Short description:

Envisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time, but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of women?s roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history.

Long description:

Envisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of women?s roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history. The central focus of this book is visual monarchy, exploring how the empress? biographies were primarily expressed in visual culture and how their images worked in support of Japan?s imperial policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book begins with a brief overview of premodern and modern imperial women to orient the reader. In each chapter, different media, audiences, and distribution channels for constructing the narrative of feminine imperial power in Japan are addressed alongside biographical information. It is argued that the ultimate purpose of all of these images was to elevate the empress and promote her image as a conventional role model for modern women, but one with enough celebrity cache to maintain popularity. The images of the modern empresses, as distributed by the Imperial Household Agency, strike a balance between propaganda and popular media, noble philanthropist and upper-middle class role model, celebrity and mother of the nation. The modern empress image was crafted to be both exalted and approachable and worked to establish individual biographies while simultaneously establishing the position of the empress as timeless in the public eye. Envisioning the Empress introduces students of royal studies as well as modern Japanese history and art history to this fascinating element of the history of monarchy and women?s history more broadly.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: The Visual Monarchy

Part I

Chapter One: The Modern Imperial Family: Institutions and Images                                           

Chapter Two: Mimesis and Multiples: Empress Sh?ken and the Power of Print in Establishing the Public Empress Persona

Chapter Three: The Optics of Modernity: Empress Teimei, Photography, Mass Media, and Gender in the Imperial Likeness

Part II

Chapter Four: Toward the Sacred and the Standard: Formality, Lineage, and Decorum in the Modern Japanese Imperial Portrait

Chapter Five: Fashion, National Identity, and the Community of Royals: Global Monarchical Visual Culture Between the Meiji and Taish? Periods

Chapter Six: Mourning and Memory: The Visual Politics of Imperial Funerals and Memorial Sites

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography