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Between Japanese and Western notions of architecture and monuments there is a great difference. Despite Meiji’s will towards modernisation and westernisation around 1885, new architectural buildings were little more than formal imitation, with theory being reduced to practical treatises of traditional carpentry. The first theoretical treatise on architecture was finally produced by IT?” Chûta, after which ?”TA Hirotarô wrote the first serious history.The imperial palace of Kyoto shows us how the Japanese notion of monumental architecture breaks free from the constraints of place, of time, and even of function. Displacements, reconstructions, reconstitutions and more or less faithful copies are everywhere: a multiplicity which gives to the Kyoto imperial palace its own mental landscape, floating above epochs and places, connecting with the original model in its spirit embodied by its form, albeit in the image of a more recent building.