Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo Audio Guide

Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum

   Welcome to the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, known in Japanese as 三菱一号館. Around you rise glass-and-steel office towers. In the middle of them stands a red brick building with steep roofs, and it looks as though it was lifted out of Victorian London. The building looks old, and its story is. It is a faithful reconstruction of the first Western-style office building that Mitsubishi put up in Marunouchi, completed in 1894. It was demolished in 1968, and it rose again in the twenty-first century. Today it is an art museum, opened in 2010, which focuses on modern art from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Over the next few minutes we will look at the building's origins, its British architect, the unusual way it was rebuilt, and the museum that lives inside it. Take a moment to look at the brick and the roofline before we begin.

2. 02

   Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum: A Victorian Office in Marunouchi

   The original building was finished in 1894, in the twenty-seventh year of the Meiji era. Japan had opened its doors to the world only a short time before. Its government had invited a British architect named Josiah Conder, and he designed this building for Mitsubishi. It was the first Western-style office building Mitsubishi built in Marunouchi, and the building's name, Number One Hall, reflects that. It was the first of many. Conder chose the Queen Anne style, a fashion in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. You can recognize it in the red brick walls and the rows of pointed roofs. The building was L-shaped and had three floors above ground and one basement. Its eaves stood about 15 meters high, and it offered roughly 6,000 square meters of floor space. Inside, the layout was practical. A bank department of the Mitsubishi company occupied part of it. The rest was divided into three-storey units joined by staircases, and these were rented out as offices. Here a quiet piece of Tokyo business history began, and Marunouchi grew into the office district you see today.

3. 03

   Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum: Lost and Rebuilt

   This building was lost for four decades. As the offices around it expanded rapidly, Mitsubishi Estate took it down in 1968 because of its age. Not everyone accepted that. During the demolition, the Architectural Institute of Japan asked on the twenty-fifth of March, 1968, for the work to stop and for the building's preservation to be discussed. The next day it sent another written request asking that the demolition be halted at once. The work went on regardless. The story came full circle in 2004, when Mitsubishi Estate announced a redevelopment plan for three nearby buildings. The plan included a new high-rise, the Marunouchi Park Building, and the reconstruction of Ichigokan beside it. Demolition of the three buildings began in 2006, and building work on the reconstruction started in October 2007. The reconstruction was completed on the thirtieth of April, 2009, and the museum officially opened on the sixth of April, 2010. The opening exhibition was titled Ichichō Rondon and the Marunouchi Style. Its title looked back to the nickname the district was given in the Meiji era, One Street London.

4. 04

   Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum: How to Rebuild a Lost Building

   Rebuilding a building from 1894 is a detective job. The architects of Mitsubishi Estate Design and the builders at Takenaka Corporation worked from only 22 surviving original design drawings. They also used measured drawings made at the time of demolition, photographs of the interior and exterior, building parts that had been kept in storage, and architectural magazines from the Meiji era. Where records were missing, they looked at other works by Josiah Conder and at buildings from the same period to infer the details. Where original materials could no longer be obtained, they used substitutes that look like the originals. The result is a reconstruction made as faithfully as possible, in the museum's own words. The new tower beside it carries the story of the district forward. The Marunouchi Park Building has 34 floors above ground and is part of a district of about 100 buildings where some 240,000 people work. Three round columns of the tower face the square in front of the museum, and they have been planted with greenery, a small way of bringing nature into the city.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   Before you go, remember that this is a museum as well as a building. It holds three major exhibitions a year, and each has a theme in modern art from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Alongside them run three smaller shows, drawn mainly from the museum's own collection and shaped by what interests its curators. If you step into the history room, you will find a recreated Meiji-era office with plaster walls and a wooden coffered ceiling. The furniture follows the tradition of Shiba furniture, made in the area near today's Shimbashi Station, where Conder supported local craftsmen. There is also a model of the original building at one-fortieth scale, and in it, on the wall of the bank's main hall, hangs an Okame mask linked to Iwasaki Yataro. A timeline also shows how Marunouchi developed, from the early Edo period to the present. In December 2024, the Chiyoda city government designated the building an Important Landscape and Townscape Property. Take a last look at the brick, the roofs and the towers rising behind them, and see how the old and the new have learned to share one corner of Tokyo.