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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation Don Choi The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation. By Alice Y. Tseng. University of Washington Press, 2008. 285 pages. Hardcover $60.00. Interest in the architecture of modern Japan has never been greater. In 2010, for instance, Sejima Kazuyo and Nishizawa Ryūe won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field's most prestigious award. In fact, since the Pritzker's founding in 1979, more Japanese architects have been recipients of these prizes than their counterparts [End Page 227] in any other nation except the United States. Monographs and coffee-table books on Andō Tadao, Maki Fumihiko, Shigeru Ban, and other Japanese architects continue to multiply. From the point of view of academic scholars, however, the English-language literature on modern Japanese architecture has long suffered from two faults. First, until fairly recently, many writers on the subject were trained as architects or critics rather than as historians or Japan specialists. As a result, many works treated contemporary topics for a professional audience rather than historical ones for academic readers. Second, the Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods have received considerably less attention than the decades from 1950 to the present. These two circumstances are linked: researching historical subjects involves different skills and goals than writing on contemporary topics. In the past decade, though, scholars have begun to craft a distinct body of English-language scholarship. In 2001, Jonathan Reynolds published Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture, arguably the first scholarly monograph in English on a Japanese architect. Jordan Sand's House and Home in Modern Japan appeared in 2003, and Gregory Clancey's Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity, 1968-1930 in 2006. In their reliance on Japanese-language sources and archival research, these books set new standards for English-language scholarship on modern Japanese architecture. In addition, the authors' willingness to tie together themes from diverse fields distinguish these works from much of the scholarship that has been published in Japanese. Clancey's Earthquake Nation, for example, investigates architecture not as an a priori discipline but as something that interweaves technical, social, political, and aesthetic issues. Alice Tseng's The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan: Architecture and the Art of the Nation is a worthy addition to this small but provocative collection of books. During the Meiji period, museums in Tokyo, Nara, and Kyoto were among the most ambitious architectural projects undertaken by the government. Josiah Conder, the designer of the first of these buildings—the museum in Ueno Park that was the forerunner of what is now the Tokyo National Museum—influenced Meiji architecture as much as anyone. As a practitioner, he designed the iconic Rokumeikan. As the first professor of architecture at the Kōbudaigakkō, or Imperial College of Engineering, he trained the Japanese students who would dominate the teaching and practice of monumental Western-style architecture throughout the Meiji period. Katayama Tōkuma, one of his first pupils, designed the other three museums at the core of Tseng's book: the Imperial Kyoto Museum, the Imperial Nara Museum, and the Hyōkeikan (the structure to the west in the present trio of main buildings in the Tokyo National Museum complex). Chapter 1 of Imperial Museums examines the origins of the terms most fundamental to Tseng's study: hakubutsukan (museum) and bijutsu (art). Both words were created in the early Meiji period to represent concepts from the West. Tseng explores the ambiguities and complexities of these terms, explaining them not as simple translations but as concepts birthed from governmental desires to create and control the roles of art. Chapter 2 presents Josiah Conder's museum as a Meiji version of London's South Kensington Museum. As one of the landmark buildings of the early Meiji period, the Ueno museum has received considerable attention from Japanese scholars, but mainly for its technical and formal innovations. Tseng's contribution is to examine the building as the material manifestation of the Home Ministry's desire to "enrich the minds [End Page 228] of the general public and educate designers and manufacturers...