Journey to the East: Jūnikai, Japan’s first skyscraper

One century after the Great Kanto Earthquake devastated Tokyo and Yokohama in September 1, 1923, the remains of the foundation of the Jūnikai (Twelve-Stories), or Ryōunkaku (Cloud-Surpassing Tower), the first Skycraper of Japan, have been discovered in the old Asakusa Park, in Tokyo. It was designed by the Scottish sanitary engineer William Kinnimond Burton (1856-1899), and inaugurated in 1890. Contemporary of Adler and Sullivan’s first high-rise buildings in Chicago, it was the icon of the Asakusa Park, a copy in Japan of the cheerful western entertainment districts such as Broadway or Montmartre. The Ryōunkaku was the focus of several pages of Japanese modernist literature and its powerful presence in Tokyo’s skyline made it one of the symbols of the country’s opening to the west, which started with the Meiji Restoration, a time of transformations in which domestic intimacy moved from the strict horizontality of Japanese dwellings—embodied by the delicate platforms built to observe the moon in the town of Katsura—to the vertiginous verticality of the new forms of high-rise living of modern towers.


From East to West: Recurrent Travels
In 1868, the Meiji Restoration 1 ushered in the modernization of Japan, which had been cut off from foreign influence under the Tokugawa dynasty throughout the Edo period . The nation sought the keys to political, cultural and economic transformation in the western model. A number of diplomatic expeditions were dispatched to Europe and America to learn about western educational systems, technical knowledge, culture, social structures and economies. The best known of these missions was Iwakura (1871-1873), led by Iwakura Totomi, who headed a group of over one hundred travelers that included ministers, historians and chroniclers, as well as a group of seventy students who were to finish their training in the west and would experience an intense cultural and technological transference on their return to Japan. Not since the so-called Iberian Century 2 had there been an opening-up on such a scale.
Here, now, comes the greatest revolutionary epoch! These are the two great events, the restoration of the Imperial power from the lands of the last Shogun after the end of several wars, followed by the opening of our communication and the forming of our treaties with the western world! 3 Wakon Yosai -"Japanese spirit, Western learning"-was one of the mottos of the Meiji era, which, along with the notion of Kyohei Fukoku-"enrich the country, strengthen the military"-took Japan to the top of the world's economies in the early 20 th century, but also led to the birth of a fearsome military power with an aggressive expansionist policy.
The recognition of western culture paved the way for a period of devoted admiration, which was especially intense in the field of architecture. In the 1870s, as a result of the aforesaid expeditions, the Japanese government invited numerous western architects to the country and entrusted them with a two-pronged mission: to design the new buildings of modern Japan and instruct the next generation of technicians in the country 's universities. 4 These were generally imposing, solid buildings on two or three floors that, in the intertwining and confusion of the various styles, reflected well the atmosphere of ferment and preparation of European architecture from the late 19 th century. 5 The adoption of the eclecticism of fin-de-siècle western architecture as the visual model for the country's new public buildings was merely another phase 1 The Meiji era  drew the curtains on the Edo period, two hundred and fifty years under the dominance of samurais from the Tokugawa shogunate-a feudal system that was abolished after the abdication of the shogun Yoshinobu Tokugawa and the concentration in 1868 of all delegated power in the warlord clans under Emperor Mutsuhito. Japan's capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo. The Meiji era ended with the death of the emperor on June 30, 1912. Ukiyo-e by Nagashima Shungyo, 1891. In the mid-19 th century, before the European architects arrived, there had been a formidable infiltration of the Japanese concept of domestic space. A people so prone to producing images as the Japanese had no problem seducing the western cultural elite who had converted to Japanism, 7 with its simple massproduced prints aimed at the lower classes: the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. 8 With an intense visuality, far-removed from realism and prioritizing representation, their flat colors and impossible perspectives are the key to a new way of looking that imbued impressionist and cubist proposals, with an influence that was also palpable in the avant-gardes at the forefront of modern architecture. 7 The term Japanism expresses the powerful influence of Japanese art on western culture in the second half of the 19th century, through universal exhibitions and the changing tastes of collectors and their extensive imports.
8 Japanese ukiyo-e prints were woodcuts made by a four-color process applied through wooden plates that were fundamental to the popularity of "Japanism" in late 19th-century Europe. Their influence on western art has not waned since then.  Burton was also an extraordinary photographer of great technical skill. In 1884, before traveling to Japan, he had published The ABC of Modern Photograph, "a manual of photography for beginners on the assumption that the gelatine process is now the process of the day." 14 The impact of this practical guide was considerable, as is evident from the continuous reprints to the present day. 15 Burton's hobbies and knowledge would seem to be aligned with exact predestination. It is no coincidence that before designing the Jūnikai, he concentrated on investigating the possibilities offered by photography in the study of the effects of earthquakes and natural disasters on buildings. 16  Japanese wrestling with Ogawa's excellent portraits. He wrote "The wrestlers themselves seemed to me to be about the most good natured and kindly lumps of humanity that I have ever come across, and it was a pleasure to observe the good feeling that evidently existed amongst themselves, and the way in which they enjoyed the work-or play-that they were going through" 18 and reflected at length on the hermetic tradition that played with the form and weight of the human body in a sacred space; a sudden, gloomy ballet, a beautiful likeness of the effort required to sustain the momentum that inspires architecture works.

The Ryōunkaku
Japan's first skyscraper was a contemporary of the first high-rise buildings in Chicago. 19 Around 1890, Burton received his first commission to erect a tower 13 The list of his contributions is so extensive that the possibility that Burton led work on the island has to be considered. It seems probable due to his status as consultant and coordinator of teams of young Japanese engineers.  in Tokyo's Asakusa Park 20 -an enormous space with amusements intended for the working classes from the Meiji era. The park, in the city's sixth district, Rokku, contained theatres, restaurants, illegal brothels and Japan's first cinemas. 21 Nobel prize-winning Japanese writer Yanusari Kawata (1899Kawata ( -1972 The symbol of this place was to be Tokyo's first skyscraper, designed by Burton. Stepping down the tower you enter a beef shop (gyü-ya) just below the tower; it is now one o'clock A.M. and there some twenty or thirty laborers or workmen of the lowest class are drinking sake, and devouring beef, pork, or even horseflesh from the boiling pans on square tables arranged in a broad, dusky room. When you enter the room, your nose is attacked by the stinging smell of bad sake and boiling flesh, mixed with the odor of cheap tobacco smoke, which fills the room and whirls like dense clouds. Maid-servants of ugly face and on rusty garment carry bottles of sake and plates of flesh, and their chattering and laughing with customers are noisy and disgusting. Among these customers there may be thieves, pickpockets, and gamblers, who have come in this house in triumph for their victories. They drink and drink till morning, and it is not seldom that they make quarrels at last, throwing bottles and breaking porcelains. 23 The precedents for a building of this height in Japan went back to the pagoda The numerous ukiyo-e prints from the period showing views of the Ryōunkaku bear witness to the popularity of the new tower. With their didactic simplicity, they depict a building with a wide-ranging hybrid of styles, basically a slender ten-story prism of brick crowned by an altogether lighter two-floor pointed structure.
Halfway between pagoda and campanile, Burton's formal hesitancy expressed his desire for syncretism. 25 With practical ingenuity, he used local materials to conceive the new building as an octagonal tubular structure, with a load-bearing brick exterior that was strengthened at the edges, and an interior core for the elevator. 26 The question of the need for openings was resolved by the use of semicircular arches, adapted to a brick construction though a serial distribution that imposed a classical, The Ryōunkaku witnessed the splendor that accompanied the turn of the century. 26 This annular structural approach-which can still be seen in many modern skyscrapersoptimizes the inertia of the building in contrast to the horizontal stress it is subject to, both wind and seismic, which are the major challenges facing high-rise construction.  of metal reinforcements in the cracked ceramic. Nevertheless, the vast quake that struck the Kanto region at midday on September 1, 1923 put an end to a history that had lasted over thirty years. 28 Ryōunkaku's final moments were narrated by Yasunari Kawabata: That symbol of old Asakusa, the Twelve Story Tower was beheaded in the 1923 earthquake. In little over a decade, Burton had managed to leave an indelible mark on Meiji

Until then, I'd been a student living in a boarding house in
Japan that survives to this day. 30 The melancholic memory of the Ryōunkaku, his mastery of photography as an innovator among a people who longed for images, which moves from ukiyo-e prints to photographic plates, and his role as a sanitary hero-the savior of a Japan that had been devastated by illnesses stemming from unsafe water-are the valuable contributions he made to the intense technical and cultural exchanges taking place between the west and Japan, reflecting the mutual admiration that existed between the two in the early 20 th century. It is no coincidence that one of the few photographs of W. K. Burton to survive to the present day is his most Japanese portrait. Like a proud 19 th -century successor to the missionaries from the Iberian Century, he shunned the then current fashion of yôfuku-or western dress-and appeared in traditional Japanese attire against a background that wa s typical of chanoyu-or the Art of Cha (Tea). As befits a guest and in keeping with tradition, he is sat on a tatami with his back to the tokonoma.
There is an ikebana to his right, a floral arrangement of plants and ceramics, and the accoutrements used in the tea ceremony at his feet, "the Japanese solution to the solitude-company dichotomy." 31 The look is inverted. Burton, the photographer subjugated by japanese style-life, is portrayed static and frontal like one more character in the ukiyo-e prints of the period, which revealed a domestic intimacy, so jealous of its privacy, composing graphic stories of multiple vignettes with impossible perspectives that surprised unsuspecting life with a didactic and exhaustive gaze, with multiple registers, from naive scenes to the most sensual passages.  Transcending its historicist skin, the Ryōunkaku advances the kinematic revolution of the modern promenade with its helical staircase that renews the traditional engawa, tightening the spatial dimension by incorporating time. The characteristic quietism of Japanese domestic interiors is subverted: horizontal planes are detached and stacked vertically to form a panoptic tower of exposed intimacy.
Built to withstand earthquakes, with a defiant will to permanence, the Jūnikai has in its structure the germ of its spatial innovation. The circulation is located on the perimeter, like an ascending porous wall of spiral staircases that mediates between inside and outside, giving priority to movement in a sequence plane that blurs any condition of limit to illuminate a new specie of space of a dynamic and mutant nature that shares many of the key features of contemporary Japanese architecture.

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If you want to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world, you must climb to the top of the dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow. At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir. But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor's heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims. At each level the creatures colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows.
Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. Its span of life is brief, since as soon as the traveller climbs down, the A Bao A Qu wheels and tumbles to the first steps, where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor. People say that its tentacles are visible only when it reaches the middle of the staircase. It is also said that it can see with its whole body and that to the touch it is like the skin of a peach.
In centuries, the A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once. 34 List of images         Ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunimasa IV. 1890.
woodblock print with collage elements on medium thick laid paper.
Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium.