CAEA - Center for the Art of East Asia

Reinventing the Past: Antiquarianism in East Asian Art and Visual Culture—Part 1

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Architectural Antiquarianism, Japanese Models and the Construction of a Modern Empire at the 1873 Vienna and 1910 Japan-British Exhibitions
William H. Coaldrake
Foundation Professor of Japanese, the University of Melbourne Edwin O Reischauer
Visiting Professor of Japanese Studies, Harvard University

This is a study of changing attitudes towards the past in the cultural diplomacy of the Meiji state as documented by models of historic buildings displayed at the international exhibitions. A pronounced difference in attitudes between the beginning and end of the Meiji period (1868-1912) is apparent by comparing the models surviving from the Vienna Exhibition of 1873 with those from the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910.

At the international exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Japan embraced the categories for architectural models with enormous enthusiasm. Hundreds were created in Japan for exhibition overseas, some small and delicate, some the size of a building in their own right. These have not been considered as part of the history of Meiji government participation in the international exhibitions because none was thought to survive. This has now changed with the discovery since 1996 in Britain, Austria and Japan of two Japanese models made for display at Vienna in 1873 and eight more from London in 1910. The architectural models displayed in Vienna in 1873 reveal that the ‘progressives’ in the Iwakura Mission viewed historic buildings as a liability to the image of a modern Japanese state. The two surviving models, discovered in 2003, represented Edo civilization still lingering in the immediate post-Meiji restoration years. They represent a daimyô yashiki, or Edo-city palace of a regional ruler, and a group of farmhouse buildings including residence, storehouse and outhouse. At the time of the Vienna Exhibition the Meiji leadership was not clear whether to emphasize modernization of traditional institutions and civilization in response to encroaching Western imperialism, or to embark on a wholesale national makeover on the Western model. The two surviving architectural models reveal what the government considered to be the finest architectural accomplishments of Japanese civilization at the time. It is important to realize that a daimyo palace and a farmhouse may be considered historic buildings today but their display at Vienna in 1873 did not constitute antiquarianism. The Foreign Ministry itself was still housed in a daimyô palace similar to the one represented by the model and most of the Japanese population still lived in farmhouses. In other words, this 'past' was still the Meiji 'present.' The models were neither antiquarian nor antique.

At the time of the Vienna Exhibition the Iwakura Mission, dispatched as an ambitious 'fact-finding' mission to the United States and Europe, was still systematically collecting information about governmental systems and industry, economics and culture in each country it visited. The diary of Kido Takayoshi, one of four Vice-Ambassadors on the Mission and a former samurai leader of the Meiji Restoration, remarked in his diary entry for 4 May 1873, after in a brief visit to Vienna, that those responsible for the Exhibition in Japan ‘have tried to display a mountain of tiny and delicate Oriental objects without regard for the expense. This seems to invite contempt for the dignity of our country on the part of others’ (Kido, 1985: 322). The new Japanese of the Iwakura Mission were more interested in bandsaws and railway trains, the size of the dome over the main pavilion and the potential of Japanese silk and lacquerware to find an export market in Europe, than models drawn from an Edo-period state and society that they were about to demolish. For them, the models served no useful function in the modern world; they were an anachronism. By contrast, in 1910 at the Japan-British Exhibition, architectural models were used to appropriate the past to promote the international standing of Japan as a modern empire founded on a venerable built culture. For the Japanese state at the end of the Meiji period, to have a future as a modern empire meant to have a past. This led to architectural antiquarianism with a rhetorical cutting edge. Building modern empires meant making historic architectural models as well as demonstrating accomplishments in modern industry and transportation, armed forces, government and education systems. This is demonstrated by a set of thirteen large models displayed in London by the Meiji government, seven of which have been located by the author. This set included some of the most important works of the Japanese architectural heritage, especially works of Buddhist temple architecture such as the Chûmon and Kondô of Hôryûji, the Hôôdô of Byôdôin, and the Karamon of Daitokuiji. Today this ‘set’ would not be regarded as a ‘representative selection.’ No castle architecture and no daimyô palaces were included. It is tempting to conclude that the government consciously ignored all relics of the Tokugawa shogunate as the awkward reminders of the achievements of a discredited feudal regime. This is not the case. Indeed, a model of the mausoleum of Tokugawa Hidetada was featured in a separate exhibit by the city of Tokyo, and lavishly praised by Mutsu Hirokichi, Commissioner for the Exhibition, in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts in London in early 1910.

The choice of buildings to be represented by models in London in 1910 was guided not by the state of the nation but by the state of Japanese architectural history at the time. In the late Meiji period there was a singular scholarly preoccupation with Buddhist temple architecture with little attention to Shinto or secular architecture of any sort. This imbalance is still reflected in the work of Alexander Soper in Paine and Soper’s The Art and Architecture of Japan (first published by Penguin Books in 1955). The energy of the leaders in the new field of architectural history at the Tokyo Imperial University, Itô Chûta (1867-1954), Sekino Tadashi (1867-1935) and Amanuma Shin’ichi (1876-1947), was directed towards the pressing needs of preserving and recording Buddhist temples. This trend was encouraged by the growing opportunities for fieldwork at Buddhist sites on the Asian mainland, including the cave temples of northern China, as the Japanese empire expanded, and the belated growth in historic preservation in the 1880s and 1890s focused on the temples of Asuka and Nara.

The work on the most challenging of all restoration projects, the monumental Great Buddha Hall of Tôdaiji, reduced by time and circumstance from its Edo-period glory to a sagging, rotting Colossus, was still proceeding (1906-1913) even as the Japan-British Exhibition was being planned and conducted in London. It was with great pride that a model of the inner precinct, including the Great Buddha Hall, roofed gallery, Inner Gatehouse, and twin seven-story pagodas, was displayed at London in 1910. This model, the work of Amanuma Shin’ichi, was built to a scale of one-fiftieth and was a conjectural reconstruction of the original Nara-period buildings created in the middle of the seventh century at the behest of Emperor Shômu.

The display in London of a model created as part of a current restoration project was, therefore, as much about the present of architectural preservation in Japan as it was about the past. For Amanuma, the model he designed of Tôdaiji was not motived by antiquarianism; it was the preliminary reconstruction of a lost building and was not even intended for display at the exhibition. However, the decision by the Commission for the Imperial Japanese Government for the Japan-British Exhibition to include it in the official set of thirteen models created a new context and meaning for the model, appropriating the past for present-day purposes, to represent Japan as a modern empire founded on a venerable civilization. This was clearly antiquarianism. There are, therefore, two ‘constructions’ of the past for the same model, one historical and the other antiquarian.

For all their technical brilliance, the models of the official set were to be surpassed in scale and spectacle by a model of the Taitokuin Mausoleum prepared under the auspices of the City of Tokyo. This was the model singled out by Count Mutsu in his speech to the Royal Society of Arts as ‘a remarkable work of art.’ (January 19, 1910). The Taitokuin Mausoleum had been built in 1632 in the city of Edo as the second Tokugawa shogun’s mausoleum. In 1910 the mausoleum was the one of the most important architectural treasures of the city of Tokyo, spectacular for its architectural flamboyance and the exuberant sculptures of dragons and tigers with which it was decorated. The mausoleum was destroyed in the fire-bombing of Tokyo in 1945 but the model was discovered by the author in 1996, dismantled in storage in the British Royal Collection.

By 1910 the set of thirteen models sponsored by the national government, and the Taitokuin Model displayed by the City of Tokyo, no longer represented the ‘present’ in Japan as the daimyô palace and farmhouse had in Vienna. Thirty years of concerted Westernization had transformed public architecture and urban infrastructure into versions of European historic architecture and contemporary Western styles. What made these models a case of antiquarianism was their appropriation as tools of modern empire-building. This involved two separate but related strategies. The first was to counter the image created by Orientalism and Japonisme of Japan as antiquely exotic. Display of these models in London was designed to refute Orientalist fantasies perpetrated in the exotic stage sets for Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, first performed in London in 1885, and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly performed first in Milan in 1904 and a year later at Covent Garden. Second, as exemplars of a venerable architectural heritage, they were intended to establish Japan’s status as modern empire founded on a strong civilization on an equal basis to their hosts in London, the British Empire. They were designed to meet British expectations that a great empire of the modern world would not only have strong industry, army and navy, but also an equally strong past. The use of these models was to transcend past and present to resolve the conundrum of tradition in relation to the idea of modern empire. It was a case of architectural antiquarianism in the appropriation of the past to deal with present political and diplomatic needs.