2 - Industrial Promotion

Summary

Exhibitions were seized on by the leaders and bureaucrats of the new Meiji state, following their experience abroad, as a way of promoting industry (kangyō), both by encouraging competition among producers at home and by fostering exports abroad. This chapter explores their early efforts, examining in detail the First Domestic Industrial Exhibition in Tokyo in 1877, and tracing its relationship to both the international exhibitions at which the government sought to impress the white world (Vienna 1873, Philadelphia 1876, Paris 1878 and 1889), and its domestic successors (Tokyo 1881 and 1890). Exhibitions at home served to create a nationwide network of officials and institutions devoted to industry, but they proved less effective at disciplining exhibitors or visitors. After twenty years, in any case, industrialization at home was well under way. Official interest in exhibitions, and also European enthusiasm for Japanese export craft, was on the wane.