Registering the Real: Photography and the Emergence of New Historic Sites in Meiji Japan

This dissertation examines the way photography engaged in the emergence of new 'historic sites (shiseki)' during the early Meiji period (1868--1882). My contention is that photography, as a distinctive and integral medium of geographical image making, occasioned a new form of visibility of space imbued with national historicity and materiality. Particular attention is paid to the four distinct sites-as history: the 'national space' in the geo-encyclopedia, architectural topographies, ancient sites, and imperial famous places.;It is important to note that photography, albeit its central role in the emergence of historic sites, was penetrated by myriad layers of meaning and discourse, and therefore the universal notion of 'photography' was often inactive in the early Meiji period. Even in the documentation project initiated by the state agency, photography was conceived as a hybrid and polyvalent idea. It was in particular engulfed in the realistic tradition of shashin, which literally means "registering the real essence of the object" yet covers a variety of representational ideas from visual resemblance to ontological truth. Photography is a hybrid historic formation, crossing and dovetailing the different fields of rationality that emerged together in the earlier moment of the Meiji era.;By setting up photography as a locus of multivalency, this dissertation aims to retrace and readdress the prevailing narratives of modernity in Japan as a singular and giant rupture from the West. Geo-historical framework of the nation-state was not formulated in one piece; nor was the conception of Meiji modernization a top-down, unidirectional, teleological process predetermined by the modern West. It instead emerged through complex and open-ended series of interactions among diverse media and ideas, just as the plural forms of 'photographies' were interlaced together in the discursive and material ground of historic sites. The Meiji national topography could only emerge out of these contingent and multiple encounters between landscape and the camera, either imported or indigenous.;Historic sites may be understood as the Japanese counterparts to what Pierre Nora called "les lieux de memoire," the system of topoi through which the modern nation recognizes itself through historical unity. Takashi Fujitani indicates that historic sites were constructed in Japan as part of the larger imperial culture through the process of the reorganization of public space for political rituals in the Meiji period. What distinguishes my approach from these studies is the emphasis on the agency of photography as a privileged medium in the geo-political investment of the modern nation. Photographic indexicality radically transformed the literary vision of 'famous places (meisho),' a set of places conceived and represented as names and toponyms, by undermining the inherent power of naming to produce the meanings traditionally associated with a place, while regrounding the conceptual understanding of place in a new order of temporality based on history. Such a photographic understanding separate from 'meishoness,' ironically, helped to reinforce meisho's archaic association, especially with the old imperial practice of viewing and naming places. This is precisely the context where photographic indexicality is to be restaged with its political register, operating within a constellation of discourses, powers and institutions that conspired to construct the modern and imperial nation-state in Japan.