Toward a “Nation-state of Culture”: Public Art Museums and Japan’s National Identity and Image in the 1980s

Yanni Li

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in East Asian Studies Wellesley College under the advisement of Professor Katharine H.S. Moon

Spring 2020

© 2020 Yanni Li Abstract

In this work, I examine the case of Japan and how the Japanese state utilized public art museums in the 1980s and early 1990s to shift their national image to that of a “nation-state of culture” (bunka kokka). Museums, especially public ones, are politically implicated institutions. Contrary to their appearance of permanence and insulation, museums are reflective of larger political, economic, and social changes in a society. Drawing upon the theories of Carol Duncan, Pierre Bourdieu, and Tony Bennett, this thesis examines art museums as institutions that facilitate identity and image-formation. Essentially, there are two related types of formations at questions here—the first is how nation-states use museums to shape their national identity and international image, and the second is how individuals form their own social and cultural identity through encounters with the museum.

This thesis lies at the intersection of politics, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies. In this work, I offer a way to unpack and understand the socio-cultural phenomenon of the “museum boom” in Japan in the last three decades of the twentieth century by placing it in the context of the international political implications of museums and framing it as a continuity of Japan’s national identity and image construction efforts since the Meiji era.

2 Acknowledgements

My best decision in college was to take Professor Kathy Moon’s Nation-building and Nationalism in East Asia course during my Junior year. When I worried that I had no prior experience in political science, Professor Moon encouraged me to bring my knowledge of East Asian arts and culture to the class instead of focusing on my deficiencies. Essentially, this led to this thesis. No words can describe my gratitude toward Professor Moon, who is my East Asian Studies major advisor, thesis advisor, mentor, and role model. Thank you for always encouraging me to pursue my academic interests, supporting me in this endeavor, helping me improve, and most importantly, inspiring me to pursue further studies in East Asian politics and culture.

I am extremely grateful for Professor Robert Goree, Professor Peggy Levitt, and Professor Mingwei Song, who not only serve on my thesis committee but also conversed with me about my topic throughout my thesis process. I would also like to thank all the Wellesley professors with whom I have taken classes or discussed my academic interests. I am especially indebted to Professor Heping Liu, whose enthusiasm sparked my interest in East Asian art during my first year at Wellesley. I would also like to thank the Davis curators who have inspired me to think deeper about a museum’s role in society. It is the liberal arts setting of the college that allowed me to explore a variety of fields and led me to this interdisciplinary project.

There has been many people involved in this project, I offer my most sincere thanks to all of you. Particularly, I would like to thank Aki Hoashi, who graciously agreed to an interview, offered such insightful remarks, and sent me extremely useful materials. I would also like to thank Kana Yamada and Mai Ogiuchi, who helped me summarize and interpret difficult Japanese texts, and Dafni Diamanti, who offered to do transcription work under really tight time constraints. A big shout out to the wonderful research librarians and Interlibrary Loan librarians at Wellesley, who helped me get my hands on important sources. Finally, I am forever grateful for my family and friends, who supported and encouraged me during difficult times. I could not have completed this thesis without all of you!

3 Table of Contents

Introduction 5

Chapter I Museums as Political Strategy in the West and East Asia 15 i. Europe and the United States...... 17 ii. South Korea...... 25 iii. Taiwan...... 39 iv. Singapore ...... 42 v. International Outlook of Museums...... 45

Chapter II The Institutionalization of Exhibitions in Japan 50 i. Exhibitionary Culture in the Edo Period and the Transition to Meiji...... 51 ii. Japan’s Participation in World’s Fairs...... 57 iii. The Birth of the Museum in Japan...... 62 iv. The Development of Fine Art Exhibitions: the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition..70 v. Colonial Projects, Imperial Subjectivity, and the National Taiwan Museum...... 72

Chapter III Japan’s Cultural Policy and Public Art Museums 79 i. Developments of Museums in Japan in the Immediate Post-war Years...... 82 ii. Japan’s National and Regional Cultural Policies in the 1970s and 1980s...... 86 iii. Public Art Museums and Civil Society...... 99 iv. Case Study: the Yokohama Museum of Art...... 108

Conclusion 121

Bibliography 126

4 Introduction

When I visited Japan in March, 2019, I went to the Vermeer exhibition at the Osaka City

Museum of Fine Arts. I had heard about the Japanese people’s appreciation for Western masters, but I was not expecting what I encountered upon entering the museum. In the dimly lit exhibition galleries, a throng of people gathered in front of each painting and observed intently. The visitors followed a regularized route to view the exhibition, making it impossible for me to turn back and revisit a painting at the beginning of the exhibition. While there were young people, the majority of the visitors I saw were middle-aged to elderly women and men, who, with their glasses, mini telescopes, and audio guides, studied the paintings almost piously. I was stunned after completing the “tour,” as I had never seen such a high level of concentration and orderly viewing in North American or Chinese museums. I experienced this phenomenon again in the summer at an exhibition on Gustav Klimt organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, where I lined up for half an hour just to enter the galleries and could barely see the entirety of each work because of the crowd.

The two anecdotes serve to illustrate the importance of art museums to the general public in contemporary Japan and show that they are popular destinations. These special exhibitions are important community events, not unlike the local matsuri (festivals), and build up anticipation well before their openings through a variety of publicity that circulates in communities. At large municipal or national museums, we can often see flyers for other special exhibitions in the region, thus creating an ecosystem of exhibition-going and art-viewing.

Noriko Aso, in her book Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan, comments on the phenomenon of museum-going in Japan by remarking on a paradox: “Standing in queues for long periods to eventually get the chance to peer over someone else’s shoulder to catch a

5 particular glimpse of a glassed-in object is not necessarily an obvious source of pleasure.” She further asks, “[W]hy did these people choose to spend their leisure time in this manner?”1 Behind this question lies the conscious effort of the Japanese government since the Meiji period (1868-

1912) to establish museums as important cultural institutions based on the Western model and to cultivate the habit of museum-going among its citizens as part of the nation’s modernization.

In July of 2019, during my conversations with Professor Michio Hayashi, Professor of

Art History at Sophia University, and with Ms. Aki Hoashi, manager of exhibitions at the

Yokohama Museum of Art, a phenomenon that came up in both conversations was the rise in the number of public museums in Japan in the 1980s and early 1990s, right at the end of the so- called “Japanese Economic Miracle.” Japan enjoyed an unprecedented degree of economic growth and prosperity in the decades following the American Occupation (1947-1952), elevating the country from a vanquished empire into not only a regional but an international economic superpower. However, the growth rate started to decline in the 1980s and the Japanese economy went into a recession in the 1990s as the asset bubble punctured (Figure 1).2 Interestingly, it is also during this decline in the growth rate that we see an increase in the number of public art museums in Japan, mainly municipal and prefectural ones, some of which are dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Many of these museums boast an international art collection and strive to organize exhibitions of internationally renowned artists. This phenomenon can be partially explained by Japan’s shift of focus from economic achievements to cultural development in the 1980s, a decade often referred to as the “Age of Culture.”3

1 Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 3. 2 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): 331-333. 3 Tomiko Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millennial Japan,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, edited by Tomiko Yoda and Harry D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 34

6 As of 2015, Japan had a total number of 5,690 museums, including registered museums, museum-equivalent facilities, and museum-like facilities. The term “museum” denotes a variety of structures—history museums, science museums, art museums, and even zoos and aquariums.4

Although the United States, with approximately 35,000 museums,5 exceeds Japan’s number by almost seven times, and Germany could boast 6,771 museums in 2017,6 Japan’s number is far ahead of most other developed countries. For example, France, a country that we often associate with the word “culture,” had 1,224 museums as of 2017.7

In Asia, Japan leads in the number of museums relative to other large and prosperous economies. For example, China, with a much larger territory and population, reached the number of 5,000 only by the end of 2018.8 Furthermore, the Japanese Association of Museums (JAM) plays an active role in the international arena and is in close connection with the International

Council of Museums (ICOM), where its most recent Extraordinary General Assembly (EGA) took place in Kyoto in September, 2019. This indicates Japan’s ambition to elevate its museums to global importance and to incorporate them into the larger network of museums. The phenomenon of the massive construction of museums in a short period of time and its association with the nation’s economic and political situations sparked my interest in public art museums in

Japan, which led to this present project.

4 "Hakubutsukan-sū, nyūkanshasū, gakugei insū no suii," Bunkachō (Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan). https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/bijutsukan_hakubutsukan/shinko/suii/ (accessed October 12, 2019) 5 "Government Doubles Official Estimate: There Are 35,000 Active Museums in the U.S," Institute of Museum and Library Services, May 19, 2014. https://www.imls.gov/news/government-doubles-official-estimate-there-are-35000-active-museums-us (accessed October 12, 2019) 6 "Complete Statistics," European Group on Museum Statistics. https://www.egmus.eu/nc/en/statistics/complete_data/. (accessed October 12, 2019) 7 Ibid. 8 "Number of museums in China reaches 5,000," People's Daily, December 19, 2018. http://en.people.cn/n3/2018/1229/c90000-9533275.html (accessed October 12, 2019)

7 Research Rationale and Questions

The main goal of this thesis is to make sense of the construction of public art museums in the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s in the context of Japan’s national identity and image-formations. While there are numerous private galleries and exhibition spaces, such as the

Ohara Museum of Art and the department store exhibition galleries of large corporations like

Mitsukoshi, I will focus on public art museums and the museum as an institution in general. This choice is partly personal, as I have been involved in art museums since high school, and it is also academic. Art museums lie in between the history museum and the zoo, the former being purely based on “facts” and narratives and the latter being a recreational site. The art museum, although it is often a site of leisure and recreation, seeks to cultivate the visitor’s aesthetic literacy and consciousness of culture. Furthermore, because artworks are more or less open to one’s own interpretation, the art museum also helps to facilitate individual thinking, a crucial aspect of building a democratic nation. Didier Maleuvre, who opposes the tendency to treat art objects as mere historical objects along with other cultural artifacts, declares that “art warrants a different historical thinking because the work of art makes history in an essentially different way than other artifacts do.”9

9 Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999): 3.

8 Figure 1. Real GDP Growth in Japan, 1983-2007. Cited in Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): 333.

Despite the abundance of academic research on the politics of Japanese post-war art and museums in the Meiji era as well as the interwar period, scholarship on the role of public art museums in the post-war socio-political environment is sparse. Research on the explicit connection between national identity and public art museums in East Asia is rare. Furthermore, even Japanese scholarship on Japan’s post-war cultural development only offers a cursory look at public art museums even though they have become an integral part of Japan’s cultural landscape. Nonetheless, works by Satō Dōshin, Noriko Aso, and Alice Tseng on Japanese museums in the Meiji era have laid the foundation and paved the way for the study of museums in the post-war democratic context.

While framing my research questions, I realized I first need to understand the challenges that Japan faced in its nation-building process in the post-war era, specifically the period in which Japan enjoyed extraordinary economic growth and then faced a recession at the end of the

1980s (Figure 2). How did the Japanese government sustain its legitimacy despite the economic decline? What might governments pursue as the “next steps” once economic development, stable living standards, and educational advancement are achieved? What role might cultural institutions play in the larger socio-political and economic frameworks? And how might we understand the increase in numbers of public museums from the 1970s to the early 1990s in relation to both domestic and foreign policies?

9

Figure 2. Growth in Real Per Capita GDP in Japan, Britain, and the US, 1870-2008. Cited in Okazaki Tetsuji, “Lessons from the Japanese Miracle: Building the Foundations for a New Growth Paradigm,” Nippon.com, February 9, 2015. https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a04003/lessons-from-the-japanese-miracle-building-the- foundations-for-a-new-growth-paradigm.html

The premise of the project is that the establishment of public art museums is closely tied to Japan’s economic development and the state’s deliberate intention to reposition Japan in the international arena. Museums, in this case, represent the nation’s aspiration to be not only economically powerful but also culturally advanced in order to align with the standards of the

West. Since Japan opened up in the late Edo period (1600-1868), the central government has been concerned about Japan’s place in the global hierarchy and how Western nations perceive

Japan. As such, museums serve as a highly potent symbol of the cultural level of a nation-state and its people. Another layer to understanding the intention behind establishing those museums is to see it as a reaction to the perceived decline in morals and order in the cultural sphere in the

1980s and 90s, as museums are institutions that have the power to shape the memory, cultural consciousness, and behavior of a people.

10 Museums as Institutions

In Exhibiting Cultures, Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp open with the statement, “Every museum exhibition, whatever its overt subject, inevitably draws on the cultural assumptions and resources of the people who make it. Decisions are made to emphasize one element and to downplay others, to assert some truths and to ignore others.”10 For example, the modern sense of the museum is an institution that preserves important cultural objects and exhibits them to the public. However, in the early period of museums in Europe, elites had viewed one aspect of the museum’s role—as protectors of the arts and history—with skepticism. Critics had targeted the authenticity of museums as they believed museums were endangering the preservation of culture by removing objects from their intended contexts and into insulated spaces, where visitors can only have an alienated viewing experience.11

Over time, the rationales for museum space and collections have changed; today, some believe museums are spaces for experimentation, innovation, and breaking with past conventions. As discourse on museums and exhibitions evolved and informational technology advanced, museums strive to put “life” in their exhibitions by highlighting the original contexts of the objects and considering how to decenter the idea of “culture” away from high culture and

Western-centric narratives. Today, recognizing the challenges in presenting diverse cultures to an equally diverse public, the new definition of museums offered by the International Council of

Museums (ICOM) in 2019 states:

Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse

10 Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine eds., Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991): 1. 11 Maleuvre, 1-2.

11 memories for future generations and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people.12

Whether this equality and access are realized, the purpose and intention are social and political.

The underlying nature of modern museums as public institutions with educational purposes, rather than private collections for private individuals’ enjoyment and cultural elevation, leads to the phenomenon that “the modes of collecting, organizing, and displaying that characterize the museum have been translated into the very way that publics think about themselves and about their cultures.”13 In short, art museums are instruments of collective identification. As Maleuvre remarks, “the museum takes part in the process of societal rationalization that controls beings by immobilizing their identity, or by simply postulating an identity—identity being already a precipitate of social immobility.”14 In other words, museums have the ability to shape the public’s way of thinking, and in today’s world of increasing globalization, this “public” is no longer just the domestic citizens but also includes international visitors. In this way, the museum’s role as a political agent becomes evident.

Methodology and Outline

A museum can be analyzed from several aspects and layers of meaning. There are two useful approaches to analyzing the art museum—the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic, to use

Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, or a combination of the two.15 While the aesthetic focuses on the kinds of artworks collected and exhibited by the art museum, the extra-aesthetic examines the

12 “Museum Definition.” International Council of Museums. https://icom.museum/en/activities/standards- guidelines/museum-definition/ 13 Susan A. Crane, Museums and Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000): 5. 14 Maleuvre, 10. 15 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): 30.

12 circumstances that engendered the particular practices and modes of art museums, including the art museum itself as an institution. My thesis is primarily concerned with the extra-aesthetic. In other words, I examine art museums as a political and socio-cultural phenomenon instead of focusing on the detailed collection and exhibition strategies of museums and the formal and aesthetic qualities of specific artworks.

I intend to combine theories, contexts, and specific analyses of various museums. One of the components is the physical space of the museum—its location within the city, its immediate surroundings and neighborhood, and its exterior and interior architectural style. The physical presence of the museum is the most immediate message; even if an individual does not enter its doors, she will be conscious of it merely by passing by. Regarding the content of the museum, it is necessary to consider the museum’s permanent collections and its rotating exhibitions. Even though I will not discuss specific artworks, it is crucial to consider the collections as a whole body and the types of exhibitions an art museum organizes. The cultural significance possessed by the objects themselves further complicates our understanding of the art museum as an institution.

In Chapter One, I first seek to place Japan’s museum scene within the larger theoretical context of scholarly literature on museums, both in the West and in East Asia. To do so, I will illustrate the cultural authority bestowed upon museums in the West, as such authority is one of the key motivations behind the Japanese government’s museum construction efforts. It is also useful to show the importance of museums in other East Asian societies as it demonstrates that, though not explicitly political, museums are venues that manifest the national image and identity in East Asian nation-states.

13 In Chapter Two, I investigate Japan’s situation, beginning with the inception of the museum in the Meiji era. The identity politics of the Meiji era shaped by the need to catch up to the West has resounding implications for post-war Japan, and it is difficult to understand Japan’s construction of art museums in the late twentieth century without tracing its lineage. Finally, in

Chapter Three, I will analyze public art museums vis-à-vis the socio-economic background and cultural policies in 1980s and early 1990s Japan. In this chapter, I will incorporate government white papers related to the nation’s cultural policy, studies done by prominent Japanese scholars, and theories devised by Western academics. Furthermore, I was fortunate to have interviewed

Aki Hoashi, who witnessed the transformations of the Japanese society in the 1980s and have a deep understanding of the development of Japanese public art museums because of her involvement with the Yokohama Museum of Art. Her observations and perceptions corroborate the larger phenomena expounded in scholarly sources. This chapter will also include a case study, the Yokohama Museum of Art, which allows us to understand the specific mechanisms through which a public art museum facilitates national image and identity. The reason why I chose a regional art museum instead of a national one is due to the significant role played by local cultural policies in the 1980s.

14 Chapter One: Museum as Political Strategy in the West and East Asia

What binds individuals together into a cultural community is the centripetal force of a connective structure that organizes a considerate body of thought and knowledge, beliefs and concepts of self: that is, a worldview rooted in a set of social rules and values as well as in the shared memory of a commonly inhabited and similarly experienced past…. At issue, then, is a sense of belonging that binds the individual into a culture while binding the culture into the individual’s mind.1

Public institutions such as museums have the ability to connect personal narratives to larger narratives of a region or a nation, thereby shaping public consciousness. This in turn establishes a relationship between museums and larger national image and identity. Based on

Jens Brockmeier’s theory on narratives and cultural memory, the museum can be interpreted as the “connective structure” that is a metanarrative to personal narratives and memory. It is a medium through which the individuals in a society make sense of the larger cultural environment and identify themselves as belonging to that society. A diagram created by Alexandru Dimache,

Amare Wondirad and Elizabeth Agyeiwaah for their analysis of identity association at the Hong

Kong Museum of History clearly illustrates the relationship between the individual and the cultural context, mediated by the museum’s narrative (Figure 1). This identification is necessary for both nation-building and constructing national identities. Furthermore, if we look at the modern museum not solely as preservers and exhibitors of culture but also as tourist sites for domestic and international audiences, its role as a mediator between the larger cultural context and the individual extends even to those not from its home society.

1 Jens Brockmeier, “Remembering and Forgetting: Narratives as Cultural Memory,” Culture & Psychology. Vol.8 no.1 (2002): 18.

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Figure 1. Museums and Place Identity. Dimache, Alexandru, Amare Wondirad, and Elizabeth Agyeiwaah. "One museum, two stories: Place identity at the Hong Kong Museum of History." Tourism Management 63 (December 2017): 300.

This chapter establishes a theoretical foundation for examining public art museums in

Japan in the 1980s and their relationship with politics and national image and identity. Because the concept of the “museum” is a Western construction from which East Asian countries borrowed, I will first trace the origins of the modern museum in Europe and the early developments of museum politics in Europe and the United States. I will then proceed to analyze how museums advance national goals in a period of political and social transition in East Asia.

To do so, I will closely examine the cases of South Korea and Taiwan in the late twentieth century and include a brief overview of Singapore’s transformations at the turn of the twenty- first century. All three states experienced transitions—political, identitarian, and social—which museums actively facilitated. After establishing the role of museums in domestic nation- building, the last section will briefly address their international implications.

16 Europe and the United States

Carol Duncan’s “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in the seminal book

Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, traces the transformation of the

Louvre from a royal palace to the Museum of the French Republic as the first case of a truly modern art museum. Commenting on the intentions behind this designation, Duncan writes,

“public art museums were regarded as evidence of political virtue, indicative of a government that provided the right things for its people.”2 Since the early nineteenth century, then, Western nations have used museums to demonstrate the “goodness” of a state and the degree of civilization achieved by its citizens. In the case of the Louvre, its re-designation in 1793 from a palace of the kings to a public museum open to everyone free of charge signified the fall of the

Old Regime and the rise of a new order. The state positioned itself as the benefactor and protector of the arts and further demonstrated its commitment to the principle of equality through the public nature of the museum.3

The Louvre also contributed to the development of a new art historical way of displaying artworks that allowed the average citizen to comprehend the progression of art and civilization.

The fashionable way of hanging an exhibition in eighteenth century Europe was generally called the connoisseur’s or gentlemanly hang, which focused on the formal ingenuity of recognized masters and classical antiquity. This style of displaying emphasized the identity of the gentleman as educated and belonging to the elite class, who would be able to understand and appreciate masterpieces without the help of labels or context. In the later eighteenth century, however, a new mode of organization by national schools gained popularity and was based on a narrative of

2 Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship” in Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991): 88. 3 Ibid.

17 progress and ideal beauty, representing a linear progression from ancient Egypt, Greece and

Rome to Italian Renaissance and French Academic art. This narrative positions France as the fourth and final phase, and arguably the climax, of the greatest moments of art history. The imbedded notion behind this narrative is that “progress in art could be taken as an indicator of how far a people or epoch evolved toward civilization in general.”4

Thus, when visitors engage with this progression, they take part in a ritual that requires them to “reenact that history of genius, re-live its progress step by step and, thus enlightened, know himself as a citizen of history’s most civilized and advanced nation-state.”5 The new system, by emphasizing national schools of art, both acknowledges and promotes state power and national identity. This focus is no longer on the reinforcement of the gentleman as a member of the elite, but instead addresses its visitor as a bourgeois citizen who “enters the museum in search of enlightenment and rationally understood pleasures.”6 In the museum, this citizen “finds a culture that united him with other French citizens regardless of their individual social position.

He also encounters there the state itself, embodied in the very form of the museum.”7 According to Benedict Anderson, this unity is fostered by the mechanism of imagination, in which the individual imagines the fellow members of his community, all of whom belong to a “nation.”8

Since the establishment of the Louvre as a public museum in 1793, the practice of establishing a national art museum or gallery had spread to almost every Western nation by the middle of the nineteenth century. The Louvre also became the archetypal model after which

Western national museums closely follow.

4 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. (London: Routledge, 1995): 25. 5 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 27. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 26. 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (New York: Verso, 1991): 6

18 The United States, as a new power on the Western political landscape, strove to establish a national gallery of art in 1859 modeled after the Louvre. However, unlike European national museums established by the state, the most spectacular museums in the US were founded by wealthy and influential individuals. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) was conceived by John Jay in 1866 as he thought America’s “first city” should have a cultural institution that could rival the great European museums. He himself began the planning of the museum, organizing committees of influential New Yorkers.9 The Met opened at its first location on Fifth

Avenue in 1870 and relocated to its current venue in 1880.10

The Met was not alone; in fact, the 1870s were a period of museum boom which saw the founding of the Met, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute, Chicago—three of the most prominent art museums even today. As Duncan describes, “In late nineteenth-century

America… the idea of the public art museum as a site of learning and uplifting pleasure—a palace that offers its treasures to all who enter—was enormously attractive.”11 These museums, although established by private individuals, function on a similar level as the European national museums in terms of establishing regional and national identities by explicitly framing the

“public” they claim to serve and rendering visible the ideals of a republican state.12 Furthermore, these museums, by borrowing explicitly from European museums in form and content, establish the US as one of the greatest nations in the West.

How the US used museums and art as political tools to assert power and dominance in changing international political situations can be seen in the Met’s architecture and curation of its collection before World War II and the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) projection of

9 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 47. 10 “History of the Museum.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/history 11 Duncan, Civilizing Ritual, 48. 12 Ibid., 48.

19 American liberalism using Abstract Expressionism during the Cold War era. Even though both the Met and MoMA are private institutions, they cater toward the public and are founded by giants of industry and finance who actively engaged in domestic politics and the shaping of the formulation of foreign policy. These board of trustees have the power to determine museum policy and hire and fire directors at their will, and because of their direct connection with politics, render the museums under political influences.13

Classical Greek and Roman architecture has long been a way for Western nations to establish a connection with the ancient Golden Age of civilization and to establish their own political power and legitimacy. Situated within this tradition, New York also invoked the classical in the architecture of important structures, such as libraries and rail stations, when it rose to become the economic and cultural center of the United States in the early twentieth century.14 As part of this strategy, the Met, established with the ambition of being an encyclopedic museum and the “greatest” in America, added to its early architecture a grand classical façade with imposing columns and staircase for elevation (Figure 2 and 3).15 The interior of the museum was also renovated in a classical manner, using rounded domes, arches, and columns as the main structure.

13 Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper & Row, 1985): 125-126 14 Maryl Gensheimer, “Rome Reborn: Old Pennsylvania Station and the Legacy of the Baths of Caracalla,” in Classical New York, eds. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Matthew McGowan (New York: Empire State Editions, 2018): 161-162. 15 Elizabeth Bartman, “Archaeology versus Aesthetics: The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Classical Collection in Its Early Years,” in Classical New York, eds. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Matthew McGowan (New York: Empire State Editions, 2018): 62.

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Figure 2. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1880. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Summer 1995

Figure 3. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, now. Source: The Art Newspaper, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/a-new-chapter-for-the-met

21 In addition to architecture, the Met also presented a collection of antique objects that was intentionally curated, reflecting the goals of its leaders who were influential figures in the city of

New York.16 Elizabeth Bartman describes the decision-making process of the museum to focus on acquiring complete Greek and Roman sculptures, as opposed to participating in archaeological projects that might excavate fragments, as reflecting the museum’s priority of building a “perfect” collection of antiquity befitting its status and ambition. Furthermore, it prioritized acquiring so-called major forms of art, such as sculptures and paintings, and looked down upon daily artifacts that might have higher educational values in terms of the history and culture of the ancient Greek and Roman societies.17 These strategies reflect the Met’s self- perceived importance as a top-tier museum in the US and its decision makers’ intention of using the museum to project an image of the country as culturally advanced and a descendant of great ancient civilizations of the West. Furthermore, the display of antiquities in one of America’s biggest museums fostered a connection between the visitors and the ancient civilization, endowing Americans with the same level of cultural prestige as Europeans.

In a different political environment, this conscious tie with a culturally accepted “glorious past” was also promoted by Mussolini when he invoked the ancient Roman past of Italy to legitimize his rule as the logical next step to the greatest empire in antiquity and to construct modern Italians as the descendants of civilized Romans. His exhibition projects, including the

Augustan Exhibition of Romanità, held in Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni between 1937 and

1938, are part of the dictator’s strategy to solidify his own power. This exhibition creates a narrative that engages visitors in a ritualistic journey in order to facilitate their consciousness as citizens of a great empire. It also justifies the military conquests of Mussolini by citing examples

16 Bartman, 63-64. 17 Ibid., 69-71.

22 of Roman imperial conquests in Africa.18 This example shows that museums and exhibitions are not only deployed by democratic states but also by authoritarian leaders. The potency of the museum in facilitating a connection between the personal narrative and the meta narrative of a state can be readily applied to different political and socio-economic contexts since the inception of the modern museum.

MoMA, as a museum for modern art as opposed to encyclopedic art, had different priorities from the Met when the US emerged as a global hegemon after World War II. MoMA proved to be an especially potent agent that conveyed American liberalism in the Cold War era of virulent anti-communism. The museum was founded in 1929 through the efforts of John D.

Rockefeller. Jr.’s family. Nelson Rockefeller, who was the director of the museum from 1939 to

1940 and resumed directorship in 1946, also served as President Roosevelt’s coordinator of the

Office of Inter-American Affairs and later Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American

Affairs. The museum was later managed by David Rockefeller in the 1960s and 1970s.

The political ties of MoMA were obvious in the sense that almost every secretary of state after WWII had been someone who benefited from the institutions managed by the Rockefellers.

Nelson Rockefeller himself served as the 49th governor of New York from 1959 to 1973 and the

41st Vice President of the country from 1974 to 1977.19 Furthermore, due to the high positions the Rockefellers occupied in large corporations and banks, they were able to shape Cold War politics directly.20 Even before the Cold War era, MoMA had been heavily involved in American foreign policy during World War II, when it was claimed to be the “latest and strangest recruit in

18 Flavia Marcello, “Mussolini and the idealisation of Empire: the Augustan Exhibition of Romanità,” in Modern Italy, vol. 16 no.3 (August 2011): 223-247. 19 “Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, 41st Vice President (1974-1977).” United States Senate. https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_Nelson_Rockefeller.htm 20 Cockcroft, 126.

23 Uncle Sam’s defense line-up.”21 One example of its involvement is when MoMA became a cultural war contractor, fulfilling thirty-eight contracts of cultural materials for the Library of

Congress, the Office of War Information, and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American

Affairs.22

In the 1960s and 1970s, MoMA actively supported Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, whose work was perceived to represent American liberalism and the degree of freedom in American society. As Eva Cockcroft describes, “Links between cultural cold war politics and the success of Abstract Expressionism are by no means coincidental, or unnoticeable. They were consciously forged at the time by some of the most influential figures controlling museum policies and advancing enlightened cold war tactics designed to woo

European intellectuals.”23 Even though proponents of Abstract Expressionism claimed it to be politically neutral and instead focused on the artistic developments of the individual, it proved to be an effective political tool. America during the Cold War precisely needed a kind of art movement that seemed to divorce art from politics, which stands in sharp contrast to the heavy involvement of the arts in politics in socialist countries. Ironically, Abstract Expressionists boasted of their independence from politics and ability to explore self-expression whereas, in fact, their rise to prominence and financial success were largely due to their alignment with the political and cultural directions of the country.24

21 Cockcroft, 126. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 130-132.

24 South Korea

Having illustrated the precedents of how the West deployed museums for political goals and to project a consciously curated national image to the world, I will now turn to East Asian countries in the post-WWII period, who borrowed significantly from the Western model of museum practices.

South Korea, emerging from Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945) and the Korean War

(1950-1953), established itself as an independent nation-state with the help of the United States and was subsequently under military rule for more than three decades.25 South Korea in the second half of the twentieth century underwent a period of intense nation-building under different political regimes. Through the change of regimes, the country also developed a discursive national narrative that adapted to the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1980s. The election by direct popular vote in December 1987 marked Korea’s official transition to democracy.26 In this section, I will focus on the role of museums during this transition by examining how they contributed to efforts of undoing colonial mentality, fighting for democracy, and striving to place South Korea on an international stage in the 1980s and early

1990s.

Under the context of General Chun Doo Hwan’s coup d’état in 1980 and the subsequent violent crackdown of the Kwangju uprising in May of the same year, the civilian uprisings and protests for democracy in the 1980s gave rise to a critical consciousness of the nation’s historical subjectivity. There was a shared sense of crisis among Koreans that “modern Korea had failed to decolonize from the former colonial power of Japan and the neo-colonial superpower of the

25 Ki-Sung Kwak, Media and Democratic Transition in South Korea. (London: Routledge, 2012): 7. 26 Uk Heo and Terence Roehrig, South Korea Since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 28-51.

25 United States.”27 Spearheaded by university students and intellectuals, they sought to overcome this failure by placing the people (minjung) at the center of history and thereby reclaiming agency and subjectivity. As Kim Minsok, a student leader at Seoul National University, stated in

1985, “only minjung is completely nationalistic, and only minjung is completely democratic.

This is my conclusion upon reflecting on modern Korean History, which has gone through trial and error in search for subjectivity [of historical development].”28 Central to this argument is the idea of Korea’s historical development and the need to “correct” it, which led to the questioning of state’s legitimacy and its dependency on colonial powers even after South Korea’s independence. In response to these pressures, the state was compelled to search for a new normative ideology to replace the type of nationalism centered on anti-communism.29

Hong Kal, in her book Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle,

Politics and History, devotes a chapter to the analysis of the making of “culture” and national narrative via public museums in postcolonial South Korea. Specifically, she uses the

Independence Hall of Korea (IHK) and the National Museum of Contemporary Art (NMCA) as two case studies to illustrate the state’s assertion of legitimacy and construction of national identity in the last decades of the twentieth century.30 However, I would argue that the IHK serves more as a monument than a museum—although it does possess a sizeable collection, its main purpose is to memorialize Korea’s independence movements during the Japanese Colonial

Period and pay tribute to the heroic feats of the Korean people.31 Nonetheless, I include this

27 Hong Kal, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History. (New York: Rutledge, 2011): 88. 28 Quoted in Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011): 23. 29 Kal, 88. 30 Ibid., 85-102. 31 “Independence Hall of Korea,” Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. https://www.mcst.go.kr/english/culture/museum/memorial.jsp (accessed October 20, 2019)

26 example to show how a structure like the IHK can inculcate certain beliefs and narratives about a nation and a people. The NMCA, on the other hand, is a potent symbol of South Korea’s effort to present itself as a modern nation that pays attention to the artistic developments of its people—in other words, it represents a conscious shift in South Korea’s national image. As such, the combination of the two structures present a narrative of South Korea’s attempt to assert its national, ethnic identity while also framing itself as part of the global community.

The Independence Hall of Korea was constructed in 1987, amidst a period of intensified anti-Japanese sentiment as well as the state’s violent crackdowns against pro-democracy protestors. As Kal describes, “in the suppression of state terror, colonial memory came to the forefront of the state cultural politics.”32 This statement echoes Brian J. McVeigh’s claim that culture is often used by the state to obscure power arrangements as it “justifies, legitimates, and rationalizes the concomitant politico-economic machinery.”33 This colonial memory testifies the aforementioned sentiment to undo colonial mentality by demonstrating Korea’s independence from colonial powers and asserting its own nationhood. Thus, the state sought to deploy the IHK to “‘normalize’ culture in the period of ‘abnormality’ by evoking a deep-seated popular sentiment of anti-colonial nationalism,” propagating a normative ideology based on ethnic nationalism and Korea’s history of fighting for independence.34 In order to illustrate how the monument shapes public consciousness, I will analyze the IHK by combining Kal’s analysis and

Duncan’s theory on the museum experience as a ritual.

The idea of a ritual seems to be a religious concept that does not belong to the modern, secular society of the twentieth century. However, as Duncan argues, “our supposedly secular,

32 Kal, 89. 33 Brian J. McVeigh, Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004): 19 34 Kal, 90.

27 even anti-ritual, culture is full of ritual situations and events—very few of which take place in religious contexts. We… build sites that publicly represent beliefs about the order of the world, its past and present, and the individual’s place within it.”35 The belief that the South Korean state attempted to propagate through the IHK is one of national unity, ethnic “Korean-ness,” and the state’s role as a legitimate guardian of anti-colonial spirit.36

Located in Ch’onan, a historical hometown of anti-Japanese patriotism, the spatial organization of the IHK is based on a typical Confucian palatial compound, with a strong northeast-southwest axial line penetrating the entire complex (Figure 4). The space conveys a sense of absolute harmony through its strict symmetry and its setting in nature, with a looming mountain to the back that conforms to Confucian geomancy. At the center is the main memorial hall, the Grand Hall of the Nation, and the Plaza of the Nation. The arrangement of these main structures recalls the design of the Choson royal palace; however, instead of exalting the king, the IHK places the collective ethnic body of the people (minjung) as the center by exposing the

Plaza to welcome visitors.37 The architecture of the main hall also follows a traditional Korean model, with a large curved roof supported by posts that make up the main façade. The spatial construction and architecture of the IHK, as well as the strategic naming, reflect the “ideal memorial architecture that manifests [Korea’s] traditional aesthetics as well as contemporary function and thus realizes our national unity,” as stated by Lee Pom-chae, a member of the museum construction committee38

35 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 8. 36 Kal, 90-92. 37 Ibid. 38 “Thoughts nearing the completion of the Independence Hall of Korea,” quoted in Kal, 90.

28

Figure 4. Aerial view of the International Hall of Korea Image from Hong Kal, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History.

The emphasis on the people and a shared past can be more clearly observed in the monuments displayed, which extend toward the past to denote a collective future. At the entrance to the IHK stands The Monument to the Nation, a 50-meter-tall white monument with a set of two identical towers leaning against each other, inspiring awe among visitors and welcoming them to the “pilgrimage.” In the Grand Hall of the Nation is a gigantic monument, The Statue of

Indomitable Korea (Figure 5), that depicts a group of young figures moving in an upward motion, culminating with a male figure pointing toward the sky. The monument “conveys the message that all members of society are determined to work together toward a collectively agreed path to the nation’s future,” but does not include the elderly or socially marginalized peoples, thereby projecting an idealized image of the Korean ethnic body.39 Interestingly, both

The Monument to the Nation and The Statue of Indomitable Korea are in all white, reminiscent of classical Greco-Roman statues as we know now, which are utilized by Western nations to

39 Kal, 91-92.

29 advance the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. This reference is not mentioned by Hal, but is nonetheless worth contemplating.

Figure 5. The Statue of Indomitable Korea Source: https://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/ATR/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=268181

Adding to the narrative of the Korean ethnic nation is another monumental statue, The

Spirit of March First (Figure 6), which depicts the Korean independence uprising against

Japanese colonialism in 1919. Different from The Statue of Indomitable Korea, this monument includes people of different social backgrounds who form a three-level human pyramid striving upward. As Kal points out, the base level stands for collective suffering, the middle for the awakening of the people, and the top for liberation. The female figure at the peak holds a torch in front of the national flag, symbolizing Korea’s freedom.40 This iconography echoes both the

Statue of Liberty in the US and the Goddess of Democracy sculpture created by art students during the 1989 Tiananmen protest in Beijing. In The Spirit of March First, the figures’ gesture of extending both hands upward thus represent both an aspiration for independence and the

40 Kal, 93.

30 progress of the nation. The monuments convey the sense that the people of Korea have and will always stand together when the nation is in crisis, thus highlighting national unity.

Figure 6. The Spirit of March First Image from Hong Kal, Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History.

How, then, do visitors associate themselves with the visual encounters at the IHK?

Essentially, the architecture, the monuments, and the visitors engage in a kind of performance that Duncan categorizes as being ritualistic in nature. Through this ritual, the individual is integrated into the official narrative propagated by the museum and becomes part of the Korean ethnic body. In order to illustrate how the museum achieves this integration, we must first understand that the museum establishes itself as an authority that claims to provide objective knowledge. For the state to plan and construct the museum is to “control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths,” which also enables it to define “the relative

31 standing of the individuals within that community.”41 A prerequisite to this effort, however, is the assumption that the visitor is “perfectly predisposed socially, psychologically, and culturally to enact the museum ritual,” which means that his or her identity is one that museum ritual fully confirms.42 This affirmation allows the visitor to identify as belonging to the group represented by the museum.

When visitors step into the IHK complex, they follow a prescribed route, recall the narratives of anti-colonial efforts they learned from school or everyday exposure to social discourse, and engage with the narrative of the museum—all of which are elements of the museum ritual as theorized by Duncan. In this way, the official narrative merges with an individual’s experience and thus enhances the consciousness of belonging to the larger national narrative. In this way, the IHK propagates the state’s goal to establish a stronger ethnic nationalism by invoking past colonial experiences, at the same time legitimizing the state’s self- ascribed role as the guardian of anti-colonial spirits. This role of the state as a guardian or a savior is also evident in the case of the National Taiwan Museum, established by the Japanese colonial government, on which I will elaborate in the next chapter. Furthermore, the IHK’s narrative betrays no trace of the concurrent domestic political conflicts in South Korea and instead portrays a coherent, unified nation. It is an ingenious effort that responds to the social demand to “correct” Korea’s historical development, facilitates national unity, and asserts the nation’s agency.

On top of the need to assert national identity during a period of political turmoil, the nation also faced the need of globalization. During the 1980s, despite being under authoritarian rule, Korean society was transformed by three decades of economic growth and the resulting

41 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 13. 42 Ibid., 9-13.

32 urbanization, which meant that the rising middle class became more susceptible to global trends and had higher cultural needs. Under this socio-economic backdrop, the government promoted the slogan of “culture for everyone” (munhwa hyangsu kihoe hwakdae) and kicked off a new era of popular culture in May of 1981 with a folk festival named “National Wave 81” (kukpung 81).

In the following decade, the state built a series of cultural facilities in and around its capital, including the Seoul Arts Center (1984), the Seoul Grand Park (1984), the Olympic Stadiums

(1986), the NMCA (1986), the IHK (1987) and the Olympic Park (1987).43 These structures were not only erected to respond to the urban residents but also to celebrate the country’s winning of the bid for the 1988 Olympic Games and to prepare for this significant mega-event.

This victory signalled South Korea’s ascension to the ranks of advanced nations, which associated the national culture with modernity and contemporaneity.44 However, the other face of progress and a new national consciousness is the need to assert the origins of the nation. Thus, if the IHK was constructed to create an idealized narrative of the nation’s past and origins, the

NMCA, the major contemporary art museum, represents South Korea’s progress and future.

The transformation of the previous National Museum of Modern Art into the National

Museum of Contemporary Art (now called the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary

Art), including its relocation to a new building and a series of rigorous exhibitions, represents the state’s effort to renew the Korean identity that aligns with the concept of segyehwa

(globalization). As Kal succinctly summarizes, “for the new civilian government facing the urgent task to renew the nation, the projection of the new Korea with the international discourse was instrumental in providing a positive vision of a nation that is no longer a victim of, but an

43 Kal, 141. 44 Ibid., 89.

33 actor within, the global community.”45 I will analyze the NMCA following a trajectory from the museum’s space and architecture to its exhibitions, and finally discussing the social debate surrounding the NMCA.

The former National Museum of Modern Art opened in 1969, in an old colonial building that was the Government General Art Museum, on the ground of the Gyeongbok Palace. Three years later, it moved to the Seokjojeon building, a neo-classical structure, in the Deoksu Palace.

Despite being a national museum, the exhibitions and programs at these two locations were limited, and its main function was to host an annual art exhibition and the National Art Show.

This lack of activity showed that the government had little interest to promote culture related to the idea of modernity and instead focused on traditional Korean culture. In 1986, however, the

NMCA moved to a new building (Figure 7) in Gwacheon, designed by the Korean-American architect Kim Tae-su (also spelled Kim Tai Soo), who was trained in the Yale School of

Architecture.46 This new building follows neither the neo-classical style based on Greco-Roman architecture nor traditional Korean architecture, but is instead a decidedly modern structure with a fortress-like minimalist aesthetic. Not only did the NMCA move to a building designed exclusively for the museum, it also reformed its institutional organization, establishing an executive office and a curatorial department. Under the executive office, there was an administration department, exhibition department, and external education department. Although not yet fully developed, this new organizational structure closely resembles the typical structure of a modern Western art museum, separating curatorial and administration.47 The relocation and

45 Kal, 102. 46 Ibid., 93-94. 47 "History." National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. https://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/contents.do?menuId=5020011210 (accessed October 21, 2019)

34 restructuring of the museum thus signalled a shift in the government’s cultural priority from emphasizing history and tradition to embracing modernization and globalization.

Figure 7. The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea Source: https://www.archdaily.com/928383/architectural-heroes-arent-only-of-the- past/5dcc24b53312fd1a1c000002-architectural-heroes-arent-only-of-the-past-image

With the new location, the NMCA started to expand its collection to include internationally renowned artists in order to become not just a Korean museum but a global museum of modern art. The overview of the collection page of the museum website states:

The museum began to focus on gathering a substantial internationally-recognized collection … in 1986. The Asian Games in 1986 and the 1988 Olympics were prime opportunities for the museum to boast its growing collection, as well as to expand by continuing to purchase artworks from an array of international artists, such as Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol…”48

The NMCA being relocated and furnished with an expanding collection at the eve of the two important sport events is no coincidence. As the above statement demonstrates, these events that attract a large number of international visitors were great opportunities to “boast” the museum collection, thereby also boasting Korea’s progress and globalization. By displaying Korean artists alongside Western artists, the museum places Korean art on an international stage and

South Korea as an internationally recognized country.

48 “Collection Overview.” National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. https://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/contents.do?menuId=2000013200 (accessed October 21, 2019)

35 Furthermore, as part of its grand opening, the museum commissioned the Korean

American artist Nam June Paik to create a centerpiece for the rotunda. The result was The More the Better (Figure 8), a monumental TV tower that shows the artist’s ideal vision of progress brought by the advance of technology. This tower spirals upward toward the dome that has the inscription “We built the hall to bring light progress of our art.”49 This “progress of our art” endorsed by the early stage of the new NMCA is essentially elitist in nature. As Kal argues, “the museum sponsored norms of modernism, elitism and formalism as if to demonstrate its distinction from the socialist realism of North Korea.” This choice of collection and art commission testifies Peggy Levitt’s claim that museums use objects to legitimize “particular social and political hierarchies, privileging some ways of knowing while excluding others.”50

Indeed, avant-garde art as represented by the American Abstract Expressionism stands as the antithesis of socialist art and was a potent weapon of the West, and by extension South

Korea, which was established with the help of the US during the Cold War era.51 What Kal fails to mention, however, is the association between the NMCA’s focus on modernism and the developments of avant-garde art in the American art scene since the 1960s, which was dominated by a type of formalism championed by the art critic Clement Greenberg. Although

Nam June Paik, as part of the Fluxus group, contributed to the effort of subverting the formalist aesthetic by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to art-making, he was nonetheless part of a movement that distinguished art from the masses.52 The NMCA organized large-scale exhibitions such as “Korean Art Today” and “’86 Seoul Contemporary Asian Art Show,” which

49 Kal, 95. 50 Peggy Levitt, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015): 7. 51 Cockcroft, 129. 52 David Hopkins, After Modern Art 1945-2000. (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000): 95-105.

36 presented Korean avant-garde art in accord with the ideas of progress and modernization.

However, it should be noted that Korean avant-garde art was largely influenced by its Western counterpart in terms of concept and form. The kind of art produced by the avant-garde artists was in no way accessible or comprehensible to the common person. Thus, what the NMCA presented was a kind of art that is culturally different from its visitors and visually and conceptually difficult to understand. The NMCA’s approach to displaying art received severe criticisms from the media, politicians, artists and art critics who questioned the national cultural identity that the museum presented. The 1980s and 1990s were a period of intense protests for democratization and saw the expansion of the minjung movement after the Kwangju massacre, which questioned the state’s dependency on colonial power such as the US Thus, the formalist narrative of the

NMCA that separates itself from politics and the masses became a target of this movement.53

Figure 8. Nam June Paik, The More the Better, 1988

53 Kal, 96-97.

37 Source: Korea JoongAng Daily. https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=3067963

Under the pressures for democratization and for involvement in the political discourse, the NMCA held a large-scale exhibition 15 Years of Minjung Art: 1980-1994, which featured over 200 works of minjung art that criticized historical and social injustice. These works represented “the alienation, agency and authentic subjectivity of minjung in a realistic manner.”54

The display of realist artworks countered the museum’s previous stance against art that has heavy political undertones, which was deemed too close to socialist realism. In this sense, the

NMCA, as a national museum that claims to represent national culture, became another battlefield for civil and political protests of the period.

The importance of the NMCA lies in that it “became a strategic ground for the state in its bid to make contemporary art a new social and political force to remake society and redefine national identity.”55 The opening of the museum in 1986 diverted the public’s attention from

“politics” and violence to culture and peace and further paved a way for the nation’s transition to democracy by facilitating cultural amnesia. Moreover, the museum symbolized the nation’s contemporary creativity, self-innovation and progress, which corresponded with its economic growth and ascension to the international stage in the 1980s and early 1990s.56

Nonetheless, like the IHK, the NMCA sought to cover the political turmoil and violence preceding the transition. While the IHK invoked a collective past of anti-colonialism and emphasized on national unity, the NMCA facilitated aesthetic contemplation that focused on art and creativity rather than politics. However, as the “museum wars” of the 1990s demonstrate, the

54 Kal, 97. 55 Ibid., 94. 56 Ibid., 94-97.

38 museum was not imperceptible to social and political trends and responded to the demands of the public by incorporating the art of the minjung into its programme.

Taiwan

Like South Korea, Taiwan also went through transformations of its identity in the late twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Taiwan has been going through identity struggles between the Chinese nationalist propaganda under early Kuomintang (KMT) rule and the nativist

Taiwanese narrative endorsed by Lee Teng-hui in the 1990s and later by the Democratic

Progressive Party (DPP) in the early 2000s, which stressed the importance of “indigenization”

(bentuhua). The latter’s approach was an effort to separate Taiwan from the People’s Republic of

China and to establish Taiwan’s own cultural distinctiveness.57 One of the issues surrounding the identity politics of Taiwan is the relationship between “elite attempts to mould identity, and popular receptiveness or resistance to such efforts.”58 Based on the overarching strategy of

“building up a nation on the basis of culture” (wenhualiguo), museums were given a prominent position. The discourse of basing nation-building on culture was also featured heavily in post- war Japan, as I will demonstrate in Chapter Three. The DPP administration under Chen Shui- bian placed the construction of a Taiwanese identity, both at home and to be projected abroad, at a central position in its cultural policy.59

Edward Vickers, in his article “History, Identity, and the Politics of Taiwan’s Museums,” examines how the different governments in Taiwan since the 1980s sought to use museums to construct a certain kind of national identity. He highlights the role of national museums in the

57 Edward Vickers, "History, Identity, and the Politics of Taiwan's Museums," China Perspectives no.3 (September 2010): 92. 58 Ibid., 93. 59 Ibid., 92.

39 transition from the KMT’s Chinese nationalism to the DPP’s emphasis on the indigenous culture and history of Taiwan. In his study, he focused on the National Palace Museum, the National

Museum of History, the National Taiwan Museum, and the National Museum of Taiwan History.

The National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei’s predecessor is the Palace Museum in the

Forbidden City in Beijing that was established to house the royal treasures after the abdication of imperial China’s last emperor, Puyi. During the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949) and the subsequent victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the national treasures in the Palace

Museum were deemed to be in danger and the museum committee decided to ship the most precious objects to Taiwan. The NPM’s collection was established upon these extradited objects, and its main building was completed in 1965 and opened to public in November of the same year.60 Because of the establishment of the NPM as an extension of the Palace Museum that housed the treasures of the Chinese mainland, the NPM’s narrative under early KMT rule is centered on the Chinese nation, which includes both the mainland and Taiwan. These objects were perceived to be only sojourning in Taiwan and would eventually return to Beijing when the

KMT regained sovereignty over the Chinese mainland.61 In this sense, “the national imagination which NPM supports is not situated in Taiwan but instead in Mainland China.”62

However, as Vickers shows, as the DPP assumed political power in Taiwan in 2000, the

NPM also sought to alter its predominantly Chinese nationalist narrative. The Director of the

NPM from 2000-2004, Tu Cheng-sheng, organized exhibitions that focused on the

“multicultural” elements of Taiwan’s early history as opposed to following the previous China-

60 "History of the National Palace Museum." National Palace Museum. https://www.npm.gov.tw/en/Article.aspx?sNo=03001502. (accessed October 25, 2019) 61 Yi-Chih Huang. "National Glory and Traumatism: National/cultural identity construction of National Palace Museum in Taiwan." in National Identities 14, no. 3 (September 2012): 222. 62 Huang, 222.

40 themed exhibitions. Furthermore, as the museum website states, the NPM under Tu’s directorship also began to collect artifacts from various Asian countries and focused on raising local consciousness by increasing education and public outreach activities.63 These new priorities signalled the NPM’s transition from being China-centered to focusing on the broader context of

Asia.

Furthermore, Yi-Chih Huang’s “National Glory and Traumatism: National/cultural identity construction of National Palace Museum in Taiwan” illustrates how the establishment of the National Palace Museum’s new branch, the NPM Southern Branch (NPMSB) was an effort to decenter the Chinese nationalist narrative and to construct Taiwan’s autonomous national identity.64 The NPMSB, established in 2003, focuses more on Taiwanese and Asian art and is thus a postcolonial project that aims to rewrite national history and reinvent the NPM as a national museum that represents an authentic Taiwanese national identity of multiculturalism.

The establishment of the NPMSB also diminishes the heavy political and Chinese connotations of the NPM and drives the museum away from solely being a remnant of KMT rule.65

Another national museum, the National Taiwan Museum (NTM), also demonstrates clearly how museums take part in the transition of power from the KMT to the DPP and thereby in the shift of Taiwan’s national identity. The museum was established in 1909 by the Japanese colonial government and is the oldest museum in Taiwan. Japanese anthropologists endowed the

NTM with a collection of valuable aboriginal artifacts as well as objects related to the Qing

Dynasty. Due to its colonial legacy and artifacts composing the majority of its collection, the early KMT government considered the NTM to be merely a provincial and second-tier museum.

63 "History of the National Palace Museum." 64 Huang, 211. 65 Ibid., 223.

41 However, with the new emphasis on Taiwanese indigenous culture, the NTM rose to prominence and truly became a national museum. It came under the Council for Cultural Affairs, which was created in 1981 to preserve Taiwan’s heritage and promote cultural development.66 The museum’s collection facilitated an emphasis on “the primordially non-Chinese roots of

Taiwanese culture and nationhood in the form of the island’s ‘Austronesian’ aboriginal heritage,” and thus was repositioned to serve the cause of raising a “Taiwanese” consciousness.67

Both the NPM and the NTM, along with other national museums mentioned in Vickers’ article, became political tools of the new DPP government to promote the indigenization of

Taiwanese culture, shifting Taiwan’s national identity away from the Chinese nationalism endorsed by the KMT prior to the 1980s. However, Vickers fails to show how these museums interacted with their audiences and how visitors connected or disconnected with their exhibitions. An extension to this research would be to investigate the ways through which the public was incorporated into this new narrative.

Singapore

Like South Korea before the democratic transition, Singapore is also a polity with limited political rights for civilians. During the early stage of the establishment of Singapore as an independent polity, the government leveraged economic growth to promote “the idea of a harmonious society that was collectively working to achieve prosperity for Singapore as a whole.”68 Different from South Korea, Singapore cannot base its national identity on a single ethnicity, as a multitude of different ethnicities comprises the city-state. Therefore, if South

66 Vickers, 97. 67 Ibid., 98. 68 Stephan Ortmann, “Singapore: The Politics of Inventing National Identity,” in Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, vol. 28 no. 4 (2009): 28.

42 Korea seeks to construct an ethnic national identity, Singapore promotes an authoritarian civic national identity.69 Singapore’s national identity construction can be separated into two phases: the first is when the nation first gained independence in 1965 and focused on economic growth and political power; the second starts from the 1980s when the city-state has gained enough economic and political confidence and began to focus on the cultural sphere to enhance its national identity.70 Furthermore, during the second phase, Singapore also sought to reposition itself geopolitically from a low-skill based industry vulnerable to economic turns to “an economy based on higher-value manufacturing, research, and development, and high-tech and creative industries.”71 This section focuses on the importance of museums during the second phase by examining the Singapore Art Museum, among many other museums in Singapore.

First, because the Singaporean nation is itself “a distinctly modern and decidedly constructed phenomenon,” according to Stephan Ortmann, museums are an ever more important apparatus to convey and shape the story of the nation. The constructed nature of the state and its museums thus highlights the connection between museums and national identity. The narrative that the Singaporean government propagates through museums reinforces “the identities of the city-state’s four official demographic groups and their history of hybridity and mixing,” while at the same time “promoting a regional list of allegedly universal values.”72 Furthermore, the government also deploys cultural policies and institutions to enhance its status as a regional and global economic power and to ensure its citizens know who they are in the world.73 Indeed, the consciousness of Singaporeans as being citizens of a not only economically strong but culturally

69 Ortmann, 25. 70 Ibid., 24. 71 Levitt, 95-97. 72 Ibid., 93. 73 Ibid., 93.

43 advanced state is crucial to this effort. As Benson Puah, the CEO of the National Arts Council, states, “You can’t become a global arts and culture hub … if your own residents aren’t self- aware or don’t appreciate art. So the first thing is to teach and to engage with art…”74 Second,

Singapore’s unique position in Asia as a city-state that relies on immigrants and foreign talents further adds another layer of intention to the state’s construction of museums. As Levitt illustrates, state-of-the-art cultural institutions not only attract museum professionals but also provide a high standard of living for executives of transnational corporations.75

Puah’s goal to help Singaporeans develop a taste for the arts, necessary skills to appreciate them, and cultivate a museum-going habit parallels the efforts of the Meiji government in the early 20th century to develop a rational museum-going and art-viewing practice among its citizens in order to catch up to the cultural developments of the West.76

Furthermore, when Puah was the director of the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), he worked on

“rescuing and reinforcing [Singapore’s] forgotten heritage,” which he deems to have been lost due to the city-state’s vigorous westernization. As Singapore strives to become truly cosmopolitan and a regional, if not global, cultural hub, asserting the nation’s own cultural heritage is extremely important to constructing and maintaining its national identity. The SAM, which opened in 1996, aligns with this goal by preserving and presenting the art of Singapore and the Southeast Asian region, including both its history and contemporary developments.

Furthermore, in order to create a truly Singaporean museum, the SAM also consciously seeks to nurture local artists. In the early nation-building phase of Singapore, because of the need to achieve financial security, very few parents would encourage their children to pursue a career in

74 Quoted in Levitt, 103-104. 75 Levitt, 93-94. 76 Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 3.

44 the arts. As a result, Singapore had few artists to call its own. However, as Puah notes, it is crucial to foster an indigenous artistic community in Singapore. Thus, the SAM actively supports local artists by commissioning artworks, giving out art prizes and awards, hosting residencies, and presenting exhibitions of Singaporean artists.77

Singapore’s museum-building effort has several layers of intentions—it establishes the city-state as a cultural hub, enhances the narrative of its multi-ethnic identity, attracts foreign talents, cultivates a consciousness of the arts among its citizens, and promotes a vibrant local artistic community. All of these goals seek to establish Singapore as an advanced, global nation while at the same time nurturing a Singaporean artistic identity.

International Outlook of Museums

As it has become clear in the previous sections, establishing museums not only asserts one’s own political virtue but also strengthens a state’s legitimacy in diplomatic relations. Non-

Western states sought to deploy the museum as “a means of signalling to the West that one is a reliable political ally, imbued with proper respect for and adherence to Western symbols and values. By providing a veneer of Western liberalism that entails few political risks and relatively small expense, art museums in the Third World can reassure the West that one is a safe bet for economic or military aid.”78 Art museums are thus crucial proponents of a nation’s international image.

In the United States, the Museum of Modern Art manifests the most detectable international aims of museums. Since the burgeoning of Abstract Expressionism, it has been exhibited abroad. Willem de Kooning’s works were included in the American pavilion at the

77 Levitt, 104-105. 78 Duncan, 89.

45 Venice Biennale in 1948 and were joined by that of Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky in 1950.

These artists were also represented in international shows in Venezuela, India, and Japan, among other countries.79 The Japanese avant-garde group, the Gutai, was largely influenced and inspired by the Abstract Expressionist exhibitions they saw in Japan, which prompted its members to explore with new media and ways of making art, focusing on self-expression rather than following the political art movements that preceded it.80 Furthermore, a 1956 show at MoMA,

Modern Art in the US, toured eight European cities. All of these exhibitions show that MoMA, as a cultural apparatus of the US, consciously promoted the liberal American culture, as represented by Abstract Expressionism, to the world in the polarized Cold War era.

In South Korea, the 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul provided the incentive and the need for the city to present international visitors with an image of Seoul as a modern, international, and cultured city. As the NMCA museum statement shows, these global sport events are opportunities for the museum to boast its collection and exhibition to a diverse audience and to garner international attention. Nam June Paik’s The More the Better, commissioned in 1986 for the NMCA’s rotunda, was unveiled in 1988 to correspond with the timing of the Olympics. By installing a work by an internationally renowned avant-garde artist who is ethnically Korean, the museum not only shows that it is part of the global modern and contemporary art narrative but also that the Korean ethnic nation has produced artists who are influential globally. The national goal to further internationalize the country can be seen more explicitly in the Kwangju Biennale, which was first held in 1995 with the theme “Beyond the

Borders.”81 The concept of a biennale can be traced back to the Venice Biennale, which started

79 Cockrcoft, 129. 80 Ming Tiampo, “Please Draw Freely,” in Gutai: Splendid Playground, eds. Ming Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe. (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: New York, 2013): 44-80. 81 Kal, 92.

46 in 1895 as a celebration of Italian art but later expanded to include pavilions of countries around the world. As such, although the term “biennale” simply refers to an event that happens every two years, the biennale as an art event came to be associated with international art exposition and cultural exchange. Furthermore, the Kwangju Biennale also served the purpose of reimagining the city from a site of state violence and bloody massacre to a center of international art, and by extension, peace. As the ’95 Kwangju Biennale Report states, “art must reject conflict, confrontation, violence and discrimination,” and instead “respect the spirit of nature based on humanism.” It further urges Koreans to “assume a central role in the production of culture as members of the global community.”82

Different from the above-mentioned countries, Taiwanese museums have a particular importance to Taiwan’s diplomatic and cultural relations with other countries as it lacks “access to many of the standard forums of international diplomacy.”83 Through the process of lending out objects to institutions abroad and borrowing objects for domestic exhibitions, Taiwan is able to establish its own cultural presence on an international arena and to draw audiences from different countries. This particular function of museums is clearly illustrated in the organizational goals of the NPM under three directors since 1965. Under Director Jiang Fu-cong

(1965 to 1983), the NPM “sent museum personnel abroad for advanced studies to develop professional museum workers.” Under Director Qin Xiao-yi (1983 to 2000), it “vigorously engaged in international art exchanges to overcome obstacles in international cultural cooperation after Taiwan’s departure from the United Nations (e.g. the NPM curated exhibitions in France and the United States, setting great examples for international loan exhibitions to

82 Quoted in Kal, 98. 83 Vickers, 101.

47 follow).”84 These exchanges were an effort to better align the museums practices of Taiwan with the conventions of the West in order to facilitate smoother cultural exchanges. Furthermore, the museum brought its treasures abroad in order to demonstrate the cultural richness of Taiwan.

This goal is stated explicitly during Tu Cheng-sheng’s directorship (2000 to 2004), during which

“selected artifact masterpieces [were] used in loan exhibitions held in Germany and Austria to promote NPM artifacts and art.”85

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have demonstrated that museums are potent political agents that can advance a nation’s nation-building and nation-branding efforts. The national or public museum, as an intermediary between the state and the people, serves as a connective structure that links personal narratives and identity to national identity. In the West, the emergence of the modern museum in the 19th century beginning with the Louvre signaled a shift away from the old order and helped to connect the state and its people. The United States, as it joined the ranks of the great nations in the West, also used museums such as the Met to establish its cultural prominence. In more recent decades, we see a trend to use museums to exert soft power abroad, as in the case of MoMA.

In East Asia, I have used examples from South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to illustrate how museums contribute to nation-building efforts as the three states emerge from colonial rule and seek to establish regional and global importance. In these states, museums also serve to foster and enhance their national identities, calling upon shared heritage and collective future outlook. The deployment of museums as political agents is thus not limited by the political

84 "History of the National Palace Museum." 85 Ibid.

48 structure of a nation; in fact, they become even more important during political transitions when a new regime needs to promote a new national identity, as seen in the case of South Korea and

Taiwan.

By illustrating the origins of the modern museum in Europe and how the US and East

Asian countries utilized museums to strengthen their national identities, I have established the theoretical background for examining Japanese public art museum in the post-war era. This chapter has shown that the establishment of museums is closely tied to the economic, social, and political contexts of a nation. Japan in the 1980s faced similar concerns as South Korea and

Singapore, as it also needed to establish itself culturally on the international arena after a period of economic growth. In the next chapter, I will examine the inception of the museum as an institution in the Meiji period and the Meiji state’s efforts to institutionalize art exhibitions, both of which are crucial to the development of public art museums in post-war Japan.

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Chapter Two: The Institutionalization of Exhibitions in Japan

In the introduction of The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm writes, “‘Traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented.”1

Although nowadays public museums have become an essential infrastructure of any major

Japanese city, the concept of the “museum” did not exist in Japan prior to the 1862 government mission to Europe. In order to properly examine the relationship between public art museums and national identity and image in 1980s Japan, we must first turn to the history and origin of museums, that is, when the institution was “invented” in Japan as a transplantation from the

West. Furthermore, it is also crucial to understand the history of the ties between museums and the state, as well as how museums were established to be an important aspect of people’s public life.

In the previous chapter, I have established the role of museums in Western and East

Asian societies and how they serve as a “connective structure” between the state and the people as well as an image to project to the world. In this chapter, I intend to illustrate that the institutionalization of art and the establishment of museums in Japan were not a sudden phenomenon but rather a gradual build-up from the popular displays in the Edo period to Japan’s participation in international expositions and the resulting emphasis on industrial objects. At first, art objects were exhibited alongside industrial, scientific and agricultural objects in both international and domestic expositions; art and art museums gradually became separate entities

1 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 1.

as Japan standardized its exhibitionary structures. Central to this development is Japan’s negotiation between Western perceptions and its national goals and identity.

I will begin by looking at the precedents of museums in Japan, namely, the vibrant exhibitionary culture in the Edo period and Japan’s participation in world’s fairs in the latter half of the twentieth century. These practices show that the museum already had a basis in Japan to build upon. Next, I will trace the origins of the museum (hakubutsukan), art (bijutsu), and art museum (bijutsukan) in Japan before proceeding to discuss how the state used the institutionalization of art (bijutsu no seidoka) and culture since the Meiji period in its nation- building effort. I will examine museums in Japan as an “invented tradition,” as theorized by

Hobsbawm, and question how the Japanese state utilized it to construct its national image and identity in different periods of its modern history. Recognizing that it is impossible to account for the entire development of museums in Japan, I will focus on the Meiji era and the early years of the Japanese colonial empire in this chapter. This period arguably represents one of the most intense nation-building efforts in Japan.

Exhibitionary Culture in the Edo Period and the Transition to Meiji

The Tokugawa, or Edo, period (1600-1868) saw the burgeoning of a domestic popular display culture that peaked in the early nineteenth century outside of official state sponsorship.

Besides the more institutionalized performance of kabuki, for the common people, and nō, for the elites, there was a wide range of informal performances and exhibitions, such as the misemono, kaichō, and bussankai. In a strictly hierarchical society, these events created a vibrant display culture in the Edo period accessible to almost all classes.2 The first known public and

2 Misemono is defined by Andrew Markus as “private exhibitions of unusual items, individuals, or skills, conducted for a limited span of time inside a temporary enclosure for the purpose of financial gain,” and were vibrant and

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secular art exhibition that resemble the modern conception of the term was the Higashiyama Art

Exhibition in Kyoto in 1792, founded by the Confucian scholar and literati painter and calligrapher Minagawa Kien. The exhibition was intended to provide an opportunity for artists of different schools to see the work of their peers and to attract more potential buyers.3 Nonetheless, it provided the public, for the first time, the access to viewing fine arts of a wide range of styles and forms. To what extent this annual exhibition helped cultivate aesthetic literacy in the people invites further investigation. Overall, these forms of display in the Edo period effectively ingrained the practice of exhibitions, with varying degrees of formality, into urban dwellers’ everyday lives before the birth of the museum in Japan.

In the Edo period, Japan remained a relatively closed country as the shogunate maintained a strict control over foreign trade and access to the country, only allowing merchants from China, Korea, and the Netherlands to trade in limited ports. This period was generally known as the sakoku (literally “lock up of the country”) era. However, the situation changed with the arrival of Matthew C. Perry and American gunboats in 1853, which forced Japan to open up for trade. Following Perry, Japan was obligated to sign a series of treaties with Western nations that officially ended its seclusion. These unequal treaties showed the weakness of the shogunate in the last decades of the Tokugawa period, which led to the Meiji restoration in 1868, where the

Japanese emperor was restored to power to replace the shogun as the political ruler of the

carnivalesque. For more information, see Andrew L. Markus, “The Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles From Contemporary Accounts.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. Vol. 45, no.2 (December 1985). The kaichō (“opening of the curtain”) was a way for temples and shrines to earn a profit by displaying important religious objects to the public, and the bussankai was a more scholarly form of exhibitions that started as a botanical and medicinal exhibition. See Nam-lin Hur, “Invitation to the Secret Buddha of Zenkōji Kaichō and Religious Culture in Early Modern Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies. Vol. 36, no. 1 (2009), and Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 18-19. 3 Christine Guth, Art of Edo Japan: The Artist and the City, 1615-1868 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010): 80-81.

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country.4 In the Meiji period (1868-1912), the priority of the government was to strengthen and modernize the nation from an agricultural society to an industrial one in order to resist further foreign invasion under the slogans of fukoku kyōhei (strong nation, strong military) and shokusan kōgyō (increase production, encourage industry). As part of this effort, the government hired foreign experts in order to jumpstart industry and the military, as well as in the realm of arts and culture. The official policy of the period, then, was to “absorb the best technologies and conceptual frameworks from the West that suited Japan’s modernization needs.”5 Thus, at the beginning of Japan’s modernization, the West held a crucial place as both a model to imitate and an enemy to overcome.

The Meiji Restoration in 1868 signalled significant changes to Japanese society—from early modern (kinsei) to modern (kindai), from late-feudal to modern institutions, and from isolation to renewed contact with the outside. The Meiji restoration was arguably the turning point at which Japan became a nation-state under a constitutional monarchy from a feudalistic society organized by different domains and a ruling shogunate. In this sense, it was not solely a political change from shogunal to imperial rule; the transition to the Meiji period caused profound social changes as well.6 As part of its modernization effort, the new state sought to suppress the carnivalesque elements in Edo display culture and replace it with a modern, rational one represented by museums. It can be argued here the idea of exhibitions is not a wholly new concept to the Japanese; rather, the government took the existing elements in society and regularized and institutionalized them to become educational and to serve its national political

4 Noriko Aso, “Greece of the East: Philhellenism in Imperial Japan,” in When Worlds Elide: Classics, Politics, Culture, eds. Karen Bassi and Peter Euben (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010): 23. 5 Hiroshi Nara. “An Adoring Gaze: the Idea of Greece in Modern Japan,” in Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia, eds Almut-Barbara Renger and Xin Fan. (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2018): 177. 6 Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds, Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986): 3.

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goals. This new form of exhibiting artifacts and art in Japan largely borrowed from Western models as the state strove to raise Japan’s international profile and integrate into global economy.7 Regarding the invention of traditions, Hobsbawm defines them to be “responses to novel situations which … establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition. It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant.”8 The museum in Japan, then, was “invented” as a necessary element for the Japanese society to become truly modern, and it is an institution that was built to become an anchor point in the everyday life of Japanese citizens.

The transplantation of the museum model onto Japanese soil was not a singular effort; rather, it was part of a larger move to rapidly adopt Western institutions in the 1870s.9 The chief and foremost objective behind this effort was to revise the unequal treaties forced upon Japan by

Western nations during the Edo period and thus achieve Japan’s national independence.10 As

Iwakura Tomomi, an influential statesman in foreign affairs, wrote in a memorandum, “We must revise the treaties of commerce and navigation already concluded with Britain, France, Prussia and the United States and thus protect the independence of our country.”11 In order to understand

Western societies better, the government sponsored numerous official missions to Europe and the United States, among them the 1862 overseas mission to Europe involving Fukuzawa

Yukichi and the Iwakura Mission from 1871 to 1873. Even though the eventual goal was treaty

7 Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014): 4. 8 Hobsbawm, 2. 9 Eleanor D. Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987): 12. 10 Chelsea Foxwell, “Japan as Museum? Encapsulating Change and Loss in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Getty Research Journal, no. 1 (2009): 39. 11 Quoted in Tomoko T. Okagaki, The Logic of Conformity: Japan's Entry into International Society. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013): 64.

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revision, the true significance of those trips does not lie in tangible achievements. Rather, it lies in “affecting the perceptions of the Japanese leaders concerning international politics and on how

Japan should act in order to enter the European club of international society.”12 These government missions were the primary way through which Japanese government officials came to understand how Western societies and organizations functioned.

Not only did the new Meiji government establish its Foreign Ministry in 1869, it also adopted a variety of Western structures such as the navy (1869), the postal system (1872), the primary school system (1872), the judicial system (1872), and the national bank system (1872), just to name a few particularly important ones.13 In this sense, Japan is unique in its large-scale, rapid, and apparently voluntary emulation of foreign organizational models. It should be noted here, however, that the museum model which Japan borrowed from the West, like the other types of institutions, is not a monolithic and unchanging one. Japan’s encounter with the West at the end of the 19th century was also a period in which the Western nations were transforming their own national organizations and systems.14 The first modern museum, the Louvre, was established merely a century ago, and the Smithsonian in the United States was established only a few decades before Japanese officials’ visits in the 1870s.

Furthermore, the Japanese approach to borrowing foreign models was eclectic in nature, meaning that they took the best from different nations in the West based on both the prestige of the organization (e.g. the French army) and the nation’s international prestige.15 Tomoko T.

Okagaki argues succinctly that, “the leaders [of Japan] needed to comprehend the requirements for membership and find ways to mobilise and transform dormant domestic institutions into

12 Okagaki, 66. 13 Westney, 12. 14 Ibid., 10. 15 Ibid., 20.

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those that suited the European criteria in order to obtain full sovereign statehood.”16 Moreover, she further places Japan’s efforts within the larger context of “the normative change in nineteenth-century international society,” where systems such as political structure and law became more stabilized in the West.17

As Eleanor D. Westney illustrates, there were three main goals that the Japanese government aspired to achieve through the establishments of these organizations. The first was to achieve a military capacity comparable to that of Western powers, which includes forming a literate and patriotic citizenry. This goal can be largely attributed to the second, which is to achieve the revision of unequal treaties, as mentioned above. These unequal treaties not only established disadvantaging trade conditions for Japan, they also deprived Japan of jurisdiction over Westerners within its state. In order to revise these treaties, the key condition was that Japan establish a system of state administration, including that of legal, police, and commerce, that met the approvals of the foreign powers.18 The third goal incorporated the previous two and was “the desire to make Japan into a modern nation that was equal of the Western powers, one that would be respected internationally as a modern, ‘civilized’ society.”19 Thus, all three of the goals can be summarized into the intense desire to “catch up” to the West in order to be treated as an equal and thus achieve treaty revision and self-determination.

Regarding the national image of Japan in the Meiji period, an anonymous contributor wrote in the June 1889 issue of Kokumin no tomo (The Nation’s Friend), “these foreigners regard

Japan as the world’s playground, a museum… They pay their admission and enter because there are so many strange, weird things to see… If our nation has become a spectacle, then we ought to

16 Okagaki, 6. 17 Ibid., 6. 18 Westney, 18. 19 Ibid., 19.

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be especially interested in the reform and progress that will make us a normal, civilized country.”20 One of the strategies to become an equivalent to the West in the cultural arena is to construct museums, as museums represent the level of advancement of nations in the West. This was part of the process of bunmei kaika, a term meaning “civilization and enlightenment.” Thus, at the outset, Japan’s modernity took shape in relation to an international, especially Western, audience. Furthermore, Japan not only needed to establish the necessary organizations and structures to make it “modern,” it also needed to construct a national image of modernity in order to bring about treaty changes.

Japan’s Participation in World’s Fairs

Preceding the museum was Japan’s participation in international expositions and organization of domestic expositions, which not only allowed the state to develop exhibition strategies that represent the nation but also prepared the public for more regularized viewing experiences. Moreover, world’s fairs and museums are a direct and visual way for the outside world, and for the Japanese, to know Japan.

Fortunately for Japan, when it developed the consciousness to display itself to the world in the 1850s, it was able to participate in the “golden age” of world’s fairs in the West, which spanned the mid-nineteenth century through the early years of the twentieth century.21 As Aso elucidates, although those international exposition were supposed to be “friendly rivalries” among nations to display the progress of human activity, they were in fact defining and upholding the existing structures of power.22 According to Robert Rydell, world’s fairs

20 Kenneth Pyle, The New Generation in Meiji Japan: Problems of Cultural Identity, 1885-1895 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969): 85. 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Aso, Public Properties, 25.

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“performed a hegemonic function … because they propagated the ideas and values of the country’s political, financial, corporate, and intellectual leaders and offered these ideas as the proper interpretation of social and political reality.”23 For example, the fact that the majority of those expositions centered on industrial and technological inventions defined the kind of advancement that valued science over the arts. Thus, Japan observed and aligned itself with this logic. In the 1867 Paris exposition, the first one that the Japanese government—at that time still the shogunate—was able to represent itself, the shogunate’s display focused on insect specimens rather than the arts.24

Furthermore, embedded in the international exposition is the requirement of one being a nation-state, which Japan was not before the Meiji Restoration. In fact, when the shogunate was preparing to participate in the 1867 Paris exposition, it faced challenges from two rival domains—Satsuma and Hizen—which also wanted to represent Japan internationally. The shogunate had to negotiate with them in order to form a “national government” (nihon taikun seifu) for the exposition.25 Moreover, Japan also faced the challenge presented by the framework of “progress” that dictated the grouping and placement of nations in those expositions that claimed to be “universal.” The first tiers were the industrialized nations of Western Europe—

Great Britain, France, and Germany—followed by Italy, Spain and the United States. These countries enjoyed their choice of placement and bigger exhibition areas. Japan was, on the other hand, placed together with nations that were perceived to be on the route of industrialization, including that of Central and South America and Asia. This hierarchy of progression was, of course, dictated by the so-called advanced nations and thus divided the world into “civilized”

23 Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984): 3. 24 Aso, Public Properties, 26. 25 Ibid., 24.

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and “primitive.”26 Following this logic, Japan needed to demonstrate that it was not a primitive state by demonstrating its affinity to the advanced Western nations.

Here a paradox emerges between the Western romanticization of Japan and Japan’s own modernization efforts. The Japanese government was particularly concerned that its industrial productions could not match that of the West. An overview of the 1873 Vienna exposition published by the Office of Expositions (hakurankai jimukyoku) states, “we… are particularly undeveloped in the way of machinery. Our products are principally limited to small, handmade goods… The main exports are silk thread, textiles, tea, lacquerwares…”27 Even in art objects, the government wanted to highlight the level of progress in Japanese art that utilizes scientific methods such as linear perspective and representational renderings.28 For example, when

Japanese officials saw the Japanese objects in the collection of a British consul general displayed at the London Exposition of 1862, they felt ashamed to see crafts that they considered mediocre and antique.29 However, the Western audience actually regarded the artworks that betray

Wetsern influence as inferior to those that represented “authentic Japanese-ness,” a romanticized image. Thus, they prized the ukiyo-e woodblock prints depicting lives of prostitutes and kabuki actors that embarrassed Japanese officials. The kind of Japonisme that captivated Western audiences is captured in Louis Gonse’s book L’art Japonais, where the art included attempted to frame Japanese art as a provocative spectacle, which sabotaged the attempt by Japanese elites to raise it to the level of fine arts comparable to Western standards.

26 Aso, Public Properties, 25-28. 27 Quoted in Chelsea Foxwell, “Japan as Museum? Encapsulating Change and Loss in Late-Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Getty Research Journal, no. 1 (2009): 41. 28 Foxwell, 41. 29 Aso, Public Properties, 25.

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Another layer to this problem is the differing political and commercial goals—politically, the Japanese government wanted to establish an image of an advanced nation through its arts; commercially, however, it was the “lowly” and “comical” popular prints that were successful.

When the Japanese government attempted to encourage artists to make art that match Western notions of progress, they “perpetuated one of two faults, either replicating the cloying effects of contemporaneous American and European academic painting or too clearly reflecting a command of Western themes and techniques.”30 In the end, there was never a clear solution to this paradox; Japan would continue to struggle between Western imaginations of its art and its own national goals and identity. Regarding this conflict, Foxwell observes that, “a foreign stance toward the Japanese past could eventually be taken up within Japan as a source of pure, immutable Japanese identity and the ideological companion of wartime nationalism.”31 Hence, one could argue that Japan’s emphasis on its artistic cultural heritage as we observe today largely stemmed from its encounter with the West in international expositions.

The Japanese government recognized that Western audiences were interested in Japanese arts and crafts and thus shifted their focus when participating in world expositions. However, the

Japanese faced the challenge where “non-Western countries were regularly invited to submit entries to the industrial and technological divisions but not the arts division, since so-called undeveloped countries were thought to be incapable of producing anything of sufficient quality.”32 In this sense, even more than technological objects, the arts symbolized the degree of a nation’s advancement and civilization. The Japanese encounter with Western art at these expositions, as well as museums, also prompted a redefinition of “art” in Japan. I will return to

30 Foxwell, 48. 31 Ibid., 50. 32 Aso, Public Properties, 31.

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the coinage of the word “bijutsu” (art) and classifications of art in the next section, together with that of the “hakubutsukan” (museum).

Japan’s participation in world’s fairs had deep international and domestic implications.

Besides international expositions, Japan also held its own domestic industrial expositions in the

1870s and 1880s, in line with the objective of bunmei kaika. These domestic expositions were intimately linked to world’s fairs and had similar forms of organization and architecture. These expositions had a two-fold significance. On the one hand, they aimed to promote industrial growth by displaying the latest developments in Japan; on the other hand, they were a way to secure the Japanese state’s position of central authority by providing only the imperial family and high officials with privileged access. While the expositions were supposedly open to all, common people could not visit the museum when important officials or the imperial family were visiting. Furthermore, as there were rules and regulations regarding what cannot be wore and brought into the venue, visiting these exposition also prepared the people with necessary knowledge of how to visit a museum.33

Finally, Japan not only had the goal of showing the West that it was not a primitive state, it also aimed to absorb information about Western strategies of exhibition in order to modernize itself. When Japan sent a delegation to participate in the Weltausstellung of 1873 in Vienna, the group was loaded with obligations. As Tseng outlines in her book, the responsibilities included:

(1) The promotion of Japan’s natural and man-made products for political and commercial purposes; (2) the evaluation of those products exhibited by European nations; (3) the study of the latest manufacturing and engineering technology from these European nations; and, finally, (4) the compilation of intelligence pertinent to erecting a museum in Japan.34

33 Aso, Public Properties, 45-47. 34 Alice Y. Tseng, The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008): 27.

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The fourth responsibility states clearly the goal of “erecting a museum” in Japan. It should be noted here, however, that Japan already established its first museum-like institution by 1872, but it was more of a preliminary sketch than a finished product—its form and functions were far from the standards in the West. In the next section, I will explore the beginning of museums in

Japan and their regularization.

The Birth of the Museum in Japan

As the next step from international expositions, which gradually lost their popularity at the beginning of the 20th century, the museum became a central component in Japan’s exhibitionary complex.35 The establishment of museums was a part of Japan’s modernization efforts to, on the one hand, catch up to the West in terms of cultural advancement and, on the other hand, expand the state’s reach into society and “redefine its relationship with the general population.”36 Hence, at the outset of the establishment of museums, Japan had two audiences in mind—the international society (i.e. the West) and its own citizens.

To begin discussing the idea of the museum in Japan, the Japanese officials sent abroad first needed to literally invent a set of vocabulary to describe the phenomenon they were witnessing in Europe and North America. Like the institution of the museum, its name

“hakubutsukan,” along with related terms such as “bijutsu” (art), “bijutsukan” (art museum), and

“bunka” (culture), is also an “invented tradition.” According to Aso, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-

1901), arguably one of the most well-known thinkers from the Meiji period, is generally credited with popularizing and standardizing the term hakubutsukan 博物館, which literally means “the

35 Aso, Public Properties, 50. 36 Ibid., 20.

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building to disseminate the knowledge of artifacts/objects.”37 Fukuzawa defines the museum as a place “established for the purpose of showing to people the products, antiquities and rarities of the world to disseminate knowledge.”38 His definition accords with the general definition of contemporaneous museums in the West provided by Tseng, which was “an integrated system of collection, classification, and display that served to provide knowledge (and, secondarily, entertainment) to an extended general public.”39 The term for fine art, bijutsu 美術, translated from the German Kunst-gewerbe (artistic craft), combines two Chinese characters—beauty (bi) and skill or technique (jutsu). This term, perhaps in line with the idea of progress and modernity that Japan pursued, sounds more technical than other possibilities of terminology to describe the concept of “art.” 40 Accordingly, the term for art museum, bijutsukan 美術館, combines the words for fine art and the term for buildings used in hakubutsukan. The first instance of the bijutsukan in Japan was a brick art museum established as the main building of the first National

Industrial Exhibition in 1877 (Figure 1).41

37 Aso, Public Properties, 15. 38 Quoted in Aso, Public Properties, 15. 39 Tseng, 18. 40 Satō Dōshin, Modern Japanese Art and the Meiji State: the Politics of Beauty, translated by Hiroshi Nara. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011): 192-193. 41 "The National Industrial Exhibition: the Museum and the Encouragement of Industries," Tokyo National Museum. https://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=149 (accessed January 15, 2020).

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Figure 1. Hiroshige III, Tōkyō meishō ueno kōen chinai koku kangyōhakurankai bijutsukan no zu (Image of the Tokyo meisho Ueno Park National Industrial Exposition Art Museum), 1877. https://bunka.nii.ac.jp/heritages/detail/358652/1

The museum model that Japan borrowed was not a specific type of museum, such as the natural history museums or the art museum, but rather a conflation of a variety of structures in the West, even including zoological parks, botanical gardens, and the Patent Office in

Washington, D.C. The one central feature shared by all these structures is the “display of a diverse range of objects for visual edification and spectacle within the confines of a specified physical space.”42 This claim is packed with different components. First, the emphasis is on objects, which assumes that objects can serve as a medium for knowledge and communication as well as an index to human culture.43 Second, “visual edification” can be interpreted as a system of classification that Japan began to put into practice following its encounter with Western art.

Third, the idea of the “spectacle” perhaps finds some familiarity in Japan, as the exhibitionary culture in the Edo period can be described as a huge spectacle with many different acts. People went to misemono and kaichō events not to learn anything new, but to enjoy the novelty provided

42 Tseng, 22. 43 Ibid., 19.

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by the spectacle. Finally, the location—within the confines of a specified physical space—calls into mind the idea of museums as a ritual space as theorized by Duncan.

The space of the museum is a crucial aspect of the museum-going experience. Most misemono were performed outdoors with simply constructed booths or stages. In other words, the individual encounters the misemono in his everyday life and setting and thus these performances become a part of his daily norms. Going to a museum, however, is quite different.

As opposed to the temporary and transient nature of misemono, the museum is established as a permanent exhibition site that displays important cultural objects. An essential feature of the museum is its ceremonial and ritualistic nature that separates it from day-to-day time and space outside—once the visitor steps into the museum, he enters a “liminal” space. The idea of

“liminality” was used by Victor Turner to describe a mode of consciousness outside of or mixed with “the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending.”44

He further recognizes that activities such as visiting an art exhibition or seeing a film require the viewer to enter a liminal space. 45 This space separates the viewer from his daily concerns and is thus, to a certain extent, transcendental. In this sense, going to a museum exhibition is more similar to attending a kabuki show, where one has to sit in a prescribed area, conform to show- viewing etiquettes, and follow the narrative presented by the performance. In essence, Duncan describes museum-going as a ritualistic experience, where one has to enter a special space, obey a certain decorum, and perform the ritual by following a prescribed route and internalizing the narratives and values represented by the exhibitions.46

44 Quoted in Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. (London: Routledge, 1995), 11. 45 Duncan, 11. 46 Ibid., 10-12.

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Japan established its first museum, what is now known as the Tokyo National Museum, in 1872, which until the early twentieth century did not precisely function as a museum but more as a venue for exhibitions. To be more exact, the government did not establish a museum in the modern sense of an institution that collects, preserves, and exhibits, but rather a Museum

Department under the Ministry of Education. What marked the materialization of the museum was the first exhibition held in March of 1872 at the Yushima Seidō Daiseiden (Figure 2), a

Confucian temple built in the Edo period. This exhibition was part of the preparation for the aforementioned Vienna exposition of 1873, for which the Museum Department made a nation- wide appeal for objects. 47 In this sense, the institution of the museum in Japan can be seen as a continuation of the state’s participation in oversea world’s fairs. Furthermore, unlike the Louvre, which owned a significant collection of fine art objects prior to their public exhibition, the first museum in Japan had an exhibition before it had its own collection. Hence, from the outset, the institutionalization of cultural objects in Japan was exhibition-driven rather than following the collection-driven European model.

In the beginning, the Tokyo National Museum was not an art museum as it is now; rather, it was linked with the National Industrial Exhibition and exhibited a myriad of objects including antiquities, animal specimen, and industrial objects. In order to make the museum into an encyclopedic one according to its first director, Machida Hisanari’s aspiration, it also sought to include a zoo and a garden as part of the museum complex. In its early years, the institution was under different ministries—first the Ministry of Education, then the Ministry of Agriculture and

Trade, and finally the Imperial Household, under which it would remain until the end of the

47 "Yushima Seido Exposition," Tokyo National Museum. https://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=144 (accessed January 16, 2020).

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Second World War.48 The complicated history of the museum’s development shows that Japan was experimenting with different forms in order to find the best way to establish its first, and most important, national museum. When the museum became the Imperial Household Museum in 1900, it began to construct a new building as a wedding gift to the Crown Prince Yoshihito.

This new building was named the Hyokeikan, its architecture modeled after the neo-classical style, and was notably dedicated exclusively to fine arts. The Hyokeikan would serve as the basis from which the museum became an art museum in 1925.49 This shift from an encyclopedia museum to an art museum represents the increasing emphasis on fine arts in Japan and would serve as a model for later art museums.

Figure2. The Yushima Seidō Daiseiden. Image from Tokyo National Museum, https://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=144.

Westney claims in her book chapter, “The Processes of Cross-Societal Emulation,” that the transplantation and invention of new organizations must take into consideration the conditions of the receiving end.50 This process is echoed by Tseng as she highlights the problem facing the Meiji state, “the decision by the new Meiji bureaucracy to modernize in order to resist

48 “Ueno Museum: The Original Honkan,” Tokyo National Museum. 49 “Royal Gallery: The Opening of the Hyokeikan,” Tokyo National Museum. 50 Westney, 24-25.

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foreign domination prompted questions about the appropriate balance between learning from

Western paradigms and affirming indigenous methods and forms.”51 For example, the state did not make museums the only channel of exhibitions as it decided to institutionalize exhibitions; instead, it made a transition starting with domestic expositions and framing some exhibitions as

“bussankan.” These types appealed to the public because they were familiar, calling into mind the misemono, bussankai and kaichō events of the Edo period; however, what this familiarity masked was perhaps the fact that the Meiji expositions were state-sponsored and thus sought to inculcate certain values consciously or unconsciously among the public.

Previous to the Meiji era, the Tokugawa government sought to enforce a vertical order that attempted to disengage and demobilize the general population, and thus the exhibition culture was one that sprung from the bottom instead of being sponsored by the state.52 However,

Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman illustrate that one aspect of the social change in the Meiji era was that “roles and aspirations … limited by hereditary designations of status threw off class restrictions to construct a meritocracy based on educational achievement,” which implies more access to educational resources for a larger portion of the population.53 The public museum, then, was a perfect instrument to show the state’s shift to a more egalitarian society, as it in theory grants viewing access of important cultural objects to everyone. As described by Jon Thares

Davidann in his essay, “An Intellectual ‘Great Game’: The Origins of American and East Asian

Concepts of Modernity, 1860-1920,” Japanese thinkers such as Fukuzawa thought that the strict social classes confined the Japanese people to their status, losing their freedom. As such, the equalizing of social classes is crucial to the liberation of individuals, which in turn will help

51 Tseng, 10. 52 Aso, Public Properties, 19. 53 Jansen and Rozman, 4.

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achieve modernity and thus the independence of the nation. Davidann illustrates how East Asian thinkers, including Fukuzawa and Liang Qichao from China, believed that “… modernity would be transacted within their nations, and this process required a sense of civic mindedness and national loyalty.”54 They thus argued for a public-minded civic nationalism that would help their nations achieve independence. Therefore, although museums in the Meiji era were officially under the Imperial Household Ministry, they nonetheless demonstrated the goodness and civic- mindedness of the state by presenting museum exhibitions as gifts to the people, similar to the

Louvre in late 18th century France, as discussed previously.55

Figure 3. Kokon chinbutsu shoran (Curios of all themes) by Ichiyosai Kuniteru (Meiji Period). Image from the Tokyo National Museum website https://www.tnm.jp/modules/r_free_page/index.php?id=144&lang=en

As Tseng aptly concludes,

The world’s fair and the national museum were two venues … where the staging and performance of Japanese national identity were conspicuously affected by the prevailing practices of Western nations. Studying the representation of Japan during this period of renewed contact with the outside world allows for an understanding of the construction of self-imagery as a relative rather than a solipsistic process.56

54 Jon Thares Davidann, “An Intellectual ‘Great Game’: The Origins of American and East Asian concepts of Modernity, 1860-1920,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 21 (2014): 321. 55 Duncan, 29-30. 56 Tseng, 10.

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The Development of Fine Art Exhibitions: the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition

Another notable development in Japan’s institutionalization of art is the Bunten, short for the Ministry of Education Art Exhibition (monbushō bijutsu tenrankai), which was first held in

1907 at the Fine Art Museum of Tokyo Industrial Exhibition, which was the first case of an art museum in Japan. Unlike other domestic expositions, the Bunten was perhaps the first strictly speaking government-sponsored fine arts exhibition. Without going into the complicated and sometimes confusing history of the Bunten, I would like to highlight its significance to the development of art and art museums in Japan since the Meiji period. First, the establishment of the Bunten signified that the art department has become independent from the Industrial

Exposition and thus the industrial development policies. The new art department under the

Ministry of Education was dedicated to “purely” the promotion and education of art, meaning that the Ministry now recognized the importance of art and separated it from the rest of the categories of the Industrial Exposition, such as machinery and agriculture.57

Following this separation, the Bunten also sought to unite the different art groups active in Japan in order to promote the development of art, in line with the government’s objective to

“unify culture” (bunka tōitsu). Before the Bunten, there was a wide range of art groups of both

Japanese-style art and Western-style art, such as the Japan Art Academy (new Japanese-style), the Japan Art Association (old Japanese-style), the Pacific Art Association (Western-style), among others. The Bunten brought the individuals from these groups together into committees and called for artworks without discrimination of style, although with preference for either

Japanese-style or Western-style art. This selection of committee members and the guidelines for

57 Yukiko Iio, “Nihon ni okeru kansetsu bijutsutenrankai ni tsuite” (About the Government-sponsored Art Exhibition in Japan) in Kanten in miru kindai bijutsu (English title: Toward the Modernity: Images of Self & Other in East Asian Art Competiotions) edited by Toshiko Rawanchaikul (Fukuoka-shi, Japan: Fukuoka Ajia Bijutsukan, 2014): 12.

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what works to accept were determined by the government, and as such the Bunten embodies the central government’s aspirations for the arts.58

The three sections at the Bunten were Japanese-style paintings (nihonga), Western-style paintings (yōga), and sculptures. As Yukiko Iio notes, it is interesting that the sections were not separated by painting and sculpture, but rather distinguishes Japanese painting and Western-style painting, which symbolizes the duality that modern Japan was dealing with, namely, the

Westernization of the nation in order to modernize quickly to catch up to the West and the nationalistic emphasis on traditional Japanese art forms.59 Western-style paintings became more popular by 1929, with 4458 submissions to the exhibition compared to the 2164 submissions of

Japanese-style paintings, which indicates how Westernization has permeated into the Japanese people’s lives as compared to the early years of the Meiji period.60

Finally, the last important implication of the Bunten is its popularity among the people, which not only familiarized the public with fine arts but also prepared them for going to art museums in the future. The Bunten was primarily a way for the government to educate the general public about art, and it apparently achieved great success in terms of attendance. For example, the sixth Bunten recorded a total of 204,500 visitors.61 Furthermore, the evaluation system of the Bunten that decided which works were fit for exhibition was based on the government’s perception of what kinds of art had the most “value” to the public. In framing the

Bunten as the most authoritative art exhibition, the government was able to both direct the public’s taste in art and incentivize artists with awards and financial gains to create works that align with its standards. The influence of the Bunten was not limited to Japan proper; after it was

58 Iio, 12. 59 Ibid., 13. 60 Ibid., 16. 61 Ibid., 14.

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renamed the Imperial Exhibition, it held exhibitions in cities of its colonies—Seoul (Korea),

Taipei (Taiwan), and Changchun (Manchuria) in order to establish colonial subjectivity.62 In the next section, I will analyze the National Taiwan Museum in order to examine how Japan established museums in its colonies to create a certain kind of national image.

Colonial Projects, Imperial Subjectivity, and the National Taiwan Museum

In order to grasp how Japan established its national image in the Meiji era, on top of domestic museums and international expositions, it is also necessary to briefly look at how museums factored into Japan’s colonial project in Asia. In this section, I will focus on the

Taiwan Governor-General Office Museum, established in Taipei by the Japanese colonial government in 1908 and later renamed the National Taiwan Museum (NTM) in 1999. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to the museum as the NTM from now on.

Japan acquired Taiwan in 1895 from Qing China as the result of its victory in the First

Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). Thus, Taiwan became the first official colony of Japan, soon to be followed by South Sakhalin and Korea. As Ping-hui Liao illustrates, there were four main stages of Japanese colonial policies in Taiwan: assimilation from 1895 to 1919, integration from

1919 to 1930, differential incorporation and coercion from 1930 to 1937, and imperial subjectification and mobilization to participate in the Pacific War from 1937 to 1945.63 The

NTM was established during the first stage of Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan, in which Japan not only needed to secure its rule and legitimize its colonization but also attempted to make

Taiwan more like Japan in terms of modernization. As a result, Japan sought to implement

62 Iio, 17. 63 Ping-hui Liao, "Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory,” In Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory, eds Ping-hui Liao and Davis Der-wei Wang, (Columbia University Press, 2006): 1-2.

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Western systems of education, industrialization, transportation, health, and sanitation on the island.64

The NTM, established in 1908 by the Japanese colonial government, is the oldest museum in Taiwan. It was founded to commemorate the completion and opening of the Taiwan

Trunk Railway, connecting the west coast of the island. This project was an important part of the

Japanese industrialization effort both in Japan and in its colonies. The museum, then called “the

Affiliated Museum of Colonization Bureau of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of Taiwan Governor-

General Office” and housed in the Lottery Office, exhibited various types of industry in Taiwan in order to illustrate the dramatic transformation of the island taken place under Japanese colonial rule. In 1915, the museum moved to its current location in Taihoku (Taibei) New Park, the first European-style urban park in Taiwan (Figure 4). The museum was renamed “the

Governor-General Kodama Gentaro and Chief Civil Administrator Goto Shinpei Memorial

Museum” (abbreviated as the Taiwan Governor-General Museum), which indicates that the museum was at the foremost established for commemorative purposes. The new museum was housed in a grand neo-classical architecture with a Greek portico style façade and a dome inspired by the Pantheon in Rome.65

64 Chia-Lin Hsu, “Politics, Culture, and Classical Architectural Elements in Taiwan,” in Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia, eds. Almut-Barbara Renger and Xin Fan. (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2018): 343. 65 "History," National Taiwan Museum. https://www.ntm.gov.tw/en/content_171.html (accessed December 8, 2020).

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Figure 4. Aerial view of the National Taiwan Museum. Image source: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3302867

The significance of using classical architectural elements comes not only from their commemorative purposes in ancient Greece and Rome but also from their later iterations in the

West, particularly Europe and the United States. Although there were no explicit references to

European neo-classical buildings stated, we can infer this layer of influence as the Japanese government, starting in the Meiji period, continuously sent scholars and students abroad to

Europe and the US to observe Western cultures and technology. As such, they must have been aware of the significance of neo-classical architecture and its use in the public sphere, such as government buildings and museums. By the nineteenth century, “the Pantheon motif can be seen wherever authority, ecclesiastical or political, demanded a recognizable, stately architectural imagery.”66 This trend manifested in the plethora of churches, civic and academic buildings, libraries, and capitols that are directly or indirectly inspired by the Pantheon. In the US, Thomas

Jefferson’s Monticello, begun in 1809, and his library at the University of Virginia are two of the earliest examples of such structures.67

66 "History," National Taiwan Museum. 67 ibid.

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The Pantheon became a symbol of authority because of its monumentality and connection to the past, which was utilized to represent the allegedly shared cultural heritage of Western civilization. In the case of the NTM, as Goto Shinpei (1857-1929), the first director of the Civil

Administration Bureau of colonial Taiwan, pointed out, “this was to impress the colonized with grand new buildings, and so to facilitate governance.”68 Thus, the monumental columns and the dome of the NTM served to proclaim Japanese authority in the heart of the city, which is enhanced by the adjacent Taihoku Railway Station that allowed Japanese government to access the island as a whole.69 Moreover, considering Japan’s modernization efforts, it also actively incorporated Western elements into its society, an example of which is the adoption of Western clothing in the Meiji era. In this case, neo-classical architecture was used politically to “confirm approval of ancient Greek civilization, in particular the ideology of Athens, and along with this approval, to demonstrate a policy orientation toward powerful Western countries, where neoclassicism prevailed.”70

The collection of the museum, on the other hand, focuses on the indigenous artifacts of natural sciences and local resources. As Aso illustrates, out of the eleven categories of the collected objects, natural sciences and related fields occupied seven, comprising 90 percent of the total number of artifacts.71 The NTM’s collection served two purposes—on the one hand, it represented Japan’s assessment of the island in terms of material resources for both extractive and research purposes; on the other hand, it provided a form of “instant education” for the general public, meaning that the visitor could get a sense of Taiwan’s history and culture within

68 Hsu, 343. 69 Aso, Public Properties, 100. 70 Hsu, 342. 71 The eleven categories are: (1) geology, geography, and mineralogy; (2) botany; (3) zoology; (4) anthropology; (5) history and education; (6) agriculture; (7) forestry; (8) maritime resources; (9) mining; (10) crafts; and (11) trade. See Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan.

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a day’s visit. However, this education is a particular perspective of Taiwan seen from Japan’s side, which focuses on the natural resources of the island instead of its cultural production. In this way, the Taiwanese public would come to understand Taiwan and its identity framed by an imperial context.72 The museum, then, is an especially potent agent to facilitate this internalization, as museums often serve as a connective structure between personal narratives and larger regional or national identities.73 Furthermore, the museum framed aboriginal artifacts and ways of living as “ancient customs,” which identified behaviors “in order to facilitate their obsolescence” and to posit the Japanese as ones who will bring Taiwan out of primitivism.74 By establishing the museum as an institution of cultural and social authority, the Japanese colonial government propagated a specific view of Taiwan that is both useful to and needed help from

Japan.

Additionally, Japan also faced the need to replace China as the civilizational center. To do so, it chose to promote “a sense of Taiwanese geographical and ethnic regionality, distinct from the continent,” which sought to instill a consciousness of the regional identity of Taiwan among the public as the first step of transforming the Taiwanese into imperial subjects while also framing Taiwan as an Other.75

Conclusion

As a result of the humiliation Japan suffered from unequal treaties with Western nations, the Meiji government sought to rapidly modernize the nation by adopting various Western

72 Aso, Public Properties, 96-97. 73 Jens Brockmeier, “Remembering and Forgetting: Narratives as Cultural Memory,” Culture & Psychology. Vol.8 no.1 (2002): 18. 74 Aso, Public Properties, 101. 75 Ibid., 96.

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structures, including the museum. The government realized that in order to revise those treaties, it must first become on par with Western standards politically, economically, socially, and culturally. One of the best ways for Japan to present a favorable image of itself to the West was through the participation in world expositions, which Japan took part in eagerly not only to reshape Western perception of the nation but also to learn about Western institutions. The museum, in this case, came into being in order to prepare for those world’s fairs and later developed to be more like Western museums. As government officials who traveled to the US and Europe recognized, the museums in the West, with their magnificent appearances and precious collections, are symbols of cultural authority and advancement. Thus, Japan also ought to have its own museum to demonstrate its cultural development, enlighten the masses, and instill a consciousness of the nation in the Japanese people. Although the emphasis at the beginning was on industrial and scientific objects, which were displayed alongside art objects, the government gradually separated the two and devoted more attention to art, as represented by the National Museum of Tokyo’s move to become an art museum and the government sponsored

Bunten. Furthermore, not only did Japan construct museums domestically, it also established museums in its colonies. As we can see in the case of the National Taiwan Museum, the

Japanese colonial government intentionally invoked the Western architectural language of Neo- classicism, with its embedded notions of power and authority, in order to facilitate colonial subjectivity in Taiwan.

Japan’s participation in world’s fairs and institutionalization of artifacts and art starting in the Meiji period, both domestically and in its colonies, must be interpreted within the larger framework of its constant negotiation between modernization and its national image and identity.

This larger conflict is embodied in the discrepancy between the kind of art that Japan sought to

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encourage domestically and the kind that Western audiences preferred. While the Japanese government supported and promoted the adoption of Western styles of oil painting, which was viewed as a form of modern and superior art, it was actually traditional Japanese art that received praise and enjoyed popularity abroad. Ironically, in some cases, it was the Western preference for indigenous forms of art that prompted the government to shift its focus back to domestic art forms in an effort to achieve commercial gains. Furthermore, as Western cultural imports entered

Japan and intermixed with Japanese cultural forms, these reshaped artistic expressions came to represent “Japanese-ness.”76 Thus, traditional arts, reconfigured by Japan’s contact with the

West, took on the symbolic meaning of Japanese national identity as a result of Western perceptions and influences.

Returning to Hobsbawm’s theory of invented traditions, we can interpret Japan’s construction of museums, the invention of a set of vocabulary to describe museums and art, and the reconfiguration of cultural traditions as deliberate moves to “invent tradition” in order to reshape Japan’s national image and identity as a modern nation. In Japan, unlike the modernization processes in Western nations, modernization in the Meiji era was a strictly top- down process, with the government at the center of the push. In the next chapter, after briefly illustrating how the museum system is regularized in the immediate post-war period, I will examine and analyze the political intentions and consequences of constructing museums, especially public art museums, in the 1980s, which provided the basis for the museum-going culture that we can observe in contemporary Japanese society.

76 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): 110-111.

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Chapter Three: Japan’s Cultural Policy and Public Art Museums

Before the American Occupation officially announced its plans to rebuild Japan, the

Ministry of Education had issued the “Education Policy for the Construction of a New Japan”

(shin nihon kensetsu no kyōiku hōshin) on September 15, 1945. The first clause states:

Planning for educational policies suitable for the new conditions of the postwar period is underway. The basic aim of future educational policy will be to abolish militaristic attitudes while firmly preserving the national polity and to create in their place attitudes conductive [sic] to a peaceful nation. Emphasis will be placed on improving the education of the Japanese people, fostering the growth and acceptance of scientific thought, and cultivating a commitment to the love of peace.1

Furthermore, the seventh clause, “Social Education,” stresses “raising the standard of public morality and improving the people’s education.”2 Because this edict was issued before the

Occupation guidelines, it was regarded as representing a “wholly Japanese view” on the reconstruction of the nation. In these statements, along with similar ones issued by the government immediately after the defeat in World War II, two overarching themes emerged that would narrate the development of post-war Japan’s identity. One is “Peace and Democracy” and the other “Construction of a Nation of Culture.”3 Furthermore, in the “New Education Policy” released in 1946, the document emphasized the fact that a democracy, because it centers on humanism, will allow the arts and culture to flourish, and accordingly, democracy also manifests in places where the arts and culture are able to flourish.4 These ideals are echoed in the then

1"(1) Educational Policy for the Construction of a New Japan." Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan. https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/hakusho/html/others/detail/1317416.htm (accessed March 20, 2020) 2 Ibid. 3 John W. Dower, “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993): 3-4. 4 Shindō Hironobu, “Chapter Twelve: shakai kyōiku (Social Education)” in Bunka seisaku no genzai (Cultural Policy Studies) Vol.1: Concepts, ed. Mari Kobayashi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2018): 186.

Minister of Education, Morito Tatsuo’s remark that “[we] have to, once again, present Japan to the international community as a nation of culture. It is remarkable that [a nation of culture] has become a unifying national opinion.”5 Later, in 1947, the notion of “a nation-state of culture”

(bunka kokka) was changed into “a cultural nation-state” (bunka teki na kokka) in the

Fundamental Law of Education to distance Japan from fascist Germany’s concept of

Kulturstaat.6

It is within this repositioning of the nation in the post-war years that museums flourished as a site of cultural preservation, display, and social education. The construction of museums, which are regarded as important and esteemed cultural institutions by the West, is closely related to Japan’s economic and political conditions. Eiji Mizushima observes that there were two major waves of museum construction in post-war Japan—the first one occurred around 1967, an era of high economic growth that also coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, and the second around 1986, amidst the asset-inflation-based economic bubble and Japan’s newly achieved status as the second largest economy of the world.7 Figure one shows the steep increase in the number of museums beginning in 1965.

5 Miho Nakamura, “bunka kokka,” in Bunka seisaku no genzai (Cultural Policy Studies) Vol.1: Concepts, ed. Mari Kobayashi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2018): 40. The translation of the quote is my own. 6 Nakamura, 41. The Kulturstaat was an ideal of Nazi Germany that sought to combine militarism with culture. 7 Eiji Mizushima, "Museums, Museology and Curators in Japan." Unirio/MAST 10, no. 2 (2017): 119.

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Figure 1. Number of Museums in Japan from 1874 to 1989 Source: Itō Tōshiro, “hirake, hakubutsukan” Iwanami bukkuretto no. 188. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991): 1

In the previous chapters, I illustrated the significance of museums to both Western and

East Asian societies and traced the origin of the museum since the Meiji era in order to build the foundation for the analysis of Japan’s museum construction efforts in the last decades of the twentieth century. This research frames museums as a social and cultural phenomenon on top of their nature as cultural institutions. In this chapter, I will focus on public art museums for their unique ability to present the creative side of the nation and cultivate aesthetic appreciation. My focus here will be twofold: first, I will examine the government intentions, in the form of cultural policy, behind building public art museums; second, I will explore the civic engagement aspect of art museums and its effects. My goal here is to demonstrate how Japanese public art museums serve to present a national image of peace, democracy, and culture inwardly to the Japanese people. Further, museums also help to instill a consciousness of national and social identities in the people. In the conclusion section, I will address how art museums and Japan’s cultural

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diplomacy serve to improve Japan’s national image outwardly to the international community.

The following pages will first outline the critical developments and ideologies for museums in the immediate post-war years that sketch a foundation for the “museum boom” from the late

1970s to the 1980s. The analysis will then be divided into three sections—Japan’s Cultural

Policies, Public Art Museums and Civil Society, and Case Study: the Yokohama Museum of Art

(YMA).

Originally, I had intended to conduct case studies on the Yokohama Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, as such a comparison reveals how modern art museums of different regions narrate their respective regional identity and how both contribute to a national identity. These two museums are also notable in the sense that both position themselves as international museums rather than mere municipal ones, where the former established triennales in 2001 and the latter hosts recurring international art competitions.

However, due to the current pandemic situation, I was not able to travel to Japan for field work and have limited resources for research. As such, I will focus on the Yokohama Museum of Art, the reasons for which will become clear in the last section.

Developments of Museums in Japan in the Immediate Post-war Years

Immediately after the end of the Second World War in 1945, there were only 231 museums in Japan, a huge difference from the figure of 5,775 as estimated by Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2008.8 Although there were different factors that caused the dramatic increase in the number of museums, we can attribute the initiation of measures to protect cultural heritage and establish cultural institutions to the

8 Mizushima, 118.

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efforts of the Arts and Monuments (A&M) Division under the Civil Information and Education

Section of SCAP. Even though the A&M was officially established in 1946, cultural protection has been on the agenda since August 1945, before SCAP was set in place. The division brought to Japan American museum curators and conservators, including George L. Stout, Laurence

Sickman, Sherman E. Lee, and Howard C. Hollis, who were collectively called the Monuments

Men.9 According to Nassrine Azimi, the main objectives of the A&M were “the protection, preservation and salvage of works of art and antiquities,” which included museums, libraries, archives, temples and shrines as well as historical sites.10 These American cultural experts worked with local Japanese art scholars and government officials to survey the whole country to inspect and assess important cultural heritage as well as to assist with the protection of cultural property and the facilitation of the display and access to those objects—in other words, to conserve and to democratize Japan’s cultural treasures. Furthermore, the Monuments Men brought with them the American practices of conserving art and organizing exhibitions. In a

GHQ internal report, the A&M also emphasized “the use of the fine arts in familiarizing the

Japanese people with the history, institutions and culture of the United States and other democracies.”11 We can postulate from this statement, then, that the arts and culture are essential to a democracy, the idea of which was then conferred onto the Japanese.

Moreover, the Japanese media portrayed the Monuments Men as savers, not takers, of

Japanese cultural heritage in a time when people believed that the Americans would take

Japanese cultural treasures as war reparations. The positive portrayal thus instilled the

9 Nassrine Azimi, The United States and Cultural Heritage Protection in Japan (1945-1952) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019): 128. 10 Ibid., 127. 11 Quoted in Azimi, 130.

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consciousness of what a democracy ought to look like.12 Therefore, the importance of the A&M was not only the fact that they helped record and preserve the nation’s cultural objects, but also that they raised the profile of art and culture in the minds of the government and the people. The media coverage of their operations, the invitation of famous cultural experts such as Howard C.

Hollis, and the collaboration with local Japanese scholars were a deeply political move on the

American side to elevate its image in the minds of the Japanese people. Nonetheless, these moves had lasting impact on Japan’s cultural development, as the A&M’s main emphasis on cultural heritage protection shaped the conservation-based focus of what Itō Tōshiro called the

“first generation” of museums, which lasted until the 1960s.13

In addition to the efforts of the Monuments Men, the most important structural development for Japanese museums in the post-war years was the promulgation of the Museum

Law in December of 1951, preceded by the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in

1950.14 The A&M had worked with the Ministry of Education to improve legal protection systems and to create a category of “Important Cultural Property” (jūyou bunkazai), which led to the establishment of the two laws.15 Together with the Japanese Association of Museums (JAM), established in 1928 and incorporated in 1940, these measures and organizations provided the structure and environment for museums to flourish in the post-war years. Since then, the number of museums began to increase steadily, with two booms around 1967 and 1986.16

The Museum Law was seminal in several aspects. First, it defined the concept of

“museum” under Article 2 of the Law as

12 Azimi, 160-161. 13 Itō Tōshiro, “hirake, hakubutsukan,” Iwanami bukkuretto no. 188. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991): 10. 14 Mizushima, 117. 15 Azimi, 133. 16 Mizushima, 119.

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social educational facilities which aim at collecting, preserving, and exhibiting materials on history, art, folk life, industry, and natural science for the educational use of the general public, and the implementation of programs necessary for their culture, research, and recreation, as well as making researches in these materials.17

Furthermore, such institutions were classified into three types—registered museums, museum- equivalent facilities, and museum-like facilities, which allowed private organizations to also build their own “museums.”18 Second, it granted government subsidies to public museums and tax cessations for private museums, enabling the establishment and development of more museums in Japan. Finally, as both Mizushima, a current member of the National Committee for

Museum Policy, and Soichiro Tsuruta, a former managing director of the Japanese Association of Museums, have pointed out, a crucial aspect to the development of museums is the training and securing of professional museum staff such as curators. Without these professionals,

Japanese museums would not have been able to reach the level of their Western counterparts.

The Museum Law defines a curator (gakugei-in) as “a staff member with specialized knowledge” who “handles specialized matters concerning work relating to the collection, storage, and exhibition of museum materials, research, and other tasks.”19 Although the Law has put in practice a national qualification system for curators, which requires one to obtain a certificate to become a curator, both Mizushima and Tsuruta believe that the quality of curators needs to be higher for a better development of the museum scene in Japan.20

Both the Museum Law and the subsequent museum building efforts can be seen as manifestations of Article 25 of the new constitution, which states that “all people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.”21 In the next

17 Quoted in Soichiro Tsuruta, "Museums in Japan, " Curator: The Museum Journal 2, no. 3 (July 1959): 199. 18 Mizushima, 124-125. 19 Quoted in Mizushima, 127-128. 20 Mizushima, 129 and Tsuruta, 201. 21 "The Constitution of Japan." Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet.

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section, I will discuss the government structures and efforts to facilitate the so-called

“wholesome and cultured living” of Japanese people.

Japan’s National and Regional Cultural Policies in the 1970s and 1980s

Government policies for museums fall under the general category of “cultural policy,” a broad term that denotes “a set of explicit and implicit actions (and inactions) of governments and other actors aimed to promote certain cultural practices and values.”22 More specifically, according to Nobuko Kawashima,

cultural policy ostensibly aims to encourage the development of creative activities and to preserve historical heritage and the cultural landscape. It also seeks to disseminate the products of creative/cultural activities and to encourage the consumption of creative products by the widest public possible. The means to achieve such purposes include financial, human, and informational resources, as well as law and regulation.”23

Essentially, there are three goals outlined in this definition of cultural policy—encouragement of artistic creativity, preservation of historical and cultural heritage, and democratization of access to culture. Cultural policy comes in during the post-war period of national reinvention as a way to rebuild Japan as a nation of culture after the defeat, intended to displace war-time politics with culture and to have culture enrich the daily lives of the Japanese people.24 However, the Japanese government, upon reflecting on the wartime totalization of culture, did not use the term “cultural policy” (bunka seisaku) from 1949 to about 1989 due to its formal resemblance to wartime

https://japan.kantei.go.jp/constitution_and_government_of_japan/constitution_e.html (accessed March 21, 2020) 22 Nobuko Kawashima, “The Development of Art Projects in Japan: Policy and Economic Perspectives,” Field: A Journal of Socially-engaged art Criticism issue 8 (2017). http://field-journal.com/issue-8/the-development-of-art- projects-in-japan-policy-and-economic-perspectives (accessed February 20, 2020). 23 Kawashima. 24 Justin Jesty, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018): 21-22.

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policy. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to use “cultural policy” in my analysis to denote the government’s policies regarding cultural administration.

Japan’s post-war cultural policy before the twenty-first century can be divided into four stages. Immediately after the war, under the context of the transition to democracy and the new constitution, the state focused on the “Nation-state of Culture” discourse and adopted the stance of liberalizing culture in order to contrast with the war-time repression of the freedom of speech and expression. In the 1950s and 1960s, although the attitude of “setting culture free” persisted, there were debates surrounding how Japan ought to carry out its cultural policy, culminating in the establishment of the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 1968. 25 The basic policies underlining the Agency were “1. Improvement of cultural quality. 2. Spread of art and culture. 3. Protection and preservation of art and culture.”26 This period was also marked by political struggles between the conservatives and the progressives, vying for power over the nation’s future directions, hence the debates surrounding the future of cultural policies.27

Next, the focus of this chapter, the 1970s and 1980s were generally referred to as the

“Age of Localities” (chihō no jidai) and the “Age of Culture” (bunka no jidai), where regional governments took initiatives to revive local culture. They established various cultural infrastructure, including museums and art museums, to improve the living environments of citizens in response to emerging problems such as environmental pollution and the oil shock.

The cultural policies of local governments were synthesized into their overall administration, an effort to culturalize administration. The concern over culture, which has traditionally been

25 Shindō Hironobu, “Chapter Six: bunka seisaku ron (On Cultural Policy)” in Bunka seisaku no genzai (Cultural Policy Studies) Vol.1: Concepts, ed. Mari Kobayashi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2018): 94-97. 26 Thomas R. H. Havens, Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan: Dance, Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, 1955- 1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982): 60. 27 Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan 4th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020): 279-289.

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considered part of educational policy, took on more significance during this period as the economic situation improved greatly. Finally, in the 1990s, with the bust of the asset bubble, the central government began to actively promote the arts and culture to fill the void. During this period, perhaps because of the change of era from the Shōwa to the Heisei, the taboo around the notion of “cultural policy,” which was deemed to resemble fascist control over culture, was gradually dissolved and the government proceeded to work out the Basic Plan on the Promotion of Culture and the Arts, enacted in 2001.28

In the “Age of Culture Report” (bunka no jidai kenkyū gurūpu hōkokusho), published by the Cabinet Secretariat of the Ōhira administration in 1980, the researchers stressed the fact that each era has its own “demands” (yōsei), and that Japan has entered an era where it needs to respond to the demand of culture.29 This report is seminal in the sense that it signalled the beginning of Japan’s shift from a developmental state to a cultural state. This shift was a result of the high economic growth Japan has achieved through the 1960s and 1970s, which not only ensured the standards of living for its people but also reinstalled Japan into the global arena. The downside of this rapid development, however, is that Japan became known as an “economic animal” and “the world’s factory,” while culturally it remained weak. Thus, at this critical juncture, Japan not only possessed the economic foundation but also had the necessity to become a “cultural power” (bunka taikoku, literally “a strong nation of culture”), as the nation was destined to enter a low economic growth era, where the nation will no longer be able to solely rely on its economic growth. The emphasis on culture, as argued by the report, does not mean that the age of economic growth is over; rather, it denotes that Japan has become a mature

28 Hironobu, 94-97. 29 Naikaku Kanbo Naikaku Shingishitsu, ed., Bunka no jidai, Ōhira sōri no seisaku kenkyūkai hōkokusho 1 (Tokyo: Okurasho Insatsu-kyoku, 1980): 17-18.

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economic power.30 This shift was simultaneously a reformation of the nation’s image and the national identity.

How does this transition to the “Age of Culture” change Japan’s national identity?

Starting in the Meiji era, the report states, Japan has responded to the necessities to Westernize, modernize, industrialize, and achieve economic growth. These processes, however, were all premised upon external influences—Westernization is based on the European model, industrialization imitates the models of advanced industrial nations, and economic growth has the goal of catching up to the economic levels of other countries (i.e. Western countries).

Although these developments strengthened Japan economically and industrially, they were in fact a negation of Japan’s own culture, which rose from an inferiority complex and lack of self- confidence. On the other hand, the rapid developments of the nation gave birth to a sense of superiority, exceptionalism, and over-confidence, which then led to the negation of other countries. This double negation made it impossible for Japan to respond to its own culture and to explain its identity to the international community.31

Furthermore, each period since the Meiji Restoration rejected its predecessor—the Meiji state negated the indigenous culture of the Edo period in order to Westernize, and the post-war period negated the culture of the pre-war and wartime periods to establish the nation as a democratic one and to achieve economic growth. In other words, the Japanese state has long neglected the positive cultivation of its own culture and self-consciousness.32 Moreover, as previously mentioned, “culture” also serves as a keyword, much like the keywords of

“Westernization,” “modernization,” and “industrialization” that direct the nation’s trajectory.

30 Naikaku Kanbo Naikaku Shingishitsu, ed., Bunka no jidai, Ōhira sōri no seisaku kenkyūkai hōkokusho 1, 37-42 31 Ibid., 7-8. 32 Ibid., 17-22.

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Therefore, in 1980, Japan has entered a new stage where it needs to focus on the internal developments of its culture not only for the sake of its people but also of its national identity in order to facilitate cultural exchange with the international community. This international exchange, in turn, is “an opportunity for [the cultivation of] self-awareness and self-knowledge of the individual and the nation.”33 From this statement, it is clear that how the outside world perceives the nation has always been a critical concern for the government since the Meiji era.

As Laura Hein observes, “as always with Japan, Japanese interaction with the international environment played a pivotal role in Japanese views of themselves.”34 As such, I would go further to argue that, although the report explicitly called for moving away from the Meiji mentality, the post-war museum construction efforts were still an effort to “catch up” to the

West.

As Aki Hoashi notes in our interview, “what people see is that [high economic development] is not going to win respect amongst the international community unless you have some cultural aspirations. I lived those days. I remember how in those times, if Japan were to become international we would have to catch up on the cultural level as well.”35 She further remarks that, during the 1970s and 1980s, national and local governments frequently sent personnel abroad to visit the famous art museums such as the Louvre in France and the Met in the US in order to observe their structure and organization, much like the missions during the

Meiji era. Although during the high growth era, the Japanese could boast of economic success as the great validating feature of their national identity, the growth is bound to slow down one day.

33 Naikaku Kanbo Naikaku Shingishitsu, ed., Bunka no jidai, Ōhira sōri no seisaku kenkyūkai hōkokusho 1, 6. 34 Laura Hein, “The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy: Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms in Historical Perspective,” Third World Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (2008): 458. 35 Aki Hoashi, interviewed by author. Zoom interview, April 22, 2020. Hoashi is currently the Yokohama Museum International Group and Cultural Group Manager, as well as the Project Manager of the Yokohama Triennale Organizing Committee.

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When that time arrives, Japan needs to be able to shift this identity narrative, which is also critical to Japan’s place in the international community. Yoichi Funabashi succinctly summarizes

Japan’s dilemma in the 1980s and early 1990s:

Japan is unquestionably an economic and technological superpower. But it remains an immature political player, keeping a low profile in world politics: Japan has often been described as having a first-class economy with “economy class” politics. Even within its economy a gap exists between the world-class competitiveness of many of its industries and the humble living standards of the ordinary Japanese. As a result, Japan may appear paramount and strong from one angle, but it may seem weak and small from another… One of Japan’s priority tasks is, thus, to try to fill these gaps.36

The “Age of Culture” report also recognizes the weak sides of the nation, where it states that the local governments share the same weakness with the central government in that both have relative immature systems for the “aesthetic and spiritual living.” Thus, the report calls for greater initiatives by local governments to raise the level of culture and access to culture for citizens.37 These larger directives correspond to trends in the international community as represented by the nineteenth UNESCO General Conference in 1976, which called for cultural development in the form of “contributing to the affirmation of cultural identity and fostering the full development of cultural values, as factors in the endogenous development of nations.”38

Specifically, nations should strive to achieve “the democratization of the means and instruments of cultural action so as to enable everyone … to participate fully and freely in the creation of culture, to benefit from it, and to develop their creativity.”39 As such, the future plans as outlined in the “Age of Culture Report” closely follows the international standards for cultural development.

36 Yoichi Funabashi, “Introduction: Japan’s International Agenda for the 1990s” in Japan’s International Agenda, edited by Yoichi Funabashi (New York: New York University Press: 1994): 1. 37 Naikaku Kanbo Naikaku Shingishitsu, ed., Bunka no jidai, Ōhira sōri no seisaku kenkyūkai hōkokusho 1, 61-62. 38 Records of the General Conference Nineteenth Session, Nairobi, 26 October to 30 November 1976. Vol. 1: Resolutions. (Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1977): 51. http://ulis2.unesco.org/images/0011/001140/114038EO.pdf (accessed April 5, 2020). 39 Ibid., 51-52.

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Although the effort to develop culture spreads across different ministries, the main government institution responsible for the administration of culture in Japan is the Agency for

Cultural Affairs (bunkachō), established in 1968 under the Ministry of Education, Culture,

Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The Agency is the result of the centralization effort that combined the Protection of Cultural Properties Commission (est. 1950) and the Culture

Bureau (est. 1966). Although in other advanced nations, the creation, diffusion, and preservation of culture are often housed in different organizations, all these functions fall under the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan. Specifically, it manages six areas that, to varying degrees, impact national identity-formation—religious affairs, copyright, language, arts, international exchange, and the protection of cultural assets.40 The central government’s increasing focus on the cultural sphere is evident in the fact that, between 1968 and 1980, the Agency for Cultural Affair’s overall budget grew around 600 percent as the government believed that sponsoring the arts “was good politics at home and good diplomacy abroad.”41

The Agency for Cultural Affairs released the white paper, “Japan’s Cultural

Administration” (waga kuni no bunka gyōsei), in 1988, outlining the necessity for the revitalization of culture.42 The white paper echoes the rhetoric of the “Age of Culture Report” in many ways, remarking on the nation’s economic growth and the need for the “cultivation of the heart.” Furthermore, like the 1980 report, it also stresses the importance for local governments to take initiative to enrich the cultural lives of their shimin (citizens of the city). However, while the earlier report by the Cabinet Secretariat only vaguely articulates the importance of enhancing

Japan’s international image, the 1988 white paper asserts this necessity more clearly. It states:

40 Brian J. McVeigh, Nationalisms of Japan: Managing and Mystifying Identity (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004): 165-166. 41 Havens, 61-62. 42 Bunkachō, Waga kuni no bunka gyōsei (Tokyo: Bunkachō, 1988): 1-2.

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During the course of increasing globalization, Japan has become an economically powerful nation. To that extent, it is necessary for Japan to inherit its own unique traditional culture, create excellent culture, and take on the responsibility of contributing to the world as a member of the international community. The culture of a nation is the source of the identity of the people of that nation, and our culture has also defined the national character of our people. In order for Japan to stand successfully in the international community, it is necessary to build a culture with rich individuality and universality and contribute to the cultural development of the world. It will also enable fruitful international cultural exchanges and establish new identities. An important issue in present day is to promote culture from an international perspective.43

In this statement, it is evident that the nation is aware of its necessary transition from a society defined by high economic growth to a cultural nation that can contribute to international development in ways other than economics. The idea of kokusaika, or internationalization, was a central concern for Japan in the 1980s, similar to South Korea’s perceived need of segyehwa.

Like the word “culture,” kokusaika also became a catchword during that period and was “one of the most potent and significant words in the contemporary [1980s] vocabulary of Japanese intellectuals, academicians, politicians and journalists.”44 However, in order to take on the global role and truly become internationalized, Japan first needed to turn inward and focus on its domestic cultural development.

Before we turn to the policies for cultural development, we should first note that

“culture” (bunka) has a wide range of connotations and is an intentionally ambiguous term. Brian

J. McVeigh argues that, in Japan, as in other countries, culture is used to justify, legitimate, and defend the politico-economic status quo; it can also be used to “obscure power arrangements.”45

We should also be reminded that the Japanese word for culture, bunka, means “to be a [sic]

European/American fashion” and is an abbreviation of bunmei kaika, which represented the

43 Bunkachō, Waga kuni no bunka gyōsei, 24-25. The translation is my own. 44 Quoted in Chris Oliver, “Kokusaika, Revisited: Reinventing “Internationalization” in Late 1960s Japan,” Sophia Junior College Faculty Journal, vol. 29 (2009): 47. 45McVeigh, 19.

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Meiji government’s national policy of modernization and Westernization.46 Thus, the ubiquitous use of the word “culture” and the obscuring of its philological origin turns it into a mystified symbol that only increases its saliency by means of permeation, inculcating the idea that Japan is a nation of culture. For example, in a survey conducted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in

1987, 61.4% of the respondents answered “yes” to the question “do you think Japan has a lot of great culture?” and 32.6% answered “a moderate amount”—only 2.4% of the survey respondents indicated “no.” This question is ambiguous in itself—what does culture stand for? What is

“great” culture? How do you quantify culture? The wide range of meanings conveyed by the term “culture” is evident in another question of the same survey, “when you hear the word

‘culture,’ what kind of image do you feel strongly about? (choose two),” to which answers spread across six categories—visual arts and music, preservation of historical heritage, creation of new things, advancement of science and technology, academics and high education level, and wisdom and ingenuity from everyday life.47 In other words, the word “culture” became a comprehensive keyword in post-war Japan to signal a new era of democracy and national rejuvenation. Furthermore, a central idea to the discussion of culture is culturalization, which also includes the intention to “increase the level of recognition of the importance of culture,” on which I will return to in a later section.48

In general, the Agency provides two types of funding to support domestic cultural development, the first is for the encouragement of artistic culture and the second is for the provision of cultural facilities, among them the national museums.49 Furthermore, it also

46 Masaaki Morishita, The Empty Museum: Western Cultures and the Artistic Field in Modern Japan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010): 10. 47 "Bunka ni kansuru setsuron chōsa (shōwa 62)." Naikakufu (Cabinet Office), Government of Japan. https://survey.gov-online.go.jp/s62/S62-07-62-04.html. (accessed April 2, 2020) 48 Morishita, 11. 49 McVeigh, 166-167.

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subsidizes the local self-governing bodies (jichitai), including prefectures and municipalities, in their cultural efforts. For example, in 1980, the Agency for Cultural Affairs distributed $10.1 million to local governments to erect and maintain local arts facilities. Although this figure seems small considering the number of prefectures and municipalities in Japan and the costs of building museums and cultural centers, it is nonetheless the most significant spending in the agency’s budget. 50 Compared to the agency’s grant, however, the total annual investment made by local governments in constructing, administering, and maintaining prefectural art facilities reached $271.3 million in 1979.51

According to Tomooka Kuniyuki, Professor of Regional Studies at Takasaki City

University of Economics, Japan’s post-war domestic cultural policy, up until the 1990s, was largely driven by initiatives of local self-governing bodies rather than by the national government.52 What this means is that, although the national government provided the bigger direction of a “nation-state of culture” and established necessary structures such as the Agency for Cultural Affairs to promote this identity, how this would be carried out in different parts of the nation depended on local governments. The reason behind the central government’s reservation to direct the cultural developments of the nation is that it did not want to appear to be totalizing the control over culture, reminiscent of the war-time period. Thus, it only sought to provide the basis for a diverse range of cultural activities to flourish, as the government believed that the arts have the ability to uplift morals and encounters with beauty are ethically instructive.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs, recognizing that cultural activities tend to aggregate in the biggest cities and become a privilege of the urban populations, initiated outreach programs to

50 Havens, 63-64. 51 Ibid., 86. 52 Tomooka Kuniyuki, “Chapter 15: chiiki, komyuniti” in Bunka seisaku no genzai (Cultural Policy Studies) Vol.1: Concepts, ed. Mari Kobayashi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2018): 225.

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bring exhibits, concerts, and productions to every prefecture in the country and to bring together artists practicing in both traditional and modern genres.53 Starting in 1980, these outreach programs not only featured Japanese artists, they also included foreign works acquired by the agency. These programs were intended to achieve two goals—on the one hand, they were an attempt to make access to art available to people in all regions, and on the other, they also prompted “prefectural and city museums to organize shows of their own, build their collections, and help local artists.”54 In effect, these outreach programs were an effort to decentralize culture and culturalize citizens, corresponding with the central government’s goal to raise local governments’ and people’s consciousness of culture.

The importance of local developments is also stressed in the “Age of Culture Report,” where it states that, “enterprises, local organizations, and cultural organizations should be the backbone of cultural operations,” thus delegating responsibilities to local governments and private organizations.55 However, this does not mean that the government deemed cultural policy as unnecessary; rather, cultural policies should be carried out with the goal of cultivating the people’s consciousness of the importance of culture and thus prompting them to act on their own initiatives.56 The report further mentions that Japan has had strong regional identities and great degrees of regional autonomy historically, as seen in the case of the different domains during the

Edo period, which is a unique characteristic of Japan. In the post-war period, even when the high economic growth has led to the equalization of the standard of living across the nation, regional differences remained intact.57

53 Havens, 80-81. 54 Ibid., 81. 55 Naikaku Kanbo Naikaku Shingishitsu, ed., Bunka no jidai, Ōhira sōri no seisaku kenkyūkai hōkokusho 1, 34. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 7-8.

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Tomooka’s observation is further supported by scholars such as Noda Kunihiro, who similarly argues that Japan’s domestic cultural policy before the 1990s was initiated by

“progressive local governments” starting in the 1970s, where certain prefectures and municipalities sought to respond to their citizens’ needs by pushing for more cultural and educational programs. A “progressive” local government denotes a government led by the former Socialist Party or the Japanese Communist Party, which became popular during a time when high economic growth produced problems such as regional inequalities, negative consequences of urbanization, and environmental problems.58 Furthermore, both Tomooka and

Noda observe that the local governments acted more or less independently from the national government in their cultural reform programs, perhaps due to the fact that the national government refrained from too much intervention in cultural developments.59

The claim that Japan’s cultural development before the 1990s was driven by local governments is evident in the fact that most of the public art museums emerging in the 1970s and

1980s are prefectural or municipal museums, while there were only three national-level museums (Tokyo National Museum, Nara National Museum, and Kyoto National Museum) and four national-level art museums (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, National Museum of

Western Art, National Museum of Art, Osaka, and Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art) by

1990. Out of the seven museums, three are in Tokyo and four are in the Osaka-Kyoto region, which means that they are not accessible to the majority of people living outside the two main regions. Hence, I would argue here that although the primary goal of regional museums is to foster the consciousness of local identity, they nonetheless contribute to people’s overall

58 Noda Kunihiro, Bunka seiseku no tenkai: ātsu manejimento to sōzō toshi (The Development of Cultural Policy: Arts Management and the Creative City) (Kyoto, Japan: Gakugei, 2018): 21-22. 59 Ibid., 22.

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imagination of the nation, since their local communities are their first contact point to understand themselves as Japanese citizens. As Benedict Anderson theorizes, a nation is an imagined political community, where members of this community will never know all of their fellow- members but “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”60 This point will become evident in my case study of the YMA.

Local governments shifted their focus from infrastructure building to the development of culture beginning in the 1960s as a result of high economic growth, where more funds can be devoted to cultural infrastructure and people have more money and time to spend on cultural activities.61 Itō observes that there were three “generations” of museums in post-war Japan. The first generation is between the end of the war and the 1960s, where national museums, temples, and shrines mainly focused on preserving cultural heritage, serving as conservation centers. This situation changed in the 1960s, during which middle-sized prefectural and municipal museums emerged. These museums are more public oriented and strove to organize exhibitions—not only regular exhibitions based on their collections but also special exhibitions that had particular narratives. It is in this generation of museums that we see a trend to democratize culture, a concept that I will expand upon in the next section.62 Early in their developments, the public art museums of the second generation sought to acquire expensive, top-tier masterpieces from the

West in order to establish themselves as sites of cultural authority that possess valuable objects.63

However, it was not always the norm for Japanese art museums to have their own collections— as Morishita observes, in the beginning, many public art museums were merely venues that

60 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (New York: Verso, 1991): 6. 61 Itō, 7. 62 Ibid., 10-14. 63 Hoashi.

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hosted exhibitions of local art groups or traveling exhibitions from the national museums.64

Finally, the third generation of museums, which emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, positioned themselves to be centers for citizen participation. On top of exhibitions, these museums would also organize a wide range of community engagement programs, which helped them assert their roles as community hubs.65

Public Art Museums and Civil Society

Public art museums are a central component to the construction of cultural infrastructure in different localities, as they are not only sites for aesthetic cultivation but also for the facilitation of new “social imaginaries.”66 The 1960s and 1970s not only saw a tremendous economic growth, it also saw, as a result, the change of class consciousness in Japan as people earned more income. As more people were able to afford the “typical” modern life symbolized by the possession of products such as the television and washing machine, “a large majority of people in Japan came to identify themselves as members of mainstream or middle-class society.”

By 1975, 77% of the respondents to a nation-wide survey considered themselves to belong to the middle-class, whereas only 56.3% in 1965 and 42.5% in 1955 identified as middle-class.67 This shift in consciousness was in part the effort of prominent intellectuals to make bourgeois society seem more welcoming to the masses, an effort that can be seen in the construction of public art museums.68 Parallel to this trend, the number of visitors at museums also grew significantly

64 Morishita, 17. 65 Itō, 14. 66 Laura Hein, “The Art of Bourgeois Culture in Kamakura” in Japan since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble, edited by Timothy S. George and Christopher Gerteis (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2012): 59. 67 Gordon, 275-276. 68 Hein, “The Art of Bourgeois Culture in Kamakura,” 59.

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during the 1980s due to higher incomes and the increase in the number of museums in regions outside the Tokyo and Kyoto-Osaka regions.69

Figure 2. Trend of per capital national income in Japan. Source: Eguchi Nobukiyo, “A Brief Review of Tourism in Japan after World War II” in Journal of Ritsumeikan Social Scienes and Humanities vol. 10 (2010): 145.

Besides the consumption of commercial products, art museums are also key sites that contribute to the formation of class consciousness. The idea of “social imaginaries” is composed of “the cultural elements from which we construct our understanding of the social world” as well as our understanding of our place in this world.70 A new social imaginary emerged rapidly in post-war Japan that portrayed Japan as a fundamentally peaceful, homogeneous, and middle- class society. The public art museum, as Duncan has illustrated, is essentially a product of bourgeois society.71 Furthermore, she also cites Pierre Bourdieu’s conclusion that “art museums give some a feeling of cultural ownership and belonging while they make others feel inferior and excluded,” thereby facilitating class and national identity.72 The relationship between art

69 Itō, 5. 70 Hein, “The Art of Bourgeois Culture in Kamakura,” 20. 71 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995): 21. 72 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 4.

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museums and this middle class consciousness is reciprocal–on the one hand, people began to visit these museums because of the emerging middle class consciousness, and on the other, museums help facilitate and reinforce the consciousness that they belong to the majority. We must keep in mind here that art museums are inherently Western constructions that seek to rationalize and institutionalize the processes of art creation and viewing. For Japan to transplant this structure onto its soil manifests the nation’s aspiration to catch up to the West culturally, as mentioned previously. We might also deduce from this idea that the middle-class consciousness produced through art museums is one based on the model of the middle class and bourgeois culture in the West.

To further understand how public art museums contribute to the Japanese society, Hein’s work is particularly useful in providing a framework to examine how art and aesthetic appreciation tie into nation building, national identity, and national image. In her article,

“Modern Art Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Japan,” Hein illustrates the role and beliefs of Wakimura Yoshitarō, who is representative of the group of left-wing reformers in the post-war era. Wakimura was an economist who, in 1945, worked in the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs to plan for the transformation of society after the impending defeat. Furthermore, he served as an official liaison between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the occupation government and was involved in efforts to curb the power of big businesses. Although he was primarily involved in the economic aspect of Japan’s post-war development, art and aesthetic appreciation occupied an important place in his thought.73 His beliefs allow us to understand the role of art and art museums in Japan from the perspective of an intellectual and politician.

73 Laure Hein, “Modern Art Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 3 (August 2010): 825-828.

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Central to Wakimura’s thought is the connection between art and politics. In the profoundly transformative post-war era where different groups sought to negotiate a Japanese identity and reconcile with the traumatic memory of the war, he argued that art appreciation could “mediate relations between potentially antagonistic groups of Japanese,” encouraging respect for different views and stances. In this way, idealistically, the enjoyment of art could also repair the split between the political right-wingers and left-wingers.74 Furthermore, it was important to him that the Japanese people cultivate aesthetic literacy, which he saw as the key to developing a political subjectivity that they lacked during the wartime. Art museums thus became the apparatus to achieve this goal, as Wakimura thought of them as “both literal and figurative spaces in which Japanese could learn to communicate directly with each other in productive and respectful ways and thereby reshape political culture.”75 It was not enough that the new Constitution provided political rights to the people; they also needed to have political confidence and a more rational, universalistic, and cosmopolitan way of thinking in order to exercise this newly obtained democracy.76

For this democracy to actualize, Wakimura argued for the need to foster ties between different social classes, echoing Fukuzawa Yukichi’s belief in civic nationalism. The art museum, then, is the perfect place where, in theory, all classes could enjoy art in a shared space.

His assumption was that social planners should make available to all the access to aesthetic experience, in conjunction with national economic policies that alleviate economic insecurity, in order to narrow the gap between classes. The resulting freedom to appreciate art would then foster a kind of middle class consciousness among Japanese citizens.77 Wakimura was not only

74 Hein, “Modern Art Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Japan,” 822. 75 Ibid., 821-822. 76 Ibid., 822-831. 77 Ibid., 832.

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concerned with how to strengthen Japan’s democracy but also Japan’s national image—he believed that modern art museums are symbolic of a peaceful and forward-looking nation that could “reconnect Japan to the international community of nations and redeem Japan’s international image.”78

Wakimura’s thought and aspirations manifested in the Kanagawa Prefectural Modern Art

Museum, of which he was a founding member. The establishment of the museum also shows the cultural initiatives of local governments and their connections with the A&M division of SCAP.

Through the efforts of Kanagawa’s first post-war governor, Uchiyama Iwatarō, and intellectuals including Wakimura, the museum opened in 1951 and was the first modern art museum in Japan.

Uchiyama, who had held diplomatic postings in Paris, Madrid and several Latin American nations, was transnational in his beliefs and worked closely with SCAP to incorporate art into his policies. His project benefitted from SCAP’s policies of decentralization and democratization that encouraged the developments of local cultural facilities.79 Both Uchiyama and Wakimura believed that a modern art museum has the power to strengthen democracy and “assuage the anxieties that had, in their view, explained the appeal of fascism to so many Japanese.”80 As such, the Kanagawa Prefectural Modern Art Museum propagated an alternative narrative that

“celebrated the modernity of diverse urban societies, defined culture as both local and transnational, and sought to resolve conflict between social classes by encouraging direct interaction across class line.”81 Essentially, the museum represented a literal and figurative space for the anti-fascist narrative of Japan invented by its founders.82

78 Hein, “Modern Art Patronage and Democratic Citizenship in Japan,” 831. 79 Hein, “The Art of Bourgeois Culture in Kamakura,” 60-61. 80 Ibid., 59. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 62-64.

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In order to examine the saliency of art museums in identity and narrative formation, we must first return to the definition of museums provided by the Museum Law, which states that museums, regardless of their type, are fundamentally social education facilities. They are not necessarily explicitly educating the general public on concrete skills that are taught in schools, rather, they achieve their role through permeating into people’s lives and ritualizing the museum- going experience. Although since the 1970s cultural development and social education have become increasingly separated in Japan,83 the nature of art museums nonetheless renders it as both a site for culture enrichment and social education. Starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, art museums in Japan became part of the modern lifestyle where people can spend their leisure time, subconsciously absorbing the politics of identity associated with these institutions.84 As Bourdieu illustrates in his book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, individual taste and cultural needs are socially constructed, and cultural capital operates as an invisible form of power. He writes, “cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level … and secondarily to social origin.” 85 As such, this predisposes tastes to function as markers of class—in this case, the middle class—and the art museum is where socially constructed aesthetic disposition is institutionalized.86

We might also add that not only do art museums dictate the public’s taste in art, they are also a site that reforms behavior, induces the consciousness of social identity, and inculcates the

83 Shindō Hironobu, “Chapter Twelve: shakai kyōiku (Social Education),” 182. 84 Hoashi. 85 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): 1-2. 86 Bourdieu, 30.

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idea of the community and the nation. By participating in the ritual of attending an art exhibition, the individual becomes aware of herself as a member of the bourgeois society. She also becomes aware and acculturates to the social etiquettes of the museum by conforming to the exhibition- viewing protocols.87 In this way, art museums are able to regularize and homogenize behavior.

Furthermore, the construction of art museums signals to citizens that their society is a cultured and democratic one, comparable to Western societies. As the art museum is intrinsically a

Western construction, and the Japanese people were not accustomed to the idea of art museums previously, the construction of art museums in different prefectures and municipalities serves as the first step in Bourdieu’s notion of education. This also shows that the government was consciously attempting to align the cultural activities and habits of its own citizens to their

Western counterparts.

With regards to associating oneself with the community, it is useful here to remind ourselves of Jens Brockmeier’s quote that I cited in the beginning of Chapter One,

What binds individuals together into a cultural community is the centripetal force of a connective structure that organizes a considerate body of thought and knowledge, beliefs and concepts of self: that is, a worldview rooted in a set of social rules and values as well as in the shared memory of a commonly inhabited and similarly experienced past…. At issue, then, is a sense of belonging that binds the individual into a culture while binding the culture into the individual’s mind.88

Art museums are critical in shaping how individuals perceive themselves and in instilling and reinforcing a stabilized social identity—in other words, they serve as the connective structure between individuals and their communities. The museum, as a public institution, is ostensibly guided by the goal of contributing to the advancement of the collective and oftentimes serve as a symbol of community pride. Furthermore, they are also able to respond to and guide individuals’

87 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995): 90. 88 Jens Brockmeier, “Remembering and Forgetting: Narratives as Cultural Memory,” Culture & Psychology. Vol.8 no.1 (2002): 18.

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social and cultural needs. By institutionalizing the aesthetic experience, art museums represent a shift from the consumerist culture as represented by the department store exhibitions that embed art viewing in commercial culture. As Hoashi comments, once people achieved certain levels of economic stability, they were no longer satisfied with the consumerist and materialist culture.

They craved for “high culture,” which the government provided in the form of art museums. As a result, people flocked to exhibitions displaying Western masterpieces, as there was still the consciousness that Western art equals high culture.89 The central government clearly recognized this need, as the “Age of Culture Report” writes, “necessary to the Age of Culture is the combination of free time and [top-tier cultural] spaces.”90

One of the major social impacts of public art museums as perceived by the governments is their ability to cultivate hobbies (shumi kyōiku), which is a concept related to the use of leisure time.91 As culture became increasingly democratized in Japan and per capita income increased, family spending on the arts and culture, including reading, music, and art lessons, increased fivefold from 1965 to 1978, prompting the government to declare in a white paper on leisure that the “Japanese engage in cultural activities” in their spare time.92 The combination of space, cultural objects, visitors, and its place embedded in the community gives the art museum a social role as a site for the broader experiences of leisure.93 Going to art museums allow people to escape from the mundane and routinized lifestyle by stepping into the liminal space of the museum. Through this process, they come to test their own identity and fix their values—in a secularized society, cultural centers and museums have become “the temple and shrines of the

89 Hoashi. 90 Naikaku Kanbo Naikaku Shingishitsu, ed., Bunka no jidai, Ōhira sōri no seisaku kenkyūkai hōkokusho 1, 79. 91 Sohyun Park, Senjō toshite no bijutsukan: nihon no kindai bijutsukan setsuritsu undo (Tokyo: Brücke, 2012): 98. 92 Havens, 17. 93 Awoniyi Stephen, “The Contemporary Museum and Leisure: Recreation as a Museum Function,” Museum Management and Curatorship, vol. 19, no. 3 (2001): 297-298.

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late twentieth century.”94 The other side to this phenomenon is that people also reinforce status and power structure by assigning higher values to certain institutions and activities, such as the art museum and art-viewing, than others, thus preserving hierarchy and conferring this status onto themselves as cultured individuals. From the government’s perspective, art museums not only enrich people’s daily lives and improve their living environments, they also stimulate people’s consciousness that culture is an important aspect of their lives. Without this mass consciousness, it is impossible for Japan to become a “nation-state of culture.” It can thus be further argued that, as much as art museums were built in response to cultural needs, they also enhance and generate more needs in order to provide a basis for future cultural developments.

Wakimura believed “the best social practice was to house art in public museums… art should be publicly funded and available to all, like education.”95 Here we can see the key concept of the democratization of culture, which was also crucial to the efforts of SCAP in the early post-war years and the subsequent policies by the Japanese government. It is important here to distinguish “democratization of culture” and “cultural democracy” because their difference is oftentimes obscured but nonetheless reveals the embedded power structures in such attempts. Emerged in post-war Europe, democratization of culture and cultural democracy are two often opposing paradigms. The former is largely a civilizing effort by those in power to make important cultural works available to the general public who might otherwise lack the financial and educational resources to access such works. The latter, as a critique of the democratization of culture as a homogenizing force, focuses on not just access to cultural works but also access to the “means of cultural production and distribution,” attempting to diversify the

94 Havens, 18. 95 Ibid., 18.

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arts outside the mainstream canon.96 We can thus characterize Japan’s cultural policy from the

1950s to 1980s as democratization of culture, where the state sought to make available to the public the cultural production that it deems valuable. Although the term “democratization” seems to denote equality, the democratization of culture is in fact reinforcing and stabilizing existing power structures. Although public art museums are not the perfect institutions to promote equal access to art, as the nature of museums indicates a certain degree of privilege, they are salient sites for the government to claim and assert cultural authority. In the 1990s and early 2000s,

Japan moved toward the cultural democracy paradigm by actively encouraging local talents in a variety of fields through the program of Art and Culture Revitalization (bunka geijutsu shinkō) in

2001.

Case Study: The Yokohama Museum of Art

Having outlined the cultural policy that allowed for the flourishing of public art museums in the 1980s, it is useful here to conduct a case study to look into the specific mechanisms through which art museums cultivate identity and image. I chose the Yokohama Museum of Art

(YMA), which opened in 1989, for several reasons. First, it is part of the Yokohama municipal government’s effort to cultivate a consciousness of local culture and identity, the needs for which began to rise after the high economic growth period. Second, the exhibitions and collections of the museum have two regional foci, Japan and the West, which convey a particular narrative of the Japanese identity. Third, the YMA is representative of the second and third phase of museums in the post-war era, where it started with a focus on exhibitions but gradually began to

96 Monica Gattinger, “Democratization of Culture, Cultural Democracy and Governance.” Presented at the Canadian Public Arts Funders Annual General Meeting, 2011. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6d44/6013f265c122576061540749842446b27e74.pdf (accessed December 10, 2019).

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develop programs and structures to engage with the local community. Finally, the YMA is one of the few municipal museums in Japan with its own international art exhibition, the Yokohama

Triennale. This began in 2001 in collaboration with the Japan Foundation. This initiative shows that the YMA is conscious of itself not only as a municipal museum but as an international one that seeks to bring global art to Yokohama, simultaneously promoting the image of Yokohama as an international city.

Furthermore, the reason that I chose to examine a municipal museum rather than a national museum is to show that municipal museums are key facilitators of a regional and national consciousness. As mentioned previously, local governments played an instrumental role in promoting regional cultural identity and establishing the necessary structures for cultural activities, and in doing so, I would argue that they also facilitated citizens’ perception of the nation. This is indeed the case with the YMA. As there can be only so many national museums, the propagation of the image of Japan as a cultured, democratic nation had to rely on the plethora of local cultural organizations and structures.

The Yokohama municipal government began to plan for the establishment of the YMA in the early 1980s as part of a larger scheme to revive local citizen culture, develop the city, and to reform cultural administration. Notably, the Yokohama government had begun to revive

“culture” to recover from the war even before the basic needs were fulfilled. It established the cultural sector of the Office of Civilian Life in 1947 in order to bring back the “human nature,” which can be interpreted as a sense of normalcy, that was lost during the war.97 However, in the

1960s and 1970s, like other regional governments, the city of Yokohama devoted its attention to building infrastructure including roads and water supply in response to the increase in population

97 Oniki Kazuhiro, “ātsu adominisutorēshon (Arts Administration)” in Bunka seisaku no genzai (Cultural Policy Studies) Vol.1: Concepts, ed. Mari Kobayashi (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2018): 293.

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and economic growth. By the late 1970s, the city government officials recognized that

Yokohama lacked its own cultural identity and citizen consciousness and thus established the

Cultural Issues Group in 1979. Experts were invited to discuss and provide advice for the city’s future arts and cultural policies, which included the construction of a public art museum.98 This move corresponds with the directives in the “Age of Culture Report” for local governments to enlist cultural experts in their cultural developments.

It has become clear by then that the city government did not want Yokohama to become a commuter town for Tokyo due to its close proximity; rather, it wanted to establish its own cultural base and identity.99 Oniki Kazuhiro, who entered the cultural sector of the municipal government in 1988, argues that it is because of the economic growth and the lack of a shimin

(citizen of the city) consciousness that the people’s needs for more cultural activities increased, which drove the government to develop relevant cultural infrastructures. For example, the artist groups and citizens’ art organizations had requested that the government build an art museum since the early post-war days. As a result, the Yokohama government devised the “Yokohama

21st century plan” in 1981, intending to enrich the cultural lives of its citizens. Furthermore, in

1985, the cultural office of the Civil Affairs Bureau provided a definition of “culture” as the basis of civilian life, the common property of citizens, and the foundation of a citizen-based identity of the city. It went further to argue that a culture that is defined by its citizens is the basis of the local self-governing body.100 Thus, in order to reify citizens’ cultural needs, the local government sought to equip the city with more permanent cultural infrastructure such as museums, cultural centers, and performing centers. This move was part of the larger trend in the

98 Yokohama Museum of Art, ed., 30th Anniversary of Yokohama Museum of Art: Your Museum, Your Future (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2019): 9. 99 Yokohama Museum of Art, ed., 30th Anniversary of Yokohama Museum of Art: Your Museum, Your Future, 9. 100 Oniki, 293-294.

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1970s and 1980s when local governments in Japan shifted their focus from economic growth and industries to cultural development.101

Located in the heart of Yokohama and close to the Yokohama station, the Yokohama

Museum of Art is part of the Minato Mirai City Planning and one of the major projects of the government’s push to develop cultural infrastructure for the city. In 1982, the Committee for

Yokohama City Museum of Art’s Basic Conception (yokohama-shi bijutsukan kihon kōsō iinkai) devised the proposal for the museum as a way to respond to and reinforce Yokohama’s identity as an international port city that is progressive, open, and globally oriented. The museum was to become an institution that befits the city’s identity and promotes its citizens’ art appreciation and creativity while simultaneously creating a connection with other art museums in Japan and in the world.102

At the beginning, however, the YMA was designed to serve as a cultural pavilion and exhibition venue at the Yokohama Exotic Showcase (yokohama hakurankai) in 1989, which ran from March 25 to October 1. It was only after the exposition ended that the structure was converted into an art museum and opened to the public on November 3, 1989. Furthermore, the museum was also the first building of the Minato Mirai 21 City Planning project and is representative of the Minato Mirai 21 area, which is now the central business and tourist area of the city of Yokohama. 103 The story here is familiar—we might recall that Japan’s first museum was also initially established as an exhibition site to prepare for the nation’s participation in international expositions during the Meiji period. Similar to the domestic and international

101 Oniki, 294-295. 102 "Yokohama bijutsukan hōkokushu, (Report of the Yokohama Museum of Art)" City of Yokohama. Last modified , 2010. https://www.city.yokohama.lg.jp/city-info/gyosei-kansa/kansa/kekka/kekka- gai.files/0070_20181005.pdf. (accessed April 10, 2020) 103 Yokohama Museum of Art, ed., 30th Anniversary of Yokohama Museum of Art: Your Museum, Your Future, 2-9.

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expositions Japan had hosted or participated during the Meiji era, the expositions in the 1980s were also intended to incentivize industrial production, attract investments, and boost regional image.104 As Hoashi comments, the ‘89 exposition retained the nature of expos as a spectacle, a familiar form of display to the Japanese people since the Edo period that had its precedence in the misemono, kaichō, and bussankai.105 What is new to the structure of the museum, then, is not the idea of exhibitions but that of having a permanent collection and an institutionalized site for exhibition, which, as Carol Duncan argued, have the power to ritualize the museum-going experience and help visitors internalize the narratives presented in the museum. Hoashi further notes that the idea of the spectacle is invoked again in the Yokohama Triennale. As much as it is an international contemporary art exhibition, it nonetheless serves as a spectacle that attracts local and international attention.106 Thus, in this sense, the concept of the spectacle was never eliminated by the modern, rational form of art museums but rather lived on in Japanese society.

The YMA originally was conceived of not only as a municipal art museum but also as an international one. The most visible manifestation of this positioning is the architecture of the museum (Figure 3), as the architecture is simultaneously people’s first encounter and impression of the museum and a conspicuous landmark of the city. The building was designed by Kenzo

Tange, one of the most significant Japanese architects of the 20th century who won the 1987

Pritzker Prize for Architecture, akin to a Nobel prize in the architectural profession. Kenzo fused traditional Japanese styles and modernism and enjoyed an international career, often representing

Japan abroad in his designs of Japanese embassies. Most notably, he was also involved in the

104 James W. Dearing, Growing a Japanese Science City: Communication in Scientific Research (London: Routledge, 1995): 65-66. 105 Hoashi. 106 Hoashi.

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development of a master plan to rebuild Hiroshima after the war.107 Thus, even in the choice of architect, the city deliberately chose someone who had an international reputation and worked in the modernist fashion. The architecture itself is of a Western, modernist style with a strict symmetry, clean-cut lines, and invocation of the pyramid and columns reminiscent of the

Louvre.

Figure 3. Kasagi Yasuyuki, The Yokohama Museum of Art Source: https://www.artforum.com/artguide/yokohama-museum-of-art-9333

The international approach of the museum also manifests in the YMA’s collection, which has two foci—Japanese art and global art. More specifically, the collection is divided into seven sections: Western art, Japanese yōga (Western-style Japanese art), Nihonga (Japanese-style art), prints, photography, sculpture, and crafts. It is curious to note that all the artworks listed under

“foreign art” are from the West, mainly the US and Europe, while art from the rest of the world is nowhere to be found. On top of the bi-regional focus, the YMA was established as a modern art museum that exclusively collects art made after 1859, the year that Yokohama Port officially

107 "Works," Tange Associates. https://en.tangeweb.com/works/ (accessed April 10, 2020).

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opened. The demarcation of the year 1859 hints at the assumption that Japan’s modernity began with the opening of the Yokohama port. According to the current director Osaka Eriko, “the museum’s unique collection covers the period of Japan’s modernization and the transition from modern to contemporary art, and particular attention has been paid to the city’s cultural history as it pertains to the media of photography and printmaking.”108 Therefore, the temporal focus of the museum’s collection consciously cultivates Japan’s identity as a modern nation and seeks to narrate the process of the nation’s modernization.

Recalling the Meiji period’s perception of Western art as a superior art form that indicates modernity and cultural advancement, this intentional collection policy can further be interpreted as an effort to elevate the status of Japanese artists by juxtaposing their works with their “superior” Western counterparts. By featuring renowned modern Western artists such as

René Magritte and Paul Cézanne, the museum writes the achievements of modern Japanese artists into the art historical canon. Furthermore, this juxtaposition also inscribes the consciousness of a Japanese national identity by delineating a boundary between Japanese art—

“us”—and Western art—“them.” As McVeigh highlights, the management of culture in Japan is through the logic of propriety—the Japanese people, by virtue of being Japanese, in some way

“own” the cultural aspects of the nation.109 Thus, the Japanese public would identify the Japanese art as their own art, while the Western art serves as the Other. Moreover, through its collection and exhibitions, the YMA presents a narrative of the modernization of not just the city but also the nation, which, as I have illustrated in the previous chapter, was a central preoccupation of

Japan since the Meiji Restoration. This formulation of the museum’s collection can also be interpreted as re-inscribing the myth of the uniqueness of Japan, a discourse that emerged in the

108 Yokohama Museum of Art, Museum Outline (Yokohama, Japan: Yokohama Museum of Art, 2015): 3. 109 McVeigh, 165

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early Meiji era which posits Japan as both non-Western and non-Asian.110 Central to this discourse is Japan’s efforts to modernize in order to align more with the West while preserving the Japanese “essence.” During the course of modernization, however, Japan also sought to distinguish itself from the “backward” Asia, making itself a unique entity. This strain of thought re-emerged in the post-war era as the Nihonjinron (theories of the Japanese), which stresses the uniqueness of Japan and the Japanese people in areas ranging from traditions of thought, aesthetics, social and economic organization, and political culture. As Gordon observes, this identity formation gained more momentum in the 1980s as Japan’s economy flourished, during which those theories “stressed the unified cohesiveness of the whole of the Japanese people, obscuring important differences and tensions within.”111 Even though the YMA strove to collect more works by artists from the Yokohama region, it also collected Japanese modern art in general, thus achieving the effect of “unified cohesiveness” of Japan.

On the other hand, as a way to show its cosmopolitan identity, the museum attracted visitors with its prestigious exhibitions of Western modern art. As Itō mentions, the Japanese public particularly favored exhibitions that feature Western masters. Noda traces this tendency back to the Meiji period, during which the government actively promoted the production and appreciation of Western art in order to popularize the notion of cultural advancement.112 In the previous section, I illustrated how people tended to equate Western art with high culture, and thus the aspiration toward high culture attracted more visitors to exhibitions of well-known

Western art. In the case of the YMA, the very first exhibition that inaugurated the museum was

Treasures from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: French Art from the Middle Ages to the

110 Taku Tamaki, “Repackaging national identity: Cool Japan and the resilience of Japanese identity narratives,” Asian Journal of Political Science vol. 27, no. 1 (2019): 109-110. 111 Gordon, 312. 112 Noda, 10-11.

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Twentieth Century (1989). This exhibition is significant in that it conferred the status and authority accorded the Met to the YMA by ways of association. Furthermore, by demonstrating the progression of French art from medieval to modern times, this first exhibition corresponds with the mission of the museum to narrate the modernization of Japan and the transformation of

Japanese art. Immediately after this, the museum organized an exhibition called New York, New

Art, which examines New York as a central stage for the development of modern and contemporary art. With several exhibitions of Japanese art in between, the museum subsequently organized the exhibitions Vincent van Gogh: Collection from the Kröller-Müller Museum (1995),

Louise Bourgeois: Homesickness (1997), Cézanne and Japan (1999), and Masterpieces from the

Louvre Museum: 19th Century French Paintings (2005). The popularity enjoyed by Western art is evident in the contrast between the number of visitors who attended Western art and Japanese art exhibitions.

For example, the first two exhibitions in 1989 had an attendance of 356,323 and 467,540, respectively, while the three subsequent exhibitions—The Third Asian Art Exhibition (1989),

Kiyokata Kaburagi Exhibition113 (1990), and The Permanent Collection Exhibition (1990)—had attendance numbers of 10,065, 27,252, and 40,637, respectively.114 Added together, the numbers of the latter three exhibitions only amounted to about one fifth of that of the New York, New Art exhibition. According to Hoashi, this huge discrepancy between the attendance numbers of

Western and Japanese art exhibitions does not necessarily mean that Japanese people in general did not appreciate Japanese art. Rather, it can be attributed to the fact that, on the one hand, people were more aware of traditional Japanese art, and on the other, they expected to see

113 Kiyokata Kaburagi (1878-1972) was a Nihonga artist and leading master in the bijin-ga genre (pictures of beautiful women). 114 Yokohama Museum of Art, “Overview of Numbers of Museum Visitors,” in Yokohama Museum of Art Records (Yokohama, Japan: Yokohama Museum of Art).

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modern Western art in an art museum like the YMA, which has the image of a “modern” museum—“modern” in this sense is associated with the idea of the West.115

Finally, the last point I would like to mention about the YMA is the Yokohama

Triennale, which started in 2001 in response to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ directive of organizing a recurrent international exhibition. The Yokohama Triennale is “an international exhibition of contemporary art held in Yokohama once every three years. The exhibition features both internationally renowned and up-and-coming artists, and presents the latest trends and expressions in contemporary art.”116 We can read two objectives in this statement—first, it marks the latest developments of contemporary art both in Japan and globally, a mission that is spelled out in the museum’s guideline; second, it supports the cultivation of emerging artistic talents. As such, the Triennale stands for Yokohama’s identity as a progressive and international city.

Furthermore, it is also part of the bigger project of “Culture, Art and Creative City Yokohama.”

The creative city (sōzō toshi) is an initiative, emerging in the early 2000s, that follows the global trend and is carried out in multiple cities in Japan, among them Sapporo, Sendai, Yokohama,

Nagoya, and Kobe. According to Noda, the ultimate goals of establishing creative cities are to draw forth the creative potentials of citizens, to use this creative force in different areas, to promote a more fluid value system, to cultivate innovation in society, and ultimately to involve citizens in the process of creating local societies that are easy and enjoyable to live.117 Thus, we can perceive the shift from the democratization of culture to cultural democracy as mentioned earlier, as local governments began actively to invite and include citizen inputs into their

115 Hoashi. 116 Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama Triennale (Yokohama, Japan: Yokohama Museum of Art, 2018). 117 Noda, 197.

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planning. The effectiveness of this transformation is beyond the current project but is nonetheless a worthwhile topic to pursue.

Conclusion

The construction of public art museums in the 1980s is part of the larger scheme of the nation to shift from an era of concentrated economic development to that of culture, intending to present Japan as a “nation-state of culture.” As much as the post-war Japanese government, national or local, sought to steer away from wartime practices by liberalizing culture, its cultural policies in the latter half of the twentieth century is nonetheless a top-down process to catch up culturally to the West, which is comparable to the Meiji state’s modernization effort. However, different from the centralization of the Meiji state, local governments play a leading role in post- war Japan’s cultural identity building, albeit following the larger directions set by the center. In

“democratizing culture,” the state was in fact seeking to propagate a specific image and identity of a peaceful, democratic, egalitarian, and cultured nation. As the central government needed to restrain from enforcing a centralized cultural policy, it resolved to prompting local governments to actively develop culture, as seen in the “Age of Culture Report.” Thus, constructing public art museums is a way that corresponds to the new identity of the nation as a democracy. As such, the cultural initiatives of the local governments were framed as responses to citizens’ cultural needs, indicating the democratic nature of the government.

Although the government’s focus on constructing public buildings during that period is often criticized as a form of “hakomonogyōsei” (literally “box administration”), implying the notion that the government is wasting tax money on unnecessary structures,118 it nonetheless

118 Nakagawa Ikuo, Bunken jidai no jichitai bunka seisaku – hakomono-dzukuri kara sōgø seisaku hyōka ni mukete (Tokyo: Keisou Shobō, 2001): 1-3.

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provides a basis for future cultural activities and serves to establish the nation’s image. By engaging the people in cultural activities such as exhibitions at art museums, the government sought to cultivate citizens’ consciousness of the importance of culture and make it part of their daily lives in order to realize Japan’s new identity as a cultural nation. In this process, the

Japanese people would also recognize their social identity as a member of the majority middle class, and, as we have seen in the case of the YMA, internalize Japan’s national identity as a modern, culturally advanced nation comparable to the West. The case of the YMA shows that the construction of an art museum is not a singular effort but part of larger city and cultural development schemes of the local government.

Here, it is worth returning to Duncan’s claim about the functions of public art museums to promote a nation’s image, as mentioned in the beginning of Chapter One. Duncan aptly argues that, “public art museums were regarded as evidence of political virtue, indicative of a government that provided the right things for its people.”119 Furthermore, these institutions are also symbolic of a nation’s cultural advancement in diplomatic relations, as she writes,

“traditional monarchs and military despots [of the Third World] create western-style museums to demonstrate their respect for western values, and—consequently—their worthiness as recipients of western military and economic aid.”120 Although Japan, after the political reform symbolized by the new post-war constitution, is no longer a Third World monarchy, the same logic applies.

Similar to the preoccupation with modernizing the nation to the level of the West during the

Meiji era, post-war Japan also needed to “prove” its cultural advancement as it sought to integrate itself into the global, Western-centric network and to become an equal to its Western

119 Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship” in Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991): 88. 120 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, 21.

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counterparts. As art museums are inherently a Western construction, the establishment of art museums in Japan serves to enhance the nation’s image of democracy and peace and boost its credibility as a trustworthy trading and political partner, especially during the bipolar Cold War era. Along with public art museums, the Japanese government also established the Japan

Foundation in 1972 to promote artistic exchange between Japanese and international artists, which is a form of cultural diplomacy.121 These forms of cultural diplomacy enhances the favorable national image Japan has built through several spectacles in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, that signal Japan’s re-entrance into the international society as a full member in good standing. 122 Added together, the public art museums, the Japan

Foundation, and the national spectacles not only projected Japan’s national image of democracy and peace but also boosted social order and promoted national pride and patriotism. As Bennett critically illustrates, museums also have the function of reforming public manners, which contributes to the overall social order of society.123

Today, public art museums that were constructed in the period between the 1970s and

1990s continue to serve as even more potent agents of Japan’s national image and identity as they engage more with their local communities, regularize their collections and exhibitions, and come to represent the place identity of cities in tourism. Outside the public sphere, private organizations such as media companies and large corporations also organized a variety of cultural activities, including art exhibitions, that both elevated their own image and enriched people’s cultural lives. This area remains an underexplored yet fascinating topic, but is beyond this project.

121 Havens, 14-15. 122 Gordon, 272. 123 Bennett, 90.

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Conclusion

In her seminal book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, anthropologist Ruth Benedict assigns one attribute to Japan as a nation “with a popular cult of aestheticism which gives high honor to actors and to artists and lavishes art upon the cultivation of chrysanthemums…”1 From the ancient waka poetry, nō drama, calligraphy and screen paintings to the more modern ukiyo-e and kabuki theatre, we can deduce that aesthetics and art have deep roots in Japanese culture and the everyday lives of its people. Furthermore, as Nassrine Azimi notes, “throughout its recorded history… Japan has… demonstrated a particular predisposition for creating, collecting, safeguarding and recording a rich and diverse body of works and monuments in almost every sector of the human arts and crafts.”2 As seen in the popular displays of the misemono, kaichō, and bussankai during the Edo period, exhibitions and collections are not a wholly new concept to the Japanese. What is new is the institution of the museum that consolidates collection, preservation, and exhibition into one place and makes it available to the people. The art museum also requires a different viewing protocol compared to open exhibits on the streets or expositions. Hence, even though the museum is a foreign import, I have examined it in terms of how it fits Japan’s narrative of itself and has become normalized in people’s lives.

The angle of the art museum has allowed us to understand the complicated processes of transculturation, especially between the East and the West, as a result of the increasing contacts among different nations. Furthermore, it also shows how Japan sought to develop its identity while constantly being conscious of the gaze of the West. National identity always develops with an “us” and an Other—encounters with the outside prompts the formation and articulation of

1 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum the Sword, reprint edition (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006): 1. 2 Nassrine Azimi, The United States and Cultural Heritage Protection in Japan (1945-1952) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019): 1.

one’s own identity. The transformations of the structure and role of the museum in Japan manifests this negotiation of identity. The Western concept of the art museum is rooted in princely and aristocratic collections of art and the Cabinet of Curiosities, which were then made available to be viewed by the masses as Western societies steered toward democracy. We might say then the art museum is a logical development of the historical progression of European societies that is transplanted to East Asia, as even the idea of democracy is a new concept introduced to East Asia by the West.

The development of museums in Japan from the Meiji era to the latter half of the twentieth century demonstrates that the transplantation of foreign institutions and structures does not, and cannot, strictly follow the trajectories in their original contexts, as different societies and cultures have differing values and needs. Unlike the collection-based Western museums, the earliest Japanese museum, established in 1872, was initially intended only as an exhibition site and included both scientific and industrial objects as well as artworks. It was also established as a preparatory space for Japan’s participation in world’s fairs, which were key events for the nation-state to display itself to the West. By doing so, Japan was essentially playing by the rules of the Western power structure in order to prove that it abides by the Western standards, thereby preventing further Western incursions on its sovereignty. However, largely because of Japan’s contact with the West, the Japanese government also became conscious of the need to focus on its own indigenous talents, as we have seen in the Bunten exhibitions. In a more modern example, Japan’s first modern art museum, the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, was also initially established as an art museum without a permanent collection, which Masaaki

Morishita argues is a Japanese characteristic rather than an imperfect adoption of Western

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standards.3 Japan would continue to work between the need to match the West and the assertion of its own culture.

In the post-war era, we see the paradoxical nature of art museums. On the one hand, they ostensibly welcome all, while on the other they enhance and stabilize power structures by prescribing who belongs and who doesn’t. This delineation is done through educational level and aesthetic literacy, both of which are premised on an income level that allows an individual to have the resources and leisure time to appreciate art. However, it is precisely through this delineation that public art museums are able to foster a consciousness of identity—both social and national. The construction of national identity manifests in the juxtaposition of works in art museums, especially that of Japanese art and Western art, which elevates the status of Japanese art and promotes the consciousness of Japan as a nation and international power.

The other paradox of the art museum is that, although it represents the democratization and liberalization of culture in Japan, its structure and space are in fact implementing a particular kind of social etiquette and, by consequence, social order. When I asked Aki Hoashi about the phenomenon I observed in Japanese art museums, as I have written at the beginning of the

Introduction, she commented, “the Japanese people like to follow orders.”4 Hence, in the museum space, the characteristics of the people of that nation-state also are on display. An extension to this study would be to explore how the contemporary museum-viewing norms developed in Japan, which would reveal both the mechanisms by which the state facilitates social order and the behavioral inclinations of the Japanese people.

3 Masaaki Morishita, The Empty Museum: Western Cultures and the Artistic Field in Modern Japan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010): 17-18. 4 Aki Hoashi, interviewed by author. Zoom interview, April 22, 2020.

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Furthermore, developments of art museums reflect changes in society and national priorities. In Chapter One, we saw how South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan used museums in a period of transition in the last decades of the twentieth century to form new identities befitting those polities’ new political structures and international positions. As Laura Hein remarks, new social imaginaries are particularly instrumental when a society is going through radical changes—be it in political system or economic condition.5 In post-war Japan, it was more necessary than ever for Japan to establish itself as a peaceful, democratic, and cultured country in order to distance itself from the war-time fascist image and to integrate into the global community. In order to achieve this shift in national image, it was also necessary to fundamentally alter how people perceive themselves and their country. As such, the keyword of

“culture” was deployed by the government to inculcate this consciousness. The development of culture further illustrated Japan’s intention to establish itself as more than an economic power, as cultural permeation was deemed a key way to facilitate good diplomatic relations and gain international prestige. Thus, on top of the exhibitions and community outreach programs, the mere presence of art museums serves to attest to the cultural level of the nation-state and continue to improve Japan’s image in the twenty-first century as more and more foreign tourists visit Japan.

The process of transculturation as seen through art museums raises critical questions in terms of power structure and myth-making. Can museums ever fully achieve cultural democracy? Will museums continue to hold their cultural authority despite more efforts to bring in diverse voices of the people? Furthermore, how many Japanese people consciously think about the art museum as a Western structure when they visit exhibitions today? And how many

5 Laura Hein, “The Art of Bourgeois Culture in Kamakura” in Japan since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble, edited by Timothy S. George and Christopher Gerteis (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2012): 59.

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are aware that the Japanese word for “culture,” bunka, is actually foreign in origin? We might go further to ask, then, if this origin is obscured and thus mystified, how would that impact the

Japanese people’s perception of their “own” culture? As Morishita lamented, current Japanese scholars of museology continue to worry about the deficiencies of Japanese museums as compared to Western ones.6 As such, the power structure where the West is always superior still persists and will continue to influence and dictate the development of Japanese museums. In this case, will the institution of the museum ever be indigenized in Japan?

Finally, I would like to highlight my observation that the transition to a nation of culture is not unique to Japan, as I have illustrated by analyzing the cases of South Korea and Singapore.

All three display the pattern where, once they achieve economic stability, they seek to orient themselves toward the development of culture either to promote a better international image and/or to stimulate new forms of economic development. We can see this process happening in contemporary China, where the state is trying to steer the country away from the image of an industrial economy after decades of high economic growth and instead frame itself as a cultural power through the “Chinese Dream” (zhongguo meng) and “national cultural rejuvenation” discourses. The recent decades have also witnessed a wave of the construction of art museums, both public and private, in China.7 As such, it would be worthwhile to conduct a more in-depth comparative study of Japan and other East Asian societies to identify similarities and differences in larger trends of their national trajectories.

6 Morishita, 8-11. 7 “2017 nian zhongguo meishuguan zengjia jin baijia, shouru zengzhang chao 30%, minying meishuguan yinglai lianghaode fazhanjiyu (In 2017, the number of art museums in China increased by close to a hundred, and their income increased by more than 30%, private art museums are welcoming great opportunities for development),” Zhongguo Chanye Xinxi, November 19, 2018. https://www.chyxx.com/industry/201811/692995.html (accessed May 3, 2020)

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Interview

Hoashi, Aki. Interviewed by author. Zoom interview, April 22, 2020.

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