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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Fujitani, Takashi. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Main Argument: Fujitani says that he "want[s] to remember the instant of historical rupture, the moment of the imperial institution's new emergence in modern Japan" (4). He argues that "the strong sense of national consciousness and identity that has characterized the modern Japanese is less a product of natural circumstances that can be traced back in time to the geological formation of the Japanese archipelago than of strategically motivated cultural policies pursued by Japan's modern ruling elites" (5). In sum, "the invention of Japan's modern national ceremonies was, quite simply, a response to specific domestic and international political forces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," and "however limited the Meiji regime might have been in producing a uniformity of belief or a uniformly self-disciplining population, its successes were considerable. Moreover, the imperial pageants as well as other elements in the regime's folklore certainly succeeded in producing a new sense of national simultaneity—a sharing of time among people who could not possibly have had face-to-face contact" (15, 29).
Historiographical Engagement: Geertz; Foucault; Durkheim, all of whom are wrong to varying degrees
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Fujitani outlines several strategies by which the Meiji oligarchs and elites sought to, as it were, create Japanese: not only speech and words, but also "mnemonic sites," which Fujitani defines as "material vehicles of meaning that either helped construct a memory of an emperor-centered national past that, ironically, had never been known or served as symbolic markers for commemorations of present national accomplishments and the possibilities of the future" (11). The first of these was ritual, both rituals performed by Shinto practitioners but also national holidays and rituals performed by the emperor himself, and most importantly "the great imperial pageants that brought the emperor, his family, and the military and civil members of his regime directly before the masses" (13). The second mnemonic site "is, in fact, the material sign on the physical landscape" of the country itself as it was transformed under these pressures (17), and in particular the two capitals of Kyoto and Tokyo and Ise Shrine, which were reconfigured to serve as meaning-making sites in Japan's culture of nationalism. According to Fujitani, these transformations were part and parcel of a transformation in the attitudes of the rulers toward the ruled: "As I would describe it, they hoped to reconstitute the people into more than simply objects of rule, so that they could become knowledgeable and self-disciplined subjects in the dual Foucauldian sense—that is, subjects who were not only subjected to 'control and dependence"'but who were also subjects possessed of their own identity by a 'conscience or self-knowledge'" (19). The policies that this transformation unleashed reflected an assessment of the masses as educable, and was conceived of in the positive sense as enlightening. In this sense, the Meiji Restoration was a true revolution, "for like its French counterpart the Japanese revolution set off a double movement of the "political." By this I mean that while it expanded, once and for all, the shape of the polity so that government became, most preeminently, that of the nation-state, at the same time the Meiji Revolution, propelled by a faith in human plasticity and a new civilizing mission for the state, extended the state's reach into the very souls of the people" (20). Fujitani uses the concept of the "folklore of a regime" both "the historical contingency of the national culture that was imposed by those in power and that now tends to be assumed as natural and timeless" and "to get at the meanings of rites, symbols, customs, and practices, so that we are not left with a simple functionalist interpretation of the culture of the nation" (23). Moreover, the doubled ocular relationship these pageants instituted and " the image of the seeing emperor facilitated the production of the nation-state as a bordered space of visibility within which the people could imagine themselves as objects of observation" (25). Thus Fujitani disagrees with the kozaha and everyone else who see the monarchy as anything but thoroughly modern, although he also parts ways with Foucault in that both surveillance and monarchical power arose in Japan at the same time in Fujitani's view. Fujitani's position (that the monarchy played an important role in Japan's modernization) is thus superficially similar to John Whitney Hall's, except that Hall at base shared the Marxist critique of the "monarchy = feudal" critics and Hall was not critical of the monarchy or the nation-state.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Suck it, Barthes; "such views of Tokyo…obstruct an understanding of Japan's capital as a city with a history in which its center has indeed been filled with meaning by a conscious governing elite. …In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it too became a place filled with significant monuments clustering around the core of the capital; and it too began to serve as a central arena for the performance of dramatic national ceremonials" (33). Shockingly to our minds, the Meiji oligarchs neglected Tokyo almost wholly for at least the first dozen years of their regime, and by the mid 1870s its appearance--dilapidated, depopulated, and burned out--was generally dismal. This neglect is linked to the fact that for the oligarchies the idea of an imperial progress and transferring the capital were inseparable; the emperor needed to be put into motion to mobilize the populace under the emperor. Thus these progresses "were often the first opportunities to diffuse the symbols and emblems that became common elements in the idiom of modern Japanese public rituals," but more importantly, the "magnificence of the progresses demonstrated that the emperor was at the center of societal significance" (52). The progresses also "provided the first opportunities for the Meiji regime to make real and believable the emperor's ability to see and know the land, the people, and the borders of the nation" (ibid). Thus archaic precedents were mobilized to serve modernity and the new nation-state. At the same time, debate over the status of Kyoto eventually settled it as "the dominant sign of Japan's past" while Tokyo served as that "of its present and future" (66). The regime drew on both to provide appropriate ritual settings after its attitude towards Tokyo changed completely in the early 1880s. Thus by 1889, "the new perception of Tokyo as a symbolic and ritual center had led to massive transformations in the capital's core. …Through numerous and spectacular imperial and civic processions between the political core and its outlying civic and military regions, Tokyo's center began to exert a strong symbolic centripetal pull on the whole of the city and, in time, upon the entire nation" (82). Having harmonized the two capitals into a national narrative and prepared them as ritual stages, the great progresses could be brought to an end, particularly since symbols not requiring the emperor's physical presence were beginning to be mobilized. The oligarchs also physically altered the landscape of the country through the building of shrines to various historical figures who were transformed into leading lights in the narrative of the country's nationalist, emperor-centered past.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Fujitani outlines three dimensions to the relationship between pageants and political power: 1) "the new imperial pageants were performed at least as much for a global as a domestic audience, and they helped construct an internationally comprehensible framework for understanding and carrying out diplomacy;" 2) "the particulars of the rites evolved with an eye turned toward the special requirements of the Japanese political order;" and 3) "these new public ceremonials helped fashion an image of the monarch as Overseer" (98, 100, 104). Fujitani reviews the principal imperial pageants of the Meiji era (promulgation of the constitution, silver imperial wedding anniversary, crown prince's wedding, military review of 1906, Meiji funeral) and concludes that "through these public displays the emperor's regime asserted that its government brought national well-being, that it was at the forefront of the modern world, and that it was thus justified in its rule" (106).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the development of the theory of "the emperor's two bodies" and the gendering thereof. Fujitani argues that "Japanese thinkers in the late 19th and 20thC wrote as if European and Japanese ideas about kingship were similar, and in so doing participated in the construction of the modern emperor's dualism" (158). One of the emperor's bodies was mystified, while the other was rendered human, both being necessary to construct a "modern" monarchy. It was also necessary for modernity that at least one of those bodies be gendered male, both to fit in with European models and as a function of the ideology of "direct imperial rule," which had to be masculine as it was then understood. Also, "while inventing a masculinized, militarized, and dynamic figure for the emperor as political actor, the makers of the modern monarchy also fashioned a new public image for the women of the imperial household as serving and nurturing, as representations of the ryôsai keno (good wife, wise mother) ideal" (180). Crucially, Fujitani notes, "the subordination of these women within the imperial family took place, then, not through their withdrawal from public view, but rather by their becoming more visible than any imperial consorts had ever been in all of previous Japanese history" (ibid). These maneuvers resonated with "the masculinization of politics in its conventional and limited sense of governance" (191). Thus "it is possible to conceive of the bodies of the imperial household's members and the space of modern politics as mutually engendering (in both meanings of the word) cultural sites" (ibid). Men were marked as men by facial hair, short haircuts, and the franchise, while "the state systematically excluded women from political activities and prescribed guidelines for their physical appearance" (ibid). Thus politics were closed to women as a masculine realm at the same time that the emperor became the paradigmatic man and the women of the imperial household became paragons of womanhood.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Fujitani looks at these pageants from the bottom up, attempting to guague "how and to what degree these inventions were received by the people" (201). Fujitani argues that "for the great majority of the people who were becoming Japanese, then, participation in these modern mass national ceremonies was a part of the process of acquiring a sense of national community, not an outcome of it" (214). Moreover, participation "enabled the people scattered through the country to experience their communion with the monarchy and with one another," which they did by journeying to the capital, participating in local ceremonies, and by buying commemorative objects and building commemorative structures, physically marking the landscape with memory (213). Finally, although the masses were mobilized through the active agency of a number of kinds of elites and organization, it is also important to note that the conflation of these pageants with "the forms of the familiar community festival facilitated mass participation in new celebrations of the emerging national community," confusing the age and tradition of one with the other thereby (223). From this perspective, the custom of traveling somewhere, particularly to Tokyo or Ise, to participate in such events resonates with the Tokugawa practices of pilgrimage-tourism, revealing the persistence of the popular folklore that contested or misunderstood the new narratives, manifesting as bizarre and unruly--undisciplined--behavior.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples Fujitani assess the Meiji state as a "memory machine," which produced both memory (of its fabricated past) and forgetting (of its fabricated past). In the postwar period, however, the same ceremonials did not carry the same weight of tradition, in keeping with the transformation of the emperor into a head of state who reigns but does not rule. Similarly, the imperial gaze became more ambiguously gendered during the post-Meiji years, and in the postwar period it was shattered entirely: the people now gaze upon the emperor, rather than the other way around, epitomized by the tabloid treatment that the imperial family receives. These developments, however, have not similarly weakened "the dominant narratives of the nation that were created in the time of Japan's modernity" (245).
Critical assessment: It's honestly surprising to me that Fujitani did his PhD here at Berkeley, as there is far too much theory in this book for it to represent a Berkeley approach; one might say that it smacks of the Harootunian. That said, there are a few points where I can hear Irv Scheiner in the text--as when Fujitani talks about things being "necessary but not sufficient," a locution I have heard multiple times in my Japan seminars--and I think Fujitani's work represents a really excellent synthesis of the Berkeley approach with theory. This is one of the few works of history I've read that I wish I had written, and all in all, it's an excellent book.
Further reading: Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People's Emperor, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith
Meta notes: Very monarchy. Much splendid. So pageantry.
Main Argument: Fujitani says that he "want[s] to remember the instant of historical rupture, the moment of the imperial institution's new emergence in modern Japan" (4). He argues that "the strong sense of national consciousness and identity that has characterized the modern Japanese is less a product of natural circumstances that can be traced back in time to the geological formation of the Japanese archipelago than of strategically motivated cultural policies pursued by Japan's modern ruling elites" (5). In sum, "the invention of Japan's modern national ceremonies was, quite simply, a response to specific domestic and international political forces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," and "however limited the Meiji regime might have been in producing a uniformity of belief or a uniformly self-disciplining population, its successes were considerable. Moreover, the imperial pageants as well as other elements in the regime's folklore certainly succeeded in producing a new sense of national simultaneity—a sharing of time among people who could not possibly have had face-to-face contact" (15, 29).
Historiographical Engagement: Geertz; Foucault; Durkheim, all of whom are wrong to varying degrees
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Fujitani outlines several strategies by which the Meiji oligarchs and elites sought to, as it were, create Japanese: not only speech and words, but also "mnemonic sites," which Fujitani defines as "material vehicles of meaning that either helped construct a memory of an emperor-centered national past that, ironically, had never been known or served as symbolic markers for commemorations of present national accomplishments and the possibilities of the future" (11). The first of these was ritual, both rituals performed by Shinto practitioners but also national holidays and rituals performed by the emperor himself, and most importantly "the great imperial pageants that brought the emperor, his family, and the military and civil members of his regime directly before the masses" (13). The second mnemonic site "is, in fact, the material sign on the physical landscape" of the country itself as it was transformed under these pressures (17), and in particular the two capitals of Kyoto and Tokyo and Ise Shrine, which were reconfigured to serve as meaning-making sites in Japan's culture of nationalism. According to Fujitani, these transformations were part and parcel of a transformation in the attitudes of the rulers toward the ruled: "As I would describe it, they hoped to reconstitute the people into more than simply objects of rule, so that they could become knowledgeable and self-disciplined subjects in the dual Foucauldian sense—that is, subjects who were not only subjected to 'control and dependence"'but who were also subjects possessed of their own identity by a 'conscience or self-knowledge'" (19). The policies that this transformation unleashed reflected an assessment of the masses as educable, and was conceived of in the positive sense as enlightening. In this sense, the Meiji Restoration was a true revolution, "for like its French counterpart the Japanese revolution set off a double movement of the "political." By this I mean that while it expanded, once and for all, the shape of the polity so that government became, most preeminently, that of the nation-state, at the same time the Meiji Revolution, propelled by a faith in human plasticity and a new civilizing mission for the state, extended the state's reach into the very souls of the people" (20). Fujitani uses the concept of the "folklore of a regime" both "the historical contingency of the national culture that was imposed by those in power and that now tends to be assumed as natural and timeless" and "to get at the meanings of rites, symbols, customs, and practices, so that we are not left with a simple functionalist interpretation of the culture of the nation" (23). Moreover, the doubled ocular relationship these pageants instituted and " the image of the seeing emperor facilitated the production of the nation-state as a bordered space of visibility within which the people could imagine themselves as objects of observation" (25). Thus Fujitani disagrees with the kozaha and everyone else who see the monarchy as anything but thoroughly modern, although he also parts ways with Foucault in that both surveillance and monarchical power arose in Japan at the same time in Fujitani's view. Fujitani's position (that the monarchy played an important role in Japan's modernization) is thus superficially similar to John Whitney Hall's, except that Hall at base shared the Marxist critique of the "monarchy = feudal" critics and Hall was not critical of the monarchy or the nation-state.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Suck it, Barthes; "such views of Tokyo…obstruct an understanding of Japan's capital as a city with a history in which its center has indeed been filled with meaning by a conscious governing elite. …In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it too became a place filled with significant monuments clustering around the core of the capital; and it too began to serve as a central arena for the performance of dramatic national ceremonials" (33). Shockingly to our minds, the Meiji oligarchs neglected Tokyo almost wholly for at least the first dozen years of their regime, and by the mid 1870s its appearance--dilapidated, depopulated, and burned out--was generally dismal. This neglect is linked to the fact that for the oligarchies the idea of an imperial progress and transferring the capital were inseparable; the emperor needed to be put into motion to mobilize the populace under the emperor. Thus these progresses "were often the first opportunities to diffuse the symbols and emblems that became common elements in the idiom of modern Japanese public rituals," but more importantly, the "magnificence of the progresses demonstrated that the emperor was at the center of societal significance" (52). The progresses also "provided the first opportunities for the Meiji regime to make real and believable the emperor's ability to see and know the land, the people, and the borders of the nation" (ibid). Thus archaic precedents were mobilized to serve modernity and the new nation-state. At the same time, debate over the status of Kyoto eventually settled it as "the dominant sign of Japan's past" while Tokyo served as that "of its present and future" (66). The regime drew on both to provide appropriate ritual settings after its attitude towards Tokyo changed completely in the early 1880s. Thus by 1889, "the new perception of Tokyo as a symbolic and ritual center had led to massive transformations in the capital's core. …Through numerous and spectacular imperial and civic processions between the political core and its outlying civic and military regions, Tokyo's center began to exert a strong symbolic centripetal pull on the whole of the city and, in time, upon the entire nation" (82). Having harmonized the two capitals into a national narrative and prepared them as ritual stages, the great progresses could be brought to an end, particularly since symbols not requiring the emperor's physical presence were beginning to be mobilized. The oligarchs also physically altered the landscape of the country through the building of shrines to various historical figures who were transformed into leading lights in the narrative of the country's nationalist, emperor-centered past.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Fujitani outlines three dimensions to the relationship between pageants and political power: 1) "the new imperial pageants were performed at least as much for a global as a domestic audience, and they helped construct an internationally comprehensible framework for understanding and carrying out diplomacy;" 2) "the particulars of the rites evolved with an eye turned toward the special requirements of the Japanese political order;" and 3) "these new public ceremonials helped fashion an image of the monarch as Overseer" (98, 100, 104). Fujitani reviews the principal imperial pageants of the Meiji era (promulgation of the constitution, silver imperial wedding anniversary, crown prince's wedding, military review of 1906, Meiji funeral) and concludes that "through these public displays the emperor's regime asserted that its government brought national well-being, that it was at the forefront of the modern world, and that it was thus justified in its rule" (106).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the development of the theory of "the emperor's two bodies" and the gendering thereof. Fujitani argues that "Japanese thinkers in the late 19th and 20thC wrote as if European and Japanese ideas about kingship were similar, and in so doing participated in the construction of the modern emperor's dualism" (158). One of the emperor's bodies was mystified, while the other was rendered human, both being necessary to construct a "modern" monarchy. It was also necessary for modernity that at least one of those bodies be gendered male, both to fit in with European models and as a function of the ideology of "direct imperial rule," which had to be masculine as it was then understood. Also, "while inventing a masculinized, militarized, and dynamic figure for the emperor as political actor, the makers of the modern monarchy also fashioned a new public image for the women of the imperial household as serving and nurturing, as representations of the ryôsai keno (good wife, wise mother) ideal" (180). Crucially, Fujitani notes, "the subordination of these women within the imperial family took place, then, not through their withdrawal from public view, but rather by their becoming more visible than any imperial consorts had ever been in all of previous Japanese history" (ibid). These maneuvers resonated with "the masculinization of politics in its conventional and limited sense of governance" (191). Thus "it is possible to conceive of the bodies of the imperial household's members and the space of modern politics as mutually engendering (in both meanings of the word) cultural sites" (ibid). Men were marked as men by facial hair, short haircuts, and the franchise, while "the state systematically excluded women from political activities and prescribed guidelines for their physical appearance" (ibid). Thus politics were closed to women as a masculine realm at the same time that the emperor became the paradigmatic man and the women of the imperial household became paragons of womanhood.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples In this chapter Fujitani looks at these pageants from the bottom up, attempting to guague "how and to what degree these inventions were received by the people" (201). Fujitani argues that "for the great majority of the people who were becoming Japanese, then, participation in these modern mass national ceremonies was a part of the process of acquiring a sense of national community, not an outcome of it" (214). Moreover, participation "enabled the people scattered through the country to experience their communion with the monarchy and with one another," which they did by journeying to the capital, participating in local ceremonies, and by buying commemorative objects and building commemorative structures, physically marking the landscape with memory (213). Finally, although the masses were mobilized through the active agency of a number of kinds of elites and organization, it is also important to note that the conflation of these pageants with "the forms of the familiar community festival facilitated mass participation in new celebrations of the emerging national community," confusing the age and tradition of one with the other thereby (223). From this perspective, the custom of traveling somewhere, particularly to Tokyo or Ise, to participate in such events resonates with the Tokugawa practices of pilgrimage-tourism, revealing the persistence of the popular folklore that contested or misunderstood the new narratives, manifesting as bizarre and unruly--undisciplined--behavior.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples Fujitani assess the Meiji state as a "memory machine," which produced both memory (of its fabricated past) and forgetting (of its fabricated past). In the postwar period, however, the same ceremonials did not carry the same weight of tradition, in keeping with the transformation of the emperor into a head of state who reigns but does not rule. Similarly, the imperial gaze became more ambiguously gendered during the post-Meiji years, and in the postwar period it was shattered entirely: the people now gaze upon the emperor, rather than the other way around, epitomized by the tabloid treatment that the imperial family receives. These developments, however, have not similarly weakened "the dominant narratives of the nation that were created in the time of Japan's modernity" (245).
Critical assessment: It's honestly surprising to me that Fujitani did his PhD here at Berkeley, as there is far too much theory in this book for it to represent a Berkeley approach; one might say that it smacks of the Harootunian. That said, there are a few points where I can hear Irv Scheiner in the text--as when Fujitani talks about things being "necessary but not sufficient," a locution I have heard multiple times in my Japan seminars--and I think Fujitani's work represents a really excellent synthesis of the Berkeley approach with theory. This is one of the few works of history I've read that I wish I had written, and all in all, it's an excellent book.
Further reading: Kenneth J. Ruoff, The People's Emperor, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith
Meta notes: Very monarchy. Much splendid. So pageantry.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-01 05:02 (UTC)