Amazon.com: Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power): 9780520202375: Fujitani, Takashi: Books
Using ceremonials such as imperial weddings and funerals as models, T. Fujitani illustrates what visual symbols and rituals reveal about monarchy, nationalism, city planning, discipline, gender, memory, and modernity. Focusing on the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Fujitani brings recent methods of cultural history to a study of modern Japanese nationalism for the first time.
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
this book shows how Japanese customs are made up by the successors of Meiji. most people think that the emperor of Japan has been lasted from the start of Japan, which is very wrong. After the success of Meiji, they made all the customs including weddings, images of the emperor, etc. From inventing all these things, they could easily plant into the people's mind that the emperor has been there watching his people from the beginning of the country. The author, Takashi Fujitani provocates that this is the basement of Japanese nationalism.
This book is really redundant in its approach of asserting the pomp and pageantry that surrounds the empire of Japan. It seems like very poor organization on the author's part. Interesting thesis, yes, but terrible execution and a terrible bore. If you are reading this for school, then good luck to you! If you are reading it for personal interest, I assure you that you can learn largely the same theses of this book in application to the British Empire in David Cannadine's Ornamentalism. This of course is because Japan had no originality in the Meiji period and looked to the West for a lot of its formation of tradition. I think this author is much to the same effect as Japan here and never formulates an original idea.
Maybe I am just not interested in the subject in general, I don't know. Do with this review what you will.
This book looks into the nation building of Japan through the creation of rituals and historicity in Tokyo (then Edo). Very repetitive. Some of the points are not clear and straightforward.