Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects

4. Museums, Heritage, and Everyday Life

110 chapter 4 Museums, Heritage, and Everyday Life From Exoticism to Common Heritage Starting in the 1980s, museums in Tokyo began to collect everyday objects and reconstruct everyday scenes of the past. This was a new kind of public investment. It also established a new public commemorative language for Tokyo, built around the everyday and the ordinary. This new public history drew from a longer intellectual tradition of the study of everyday life, which, after 1970, converged with a developing exhibit design industry that made scenes of everyday life one of its specialties. The confluence found fullest expression in the planning and design of the Edo-Tokyo Museum, completed in 1993 (see figure 12). With lavish funding from a municipal government flush with property tax revenues, scholars, designers , and bureaucrats in cultural administration collaborated to create the first comprehensive museum of the city. The Edo-Tokyo Museum was designed to serve as a new monument for the city at the apex of its fourhundred -year history and as an architectural icon of Governor Suzuki Shun’ichi’s “World City Tokyo.”1 It thus presented an official summation of how the city’s past was to be remembered, symbolically ending the period of experiments in using Tokyo’s past to claim the city as the property of its citizens. The monumental and the everyday, two poles of meaning configuring urban space since the 1960s, came together here, but the terms were reversed, as a privatized everyday was given monumental form. Monumental expression of the city’s history did not, however, close it off to further appropriation. In continual flux before the Edo-Tokyo Museums, Heritage, and Everyday Life | 111 Museum’s completion, history and nostalgic memory continued to evolve afterward as well. This chapter traces the intellectual currents and institutions that produced exhibits of everyday life in Japanese cities, particularly in Tokyo, from 1970 through the years that the Edo-Tokyo Museum was planned and built, and into the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although everyday life has been represented in museums in many countries since the nineteenth century, the way it was represented and contextualized, and the meanings derived from it, changed significantly in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first great sea change, noted by many museologists, reflected the populist turn in preservation by shifting from an antiquarian focus on the document and the artifact to an emphasis on reconstructed settings. Writers on museums have referred to this change variously as a shift “from object to experience,” or “from knowledge to narrative,” but both connote the same overall trend.2 The reconstructed interior, house, or streetscape had its roots in ethnographic displays at nineteenth-century expositions—some involving living human beings—and in folk-house museum parks like Sweden’s Skansen (built in 1873), but in public history museums it became common only in the latter half of the twentieth century.3 figure 12. The Edo-Tokyo Museum. Photograph by the author. 112 | Museums, Heritage, and Everyday Life In Japan and around the world, this trend coincided with development of the notion of “cultural heritage” (bunka isan) as a way of describing things recognized as constituting a valuable shared past for some community of people in the present (including, potentially, the global community of all humanity). International diffusion of the concept of cultural heritage following the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage encouraged a more holistic understanding of the usable past. “Heritage ” also signified a new view of national and international publics as the heirs to historical artifacts and places—recipients of a history passed down to them in things—rather than as passive audiences to be instructed by monuments, historic sites, and museum exhibits. Exhibits of everyday life in Japan prior to the 1970s were primarily folkloric or ethnographic in nature. Museum contents were presented as belonging to a culture exotic to the curator and viewer, and distant in geographical and class-cultural terms if not in time. In the 1920s, Shibusawa Keizo -, grandson of the Meiji industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi and future minister of finance (from 1945 to 1946), built the country’s first modern museum collection of native everyday artifacts, which he called the Attic Museum. Shibusawa had begun by collecting traditional handmade toys (kyo -do gangu). He formed a collectors’ society, which in its early days had the character of a hobbyists’ club...