Masamichi Kuru’s Ho-o-den Palace

Japan at the Fair

At the same time that Ida B. Wells and her colleagues decried the lack of representation of Black Americans at the Fair through their publication The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (Wells 1893), the Meiji government of Japan was invited and warmly welcomed to participate in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Indeed, only Great Britain sent more exhibits to the Chicago Fair than Japan. In controlling their narrative through their exhibits, Japan succeeded in cementing a national identity as a “civilizing” modern nation-state and colonizing force like the U.S. and other European nations (Langlois 2004:1,4). Their positive reception at the Fair also helped Japanese diplomatic efforts to craft more beneficial commercial treaties almost immediately after the Fair’s conclusion.

Of Japan’s numerous exhibits at the Chicago Fair, one deserves particular attention: the Ho-o-den (“Phoenix”) Palace, situated at the northern end of Jackson Park’s Wooded Island. Japan’s national exhibition pavilion ultimately “promoted the antiquity and sophistication of pre-modern Japanese history” and, in doing so, it helped legitimize the Meiji regime and presented the country as a peer in the Western-centered hierarchy of nations (Langlois 2004:8,15). This proceeded despite the simultaneous racial othering of Japanese people manifested, for instance, in consumer goods like the Geisha Girl dishes.

Building the Ho-o-den Palace

In preparation for the 1893 Fair, the government architect of Japan, Masamichi Kuru (1855—1914), along with the builders of the Okura Company moved to Chicago to begin work on the Ho-o-den Palace. Based on the Uji temple near Kyoto, the tripartite structure recalled the architecture of the Fujiwara (898—1185 AD), Ashikaga (1350—1550 AD), and Tokugawa or Edo (1603—1868 AD) periods. Under the direction of Kakudzo Okakura, students from the Tokyo School of Fine Arts Academy decorated the interior of the structure, and its rooms were filled with examples of art and furniture selected by the Imperial Museum (Okakura 1893).

The entire structure was a gift to Chicago from the Imperial Japanese Commission. Unlike the vast majority of the Fair’s structures, the Ho-o-den was intentionally designed and built to be preserved after the conclusion of the Fair.

Reception and Lasting ImpacT

The Ho-o-den did indeed remain in Jackson Park after the conclusion of the 1893 Fair. In 1934 some additional Japanese structures that had been on display at the Century of Progress Exposition, a fair held on Chicago’s lakefront the previous year, were brought in and added to it, and the South Parks Board released funds to repair the parts of the structure that had deteriorated (Bennett 1934:7). Shōji Osato and his wife, Frances Fitzpatrick Osato, ran a tea house concession there until he was incarcerated during WWII under the U.S. government’s Japanese internment policy (Dumelle 2019). In July 1946, the first of the three buildings burnt down (Chicago Daily Tribune 1946a:1). In October 1946, two teenage boys, supposedly playing with matches, burnt the second structure (Chicago Daily Tribune 1946b:3), and soon after that the final segment was destroyed.

Subsequent to its disappearance, the Ho-o-den received a somewhat backhanded acclaim as an influence on Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the architects behind the Charnley House, showing the far-reaching and interconnected elements of the 1893 Fair (see Nute 1993:48-72). The Garden of the Phoenix/Osaka Garden was restored to the east of the structure’s footprint in 1993. And in 2016, Yoko Ono’s “Sky Landing” art installation was placed atop the former Ho-o-den site.

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