| The research delineates the process of the building of the railway system in modem Japan (1868--1937). While the railways are commonly considered to be an economic and political infrastructure that is functional to the secular governments to integrate the invented nation-state, however, this does not adequately explain why there are many distinctive cultural imaginaries related to the railway in Japan and why the Japanese seems to be faithful enough to continue to lay tracks for years. I argue that trains are more than mere economic infrastructure through which collective sentiments are expressed. Instead, I argue that the belief that is formed towards the railway had been collectively crafted by different social players for a variety of reasons in the due course of modem Japanese history. Emerging social players, including capitalists, politicians, and commoners, tried to justify their varied practices by making claims to define the great use of railway. Railway building gradually became a shared platform on which different power and interests could be defined and practices legitimized. Those rationales, however, might have nothing to do with the instrumental "use" of railway, but were intimately related to the making of capitalism, democracy and nation-building in modem Japan.;The research appropriates a theoretical-methodological framework of institutionalization analysis, which helps us to delineate how a collective belief, as in the case of railway building in Japan, was formulated. This framework helps us to delineate how a legitimate social order was established through discoursing, ritualizing, and imagining. Myths, rituals and imaginations attached to the notion of railway were indeed ideological concepts and packages to represent the changing society, even though these efforts might not be well recognized by different social players who participated in the making of this railway belief. The research argues that railway building became one of the most powerful manifestations of nation building. It is a part of the long-evolving process of Japan through which the emerging collectivity came to define and redefine itself in the growing world society. Through railway building, different social players tried to articulate myths, form rituals and share imaginations, and at the same time negotiate what rational economic policies, a legitimate democratic polity and an imagined community meant. |
