Organizer and Chair: Noriko Aso, Portland State University
Discussant: Leslie Pincus, University of Michigan
Our panel examines three moments in which the nation was put on display during Japan’s era of nation-state building and industrialization, moments when "political" and "cultural" concerns were intertwined to produce an idealized Japanese modernity. The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, the emergence of Japanese department stores in late Meiji and Taisho, and the canceled 1940 Tokyo Olympics all provide insights into the nature of a visual and geographically located political economy. That is, a nationalized space was provided for the placement, viewing and exchange of objects, shaping the way in which they were made to bear value. Industrial technology (or its lack), arts and crafts, and athletic bodies were all deployed to measure not only Japan’s success in responding to the demands of modernity, but also the extent to which such a response was still indigenously "Japanese."
Our emphasis on the visual and located nature of these objects points both to the specificity of the physical sites of power which determined the channels of exchange, and to the importance of visual mediation in making objects and interactions bear meaning and value. In so doing, we hope to complicate our understanding of modernity—to suggest that there is more than one way and one place in which to be modern.
Angus Lockyer, Stanford University
Spring 1867 found Japan in Paris, in the person of Tokugawa Akitake, the fourteen-year-old brother to the last shogun, and the Bakufu’s official representative to the Paris Exposition Universelle. The last year of the Tokugawa shogunate thus saw the first endorsement by a Japanese government of exhibitions as one of the highest forms of statecraft. The Bakufu party, however, found itself somewhat at odds with the norms of international diplomacy, and the visual and other technologies which allowed political claims to be advanced diplomatically. As had its predecessors, the 1867 Exposition Universelle sought to illustrate a general theme of universal progress through taxonomic analysis, with the nation-state as object. Yet within this taxonomy, Japan’s presence was intermittent, the gaps and ambivalences in its display giving evidence of a backwardness which could only place it as sideshow on the farthest edge of the Orient. Moreover, the problem was compounded in that the Bakufu’s representation of its authority was challenged by Satsuma, claiming an independent status as "King of the Ryukyus," and thus generating a multiple Japanese presence at the exhibition which was to prove confusing for European observers, for whom nationality was marked by clear boundaries and single authority.
The exhibition thus highlights the potential and the ambivalence for both the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate and the exhibitionary form. While the international area afforded new possibilities and models for any putative national government, it also insisted on a particular place for every nation, and disdain for any nation which could or would not conform to its Eurocentric norms of self-presentation and display. In addition, it served to highlight the conflicts and contradictions of a domestic political order in which issues of sovereignty and political economy were as yet only in the process of being resolved.
Noriko Aso, Portland State University
Industrial expositions, government product display centers (kankoba) and department stores all contributed to a redefining of relations between consumers and commodities in prewar Japan. Modern Japanese department stores, in particular, brought innovations first introduced through domestic expositions to a new, "spectacular" level. Mitsukoshi’s 1904 "Department Store Declaration" heralded the institution’s ambitions to define "taste"—and an entire lifestyle—for the emerging urban, white-collar, middle and upper middle classes. Other stores soon joined in the race.
In contrast to Edo Period practice, when clerks chose samples from among the various goods in stock to please a customer waiting out front, department store customers could "interact" with commodities free from the mediation of the store clerk. Glass cases and other display techniques were marshaled to animate the otherwise silent commodities, so they could call out to the casual passerby. New store spaces were designed so that customers could move about freely, distinctions between sections such as "stationery" and "toys" kept fluid in order to encourage leisurely wandering, and to simulate a brand name lifestyle that was both modan (modern) and reassuringly "traditional."
In my presentation, I will examine the development of prewar Japanese department stores in light of the transformations mentioned above, particularly with respect to the tension between "modernity" and "tradition" in the appeals made by the department stores to their clientele.
Sandra Collins, University of Chicago
The 1940 Tokyo Olympic Games did not take place. From 1936 until the Japanese Government forfeited the right to host the Games in 1938, however, Japan agressively planned the first Olympic Games to be held in Asia. The planning documents for the 1940 Games reveal the ways in which the Olympic Games were being used to define and commemorate a certain national identity for 1930s Japan. This presentation will analyze the "Torch, Shrine and His Majesty’s Voice" debates that emerged during the planning stages of the Tokyo Games. In particular, this presentation will explore the controversy within the Japanese state over which images should define the Japanese past and how these images should then be mobilized to commemorate the Japanese nation through the Tokyo Games. These contested images provide traces of the imagined contradictions between tradition and modernity and core Japanese and modern Olympic symbols that plagued the failed 1940 Tokyo Olympic Games.