Japan Luncheon Series
Maki Fukuoka, Assistant Professor of Japanese Humanities, University of Michigan
Focusing on 1872 exhibition at the Yushima Confucian Temple, Maki Fukuoka explores the extent to which this exhibition's spatial and material positioning echoes and differs from hakubutsu-gaku exhibitions organized during the late Tokugawa period by the Shohyaku-sha, a private group of hakubutsu-gaku scholars based in Owari domain. Two key members of Shohyaku-sha, Ito Keisuke and Tanaka Yoshio, participated in orchestrating the 1872 exhibition. Dr. Fukuoka asks how we can characterize the differences and similarities in the exhibition practices of Owari Tokugawa and Yushima Meiji, and in what way they interrelate to historical issues of Japan's modernity.
Maki Fukuoka works on visual culture of 19th century Japan with a particular emphasis on photographic representations and technology. Her dissertation "Between Seeing and Knowing: Shifting Standards of Accuracy and the Concept of Shashin in Japan, 1830-1872" examines the process of formulating hakubutsu-gaku discourse, a field of study that combines Chinese and Japanese medical practice with theories of imported natural history, and the role of pictorial representations in establishing and validating the "accuracy" of hakubutsu-gaku epistemology. The Shohyaku-sha's frequent use of the term shashin, which came to designate photographic technology in 1870s, offers the intellectual resonance that this concept conveyed within their discoursive formulation, and a point of critical intervention to re- examine the history of photography in Japan. She is interested in the intricate relationship between "tradition" and "modernity" in Japan and the ways in which their conflicting and often confusing relationships are represented or articulated visually.