For years, while most of the academic community ignored the era, Fujimori hammered away at Meiji. He wrote stacks of academic tomes, expensive volumes outfitted in stiff, silk-finished slipcovers, and impudent paperbacks clearly intended to be slipped into a jacket pocket. He discovered many unknown but still extant examples of the era in humble neighborhoods where academics rarely ventured. (In 1987, architectural historian David Stewart claimed there were only 33 such buildings in Tokyo, where Fujimori hunted.2) He traveled abroad to odd, out-of-the-way places to gain insight into the emergence of an almost-Westernized practice at home. A hallmark of Fujimori’s research has been the even-handed way he addresses amateur and professional architect alike. He loves the unschooled exuberance of early architectural efforts; it frustrates Fujimori that he lost the trail of Thomas Waters at the point when the influential English engineer-cum-architect left Japan.