Japanese Village, Knightsbridge

Japanese art and culture had become extremely popular in Victorian England by the 1880s, and more than a million people visited the Village.

As a result of the opening up of Japan to trade with Britain in the 1850s, an English craze for all things Japanese had developed through the 1860s and 1870s, fed by the British perception of Japan as a mediaeval culture, and it greatly increased imports of Japanese art, design and decorative objects to Britain.

[2] The planned exhibition was announced in the financial section of The London and China Express on 11 January 1884; it was expected to take a team of Japanese workers seven months to build.

He stated that the goal of the Village was to raise money for a mission, led by his British-Japanese Christian wife, Ruth Otake Buhicrosan (1851–1914), to help women in Japan.

[6] The exhibition was built to resemble a traditional Japanese village, completely contained within Humphreys' Hall (which was south of Knightsbridge and east of what is now Trevor Street).

[9]The Village opened on 10 January 1885 by Rutherford Alcock, a diplomat who had served in Japan and had organised the Japanese stand at the 1862 International Exhibition in London.

[1] Prominent references to the exhibition are made in the 1999 film Topsy-Turvy[11] and the 2015 novel by Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.