The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation (review)

Clearly written and handsomely produced, The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan examines the origins of four museum buildings sponsored by Japan's central government as elements of Meiji state formation: the Museum in Ueno Park (1881, designated an imperial museum in 1889), the Imperial Nara Museum (1894), the Imperial Kyoto Museum (1895), and the Hyōkeikan Art Museum (1908) adjacent to the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum at Ueno. This knowledgeable study highlights the political purposes and architectural designs of the four institutions, with secondary attention to their collections and exhibitions. Drawing extensively on recent scholarship in Japanese and Western languages, Alice Y. Tseng correctly argues that "places, objects, and conventions hitherto limited to the purview of the elite were reassigned" by the Meiji state "as the nation's prerogative, to be maintained for national ends" (p. 3) in imperial museums. The book is dappled with striking visual images, a few of which—especially those from abroad—seem tangential to the main narrative.

Tseng makes it clear that government planners modeled their configuration of Japanese art along Western lines and intended the imperial museums to showcase a newly canonized national art for international appeal. The first collections were assembled from diverse public and private sources, including both fine arts and the industrial products (kōgei) often known as "crafts" (the author prefers the term "industry"). As with the international expositions Japan joined beginning in 1873, the museums initially were expected to disseminate scientific knowledge and promote Japanese art and industry to both foreign and domestic visitors. The government thus aimed to integrate contemporary art production with the preservation of past cultural products. Tseng ably probes the complexities of establishing the imperial museums and shows how closely tied the art world was to the project of state formation. Renamed Imperial Household Museums in 1900, then reorganized as National Museums during 1947–52, these institutions nominally became independently administered National Museums in 2001, with few changes in function.

Early overseas travelers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901), Kume Kunitake (1839–1931), and Sano Tsunetami (1822–1902) urged the Meiji government to establish museums along British lines in order to link "knowledge to progress and national strength" (p. 32). The young English architect Josiah Conder (1852–1920) was chosen to design the Museum at Ueno Park soon after arriving in Japan in 1877; completed four years later, the building provided unprecedented access to the general public and was meant "to evoke a sense of shared heritage" (p. 60). Tseng argues that Conder was more concerned with style than function, attempting an orientalized design he called partly "Saracenic," a pejorative term used to cast Muslims as essentialized "Others" in contrast to Europeans. The resulting design was vaguely Asian, leaving Conder uncertain "whether anyone other than himself found it legible" (p. 78). Thus, the author gently editorializes, "Conder forfeited a major opportunity to innovate by incorporating his unique, firsthand knowledge of Japanese architecture, structural and ornamental, as the means of signifying difference from the West" (p. 78). Yet, as Tseng explains elsewhere, the government's goal was to win acceptance by Western countries, which at this early point usually meant establishing congruity rather than difference. The museum's partially Saracenic style was never again used for major national projects in Japan. The building's exhibit space soon proved deficient, and its demise was little lamented when the structure collapsed in the earthquake of September 1, 1923.

The new imperial museums erected in Nara and Kyoto during the mid-1890s minimized kōgei and focused mostly on art and history. The book aptly notes that the government's interest in pre-Meiji works was well developed by the early 1870s and thus was not primarily attributable to lobbying a decade later by Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin, 1862–1913) and Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), both of whom were self-appointed champions of early Japanese art. The latter...