National spaces and identities— the phantasmic emperor
- “So it seems that at every rupture point between the moderns and the traditionalists there occurs a memory crisis—at the end of the nineteenth century and once again in the last few decades of the twentieth century—a problematization of the normal relationship of the present to the past... As every memory crisis recognizes that something is lacking in the present, a desire develops to collect tokens from the past, to store them in museums and collections lest these items be allowed to slip from our view, be forgotten in the dust of time, or be free to roam at will and thus disturb the road to the future.... And like the last half of the nineteenth century, we too have experienced a “frenzy of the visible”: a memory crisis of too many images, too phantasmagorical, too commodified, that inhibit the recall and recollection of images stored in the mind”
(Boyer 1994, 26-27).
Even today, the most central of national spaces are those made for and by and surrounding the emperor in Japan. To illustrate this, one only needs to consider the astounding amount of the nation’s Realpolitik (and economic and cultural) practices that occur within a half an hour’s walk of the current Imperial Palace in Tokyo. This clustering of administrative and executive functions is not merely vestigial—it is not the simple outcome of the former imperial state, but is today firmly defended, against an increasingly compelling logic in favor of building a new administrative center1 away from Tokyo’s over-congested center.
Central state bureaucrats who find themselves in disfavor often find themselves moved out of the Tokyo office to some prefectural city: the more trouble they’ve caused, the further away they get. One health ministry official recently did a series of opinion articles in a Tokyo newspaper, commenting on the pressures of ministry work. He found himself reassigned, first to Shikoku, and then to Kyushu (the furthest main island away from Tokyo). But then bureaucrats are accustomed to travel. Central government funding for local projects usually is accompanied by a central government official to oversee the project.
In this way, Tokyo maintains a level of direct control over regional governmental offices that belies the latter’s claim to independent decision making. Without any clear separation of powers between the local “semi-autonomous” governments and the central state government in Japan, city and prefectural government offices serve also to implement central state policies. And again, these policies are made within that short walk to the Tokyo imperial palace.
- “There are all kinds of ghosts prowling these confused streets [of Prague]. They are the ghosts of monuments demolished—demolished by the Czech Reformation, demolished by the Austrian counterreformation, demolished by the Czechoslovak Republic, demolished by the Communists. Even statues of Stalin have been torn down. All over the country, wherever statues were thus destroyed, Lenin statues have sprouted up by the thousands. They grow like weeds on the ruins, like melancholy flowers of forgetting”
(Kundera 1980, 158).
Meanwhile, Kyoto finds itself haunted by hundreds of vacated (but fenced and maintained) imperial sites from a thousand years of court life in a series of palace: a cultural production which ended abruptly when the emperor Meiji was restored in the 19th century and chose to move—as fast as was possible—into the shogunal palace in Edo (then renamed Tokyo: “the Eastern Capital”). Kyoto became koto: the “old” capital: as suddenly acephalous (in a political sense) as the tens of thousands of people—many of them Buddhist monks— who had been separated from their heads on the banks of the Kamo River during the course of Kyoto’s imperial era.
Although the ghost of Meiji is enshrined in Tokyo, his body is entombed in an enormous mound on a hill near Kyoto. As with other imperial sites, this one is also off-limits, and so a visit to the tomb allows one to stand outside a gate several hundred meters away (and several gates removed) from the actual mound.
Photo by the author
Almost since the day when the emperor (and a hundred thousand or so of his relatives and other court and government officers) “skipped town,” more than a hundred years ago now—this after a millennium of building its own cultural production on the basis of the presence of the imperial aristocracy—Kyoto has been searching for some way to recapture its imperial past. Early in the Meiji period, the phantasm of the emperor, lurking in Kyoto, became the core of the city’s plans to retain its cultural position, this time as the cultural center of a modern nation. The primary construction for the 1100 year anniversary of the city in 1894 was the building of the Heian Shrine, wherein were captured and worshipped the spirits of the first and the last emperors to rule in Kyoto (the emperor Meiji, although entombed nearby, has his spirit enshrined in Tokyo—where it pre-occupies one of the only major, not-quite-public open spaces in the city).
Rather than being constructed on the model of other Shinto shrines, the Heian Jingu (Shrine) replicates the original palace of the early emperors in Kyoto. It is the home not for the current emperor, who has chosen to live in Tokyo, but rather for the phantasmic “ghosts” of the first and last emperors of Kyoto2. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
Marilyn Ivy (1995) has ploughed the fields of marginalized traditions in Japan’s rural districts, finding at the far side of Japan’s modernity a ghost of the past. This phantasm appears as the vestige of the vanishing practices that were once so embedded into daily life that they were considered atarimae. And also, it appears as the continuing vanishing of past practices within those practices that now memorialize the past through novel media and means:
- “An organizing theme of this study is that of the vanishing, which (dis)embodies in its gerund form the movement of something passing away, gone but not quite, suspended between presence and absence, located at a point that both is and is not here in the repetitive process of absenting. How is that moment-if it can be called that-made to signify? What marks it as founding entire regimes of authentication? The vanishing can only be tracked through the poetics of phantasm, through attentiveness to the politics of displacement, deferral, and originary repetition. Practices and discourses now situated on the edge of presence (yet continuously repositioned at the core of the national cultural imaginary) live out partial destinies of spectacular recovery. Their status is often ghostly. And it is through the ghosts of stories and (sometimes) stories of ghosts that I work, disclosing an economy of the appropriated marginal, of lacunae in representation at the center of the dominant” (Ivy 1995 20-21).
The same phantasms, I have found, are at literally work at the self-proclaimed center if Japan’s national cultural project. In Kyoto, phantasmagoric emperors watch over the city’s spectacles, which, in turn, pay homage to past emperors while overlooking the absence of the current emperor, who rarely visits Kyoto, although several residences are kept ready for such occasions.
The Jidai Matsuri travels from the Kyoto gosho palace to the Heian Shrine. It celebrates the times when Kyoto was the imperial capital of Japan. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
Two of the three main “civic” festivals in Kyoto are reenactments of imperial processions that now take place without an imperial presence. Costumed historical pageants, they move through the traffic-choked streets like a party of somnambulating geriatrics: out of time, and out of place—but still representing the central (imperial-ized), national space, and the national historical project to a population that is regularly excluded from the many imperial sites that surround them.
The Aoi (hollyhock) Matsuri reinvents another imperial procession, this one from the Kyoto gosho palace to a shrine north of the palace. Photo from:
http://web.kyoto-inet.or.jp/org/hellokcb/
The old Imperial Palace (gosho) in Kyoto is today off-limits to Japanese citizens (overseas tourists can visit these at any time) except for a few days in the year; and the same holds true for the two nearby “Imperial Villas.” In part, the imperial family does this to signify their potential, future use. Imperial tombs and temples ranging from modest to enormous are located in various parts of the city and its environs. The tombs are also shut off to the public: each one presents another closed gateway3 and a high wall behind which one would find a well-tended garden space usually emptied of the living. These phantasmagoric spaces are tended by workers hired by the imperial household agency, and would, if they were turned to public use, provide Kyoto with much-needed open green space.
1I once spoke with a top-level bureaucrat at the Ministry of Finance in Kasumigaseki, Tokyo, who noted that the Americans had taken over the building where we were then talking, and used it for a school. After the occupation, the Ministry moved back, “and we are never again going to leave,” he assured me.
2 Japanese who visit on tours are reminded when they approach the main building that, in prior times, this would have been off-limits to them. In 1994 one of Japan’s top rock-and-roll stars gave a concert at the Heian Jingu in celebration of the 1200th anniversary of the city. Instead of holding the concert in front of the gates where there is a wide public park, the city held the concert inside the shrine, and again the population was left out as the city’s top officials distributed the tickets to their friends.
3One of these sepulchral gardens lay along a road I often walked near my house. One day, after several months when it was closed, the giant gate stood ajar. I plucked up my courage (and armed myself with the usual foreign-tourist alibis) and wandered inside. I met no one. Along a curving hillside a gravel path with marble pavers led, surrounded by an immaculate garden of moss and ferns. Overhead there were palm trees (not usual in Kyoto), and a few hundred yards in, there was the granite marker, not quite an obelisk. I wandered back out the gate and down the road. On my return the gate was closed. It remained closed for the rest of my stay in Kyoto.
