The Japanese Pavilion

The Japanese pavilion at the 1900 world’s fair showed a remarkably historicizing approach to the display of Japanese cultural history, with a focus on creating an integrated environment around the tea ceremony.  This display, of course, was closely integrated with Japan’s commercial approach to international tourism, and thus combined the government’s 1900 efforts at art historical canonization with a simulation of tourism in Japan.

The main pavilion, featured in many reports on the fair, was an updated representation of the Golden Pavillion, or Kinkakuji, which was a major tourist destination to be found just outside of Kyoto. (Tsen 121) The pavilion on display in 1900, however shows major changes from its contemporary, the still-standing original structure. Some changes are restorations, and others modernizations. While the extant building, named for its gold trim, had long since faded and worn, the building in Paris was covered in gold paint as if suggesting a teleportation back in time to its original splendor. Simultaneously, however, the building’s first story is omitted in the Paris version, and the paneled walls are opened up with glass windows in what appear to be an indo-Saracenic style considered a Japanese national style at the time. These features make the building accessible by stair, and likely more approachable to foreign viewers. Finally, while the original Kinkakuji was repurposed as a Zen Buddhist temple following the death of its builder Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in 1394, its original function as a teahouse was restored in its Paris reconstruction.

The visitor Andre Hallais describes the experience of drinking tea at the pavilion in depth in his account of the 1900 fair, and delights in finding many traces of Japanese “national character.” At the Japanese garden in the Trocadero, he orders the reader to walk past the vulgar black tea served by Parisians at nearby restaurants, but instead to climb to the first floor, where one can enjoy "chanoyu… the ceremony of tea." For several pages, he describes with bombastic enthusiasm this source of "extremely delicate enjoyment…" with its "politeness of speech, the grace of its gestures, the neatness of its utensils…" This extraordinary experience, Hallais writes, all of its "taste" and "elegance," can be "characterized in one word: exquisite." (242) In his memory, as Hallais drank his green tea, he gazed into the calm and tranquil garden, where sculpted branches met in peaks to reverberate echoes of Mount Fuji and the landscapes of Japan. Numerous flower arrangements and ceramics adorned the room, and the guest is finally sent away with a small package of tea, sweets, small flowers. This, Hallais declares with some envy, is Japan, "with its childlike grace, the Japan that the globe-trotters have experienced." (244)

1900 Japanese Garden

The effort on the part of Japanese planners to create an accessible, multi-sensorial experience of Japanese cultural heritage is clear from Hallais’ report. Combining the ritualized performance of the tea ceremony, the drink itself, multiple arts, and the surrounding garden would have offered a coherent experience of Japan recognizable from the accounts of returning European tourists. Hallais’ remarks reveal another dimension of the tea ceremony, however: its quality as an integrated display of multiple high art objects, including painted screens, displayed ceramics, hanging scrolls, and lacquerware. The Japanese government had already pioneered this type of integrated tea display in its replica of the Phoenix hall at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair under the guidance of Okakura Kakuzo, who thought this ensemble presentation to be most coherent expression of Japanese art. (Coaldrake 185) This ensemble, “freed from ex post facto categorization” in 1900 as in 1893, was one of two places where visitors could see Japanese art objects together rather than strewn in various displays around the fair.

1893 Japanese pavilion and interior

The other of these two locations was in a display of thirteen centuries of Japanese art in sculpture, painting, and ceramics also held in the Japanese pavilion (the display building is still uncertain). These works were accompanied by the publication of a weighty 273-page tome, L’histoire de l’art du Japon, which functioned as a narrative guide not only to the display, but also to the many craft objects presented as anonymous works in multiple “applied arts.” This book was published in French as the first full history of Japanese art from the premodern era to the threshold of the modern era.

Kinkakuji in 1900, before 1950 fire and reconstruction

In spite of the extraordinary effort to assemble this meticulous, era-by-era account of Japanese art, the French viewer still occasionally insisted on maintaining the innocent and unknowing gaze of the amateur. Andre Hallais writes, for example, that the"… The statues, lacquerwares, bronzes, ceramics, kimono displayed at the marvelous pavilion Japan built at the Trocadero… there, we have the revelation of an ancient art of which we know nothing." He continues: "we are barbarians- it is indisputable- we are barbarians without grace, agility, subtlety. (21) I know nothing of this art: I ignore the centuries, the schools; I am inclined to all sorts of errors. Before these [objects]… I sense they have a beauty, a beauty that I, the barbarian- will never penetrate." (22) As rich as these words are in praise, Hallais merely cites a conventional attitude towards Japanese art here, which is to refer to it as a transhistorically graceful, elegant, and childish (see his quote above) society only at the threshold of civilization. Deliberate ignorance of the specifics of its history and a focus on sensorial experience instead, it seems, is key to maintaining this image.