Public Properties by Noriko Aso

Public
Properties
museums in
imperial
japan
Noriko Aso
ASIA-PACIFIC: CULTURE, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY
Editors: Rey Chow, Michael Dutton,
H. D. Harootunian, and Rosalind C. Morris
A STUDY OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Public Properties
•••
Museums in
Imperial Japan
Noriko Aso
Duke University Press

Durham and London 2014
© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Arno Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aso, Noriko.
Public properties : museums in imperial Japan / Noriko Aso.
pages cm—(Asia-Pacific) (Study of the Weatherhead
East Asian Institute)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8223-5413-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8223-5429-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Museums—Japan—History—19th century. 2. Art, Japanese—
Meiji period, 1868–1912. 3. Japan—Intellectual life—Western
influences. I. Title. II. Series: Asia-Pacific. III. Series: Studies of the
Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
am77.a2a75 2013
069.0952′09034—dc23 2013018958
STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is Columbia University’s center for
research, publication, and teaching on modern and contemporary
East Asia regions. The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant
new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.
Contents
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
Stating the Public 13
Chapter 2
Imperial Properties 63
Chapter 3
Colonial Properties 95
Chapter 4
The Private Publics of Ōhara,
Shibusawa, and Yanagi 127
Chapter 5
Consuming Publics 169
Epilogue 203
Notes 223
Bibliography 279
Index 297
Illustrations
Figure I.1: Visitors to the Shōsōin Imperial Treasures Special Exhibit 2

Figure 1.1: Eighteenth-century kaichō 17
Figure 1.2: Catalogue of museum displays, zoological section, 1877 22
Figure 1.3: The Vienna world’s fair of 1873 24
Figure 1.4: The Japan exhibit at the London world’s fair of 1862 26
Figure 1.5: Bronze pagoda displayed at the Chicago world’s fair of
1893 29
Figure 1.6: Japanese marble displayed at the Chicago world’s fair of
1893 29
Figure 1.7: Second National Exposition of 1881 34
Figure 1.8: Fifth National Exposition held in Osaka, 1903 38
Figure 1.9: Transportation Building at the Fifth National Exposition
(Osaka) in 1903 41
Figure 1.10: Palace of Fine Arts at the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 41
Figure 1.11: Aichi Prefecture Bazaar at the Fifth National Exposition
(Osaka) in 1903 42
Figure 1.12: Formosa Building at the Fifth National Exposition (Osaka)
in 1903 42
Figure 1.13: Yushima Seidō in 1872 52
Figure 1.14: Yamashita-monnai museum 53
Figure 1.15: Viewing Art at the 1877 First National Exposition by Andō
Hiroshige 57
Figure 1.16: Exhibit cases on the second floor of the Ueno museum 58
Figure 1.17: Commemorative photograph of those involved in preparing for
the Vienna world’s fair of 1873 60
Figure 2.1: Kyoto museum gates 79
Figure 2.2: Tokyo Imperial Museum in 1938 81
Figure 2.3: The Tokyo Imperial Museum with elementary schoolchildren
helping with landscaping 81
Figure 3.1: Government-General Museum of Taiwan 98
Figure 3.2: Korean exhibit at the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 111
Figure 3.3: Government-General Museum of Korea 113
Figure 4.1: Ōhara Museum of Art 134
Figure 4.2: Attic Museum artifacts 142
Figure 4.3: Japan Folk Crafts Museum 156
Figure 4.4: Interior of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum 157
Figure 5.1: Nihombashi (main) branch of Mitsukoshi 170
Figure 5.2: Display cases and counters at the Nihombashi branch of
Mitsukoshi 176
Figure 5.3: Mitsukoshi central hall 177
Figure 5.4: Model daughter of the house 182
Figure 5.5: Notice of art exhibit published in Mitsukoshi 195
Acknowledgments
These acknowledgments are just the briefest sketch: there is really

no way to adequately express my thanks to the many people and
institutions that have helped me while pursuing this project.
Edwin McClellan’s advice sent me to the University of Chi-
cago, where this project began as a doctoral dissertation. William
Sibley, Norma Field, Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, and
Leora Auslander gave wise and warm guidance as well as ongoing
inspiration. Bill has left us, but the community he nurtured will
always remember his great kindness, dry wit, and deceptively
casual brilliance. In Tokyo, many scholars, including Kano Ma-
sanao, Satō Kenji, Kinoshita Naoyuki, Kobayashi Mari, Igarashi
Akio, Narita Ryūichi, and Yoshimi Shun’ya, have been bound-
lessly generous and patient with me over the years. Yoshimi’s
Hakurankai no seijigaku redefined the field just as I was getting
started. While affiliated with the University of Tokyo’s wonderful
program in cultural resource studies, I was further introduced to
the fine work and friendship of the then students Park Sohyun and
Lin Pei-Yu and the fellow Tze M. Loo. I would also like to express
my deep appreciation for the open doors and unforgettable ex-
periences made possible by Sugiyama Takeshi and his colleagues
at the Japan Folk Crafts Museum. Shibusawa Masahide, Koide
Izumi, Kusumoto Wakako, and Inoue Jun of the Shibusawa Eii-
chi Memorial Foundation, and Kitsukawa Toshitada and Katsuki
Yōichirō of the Institute for the Study of Japanese Folk Culture
at Kanagawa University, have further extended extraordinary kindness and
assistance. Fellow students in Chicago, Tokyo, and elsewhere were and are
my teachers as well as friends. A very partial list includes Bob Adams, Kim
Brandt, Susan Burns, Alan Christy, Kevin and Therese Doak, Gerald Figal,
Aaron Gerow, Beth Harrison, Takahiko Hayashi, Douglas Howland, Yoshi-
kuni Igarashi, Helen Koh, Kim Kono, Tom Lamarre, Tom Looser, Debbie
Lunny, Bill Marrotti, Janice Matsumura, Elizabeth McSweeney-Cobb,
Valerie Mendoza, Martin and Jacqueline Messick, Abe Markus Nornes,
Okamoto Koichi, Leslie Pincus, Suzanne Ryan, Barbara Sato, Hatsue
Shinohara, Kentaro Tomio, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Daqing Yang, Marcia Yo-
nemoto, and Ida Yoshinaga. Andrew Hare’s perspective on the world of art
conservation is warmly witty and always illuminating. Stefan Tanaka fin-
ished up at Chicago before I arrived, but he has been a generous mentor.
While finishing the dissertation and after, I was honored to have the
opportunity to teach and pursue research at the Ohio State University
(osu), Portland State University (psu), San Francisco State University
(sfsu), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (ucsc), all proud
public institutions. I would like to convey my deepest gratitude and ad-
miration toward my former colleagues at osu, psu, and sfsu, including
Angela Brintlinger, Philip Brown, Steven Conn, Michael Hogan, David
Johnson, Larry Kominz, Maji Rhee, Patricia Schechter, Mary Scott, Julie
Smith, Linda Walton, and Patricia Wetzel. As for the wonderful colleagues,
staff, and students I work with in the History Department at ucsc, I regu-
larly have to pinch myself to make sure this is not just a dream. I would like
to give further thanks to my faculty mentor, Buchanan Sharp, and to the
members of the East Asian reading group—Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig,
Alan Christy, Minghui Hu, Alice Yang, Catherine Chang, Rebecca Cor-
bett, and Su-Kyoung Hwang—who suffered through multiple iterations
of each chapter. Cheryl Barkey, Sakae Fujita, Jennifer Gonzalez, Lyn Jeffry,
Kate Jones, Stacy Kamehiro, Cat Ramirez, Shiho Satsuka, and Vanita Seth
kept nudging me forward with conviviality and practical advice. The Japa-
nese Arts and Globalization research group, founded by Miriam Wattles
for the University of California system and beyond, has been a wonderful
extended community that gave me excellent feedback on the final chapter
for this book. The anonymous reviewers for my midcareer and tenure files,
as well as Kathy Chetkovich and Mark Selden, further provided invalu-
able suggestions for the project. Finally, I would like to express my deep
appreciation for the patience and support of Ken Wissoker, Jade Brooks,
Acknowledgments
• xii •
and everyone who helped bring this book to fruition at Duke University
Press, including the thought-provoking yet generous anonymous readers.
The book greatly benefited from this process, and any shortcomings are
solely my own.
The Tokyo National Museum, National Diet Library, Mitsukoshi-Isetan
Holdings, the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial
Foundation, the Ōhara Museum of Art, and the David M. Rubenstein Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, were all exceedingly gra-
cious in granting permission to reproduce images for this book.
This project was pursued and completed with the generous support of
the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the Japanese Ministry of
Education, the Ohio State University Humanities Fellowship Program, the
Itoh Scholarship Foundation, the Social Science Research Council’s Japan
Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, the uc President’s Re-
search Fellowship in the Humanities, the ucsc Committee on Research,
and the ucsc Institute for Humanities Research.
On a more personal note, I would like to thank my very first and be-
loved teachers, my parents, Takenori and Carol Aso. Michitake Aso is my
brother, dear friend, and (secretly) hero. Alan Christy has been a true part-
ner in life as well as work. I cherish our time growing together. Our chil-
dren, Peter and Samuel Christy, keep my joints moving and my heart and
mind open to the world’s wonders. I am grateful.
Acknowledgments
• xiii •
Introduction
A grand staircase anchors the center of a stately, high-ceilinged

foyer. Two long queues of patiently intent visitors fill a broad hall-
way on the right, channeled by wooden gates and gesturing offi-
cials. There are almost as many women as men, the former in ele-
gant kimonos with fur-collared wraps and the latter in Western
suits and hats, a few in uniform. A mother tightly clasps the hand
of her young son as they turn around a corner to go up the stairs,
which are divided from top to bottom by a rope. Incomers tightly
pack the right side, but those on the left have a bit more room on
their way out. Two schoolboys pause to lean over the banister to
gawk as small groups wait at the base for straggling members of
their parties. Meanwhile, another crowd hovers at a separate en-
trance, waiting to be directed in small numbers past and under the
staircase. The overall mood is lively but orderly, good-humored
but contained.
The setting was the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum
(Tokyo Teishitsu Hakubutsukan), now known as the Tokyo Na-
tional Museum (Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan; tkh). The
event was the Shōsōin Imperial Treasures Special Exhibit (Shōsōin
gyobutsu tokubetsu tenrankai), which opened on November 5,
1940, in conjunction with the commemoration of the 2,600th
anniversary celebration of the Japanese empire (Kigen 2600-nen
Kinen Gyōji). Attendance for the twenty-day exhibit—417,361—
exceeded all previous annual totals for the museum.1 The charged
Fig I.1: Illustration by Noma Seiroku of visitors to the Shōsōin Imperial Treasures
Special Exhibit, held at the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum in 1940. Reprinted with
permission from the Tokyo National Museum; this image may not be reproduced without
tnm permission.
atmosphere was captured by Noma Seiroku (1902–66), a member of the

museum’s arts division, in a series of illustrations titled Snake Story: The
Shōsōin Imperial Treasures Exhibit Picture Scroll (Kuchinawa monogatari:
Shōsōin gyobutsu tenran emaki).2
This sketch (figure I.1) by Noma portrays an imperial era (1868–1945)
museum as a crowd scene, in contrast to the more common practice at the
time of representing museums as architecture, artifacts, or a place for indi-
viduals to commune with a particular work or display.3 I too aim to fore-
ground the public nature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Japanese museums—not to celebrate the existence of museum crowds as
such, but to trace how they came to be imagined in relation to the central
state. I examine museums—whether established by the central govern-
ment, Japanese colonial administrations, commercial institutions, or pri-
vate individuals—as sites specifically designed to call imperial publics into
existence.
Large crowds gathering in the Tokyo National Museum to view dis-
plays of Japanese art-historical heritage are common today, but this has not
always been the case. Noma recorded the mass enthusiasm for the Shōsōin
exhibit of 1940 as a moment of institutional triumph.4 Moreover, the par-
ticular configuration of class, gender, nation, popular appeal, and orderly
behavior that he vividly portrayed was the fruit of decades of effort to root
museums within the modern Japanese cultural landscape. The question
is how such cultural practices came to be seen as a desirable norm. For
example, since the treasures of Shōsōin had been safeguarded in sacred
Introduction
• 2 •
storage for centuries until the Meiji era (1868–1912), why did the mod-
ern Japanese state risk bringing them out to put on view? Why was access
given to anyone who could purchase a ticket? While popular displays of the
marvelous and strange had drawn large street crowds since the Tokugawa
period (1600–1867), they were often raucous affairs and certainly not state
sponsored. How did the museum audience come to be so respectable and
well behaved? What is more, standing in queues for long periods to even-
tually get the chance to peer over someone else’s shoulder to catch a par-
tial glimpse of a glassed-in object is not necessarily an obvious source of
pleasure. Granted the opportunity, why did these people choose to spend
their leisure time in this manner? What sense of connection to the arti-
facts, more academic than amusing, were these men, women, soldiers, and
schoolchildren all supposed to share?
Answers to these questions were closely entwined with the cultivation
of a modern national identity in Japan from the mid-nineteenth century.
The organizational role performed by nation (kokka) and Japan (Nihon) in
the Meiji establishment of the fields of art and art history has been subject
to critical scrutiny in a series of major works by Satō Dōshin.5 Also in the
field of art history, Alice Tseng has analyzed the role of Japanese imperial
museums as sites of national self-representation.6 In this context, the im-
pressive attendance figures for the Shōsōin exhibit can be seen as evidence
of successful nationalist indoctrination. Artifact and viewer were supposed
to share a “Japaneseness” that transcended other social identities.7
However, museums in the imperial era can offer more than a case study
in the imagining of a national community. Specifically, this book juxta-
poses central-government museums with colonial and privately estab-
lished museums to explore elasticity, expansiveness, and divisions in the
creation of imperial publics, whose definition and redefinition in relation
to the Japanese state were ongoing. Displaying so-called heritage arti-
facts in national museums was certainly meant to bolster state and im-
perial prestige. The question of what this legacy was and what objects and
images should be used to represent it, however, had to be answered anew
in Japanese colonial museums, precisely because their charge was to culti-
vate a sense of shared imperial identity within different ethnic populations.
Moreover, even as museums promoted popular investment in such ideas
as imperial heritage, they opened the door to assessment from outside the
state. The very possibility of creating alternative aesthetic canons in private
museums emerged from this productive tension. In short, ongoing nego-
Introduction
• 3 •
tiation of who exhibits, why, and to whom, all of which in turn profoundly
affect what is exhibited, was and is critical to the expansion of the museum
form. Without a viewing public, a museum is simply a collection, not a cul-
tural institution.
The Tokugawa era (1600–1867) boasted a lively domestic culture of
popular display, but it did not enjoy official state sponsorship. Accord-
ingly, the first chapter, “Stating the Public,” begins by looking at the newly
established Meiji regime’s translation of Western exposition and museum
practices for a domestic Japanese audience, characterized from the start by
multiplicity, experimentation, and negotiation. The most effective terms to
convey the nature and function of these modern cultural institutions were
by no means obvious: early Japanese observers at first relied on vocabulary
that emphasized the sheer multitude of objects in sites such as the Smith-
sonian before they worked toward definitions pointing at the critical func-
tion of public outreach. This was not seen in Japan as merely an academic
exercise. Political and economic factors drove the Meiji government from
the early 1870s to actively engage in “exhibitionary” culture, which was
then approaching its zenith in Europe and America. Most immediately,
the state’s goal was to raise Japan’s international profile to gain a share in
global markets and to harness for its own ends the symbolic tools of Euro-
American imperial power. The Meiji government worked to change classi-
fication of Japanese entries in Western world’s fairs from primitive handi-
crafts to civilized art, even as it adapted Western exposition methods for
asserting civilizational superiority in Asia, with neoclassical architecture
reserved for central-government pavilions, traditional Japanese styles for
regional pavilions, and exotic structures for imperial colonies. Meanwhile,
the first government museum was established to serve as both a way sta-
tion and permanent exposition. Conceived as a tool for mass education in
an Enlightenment vein, the museum initially emphasized natural science
and technology. It was a mechanism to mobilize the populace for indus-
trialization. For this reason, carnivalesque elements in Tokugawa display
culture were suppressed to create a modern museum-going public. New
measures ranged from expanding days of operation, in order to encourage
attendance by members of the working class, to rules for appropriate be-
havior, such as prohibiting clogs and dogs.
From the 1880s, however, the encyclopedic museum model began to lose
ground in the course of reworking the government museum, its properties,
and its nascent public as “imperial” in policy and practice. As chapter 2,
Introduction
• 4 •
“Imperial Properties,” explores, this meant placing the original museum
under Imperial Household Ministry control, reconstituting the collection
in an art-historical rather than scientific vein, and constructing new mu-
seums with gates, entrances, and rooms exclusively reserved for imperial
family members. The category of imperial was itself being redefined at the
time to serve as a mediating buffer in negotiating the boundaries between
state and society and public and private. Of particular relevance to mu-
seums were the bureaucratic debates on how to create the general cate-
gory of imperial property, which resulted in a major transfer of land and
other resources from various sectors of society to possession by the im-
perial family, a form of privatization in the name of public good. With the
shift of government museums into the emperor’s portfolio, state cultural
authority was personalized in the figure of the emperor and his immedi-
ate relations, veiling an emergent canon under majesty not to be impoli-
ticly scrutinized. Even as these museums crafted narratives of an aesthetic
nation, imperialization kept the publicness of these institutions in check.
Visitors were granted a gift of access, not a right.
Turn-of-the-century export of the government-museum form to Japan’s
colonies raised new questions regarding the why, how, and who in con-
stituting an imperial public, as examined in chapter 3, “Colonial Proper-
ties.” By the mid-1930s, the Japanese museum system had established or
absorbed institutions in Taiwan, Korea, Sakhalin, and Manchuria. A hand-
ful more were taken over when the Japanese state captured various West-
ern colonial possessions early in the Asia-Pacific War. Chapter 3 focuses on
Taiwan and Korea, where Japanese colonial museums set down the deep-
est roots and were most active in engaging the local population. Differ-
ences in colonial context had a dramatic impact on the nature of the col-
lections and collection processes, giving rise to variant visions of Japanese
imperial identity. The Government-General Museum of Taiwan (Taiwan
Sōtokufu Hakubutsukan), established in 1908, emphasized natural history
and anthropology, portraying the island as rich in resources for extraction
but in need of Japanese tutelage to rise above a primitive cultural state. In
contrast, the Yi Royal Family Museum (Ri Ōke Hakubutsukan) in Seoul,
opened in 1909, represented a complex maneuver on the part of the colo-
nial government-general: established in the name of the Korean royal
family to cloak Japanese rule, the museum was also intended to under-
mine the royal family by appropriating private palace grounds for a pub-
lic museum. (Japanese interest in destabilizing the Korean royal line was
Introduction
• 5 •
no secret after the assassination of Empress Myeongseong, commonly re-
ferred to as Queen Min, in 1895.) In the Yi Royal Family Museum, an-
cient—not modern—Korean art on display was co-opted for the Japa-
nese empire. These colonial institutions cultivated Taiwanese and Korean
publics to serve Japanese interests, but the institutions also left a legacy of
practices and materials that framed local identity in ways that later were
turned against Japan itself, while being redeployed within a complex and
divided postcolonial landscape.
Even as the Japanese state expanded its exhibitionary infrastructure
at home and abroad, private museums began to dot the early twentieth-
century landscape. Chapter 4, “The Private Publics of Ōhara, Shibusawa,
and Yanagi,” takes a more individualized look at three museum projects
that directly criticized the state for representing the nation only in terms
defined by a central elite. Ōhara Magosaburō (1880–1943) challenged the
cultural hegemony of Tokyo by transforming Kurashiki in Okayama Pre-
fecture into a “New Elysium.” The crown jewel of his efforts was the Ōhara
Museum of Art, which provided unprecedented access to original works
by such contemporary Western artists as Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.
Shibusawa Keizō’s (1896–1963) proposal for a “folk” museum of economic
history presented a detailed plan for a public institution to honor nonelite
contributions to national development. While this project was never com-
pleted, it was to include such features as a showcase for portraits of ordi-
nary businessmen, industrialists, scholars, inventors, and farmers, whose
contributions were not acknowledged within the “great man” school of
history. In a comparable manner, Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) founded
the Japan Folk Crafts Museum (Nihon Mingeikan) to offer a vision of
national aesthetic heritage that valorized the everyday, commonplace, and
useful. Posed as a counterpoint rather than a supplement to the imperial
canon, the museum also sought to attract the same metropolitan bour-
geois public that earnestly attended the Shōsōin exhibit. All three of these
private-sector museums represented early twentieth-century attempts
to shift some degree of government authority over to nongovernmental
hands, and to serve social interests that the central state was seen as having
failed to acknowledge.
Japanese department stores provide an institutional, in contrast to indi-
vidual, window into this broader effort to stake “private” claims to a “pub-
lic” form of authority through exhibition. Chapter 5, “Consuming Publics,”
traces the early twentieth-century emergence of department stores as cul-
Introduction
• 6 •
tural showcases, in the process revisiting various aspects of modern Japa-
nese exhibitionary culture. While informed by such Western retailers as
Harrods, Japanese department stores developed in a particularly close rela-
tionship with national expositions and museums. Soon department stores
positioned themselves alongside—and sometimes in competition with—
state cultural institutions. While loyally flying the national flag and market-
ing such patriotic goods as Russo-Japanese War handkerchiefs, department
stores established their own credentials by holding art and art-historical
exhibitions; organizing research associations with prominent intellectu-
als, politicians, and bureaucrats of the day; and sponsoring public lectures,
roundtables, and publications. In the process, the department stores’ con-
sumer publics—which included women and children as full-fledged citi-
zens—merged with broader conceptions of society, nation, and empire.
The triumphal claims of Japanese department stores did not go unchal-
lenged in the colonies: the Korean authors Ch’ae Man-sik and Yi Sang
savagely portrayed the Seoul branch of the Mitsukoshi Department Store
as a second-rate shrine to Western consumerist capitalism. Moreover, the
wartime crisis of the late 1930s and early 1940s provided the state a chance
to requisition private sites of publicness. Department stores were trans-
formed into government ration-distribution centers and uniform manu-
facturers, while shelving and escalators were dismantled for war materiel.
This reassertion of direct state control underscores the fact that the im-
perial era’s expansion of publicness had always been subject to strict his-
torical limits.
War had brought both material scarcity and new (conquered) facili-
ties to the state museum network, but defeat in 1945 meant Japanese sur-
render of its colonial possessions. The epilogue offers a look at how the
public nature of the national museum system was redefined at the end of
the war, during the long postwar era, and in the present. Under Ameri-
can occupation (1945–52), the national museum system was transferred
from the emperor to the Ministry of Education. Subsequent reforms were
touted as democratization but were administered by bureaucrats who
sought to rebrand but not necessarily reimagine Japan as a “cultural na-
tion” (bunka kokka). This New Japan—reliant on rather than resistant to
American hegemony—was placed on display in government museums as
well as sports facilities during the well-received Tokyo Olympics of 1964,
after which the security and prestige of the postwar state’s cultural appara-
tus seemed unassailable. However, as part of a series of sweeping neoliberal
Introduction
• 7 •
transformations, the national museums were redefined in 2001 as indepen-
dent and, eventually, self-funding entities. A fresh round of heated debate
regarding the roles, boundaries, and responsibilities of state and society is
well under way.
I take up the introduction and entrenchment of the modern museum
form in Japan because it is founded on historically shifting conceptual-
izations of publicness, loosely stitching together state and society, nation
and individual, authority and audience. Significantly, Jürgen Habermas in-
cluded museums, along with coffee houses and salons, as formative loca-
tions in his classic study of the rise of the “public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit) as
bourgeois practice and ideal in Western Europe in the eighteenth century.8
In particular, Habermas highlighted the way in which museums “institu-
tionalized the lay judgment on art: discussion became the medium through
which people appropriated art.”9 This characterization falls in line with his
basic narrative of the public sphere as a space of self-determination; yet the
state remains lurking in the background, ready to emerge in later chapters
as a crucial entity against which, and with which, the public sphere had to
define itself.10
While Habermas emphasized egalitarianism in Western European con-
ceptualizations of the public sphere, various scholars have since pointed to
ways in which this forum was deeply riven by tensions between exclusion
and inclusion.11 Establishing a public sphere did not necessarily, and cer-
tainly not automatically, move historical practices toward more universal
participation.12 Accordingly, although the public sphere has been a produc-
tive concept in museum studies, contemporary practice has moved toward
foregrounding diverse and frequently opposed viewpoints in museum-
community formation.13 The fierce political and social conflicts embedded
within postwar museum exhibits on the Asia-Pacific War have, moreover,
inspired various scholars in Asian studies to take a closer look at the role
of such institutions in shaping historical memories.14 Japanese museums of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can also be said to have
opened up room for claims—such as those made by Ōhara Magosaburō,
Shibusawa Keizō, and Yanagi Muneyoshi—to the legitimacy of lay judg-
ment and appropriation.15 Yet the modern state was the driving agent be-
hind imperial-era establishment and growth of this institutional form. At
the same time, this state was neither monolithic nor uncontested, so multi-
plicity and friction are central elements in my account.
While Habermas has played a foundational role in contemporary de-
Introduction
• 8 •
bates on the emergence, potential, and limits of modern publics, and this
field has in turn shaped the present work, I am not attempting to read a
Habermasian public sphere back into late nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century Japan. Instead, I have chosen to use such capacious
terms as publics and publicness rather than the more codified public sphere.16
Evolving notions of publicness became germane to imperial Japan because
a new form of governance had been established, one that required increas-
ingly higher levels of participation on the part of the general population,
even as the new state sought to curb and quell its potential. Publicness—
neither an exact equivalent for an idealized Western European public
sphere nor a neatly bounded alternative—in Japanese museums emerged
during this era as a hierarchically structured space of conversation between
the state and the general population, eventually including the colonies,
which was at the same time part of a hierarchically structured conversation
with contemporary Western discourse and practice.
This book addresses publicness in the historically specific forms of kō
(公) and kōkyō (公共), Japanese terms often used today as equivalent to
the English public or public sphere.17 In a process that did not originate in
the Meiji Restoration of 1868 but accelerated with it, kō and later kōkyō
were two among a host of reworked and invented terms that emerged for
rethinking relations between those who governed and those who were gov-
erned.18 One particularly dense knot of Japanese words and phrases col-
lectively constituted what we might call nation, including the proper name
Nihon (Japan), the more abstract kuni (“domain” in the Tokugawa period,
and “country” in the Meiji period), kokka (nation-state), and kokumin-
kokka (ethnic nation-state), and a host of related words and concepts such
as kokutai (national essence).19 A well-established, rich, and interlaced
body of scholarship has thoroughly explored how the discourse and prac-
tice of nation and nationalism took shape in the modern period.20 More-
over, the central state and its bureaucracy—kan, seifu, seidō—have been
closely analyzed for their active role in structuring this political terrain, be-
ginning with the new government’s Charter Oath of 1868.21 The emperor
(tennō), “restored” as modern head of state, has been similarly scrutinized
as a focal point for modern Japanese nationalism.22 Yet, as various Japa-
nese and Western scholars have noted, the question of whether the mod-
ern state truly represented the nation has been raised since the late nine-
teenth century.23 It is not surprising, then, that terms from the imperial era
designating the people—including jinmin, shūsho (衆庶), hitobito, tami/
Introduction
• 9 •
min, minshū, kokumin (national subjects), and later taishū (the masses)—
were also diverse, layered, and laden.24 While some political figures called
for people’s rights (minken) and others celebrated obedience as the high-
est virtue of imperial subjects (kōmin), bureaucrats were reconceptualiz-
ing governance in biopolitical terms, as the management of an aggregate
population.25 Society—yo, seken, sōtai, and shakai—was in turn increasingly
invoked both inside and outside of government circles, sometimes as a sec-
tor distinct from the state, sometimes as an integral element of a totality
most often presumed to be the nation, but on occasion pointing beyond,
to humanity or the world.26 Then, as the outlines of an overseas Japanese
colonial empire (teikoku) became clearly visible by the early twentieth cen-
tury, the already multivalent host of terms for nation, people, emperor, state,
and society had to be renegotiated again and again.27
Adding kō and kōkyō to the cluster of terms is intended to underscore
the interconnectedness of this conceptual network. Kō should not be
understood as a transcendent concept that hovered over and explained the
others; rather, it performed a bridging function for foreign and domestic
conceptions of emperor, nation, state, and society. The chapters that follow
look at modern claims to publicness in light of how they opened up a par-
ticular space for ongoing negotiations of such concepts as nation, empire,
state, and people as they collectively came to dominate discourse in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. Sometimes these interactions were
fraught, and sometimes they strengthened conceptual associations and the
complex as a whole.
It is also worth keeping in mind that, although publicness was renegoti-
ated from the nineteenth century in conversation with Western and mod-
ern strands of thought, it had a longer genealogy.28 In the seventh and
eighth centuries, gong and si (公/私; now generally translated as public
and private) were introduced along with many other Chinese governing
terms, concepts, and social technologies as part of the establishment of a
centralized bureaucratic state headed by the Japanese imperial clan.29 Gong
bridged the gap between Chinese ruler and ruled in the sense of “commu-
nal matters,” as it was incorporated into character compounds for popular
opinion as well as government offices. In Japan, gong was mapped onto the
native term ōyake, which had hitherto referred to the governing spheres
of the great clans of the archipelago. Redefined as equivalent to kō (the
Chinese-style reading of the character for gong), ōyake came to form a bi-
nary with watakushi or shi (newly coined as Japanese ways of reading the
Introduction
• 10 •
character si, 私).30 Kō came to encompass both the imperial line miyake
(御ヤケ) and the aristocracy (kōmin, 公民), while shi designated matters
outside of governmental interest.
However, a law passed in 743 that allowed permanent, private posses-
sion of newly opened lands initiated a long-term process of redefinition.31
Intended to encourage temples, shrines, and aristocrats to invest in bring-
ing new fields under cultivation, this imperial policy paved the way for the
rise of shōen estates, defined by their exemption from having to pay trib-
ute or taxes to the central government. Such exceptions came to riddle the
theoretically whole cloth of the imperial realm with so many holes that
Emperor Go-Sanjō (1034–73) introduced reforms that allowed members
of the imperial family (with the sole exception of the reigning emperor) to
join other members of the elite in diverting “private” revenue streams from
the central fisc.32 The result was that the terms ōyake and kō shifted from
equivalence with the state apparatus and its officials to the designation of
obligations organized by the state across various levels of society, while
the terms watakushi and shi were reformulated to refer to matters that fell
outside such specified duties. In the process, ōyake and kō and watakushi
and shi came to be more tightly interdependent: even as public lands were
moved into private status through commendation, state law provided the
very foundation for private rights and legitimization for drawing peripheral
territory into a centralizing system.33 There was no singular site for either
ōyake or watakushi, which together cut through, and united, each tier of
society even after the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunal (warrior)
regime in the seventeenth century.34
Contemporary usage of the term kō certainly draws on a legacy of strong
association with the state, which is why various scholars have discounted
the authenticity of a Japanese publicness.35 The modern Japanese state was
also unquestionably an important agent in the account of museums as pub-
lic institutions in the imperial era. On the other hand, such concepts as the
state, the emperor, subjects, and the people have long formed a tightly knit
and mutually constitutive cluster, albeit one characterized by redefinition
from the eighth through the twenty-first centuries. Within this constella-
tion, ōyake and kō can serve as a useful barometer for shifting relations be-
tween state and society.
In the modern imperial era, publicness continued to demarcate a some-
what amorphous and certainly malleable boundary area that partook both
of state and society: it was the face the state turned to society, and vice
Introduction
• 11 •
versa. This publicness should not be seen as equivalent to democracy in
some abstract and idealized sense, yet it provided some ground for the
emergence of a suffrage movement in the late nineteenth century. While
its modern conceptualization was largely born of the Meiji state and its at-
tempt to mobilize the general population, it was also swiftly turned against
the state in nationalist and imperialist as well as liberal and progressive cri-
tiques. Founded by government and private entities on the fundamental
premise that publicness was significant, modern museums offer a concrete
case through which we can examine these productive tensions at work in
imperial Japan.
Introduction
• 12 •
Notes
Introduction
1. Attendance figures from “Kanranshasū ichiranhyō,” in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu
Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, 1973),
663.
2. Noma Seiroku, Kuchinawa monogatari, image no. n87197 in the Tokyo National
Museum (tkh) archives.
3. This is not to say that Noma’s emphasis was without precedent: his choice of
the term emaki (picture scroll) clearly signaled that he was drawing on an older
visual tradition in Japan. Moreover, depicting crowds at museum exhibits be-
came more common in the postwar period, underscoring their eventfulness.
Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 663.
5. Among Satō Dōshin’s major works are “Nihon bijutsu” tanjō: Kindai Nihon no
“kotoba” to senryaku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996); Meiji kokka to kindai bijutsu: Bi
no seijigaku (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbun, 1999); and Bijutsu no aidentitii: Dare no
tame ni, nan no tame ni (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2007).
6. Alice Tseng, The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of
the Nation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). See also Tseng’s
“Art in Place: The Display of Japan at the Imperial Museums, 1872–1909” (PhD
diss., Harvard University, 2004). For an earlier introduction in English to Japa-
nese museums, see Masatoshi Konishi, “The Museum and Japanese Studies,”
Current Anthropology 28: 4 (August/October 1987). See also the important
work by the art historian Christine Guth in, for example, Art, Tea, and Industry:
Masuda Takashi and the Mitsui Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993); and Ellen Conant, ed., Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorpho-
sis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
2006). For a different approach to some of these issues, see Kim Brandt’s close
analysis of the Japanese folkcraft movement in Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and
the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
Leslie Pincus provides an intellectual history of imperial-era aesthetic discourse
in Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of National
Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). A current look at the
role of the Japanese state in relation to national culture is offered by Kuniyuki
Tomooka, Sachiko Kanno, and Mari Kobayashi in “Japanese Cultural Policy and
the Influence of Western Institutions,” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and
Globalization, edited by Diane Crane, Nobuko Kawashima, and Ken’ichi Kawa-
saki (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 663.
8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger (Cambridge:
mit Press, 1994).
9. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 40.
10. See, for example, Habermas’s chapters “Political Functions of the Public Sphere”
and “The Political Public Sphere and the Transformation of the Liberal Consti-
tutional State into a Social-Welfare State” in his The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere, 57–88, 222–35. Habermas even warns, “The democratic pro-
cedures and arrangements that grant united citizens the chance for collective
self-determination and political control over their own social existence can only
diminish as the nation-state loses its functions and capabilities, unless some
equivalent for them emerges at the supra-state level.” Habermas, “Toward a
Cosmopolitan Europe,” Journal of Democracy 14: 4 (October 2003): 92.
11. Nancy Fraser summarizes and extends various critiques of a Habermasian
public sphere, while acknowledging the concept’s analytic uses. Fraser, “Re-
thinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990).
12. Although I will not rehearse here the major debates in the rich and still-growing
Japanese- and English-language literature on the public sphere and civil society,
they have, of course, propelled the very conception of this book in its present
form. Habermas’s work, already mentioned, not only has played a foundational
role in the Western scholarly debates on this topic but also has been widely
referenced in Japanese discussions. Hannah Arendt’s work along these lines,
particularly in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), has been equally if not more influential in Japanese circles. See, for ex-
ample, Saitō Jun’ichi, Kōkyōsei: Publicness (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2000). Saitō uses
Arendt’s formulations as a foundation for his consideration of publicness in
contemporary Japan. The Public Culture special issue “New Imaginaries” (win-
ter 2002), edited by Dilip Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee, and featuring contribu-
tions by Arjun Appadurai, Craig Calhoun, Mary Poovey, Charles Taylor, and
Michael Warner, provides a useful introduction to approaches that to a greater
Notes to Introduction
• 224 •
or lesser degree begin to grapple with publicness as an issue that extends be-
yond Western Europe. Kuan-Hsin Chen takes a hard and critical look at civil
society theory and practice within East Asia in his Asia as Method: Toward De-
imperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
13. Museum studies is a rich and still growing field; I will note here only a few of
the works that have informed this study: Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); James Clifford, The Pre-
dicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Steven Conn,
Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1998); Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums
(New York: Routledge, 1995); Shelly Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive
Culture and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998); Ivan Karp et al., eds., Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transfor-
mations (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen
Kreamer, and Steven Levine, eds., Museums and Communities (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); Ivan Karp and Steven Levine, Ex-
hibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Jim McGuigan, Culture and the Public
Sphere (New York: Routledge, 1996); Daniel Sherman, Worthy Monuments: Art
Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998).
14. For example, Tze Loo offers a sharp historical analysis of the museumification of
Shuri Castle in her article, “Shuri Castle’s Other History: Architecture and Em-
pire in Okinawa’s History,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (2009), accessed
January 21, 2013, http://japanfocus.org/-tze_ m _-loo/3232. See also the various
chapters that critically examine American and Japanese memory making with
regard to the Asia-Pacific War in Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living with
the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk:
M.E. Sharpe, 1997). Also of interest is the proposed but ultimately rejected
script for the Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay, published in Philip Nobile,
ed., Judgment at the Smithsonian (New York: Marlowe and Co., 1995). Cross-
cultural comparisons can also be found in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in
History and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I touch on
Japanese peace and war museums once more in the epilogue.
15. While the question of whether Habermas’s formulation of the public sphere
can be extended to analyze specific developments in Asia is not central to this
book, there are a growing number of works that pursue this issue in a nuanced
and detailed fashion, such as Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks
and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005); and Jeong-Woo Koo, “The Origins of the Public Sphere and Civil
Society: Private Academies and Petitions in Korea, 1506–1800,” Social Science
History 31: 3 (fall 2007).
16. Habermas and others have, of course, noted potential problems in the very
• 225 •
multiplicity of meanings and uses of public and its cognates; Habermas, The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1–2. Michael Edwards provides
a succinct discussion of the forms and norms of the public sphere in his Civil
Society (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2004), 54–71.
17. Publicness as a concept in Japan before 1945 has not constituted a major topic in
the English-language literature, the exceptions being M. E. Berry’s incisive essay
“Public Life in Authoritarian Japan,” Daedalus 17: 3 (1998); Douglas Howland’s
Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), and Personal Liberty and the Pub-
lic Good: The Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China (Toronto: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 2005); and Ikegami’s sweeping Bonds of Civility. In
Japan, however, studies of kōkyōsei (today used as a translation for the public
sphere) have recently increased exponentially, to the point that they can claim
their own shelf or two within various bookstores. The ten-volume University
of Tokyo series Kōkyō Tetsugaku (Public Philosophy) provides an organiza-
tional core to the field by drawing together prominent scholars and publish-
ing their presentations with transcriptions of follow-up roundtable discussions.
See Sasaki Takeshi and Kim Tae-Chang, eds., Kōkyō tetsugaku, 10 vols. (Tokyo:
Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2001–6). Sasaki Takeshi, Yamawaki Naoshi, and
Murata Yūjirō, eds., Higashi Ajia ni okeru kōkyōwa no sōshutsu: Kako, genzai,
mirai (Tokyo: Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2003), raise the topic in a
comparative framework. “Kōkyōen no hakken,” Gendai shisō 30: 6 (May 2002),
and “Kōkyōsei o tō,” Gendai shisō 33: 5 (May 2005), are only two of a number
of recent special issues in major journals on publicness. Hirata Oriza examines
financial support of the arts in light of publicness in Geijutsu rikkokuron (Tokyo:
Shūeisha, 2001). Ono Ryōhei explores public spaces in the late nineteenth cen-
tury in Kōen no tanjō (Tokyo: Furukawa Kōbunkan, 2003).
18. Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1985); and Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late
Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), are classic works that
examine active engagement in the nineteenth century with new political con-
cepts and practices among both central elites and rural citizens.
19. Conrad Totman provides a close look at Tokugawa tensions embodied in the
word kuni and transformation in the Meiji period in “Ethnicity in the Meiji Res-
toration: An Interpretive Essay,” Monumenta Nipponica 37: 3 (autumn 1982).
Takashi Fujitani examines the making of the modern emperor as a focal point
for a national communal imaginary in Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry
in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
20. Kevin Doak provides an incisive overview of the field in “What Is a Nation
and Who Belongs? National Narratives and Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-
Century Japan,” The American Historical Review 102: 2 (April 1997). Major works
published since Doak’s essay include Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s Re-inventing Japan:
Time, Space, Nation (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); and Stefan Tanaka’s New
• 226 •
Times in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Both au-
thors bring fresh attention to temporality as an integral dimension of the mod-
ern Japanese nation.
21. See, for example, Bernard S. Silberman, “The Bureaucratic State in Japan: The
Problem of Authority and Legitimacy,” in Conflict in Modern Japanese His-
tory: the Neglected Tradition, edited by Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). More recently, he has placed his
analysis of the Japanese bureaucracy in a comparative framework. See Silber-
man, Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the United
States, and Great Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). E. H.
Norman’s classic work was republished in Origins of the Modern Japanese State,
edited by John W. Dower (New York: Pantheon, 1975). Ryōsuke Ishii provides
an overview of Japanese governing structures in A History of Political Institutions
in Japan (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1980). Chalmers Johnson’s miti
and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1982), while more focused on the postwar era, has
been extremely influential; a further look at the state’s impact and further ap-
plication is available in Meredith Woo-Cumings, ed., The Developmental State
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Muramatsu Michio provides an over-
view with attention to central-regional administrative relations in Nihon no gyō-
sei (Tokyo: Chūō kōron, 1994). A translation of the Charter Oath of 1868 can
be found in W. Theodore de Bary, ed., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 136.
22. The emperor system has been a key point of Japanese historiographical debate.
In English, prominent works range from the early postwar work of Maruyama
Masao, available in Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, edited by
Ivan Morris (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), to more recently Harold
Bix’s Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins,
2000). The influential volumes by Irokawa (The Culture of the Meiji Period),
Gluck (Japan’s Modern Myths), and Fujitani (Splendid Monarchy) have been
cited above.
23. Doak, “What Is a Nation and Who Belongs?,” 287.
24. See in particular Howland’s nuanced examination of the impact of translation
as a historically situated practice on conceptions of the “people” in Translating
the West and Personal Liberty and the Public Good.
25. Fujitani analyzes the Japanese imperial state in light of the Foucauldian concept
of biopolitics in “Right to Kill, Right to Make Live: Koreans as Japanese and
Japanese as Americans in wwii,” Representations 99 (summer 2007).
26. Works that closely examine conceptions of society (shakai) in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries include H. D. Harootunian, Overcome
by Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Marilyn Ivy,
“Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar Japan as History, edited by Andrew
Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). In Translating the West,
• 227 •
Howland devotes a chapter to this topic, “Representing the People, Imagin-
ing Society,” 153–82. Germaine Houston focuses on how Marxist theorists and
activists in Asia approached the question in The State, Identity, and the National
Question in China and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
27. Andrew Gordon’s Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991) directly confronts the intertwining of na-
tionalism, colonialism, and suffrage in the early twentieth century. Eiji Oguma’s
A Genealogy of “Japanese” Self-Images, translated by David Askew (Melbourne:
Trans-Pacific Press, 2002), provides an encyclopedic overview of multiple and
often clashing positions in the imperial era. The literature on Japanese colonial-
ism in English has rapidly grown in recent years: an early overview was provided
in Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Stefan Tanaka analyzes the con-
struction of “Shina” (China) in the imperial Japanese academy in Japan’s Ori-
ent: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
Louise Young’s Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Japanese Im-
perialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) has led a reassessment
of colonialism as a social project; and Peter Duus’s The Abacus and the Sword:
The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–1910 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995) and Hyun Ok Park’s Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and
the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2005) directly engage with the question of capitalism and private
property in Japanese colonial expansion to the Asian continent. There is a large
literature in Japanese, with Ōe Shinobu et al., eds., Kindai Nihon to shokuminchi,
vols. 1–8 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1992–93), offering a comprehensive introduction.
28. Mizubayashi Takeshi, “Nihon-teki ‘kō-shi’ kannen no genkei to tenkai,” in
Nihon ni okeru kō to shi, vol. 3, Kōkyō tetsugaku, edited by Sasaki Takeshi and
Kim Tae-Chang (Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai, 2002).
29. The Chinese binary gong-si (public-private) initially emerged as a means of
differentiating between the concerns (particularly land) of a chief as the head
of a community and those of individual members of said community. From
the fourth century bce, guan (bureaucracy) and min (the people) began to be
deployed within an emerging imperial state apparatus in China to distinguish
between state and society. In this context, the term gong bridged the gap be-
tween ruler and ruled—incorporated into character compounds for popular
opinion as well as government offices—in its sense of “communal matters”;
si was that which was not relevant to the community. Gong-si and guan-min
overlapped but were not equivalent, until, in the seventh century ce, imperial
officials began to substitute gong-si for guan-min in order to avoid reference to
the Tang dynasty’s own min origins. Mizubayashi, “Nihon-teki ‘kō-shi’ kannen
no genkei to tenkai,” 7–8. Also see Joan Piggot, The Emergence of Japanese King-
ship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), for a detailed discussion of the
state-building project.
• 228 •
30. Ōyake had previously been complemented by the term woyake, designating a
clan possessed of a lower level of status. Since woyake had never demarcated a
space outside of governance (that is, both ōyake and woyake referred to ruling
structures, distinguishable only in terms of scale), woyake soon faded into irrele-
vance with the rise of a more totalizing form of imperial hegemony. Mizubaya-
shi, “Nihon-teki ‘kō-shi’ kannen no genkei to tenkai,” 6.
31. The law is known as the Konden Einen Shizaihō (墾田永年私財法). Mizubaya-
shi, “Nihon-teki ‘kō-shi’ kannen no genkei to tenkai,” 12.
32. A new formal basis for shōen in the eleventh century was established by re-
quiring up-to-date documentation to enjoy tax-free status. Many improperly
or undocumented shōen were then converted to “imperial edict fields” (choku-
shiden), essentially private estates possessed by members of the imperial line.
See Thomas Keirstead, The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), for an extended discussion.
33. Mizubayashi, “Nihon-teki ‘kō-shi’ kannen no genkei to tenkai,” 13.
34. For the Tokugawa period, Watanabe Hiroshi employs the image of a series of
nested boxes, the enclosing one labeled ōyake and the enclosed labeled wata-
kushi; those lower down at any point of the social pyramid under the shogun
would refer to matters above their level as ōyake and matters at their own level
as watakushi. Meanwhile, superiors drew inferiors into publicness with the
appellation of ōyake or kō for affairs subject to regulation in the name of so-
cial order, such as marriage alliances within the ruling elite. Watanabe Hiroshi,
“Nihon shisōshiteki myakuraku kara mita kō-shi mondai,” in Shōrai sedai sōgō
kenkyūjo, ed., Hikaku shisōshiteki myakuraku kara mita kō-shi mondai: Dai ikkai
kōkyō tetsugaku kyōdō kenkyūkai (Japan: Shōrai sedai kokusai zaidan, 1998), 121;
quoted in Mizubayashi, “Nihon-teki ‘kō-shi’ kannen no genkei to tenkai,” 19.
Watanabe also provides a comparative look at Chinese, Japanese, and English
conceptions of publicness in “‘Ōyake’ ‘watakushi’ no gogi,” in Sasaki and Kim,
eds., Kō to shi no shisōshi, 145–74.
35. Deep skepticism regarding modern Japanese civil society, let alone Haber-
masian public sphere, is justifiably engrained in Japanese- and Western-language
studies of modern Japan. See, for example, Sheldon Garon’s Molding Japanese
Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997);
and Gregory Kasza, The Conscription Society: Administered Mass Organizations
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Saitō Jun’ichi emphasizes that the
three-character-compound kōkyōsei referring to a Habermasian public sphere
only came into common use in Japan in the 1990s. Saitō, Kōkyōsei: Publicness
(Tokyo: Iwanami, 2000), 1–2.
1. Stating the Public

Translations of published Japanese texts are mine, except in cases that I note when I
have found a published English translation already in circulation.
1. See, for example, Hashizume Shin’ya, Meiji no meikyū toshi (Tokyo: Heibonsha,
Notes to Chapter 1
• 229 •
1990); Kinoshita Naoyuki, Bijutsu to iu misemono (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993);
Peter Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values: Early Meiji Expositions
and Their Precursors,” Monumenta Nipponica 49: 2 (summer 1994); Andrew
Markus, “The Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles from Contemporary Ac-
counts,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45:2 (1985); Timon Screech, The Lens
within the Heart (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002).
2. As Douglas Howland points out, “Japanese efforts to translate the West must
be understood both as problems of language—the creation and circulation of
new concepts—and as problems of action—the usage of new concepts in de-
bates about the policies to be implemented in a westernizing Japan.” Howland,
Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 2.
3. Kitazawa Noriaki, Me no shinden (Tokyo: Bijutsu shuppansha, 1989), 115. The
Institute for the Study of Barbarian Books (Bansho Shirabesho), an expanded
and revitalized version of the Tokugawa Shogunate’s translation bureau, was
established in 1856 not only to shore up the long-standing shogunal monopoly
on foreign information but also to train young intellectuals to confront the na-
tional crisis precipitated by the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853.
For more, see Howland, Translating the West, 9–10.
4. Kitazawa, Me no shinden, 112–15; Shiina Noritaka, Meiji hakubutsukan kotoha-
jime (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1989), 17–30. For a detailed English-language account
of the mission of 1860, see Masao Miyoshi, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese
Embassy to the West (New York: Kodansha International, 1994).
5. Kitazawa, Me no shinden, 112–14; Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 23.
6. Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 21–23.
7. Kitazawa, Me no shinden, 112.
8. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 19. Also see Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual
Life, 1876–1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Daniel Sher-
man, Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-
Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
9. This formulation draws from the work of Howland, who engages with Reinhart
Koselleck’s theories of language, ideas, and history to explore the complexity
of introducing Western philosophical and political concepts to a nineteenth-
century Japanese context in Translating the West.
10. Both Shiina and Kitazawa analyze Fukuzawa’s definition and its impact. Kita-
zawa, Me no shinden, 117; Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 31–36. Alice
Tseng offers a complete translation in “Art in Place: The Display of Japan at the
Imperial Museums, 1872–1909” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004), 25–26.
11. Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 29.
12. Reprint of Seiyō jijō in Fukuzawa Yukichi, Fukuzawa Yukichi, in Nihon no meicho:
33, edited by Nagai Michio (Tokyo: Chūō kōron, 1969), 376.
Notes to Chapter 1
• 230 •
14. Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 31–35. The Jardin des Plantes is now a
department in the French National Museum of Natural History (Muséum na-
tional d’histoire naturelle).
15. Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 25.
17. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 20.
18. I am borrowing the phrase from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking
Press, 1973).
19. Prominent, but not the sole, representatives of this field are Kinoshita, Bijutsu
to iu misemono; Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values”; Markus, “The
Carnival of Edo”; and Screech, The Lens within the Heart.
20. Kitazawa, Me no shinden, 116–17; Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 43–47;
tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu
Hakubutsukan, 1973), 2–7.
21. The visits of a handful of Europeans with an interest in Japanese botany during
the Tokugawa period are also often mentioned as a stimulating influence. tkh,
Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 3–4.
22. For detailed information on major figures in honzōgaku (medicinal-plant
studies), see Ueno Masuzō, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden (Tokyo: Yasaka shobō,
1991).
23. Hiraga was a scholar and popular writer who studied kokugaku (native studies),
rangaku, bussangaku (study of man-made and natural products), and honzō-
gaku. He is well known both for having invented a machine to generate static
electricity for therapeutic purposes and for his satirical works of fiction. Unfor-
tunately, he died in jail after going insane and killing one of his students.
25. See, for example, Ueno’s account in Nihon hakubutsugaku-shi (Tokyo: Kōdansha
gakujutsu bunko, 1989), 166–80.
26. Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 53–55.
27. tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 5.
28. See Amino Yoshihiko’s classic Muen•kugai•raku for a detailed study of the
concept of this spatial expression of Otherness as it developed in the medi-
eval period. Amino also addressed these issues in his work Nihon no rekishi o
yominaosu (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1991) and Zoku Nihon no rekishi o yominaosu
(Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1996) aimed at a more general audience. See also Alan
Christy’s translation of the latter two as Rereading Japanese History (Ann Arbor:
Center for Japanese Studies, 2012).
29. Amino Yoshihiko, Zoku Nihon no rekishi o yominaosu, 51–55. See also the discus-
sion in Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Ori-
gins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 88–90.
30. See, for example, Michael Smitka, ed., The Japanese Economy in the Tokugawa
Era, 1600–1868 (New York: Routledge, 1998), particularly the chapters by David
Howell, “Proto-industrial Origins of Japanese Capitalism,” 112–30, and by No-
Notes to Chapter 1
• 231 •
buhiko Nakai and James L. McClain, “Commercial Change and Urban Growth
in Early Modern Japan,” 131–208. For more in-depth discussion of the complex
economic intersections in the Tokugawa period of local, domainal, and sho-
gunal interests linking protoindustrialization with the emergence of capitalism,
see David Howell, Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society, and the State in a
Japanese Fishery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
31. Kornicki, “Public Display and Changing Values,” 179.
32. M. E. Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 231.
33. Berry, Japan in Print, 231.
34. Berry, Japan in Print, 230.
35. Ikegami, Bonds of Civility, 366.
36. Berry, Japan in Print, 211–13.
38. Quoted in Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 48.
39. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Essential Foucault, edited by Paul
Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), 244.
40. Ueno gives a synopsis of the Meiji government’s steps toward establishing an
educational system, which began with taking over the shogunate’s Kaiseijo (for-
merly the Institute for the Study of Barbarian—then Western—Books) in 1868.
Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 154.
41. tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 42–47.
42. Tanaka was of samurai background and born in Owari Domain. He was in-
fluenced by his father and brother, who were physicians, and studied with Itō
Keisuke (1803–1901), an eminent scholar of medicine and rangaku. Tanaka was
employed by the Institute for the Study of Barbarian Books and helped prepare
and oversee the shogunate’s natural-history exhibits for the Paris exposition of
1867. After the establishment of the Meiji regime, Tanaka was employed in the
university and dispatched to the Vienna exposition of 1873. He was closely in-
volved in the founding of the first permanent government museum and instru-
mental in opening a government zoo in Ueno Park. He was the second director
of the national museum in Ueno, following Machida Hisanari, with whom he
had clashed. See the biography provided by Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden,
151–60. For an account that highlights his conflict with Machida, see Kuresawa
Takemi, Bijutsukan no seijigaku (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2007), 78–81.
43. The proposal from February 1871 is quoted in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Haku-
butsukan hyakunenshi, 28–29. In the end, credit as the first domestic exposition
went to the Kyoto exposition of 1871. See Maruyama Hiroshi, “Meiji shoki no
Kyoto Hakurankai,” in Bankoku hakurankai no kenkyū, edited by Yoshida Mitsu-
kuni (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1986).
45. Quoted in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 29.
Notes to Chapter 1
• 232 •
47. tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, shiryōhen (Tokyo: Tokyo
Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan, 1973), 605. For an illuminating comparison, see
the succinct but far-reaching account of the turn represented by nineteenth-
century Western scientific archival philosophy by Geoffrey Bowker in Memory
Practices in the Sciences (Cambridge: mit Press, 2005), 71.
48. The process by which the state developed its educational arm was not at all
smooth, and the main branch of the university had actually been dismantled
in 1870. For more details, see tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi,
23–24. For the establishment of the Exhibition Bureau, see tkh, Tokyo Koku-
ritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 42–43.
49. Satō Dōshin, “Kindai shigaku to shite no bijutsu shigaku no seiritsu to tenkai,”
in Nihon bijutsushi no suimyaku, edited by Tsuji Tadao-sensei chireki kinenkai
(Tokyo: Perikansha, 1993), 152.
50. Robert Rydell’s landmark studies All the World’s a Fair (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1984) and World of Fairs (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993) provide a critical overview of this era, with particular attention to
representations of nation, race, and ethnicity. Yoshimi Shunya analyzes Euro-
American world’s fairs, with a critical discussion of Japanese participation in
exposition culture, noting how the twin forces of the state and capital used the
fairs to visualize an imperial nation that was disciplinary in nature, in his classic
Hakurankai no seijigaku: Manazashi no kindai (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1992).
Official and unofficial records and albums from these expositions abound, in-
cluding Paris illustré: 1889 exposition universelle (Paris: A. Lahure, 1889); John J.
Flinn, Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition in the City of Chicago,
State of Illinois, May 1 to October 26, 1893 (Chicago: Columbian Guide Company,
1893); and Plan and Scope of the International Exposition at St. Louis (St. Louis:
Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1903).
51. Last public address of William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition,
Buffalo, New York, September 5, 1901, recording by Thomas A. Edison, Inc.
Thomas A. Edison, President McKinley’s Speech at the Pan-American Exposition,
35 mm paper pos. (New York: Thomas A. Edison, 1901), United States Library
of Congress Paper Print Collection (lc 1811).
52. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 3.
53. Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibi-
tions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001).
54. Robert Rydell, “A Cultural Frankenstein? The Chicago World’s Columbian Ex-
position of 1893,” in Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893, edited by Neil
Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert Rydell (Chicago: Chicago His-
torical Society, 1993).
55. Rutherford Alcock had assiduously collected close to nine hundred pieces of
lacquerware, pottery, copperware, cloisonné, paintings, armor, swords, lanterns,
straw coats, footwear, Japanese clocks, and mechanical dolls. For an account of
Notes to Chapter 1
• 233 •
Alcock’s time in Japan, see his The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three
Years’ Residence in Japan, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts,
and Green, 1863).
56. Yoshimi, Hakurankai no seijigaku, 112.
57. These were probably the first Japanese women in Europe, and the first on gov-
ernment books in Japan as “employees.” One Western observer wondered at
the composure of these women before the throngs of curious onlookers, sub-
jected to requests for the very clothing off their backs. The writer doubts that
many European ladies could have held up as well under the pressure of being
so displayed. Of course, as high-class geisha, O-sumi, O-Sato, and O-Kane were
accustomed to spending their lives on stage. O-sumi was probably the same
O-sumi who accompanied the second Tokugawa mission to the West in 1862 as
“companionship” for the thirty-eight delegates. As Shibusawa Hanako points
out, this is an early example of using national monies to “provide” for govern-
ment officials, later put in practice on a large scale as the “comfort women”
(ianfu) system during the Asia-Pacific War. Shibusawa Hanako, Shibusawa Eiichi,
Pari banpaku e (Tokyo: Kabushiki gaisha kokusho kankōkai, 1995), 87–89. See
also Yoshida Mitsukuni, ed., Bankokuhaku no Nihonkan (Tokyo: inax, 1990), 11.
58. Ayako Hotta-Lister provides a close examination of various aspects, including
economic, of Japanese participation in both major and minor overseas exhibi-
tions in The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910 (Richmond, U.K.: Japan Library,
1999).
59. See the discussion of this in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi,
13–18.
60. Machida Hisanari was born in Satsuma Domain to a very prominent samurai
household. He went at age nineteen to Edo to study kokugaku (native studies).
He was later called back to Satsuma and directed to study English and West-
ern matters. At the young age of twenty-six, he was appointed ōmetsuke (high
inspector). Machida was sent by his domain in 1865 to London, and in 1867 he
was asked to help with the Satsuma presentation in Paris. In 1868 the new gov-
ernment employed Machida in what was to become the Foreign Ministry. In
1870 he was moved from foreign affairs to the university with particular respon-
sibility for the division that represented the legacy of the Institute for the Study
of Barbarian Books. From the beginning, Machida promoted the establishment
of a permanent museum along the lines of the British and South Kensington
(Victoria and Albert) museums, and he headed various incarnations of exposi-
tion and museum bureaus. He was also a major private-art collector and a force
in beginning a program for government preservation of antiquities. He worked
with Tanaka Yoshio to bring the museum to Ueno Park, but clashed with Tanaka
regarding the museum’s direction. Machida was ousted as museum director in
1882 and replaced by Tanaka. Machida soon after departed from government
service and took Buddhist vows at a temple on Mount Hiei. Machida figures
prominently throughout much of tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyaku-
Notes to Chapter 1
• 234 •
nenshi; for initial background information, see pages 18, 24–28, and for his de-
parture, see pages 226–29. Kuresawa also discusses Machida in some detail in
Bijutsukan no seijigaku, 75–82. Christine Guth offers a short English-language
introduction to Machida’s career in Art, Tea, and Industry: Masuda Takashi and
the Mitsui Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 106–7.
61. Ueno, Hakubutsugakusha retsuden, 151.
62. Yamataka Nobutsura was born in Shizuoka Domain of samurai background,
and was appointed as a shogunal metsuke (inspector). In this capacity, he was
sent to the Paris exposition of 1867. Yamataka later joined the Meiji govern-
ment’s Ministry of Finance, and in 1872 he was appointed to the Exposition
Office to help prepare for Vienna. In 1876 he was placed in charge of general af-
fairs (shōmugakari) for the exhibition division, rising to a level of responsibility
just below Machida and Tanaka, in charge of the crafts division (kōgei). He be-
came director of the Ueno museum from 1885 to 1889. He later became director
of the Kyoto and Nara imperial museums in 1894. In addition, Yamataka was
a noted bunjinga (literati style) painter. tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan
hyakunenshi, 18, 70, 175, 177, 225, 229–30, 262. For a recent biography, see Shiba
Kōshi, Yamataka Nobutsura to sono shinzoku (Yokohama: Shiba Kōshi, 2005).
63. Sano Tsunetami is most widely known for his role in helping establish the Ha-
kuaisha, forerunner to the Japanese Red Cross. He was born in Saga Domain
of samurai background, and first went to Edo in 1837, for training in medicine
and the sciences. He returned to Saga several times, and in 1857 he got involved
in building up a navy. He was dispatched to the Paris exposition of 1867 on the
basis of his scientific expertise. In 1870 he was appointed by the Meiji govern-
ment to help establish a navy but was circulated out due to various conflicts.
Sano helped prepare for, and was sent to, the Vienna exposition of 1873. He
continued to serve the government, but in the 1880s he also became closely
involved with the establishment of the Hakuaisha. In addition, Sano was very
active in the art world: he was dispatched on an official survey of European art
schools and museums and drafted a report in 1875; he was president of the Ryū-
chikai and the Nihon bijutsu kyōkai (Japan Art Association); he helped insti-
tute a system of creating imperial household appointments and patronage for
artists. For a full biography of Sano, see Yoshikawa Ryūko, Nisseki no sōshisha
Sano Tsunetami (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2001). Various references to his
activities in the art and museum world can be found in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu
Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, such as on 19, 115–17, 122–28; and in Ellen Conant,
Steven D. Owyoung, and J. Thomas Rimer, eds., nihonga: Transcending the
Past; Japanese-Style Painting, 1868–1968 (New York: Weatherhill, 1995), 20, 22,
80–81, 92.
64. Ōkuma is so well-known that I will not include biographical details here. In
English, see Joyce Lebra-Chapman, Okuma Shigenobu: Statesman of Meiji Japan
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973). It is also worth noting
that both Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931), traveling as an advisor to Tokugawa
Notes to Chapter 1
• 235 •
Akitake and about to found a financial empire, and the future textile magnate
Godai Tomoatsu (1835–85), who managed the Satsuma displays, would return
to Japan stressing the importance of adopting the corporation form of business
organization. Nakaoka Tetsurō, Hakurankai (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 2005),
195–96.
65. For a close analysis of the problem of recruitment and continuity in the Meiji
bureaucracy, see Bernard S. Silberman, “Bureaucratization of the Meiji State:
The Problem of Authority and Legitimacy,” in Conflict in Modern Japanese His-
tory: The Neglected Tradition, edited by Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 421–30.
66. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 55–56; see also Timothy Mitchell, “Egypt at the
Exhibition,” in Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991),
1–33; and Hoffenberg, “Terrae Nullius? Australia and India at Overseas Exhibi-
tions,” in An Empire on Display, 129–65.
67. For a stimulating account of Mexico’s struggles for recognition at international
expositions, see Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a
Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
68. Russell Lewis, “Preface,” in Harris et al., Grand Illusions, xii.
69. Lewis, “Preface,” xii.
71. James W. Buel, ed., Louisiana and the Fair: An Exposition of the World, Its People,
and Their Achievements, vol. 4 (St. Louis: World’s Progress Publication Com-
pany, 1904), 1399–400.
72. See tkh, Seiki no saiten: Bankoku hakurankai no bijutsu (Tokyo: Tokyo Koku-
ritsu Hakubutsukan, 2004); tkh, Umi o watatta Meiji no bijutsu: Saiken! 1893-
nen Shikago Koronbusu sekai hakurankai (Tokyo: Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubu-
tuskan, 1997); and Tokyo-to Edo-Tokyo Hakubutsukan, Hakuran toshi Edo
Tokyo (Tokyo: Edo Tokyo Rekishi Zaidan, 1993). Reproductions of period ma-
terials related to expositions in the late nineteenth century can also be found in
Tsunoyama Yukihiro, ed., Uiin banpaku no kenkyū (shiryōhen) (Tokyo: Dōbōsha,
2000). Hino Eiichi notes that Arita tokkuri (servers for Japanese wine) were a
hit at the exposition in 1867, but they were used for lamp stands rather than for
their original purpose. Hino, “Bankoku hakurankai to Nihon no ‘bijutsu kōgei,’”
in Bankoku hakurankai no kenkyū, edited by Yoshida Mitsukuni (Kyoto: Shi-
bunkaku, 1986), 22.
73. Tokyo-to Edo-Tokyo Hakubutsukan, Hakuran toshi Edo Tokyo, 56. Léon Roches
(1809–1901), French envoy to Japan from 1864 to 1868, promoted trade between
France and Japan. Toward this end, he contributed to the construction of facto-
ries and similar projects.
74. Wagener, a German chemist who arrived in Tokyo in 1868, greatly contributed
to developments in the fields of chemistry and craft production in Japan. Ki-
tazawa, Me no shinden, 136; Hino, “Bankoku hakurankai to Nihon no ‘bijutsu
kōgei,’” 23.
Notes to Chapter 1
• 236 •
75. Kitazawa, Me no shinden, 136–37.
76. Nakaoka, Hakurankai, 200–205.
77. Satō Dōshin, “Rekishi shiryō to shite no korekushon,” in Kindai Gasetsu 2
(Tokyo: Meiji bijutsu gakkai, 1993), 44.
78. For further accounts of Japonisme, see Kodama Sanehide, Amerika no japoni-
zumu (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1995); Kokuritsu seiyō bijutsukan, ed., Japoni-
zumu ten zuroku (Tokyo: Kokuritsu seiyō bijutsukan, Kokusai kōryū kikin,
Nihon hōsō kyōkai, Yomiuri shimbun, 1988); and Salem Peabody and Essex
Museum, ed., A Pleasing Novelty: Bunkio Matsuo and the Japan Craze in Victorian
Salem (Salem, Mass.: Peabody and Essex Museum, 1993).
79. Hino, “Bankoku hakurankai to Nihon no ‘bijutsu kōgei,’” 24.
80. The call was circulated for the domestic exposition of 1872 that was intended
to prepare for the world’s fair in 1873. Hakurankai jimukyoku, “Uinfu (Ōchiri
no miyako) ni oite rai-1873-nen hakurankai o moyōsu shidai” (1872), quoted by
Hino, “Bankoku hakurankai to Nihon no ‘bijutsu kōgei,’” 24.
81. For visual illustration of such tendencies, see the official catalogue for the Tokyo
National Museum’s exhibit from 1997, tkh, Umi o watatta Meiji no bijutsu: Sai-
ken! 1893-nen Shikago-Koronbusu Sekai Hakurankai. This trend is explicitly ana-
lyzed on pages 93–94.
82. Pierre Lehmann also notes the strong resistance on the part of many in or from
the West to non-Westerners refusing the role of the Other. Thus the unkind
comments about Japanese in Western dress appearing as monkeys. Lehmann,
The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850–1905 (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1978).
83. Kinoshita, Bijutsu to iu misemono, 16–34; see also Nakamura Denzaburō, “Meiji
Sculpture,” in Japanese Arts and Crafts in the Meiji Era, edited by Uyeno Naoteru
(Tokyo: Pan-Pacific Press, 1958).
84. For a detailed account of the tumultuous fate of Buddhism during the Meiji
period, see James Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs: Buddhism and Its Persecution
in Meiji Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
85. Kinoshita, Bijutsu to iu misemono, 29–31.
86. Kinoshita, Bijutsu to iu misemono, 30.
87. For Takamura Kōun’s own recollection on the making of this statue, see Taka-
mura, Bakumatsu ishin kaikodan (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), 372–77.
88. See Hino’s discussion of the classification of Japanese works as art in 1893, “Ban-
koku hakurankai to Nihon no ‘bijutsu kōgei,’” 31–33, and in 1900, 34–38.
89. Yoshida, Bankokuhaku no Nihonkan, 22.
90. Umesao Tadao, “Chi” no korekutaatachi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1989), 237–38.
91. For a critical overview, see Yoshimi, Hakurankai no seijigaku, 122–44. For repro-
ductions of primary materials related to domestic expositions, see the invalu-
able series published by the Meiji Bunken Shiryō Kankōkai, Meiji zenki sangyō
hattatsu shi shiryō, 110 vols. (Tokyo: Meiji bunken shiryō kankōkai, 1973).
92. Satō describes the relationship as a “two-tiered transformer” for the economy
Notes to Chapter 1
• 237 •
in “Meiji no shokusan kōgyō seisaku to Ōbei no Nihon bijutsu korekushon,” a
report presented as a member of the Tokyo Kokuritsu Bunkazai research group
(unpublished, date unknown), 4.
93. The Cultural Bureau (Bunkachō) explicitly models categories, in particular with
regard to the case of Japanese art. See Bunkachō, ed., Wagakuni no bunka to
bunka gyōsei (Tokyo: Kabushiki gaisha gyōsei, 1988), 103–31.
94. Detailed accounts are offered by Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 54–71;
and tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 49–60.
95. Currency denominations followed the New Currency Act of 1871, which estab-
lished the yen, sen, and ri. The transitional form of ryō, equivalent to yen, was
also still employed at the time. One yen equals one hundred sen, and one sen
equals ten ri. At the time, one shō (1.8 liters) of rice cost about 42 sen.
96. Proposal quoted in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 49–50.
97. Proposal from 1872, quoted in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunen-
shi, 49.
98. Quoted in tkh, Tokyo Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan hyakunenshi, 49.
100. Yoshimi, Hakurankai no seijigaku, 122–23.
101. Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel, vol. 1 (New York: Double-
day & McClure Company, 1899), 331.
103. Stephen Vlastos, “Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 1868–1885,” in The
Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century, edited by Marius B.
Jansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 398.
104. Satō, “Meiji no shokusan kōgyō seisaku to ōbei no nihon bijutsu korekushon,” 5.
105. Hakurankai annai: Daigokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai sōsetsu (Tokyo: Kin-
kōdō, 1903), 1. In everything from conception to timing, domestic expositions
were seen by the government as integrally connected to Japanese participation
in world’s fairs. See, for example, Hakurankai annai, 2–3.
106. Information on the evolution of the national expositions is from Hakurankai
annai, 2–7. See also Noriko Aso, “New Illusions: The Emergence of a Discourse
on Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts, 1868–1945” (PhD diss., University of
Chicago, 1997); and Yoshimi, Hakurankai no seijigaku.
107. Hakurankai annai, frontispiece map.
108. Buel, Louisiana and the Fair, vol. 5, 1692.
109. Daigokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai kinen shashinchō offered a particularly rich
visual record of the exposition (Osaka: Gyokumeikwan, 1903).
110. See Neil Harris, “Memory and the White City,” and Wim de Wit, “Building an
Illusion: The Design of the World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Harris et al.,
Grand Illusions.
111. The seven-volume series Daigokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai kinen shashin-
chō provides a rich set of images of various aspects of the exposition. See, for
example, plate 2 of the Bazaar of Nagoya (Nagoya-kan; English translation as
Notes to Chapter 1
• 238 •
given in the original), and plates 7–8 of the Formosa Building (Taiwan-kan) in
vol. 1, 13–14, 19. See also plate 7 of the Bazaar of Osaka in vol. 3, 41; and plate 11
for the Bazaar of Kyoto in vol. 4, 10.
112. Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993), 19.
113. Hakurankai annai, 95.
116. Hakurankai annai, 95–97.
117. See Hakurankai annai, 63.
118. Matsuda Kyōko, Teikoku no shisen: Hakurankai to ibunka hyōshō (Tokyo: Furu-
kawa kōbunkan, 2003), 76–77.
121. Matsuda, Teikoku no shisen, 82–118.
122. Hakurankai annai, 63, 97–99.
123. For a discussion of conceptualizing a nation as a “collective actor,” see Craig
Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2007), 48.
124. Accounts of this pavilion may be found in Arazato Kinbuku, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro,
and the Ryūkyū shinpōsha, Okinawa no hyakunen, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Taihei, 1971),
198–200; Murata Yūjirō, “Chinese Nationalism and Modern Japan: Imitation
and Resistance in the Formation of National Subjects,” in Japanese Civilization
in the Modern World XVI: Nation, State, Empire, edited by T. Umesao, T. Fuji-
tani, and E. Kurimoto, and translated by Noriko Aso (Osaka: Japanese National
Museum of Ethnology, 2000); and Ōta Masahide, Okinawa no minshū ishiki
(Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1987), 289–95.
125. Murata, “Chinese Nationalism and Modern Japan: Imitation and Resistance in
the Formation of National Subjects,” 39, footnote 9.
126. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 97.
127. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 236.
129. Quoted by Shiina, Meiji hakubutsukan kotohajime, 60–61.
130. Fujiwara Masato, ed., Meiji zenki sangyō hattatsu shi shiryō, kangyō hakurankai
shiryō 6: Daigokai naikoku kangyō hakurankai Tokyo shuppin renmeikai hōkoku
(Tokyo: Meiji bunken shiryō kankōkai, 1973), 63–64. See also Hakurankai
annai, 167–71.
131. Fujiwara, Meiji zenki sangyō hattatsu shi shiryō, kangyō hakurankai shiryō 6,
64–67.
132. Hakurankai annai, frontispiece map.
133. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 69–75.
134. In the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods, rest days were configured in a differ-
ent manner, but from the 1870s on, the idea of designating at least a portion of
Notes to Chapter 1
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A STUDY OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

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STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

Figure I.1: Visitors to the Shōsōin Imperial Treasures Special Exhibit 2

These acknowledgments are just the briefest sketch: there is really

A grand staircase anchors the center of a stately, high-ceilinged

atmosphere was captured by Noma Seiroku (1902–66), a member of the

1. Stating the Public

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A STUDY OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

Duke University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

Figure I.1: Visitors to the Shōsōin Imperial Treasures Special Exhibit 2

These acknowledgments are just the briefest sketch: there is really

A grand staircase anchors the center of a stately, high-­ceilinged

atmosphere was captured by Noma Seiroku (1902–66), a member of the

1. Stating the Public

You might also like

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A grand staircase anchors the center of a stately, high-ceilinged