Organizer and Chair: Morgan J. Pitelka, Occidental College

Discussant: Jordan Sand, Georgetown University

This panel explores four examples of historical preservation in modern Japan with particular attention to the construction of national identity. How do decisions about the preservation of material culture relate to changing notions of Japaneseness? What is the relationship between material conservation and ideologies of the national subject? As important as the notion of the invented past is that of the forgotten one; what role, therefore, does preservation play in effacing certain kinds of histories? Institutional amnesia emerges as a particularly important trend in the 1930s and the 1960s, periods in which historical preservation projects were pursued with notable enthusiasm in Japan. We approach these issues from four distinct fields within Japanese studies: modern Japanese history, premodern Japanese history, architectural history, and art history. Both in the subject matter and the methodologies of the papers, this panel will call attention to modernity as a rough, multifaceted work-in-progress, negotiated not only in the pages of journals or the halls of government but in exhibitions and memorial celebrations.

Michael Wert, University of California, Irvine, Japan

In 1931 Kurata and Ubuchi villagers pulled their resources together to erect a memorial stone honoring their former lord, Oguri Tadamasa. Local authorities immediately ordered the project stopped due to the stone’s inscription which read: "The great Oguri, executed without having committed a crime." Police objected that the loyalist imperial forces fighting in the Meiji Restoration would not have executed an innocent person. In the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate Oguri was a leader of the hawk faction that advocated war with the imperial loyalists, who labeled him an enemy of the court. But he also made significant contributions to Japan’s modern infrastructure later adopted by the Meiji government. After Oguri’s death in 1868 journalists and politicians used Oguri’s image as a way to resist the Meiji victory. Gunma Prefecture locals appropriated Oguri’s image in order to offer alternatives to master interpretations of the Meiji Restoration. This paper traces how private citizens gather objects, erect memorials, perform ceremonies and hold festivals in an effort to transform their martyred hero from the status of criminal to that of a national historic figure. In the process they strengthen their own local identity as villagers, prefectural citizens and Japanese; providing opportunities for regional variation within a larger, yet diverse, national history.

Morgan J. Pitelka, Occidental College

Marquis Tokugawa Yoshichika, nineteenth head of the Owari branch of the Tokugawa family, embodied the contradictions of early twentieth-century political culture in Japan. He was an opponent of corruption in parliamentary politics and proposed an elected House of Peers despite the fact that he himself was a hereditary member. In the interwar period, he helped fund right-wing attempts to overthrow the government but then became a colonial administrator in Singapore; in the postwar period he supported the reestablishment of the Japan Socialist Party. Yoshichika’s establishment of the Tokugawa Art Museum is not unrelated to his more explicitly political activities. This paper will link Yoshichika’s attempt to preserve the legacy of the Tokugawa, buttressed by his donation of the Tokugawaen residence and gardens to the city of Nagoya, to broader preservation trends and discourses about culture of the 1930s. Underlying the opening of the museum are competing notions of national identity that emerge directly from Yoshichika’s fraught subjectivity as both a would-be progressive reformer and a symbol of the feudal past. The public nature of the museum serves the needs of the collective, while its focus on the Tokugawa line puts the history of his family on a kind of mythological pedestal.

Milena Metalkova-Markova, Akita International University, Japan

This paper will investigate the way in which the historical past is preserved, represented, and consumed in vernacular houses (minka) turned into museums in Akita prefecture, Japan. Of particular interest is the role of three strategies of house preservation in the construction of national identity after the 1960s, particularly through the system of important cultural treasures. Minka houses were allowed into this exclusive pantheon of treasures only after a substantial "purification" of architectural space, family history, interior furnishings and personal traces. The value of minka houses was defined predominantly in terms of their age, condition, architectural features, and local features, while every trace of their residents’ personal histories, lifestyles, and tastes was removed, thus leaving a bare architectural space, stripped of human touch. The examples from Akita will be examined in terms of the roles of original wooden structures, spatial composition, interior treatment, exhibited artifacts, and visual and acoustic media, with attention to how these elements are presented to fit a socially acceptable and attractive image of the past. An analysis of the proportion between historic authenticity, scientific objectivity, and "beautification" of the socially constructed historical environment will be used to argue that a process of purification or taming of the past constitutes the unquestionable substance or imperative of historic preservation practice in Japan.

Yoko Shirai, UCLA

Concrete, stone, and earth were first used in Japan during the 1960s to build historical parks (rekishi kôen) over ruined Buddhist temples at the conclusion of archaeological surveys. These parks may be viewed as physical manifestations of a postwar phenomenon that increasingly relied on the interpretation of archaeological evidence to answer questions about the early origins and accomplishments of the Japanese state, and to define a new vision of nation and nationality for the Japanese people. The four historical parks that I discuss -- Yamadadera in Nara prefecture, Kawachi Kudaradera in Osaka-fu, Kitano haiji in Aichi prefecture, and Noto Kokubunji ato in Ishikawa prefecture -- were among the earliest Buddhist temples built in their locales during the 7th century CE and later. While this distinction contributed to each site’s re-invention as historical park during the 20th century, such projects would not have occurred without the intervention of local historical societies, scholars such as Ishida Mosaku (1894-1977), or state-sponsored institutions. While a certain degree of irregularity exists in the design, conception, and historical accuracy of each park, many excavation reports or websites for these sites invite visitors to touch the original artifacts and walk around the beautified public spaces. Such themes suggest that the romanticized myth of homogeneity is being played out as one narrative among several that led to the movement to build such historical parks; that is, here lie the ruins of temples that were built by ancestors from a collective past history of the modern Japanese.