Unbracketing Japanese artifacts

Orientalism changes the meaning of a variety of objects in Asian material culture. EuroAmerican scholars and institutions treat artifacts as if they know better than Asian peoples what those artifacts mean. Japan as a country is one of the main focuses of western understandings of the “orient,” Japanese artifacts even more so. This exhibit focuses on two types of artifacts particularly subject to orientalism: consumer fashion and military implements.  To move away from orientalism, we draw inspiration from Japanese literary scholar Karatani Kojin, who introduces the idea of "unbracketing" from Immanual Kant (1724-1804) as a way to resituate orientalized objects in their historical contexts. [1] Each object in this exhibit thus needs to be understood as having lived a complex life in its journey from Japan to the Illinois State Museum and the curators here provide analyses that explain both the American and Japanese contexts of these objects and consider the types of agency exercised by each object. Each of these objects embody Japanese and American pasts and presents; each represents different meanings to people in different contexts.

 Consumer fashion objects: inrō, netsuke, and kimono

Consumer fashion can be defined as common items that the Japanese people wore during the Tokugawa era and after. In the Tokugawa period, these objects adorned bodies, were purchased according to the whims of flourishing commercial economies, and both energized and reflected tensions of status.  Under modernity, such objects became recontextualized as art and tradition. These objects exemplify the way that artifacts brim with motifs and symbols that help give them and their wearers meaning. These artifacts thus exemplify the need to understand changes in interpretation as objects travel from one context to another. In this collection, you can find a kimono and assemblages of seal holders and toggles (inrō and netsuke). The latter are part of a collection assembled by Springfield magnate Thomas Condell (1863-1929), which fits the apex of American orientalist collecting in the early twentieth century before its donation to the collection to the Illinois State Museum in 1952.  

Literally just meaning “clothing,” kimono are among the most stereotypical aspects of Japan that Americans have. Historically known as kosode, these silk robes are decorated with colors and many patterns that tell stories of the wearer, their family, and the past or present in general. Kimono often represent something significant for the wearer and express multiple meanings. This exhibit’s black kimono with peonies, for example, would be worn by a married woman in the winter, to remind viewers of warm weather when the flowers are in full bloom.

Composed of exquisite lacquerware and carvings, inrō and netsuke exemplify the transformation of what historian Susan Hanley has called the high technology of the Edo period into a decontextualized and timeless traditional handicrafts after being repurposed by modern collectors, such as Condell.[2] Moreover, many of our inrō and netsuke display representations containing religious symbolism that is often subjected to orientalist assumptions about the universality of certain ideas and meaning can often be lost in translation when moving one culture to another culture. Demons (oni and tengu), dragons, Mt. Fuji, and idealized landscapes and seascapes depicting philosophical concepts and icons, such as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.  Such images endure as what many might consider “universal” symbols of Japan or even Asia in the western mind, but there’s an important piece missing from the story—what these symbols have represented to the Japanese people themselves in different eras.

Military gear

This exhibit highlights the dangers in aestheticizing samurai arms and armor and illuminates transformations of meaning in their practical use and symbolic meaning to ground our understanding in specific contexts. It includes an array of objects from from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, including historical and modern military swords, an arquebus (matchlock musket), and a helmet.  Similar to our exploration of consumer fashion items, this exhibit considers the acquisition of these objects by individuals from Illinois as central to their evolving histories.  

Our earliest swords date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These highlight how modern eyes typically see swords as objects of beauty and careful craftsmanship. The idealized viewpoint of Japanese swords as art erases their purposes and meaning as instruments of violence and status, removing the very power it gave the Japanese people during the era of warring states (1467-1590) and Tokugawa period (1600-1868). Swords in this time often helped warriors embody elite status. Samurai took great satisfaction in holding a blade that had been passed down to them from their ancestors or given as gifts to cement bonds of patronage.[3] 

The second group of swords exhibited fall under the heading of new military swords (shin guntō) produced between 1935 and 1945.  Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese government began a process of rapid modernization resulting in a dramatic change in its societal, governmental, and martial structures.  This process of modernization resulted in the replacement of many Tokugawa-era traditions and objects with western ideals and military gear. Then at the beginning of World War II, Japanese craftsman started to manufacture swords again for the soldiers to carry and use on the battlefield as part of the modern invention of Bushidō, which enabled modern Japanese conscripted men and officers to embody the spirit of the samurai.  However, unlike the hand-crafted models of earlier eras, many new military swords were mass produced in government factories based on the idea and the design from earlier eras.  Others, such as one in our exhibit from 1864, were family heirlooms given modern military fittings to reacculturate them into the imperial forces. 

 During the war, Japanese officers used and authorized the use of these blades in the perpetration of war crimes. This dark aspect of their history was later forgotten. During and after the war, many swords and other military articles were taken from Japan to the United States as trophies of racial and military dominance. Postwar rehabilitation of Japan included the aestheticization of samurai culture through both American and Japanese popular culture. Swords in particular have served as highly charged ideological symbols in the twentieth and twentieth century that both empowered militarism and imperialism and in the postwar cultivated amnesia about war crimes as representations of a “cool Japan.”[4]

Similar trans-Pacific multivalence imbues other military objects in the exhibit. This seventeenth-century Japanese matchlock may have seen conflict; it became an item for studying military arts, a symbol of status, and a vehicle for developing masculinity.[5] After the Meiji restoration, it represented Japan’s feudal past and part of a lineage of firearms for an Illinois collector.  A helmet used in the nineteenth wars that brought down the shogunate and ushered in modern Japan hints at entangled trans-Pacific emotional histories. It was a functional piece of protective equipment designed to strike fear into opponents, hiding the terror of being on the battlefield. In the twentieth century, it went from being a family heirloom, a symbol military heritage, to a gift of gratitude given by a Japanese student to his American mentor.

Our exhibit of fashion-related and military artifacts introduces new, complex stories of transnational dialogue by tracing the long lives of these objects from their creation in Japan sometimes hundreds of years ago to their arrival in the Illinois State Museum.  Instead of seeing these objects as the embodiment of decontextualized “oriental tradition,” they can be seen as material culture with distinctive commercial, political, and emotional resonances as they passed from hand-to-hand across the Pacific, changing their own identity and the identity of those who possessed them in these voyages across the sea and the centuries.

 

[1] Kojin Karatani, “Uses of Aesthetics: After Orientalism,” trans. Sabu Kohso, boundary 2 25.2 (1998): 145-160.

 [2] Susan Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: The Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

[3] Morgan Pitelka, Spectacular Accumulation: Material Culture, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Samurai Sociability (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).

[4] Kohki Watabe, “Japanese Swords as Symbols of Historical Amnesia: Touken Ranbu and the Sword Boom in Popular Media,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19:7 (2021): 1-20.  

[5] Anne Walthall, “Do Guns Have Gender? Technology and Status in Early Modern Japan,” in Recreating Japanese Men, ed. Sabine Früstück and Ann Walthall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 25-48.