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The annex of the Grand Hotel on the Bund in Yokohama.
Courtesy of the Yokohama Archives of History
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 aul Pierre Sarda graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris in 1873, and was hired by the Japanese Ministry of the Navy as an instructor for the school attached to the shipyard in Yokosuka, south of Yokohama. Sarda, who took up his post in October, taught mechanics, as well as mathematics and technical drawing. Upon the completion of his contract in 1876, he repatriated, but soon returned to Japan. |
| Japan, emerging from two and a half centuries of feudalism, was bent on catching up with the advanced countries of the West. The government recognized that employment of foreign experts was the fastest way to modernize. It paid its hired foreign help princely sums. |
| But Sarda likely did not make a U-turn for money alone. Japan was reputed one of the world’s most beautiful countries. The lushness of the countryside, the charm of demure lasses in kimonos, the quaintness of the folkways—hese drew young men to Japanese shores during the latter half of the 19th century. The 24-year-old Frenchman would have felt the tug of Japan. |
| Sarda taught at Tokyo Imperial University for six months, worked briefly as an engineer for Mitsubishi, and then opened an architectural office in the Yokohama foreign settlement around 1882. He had found a home and a métier. Over the course of the next two decades he would bequeath many prominent buildings to his adopted city. |
| Notable was the Public Hall. In the age before cinema and television, theatricals were a principal entertainment in Eastern treaty ports. A venue was needed for amateur thespians as well as for touring troupes. To create such a venue the Yokohama Public Hall Association was established in February 1882. The association awarded the contract for the design of a theater to Sarda. |
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| Construction began in 1883, only to be suspended in
December. Capital had dried up; fewer residents than expected had
invested in the project. The association pressed investors to double
their contributions. Some balked; the project remained strapped for
funds. Next the association requested Sarda scale back the design.
So he scrapped the second-story concert hall and reduced the building’s
height. Construction resumed in September 1884. The Public Hall was
completed in the spring of the next year. |
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Sarda as rendered by Charles
Wirgman in Japan Punch. “The gay and festive “Public
Hall” begins to begin,” reads the caption.
Courtesy of the Yokohama Archives of History |
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| That the Public Hall was, according to one theatergoer, “a squat, homely, red-brick building” was not entirely Sarda’s fault; the hall had not been built according to his initial design. But the Gaiety Theater, as the hall was later known, is remembered not for its architecture but for the performances there. The first professional performance of Hamlet in Japan was staged at the Gaiety in June 1891. The Japanese debut of Oscar Wilde’s Salome took place there in 1912. Such performances influenced a generation of Japanese novelists and playwrights who flocked to the Gaiety for a taste of Western culture. |
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| In 1889 Sarda made a successful bid for the design of a new wing for the Grand Hotel, Yokohama’s premier hostelry, on the Bund, the road along the waterfront. His elegant annex, busy with gables and dormers, opened in the summer of 1890. Happily he set the annex back from the Bund to leave space for a lawn. Another Sarda touch was the wide veranda. Evenings guests would sit drinking whisky on the veranda as a band played and jugglers performed feats on the lawn, beyond which danced the lanterns of rickshaws trundling along the Bund and shone a thousand lights of ships in harbor. |
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The Gaiety Theatre.
Courtesy of the Yokohama Archives of History
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When the French government decided to build a new consulate, they would, as a matter of course, have turned for the design to Sarda, a prominent local architect and favorite son. Sarda designed a handsome two-story brick building. Completed in 1896, the consulate included a windmill to pump water from a well. |
| Sarda, over the course of a long residence in Yokohama, had become one of its best known figures. In addition to his landmark projects, he had designed and erected numerous business premises, private homes and warehouses. He was credited with introducing concrete basements. He was a successful businessman, acquiring much property himself and a valuable collection of art. His large presence made him a target of satirical cartoonists who depicted him as a bearded rotund gentleman wearing an outsized hat. |
| Sarda died at the age of 55 in 1905 and was buried in the Yokohama Foreign Cemetery. His entire architectural oeuvre was reduced to rubble by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Thereafter he fell into obscurity. Even his headstone disappeared in a mudslide. |
| But the past two decades have been kinder to Sarda. His headstone was unearthed in 1985. More recently the well on the former consulate grounds was excavated and a replica of the windmill built. One of a pair of medallions that had adorned the wings of the consulate now decorates the masonry of a footbridge built at its former site. In its rotundity the medallion recalls Charles Wirgman’s caricatures of Sarda. It bears the initials for “Republigue Francaise,” which could serve as the monogram of the architect who gave Yokohama streetscapes a touch of France. |
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The French Consulate and medallion (inset), one of two that decorated the consulate’s wings.
Courtesy of the Yokohama Archives of History
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