Im Wettstreit mit dem Westen: Japans Zeitalter der Ausstellungen 1854–1941 by Daniel Hedinger (review)

In his introduction to the book under review, Daniel Hedinger recounts the following episode: When Commodore Matthew Perry landed in Edo bay to extract a treaty from the Tokugawa government in 1854, he had in tow what—in the words of an observer—amounted to a “full-sized industrial exhibition” (p. 34), including a length of railroad track and a locomotive. The purpose of this gift was, of course, to impress the Japanese negotiators and convince them of American technological and military power. The Japanese made an effort to reciprocate with a Sumo demonstration, but this was dismissed by the American party as disgusting and uncivilized.

Hedinger’s study, whose title can be translated as “Competing with the West: Japan’s Age of Exhibitions 1854–1941,” draws a comprehensive picture of Japan’s age of exhibitions and consciously tries to avoid simplistic master narratives. But if there is one major theme pervading the book, it is contained in the above vignette: For Japanese elites, exhibitions as the Western powers employed them bristled with issues of world order and global competition from the very beginning of Japan’s opening, and Japanese appropriations of the medium in the century or so that followed were fueled by the perceived need to stand up to this competition. Hence the book’s time frame, which starts with Perry’s diplomatic display and ends with the last Japanese military exhibitions, which took place in Tokyo and Hyōgo in 1941, the year of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hedinger is not the first to engage with the nexus between exhibitions and world order (or, more bluntly, imperialism), but his work—because of its comprehensive scope and attention to fine detail—brings the debate to a new level.¹

In pursuit of his topic, Hedinger casts a wide net. He pairs a bird’s-eye view on long-term changes in the political, economic, and cultural makeup of exhibition practices with thick descriptions and analyses of world’s fairs, industrial expositions, and the like. His examples include exhibitions ranging in scale from the local to the global and taking place both within Japan and elsewhere, and he draws links among these diverse events. Moreover, Hedinger exploits a wide range of textual and visual sources from state agencies and private companies, organizers and visitors, and observers both from Japan and from the West. The result is a stupendously nuanced and multilayered account.

Part 1 offers a chronological overview of the period up to World War I and places the history of exhibitions in the context of wider developments of the time. Part 2 discusses in more detail four key aspects that characterized Japanese exhibition practices in the Meiji period, organizing this information into chapters on education and knowledge, civilization and the future, emperor and nation, and consumption and amusement. Part 3 is on the interwar period and includes a chronological account as well as chapters on empire and colony and on war and peace.

How did a politico-economic sector devoted to exhibitions (Ausstellungswesen) emerge and evolve in the course of the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods? That is the question addressed throughout the chronological narrative. The first major event—whose significance echoes that of the encounter with Commodore Perry described above—was the Great London Exposition of 1862. There, a puzzled Japanese delegation had to deal with the fact that, even though the Tokugawa government had not been invited, the exhibition featured a Japanese Hall, furnished with pieces from a private collection. Unwilling to leave the representation of their country to foreigners, the Japanese took up a proactive exhibition policy—a form of nation branding avant la lettre.

The subsequent exhibition boom of the early Meiji period was to a large extent driven by the active role of the state in organizing and promoting these events. Hedinger identifies three factors that were particularly important in helping the exhibition...