Richard Holttum stated, ‘a botanic garden is essentially a museum of living plants’.¹ Its position as a museum is a result of the garden’s double function; it is a place where plants can be studied by experts for science and a place where exhibits occur for the education and recreation of non-experts. Museums are also seen as having a political function and traditionally, the political function of botanic gardens originates from the garden’s position as a colonial construction. However, as this blog post will explore, in the aftermath of World War II and on the advent of Singapore’s independence, the Singapore Botanic Gardens took on a further political dimension as the garden’s award-winning orchids stemmed the beginning of ‘orchid diplomacy’. The prestigious reputation of orchids grown in the Singapore Botanic Gardens allowed the plant to provide a visible, unique symbol of nations’ friendship that was and still is today used as a tool of diplomacy.²

Holttum, who was took on the position as Director of the Gardens from 1925, is credited with the popularization of the technique of orchid hybridisation that facilitated the orchid becoming prestigious.³ However, itwas the international flower shows and exhibitions that placed Singapore’s orchids on the world map. Timothy Bernard explains that when Tan Chay Yan’s hybrid orchid the Vanda won the highest honour in the horticultural world at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1954 it placed ‘Singapore as a powerhouse on the world map of orchid cultivation.’⁴ The presence of the orchids within international diplomacy soon became national interest with the Sunday Standard reporting that Queen Elizabeth was presented with a bouquet of orchids flown from Singapore to London cultivated at the Botanic Gardens in Singapore.⁵The gifting of them to one of the most important diplomatic figures of the time, marked by the Queen’s position as Head of the British Empire that ruled over Singapore, evidences how the garden’s orchids had begun to be recognized as an important symbol for the nation within international diplomatic circles. The New Nation also reported how Singapore’s leaders were ‘saying it with orchids’ when welcoming New Zealand’s governmental visitors on their visit to the botanical gardens.⁶ Again, this exemplifies the plant being used as an offering of friendship within international politics. Alongside orchids being given to important foreign dignitaries, in 1956 following the nation’s independence, Singapore’s Botanic Gardens began the “VIP Orchid Naming” Program at the Gardens. This was an official government practice that named orchids for visiting dignitaries and celebrities such as Michael Jackson.⁷The timing of this program is also significant it began in the same year Singapore received independence, as Bernard argues the program thus exemplifies an effort from Singapore to ‘enter complex, scientific, economic and diplomatic networks’ that were not controlled or overlooked by their previous colonial rulers.⁸ The focus on orchids as a symbol that embodied honour and prestige not only in the Gardens but internationally continued into the late 20^th century. In 1990, in an interview with The Strait Times, the Chief Executive Director of the new board at the Botanic Gardens, Dr Tan, emphasised that an ‘immediate goal was to get the Orchid Garden at the Botanic Gardens going’.⁹ The directors believed that this achievement would turn the botanic garden into a ‘national asset’.⁸This reinforces how still forty years later, the orchids were an emblem that added an additional political function into the Garden, one that impacted within national and international realms.

This blog post’s investigation using newspaper reports and Bernard’s in-depth evaluation of Singapore’s Botanic Gardens reveals how the Garden’s orchids became a symbol of friendship, prestige and honour that was recognized and respected internationally from the 1950s until the present-day. This exemplifies how the space and objects within the Garden took on many functions and how over time different functions were prioritised. If we look beyond the Garden’s traditional definition as an institution of science and consider the space as a ‘living museum’ it helps to discover and explain these differing functions. This specific case of orchid diplomacy suggests that a further investigation of the Singapore Botanic Gardens or other botanic gardens could reveal other examples of the space being used for purposes outside of the gardens traditional scientific role which suggests that it potentially providing an interesting space for a long-essay investigation.

1. R. E. Holttum, “The Historical Significance of Botanic Gardens in S.E. Asia,” TAXON 19, no. 5 (1970): pp. 707-714, https://doi.org/10.2307/1219283, 707. [↩]
2. Timothy P. Barnard, Nature’s Colony Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 131. [↩]
3. Ibid., 127. [↩]
4. Ibid., 129. [↩]
5. “Malayan Orchids For The Queen,” Sunday Standard, May 27, 1951, 3. [↩]
6. “Saying It with Orchids,” New Nation, 1973, 3. [↩]
7. Barnard, Nature’s Colony, 132. [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
9. “Turning National Parks into ‘Global Asset’,” Strait Times, June 9, 1990, 8. [↩]

“At first, Guizhen was in the public school of Zhabei. When she was fourteen years old, she was about to graduate, however, due to some reason, she dropped out of school. From then on, she was unemployed and stayed at home. When she was sixteen years old, Shenxianshijie promoted feminism and also admired her name, and hired her to be a waitress.” ¹

— Xiao Yan, “Kuaile Shijie”.

The above paragraph is quoted from a story published in Kuaile shijie (Happy World) which was a newspaper established in Shanghai in 1927. The story is about two waitresses Wu Guizhen and He Zhenbao who worked for Shenxian Shijie, a cabaret. In the story of Wu, the author mentions that she was hired because Shenxian Shijie promoted feminism. Also, after she started to work for the cabaret, Wu was able to make twenty five yuan a month, in addition to the amount of tip she earned is the double of the fixed salary. Therefore, the whole family of Wu relied on her income.² The way the author phrased the life story of Wu implies the existence of feminist elements in her choice of work and the cabaret. However, the real life of the hostesses and waitresses may suggest the opposite. This newly appeared gender dynamic due to the appearance of a new gender interaction brought by cabarets and dance halls between males and females created a hallucination of the rise of feminism in Shanghai in the 1930s. This new gender dynamic could be viewed as a new extended form of the traditional male and female power dynamic outside of the domestic sphere, and the existence of the element of feminism which Kuaile shijie observed in the life stories of these two waitresses is questionable.

One of the reasons why there was considered to be a rising trend of feminism in Shanghai was because of the appearance and popularisation of cabarets and dance halls which created more job opportunities for women and a new form of gender relation which did not exist in China before the 1920s. The former is not hard to understand, just like the author of Kuaile shijie described that the whole family of Wu relied on her income, which somehow won women a more important status in their family. This new economic advantage of women also seems to lift the social status of women in the early half of the twentieth century in Shanghai. The latter requires more explanation. Dance halls and cabarets created a space where males and females could establish an intimate relationship without the intervention of senior family members which is unprecedented in Chinese society. The dance halls and cabarets were different from conventional prostitution and brothels. Hostesses and waitresses had more publicity and fame. Then when men went to cabaret, they did not simply seek sexual consumption. As Andrew Field argued in his book Shanghai’s Dancing World, male patrons sometimes do not aim for sexual activity while ‘courting’ a hostess. They use many ways, including treating her to dinner, taking her out to a show, or buying her gifts, to establish a relationship with the hostess.³ On a superficially level, it seems that a famous and influential hostess gained the power which could attract men to please her and somehow reversed the conventional gender structure of society.

This new gender relation brought by the appearance of the cabaret created the impression that feminism was rising and developing in Shanghai. However, it did not dismantle the traditional gender dynamic, because it did not change the underlying unequalness between males and females. The courting practices in a dancehall or a cabaret of a male patron did not imply a superior status of women but rather more explicitly reveal the demand of men to share a consensual experience shared among male patrons that facilitated a male-male relationship in contrast to heterosexual bond.⁴ Ueno Chizuko expressed a similar point in her book Misogyny that a man, by imitating other males’ sexual desires, becomes the subject in a heterosexual relationship. Having a sexual relationship with females is a way to imitate other males’ sexual desires and a way to be accepted by the group of the male gender.⁵  Then the practice of courting and ‘winning’ a waitress is a pass for males to enter the world of masculinity.

This demand for affirming one’s masculinity may originate from the fast development and urbanisation of Shanghai as a city that represents modernity where people come together in greater numbers than ever before. City destroyed the traditional social structure and hierarchy of ancient China, in which society was made up of many units of families. Without this traditional familial structure, men lacked the confirmation of traditional masculinity because they no longer played the role of the head of the family. In cities, a new power dynamic is constructed. These institutions were not family-centred, such as administrative institutions, gangs, and large enterprises, in these places, men automatically lost their given superior status in their own families, and the dominant positions were controlled by a limited number of men who might be considered to be the most capable, and in the case of Shanghai by westerners. Therefore, the cabaret and dancehall became a new place to either conspicuously show one’s masculinity or seek reconfirmation of it. Then the underlying narrative of the gender dynamic in a cabaret still objectifies women. The feminism which Shenxianshijie claimed to promote does not exist.

1. Kuaile Shijie, 1927. 02. 22, p. 3. [↩]
2. Ibid, p.3 [↩]
3. Andrew Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Modernity in Old Shanghai, 1919-1954 (2010), p. 128. [↩]
4. Ibid,p. 128. [↩]
5. Ueno Chizuko, Misogyny (2015, SanLian). [↩]

It is a common sentiment that the internet age has brought on rapid and radical changes to the world in almost every aspect – creating new and commonly used methods of communication, information exchange, industry, and so on. Despite all of this, the spatial dynamics and history of the internet age remains woefully understudied in an academic context. In this short blog post, I wish to make the case for ‘virtual spaces’, or perhaps more accurately, spaces adjacent to the virtual as being worthy of dedicated study, and as being important in modern cultural history. In my opinion, South Korea offers some particularly rich examples that are worthy of academic attention.

 

While the PC Cafe exists as a concept and space in western culture, it is often associated with negative images. The PC Cafe is often conceived as being grimy, worn down, outdated and in general far from an appealing space – something that stands in stark contrast to the South Korean ‘PC방’ or ‘PC Bang’. The PC Bang is defined as a space that is appealing and unique from a PC Cafe, despite the fact that at the most basic level, both spaces offer similar services.^[1] This is a space that is obviously and unambiguously associated with the virtual – PC Bangs seen primarily as a place where people can play specifically online competitive video games, many of which involve teamwork and communication – an example being the ever popular League of Legends. While it would be a mistake to overemphasize the importance of these spaces in South Korean culture, their rise to prominence in the late 1990s and 2000s – long before video games, especially in a competitive context, would enter the ‘mainstream’ – and their alleged prominence amongst the younger generations in South Korea suggests that there is potentially unique spatial dynamics at play.^[2]

 

The PC Bang is also closely associated with another spatial construction relatively unique to South Korea – that of the esports ‘event’ – a broad analogue to a sports event, where organized leagues test the skills and abilities of the best players of a specific video game. The two key factors that in my opinion make these events worth analyzing from a spatial construction is their notable level of popularity and complexity. In the case of the latter, esports events and leagues in South Korea have been historically able to construct elaborate studios and stages to facilitate themselves. An example can be found in that of the permanent studio utilized by the Global Starcraft II League, or GSL – which is covered in lights and displays, seating for spectators, live commentators in both English and Korean, and an atmosphere that is analogous to that of a baseball stadium, but still unique.^[3] Regarding the point of popularity, esports events in South Korea have demonstrated the ability to draw in significant live crowds – one example can be found in the 2005 ProLeague finals, which saw over 100,000 people arriving live to watch two teams compete in Starcraft: Brood War.^[4] While esports events in the 2000s in the west mostly consisted of grass roots, community driven events, esports events in South Korea were considered popular enough to warrant the investment of large businesses such as SK Telecom and the KT Corporation, respectively responsible the successful and roughly two decades old esports teams known as T1 and KT Rolster.

 

While the examples discussed in this short post are based in South Korea, there are similar cases of unique and influential virtual spaces across East Asia as a whole, which only further emphasizes the unmined potential in this area of research. Virtual spaces are also interesting in my opinion due to their very modern origins and fast rate of development. While this does pose challenges in terms of research, with an overload of available information making separating the useful information from noise difficult, the entrenchment of the internet in modern life means that is almost certainly going to be a problem that historians will have to deal with at some point.

^[1] Tae-gyu, Kim. ‘`PC Bang’ Emerges as New Way of Promotion’. The Korea Times, 23 July 2007.

^[2] Tae-gyu, Kim. ‘`PC Bang’ Emerges as New Way of Promotion’.

^[3] Olsen, Creighton. ‘GSL Studio: The Heart And Seoul Of Starcraft’, 13 January 2020.

^[4] Erzberger, Tyler. ‘Beaches of Busan Awash in Esports History’. ESPN.Com, 28 July 2017.

Tourist handbooks act as useful primary sources when studying nineteenth century East Asian history. Since they were written for outsider, they are usually in Western languages, making them more accessible than most other sources. Furthermore, these guidebooks can offer insight into messages those behind the books wished to send, regarding their own country, the region in question, or the success of colonial projects. A Handbook For Travellers in Japan was written by Basil Hall Chamberlain, a British academic studying Japanese language and culture. Therefore, while not being directly influenced by the Japanese government, Chamberlain was likely tuned in to current event surrounding the nation, specifically around the island of Taiwan, which had been annexed by Japan in 1895. Between his handbook published in 1901 and a new edition published in 1907, subtle changes help show how the colonial government was consolidating control across the island, and how from a European perspective this impacted the potential for tourism in Taiwan.

In both versions, the general description of the island remains unchanged. However, in the 1907 edition a small passage had been removed. This described Taiwan as “a very unsettled state, owing to frequent risings of the Chinese”. Its removal could indicate that the Japanese government was eager to display the success of its actions in Taiwan to Western nations. Later in the 1907 guidebook, Chamberlain says that both the West and North of the island are fully accessible, “though in some parts it is advisable not to travel after dark”. This represents a significant change from just 6 years earlier, where Chamberlain noted that “practically only the capital and the larger ports are accessible”. That these are two of the most obvious edits between the guidebooks shows that the Japanese government wanted to make it clear that their operations on “civilising” Taiwan had been successful, and that more of the island was safe for travellers to visit.

The greatest difference between the two editions is an entirely new section on rail travel in Taiwan. While completely absent from the 1901 edition of the guidebook, the 1907 edition mentions that rail travel now connects Taipei in the North with other cities in the South of the island. The addition signifies the rapid construction of land routes across the island, likely constructed to provide additional security for Japanese administrators. Nevertheless, this method of travel had now become open to the public, and represented a new way to experience the island compared to travel by steamer, frequently complained about in both editions for missing the most scenic parts of the island.

Aline Demay argued that “tourism is a major and indispensable player in colonial policies”. Chamberlain’s guidebooks seem to indicate that the opposite is also true. Upon annexing Taiwan, the Japanese government’s aims were to open up the island to travel by colonial authorities, and to remove the threat of attack from both Chinese rebellions and from the indigenous people living in the highlands. By doing both of these, Taiwan also became an achievable destination for European travellers, though some intrepid spirit would still be necessary to visit much of the island. The creation of rails, vital for colonial policy, would turn out to be equally vital for enabling European tourism across the island.

Sources

Chamberlain, Basil Hall, A Handbook For Travellers in Japan, (1901, London).

Chamberlain, Basil Hall, A Handbook For Travellers in Japan, (1907, London).

Demay, Aline, Tourism and Colonization in Indochina (1898-1939(, (2014, Cambridge).

This blog post will explore how Mary Pratt’s argument of imperial nations using an ‘anti conquest’ narrative to disguise their colonial presence is applicable to the Dutch colonial force’s advertisement of Bali as an ‘island of paradise’. As Pratt explains in the chapter ‘Narrating the anti-conquest’ within her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, ‘anti-conquest’ refers to the strategies of representation that European bourgeoisie subjects use to secure their innocence whilst simultaneously asserting European hegemony.¹To demonstrate the concept, Pratt explores how naturalists used a rhetoric of ‘anti-conquest’ within their travel writings of the Cape Colony to legitimise imperial powers’ actions and takeovers of the region.²As this blog post will show, in the early 20^th century, the Dutch government also adopted an ‘anti-conquest’ rhetoric within their depiction of Bali as a tourist destination through brochures advertising the nation as an ‘island of paradise’ to disguise and hide their aggressive takeover of the island.³

The Dutch conquest of Bali was a lengthy and bloody battle, with the Balinese people proving a tough force to defeat. When Bali was eventually conquered following the death march of the Balinese rajas after the puptans of 1906-8, the Dutch invaded Bali and killed off or exiled much of the population, destroying everything. As Adrian Vickers explores in Bali: A Paradise Created, the Dutch massacres contrasted significantly to the ‘liberal imagination of the Netherlands’ thus, in the aftermath the Dutch government was concerned with how their actions would impact their international standing.² As a result, the Netherlands were eager to find a way to present their new colony internationally whilst not exposing the nation’s colonial atrocities. This can be seen through their advertisement of Bali as an international tourist destination which can be analysed as an example of Pratt’s concept of an ‘anti-conquest’ rhetoric.

In 1914, only six years after the Klungkung puptan, the first tourist inducements to visit Bali were published. They began with the Dutch steamship, the KPM, issuing the first tourist brochures of Bali. These brochures advertised Bali as the ‘Garden of Eden’, an island that featured ‘jungle scenery,  palm trees and rice fields’ untouched by modernism.⁴ The brochures communicated an image of Bali that did not refer to any violent or imperial expansionist policies. Instead, they portrayed the Dutch colonisers as the ‘protectors of culture’. The account and ‘gaze’ of Bali that was transmitted as an official discourse suggested and publicised that the Dutch’s presence was uncontested. As one can see from the brochures (see figure. 1 and figure. 2), they intently focus on landscape and nature descriptions. They use visual imagery to remove both the Dutch as European antagonists from the image of Bali and the presence of any indigenous Balinese settlers that opposed the Dutch’s presence. This depiction aligns with Pratt’s ‘anti-conquest’ as the examples of travel writing she explores emphasis that the ‘anti-conquest’ consists of rhetorics that narrate a sequence of sights and seeing that focus on the landscape and minimises the European presence.⁵ Alongside the ‘anti-conquest’ rhetoric guiding the international ‘gaze’ away from the possibility of any colonial atrocities, Vickers notes that the advertisements were also seen as a way to ease the Dutch’s consciences. It not only allowed them to control the international narrative and image of the island but within official circles helped secured the nation’s innocence.

The brochures not only featured natural landscape and scenery, they also included a significant focus on half-naked Balinese women. This further illustrates the tourist brochures aligning with Pratt’s concept of ‘anti-conquest’. As Pratt explores, the ‘female figure of the “nurturing native”’ has often been a key in sentimental versions of the anti-conquest.⁶ This figure of the half-baked Balinese woman was so key to the KPM’s tourist advertisements that Bali became known as ‘a land of Woman’.⁷ Again, this evidences the advertisements promoting a gaze of Bali that depicted the island as a utopia hiding the exploitation or violence that underpinned the Dutch’s presence reinforcing how the advertisements should be seen as an example of Pratt’s concept of ‘anti-conquest’.

In conclusion, as Pratt highlights, it is ‘only through a guilty act of conquest can the innocent act of the anti-conquest be carried out’.⁸ In the Netherlands’ attempts to absolve themselves of the guilt and potential international backlash that existed from their bloody imperialist conquest, they used tourist brochures to promote a gaze of Bali rooted in the rhetoric of ‘anti-conquest’. Their advertisements of Bali focussed on natural images and the exotic, attractive nature of Balinese women which minimise or avoided the publication of their aggressive European presence and maintained the innocence of Dutch hegemony.

1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 58. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
3. Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created (Victoria: Penguin Books, 1989), 130. [↩]
4. Ibid., 131. [↩]
5. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 60. [↩]
6. Ibid., 96. [↩]
7. Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created, 132. [↩]
8. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 66. [↩]

Edogawa Rampo was a rather fascinating man. He deserves to be admired for his dedication to his craft, which saw him almost single-handedly translate the concept of detective fiction to Japan¹. His fascination with the West allowed him to hone his craft through imitation, then invention, putting his own spin on the books he read, and which saw him create his name through a combination of homage and some very clever wordplay.

He is perhaps best known, though not in the West, where his namesake still reigns supreme, for his locked-room murders. In a translation of Rampo’s early work, William Varteresian argues that Rampo’s skill lay in just how he managed to do this. In discussing one of his earliest stories, The Case of the Murder on D Hill, he states that Rampo wrote it deliberately  “as a response to critics who argued that it was impossible to set the secret incidents and mysterious dealings which formed the core of the modern Western mystery in the open, wood-and-paper houses of Japan”.²

It was obviously a success. However, reading through Rampo’s early work, the theme that stood out the most to me was not the specific elements of the locked-room mystery as a trope, but the common thread of the personality types that he employed, both for the victims and perpetrators of crime. In the collection of short stories published before the invention of his long-running detective, Akechi Kogoro, he wrote a series of unrelated mysteries, published in English as Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Rather than the typical detective fiction of a murder and resolution, these instead read as more akin to Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. At a total of nine stories, it is a relatively short read, and yet they are the kind of stories that linger long after the reader has finished. From the beginning, they establish a gruesome fascination with the human body, warped and twisted both mentally and physically. Each one ends abruptly, with no resolution, and, in the case of The Cliff, quite literally on a cliff-hanger.

These stories belong to a sub-genre known as ero-guro-nansensu, or ‘erotic, gruesome nonsense’. Varteresian argues that this fascination with ero-guro-nansensu allowed Rampo to “explore the extremes of ugliness” in his work, and that “[his] concern is always more for the sensational effect of bizarre appearances and chilling deeds than for social realities.”³

Varteresian ties this fascination with the bizarre to the timeframe that Rampo lived through. Born in 1894, Rampo lived through the upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century in Japan. A time of massive upheaval and westernisation, he argues that Rampo’s fascination with and observations on the West is precisely what allowed him to create a new genre of detective fiction. By playing on the ‘newness’ of all things Western, Rampo was able to create a new and unsettling style of writing. His familiarity with all things Western meant that he was able to depict Western rooms, clothing, objects and even speech with ease, things which would not necessarily have been familiar to his readers. This creates a kind of superiority in his writings, almost an arrogance at deliberately including knowledge that he knew not all of his readers would understand.

To the modern reader, many of his descriptions are, as Varteresian puts it, “horrifically insensitive”, but it is exactly this that makes it effective⁴. Rampo himself considered these stories the weakest of his work, and this becomes clear when comparing it to his later work. Sadly, very little of his work has ever been translated, and so this and The Early Cases are some of the only works available in English. Interestingly, despite this dissatisfaction in Japanese Tales, he oversaw the English translation of it himself, working painstakingly line-by-line with the translator, James Harris, to ensure that the resulting work was as close to the original Japanese as possible⁵.  However, with the recent rise in popularity in Japanese works throughout the West, there is hope that Rampo’s work may be translated in the future, where he can be placed in equal renown of his Western counterparts.

1. Edogawa Rampo, The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro trans. William Varteresian, (Fukuoka 2014), pg ix [↩]
2. Ibid, pg xi. [↩]
3. Varteresian, Japanese Tales, pg. xvi [↩]
4. ibid [↩]
5. Edogawa Rampo, Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination trans. James B Harris, (Tokyo, 1956), pg. iii [↩]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries World’s Fairs were opportunities for nations across the globe to display and showcase their achievements and project their power. They became spaces where East Asian nations began pushing to represent themselves on their own terms, taking control of narratives which had largely been created by Western countries. A Handbook of Japanese exhibits at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair offers insight into how the nation sought to use the Exposition to project a specific image of itself, as a country both steeped in history, and as aggressively modernising as any of the Western powers.

The last section of the handbook is dedicated to describing the Japanese exhibits at the World’s Fair. In it, Hajime emphasises the natural beauty of the garden that had been created for the Japanese exhibition, saying that placements of trees and other features “add beauty to the garden and make the views from within superior to any in the Fair Grounds” (Hajime, p. 114). Within this description of the exhibition, Hajime highlights the age of the features within it, from the Bonsai trees, “many centuries old”, to the buildings, each designed after aristocratic buildings at least two hundred years old. Hajime’s words make it clear that the exhibit was trying to equate Japan’s history with those found in Europe, displaying the beauty and rich culture that could be seen within the nation’s past.

Within the exhibit however, displays were described to show how modern, and similar to the West Japan had become. Within the education tent were photographs of gymnastic exercises, explicitly described as “similar to those practiced in Europe and America” (Hajime,  p. 116). The exhibition also took care not to give visitors unintended impressions from its exhibits. While the electricity exhibit was small, Hajime asked that “this must not be taken to mean that electricity for all purposes is not in general use throughout the Empire” (Hajime,     p. 121). The intended impression of the overall exhibit was of a nation with a background as culturally rich as any European nation, but one which had been able to keep up with the rapid pace of modernisation, putting it on equal footing with any Western power.

Despite Japan’s clear interest to use the exposition to represent themselves on their own terms, Hajime’s handbook presents a clear contradiction here. He mentions a Formosa exhibit, focused on Taiwan, describing the island as “ceded by China to Japan” (Hajime,               p. 120). By 1904 the island had become a Japanese colony, and as such was unable to represent itself at a World’s Fair such as this. Therefore, while Japan was struggling to display itself to the West, the nation ultimately took control over how its colony presented itself on the same stage. In addition, within Korea exhibitions would later be used to display the importance and success of assimilation (Henry, 2014). These contrasted a weak past with a more powerful present courtesy of Japan – the same stereotype Japan had been trying to overcome when presenting itself to the West. Overall, the imperial nature of such exhibitions meant that, as Japan emulated Western powers with its displays, contradictions such as this arose.

Raizman and Robey argued that, despite being designed to promote international unity, World’s Fairs were spaces where nations could present themselves to the international community (Raizman and Robey, 2017). Japan, like other East Asian nations chose to use these expositions to reject stereotypes of the nation as being underdeveloped compared to the West. Hajime’s handbook of the exhibition emphasises the impressiveness of both Japan’s past and present. The exhibition placed Japan on equal footing to the West following national humiliation in the 1895 Triple Intervention, where Western powers stopped Japanese expansion into China. While future events like the Russo-Japanese War would showcase Japan’s military strength, expositions were a softer way of expressing the nation’s newfound power.

 

Sources

Hajime, Hoshi, Handbook of Japan and Japanese Exhibits: at World’s Fair, St. Louis, 1904.

Henry, Todd, Assimilating Seoul, (2014, Berkeley).

Raizman, David and Robey, Ethan, ‘Introduction’ in, Raizman, David and Robey, Ethan, Expanding Nationalism at World’s Fairs, (2017, London), pp. 1-14.