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| ISBN-13: | 9780822354291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/27/2013 |
| Series: | Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society Series |
| Pages: | 316 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Noriko Aso is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Read an Excerpt
Public Properties
MUSEUMS IN IMPERIAL JAPAN
By NORIKO ASO
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5413-0
CHAPTER 1
STATING THE PUBLIC
In 1872, the Meiji state established its first museum. Inspired by the national, encyclopedic, Enlightenment institutions for display represented by the British Museum and the Smithsonian, the museum was understood as a means of priming the Japanese population to participate in the government's ambitious plans for transforming domestic industry and stimulating economic growth. The museum was also seen as a foreign concept, despite the rich and diverse forms of domestic exhibition that had flourished in Japan well before the second half of the nineteenth century. Such domestic precedents played an important role in the actual translation of museums into a Japanese context; nevertheless, contemporary concerns drove the project from the beginning.
One of the earliest indications of Japanese contact with the Western concept of the museum was an issue of Nederlandsch Magazijn from 1853 that described various European examples found within the holdings of the Institute for the Study of Barbarian Books (Bansho Shirabesho). Whether much—or anything—was made of this information is unknown. The first Japanese descriptions of museums are contained in reports and diaries by students sent overseas (some by the institute) and members of Japanese missions to the West before and after the Meiji Restoration. The British Museum and the Smithsonian loomed large in such records, which invariably noted their monumental architecture, wide range of exhibits, and such curiosities as Egyptian mummies and live crocodiles. Members of the mission to the United States in 1860, for example, referred to the U.S. Patent Office and its museum-like displays variously as hakubutsukan (now standard for "museum," literally "building for spreading knowledge through artifacts"), kikaikyoku (technology bureau), igakukan (medical-studies institution), meiki homotsu shuzo no tokoro (site for the storage of famous instruments and treasures), and patento ofuyun (patent office). The Smithsonian in its turn was referred to as a kyuri no kan (building for science), hyakka chozo no tokoro (place for storing myriad things), shokoku no chinbutsu wo atsumetaru tokoro (place where rare things from many nations are gathered), denki kigu nado o bichi aru yakusho (government site where electrical instruments and the like are located), and hozo (treasury). Variants at the time also included hakubutsusho ("site" rather than "building" for artifacts), hyakubutsukan (building for myriad objects), and shoshu kobutsu ari no kan (building for various kinds of antiquities).
The concrete quality of the phrasing as well as the multiplicity of terminology provide a window into how Japanese observers began to process the potential significance of museums. Their terminology further reflected the diversity of types and practices to be found among these Western institutions at the time. Museological institutions were in flux rather than fixed throughout the nineteenth century: "The process of [museum] formation was as complex as it was protracted, involving, most obviously and immediately, a transformation of the practices of earlier collecting institutions and the creative adaptation of other new institutions—the international exposition and the department store, for example—which developed alongside the museum." The museum form was neither singular nor universal even in the West: hotly debated matters included orientation toward the natural sciences, the arts, or both; prioritization of research or educational goals; collection and display practices; public outreach and access; funding models; and relations with the state. The Smithsonian was itself not even fifteen years old when the members of the mission visited in 1860. Accordingly, the eventual translation of the museum form to Japanese shores was not a prefabricated affair but was marked by ongoing engagement with an institution that had just come into its own, and was still under construction.
Several factors influenced the founding of the first modern Japanese museum. After touching on Tokugawa display culture to highlight the major change represented by the Meiji state's entry into this field, I examine how government participation in world's fairs and sponsorship of domestic expositions were intertwined with the decision to establish a permanent exhibition site. Exposition experience also revised expectations for the government museum, which at first focused on natural science and technology but later came to place increasing weight on domestic arts and crafts. All this change and growth in government museums was unified, however, by the goal of calling into being, nationalizing, and ordering a modern Japanese viewing public.
A Meiji Exhibitionary Complex
Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) is generally credited with the popularization and standardization of the use of the term hakubutsukan to refer to museums. A minor participant in the mission to the United States in 1860 and translator for the mission to Europe in 1862, Fukuzawa had many opportunities to see firsthand the great museums of the West. It was in the course of discussing translation issues during the mission in 1862 that the descriptive accounts of the participants began to coalesce around the terms hakubutsukan (museum) and hakurankai (exposition), both beginning with the Chinese character haku (to disseminate). Fukuzawa's Conditions in the West (Seiyo jijo), published in 1866, brought the fruits of these missions back to a popular Japanese audience in the form of an encyclopedia of concepts, practices, and institutions. His entry on museums begins: "A place established for the purpose of showing to people the products, antiquities and rarities of the world to disseminate knowledge." As Shiina Noritaka points out, the concrete examples of museums provided by Fukuzawa—mineralogical museums, zoological museums, zoos, botanical gardens, and medical museums—suggest that his basic model was the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, established in 1626. Museums were defined by Fukuzawa as an element of a progressive, scientific, and pragmatic Enlightenment project. Accordingly, Western museums that showcased nonutilitarian art and backward-looking history—for example, the Louvre—did not merit mention in his canonical description.
While Shiina Noritaka argues that many early Japanese observers largely understood Western museums as storehouses and treasuries, not as exhibition facilities, Fukuzawa's account from 1866 emphatically underscored museums' institutional goal of display as a form of mass education. Museums were to be conceptually distinguished from other kinds of collections by their public function of advancing popular knowledge. Moreover, Shiina views the move to make museums and expositions into linguistic and conceptual cognates (both beginning with haku) as something of a mistake, indicating the inability of Japanese at the time to perceive their differing origins, practices, and long-term goals. Museums were permanent and academic, while expositions were temporary, for profit, and more entertaining than scholarly.
Yet the apparent confusion between museums and expositions that characterized Japanese engagement with these forms through the 1860s and 1870s can also be read as a sign that Fukuzawa and his colleagues were reaching toward the underlying affinity between these pillars of the nineteenth-century Western "exhibitionary complex." Tony Bennett argues that European museums and expositions were spaces carefully crafted in the nineteenth century to call into being a particular relationship between modern states and their subjects: "The capacity to effect an inner transformation that is attributed to culture reflects a different problematic of government, one which, rather than increasing the formal regulatory powers of the state, aims to 'work at a distance,' achieving its objectives by inscribing these within the self-activating and self-regulating capacities of individuals." No one would argue that the Meiji state was shy in making use of and expanding its coercive powers. Bennett certainly does not claim this for British governance in the nineteenth century. Rather, he explores how Western governmentality expanded its powers during this period by "reforming" a hitherto relatively untapped resource: plebeian ways of seeing. So, too, did the Meiji state.
Popular Precedents in the tokugawa Period
However, the new government did not operate within a vacuum. Tokugawa exhibition practices offered important precedents for a Meiji exhibitionary complex. Rich and varied, Tokugawa popular display culture included mise-mono (marvelous spectacles encompassing freak shows to foreign curiosities), kaicho (unveilings of sacred icons and objects; see figure 1.1), and bussankai (displays of man-made and natural products). The third of these categories, the relatively academic bussankai, represent the most direct domestic antecedent to modern museums.
Building on a long tradition of engagement with Chinese texts on medicine and other aspects of the natural world, as well as a limited number of Western (rangaku) scientific texts that entered Tokugawa Japan via Dutch traders, systematic study of the natural world rapidly grew in scope and sophistication from the sixteenth century onward. Bussankai, also known as yakuhinkai (medicinal-product gatherings), honzokai (medicinal-plant gatherings), or hakubutsukai (natural-science gatherings), were opportunities for gentlemen-scholars to display the results of their extensive collecting and research activities. Such exhibitions were often accompanied by the publication of detailed catalogues and works on agricultural and mechanical innovations.
Individuals exhibited from the early eighteenth century, relatively small-scale bussankai were held in Osaka starting in 1751, and the first large-scale event of this nature took place in 1757 at Yushima Seido, a Confucian temple in Edo, near what is now Ueno Park. Sponsored by Tamura Ransui (1718–77), exhibitions were held thereafter at Yushima on a regular, almost annual, basis. By the close of the Tokugawa period, more than three hundred bussankai had been staged not only in major cities such as Edo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagoya but also in various domains throughout the archipelago. Moreover, a broad network for collecting specimens was constructed so that, by the 1760s, bussankai could boast artifacts from overseas in addition to from all over Japan. The bussankai at Yushima in 1762, organized by Hiraga Gennai (1728–79), played a significant role in regularizing this network, which yielded for the exhibit approximately thirteen hundred artifacts gathered at thirty-three collection stations, with transport fees covered by the sponsors.
The numbers and nature of viewers also rapidly grew and became more diverse. Early bussankai were generally by invitation only, composed of small gatherings of like-minded intellectuals. While motivated by questions of societal advancement, they did not see their exhibits as a direct means of popular education. However, particularly from the time of Hiraga Gennai's bussankai in 1762, the larger-scale events directly appealed to a much broader audience. Notices were distributed, tickets placed on sale, and crowds composed of both the samurai elite and townspeople flocked to see the advertised curiosities, rarities, and innovations. Bussankai became tightly woven into the lively commoner entertainment culture that flourished in the urban centers of Tokugawa Japan.
This commoner culture was shaped both by ancient beliefs and specific developments in Tokugawa politics and economics. First, while it is not surprising that kaicho were associated with temples and shrines, the carnivalesque misemono and educational bussankai were also closely associated with sacred spaces, albeit in the latter case with comparatively academic Confucian temples. Well before and throughout the Tokugawa period, entertainment districts were often located by temples and shrines. People on their way to pay their religious respects at Senso Temple of Edo, for example, would not have seen it as the least bit incongruous to pass through the peep shows, teahouses, and displays of curiosities of Asakusa, nor would pleasure seekers feel their spirits dampened by proximity to holiness. This long-standing spatial logic was important: according to the medieval historian Amino Yoshihiko, temples and shrines constituted an "unconnected" (muen, literally "without ties" to this world) sphere in which high and low were intimately intertwined by virtue of both being Other. Waterways and bridges, archetypal borders sacred in their muen liminality, were also often entertainment areas. On a more pragmatic level, such sites did not fall under the jurisdiction of ordinary government administration and were thus magnets for all that challenged the boundaries of the regular and regulated. In fact, Amino argued that muen space represented a form of public (ko) that explicitly belonged to society as distinct from the state, one characterized by fluid, ephemeral, and horizontal ties and grounded in acts of exchange—religious, convivial, sexual, and commercial.
Second, the growth and development of misemono, kaicho, and bussankai owed much to the remarkable urbanization that took place during the Tokugawa period: by the end of the seventeenth century, nearly 15 percent of the Japanese population was living in cities, in contrast to a mere 3 percent a century earlier. Shogunal policies, most notably the requirement that members of the military samurai class move from villages to towns and cities or surrender their status, and the demand that domainal lords and their retinues attend the shogun in Edo in alternate years, swiftly led to the creation of large and captive consumer markets in urban areas, extensive land-transport networks, and a complex, arguably protocapitalist economy. These in turn fueled the development of a commercial entertainment complex of publication, performance, and exhibition, anchored by, though not exclusive to, the metropolitan centers of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Peter Kornicki particularly emphasizes the degree to which display became thoroughly commercialized in the Tokugawa period: "It made commodities out of works of art, out of what had been religious icons, or even out of people." We can add to the list the scholarly collections of natural specimens on view at bussankai.
This landscape made it all but unthinkable for the Tokugawa shogunate to capitalize directly on popular exhibition culture. This is not to say that individuals or even academies affiliated with the state never sponsored exhibits: there are records of shogunal schools as well as officials, particularly physicians, involved in the respectably educational field of bussankai. However, the very principles of Tokugawa rule worked against regularized state engagement with popular exhibitionary forms. The state did not want or need to mobilize commoner support; rather, in M. E. Berry's succinct phrasing, "what the Tokugawa wanted from the public was disengagement and demobilization, not mass allegiance or populist activism." The primary role of the state was to enforce a vertical order, concentrated on regulating elites. In direct response to the political, economic, and social tumult of the sixteenth century, the shogunate systematically drained governance of charisma and personal passion and cloaked its paramount power by exercising it through intermediate authorities, from the top tier of domainal lords through to village heads.33 The Tokugawa order did not demand direct loyalty to the shogun; it required obedience to one's immediate superior. Thus, the shogun's body was hidden from the gaze of commoners; his "voice was silent, for rarely did any shogun put his seal to laws or public correspondence," and "even indirect efforts to project the shogunal person into a public arena—as the sponsor of festivities, amnesties, almsgiving—remained unusual."
In contrast, both the intimate and popular incarnations of bussankai illustrate the expansive and active voluntary social networks of Tokugawa Japan that Eiko Ikegami argues "came closer to signifying one of the ancient root meanings of publicness, that of common spheres constructed by the association of private individuals." Born of and spurring far-ranging academic collection and research, consciously working through visual displays to improve social welfare, and actively reaching out to popular, not just elite, audiences, bussankai appear to uncannily anticipate the publicness of modern museum work. Of course, the Tokugawa period is often labeled "early modern" precisely because such uncanny resemblances are not difficult to find. However, Berry argues against both falling into the trap of hailing anything in the "premodern" that resembles the "modern" as "early," and the trap of rejecting resemblances as mere anachronistic projection. As Berry suggests in the case of the (loaded) concept nation, we can examine the antecedent set by bussankai for modern museums in Japan in light of the comparative possibilities it opens up.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Public Properties by NORIKO ASO. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Stating the Public 13
2. Imperial Properties 63
3. Colonial Properties 95
4. The Private Publics of Ohara, Shibusawa, and Yanagi 127
5. Consuming Publics 169
Epilogue 203
Notes 223
Bibliography 279
Index 297