In 1893, a Japanese official in the United States declared that convincing displays of Japan's fine art would “prove that Japan is a country worthy of full fellowship in the family of nations” (p. 176). This nexus of art, exhibition, and national cultural legitimacy is the focus of Alice Y. Tseng's laudable study. It is perhaps best understood alongside the recent fascination with what might be called “exhibition studies” of Meiji Japan. Historians and anthropologists, among others, have lately taken to world fairs, industrial expositions, zoos, and other sites of purported “imperial display.” As an art historian, Tseng uses museums to add a valuable perspective on the public visualization of imperial authority and modern national identities.
This volume highlights four buildings and their contents: the Museum in Ueno Park in Tokyo, the Imperial Kyoto Museum, the Imperial Nara Museum, and the Hyōkeikan Art Museum in Tokyo. The Ueno museum is the work of the British architect Josiah Conder, while Katayama Tōkuma, who studied under Conder, designed the rest. Devoting a chapter to each building, Tseng characterizes each structure distinctly. As the very first museum in Japan, the Museum in Ueno Park is presented as having “undeniably established the precedent of monumentality—of scale and of style—as national architecture and as museum architecture” (p. 81). The Imperial Kyoto Museum exemplifies the city's hybrid modernity, which looked backward and forward at once; this is nicely counterintuitive, given that Kyoto is all too easily associated with traditional culture. Through the Imperial Nara Museum, which displayed the rich religious artifacts of the Kinki region, Tseng examines “the invented concept of ‘Buddhist art’” (p. 146) and shows that the museum contributed to “the humanizing and rationalizing of Buddhism” (p. 167) in modern times. Finally, the Hyōkeikan—“the nation's first permanent, purpose-built art museum” (p. 173)—is considered a bottom-up result of “civic consciousness in Tokyo akin to what was driving the rush of museum and library building in New York and Boston” (p. 192). The author argues that the Hyōkeikan contrasts with the imperial museums, which were produced top down by the central government (although the Hyōkeikan was ostensibly erected to commemorate the would-be Taishō emperor's royal nuptials in 1900).
The arguments and sensibilities that drive this work are mostly effective and agreeable. Basic elements of both the narrative and the analysis here are familiar to scholars of Meiji Japan: the invention of tradition, the primacy of state planning, self-reaffirmation through external encounters, and appropriating the past to serve contemporary needs. So, too, are the doyens of Meiji art, such as Ernest Fenollosa, Okakura Kakuzō, Josiah Conder, and Katayama, who are featured prominently. Nonetheless, Tseng's tweaking of Meiji cultural periodization (pp. 84, 96), reevaluation of Katayama (p. 110), and insistence that the use of European styles in designs such as the Hyōkeikan “should be read as a gesture not of deference but of equivalence” with the West (p. 190) are all subtle yet suggestive. Her assertion that Meiji modernity was distinctly transnational may be the most provocative of all. The author makes this point through examples such as Conder's intent to convey a “pseudo-Saracenic” style through the Ueno museum (pp. 70–78) and by locating the Imperial Kyoto Museum within a greater effort to “mold Japan into a vanguard international force and not a duplicate of any one nation” (p. 132). This helps us move away from the persistent conceit that Meiji Japan simply aped a monolithic West.
Like most studies that examine “modernity,” this one stresses the historical novelty of its subject. To this end, Tseng notes that no appropriately useful palatial structure or royal art collection existed prior to the Meiji era, thus compelling the state to create entirely new structures and categories through these grand projects. Likewise, neologisms such as bijutsu (art) and hakubutsukan (museum) only gradually gained currency after the Restoration, which again underscores newness. On the other hand, Tseng recognizes some premodern legacies, including urban street shows, such as misemono and religious practices such as mushiboshi, whereby temples and shrines periodically displayed their wares to the public (pp. 141–42). Those precedents aside, the basic premise here is that museums and their attendant cultural concepts such as “national style” and “fine art” were new modern constructs of the Meiji era. Such emphasis on novelty differs from William Coaldrake's work. In Architecture and Authority in Japan (London: Routledge, 1996), Coaldrake argues that elite architecture has always been used to monumentally project political authority and cultural standards throughout Japanese history, beginning with the Grand Shrines of Ise and Izumo in the first millennium.
Tseng's presentation is smart, deft, and clean. Her writing is crisp and steady, rather elegant at times, and mostly free of burdensome jargon. The volume is graciously and colorfully illustrated with many striking images—some captured by the author herself—that please the eye and edify the mind. This work should prove rich enough in technical architectural details to satisfy those who are so inclined. Tseng marshals an admirable range of source materials, both visual and textual. In addition to the buildings themselves, she consults architectural plans and drawings, official and private reports by designers, critical reviews, and even a novel, all to good effect. Her assessment of these materials is insightful yet judiciously measured as to inspire confidence in the reader. In sum, Tseng's strong work contributes much to an emerging scholarship on cultural struggles and public exhibitions in Meiji Japan.
