First, we'll begin from the year 1868 with Japan's emergence as a new nation. Its new and increasingly Western-style capital city of Tokyo grew upon the foundations of a far smaller seventeenth-century town called Edo surrounding a feudal castle. Before long, changing building methods and materials foretold a different age. By the turn of the twentieth century, a strong contrast between the old-style, low, wooden, Japanese structures and up-to-date modern buildings, first distinguished by red brick and later by industrially produced materials, was clearly visible to any and all.