo-Gothic architecture he had studied under Burges, held some universal principles that could be transplanted and appropriated in non-native contexts with positive results. He believed, in other words, that in a world in which different local traditions came into ever closer and more frequent contact, the evolution of the arts relied more than ever on a well-regulated practice of hybridity.

But how did Conder square this love for traditional Japanese buildings and gardens with his work as a British architect in Japan, which consisted of replacing those traditional forms he admired with modern constructions built of brick and stone? His early commissions included the Imperial Museum at Ueno and the Hokkaido Sales Hall (both of which have since been destroyed), as well as a new set of buildings for Tokyo Imperial University, all of which were heavily influenced by the aesthetics of the Gothic Revival promoted in Britain by Burges. Conder marked the geographical specificity of these buildings by adding non-Western, Islamic-inspired elements that he referred to as ‘Saracenic’. It is important to stress that, while such buildings were in dialogue with the use of the Gothic as a visual signifier of British imperial power in India and elsewhere, the symbolism in Japan was fundamentally different.³² These were all buildings commissioned by the Japanese government and designed to mark — indeed, to shape — Japan’s status as a peer of European nations and the United States in a global system of exchange and competition operating by Western rules and standards. Conder’s Japanese constructions, therefore, should not be seen as merely copying or imitating buildings in the West but rather as creating an original vernacular style that embodied the new Japanese national identity.

Of these early public buildings, the one that most spectacularly dramatizes Conder’s role in Japan’s search for a new identity is the Rokumeikan or ‘Hall of the Deer Cry’, whose name refers to an ancient Chinese poem about hospitality and friendship with strangers (Fig. 6). Inaugurated in 1883 in a prime location in central Tokyo close to railway connections, government offices, and diplomatic buildings, this lavish building was meant to create a space for the entertainment of foreign visitors and for cosmopolitan Japanese who wanted to experience fashionable foreign forms of sociability such as balls, classical music concerts, and charity bazaars (Fig. 7). It comprised a library, smoking rooms, card rooms and dining rooms, salons, and a ballroom that became iconic of the outward-looking and somewhat decadent ethos of Meiji westernization. For its design Conder adopted what he described as a ‘Renaissance villa’ style which, in fact, as Dallas Finn has argued, bore the distinctive imprint of Burges’s Victorian historicism and eclecticism, as well as the exoticism that characterized his decorative ideas.³³

Fig. 6: The front facade of the Rokumeikan building (c. 1883–1900), albumen print, 20.8 × 26.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 7: Yōshū Chikanobu (Hashimoto Chikanobu), Illustration of the Ladies’ Charity Bazaar at the Rokumeikan (1887), woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and colour on paper, 37.1 × 72.7 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection.

In the speech he delivered at the grand opening of the Rokumeikan, Conder portrayed himself as a committed advocate of modernization. He spoke about the importance of converting ‘this large wooden Capital into a permanent city’ by erecting solid buildings made of brick and stone on Western principles, which would also put an end to ‘those fearful conflagrations’ that still far too often lit up Tokyo’s midnight sky.³⁴ This followed the inaugural speech by the Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru — a key promoter of the Rokumeikan project and of modernization more broadly. Inoue extolled the building as celebrating Japan’s new global connections and new ‘friendships which know no degree of latitude and longitude and which are not limited by national boundaries’.³⁵ Publicly delivered in this symbolically charged space, the words of the politician and the architect clearly show the diplomatic function of the type of architecture that Conder practised in Japan. This called him to perform an official role that only allowed for limited public sympathy with the perishable architectural forms to whose destruction he was indirectly contributing in the name of progress.

By contrast, Conder’s 1886 address to the Association of Japanese Architects, crucially delivered after his official government appointment ended in 1884, shows that his effort to professionalize architecture in Japan was founded on the twin principles of modernization and preservation. Here too he seized the opportunity to criticize those specialists in the West who deemed that the title of architecture ‘is applicable only to monumental erections built on solid and permanent materials’. For that reason, he urged the association to make it its business to ‘raise its voice against any ruthless neglect or destruction of historical and artistic monuments of the past’.³⁶ At the same time, ever conscious of the threat posed by fire, he incited Japanese architects to embrace ‘modern progress’ for the sake of safety, especially when it came to building materials, while pragmatically recommending that the association should prepare a reliable systematic record of traditional old buildings in order to preserve their memory in case of accidents.³⁷

Conder was conscious of being in Japan at a time of transition, when the country was caught between cosmopolitan and nationalistic impulses — an opposition that had overlapping aesthetic and political implications. Already in the 1880s, in architecture as in other art forms, it was possible to see a reaction gathering against the modernizing spirit of the early years of the Meiji that had brought him to the country in the first place. Conder was worried that the current situation should ossify into a stark binary opposition between nationalist and cosmopolitan camps. In his address to the Association of Japanese Architects he warned against the idea, promoted by cultural nationalists, that Japanese artists should not study the arts of other countries, arguing that artistic progress always comes from being open to ideas and influences from abroad. He had a name for the ideological nativism that he dreaded: the ‘terror of the bugbear called “hybridity”’, which, in this specific case, risked to curtail the intellectual and creative freedom of a young generation of Japanese artists by imposing ‘a narrow and seclusive curriculum of art education’.³⁸ Assimilation and hybridity were for him the keys to a desirable form of ethical cosmopolitanism in the arts.

This ideal of hybridity is strongly in evidence in some of the domestic commissions that Conder received from wealthy Japanese patrons after he ended his government-sponsored job, such as the Tokyo residence of the Iwasaki family, owners of the powerful Mitsubishi firm (Fig. 8). The complex, which is still extant and has been lovingly restored, comprises of a pre-existing traditional Japanese house, a Western-style house designed by Conder with his characteristic Islamic decorative elements, and a detached billiard room, also designed by Conder in a neo-Gothic Swiss-chalet style. The veranda on the first floor of the Western building is decorated with Minton quatrefoil floor tiles designed by Pugin around 1850. It is exceptional that such tiles, which were originally intended for the Houses of Parliament in London, should be used in a private home (Fig. 9). The Japanese and Western houses are attached to each other by a somewhat incongruous corridor that creates an impression of easy mobility between two worlds: the Japanese house, where the family lived their daily life, rooted in a sense of tradition and continuity, and the Western house designed for receiving foreign guests — a private Rokumeikan of sorts — which reflected the new cosmopolitan aspirations of the country. How should we interpret the complex temporality of this building, which juxtaposes a Japanese ideal of permanence with Western architectural forms that simultaneously looked forward to the Japan of the future and backward in their revivalist (and orientalist) aesthetics?

Fig. 8: Tokyo residence of the Iwasaki family designed by Josiah Conder. Photograph by authors.

Fig. 9: A. W. N. Pugin (designer) and Minton & Co (maker), quatrefoil tile decorating the first-floor veranda of the Tokyo residence of the Iwasaki family, (c. 1850). Photograph by authors.

Reading the Japanese neo-Gothic: now and then

A possible, indirect answer to this question can be glimpsed by zooming forward to the twenty-first century. Hayao Miyazaki’s recent anime, The Boy and the Heron (2023), features a teenage protagonist, Mahito, who relocates to the country in order to escape the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 after losing his mother in a hospital fire. The mansion of his wealthy arms-manufacturing family in which the action takes place bears a striking resemblance to the residences Conder built for the Iwasaki family in Tokyo and for the wealthy landowner Moroto Seiroku in the Mie Prefecture (the Rokkaen): it consists of a grand old Japanese house incongruously joined to a Western building, the difference being that in The Boy and the Heron the family now uses the Western house as their main residence, keeping the Japanese part as an immaculate space that characters pass in and out of, maybe as the symbol of a past that is only allowed to survive in the present in the form of a somewhat abstracted space that cannot be properly inhabited. Tantalizingly, the estate also includes a crumbling Gothic tower built by Mahito’s architect grand-uncle as a library during what we guess must be the late Meiji period. As often with Miyazaki’s works, architecture provides the point of entry into an alternative world of fantasy, haunting, time travel, and psychological introspection. It would be far-fetched to see direct allusions to Burges and Conder in The Boy and the Heron — if anything, Miyazaki’s labyrinthine plots are notoriously hard to pin down to stable sources.³⁹ What is certain, though, is that the architectural references act as a foil for a reflection on the historical evolution of Japanese individual and national identities: set during the Second World War at a time of traumatic breach with the West, the anime looks back to the Western-inspired architectural taste and practices of the Meiji period with evident nostalgia, as an idealized past characterized by creative freedom and a cosmopolitan outlook.

In this sense, Miyazaki’s contemporary work participates in a larger project of preservation and rereading of the country’s Meiji architectural heritage. For instance, the banking department of the Mitsubishi Tokyo headquarters, another Conder building dating to 1894, has been meticulously reconstructed in the twenty-first century and turned into a public building, after being completely demolished in 1968. It now houses the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, which specializes in nineteenth-century Western art. As these examples show, the legacy of revivalist Meiji architecture is identified with an ideal of liberal cosmopolitanism in the artistic as well as the social spheres: it simultaneously conjures a desirable past, whitewashed of its tensions, and points to a future direction for the country within a globalized order that sees it, once again, as closely allied with Western ideas and interests.

Already in the nineteenth century, however, the writer Lafcadio Hearn understood the symbolic significance of Western-style architecture in Japan as a space of self-staging. Hearn — who, like Conder, was one of the few Europeans who settled in Japan on a permanent basis — was an outspoken critic of Western-style modernization. But he admired Conder’s profile as an international mediator of Japanese architecture — a task that he thought Conder accomplished with a ‘sympathy’ that made him unique among Western writers on Japan.⁴⁰ Architecture was extremely important to Hearn’s theories of aesthetics and it is the subject of several of his Japanese essays. In his letters he expresses a special fondness for the rich imaginative and fantastic associations of the Gothic style that aligns him with Burges:

It is the only architecture that is really alive. […] Within it is all bone and tendon, jointings, articulations, ribbings, vertebrae, — processes fantastic and innumerable. Without it is a hymn whose strophes rise and burn to heaven as flame, — it is a conflagration of aspirement in stone.⁴¹

His own literary work can be seen as an attempt to fuse the English Gothic with vernacular Japanese motifs. However, his impressions of the most neo-Gothic and Burgesian of Conder’s buildings at Tokyo Imperial University were decidedly mixed. After attending a long matriculation ceremony next to a French Jesuit (a circumstance that the proudly atheistic Hearn regarded with some dread), he reported that they

were both amused by the architecture of the university. It is ecclesiastical, of course, — and the pinnacles and angles are tipped with cruciform ornaments. ‘C’est tout-a-fait comme un monastère,’ said my comrade of the beard; — ‘et ceçi [sic], — on en fera une assez jolie église.’⁴²

Hearn had a very personal connection with the use of the Gothic Revival in educational settings, having spent his deeply unhappy school years at Ushaw College, in Durham, whose buildings were designed by three generations of the Pugin family. In Tokyo the proposal of turning the university into a church is of course only meant in jest by the unexpectedly humorous Jesuit; but, to Hearn, it holds an uncomfortable insight on the symbolism of the buildings.

Hearn’s ironic distance from the transplanted Gothic in Japan is not surprising, given his investment in traditional Japanese buildings. He was especially proud of feeling at home in traditional Japanese houses, which he used as a stage from which he projected his identity as a naturalized cultural mediator. One of his first Japanese essays, ‘In a Japanese Garden’ (1892), is a detailed description of his old samurai home in the city of Matsue, in which domestic space and garden are perfectly integrated to form an organic whole. Conder’s work on Japanese landscape gardening is among the handful of sources cited by Hearn, who interpolates a highly visual and sensorial description of the house and garden with Japanese poetry quotations and snatches of popular songs, providing a human, thoroughly sympathetic perspective on Japanese domestic architecture. Hearn’s emphasis was, however, on the fragility of traditional Japan:

Those antique garden walls, high-mossed below their ruined coping of tiles, seem to shut out even the murmur of the city’s life. […] Outside them hums the changed Japan of telegraphs and newspapers and steamships; within dwell the all-reposing peace of nature and the dreams of the sixteenth century.⁴³

Hearn’s sentiment echoes Burges’s words in 1862 about Japan’s power to transport one to the ‘domestic life’ of ages long gone and is tinged with a similar orientalist melancholia which is much more poignant in Hearn, who was witnessing first-hand the destruction wrought by the ideals of modernization imported from the West. This characteristic affect, together with Hearn’s impassioned advocacy of preservation, struck a note with Conder, who in his turn referred to ‘In a Japanese Garden’ in his new book, Landscape Gardening in Japan, the following year.

Hearn’s embodied impression at Tokyo Imperial University echoes a more technical assessment that appeared in the British architectural journal, The Builder:

The style is Early Gothic, but the details have, where possible, without incongruity, been infused with a Japanese spirit, more especially in the internal architecture and fittings. The great difficulty that a European architect has to contend with in attempting to imbue brick and stone buildings in Japan with the spirit of the native architecture is that, throughout the entire country, the architecture is wooden; every quaint form, such as the bracketing under the eaves and on posts, attenuated lintels, supports, &c., are entirely illogical, weak, and meaningless translated into a stone or brick or other solid material.⁴⁴

The dialogue between Gothic and Japanese that Burges suggestively set out in 1862 carried on in the following decades. Conder’s pupils at the Imperial College of Engineering became the first generation of Japan-trained Japanese architects. These included Tatsuno Kingo, who briefly worked with Burges as an apprentice during an extended stay in Britain in 1880 and was responsible for major public commissions such as the Bank of Japan and Tokyo station; and Sone Tatsuzō, whose Library Building at Keio University is another outstanding example of translated Gothic Revival, complete with a monumental stained-glass window that fuses Japanese and medieval European motifs (Fig. 10). This generation kept alive the long legacy of the English neo-Gothic even as the Japanese officials now commissioned important public infrastructure such as the new Tokyo District Court and Justice Ministry from German architects, who introduced a competing form of vernacular revivalism based on neo-Renaissance and neo-baroque canons.⁴⁵

Fig. 10: The Old Library building of Keio University, Minato Campus, Tokyo, designed by Sone Tatsuzō in 1912. Photograph by authors.

At the end of the nineteenth century, looking back on generations of English Gothic Revivalists and japonistes, Oscar Wilde ironically chastised their attempts to pursue an artistic ideal uncorrupted by modern Western materialism:

Surely you don’t imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on mediæval stained glass or in mediæval stone and wood carving […]. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. […] And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.⁴⁶

Wilde wrote this in the late 1880s, over twenty-five years after Burges had been imaginatively transported to the Middle Ages by the Japanese objects on show at the London International Exhibition. By then, Burges’s student Conder and his own Japanese disciples were in fact busy filling metropolitan Tokyo with neo-Gothic effects, to paraphrase Wilde’s witticism, which were pregnant with symbolic meanings about transcultural relations and national identity for their Japanese viewers. Wilde mocks fantasies of time travel and revivalism. But ultimately, he makes a plea to find ways of preserving the transformative power of the encounter with Japanese arts and crafts, which Burges was one of the first in Europe to write about.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.