Few building types evoke more compelling insights into the relationship among architecture, nationalism, and modernity than the museum. Alice Tseng’s The Imperial Museums of Meiji Japan is a thoughtful, nuanced book that illuminates how notions of national identity were shaped and reinforced through architectural form and aesthetic display in the new institution of the art museum in modern Japan.

Tseng examines the development of the four national museums of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan as part of the larger story of the birth of the museum as a key institution of modernity. According to Tseng, these museums were “sites of constructed and idealized national self-images” that developed in tandem with the modern nation-state. In Japan, as in Europe and the United States, the museum in the nineteenth century served as a space for organizing and promoting a unified conception of national identity. In Meiji Japan, the elucidation of national identity entailed not only formulating and distinguishing a new cultural self from conceptions seen by many to be tainted by association with the recent feudal past, but also coming to terms with the influence of Western cultures that were central to Japan’s encounter with modernity. For many members of the Meiji intelligentsia, museums served as an index of Japan’s rise in a global, Western-dominated order at the height of Euro-North American imperialism.

The strength of Tseng’s work lies in her integration of the diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural aspects of Japan’s encounter with the expansionist Western powers. The conceptual and linguistic elements of this encounter are the focus of the first chapter, which recounts the origins of the modern terms for hakubutsukan and bijutsu as neologisms for the Western concepts of “museum” and “art,” respectively. Although the excavation of the origins of the modern terms for “art” (bijutsu) and “Japanese art” (Nihon bijutsu) by Japanese historians of modern art such as Satō Dōshin and Kitazawa Noriaki has been recounted elsewhere, Tseng shows how these terminological transformations were reflected in architectural form. Tseng details the Meiji official effort to harness the visual and material to convey to a mass audience a unitary national identity. Tseng’s analysis of early accounts by Fukuzawa Yukichi, Kume Kunitake, and Sano Tsunetami regarding the organization and presentation of national cultures in museums in the West confirms that early Meiji experts on Western culture shared a positive view of the museum as a tool for popular enlightenment through the ordered, visual presentation of scientific knowledge and technological advancement.

Tseng’s second chapter expands upon her earlier article in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians on the design of the first Japanese museum (hakubutsukan) in Ueno Park, as well as the design intentions of its architect, the Briton Josiah Conder (Alice Tseng, “Styling Japan: The Case of Josiah Conder and the Museum at Ueno, Tokyo,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians [December 2004]: 472–97). Like the South Kensington Museum’s perpetuation of display practices in London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, the permanent museum that opened in Ueno, Tokyo, in 1882 was intended to provide a permanent institutional home for the material culture of the National Industrial Exhibitions, the first of which was sponsored by the Meiji government in 1877. The origins of the institution underline the fact that museums were initially understood in Japan as spaces for the comprehensive exhibition of scientific developments and industrial products. Tseng analyzes how Conder, hired by the Meiji government to establish the first professional course in architecture in Japan at the Imperial College of Engineering, nurtured cultural assumptions that informed his elucidation of an architectural idiom appropriate to modern Japan. Tseng notes the tension between Conder’s personal fondness for Japanese “traditional” art and culture—a predilection shared by his mentor, the British architect William Burges—and his professional mission to transform architectural practice in Japan. Although Conder studied ink painting with the noted artist Kawanabe Kyōsai, and published authoritative texts on Japanese flower arrangement (ikebana) and garden design, his professional charge at the School of Engineering was to train architects to create buildings with the technical, ornamental, and functional prerequisites to represent a modernized Japan to the industrialized Western powers.

The museum at Ueno combined iconically Western, modern materials such as red brick and stone facing with stylistic elements that, for Conder, symbolized an appropriately non-Western modernity. The architectural details of Conder’s “Pseudo-Saracenic” style drew heavily from British colonial appropriations of Islamic medieval architecture in India, including the bulbous domes on open pavilions reminiscent of Mughal chattri as well as pointed arches and floriated windows. Tseng analyzes the Orientalist assumptions behind the architect’s advocacy of the Pseudo-Saracenic style for Japanese modern design: in his search for an “Eastern,” monumental aesthetic, Conder conflated the architectural legacy of Japan with the very different historical building practices of South Asia and the Middle East. Though Conder shared with his European peers the desire to elucidate new forms expressive of a non-Western modernity, he was unable to draw upon his deep knowledge of Japanese timber-frame architecture to influence the structure and form of the new building type. Although the Pseudo-Saracenic style had little lasting influence in Japan, Tseng points out that the Ueno Museum established lasting emphases in Japanese institutional architecture on monumentality, bilateral symmetry, and simple massing, as well as the use of the façade to communicate national identity.

The heart of Tseng’s text examines what she calls the “age of imperial museums,” the final decade of the nineteenth century that saw not only the reorganization of the projected network of three national museums under the Education Ministry (Monbushō) and the Imperial Household Ministry (Kunaishō), but also the construction of the national museums at Nara and Kyoto. Tseng shows how this stage marked a decisive shift in the Japanese official conception of museums as spaces for the preservation, exhibition, and production of art, rather than as places for the promotion of national advances in science and industry. The privileging of painting and sculpture as the most meaningful representation of national identity owes much to the advocacy of the initial museum administrators Kuki Ryūichi, Ernest Fenollosa, and Okakura Kakuzō, as well as the influence of Itō Hirobumi, who during part of his tenure as the first prime minister of Japan also served as imperial household minister. Fenollosa, an American professor of philosophy at Tokyo University, and his student Okakura gained international prominence as connoisseurs and promoters of a unified conception of Japanese aesthetic production. Both men shared an ideological and practical commitment to encouraging the making and selling of art based to some extent on indigenous thematic and formal precedents, exemplified in the neo-traditional “Japanese-style painting” genre known as Nihonga. Tseng focuses on Okakura’s and Fenollosa’s roles as members of government commissions that studied the art schools and museums of Europe and the United States, and surveyed the collections of temples and shrines throughout Japan.

Although Tseng recounts the individual roles of important Meiji public intellectuals and officials, her primary contribution here is to show how the development of the modern museum in Japan contributed to the official vision of a unified Japanese cultural heritage, while also promoting neo-traditional forms of visual culture for domestic and international consumption. The administrative ties between the Imperial Museum and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts founded in 1887 illustrated a shared institutional and ideological commitment to the notion of pre-modern material culture as signifier of a timeless, Japanese cultural essence. The dual agenda of molding national consciousness and favorably influencing international perceptions of Japan is exemplified in Okakura’s logic for the tripartite division of historical responsibility among a network of national museums based in Nara, Kyoto, and Tokyo, cities whose cultural legacy he likened respectively to Rome, Paris, and London. The museum thus posed a daunting architectural challenge: the need to exhibit and exalt a venerable cultural legacy within a building that embodied modern technological competence in a competitive international arena.

Like her analysis of Conder’s work on the Ueno Museum, Tseng’s account of the training and works of Katayama Tōkuma is sympathetic and detailed. The foremost official architect to emerge from Conder’s first class at the Imperial College of Engineering, Katayama, in his Nara and Kyoto museums, created works that represented Japan as a modern nation to the world. Rather than decrying Katayama as a derivative architect for his use of Greco-Roman classicism, Tseng notes that the modern interpretation of these modes represented a “shared language of power, empire, and political legitimation for many nations with global aspirations regardless of actual ethnic kinship”(7). Tseng’s insightful analysis of the intentions of Japanese architects within the wider context of disproportionate Western cultural and political influence on the global scene is matched by her attention to the specific design process and intentions behind each building. Her analysis of the multiple meanings and functions of buildings that have often been dismissed as simply derivative in inspiration, design, and function goes much further than existing English-language scholarship. For instance, she examines Katayama’s decision to ornament the pedimented front façade of the Imperial Kyoto Museum with stone relief sculptures of indigenous deities. On a broader scale, Tseng shows how the Imperial Kyoto Museum was designed to reinforce the old capital’s leading role as a center of art production, while the Nara museum represented Nara as a “signifier of Japanese art as ancient religious heritage” (7).

The tale of the desacralization of religious material culture to fit within the modern practices of display and exhibition also strikes a chord with recent scholarly attention to the shifting functions and meanings of art objects. Tseng defends Katayama against contemporary criticisms of the spatial and lighting limitations of the Kyoto and Nara museums by noting that museum administrators rarely followed Katayama’s careful matching of specific spaces to particular object types. This sympathetic defense of Katayama raises familiar questions about the role of the architect in the design process.

The brevity of her concluding chapter suggests that Tseng found no easy answers to the nagging question of the success of Meiji architects in the “construction of a Japanese national image as equal to, yet unique from, Western civilization” (5). To whom were these architectural messages directed, and to what extent did these various constituencies—foreign officials, local dignitaries, ordinary citizens, et al.—internalize or reject these ideas? We are left with a greater appreciation of the regional, national, and international considerations faced by designers, administrators, and politicians controlling the purse strings for each project. However, as Tseng admits, it is difficult to gauge from scant primary sources how ordinary museum visitors were affected by their encounters with these new, public spaces of display. In a similar vein, it is difficult to trace how the perceptions of Japanese citizens changed with regard to specific categories of aesthetic production.

Tseng’s work has certainly opened the door to further exploration of the ways in which cultural identity can be shaped by and reflected in the architectural settings for display of visual culture. By illuminating in detail the design process for each museum, as well as the ideological and institutional contexts of state-sponsored, Western-style architecture in Meiji Japan, Tseng has made a major contribution to the study of Japanese modern architecture.