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).
The building, erected in 1936 when Japan was already on the brink of being ruled by an antiparliamentary militarist order, was in other words designed as a "memento mori" -- a wistful memorial to Ito and for the promise of a more politically enlightened era than the one that in fact emerged.
Suzuki, a professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo, presented his thesis at a recent symposium at Columbia University on "Architecture and Modern Japan" that attracted 19 scholars, mainly from Japan and the United States, reflecting on the meaning of 20th-century Japan's architecture.