Résumé

The present work is an investigation on the Japanese reception of “monuments” and also a study on the genesis of the Japanese architectural heritage starting from the 15th century. The trail starts from the travel records, the translations, the publications and the interpretations of the first Westerners having seen and commented on the Architecture of Japan. Those travellers are Àlvares, Fróis, Kaempfer, Charlevoix, Siebold, and finally Humbert. These documents are a historical and a mirrored image of the values conveyed in Western architecture. But aren’t all those writings designating “monuments”, chosen by Japanese themselves, as a medium of their culture and society? Forgotten in history, those builders of identity were the masters of scholars such as Fenellosa and Okakura, Itô, Gonse and Cram. During the great movement for reinventing the national tradition started in 1868, those scholars whished to found a Japanese School of Art History based on a Western mode of thinking. Were those attempts unavailing? In fact Japanese monuments were waiting to be interpreted in a Japanese way. The basis of their architectural grammar and history were completed at the beginning of the 20th century by Amanuma and Adachi. Therefore, the history of Japanese architecture would only become a social science in 1947, through the work of the young but genius historian, Ôta Hirotarô. Breaking with the political chronology and renewing with an Edo tradition exemplified by the work of Uramatsu Kôzei, the work of Ôta argues that the Japanese monumentality is a sort of restoration of the memory. By becoming History itself, by being restlessly relocated through the ages and thought about as impermanent, don’t the Japanese monuments firstly condemn the scholar to search an already lost model and secondly the builder to only restore it? Extending from East to West, from historians to monuments, this investigation of the reception of Japanese monuments will bring out different conceptions of time, history and memory that will show the monuments of Japan as mirrors of Western times.