Tokyo & Imperial Japan Vintage Menus

The Imperial Hotel of Tokyo and pre-WWII Japanese hospitality, 1900–1920s

The Imperial Hotel of Tokyo, opened in 1890 and famously rebuilt by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1923, was the meeting point of Imperial Japan and the Western elite. Its printed menus — bilingual in Japanese and English/French, with elegant typography and occasional traditional Japanese illustrations — are a singular category of pre-WWII transpacific hospitality ephemera.

A small but highly distinctive sub-archive bridging East and West.