Wikipedia
The was a large two-story building in Tokyo, completed in 1883, which was to become a controversial symbol of Westernisation in the Meiji period. Commissioned for the housing of foreign guests by the Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru, it was designed by Josiah Conder, a prominent Western architect working in Japan.
Although the Rokumeikan's heyday was brief, it became famous for its parties and balls, which introduced many high-ranking Japanese to Western manners for the first time, and it is still a fixture in the cultural memory of Japan. It was, however, largely used for the accommodation of guests of the government, and for meetings between Japanese who had already lived abroad, and its image as a centre of dissipation is largely fictional.
Rokumeikan is a four-act costume drama by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. It was commissioned by the Bungakuza group for its 20th anniversary, and its first run was from 27 November to 9 December 1956 at the Daiichi Seimei Hall, with Haruko Sugimura playing Asako and Nobuo Nakamura playing Kageyama. The text was published in the December 1956 issue of Bungakukai.
The play was enormously successful, and toured the country. It has been revived on several occasions; a film version appeared in 1986, and a TV version in 2008. An English translation by Hiroaki Sato was published in 2002.
The play was adapted into an opera by Shin’ichirō Ikebe; it was premiered by the New National Theatre Tokyo in 2010.