Chapter 7
After Commodore Matthew Perry and his armada of “Black Ships” forced Japan to open economic relations with the West in 1854, the Japanese government ultimately decided trade shows, starting with the National Industrial Exhibition, were the quickest way to foster international commerce—and competition.
More than 100 Western ships had previously essayed Japan’s unwelcoming shores, which had been barred to outsiders since 1639’s closed-country (“sakoku”) policy. The shogunate forbade most visits by Europeans, outlawed Christianity, and conducted a limited trade with the Dutch and Chinese.
Those who braved landing were rebuffed. But the country of silken robes and tentacle erotica did not appreciate that Perry was but an emissary of a greater economic and political juggernaut. His nine ebony-hulled ships had come bearing gifts—and 100 mounted guns—that represented the United States’ inventiveness and industry: newfangled daguerreotype technology to record the occasion; telegraph equipment with three miles of wire; a toy-like, quarter-size steam engine with 370 yards of track; Irish potatoes; cherry cordials; a barrel of whiskey; a telescope; muskets; cavalry swords; and more. The reciprocal Japanese gifts included rice, Chin dogs, and pornographic paintings, which, a naval officer confided in his diary, were “proof of the lewdness of this exclusive people.” (The prurient paintings subsequently disappeared, their whereabouts unknown to this day.)
But once the Treaty of Kanagawa was signed, weeks after the arrival of Perry, which pried open the country to foreign domination, the usual American battle plan of we-sell-you-buy did not survive contact with the enemy. The Japanese finally struck back at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. Budgeting at least $600,000 for its “Japanese Dwelling” exhibit, the country shipped more than ٧,٠٠٠ containers to the show. The display of pottery, porcelain, furniture, toys, and other artwork raked in 142 awards and ushered in an era of upper-crust adulation for elegant Japanese craftsmanship and graceful lifestyle.
Courtesy of the Japan National Diet Library
Inspired in part by its success on foreign shores, Japan’s Home Minister Okubo Toshimichi intensely advocated for a modernization campaign that included exhibitions. This led to the National Industrial Exhibition in 1877, the first of five such expos that would be staged every five years.
Under the slogan “Fukoku kyohei, Shokusan kogyo” (roughly, “Enrich the country and strengthen the military; encourage new industry”), the initial National Industrial Exhibition was staged in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. With most of the expo held in a massive brick art museum, the venue was divided into half a dozen themed sections, such as mining and metallurgy, agriculture and horticulture, and fine art.
Boasting 16,000 contributors and 450,000 visitors, the expo ran for 102 days. It showcased indigenous products as diverse as otter skins, bamboo mats, and designs for gunboats. It also spotlighted attractions that might have seemed bizarre to Western sensibilities, such as the set of realistic fetus dolls that illustrated seven different stages of growth, from embryo to birth.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
The subsequent exhibitions were just as prosperous—and set the stage for Japan to enter the international stage with swagger worthy not just of a samurai, but a Toshiro Mifune samurai. By the time the fifth and final National Industrial Exhibition took place in Osaka, Japan, in 1903 (the third exhibition, and subsequently the others ones following it, had veered from their original schedules), it had become a celebration of a once-withdrawn Japan opening the kimono to global ambitions. Following its crushing victory over China in the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War, and the stretching of its railroad network virtually across the country, Japan had the confidence and the infrastructure to compete internationally.
Running for 153 days, the final National Industrial Exhibition was the longest in the history of the expos. Nearly 4.3 million attendees gazed, with a wonder reserved for saints, upon X-rays, the telegraph, and an elevator. It was the first of the five exhibitions to remain open at night, illuminated in part by an oversized lighted fountain. The effect of the lights was so mesmerizing that a contemporary artist drew the nocturnal scene as a dreamscape, with visitors reacting as if they had stepped through a Narnian doorway. Its rival may only be Giacomo Balla’s painting of Paris’s 1900 Exposition Universelle at night, whose sky, black as a hearse, is pierced by the firefly-like glow of electric lights.
Planning to recast the next National Industrial Exhibition scheduled for 1907 as an international exposition on par with recent incarnations of world’s fairs in Paris and Buffalo, New York, Japan was thwarted by financial complications resulting from the unsatisfactory peace, i.e., a lack of monetary reparations from its opponents in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. Slapped down and strapped for cash, Japan would not realize its exhibiting ambitions for decades until Expo ’70 when, in virtually the same spot as the 1903 expo, the world’s fair would draw nearly 80 exhibiting countries and about sixty-two million visitors.
Few realize the industrial fairs also served as an inoculation—with several booster shots—against the fear of modernization. Japan, ending centuries of paranoid isolation, was entering a period of express-lane transformation many blanched at. As recently as 1825, the influential scholar Aizawa Seishisai railed in his influential book “New Proposals” that the Japanese Achilles’s heel for “novel gadgets” could “lure ignorant people” to be svengalied by the “treacherous foreigner.”
Trains and electricity became the vaccines and GMO foods of the day. After the railroads expanded across the country in the 1870s, so did the incidents of phantom train sightings, where train conductors swore they saw oncoming ghost trains materialize abruptly in the dark of the night. Shaken by the sight of a charging locomotive on a collision course, conductors slammed on the brakes only to see the approaching train melt into air. Sensible if superstitious Japanese attributed the phenomenon to shape-shifting creatures such as the kitsune (fox), and mujina (badger).
Electric power lines provoked similarly deep-rooted trepidation, suggested by the widespread belief that the wires’ coal tar insulation was actually concocted from the blood of virgins. Merely strolling under the power lines could give all parties, virgin and experienced, male and female, a case of cholera.
Nearly 140 years after the 1877 exhibition, the globalizing events set into motion by the fair resulted in a trade surplus of almost $55 billion for Japan, as Americans—the dangerous strangers it was once prohibited from negotiating with—favored its automobiles, semiconductors, and consumer electronics over those made domestically. The exhibitions created a mass experience shared by millions over a generation and sculpted a shared reality, one in which the seeds were sown for a generation of industrial giants like Nintendo Co. Ltd., NEC Corp., and Yamaha Motor Co. to establish themselves. The shows buffered the shock of the new and kindled a passion for technologies that now seem every bit as much a part of the Japanese worldview as the chrysanthemum or the sword.