A telegram arrived in Tokyo bearing grim news. Princes Yasuhiko Asaka and Naruhisa of Kitashirakawa, in Europe on military study, had been involved in a car crash near Paris. Prince Naruhisa did not survive; Prince Asaka sustained serious injuries. The incident, a rare instance of foreign calamity involving imperial family members, attracted significant media attention in Japan.

Much of the coverage focused on Princess Nobuko Asaka, the eighth daughter of Emperor Meiji and the wife of Prince Asaka. Within weeks of the accident, she was preparing to travel to France to support her husband as he recovered. Newspapers followed her departure and journey with close interest. It was 1923, and it was rare for a female royal to undertake a private, unscripted mission—not in service of court ritual or diplomacy, but by her own will.

Nobuko joined Yasuhiko, and the Asakas convalesced in Paris until 1925. Official accounts described the princess as a nurse and wife, yet archival fragments hint at a parallel narrative over those two years. A surviving collection of approximately 3,000 receipts, meticulously preserved in monthly volumes by palace aides, suggests that she developed a taste for Parisian consumer culture, spending generously on fashion, luxury goods, and decorative furnishings.

It must have been, in all fairness, a compelling time to be in Paris. An aesthetic movement that had begun shaping the city’s cafés, salons, and shopfronts during the 1910s was nearing its crest. Designers and artists favoured clean, structured forms: triangles, circles, zigzags, sunbursts, and stepped profiles. The materials were sleek and reflective, featuring glass, polished wood, metal, and marble. In place of the ornate flourishes of earlier eras came an updated visual language calibrated to a faster-moving world.

Between April and November 1925, the French government staged an exposition in Paris, showcasing the emerging decorative aesthetic known at the time as Le Style 1925. The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes gathered architecture, furniture, fashion, jewellery, and industrial design. The movement would, some 40 years later, be called Art Deco, a name derived retrospectively from Arts Décoratifs. It swept across Europe, and Princess Asaka was among those it captivated.

Aesthetics and ways of living encountered abroad often find their most natural expression in the home. My place in London holds numerous Japanese furnishings: a shōji screen here, an Iwayado chest there, coffee cups from a favourite kissaten, sake sets arranged in a glass cabinet. Through these objects, a small window opens onto another place. This kind of interior curation is not unusual. Many travellers return with pieces that preserve a mood or memory. In the Asakas’ case, however, status, means, and the depth of immersion gave that impulse extreme force.

The imperial couple returned to Japan in December 1925, shortly after the exposition ended, and plans for a new residence in Shirokanedai, Minato-ku, soon followed. A handy 3.54-hectare plot, in one of Tokyo’s most expensive districts, was chosen to house their family of five. With Le Style deeply embedded, Princess Asaka initiated contact with Henri Rapin, a painter, illustrator, and designer whose work had caught her attention at the exposition, to assist with the interior design.

Rapin’s involvement brought further introductions: to René Lalique, the celebrated jeweller, who supplied glass doors and chandeliers; to Raymond  Subes, who designed the decorative metal grilles; to Max Ingrand, who contributed etched glasswork to the doors of the Salon and Great Dining Hall; and to Ivan‑Paul Poiret, whose stained and etched glass panels added refinement and atmosphere to the main reception rooms. The princess had gathered something close to an Art Deco dream team.

While the design sensibility of the Asaka Residence came from Paris, its structure was unmistakably Tokyo. The architecture was overseen by the Construction Bureau of the Imperial Household Ministry, one of Japan’s most influential architectural institutions, known for its work on shrines, museums, and imperial villas. The project was led by Yōkichi Gondō, an architectural engineer trained in Western design.

Working closely with the Asakas, Gondō and his team transformed Rapin’s decorative sketches into architectural form, creating elevations, façades, and floor plans that were adapted to local materials, seismic conditions, and Japanese spatial sensibilities. The residence was completed in 1933 and remains one of the most distinctive examples of early Shōwa era domestic architecture in Japan.

By the early 1930s, Art Deco had reached Tokyo, albeit in a limited way. Its presence was fragmentary: commercial façades, lighting fixtures, department store interiors. At Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi, rebuilt after the 1923 earthquake, geometric grilles and stylised ceiling panels nodded to the emerging style. The Wako Building in Ginza, with its symmetrical clock tower and pale stone, offered a more subdued civic expression of Deco modernity. These and other examples remained decorative flourishes layered onto commercial forms.

The Asaka Residence, by contrast, embodied Art Deco in full, becoming the most complete and luxurious realisation of the style in Japan. It was a dreamscape drawn from 1920s Paris and realised in the language of modern Tokyo architecture. Yet Princess Nobuko never lived in the world she had helped to imagine. She died of kidney disease on 3 November 1933, aged 42, shortly after the residence was finished. There is sadness in this, yet the essence of a vision often lies not in occupying it, but in bringing it into being. That, she achieved.

However, as the house stood newly completed, its ideals already faced erosion. That year, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations and began a more definitive turn toward militarism. The spirit of internationalism that had briefly shaped parts of elite life was already in retreat by the time of the buildup to World War II. Prince Asaka’s legacy, too, would later be overshadowed. In 1937, as commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, he led the advance into Nanjing and was the most senior Japanese officer present during the early phase of the massacre.

In 1947, as part of post-war reforms aimed at dismantling Japan’s aristocratic order, all collateral branches of the Imperial Family, including the Asakas, lost their royal status. These collateral branches were established not for political power, but to ensure dynastic continuity. The term shayōzoku (斜陽族), meaning “declining aristocracy,” came to describe this sudden shift from privilege to a civilian life that was ordinary, and often precarious.

With little experience beyond court society, many former princes and princesses found themselves unprepared for existence in a devastated, democratising Japan. Their grand residences, once scattered across the high ground of the Yamanote area in neighbourhoods such as Takanawa and Akasaka, eventually passed into other hands. Most were lost to demolition or decay, but a few exceptions remain, including the Asaka Residence, still standing in Shirokanedai with only modest changes since its completion.

The building is now in its 42nd year as the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum. Each year, the annual Looking at Architecture exhibition presents the residence’s design through a different lens. This year’s show, which I visited last week, traces the site’s evolving role and how its function has shifted in step with broader social changes.

After serving as the home of the Asaka family from 1933 to 1947, the building became the official residence of Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who used it for both living and discreet political meetings. From 1955 to 1974, it served as a state guest house under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For the next nine years, it was managed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government as a venue for official functions and private events, before reopening to the public in 1983 as the museum we find today.

Despite its many adaptations in function, a walk through the house reveals immaculately preserved rooms with walnut panelling, Rapin’s ceiling paintings, and the salon’s remarkable coffered ceiling featuring forty semi-circular light fixtures. It is rightly designated an Important Cultural Property, reading now as a precursor to the more abundant examples of late Shōwa period design that would follow. European influences, filtered through Japanese design sensibilities, yield something finely resolved: perfectly formed ornamentation that is scaled and attuned to the local context.

Just off the Salon, in a smaller room, stands one of the residence’s more intriguing elements: a slender white porcelain structure known as the “perfume tower.” Rapin had designed it as a decorative fountain, but Princess Asaka revised its function. According to Toyojiro Hida, director of the Teien Museum, it was her input that turned the piece into a perfume diffuser. Fragrance placed at its base would rise gently as the interior light warmed the air, carrying scent through the room. The object hints at Nobuko as a creative hand and cultural interlocutor, connecting Japanese and French makers in the execution of an ambitious vision. At a time when women, even imperial, had little agency, she found hers in travel and detail: in glass, in plaster, in floral form.

I arrived late in the day to view the exhibition, which runs until 24 August 2025. Climbing the staircases, I paused in each room to photograph the interiors. By the time I reached the top floor, the museum was closing, and I was the only visitor remaining. As I descended, passing through each level, past the lockers, reception, and out through the arched entryway, the entire staff was waiting. In stairwells, at corners, and lined along the corridors, they bowed and expressed their thanks. It is surely a well-practised routine for closing time, but as the sole guest, I felt a faint echo of something imperial. A glimpse, perhaps, of the privilege once extended to the Asakas in the splendour of their home.

Until we meet at the salon,