Visitors to Tokyo and long-term residents of Japan alike may wonder why the Diet building is crowned with a mausoleum-like structure evoking the ancient prototype of a Persian king's tomb at Halicarnassus. The answer, according to Hiroyuki Suzuki, a Japanese architectural historian, may lie in the design's association with Hirobumi Ito, the "father" of the prewar Constitution and a prime minister during the modernizing Meiji Era (1868-1912).