Imperial Hotel (1890)

(Above:) Imperial Hotel,Tokyo The 1890 Imperial Hotel represented the heights to which Japan had ascended into the world of the Great Powers. The hotel served as a hostelry for visiting Western investors and as the social center of Japan's rising social class of modern-era aristocrats.

Yes, Hanako, there was an Imperial Hotel preceding the famous one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright! The first Tokyo hotel to be given the name Teikoku Hoteru [Imperial Hotel] opened for business in 1890 around the corner from the Rokumeikan near the Hibiya army marching grounds (which, from 1903 onward, became Hibiya Park).

The early Imperial's architecture was similar to that of the now long-lost Rokumeikan, and with good reason. The 1890 hotel was designed by a Japanese student of the Rokumeikan's architect, Englishman Josiah Condor. The Imperial Household entered in partnership with several of Japan's first modern-age entrepreneurs to build an elegant and well-appointed hotel that catered to foreign dignitaries, locally-based expatriates, and Japan's new aristocrats and industrial magnets.

This first Imperial Hotel was lost to fire on the eve of the opening of its Wright-designed successor in 1923.