12 - The Restoration of the Ancient Capitals of Nara and Kyoto and International Cultural Legitimacy in Meiji Japan

Summary

For the Japanese nation-state to acquire first-class status following the Meiji Restoration, it required more than the establishment of modern, civilized, universal institutions like the army, constitution, and parliament. During the 1880s when the constitution was being prepared, there emerged a new emphasis on Japan’s own distinctive history, tradition, and myth, and their transmission across Japan and overseas. This was the context in which, under the tutelage of Ernest Fenellosa and Okakura Tenshin, Nara was compared to ancient Greece, and the ancient Buddhist statues of its temples, Hōryūji and Tōdaiji, were preserved; Nara became Japan’s “ancient capital,” and the source of ancient Japanese civilization. At the same time, Kyoto acquired new meaning as an ancient capital that had given rise to so-called “kokufū culture” in which the Japanese nobility owed nothing to China. In the midst of Meiji period nationalism, the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto acquired unprecedented significance, revealed in policies to preserve old shrines, temples, and the Kyoto palace, as well as in the revival of such Heian period rites as the Kasuga and Kamo festivals.