Paul Baxter enjoys an in-depth and insightful examination of the cultural currents running between Japan and the West
‘Japan and the West: an Architectural Dialogue’
Neil Jackson
Lund Humphries, 416pp, £55
Hamaguchi Ryuichi, editor of Kokusai Kenchiku magazine in the 1950s, mused that “It is impossible to understand the rise of modern architecture in the West without some reference – all along the line – to the architecture of Japan”. In an ambitious and exhaustively researched book, Neil Jackson traces this complex, interwoven story and its inverse over the past 150 years. Jackson’s well-illustrated essays track important figures, movements and themes, from the isolationist, feudal pre-Meiji period to the present, switching back and forth between parallel or related developments in Japan, Europe and the USA.
The book would, of course, be incomplete without extensive pieces on such important, though already well-documented subjects as japonism, Glasgow, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Wright was characteristically self-serving in describing his first visit to Japan as “great confirmation of the feeling I had and the work I had myself done before I got there”, while Le Corbusier visited and worked less in the country but, with a diaspora of prominent Japanese followers, including Maekawa Kunio, Tange Kenzō and Sakakura Junzō, has surely been the more enduringly influential.
Top: The moon-watching platform in the Western-style reception room, with the Japanese rooms beyond, at the Villa Hyūga, in Atami, Japan, designed by Bruno Taut in 1936 (ph: Neil Jackson).
Above: The Imperial Hotel at Uchisaiwaichō – and now partly rebuilt at Meiji-mura – designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1923 (ph: NJ).
However, it is the less familiar figures in Jackson’s book who provide the narrative with fresh insight and contextual depth. An important thread running through the book follows the endeavours of Japanese architects, throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to reconcile the adoption of a modern, ‘westernised’ architectural language with the desire to preserve their sense of national identity, tradition and culture; a struggle reflected in Japanese society and politics during the period – a niggling undercurrent which still persists.
Many of these architects will surely be unfamiliar – Tatsuno Kingo, Nagano Uheiji and Itō Chuta, for instance, who was active throughout the period leading up the second world war and saw the evolution of Japanese architecture as being “like fostering one species with special care and fertiliser, and gradually developing it over time into a different species”. In the same way that Greek architecture evolved from timber to stone, so could, he believed, the architecture of Japan.
Also less well-known is the work and influence of western architects and builders active in Japan during the latter years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century. While Josiah Conder is foremost amongst these, Jackson introduces figures such as Wilhelm Bockmann, Daniel Cosby Greene and the missionary architects, and relates the saga surrounding the design of the National Diet Building, which perhaps encapsulates the tensions present in the architectural discourse of the age.
The National Museum of Western Art in Ueno Park, Tokyo, designed by Le Corbusier and built by Maekawa Kunio, Sakakura Junzō and Yoshizaka Takamasa in 1959 (ph: NJ).
Chapters on the Pacific Rim architects and a piece covering the “severe exquisiteness” of the interior design trend ‘shibui’, as promoted by House Beautiful magazine in the US in the early 1960s, are also fascinating tributaries to the main narrative.
Jackson analyses the elements of the traditional Japanese house (‘minka’) in detail, and shows how the concepts of modularity, adaptability and proportion have been long admired by architects and writers. Walter Gropius’ reaction, on a visit to what is surely the most influential single building in this story, the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, is still pertinent. He saw it as “strikingly modern”, offering solutions for “complete flexibility of movable exterior and interior walls, changeability and multi-use of spaces, modular coordination of all the building parts, and prefabrication.”
There is so much else here that fascinates: a discussion of the work of SANAA and the concept of ‘ma’ in contemporary Japanese and Western architecture, the ancient yayoi (lyrical, patrician) and jōmon (plebeian, ‘irrepressible’) cultures and their bearing on twentieth-century Japanese architecture, post-modernism and the work of Nigel Coates in Japan, the links between Archigram and Metabolism and more besides.
With subject matter of such breadth and diversity it would be difficult to draw sweeping conclusions from Jackson’s book. However, it is hard not to finish this wide-ranging and forensic work with the impression that the lasting influence of Japan on Western architecture has been more profound and persistent than that of the West on Japanese architecture. As Jackson, paraphrasing Hamaguchi Ryuichi, concludes, “Modern architecture in the West needs Japan rather more than Japanese architecture needs the West”.
