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Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan

University of California Press

The place of the Emperor in Shinto should be mentioned. He is considered to be descended from the sun-goddess, Amaterasu-o-mikami. Some people connect Amaterasu with the sun; others say Nichirinsama and Amaterasu-o-mikami are different gods. The bowing of farmers to the east on arising is by some ascribed to reverence for the sun, by others to reverence for the Emperor (whose palace is to the east of Suye). When school children or a group of people at school bow to the east before beginning work on hand, it is definitely toward the Emperor's palace.
John F. Embree, Suye Mura: A Japanese Village (1939)

All nations have their sacred places: national cemeteries, monuments to commemorate significant events in the authoritative history, palaces or other official residences of royalty and heads of state, shrines to the gods of the national religion, and public statuary celebrating national heroes. Not only do a nation's subjects experience these sites in everyday life—directly as well as through photographs, paintings, and postcards—they even make special pilgrimages to them. In Japan, for example, school excursions (shugaku ryoko ) to such sites as Ise and Yasukuni Shrines, the Imperial Palace, Kyoto, and other points of interest highlighted in the official national history began as early as the 1880s and became a customary practice in nearly all elementary schools by the turn of this century.1 And by the time the Japanese Empire had extended its reach into the South Pacific, groups of imperial

subjects intent on taking in the national sights came not only from the ends of the Japanese archipelago but from as far away as the islands of Micronesia. Typically, a sight-seeing tour of local elites from the "South Seas" (Nan'yo) included pilgrimages to Yasukuni and Meiji Shrines, a walk down the fabulously modern Ginza Avenue, a visit to Nijubashi, the "Double Bridge" leading into the Imperial Palace, a guided walk around the walls of the palace, and a round of banzais to the emperor.2

The capital cities of most modern nation-states hold an extraordinarily large number of such sacred sites. Filled with objects of national significance, they form prominent points, or central landmarks, on what might be called a symbolic national topography. Moreover, in addition to dominating the symbolic dimension of national landscapes, the great capital cities of the world have also served as central arenas for the staging of national ceremonies.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the governing elites in Europe, America, and elsewhere transformed their capitals into grand symbolic and ceremonial centers. Their style of city planning was characterized by the strategic siting of massive public buildings, expansive processional avenues, axial approaches to monuments and plazas, riveting scale, and enveloping greenery. In fact, in that age of rising nation-states a sort of international rivalry in the display of national power and prestige through urban architecture and space swept through Paris, Madrid, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, and Washington.3 Washington, to take one example—with its center dominated by the Capitol, White House, and Washington Monument and unified by the Mall and the Pennsylvania Avenue processional route—began to take shape only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, it had been "little more than an overgrown village spread loosely over its enormous site and dotted here and there with large but unrelated public buildings."4 Even London, a capital often thought to be exceptional in its lack of attention to this style of city planning, experienced considerable embellishment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the large-scale construction or rebuilding of national buildings and monuments.5

This wave of capital city reconstruction sent reverberations to places as far away as New Delhi and Canberra. Edwin Lutyens, the primary architect of New Delhi, designed the city with a long processional route that provided magnificent vistas of such monuments as the All-India Memorial Arch, the Jaipur Column, and above all the Viceroy's House perched atop Raisina Hill.6 Though Canberra has never completely fulfilled the 1913 vision of its architect (the American Walter Burley

Griffin) as a majestic, monumental city, crowned by the purely symbolic Capitol Hill, it too bears the basic imprint of this modern style—a fact that was recently brought home by the opening of Australia's new Parliament House on Capitol Hill, which incidentally was timed to coincide with the two hundredth anniversary of British settlement. One architectural historian has explained the original vision: "Like the acropolis at Raisina, Capitol Hill was intended to be profoundly symbolic: although not meant to house the mechanism of government, its building was to serve as a ceremonial and archival center, commemorating Australian achievements and representing an emotional and spiritual focus of national life."7

Present-day observers of Tokyo have often remarked on the singularly unimposing appearance of Japan's capital, especially when compared to such cities as those mentioned above. The monumental architecture and the well-ordered avenues, they claim, are lacking; and the core of the city is conspicuous by its relative emptiness, the Imperial Palace's walls concealing the place which ought to display meaning most openly.8 In typical fashion, the French semiotician Roland Barthes has observed that while Tokyo is similar to the vast majority of Western cities in its concentric design, it is aberrant in having a center which is empty rather than full of meaningful things. Thus Tokyo is described as a paradoxical city, one which is "built around an opaque ring of walls, streams, roofs, and trees whose own center is no more than an evaporated notion, subsisting here, not in order to irradiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness, forcing the traffic to make a perpetual detour." Tokyo, in short, is deemed to have a structure quite different from cities consonant with "Western metaphysics."9

And yet, such views of Tokyo, which transform the city into an exotic abnormality, obstruct an understanding of Japan's capital as a city with a history in which its center has indeed been filled with meaning by a conscious governing elite. Though its appearance may not conform to modern Western standards, this fact should not deter us from understanding the enormous symbolic power of the city on its own terms. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it too became a place filled with significant monuments clustering around the core of the capital; and it too began to serve as a central arena for the performance of dramatic national ceremonials.

However, it is true that just after the Restoration of 1868 it was not by any means evident to Japan's modern rulers that Tokyo had, or for that matter needed, a symbolic and ceremonial dimension. There was

confusion as well about what was to become of Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital. This is certainly not to say that the new government's leaders were inattentive to the symbolic and ritual dimension of politics, for they vigorously...