Heyo, Tokyo ghoul people, I've got a question: does anyone who knows some architecture and some Japanese history have a good estimate/theory for what decade the Old Dragon's underground city was built/is from? When was the old One-Eyed King's rebellion?
I've got some rough ideas, but could use input from people with more knowledge.
It's more "modern" looking than I expected, to start with.
The architecture definitely isn't traditional Japanese. It's got blocky, squareish buildings and there's a lot of smashed faux-Greco-Roman-looking columns laying around.
Makes me think of periods where Japan had to copy Western styles of... a lot of things, really, to be taken seriously as a country on the world stage.
Here's probably the best/clearest panel of it:
Of course, lots of stone and earthwork, and concrete and brick made of that stone and earth, would be expedient building materials for a city built underground. I mean they had to dig all that out in the first place, unless they were exploiting natural caves and just making them bigger (but that's still a huge project and likely produced absolute shitloads of fill).
(I do know the end date, where it can't be any later: the underground city has to pre-date WW2, for hopefully obvious reasons. But also for a less obvious one - the traditionalism movement(s) that fed Japanese nationalism at the time, whereas this architecture is based on imported Western designs, and those two cultural forces aren't compatible.)
