Touring "Japan-As-Museum": NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues

JAPAN is indeed a “Land of Color, Culture and Charm.” It is the land where East and West meet in perfect accord, where the modern culture of the Occident harmonizes with Oriental civilization. Available throughout Japan are the latest travel facilities from automobile to airplane, plus home comfort and snug hotel accommodation, which assure the tourist a delightful trip at minimum expense of time and money. —Board of Tourist Industry, Japanese Government Railways, advertisement, 1939

Okakura Tenshin, the prominent turn-of-the-century cultural ideologue, envisioned Japan as a museum, both the repository of Asian culture and a living exhibit of this legacy functioning in the contemporary world.¹ The illustrated, Western-language, promotional quarterly NIPPON (1934–1944) was an invitation to tour this museum. Touting the magazine as a representation of “actual life and events in modern Japan and the Far East,” NIPPON's designers used a host of sophisticated modernist visual techniques, including an array of stunning photomontages, as a means of enticing the Western tourist to authenticate Japan by experiencing “the world-as-exhibition,” about which Timothy Mitchell has so eloquently written.² This “world-as-exhibition,” explains Mitchell, was “not an exhibition of the world but the world organized and grasped as though it were an exhibition.” Like the dioramas and live exhibits at the Parisian world's fair in Mitchell's analysis, NIPPON's Japan was a world set up as a picture. It was “ordered up as an object on display to be investigated and experienced by the dominating European [Western] gaze.”³

As an instantiation of Japan-as-museum, NIPPON deserves consideration as “a privileged arena for presenting self and ‘other.'”

⁴ Jeanne Cannizzo has argued that the museum is a “cultural text, one that may be read to understand the underlying cultural or ideological assumptions that have informed its creation, selection and display.”5 In keeping with the museum metaphor, I will consider the magazine layout as an analogue to gallery installation and the designers as curators of the exhibition experience, the magazine text becoming a kind of expanded wall label that explains the cultural practices and artifacts being presented. Yet the question of who controls the means of representation still remains. Everything in a museum is put under the pressure of a “way of seeing,” according to Svetlana Alpers, and it is the purpose of this essay to elucidate the mechanisms by which NIPPON's director Natori Yonosuke (1910–1962) and his stable of skilled commercial designers and photographers at the publishing firm/design studio Nippon Kobo (Japan studio) constructed a way of seeing Japan.6

The Nippon Kobo members were already individually well known for their work in photojournalism (hodo shashin) and advertising (kokoku) before they launched the journal. Their integrative techniques effectively blurred the line between avant-garde art, reportage, advertising practice, and national propaganda (kokka or kokusaku senden). As I will discuss below, the blurring of boundaries extended to the line between metropole (naichi) and colonies (gaichi), between essays and advertisements, and between culture and industry, visually simulating the literal annexation of Japan's colonial subjects into the empire and establishing industrial and commercial interests as fundamental components of Japanese modern cultural identity.

What should not be forgotten in the analysis of this periodical is the intended audience: the Western viewer. Implicit in NIPPON is the display of one culture by its self-appointed representatives to another culture (or in this case many other cultures, to disaggregate “the West”). Michael Baxandall reminds us to consider the “status of the viewer as an agent in the field of exhibition,” pointing to the relationship between presenter and presentee as an integral factor in the configuration of the means and mode of representation.

7 It can be said that since its forced opening to Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, Japan has maintained an ambivalent relationship to...