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Touring Japan-as-Museum: NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues

Touring Japan-as-Museum: NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues positions 8:3 © 2000 by Duke University Press positions 8:3 Winter 2000 designers used a host of sophisticated modernist visual techniques, including an array of stunning photomontages, as a means of enticing the Western tourist to authenticate Japan by experiencing “the world-as-exhibition,” about which Timothy Mitchell has so eloquently written.2 This “world-asexhibition,” explains Mitchell, was “not an exhibition of the world but the world organized and grasped as though it were an exhibition.” Like the dioramas and live exhibits at the Parisian world’s fair in Mitchell’s analysis, NIPPON’s Japan was a world set up as a picture. It was “ordered up as an object on display to be investigated and experienced by the dominating European [Western] gaze.”3 As an instantiation of Japan-as-museum, NIPPON deserves consideration as “a privileged arena for presenting self and ‘other.’ ”4 Jeanne Cannizzo has argued that the museum is a “cultural text, one that may be read to understand the underlying cultural or ideological assumptions that have informed its creation, selection and display.”5 In keeping with the museum metaphor, I will consider the magazine layout as an analogue to gallery installation and the designers as curators of the exhibition experience, the magazine text becoming http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

Touring Japan-as-Museum: NIPPON and Other Japanese Imperialist Travelogues

Weisenfeld, Gennifer
positions asia critique , Volume 8 (3) – Dec 1, 2000
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References (44)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-8-3-747
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

positions 8:3 © 2000 by Duke University Press positions 8:3 Winter 2000 designers used a host of sophisticated modernist visual techniques, including an array of stunning photomontages, as a means of enticing the Western tourist to authenticate Japan by experiencing “the world-as-exhibition,” about which Timothy Mitchell has so eloquently written.2 This “world-asexhibition,” explains Mitchell, was “not an exhibition of the world but the world organized and grasped as though it were an exhibition.” Like the dioramas and live exhibits at the Parisian world’s fair in Mitchell’s analysis, NIPPON’s Japan was a world set up as a picture. It was “ordered up as an object on display to be investigated and experienced by the dominating European [Western] gaze.”3 As an instantiation of Japan-as-museum, NIPPON deserves consideration as “a privileged arena for presenting self and ‘other.’ ”4 Jeanne Cannizzo has argued that the museum is a “cultural text, one that may be read to understand the underlying cultural or ideological assumptions that have informed its creation, selection and display.”5 In keeping with the museum metaphor, I will consider the magazine layout as an analogue to gallery installation and the designers as curators of the exhibition experience, the magazine text becoming

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positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 2000

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