Fashionable pilgrims: Rental and second-hand kimono shops styling paths of new embodied communities

Ever since the Meiji period, the kimono has been commodified — nationally and internationally — as the Japanese national dress, symbolising Japan as a land full of exquisite, exotic traditions. While kimono production is now in decline, its image is still thriving, actively promoted and marketed to attract tourists — domestic and international ones alike — in quest of an “authentic”, sometimes premium, Japan experience. As a result, the kimono consumed by visitors in Japan, especially in the emblematic “traditional” Kyoto, becomes an object that can be placed at the nexus of content and fashion tourism as well as pilgrimage, with the rental kimono practices or second-hand kimono purchases employing similar liminal dynamics. This article analyses the interactions the kimono entertains between design and marketing, experience and global consumerism, tourism and pilgrimage; mapping the different territories shared by kimono pilgrims and their communitas by first looking at kimono as contents and secondly, kimono as rental / second-hand object.

Education and ‘Civilization’

Studies on the transformation of the Japanese educational system in the Meiji period usually emphasise the intensity of reforms and their comprehensive character. In the framework of the present study, I will briefly summarise the central aspects of this transformation, then turn to the examination of the tension manifested in Meiji period discourses on education. This is a tension that emerges when one compares the interpretation of the Meiji era as the introduction of ‘enlightened’ Western liberalism with the ideology of centralised reform, far from being as liberal as reported by Meiji period intellectuals themselves. I draw attention to this tension as manifested in the purposes of Meiji educational reforms, then I turn to the analysis of the education of women as a central question in terms of the interpretation of the family in Meiji Japan. The analysis is based on the writings of the leading intellectuals of the time, basically their essays published in the famous journal of the 1870s, Meiroku Zasshi 明六雑誌.

Toward a genealogy of the police idea in imperial Japan: a synthesis

This paper explores how Japanese officials and others conceptualized police power at particular junctures in imperial Japanese history (1868–1945). It does so by synthesizing prior scholarship on the Japanese police into a broader genealogy of the police idea in prewar Japan, beginning with the first translations and explanations of police in the Meiji period, the changing perceptions of the police in the 1910s, and the evolution from the “national police” idea in the 1920s to the “emperor's police” in the late 1930s. The essay proposes that the police idea in Japan (and elsewhere) can be read as a boundary concept in which the changing conceptions of police power demarcate the shifting relationship between state and society. Indeed, it is the elusiveness of this boundary that allows for police power – and by extension, state power – to function within society and transform in response to social conditions. Approached in this way, the essay argues that the different permutations of the police idea index the evolving modality of state power in prewar Japan, and thus allows us to reconsider some of the defining questions of imperial Japanese history.