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Josiah Conder, the best-known foreign architect of the Mieji Era, arrived in Japan in 1877 at the invitation of the Ministry of Technology. While teaching at the influential College of Technology, Conder managed to complete a number of architectural projects, including the School for the Blind in Tsukiji and, in 1881, the Imperial Museum at Ueno — a Gothic, redbrick building that managed to incorporate Islamic elements.
The Meiji Era writer Ogai Mori, enjoying a stroll up the gentle slope of Muenzaka, in the district of Yushima, would write of the house that Condor built for Iwasaki Hisaya, son of the founder of the Mitsubishi industrial and financial conglomerate, "Even in the days I am writing about, the Iwasaki mansion was located, as it is today, on the southern side of Muenzaka, though it had not yet been fenced in with its present high wall of soil."
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