Modeling, models, and knowledge exchange in early modern Japan

Abstract

This essay reflects on the historical and cultural contingency of the model both as an analytical category and as a material thing in the context of Japan, with particular reference to its role in diverse forms of knowledge exchange in the early modern era, a period roughly coinciding with the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns from 1603 to 1867. It is intended as a brief intervention, not an encyclopedic survey of this complex and understudied subject. Models exist in many forms in Japan, both twoand three-dimensional, but also embodied, and have operated within multiple and sometimes overlapping social and cultural processes that constructed their codes, values, and uses. Their study is complicated, however, by the fact that neither their forms nor the language used to refer to them have remained constant across historical periods, raising fundamental questions about what constituted a “model” in the early modern era. Mokei, for instance, which most closely approximates the English term “model,” is a modern coinage that gained currency in the late nineteenth century in response to the practical need for a classificatory category for the reduced-scale models of historic buildings that became fixtures in the international expositions in which Japan participated. These were primarily ethnographic specimens that made visible the distance between Japanese and Western architectural materials, techniques, and styles. The word mokei replaced an older term, hinagata, which was commonly applied to models of many kinds, but especially printed books that enjoyed wide circulation from the seventeenth century featuring pictorial models of fashionable garment designs. Yet