Rokumeikan

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.

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.

The building was officially opened on 28 November 1883 with a gala to which 1200 guests were invited, including nobles, bureaucrats and foreign diplomats, presided over by Inoue and his wife Takeko.

Pierre Loti, who arrived in Japan in 1886, compared the building (in Japoneries d'Automne, 1889), to a mediocre casino in a French spa town, and the European-style ball to a “monkey show”.

[5] Likewise, the noted French artist Georges Ferdinand Bigot published a cartoon depicting a stylishly dressed Japanese man and woman admiring themselves in a mirror, but the reflection was that of a pair of monkeys.

[2] Japanese conservatives were outraged by what they perceived to be the degeneration of traditional morals, especially by the close proximity between men and women during dances, linked rising taxes with the supposed dissipation and self-indulgence of the government.

[1]: 245 The failure of "Rokumeikan diplomacy" to achieve its desired goal of treaties revised in Japan's favor led eventually to the discrediting of Inoue, who resigned in 1887.

The banquets and balls continued, and the nativist reaction did not slow the construction of Western-style buildings in Tokyo, but with the increasing westernization of Japan, a growing sense of cultural nationalism, and the eventual elimination of the Unequal Treaties in 1899, the Rokumeikan steadily diminished in importance.