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The public museum that opened in 1882 in Ueno Park, Tokyo, was conceived as the archetypal museum of Japan, serving to maintain and exhibit the nation's cultural assets, natural specimens, and industrial collections. In this article, I focus on the Ueno Museum's architecture, which was a product of the alliance between the English architect Josiah Conder (1852-1920) and his Japanese host, the nascent Meiji bureaucracy (1868-1912). As an institution of conspicuous national significance, it encompassed multiple layers of meaning both intended and projected. Many of the nuances of expression stemmed from the complexity of Japan's standing as a non-Western nation in a Western-centric world, as well as the particular patron-architect dynamic between the Japanese government and its foreign specialist. An examination of the formative stage of the museum through the various factors that propelled the design sheds light on the intricate process of cultural interchange and the underlying notions of progress and modernization in the late nineteenth century.

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This chapter focuses on the major building projects that directly served the imperial institution and the imperialist mission during the reign of Emperor Meiji of Japan (1868–1912). Recognizing the ideological centrality of the emperor in the construction of modern Japan as Imperial Japan allows for the assessment of what may otherwise appear to be a varied amalgam of architectural functions, styles, and expressions as an integrated body of works with a shared agenda. The buildings examined – imperial residences, shrines and mausolea, and parks and museums – when understood as conscious built forms expressive of Imperial Japan, vividly demonstrate the complex, and at times contradictory, sets of inspirations and aspirations that were frequently cross‐cultural and cross‐temporal.