THE TOKYO IMPERIAL
by Joao-Manuel Mimoso
Tokyo's Imperial Hotel came out of the self-imposed "westernization" of
Japan in the second half of the XIX century. The Old Imperial was designed
by architect Yuzuru Watanabe in a neo-classical, somewhat Victorian and
somewhat French palatial, style. It opened in 1890.
Above: the Old Imperial and its label in the 1910s.
The increased demand felt after the Russo-Japanese war
and the contracting of a new and dynamic manager (Aisaku Hayashi ), led
to the decision of building a new hotel adjacent to the old premises. The
hotel's future mythic and historical status was set, quite unwillingly,
by the fateful and somewhat surprising decision to commission the job to
American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. When Lloyd Wright signed the terms
of employment on March 1916 he was almost 50 years old but, amazingly,
Falling Water and some of his other best remembered work were still 20
or more years away in the future.
For the new Imperial the architect came out with a design of great
originality, completely different from traditional solutions. The building
itself is a mix of Asian, Maya and Western themes and geometrical solutions.
The interiors, making extensive use of a local greenish stone, again recall
the ruins of the great civilizations of Central America and would not be
out of place in some far-away planet of Frank Herbert's "Dune".
The new Imperial opened on the first of July 1922, one year ahead of
full completion, to fill in for the original building which had been destroyed
in a fire 10 weeks earlier.
Above: Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Tokyo Imperial;
the only label showing the complete building; and a view of the colonnade
of the dining room.
The diamond label above, printed in Italy, must have been used in the
1920s and is quite uncommon. The classical Imperial label of the 1920s
and 1930s is a red bordered triangle (other colors are known to exist)
with a central drawing or photo of the hotel. Many varieties were printed,
differing in the depicted image and the lettering. The earlier versions
(with a drawing ) are much rarer, particularly the earliest one showing
a central roof design that was not finally adopted (at right in the image
below).
After the war, the labels most used were of a rectangular
type, again in two sizes, of which variations exist differing in the color
of the building or trees, on drawing details, or (rarer and more interesting)
on the lettering (below, lower left).
Due to the deterioration of the building (partly because
of differential subsidence in the marshy ground) and expected cost of renovation,
the Imperial was unbuilt (as architects say) in 1967 to be replaced by
the New Imperial which, although of no interest to us, continues to offer
the same kind of superb service (if you can afford the price...). Some
interiors were preserved in the new hotel and the entrance and lobby were
re-erected several years later in an open-air museum where they now stand
as a memorial to a great architect and to a fallen masterpiece (picture
below).
B/w pictures and some information adapted from "Grand Hotels" by Elaine
Denby (Reaktion Books, London 1998), a book well worth buying for the wealth
of information about the origins of grand hotels, that may be used to date
labels.
May 12, 2001......................................................Go
back to the short history of hotel labels
The author is a mechanical engineer and a collector who
has traveled extensively searching for old luggage labels and gathering
information on these little studied but highly interesting pieces of graphic
design. He is not a dealer and is not offering to sell any labels.
He hopes the above information may be of use to viewers and stresses the
importance of gathering and trading information on the most obscure aspects
of the history of hotel labels, their artists, printers and on the dating
of the earliest types.
Joao-Manuel Mimoso ...Email:
hotelsticker@netscape.net (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German,
or Italian).