Rokumeikan

The Rokumeikan (鹿鳴館^?, "Deer-cry Hall") was a large two-story building in Tokyo, completed in 1883, which was to become a controversial symbol of Westernisation in the Meiji period. Commissioned for the housing of foreign guests by the Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru, it was designed by Josiah Conder, a prominent Western architect working in Japan.

Although the Rokumeikan's heyday was brief, it became famous for its parties and balls, which introduced many high-ranking Japanese to Western manners for the first time, and it is still a fixture in the cultural memory of Japan. It was, however, largely used for the accommodation of guests of the government, and for meetings between Japanese who had already lived abroad, and its image as a centre of dissipation is largely fictional.

The site of the Rokumeikan was in Hibiya, near the Imperial Palace on land which had formerly been used as an arsenal for the Satsuma domain. After the Meiji restoration, in 1872 the land became the headquarters of the secretariat charged with preparations for the Vienna Exhibition of 1873. Between July 1875 and October 1881 the land was occupied by the colossal “Yamashita Monnai Museum”, a combined zoological and botanical garden, which was then moved to Ueno to make way for the new building and its grounds.

Foreign visitors had previously been housed in the Enryōkan, a building originally erected by the Tokugawa shogunate as part of a training school for naval cadets. Despite attempts at modernization, the building was old and deemed no longer considered satisfactory for housing foreign dignitaries.

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