Panel 8: Consuming Meiji Japan

Chair: Roderick Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Panelists

Adam Coldren, Michigan State University, “Making Martyrs, Branding Traitors: Using the Dead to Define the Nation in Meiji Japan, 1868–1890”

The first half of the Meiji period was defined by a fledgling government attempting to radically reform the nation while simultaneously trying to consolidate its political power amidst a series of domestic crises. Meiji oligarchs identified the active construction of a new “nation” with the emperor at its core as a solution to both problems. While complex and multifaceted, a key element of this process was the use of the dead to demarcate the boundaries of the new nation. Those who died for the emperor’s cause were cast as martyrs, their deaths highlighting idealized versions of the new nation’s core values. Conversely, those who died “opposing” the emperor were branded traitors and relocated outside the new nation, marking a distinct boundary for the nation. This paper will explore the relatively unfocused origins of this process and its gradual development into a focused government initiative over the first half of the Meiji period, culminating in its consolidation by 1890.

Sherry Huang, University of Chicago, “Light and Shadows of Bunmei Kaika: Meiji Japanese Cityscape Prints and the Tension between Tokyo’s Public Space as Conceived and Lived”

In Meiji Japan, with extensive state intervention in urban planning and the Meiji government’s top-town view of the function of Tokyo’s public space, there came a tension between the political conception of space and the space as lived. This paper unveils this tension by investigating how color woodblock prints in the Meiji period depict what the printmakers and their buyers believed to be “famous places” (meisho 名所) in the city of Tokyo. As a form of mass media, the nishiki-e 錦絵 (color woodblock prints) can help us take a glimpse into common townspeople’s views about the relationship between Meiji Tokyo’s public space as conceived, perceived and lived—to use Henry Lefebvre’s tripartite theory of the production of space. I am paying particular attention to Kobayashi Kiyochika’s (小林清親, 1847-1915) series of cityscape prints Famous Places of Tokyo (Tokyo Meisho-zu 東京名所図, 1876-1881), in which the prominent visual symbols of bunmei kaika are sometimes shrouded in darkness of the night with the people on the streets as silhouettes. The contrast between light and shadows in Kiyochika’s cityscape prints creates a sense of alienation between the viewer on one hand and the city spectacles and the crowds in silhouettes on the other hand. In this way, the prints give shape to a lived experience in the newly constructed urban spaces that has no room in either the government’s conception of the space nor other contemporary cityscape printmakers’ perceptions of those spaces.