Edutainment > From Protest to Participation: Politics and the Meiji Popular Print

  <  Part Thirteen: Conclusion: Popular Culture and Political Authority

Actor Before Landscape
to Avoid Censorship, by Kunisada 1852

This article series outlines roughly 120 years of Japanese printmaking from the Edo period under the Tokugawa shogunate until the Westernization of Japan during the Meiji era. The article describes the development of the popular Japanese print as the result of the political, social and economic environment of the times in which they were made and the people for whom they were produced.

The last part of this article series is a wrap-up of the major differences in political and social aspects of the popular print in Edo and Meiji.

Symbolic Meiji Integration ...

Such an examination of the politics of the Meiji popular print calls into question the "story" of the Tokugawa print, as a pure product of the spirit of the people, standing outside of the sphere of political influence.

For just as the Meiji government's symbolic integration of the people can be seen as playing a vital structuring role in Meiji popular culture, with the forms of print production closely related to government policy of any particular time, so in the Tokugawa Period does the bakufu's relegation of the people outside the political structure create a self-centered, hedonistic and apolitical print culture, which could aggressively resist the bakufu when it attempted to control it from outside and above.

From such a viewpoint, the Edo print - and the Edo populace - can be seen to be as politically engendered as those of Meiji, differing only in the structure of the relationship between common people and government.

... Compared to Tokugawa Exclusion

Actor Fan Club Disguised
as Historical Scene, by Kuniyoshi ca.1852

By dividing rulers and ruled into exclusive, hereditary classes, the bakufu essentially denied political consciousness to the commoners, as well as any sense of social responsibility. This division and denial in turn allowed the commoners to develop a self-enclosed culture unconcerned with official bakufu ideology, a morally irresponsible realm of private pleasure lacking interest in the good of anything larger than itself. Without representation, and blocked from other lines of political expression, the Edo commoners simply had no meaningful relationship to the bakufu rulership, and no incentive to obey its promulgated order but the threat of violence done against them.

Therefore, though they might bow when confronted, the feelings of commoners were not of respect for their right leaders, but of self-preservation, and the requirement to submit to this rulership from whom they were alienated created resentment.

Edo: Control by Censorship and Oppression

Nowhere is this pattern of obsequiousness and resentment more explicit than in the popular print, which responded to each measure taken against it by the bakufu with surface compliance, while breaking the restrictions placed on it in spirit. And ultimately, after each harsh period of censorship on the popular form, printmakers would respond with protest and open defiance, actually bordering on the level of the political from which they had been denied. Though such involvement can be seen as an apparent violation of the political definition of the commoner, it is in fact a result of the system the bakufu designed in its actual practice.

Meiji: Control by Participation

Sino-Japanese War Scene
by Chikanobu Toyohara, 1894

The Meiji system, in contrast, by establishing a relation of greater tolerance and participation between the government and the popular arts, actually enabled its rulers to assert an unprecedented degree of control over print production. This control was indirect rather than immediate in most cases, mediated not through censorship or prescription to the print designers and publishers, but rather through the government's influence over the general populace, whom it was now said to represent.

With nationalism and national development as the shared goals of both government officials and the general populace, the Meiji popular print walked hand-in-hand with politics, shaping representations of the Japanese nation both at home and abroad. Prints of developing Japan were an appeal not only to national pride, but also to the Western colonial powers to see Japan as an advanced nation worthy of respect.

Prints depicting the emperor and Meiji foreign wars also had a dual function, being both educational and celebratory in their functions as public propaganda, first informing the general populace of a structure of national leadership and heroism, and then elaborating on that structure in praise of national symbols.

Open Issues and No-No's in Meiji

Meanwhile, within the limits of the Meiji system, printmakers were free to express political viewpoints on specific issues, though not in criticism of emperor or government. Printmakers enjoyed an unprecedented freedom to comment on "open" issues in satire, while standing at the forefront of representations of current events as newspaper illustrators. Quite distinct from the tradition of parody in the popular print, mid-Meiji satirists were not criticizing a political system from the outside, but hoping to influence the decision making of those at the seats of power.

Centered Around Nation-Building

Though the forms the Meiji print took were various and diverse, almost all of them can be seen in one way or another as related to the project of modern nationhood, and thereby joining in the goals of the Meiji government. By incorporating the common people into the project of nationhood, the Meiji leaders successfully defused the popular print from its former mode of passive protest, and transformed it into one of active participation.

Never simply an autonomous agent free of the influence of political authority then, popular culture must be seen as ultimately mediated by the elite culture of leadership, its definition of and relation to the common people.

Dan McKee

The author, Dan McKee is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Japanese literature program at Cornell University, NY.  He has a Master of the Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University, as well as an M.A. from Cornell. Dan McKee is presently writing a dissertation on "surimono as a literary practice in nineteenth century Edo."

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