What Are Exhibitions For? An Anthropological Approach 1350065358, 9781350065352

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What are Exhibitions for?
SPREAD 1: The AHJ booklet – A practical tool to study exhibition visitors
1 Representational and Performative Knowledge
SPREAD 2: Mike – ‘There is a connecting memory in my feet’
2 Photography, Exhibition Design and Atmosphere
SPREAD 3: Sue – ‘Photography students have been very surprised to learn that what appears to be an actual window is in fact an illusion’
3 Similarities and Stereotypes
SPREAD 4: Jen – ‘I was very interested in anime and manga’
4 To Learn or not to Learn?
SPREAD 5: Natasha – ‘And I have been putting them in the dishwasher!’
SPREAD 6: Natalia – ‘It is in our shower because it’s very useful’; Molly – ‘It is something I found and can’t give away’
5 Photography, Performance and Play
SPREAD 7: Ali – ‘I never found England a very interesting place’
Conclusion: Exhibitions as Technologies of the Imagination
Notes
References

Citation preview

What are Exhibitions for?

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY: The Inbetweenness of Things, edited by Paul Basu The Japanese House, Inge Daniels Micromuseology, Fiona Candlin

What are Exhibitions for? An Anthropological Approach

Inge Daniels With photography by Susan Andrews

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Inge Daniels, 2020 Inge Daniels has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Maria Bazhanova Cover image © Laura Haapio-Kirk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-3500-6535-2 978-1-3500-6539-0 978-1-3500-6536-9 978-1-3500-6537-6

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

In memory of Yutaka Kagemori and Seiichi Takahashi, two intellectual giants and big-hearted friends, who are tremendously missed.

All reasonable attempts have been made to trace copyright holders of images and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in copyright acknowledgement and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: What are Exhibitions for?

1

SPREAD 1: The AHJ booklet – A practical tool to study exhibition visitors 25

1 Representational and Performative Knowledge

31

SPREAD 2: Mike – ‘There is a connecting memory in my feet’ 57

2 Photography, Exhibition Design and Atmosphere

63

SPREAD 3: Sue – ‘Photography students have been very surprised to learn that what appears to be an actual window is in fact an illusion’ 85

3 Similarities and Stereotypes

91

SPREAD 4: Jen – ‘I was very interested in anime and manga’ 125

4 To Learn or not to Learn?

131

SPREAD 5: Natasha – ‘And I have been putting them in the dishwasher!’ 159 SPREAD 6: Natalia – ‘It is in our shower because it’s very useful’; Molly – ‘It is something I found and can’t give away’ 165

5 Photography, Performance and Play

171

SPREAD 7: Ali – ‘I never found England a very interesting place’ 195

Conclusion: Exhibitions as Technologies of the Imagination

201

Notes 211 References 217

vii

Acknowledgements

My warmest thanks go to my friends in Japan who have generously supported me over the past twenty years. I am deeply grateful to Yutaka, Noriko and Shigeko Kagemori without whom I would never have been able to produce the exhibition that is the focus of this book. They not only gave us permission to use their home as a template for the show, but they went out of their way to assist me in collecting objects, transformed a whole room in their tiny flat into a storage space, and organized the transport of the objects back to London. Noriko and Yutaka were also the only participants from my original 2003 research who travelled to London to see the exhibition and throughout this book I will draw on their frank comments, and on their performative engagements with the displays. Other Japanese friends who played a key role in the success of this project are the Takahashis, the Matsuis, the Tsumuras, the Nishikis, and the Nittas: we employed life-size photos of their homes and they donated a variety of items of domestic material culture to the show. Finally, special thanks go to Kema(ke), whose effort in sending an endless stream of postal packages from Yokohama, containing a myriad of treasures that make up the fabric of banal everyday life in Japan, has been truly heroic. Her quirky insights have also brought a much-needed humorous touch to the exhibition. Huge thanks go to Susan (Sue) Andrews, who co-curated the show with me. She has been responsible for much of the visual experimentation that was central to the exhibition, and she was also instrumental in the visual study we conducted in the homes of participants in our raffle study. I am also very grateful for the time and effort she has put into the selection and preparation of all the photographs that feature in this book. I would also like to thank Danny Miller for being a tremendously inspirational and supportive mentor, whose generosity I will never be able to repay. Professor Akiko Mori invited me to present my research at a conference at the Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka and the participants in this event were instrumental in helping me to fine-tune the overall ideas expressed in this book. A generous grant from this museum also allowed me to spent two months to familiarize myself with museological debates pertaining to this project. I also want to thank Laura Haapio-Kirk and Rosanna Blakeley for collecting such high-quality data. Laura also created the beautiful maps that have added another dimension to this book. I also want to thank Charlie Crook, Chris Laver and Maria Bazhanova for producing the mock-ups that were used as templates for the book as well as my PhD students, but especially Julien Dugnoille, Maria Salaru, Alex Donnelly and Mayanka Mukherji, for providing me with much-needed intellectual stimulation and humorous (and alcoholic) relief. Without the support, trust and generosity of the Geffrye Museum in London this book would not have been possible. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to Eleanor John and Alex Godard, two visionary curators, whose patience, I am sure, I have tested to the limits. I owe special thanks to both the Geffrye Museum and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford for viii

Acknowledgements

ix

funding my visitor study, while a Sasakawa travel grant made it possible for me to transport many of the objects from Osaka to London. My deepest gratitude also goes to those visitors to the exhibition, who have happily shared their experiences of, and thoughts about, the displays with us. I also wish to thank the nine participants in our raffle study (Ali, Jen, Mike, Molly, Natalia, Natasha, the O’Donnells, the Waghorns and Steven) as well as the Kosaka family, who have all welcomed us into their homes, patiently answered questions and allowed us to take photographs. Above all, I am grateful to my brother Johan for his continuous support and to my sister Linde for her special brand of ‘Skype Therapy’. Finally, the person who, without a doubt, has ‘suffered’ most, while patiently enduring the many ups and downs of this project, is my husband and companion, Shaun. His boundless love and care – as well as endless supplies of sushi! – have carried me through the joys and difficulties of writing. I thank him last because he really knows how much these pages mean.

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Introduction What are Exhibitions for?

1

What are exhibitions for? Why do people visit them, what do they hope to gain from doing so, and what do they actually do once inside? Most exhibitions are (still) rule-bound, designed environments where visitors are expected to behave in routinized ways: we should quietly shuffle along while viewing the displays from a distance. Intermittingly, one might move in closer to inspect a particular scene or to read labels and other textual information, or one might sit down to contemplate a specific work on display or watch a film in a darkened space, but generally the do-not-touch rule must be adhered to at all times. However, what would happen if people were freed from the regulations and restrained behaviours associated with exhibition going; if visitors were not expected to read labels and panels, if they could touch and try anything, if they were allowed to take photographs, if they were encouraged to move freely through the spaces, to be boisterous and playful? Through an anthropological examination not only of the processes involved in the making but also the reception of one particular exhibition experiment, this book intends to shed light on what exhibitions are, and, in my view, more importantly, to envisage what they could be in the future. The exhibition concerned, entitled At Home in Japan – Beyond the Minimal House (hence forward AHJ ), was held at the Geffrye Museum in London from March until August 2011. I co-curated this show with Susan (Sue) Andrews, a professional photographer and senior lecturer at the Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design in London. Because we were fortunate to work with in-house curators who were eager to push the boundaries of the exhibition format, we were given unprecedented degrees of access to study production and design processes behind the scenes as well as visitors inside the exhibition spaces. The exhibition was informed by my ongoing research in Japan over the past twenty years, but it drew heavily on a year-long ethnography that I conducted in 2003 inside thirty homes in the Kansai region (Osaka, Kyoto, Nara) as well as a shorter visual study about the same topic that I embarked on with Sue in 2006. Both these projects also formed the basis for a monograph, entitled The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home (Daniels 2010) that was initially published by Berg and then carried over into the Bloomsbury catalogue. In this publication, Sue and I explored how innovative combinations of photography and text might enable us to disseminate academic knowledge more effectively to wider audiences. Because we did not want to use images merely as illustrations of the text, we did away with captions to allow visuals to retain a degree of autonomy and employed visual techniques such as pairing and sequencing in order to encourage ‘active looking’ (Daniels 2010: 22–24). Through co-curating AHJ , Sue and I were able to further advance our visual experimentation in a spatial context. The next section will elucidate our exhibition experiment, which allowed us to test the validity of the assumptions about contemporary exhibition making and going that I have introduced above.

The experiment: At Home in Japan in London The findings presented in this book are based on an ethnographic study of the production and reception of the exhibition At Home in Japan – Beyond the Minimal House. The show was held from March until August 2011 at the Geffrye Museum, a historical museum of the home in east London. The Geffrye’s permanent exhibition displays period rooms and gardens of the English middle class over the past four hundred years,1 but in the basement of a more recently built extension, more experimental exhibitions are held for six-month periods. AHJ was the first temporary exhibition at the museum that did not focus on the UK .2 It aimed to challenge the ubiquitous trope of the Japanese minimal house, characterized by empty spaces devoid of people and things, that retains a strong grip on the Western imagination. 2

3

We therefore did not endeavour to showcase the much-admired (and much-exoticized) aspects of Japanese Culture with a capital C, but instead zoomed in on what the novelist Kenzaburo Oe has called ‘the Japan of the little tradition’. By confronting visitors with the complexities and contradictions of Japanese everyday life lived behind closed doors, we hoped to reveal that mundane practices of nonelite populations are surprisingly similar across cultures.3 Visitors with various degrees of familiarity with Japan reacted differently to the stress the exhibition placed on similarity (see Chapter 3). Many who had spent a long period of time in Japan but also those who had never visited the country wanted to see more (of what they considered to be) unique elements of Japanese domestic life ranging from wooden baths to high-tech toilets. Some of these former visitors were prompted by the displays to act as cultural brokers, encouraging their companions to enact Japanese practices similar to those they (claimed they) had witnessed. A minority of people who lived in Japan but also most Japanese visitors were drawn to the ordinary material culture on display such as food that evoked specific memories, while some appreciated the subtle humorous touches in the show.4 Instead of producing yet another exhibition that showcased the iconic material culture of other cultures for visitors to gaze at from a safe distance, treating culture and experiences as texts and prioritizing representational ways of knowing and learning, I wanted to explore the tension between representational and embodied knowledge practices. Building on anthropological literature about perception that argues that vision cannot be disconnected from haptic experiences of the moving body in space (Ingold 2000), we set out to create a three-dimensional immersive environment that people were invited to explore with

4

Map 1

all of their senses; with their bodies and their brains. The space we created evoked a typical 2LDK apartment consisting of a communal living-dining-kitchen (LDK ) area with two extra rooms (one Westernstyle room with wooden flooring and one tatami room) as well as an entrance hall, a central corridor, a toilet (represented by a photograph) and a bathroom (see Map 1). The average size of this type of home would usually be between 60 and 80 square metres, but because of health and safety requirements, we had to double the size of the corridor, the doorframes and the LDK area. This meant that total exhibition space (including the introductory area) measured 134 square metres. We filled this space with everyday used objects that were primarily donated by participants in my 2003 and 2006 research. In Chapter 4 I will discuss this process in more detail, but here I want to stress that the generous, collaborative attitude of a number of Japanese people, who over the years have become my friends, was vital in the making of the exhibition. The majority of the items we displayed were mundane, mass-produced commodities and the show thus also problematized the artificial distinction made between objects linked with commerce and the categories of art and artefact associated with museum collections. Because the Geffrye is not an ethnographic museum, I spent a considerable amount of time explaining anthropological concepts and methods, while some ethnographically grounded ideas such as instructing visitors to remove their shoes never came to fruition (see Chapter 1). However, holding the exhibition in this particular setting also had the unexpected advantage that in-house staff were not interested in entering our ‘ethnographic’ objects into their collections and submitting them to

5

Photographs © Inge Daniels

standard practices of conservation and categorization. This ultimately enabled us to allow visitors complete access to the exhibits and gave us the opportunity to raffle off most of the objects after the end of the show, a point that I will return to below. Thus, we did away with standard infrastructural elements such as glass display cases and ropes that transform objects into singular, authentic, museum pieces and we submerged our objects into the material fabric of the space (see Chapter 1). We used life-size photographs (and audio recordings) taken inside Japanese homes to evoke a sense of place, a feel of home (Chapter  2). We replaced labels and authoritative texts printed on panels with wallpapers that contained a combination of written commentary and images to contextualize Japanese domestic interiors within their specific historical, economic and cultural contexts (see Chapter 4). This multi-model approach presented visitors with a dynamic mix of layers of representative and embodied knowledge that they were free to pick and choose from or dip in an out off as they pleased. We opted for this method (much like the anthropologist’s experience of participant observation during ethnographic fieldwork) because we wanted to test whether visitors, if given the opportunity to both absorb and reflect upon representational information (through reading and observation) and to actively immerse themselves in an everyday, lived-in environment, might have their curiosity and imagination piqued and consider their everyday lived world from the perspective of others. Some lone visitors and parents with children read the texts we provided to gain knowledge. For others they formed the starting point for a wide variety of social interactions with other visitors, often driven by interests and motivations beyond the immediate exhibition experience (see Chapter 4). Because photography was allowed inside the spaces, many used the camera to tap into their imagination and engage in mimetic play (see Chapter 5). By not using standard framing practices for museum objects, we were thus able to transcend a sole educational agenda and promote more playful and participatory interactions within the museum space. There are other examples of academic publications that focus on one exhibition such as Butler’s Contested Representations (1999) or Kratz’s The Ones That Are Wanted (2002). But this book is unique in its emphasis on achieving a balance between analytical, theoretical and visual presentation. Because the visual formula of our previous book about Japanese homes (Daniels 2010) proved to be a success, Sue and I decided to use it as a template for this new publication about exhibitions. The majority of the photographs included, which were taken by Sue, are therefore without captions. Copyright and other information will only be provided underneath my personal research images, photographs by research

6

6

7

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participants and those who visited the exhibition, historical images and reviews and promotional material for the exhibition. Another element that we kept from The Japanese House book is the employment of several ‘spreads’ that consisted of a combination of text and images to narrate the story of some of the objects that we gave away in a raffle after the exhibition. I have also included thirteen maps, produced by Laura Haapio-Kirk, that show the trajectories that visitors took inside the exhibition space. That said, this publication also takes our previous experimentation with the book form to a new level by employing visual techniques that blur the distinction between two- and three-dimensionality. One of our aims was to induce a more ‘embodied’ kind of viewing. By placing photographs of closets, photo albums and other framing devices in the middle of two pages, for example, we tried to simulate the action of looking into a 3D object. Another example is the inclusion of large, high-res scans of objects used in the exhibition, such as New Year’s decorations (see image on previous page), fans or textiles in order to reveal their tactile qualities. We also tried to create a sense of awkwardness or disorientation, similar to what many visitors had experienced inside the exhibition space (see Chapter 1). Most chapters, for example, start with a photograph taken inside a Japanese home (in 2006) that is followed, after turning the page, by the same image used life size in the exhibition space, with the aim to momentarily disorientate viewers. Visual experimentation and attractiveness are also central in some other publications about exhibitions such as Ordinary Lives: After 2002 Seoul Style (Sato and Yamashita 2002) or any of the books in the Exhibition Histories series published by Afterall books since 2010 (e.g. Steeds et al. 2013; Decter et al. 2014; and Crippa et al. 2016). However, the emphasis of these texts is on the production and design of exhibitions, while this book is, to my knowledge, the first of its kind that gives similar attention to the making and reception of an exhibition. In what follows, I will discuss our observational study of visitors to AHJ , which enabled us to gain a unique insight into what people actually do in exhibitions and test whether our intentions when making the exhibition matched visitors’ expectations and experiences.

An ethnography of exhibition visitors Scientific and commercial studies about museum visitors are plentiful and there even exists a whole journal, called Visitor Studies, dedicated to the topic. However, until recently this body of work consisted primarily of large-scale, quantitative surveys, often based on US psychological models, that measure educational impact. It is only since the late 1980s5 that there has been a rise in qualitative studies that reframe visitors as active, meaning-making participants. However, due to the ongoing importance museums place on visitor numbers as the benchmark for success, large-scale surveys, generally considered both more objective and reliable, continue to be popular (MacDonald 2002: 219).6 One wellknown example of a conventional large-scale study is Serrell’s 1998 multi-sited research into one hundred exhibitions in the US . This project, that explicitly links learning impacts with time individuals spent inside a show,7 highlights two persistent problems associated with quantitative visitor studies; firstly, the tendency to categorize exhibition-goers solely according to their diligence for learning, and, secondly, the propensity to concentrate on the behaviour of individuals while the social aspect of the visit is ignored. This book, by contrast, argues for the need to study people inside exhibitions empirically and it proposes that ethnography is the best method equipped to do so. Ethnography is the term used to refer to a set of techniques (developed by anthropologists) to study the complexity of social life across cultural contexts, and it is, therefore, particularly suited to investigate both the didactic and the social aspects of looking, discussing and interacting with exhibition displays. Ethnographies are ideally grounded in

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‘participant observation’, whereby researchers not only observe but also actively participate in a range of practices that the people studied engage in. Such an approach therefore differs substantially from research based on questionnaires or interviews, primarily concerned with examining narratives and discourses, whether or not these correspond to actual practices. However, what, in my view, really sets ethnography apart from other qualitative research methods is the stress placed on immersing oneself in a social situation – in our case experiencing an exhibition – without predetermining what is and isn’t important. In other words, although the researcher might enter the field with a certain research agenda,8 she needs to remain open-minded about what is relevant for people on the ground and, if necessary, change the direction of the research accordingly. To date there have only been a handful of in-depth ethnographies conducted inside museums.9 One example is Handler and Gable’s ethnography of the open-air museum Colonial Williamsburg, a historical reconstruction of the former US capital (Handler and Gable 1997). Both researchers conducted fieldwork (with a research assistant) for more than one year (on average two or three days a week) on this site in order to explore ‘the total social life of a contemporary museum’ (ibid., 9). However, in the end, their book primarily pays attention to the complex workings of a large corporation and only one chapter discusses how the museum is received by the public. Similarly, Sharon MacDonald’s 2002 ethnography of the Science Museum in London offers an unusual insight into the complexities of running a major museum describing the production, design and marketing of exhibitions, but her account is only sporadically interspersed with visitors’ experiences (MacDonald 2002). The fact that both examples are organizational, ‘behind the scenes’, ethnographies with comparatively little regard for visitors, highlights some of the difficulties involved in conducting fieldwork amongst dispersed individuals or small groups of families or friends with a shared, albeit temporary, interest in a specific exhibition. Firstly, although the exhibition space is in theory an example of a ‘bounded’ field site, because of the short time most people actually spend inside, it is difficult to get to know visitors. Visits to AHJ , for example, lasted twenty-eight minutes on average, and because it was a temporary exhibition, the topic of study itself was destined to disappear within six months. Secondly, although most exhibition-goers are middle class and cosmopolitan, they cannot be said to constitute a community bound together by a social network that the ethnographer could try to become part of.10 One group of people on the move that closely resemble exhibition visitors, and pose similar methodological challenges, are tourists. Indeed, tourists tend to spend a limited amount of time in a particular place, including in museums, and social scientists have developed ingenious ways to circumvent the methodological problems associated with

Photograph © Mick Williamson

10

studying them. A famous example is outlined by the American anthropologist Edward Bruner (2004), who found employment as a tour guide and gained a unique perspective on the everyday lives of the tourists in his charge. Another example is provided by the geographer Jonas Larsen (2005, 2008), who used his camera like a tourist to examine how photography drives tourist performances (for more on Larsen, see Chapter 5). However, I have been particularly inspired by Paul Basu’s ethnography of genealogy or ‘roots’ tourism in the Scottish Highland diaspora, in which he employed a combination of online and offline research methods (Basu 2006). The two years he spent doing fieldwork in Scotland, while also befriending potential tourists online, is not really comparable to our three-month ethnography of exhibition-goers. However, the fact that many visitors also used new technologies to share their experiences of AHJ online, allowed me to expand the normal reach of visitor studies by analysing blogs, online magazines and media websites that discussed the exhibition. These data were further enriched by the research that Sue and I conducted in the homes of ten people who participated in the free raffle at the end of the exhibition. Finally, to conduct an ethnography inside an exhibition, it is, of course, paramount to secure the cooperation of the institution involved. As I have indicated above, our study was only possible because the Geffrye Museum granted us unusual levels of access. Between June and August 2011, I together with two anthropology students at Oxford, Laura Haapio-Kirk and Rosanna Blakeley, conducted an ethnographic study of visitors. We were given permission to ‘shadow’ visitors without informing them upfront about our intentions; we were not easily identified as researchers because we did not wear name tags or use clipboards and only carried a small booklet to help us conduct the study (see Spread 1). After visitors exited the exhibition we told them about our study, asked for their consent and inquired if we could engage them in a brief interview. We also experimented with participation and during quiet periods all three of us would interact with the displays in order to observe the impact this might have on other visitors. In Chapter 1, I will discuss how removing our shoes and putting on slippers resulted in visitors following our example. On the other hand, folding the kimonos and obis, an action I generally conducted at the end of the day in order to fit the garments back into their drawers, led some visitors to inquire whether I was one of the curators, which upon my confirmation led to an avalanche of questions about the displays. Finally, Sue and I also had the opportunity to observe and engage with visitors while taking them on several guided tours through the exhibition. Over three months we collected data from one hundred and seven visitors.11 Our study is based on what some might consider a rather small and insignificant sample, but we did not aim to be representative of ‘the museum-goer’s experience’ nor did we select people according to social variables such as gender, age, ethnicity or socio-cultural class.12 Instead, like anthropologists conducting ethnographies in other field sites, we started from the premise that there are potentially as many possible experiences as there are visitors, and we aimed to account for this by paying attention to the specific creative interactions individuals or small groups of visitors had both with the exhibition displays and with each other. Bhatti, who has, to my knowledge, conducted one of the only comprehensive ethnographic studies of visitors to the Lahore Museum in Pakistan, demonstrates that while museums tend to stress educational value, in practice visitors ‘employ their own agency and creativity’ and engage with the ‘visual delights on offer in a myriad of active ways’ (Bhatti 2012: 149–50). In Chapter 4, I will problematize the stress museums continue to place on learning by demonstrating that, although some visitors to AHJ were in search of knowledge (40 per cent), more were driven by the pleasure of the unexpected (50 per cent), and a minority sought inspiration for their own homes (10 per cent). However, in practice these different motivations were intertwined.

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Our ethnographic study of visitors examined what might happen if visitors were set free; if they were allowed to move around without restrictions and touch, pick up and handle anything in the display. Our data demonstrate that depending on people’s socialization to the do-not-touch rule and how strong their conviction that reading is the only bodily practice sanctioned inside exhibition spaces, their levels of reading and touch vary: they may or may not read the introductory panels, look at/read image-text wallpapers, open drawers and look inside closets, sit on chairs and sofas, go through photo albums, and try on slippers or a kimono. I have already explained above that we were able to encourage high levels of physical interaction because we employed ordinary, mass-produced objects that were not submitted to the strict rules and regulations imposed on material culture destined to enter museum collections. However, our experiment did not end there. We further challenged the standard exhibition format by giving the majority of our objects away in a public raffle held at the end of the exhibition. Next, I will discuss this event and the study that we conducted to trace the journeys of some lots into their new homes.

Back to freedom: Object journeys beyond the museum Once objects have been delivered to a museum, they hardly ever find their way back to freedom. SLOTERDIJK 2014: 447 The Geffrye Museum partly funded my trips to Japan in the summer of 2009 and 2010 to collect and purchase the majority of exhibited objects and transport them back to London. As the museum did not envision these objects becoming part of their collections after the exhibition ended, we were free to use them as we pleased. Thus, in the spirit of the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s quote13 above, we decided to set the exhibition objects free by giving them away in a public raffle. This event, that was attended by more than two hundred people, tied-in with one of the main themes of the exhibition; the circulation of objects through gifting. Sue and I conducted a follow-up study to investigate if and how raffled objects were integrated into their new owners’ everyday lives, and if their presence had an impact on their (previously held) ideas about Japan. More generally, I hoped to challenge the undisputable link between exhibitions and museum collections, as argued in a recent book about the future of museums by anthropologist Nicholas Thomas (Thomas 2016). This issue is particularly relevant (and delicate) in the light of the 2008 economic crisis that has resulted in the slashing of museum budgets in the UK (and the rest of Europe). Indeed, in this book I will propose that by emphasizing the recirculation, consumption, and even the destruction of objects instead of their ownership and preservation in collections, (at least some) exhibitions might be reconfigured as multisensory participatory spaces that facilitate imaginative physical interactions and dialogues surrounding a range of current and controversial issues (including cultural stereotypes). On the day of the raffle, one week after the closure of the exhibition, we displayed sixty lots in front of the temporary exhibition space. Each lot consisted of a group of objects, which corresponded with our display strategy to create families or assemblages of objects in order to highlight the importance of material relationships (see Chapters 1 and 3). During the raffle, one of the museum’s staff selected a number from a box and the winning person was then invited to step forward and choose a lot. The majority of the lots consisted of utilitarian goods, employed in everyday practical activities such as bathing, eating and gardening. The main reason for this was that AHJ ’s focus was on mundane Japanese domestic spaces, but also many decorative objects such as dolls, seasonal objects and photo albums

PARTICIPANTS IN THE RAFFLE STUDY

The O’Donnells

Natasha

Ali

12

Molly

Mike

The Waghorns

Steven

Jen

Thalia 13

14

were not entered into the raffle because I wanted to use them in a future exhibition. Still, I was surprised to find that the first few items selected were all functional goods, such as a bamboo stand used to store domestic slippers, which ended up with the Waghorns, one of the participants in our raffle study that I will discuss in Chapter 5. By contrast, two exquisite (and expensive) silk kimonos went very late into the proceedings. One reason for this could be that kimonos are no longer considered that ‘unusual’ in the UK . Indeed, judging from their frequent presence in second-hand shops and markets in London in the last ten years, one could assume that these garments like a number of other objects associated with ‘Japaneseness’ such as futons and chopsticks have become part of British domestic life. Similarly, Japanese food seems to have become part of (middle-class) people’s diets and many of those participating in our raffle study possessed both the ingredients and tools (primarily chopsticks and ceramic tableware) necessary to make and consume Japanese dishes such as sushi rolls, ramen or miso soup. Still, it is important to distinguish between these utilitarian objects and more symbolically dense items (Weiner 1994) such as kimonos, but also between fans or dolls that are intrinsically linked with specific Japanese practices and as such are more difficult to recontextualize within European homes. As Ali, a blogger participating in our raffle study, put it: ‘what would I do with it (kimono), apart from putting it in a suitcase or box’.14 Because our objects were not assessed into a museum collection, provenance was not a reference point to judge their (monetary) value by (Geismar 2001) and our follow-up study thus examined how people, in practice, attributed value to the goods they received. I will present our findings in five raffle case studies presented in ‘spreads’ at the end of each chapter, but here, I want to stress the difference between those choosing something they liked and those who had to make do with what was left. Moreover, even if one’s number was called early on, what people chose depended largely on their motivation for participating in the event in the first place. We had advertised the raffle on a panel inside the exhibition space and many people who had seen the show returned for the raffle. However, at the other end of the spectrum, there were also those who just ‘happened to be’ visiting the museum on the day. Indeed, three participants in our study took part in the raffle by chance and received their objects without actually seeing the show. Finally, people’s familiarity with Japan was also an important factor when choosing a particular lot. Three participants in our study spent at least one year in Japan and I will show how they drew on the raffled objects to rework or manipulate Japan-related memories in a variety of ways. Although initially the raffle went smoothly, after a while the space in front of the tables became crowded with people milling around, indecisive about what to choose because their favourite objects had already been taken. At any point the event could have descended into chaos and we were therefore extremely relieved when all the lots were finally gone. Still, because many people stayed put, we decided, on a whim, to raffle forty pairs of new slippers that we did not use in the exhibition (see Chapter 1). After this only a small tray of disposable chopsticks that I had meant to dispose of remained. When I placed these chopsticks on one of the tables, it wasn’t long before the audience had descended on them too and in a few minutes the whole content had disappeared. It was fascinating to see just how eager people were to take something, anything, away, even if only a cheap pair of slippers or one single chopstick. These were ephemeral tokens that acknowledged participation in the event, but our study confirmed that, once people returned home, they were often quickly forgotten, passed on or thrown away. On the day of the raffle I also distributed notes amongst those present to ask for volunteers for our follow-up study. At first twenty-five people showed an interest but, by the time Sue and I actually started the project six months later, only nine people were able to commit. The majority of these people lived in the Greater London area, but we also travelled to Kent to meet with two participants and one person

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lived in Leicester. These data form the basis of five raffle case studies that accompany each of the chapters, but some of the material is also included in the text. During our raffle study, we discovered that some objects had travelled abroad. One such example was a white, embroidered hanging curtain (noren) that we placed across the entrance to the bathroom. This ‘white piece of textile’ had formed part of Mike’s lot (see Spread 2), but during our visit to his home in west London, he revealed that because it was ‘quite feminine’ and he didn’t know what to do with it, he gave it away. When I explained that it was a noren, a curtain that Japanese people hang in doorways, Mike replied: ‘Well, I thought it was either a kind of curtain material or a very big tablecloth, far bigger than mine, which is now somewhere in Spain – in my girlfriend’s mother’s house.’ Like a number of other raffled objects, the textile had quickly changed hands and had started a new life as a tablecloth in Spain. This example also shows how participants, whether or not they were aware of the objects intended ‘Japanese’ use, had creatively appropriated items to fit their own domestic contexts. Some people who had initially volunteered for our study have since moved abroad. One example was Steven who visited the Geffrye Museum by chance on the day of the raffle, while he was in London for a six-month art conservation placement programme. He kindly agreed to communicate with me by email about the lot that he won in the raffle and his interest in Japan more generally. He chose a set of five brown cups with lids covered in an unusual modern design that were donated by Fujii-san, a middle-aged cooking teacher from Osaka. Steven has a strong interest in Japanese decorative arts and he clearly treasures these objects, recalling that when he moved back home, he carefully packed the cups in his suitcase and ‘prayed that they would make it back to the US unbroken’ (email communication, November 2012). When he subsequently found a job at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC , he left his ‘art and nice dishes’ in the care of his parents in New Hope, north of New York. I will return to this issue in the ‘spreads’, but our study showed that ceramics were easily employed in new and unexpected ways. Thus, an exquisite blue-and-white ceramic bowl in the shape of a chrysanthemum flower donated by the Kagemoris from Osaka (see Chapter  3) ended up in the O’Donnell’s home in Kent, where it was used to store keys. The Waghorns, also based in Kent, had

1

2

4 3

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1

The bowl in the shape of a chrysanthemum flower donated by the Kagemoris in Osaka ended up being used to store keys in in the O’Donnell’s home in Kent.

2

One of two sushi-trays, that I bought with Yukata Kagemori in a tableware store in Osaka, was transformed into a flower-tray by the Waghorns in Kent.

3

A set of 6 ceramic cups with lids, purchased in a wholesale store for tableware in Osaka, found a new home among treasured possessions inside a special cupboard in Natasha’s home in London.

4

We received large donations of chopstick holders from Japanese families and we therefore regularly changed them on the table in the exhibition. A bamboo pair ended up being used as a toothbrush holder in the Waghorns bathroom in Kent.

1

2

3

4

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transformed an oval-shaped tray (used to serve fish) into a container for two small plants on display on a table in their living room. Interestingly, the same family had also turned a bamboo chopstick holder into a receptacle for toothbrushes in their bathroom. Finally, Natasha, a Polish-American women, who I will discuss in more detail in Spread 5, demonstrated some new uses for a set of five blue-and-white ceramic cups with lids, which are generally employed to steam a savoury egg custard dish called chawanmushi (meaning literally ‘steamed in a tea bowl’). Particularly interesting was her clever usage of the lids when serving tea in the cups: before pouring the hot water on the tea bag, she placed the lid under the cup, saying ‘we put this so that we can pick it up and take it all the way to the living room’. When I eventually inquired whether she knew what these kinds of ceramic cups were employed for in Japan, Natasha responded, ‘I thought they were tea cups’, while her partner asked tentatively, ‘Miso soup?’ By the time we started our follow-up study in 2012, many of the raffled objects had already changed hands and quite a few had ended up being donated to second-hand shops. Most items that met this fate were functional plastic objects, such as the drying rack for towels we used in the bathroom and the large plastic lunch boxes we displayed in the kitchen cupboards. Some objects were lost, and one

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particular item, that we traced to the O’Donnell’s home in Kent, met an unusually gloomy ending. The family won three lots; they threw away some things they didn’t like and they were unsure what happened to others, for example, a pink bag with an ice cream pattern on it. But they kept some items – notably, a set of six large glass bowls that ‘are good for snacks and dips . . . or salads’, but that Japanese people tend to eat summer noodles (sômen) from, were kept in a cupboard in their kitchen, and also the ceramic bowl shaped like a chrysanthemum flower discussed above. A third object, chosen by their youngest daughter, was a small white and golden ceramic owl that had been displayed amongst an array of lucky owls in the entrance hall of the exhibition. The owl had been given pride of place on a bookshelf above the girl’s bed in front of a poster of horses and amongst rosettes she had won in horse riding competitions. I remembered that we displayed it in the exhibition inside a wooden square used for measuring rice, but when we inquired about this, the girl blushed and said: ‘Well, uhm, Autumn got it. We had it next to the owl and somehow Autumn got it.’ Autumn is the name of their energetic Irish setter who, probably attracted by its strong cedar smell, seemed to have chewed the wooden square to pieces. A rather uneventful and unexpected ending for such a well-travelled object!

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Exhibitions: An anthropological approach By tracing the raffled objects journeys from Japan via the exhibition space to their new homes in the UK , and by following and observing visitors inside the exhibition space and beyond, I aimed to improve our current understanding of exhibitions and offer a novel perspective on what they could be in the future. Readers might, of course, be sceptical about whether a focus on just one exhibition can tell us anything about exhibition going more generally. However, in arguing for the necessity of a more practice-based understanding of exhibitions, this book will demonstrate the distinctive strengths of an anthropological approach that is based on balancing empirical insights gathered in one particular site with a commitment to generalization. It is the unique depth of the fieldwork encounter, which involves direct observation, conversation and participation, that gives anthropologists the confidence to speak about what matters to the people they work with and collect the kind of rich, personal data that could never be gathered through survey questionnaires or focus groups. Although such an in-depth involvement is inevitably based on a very specific population and thus limits the potential for generalization, by comparing my data with findings from other experimental exhibitions, it will be possible to consider both the particular circumstances of visitors to AHJ and highlight more general trends. It is through this combination of depth and breadth that this book aims to offer comprehensive scholarly answers to the questions about exhibitions raised above. Because of my expertise as an anthropologist, my main point of comparison will be a selection of innovative exhibitions curated by ethnographically grounded anthropologists ranging from O’Hanlon’s Paradise (1993) to Asakura and Sato’s Seoul Style (2002). However, many of the exhibitionary practices that I will discuss were pioneered in the art world, where over the past twenty-five years a noticeable shift has occurred from the modernist, so-called “white cube” model for displaying contemporary art, premised on a detached optical relationship between objects and visitors, to shows that display openended works that encourage bodily and social interactions. In other words, the conceptualization of the collection-based museum as ‘a sanctuary for private contemplation’ (Klonk 2009: 15) is competing with (but has not quite been superseded by) the notion of the experimental laboratory (Bishop 2004: 52). A seminal example of this latter approach is Eliasson’s popular 2003 Weather Project at Tate Modern in London, which consisted of a huge artificial sun hung up high in the Turbine Hall, that engulfed visitors in a misty sensual atmosphere and thus allowed audiences to completely ‘lose themselves in a kind of out-of-body experience’ (Klonk 2009: 194). Experiential exhibitions should of course be situated within the contemporary enthusiasm for more inclusive and participatory experiences amongst exhibition-goers. The widespread (middle-class) use of the Internet and other technological innovations such as smart phones since the 2000s has encouraged novel ways to ‘create, distribute, access and assess information’, but also to understand and express identity and community (Kidd 2014: 5). Museums have responded by embracing the Internet to actively engage the general public through their websites in ‘new forms of dialogue and participation’ (Pierroux and Ludvigsen 2013: 153). The ongoing digitalization of exhibition design is another consequence, but to date there is still very little consensus about the actual impact of these changes.15 Questions have been raised about the fact that screen-based technologies such as handheld exhibition guides or applications for mobile phones are designed for individual use only (Sharples et al. 2013), and they thus downplay the social aspect of exhibition visits. Based on a rare observational study conducted in 2013 at the Museum of London, Kidd, for example, problematizes

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this latter point by distinguishing between interactive touchscreens and other digital devices, considering the former to be more dynamic, enabling more sociality than the latter (Kidd 2014: 102). However, she also reveals that, unless visitors have a personal interest or a direct link with the information provided, the novel experience of using the touchscreens seems to matter more than the actual content of the show (ibid., 102).16 These research findings, however limited, caution us not to uncritically equate the increased presence of interactive digital displays in exhibitions with enhanced visitor participation or improved learning outcomes. This publication therefore starts from the premise that even if many museums have been transformed into hyper-mediated environments, visiting exhibitions remains a bodily, spatial practice (Rees Leahy 2012). Contrary to widely held opinion, I hope to show that non-digital display techniques might be as effective as digital technologies in evoking a sense of space (see Chapter 2). Moreover, our project also suggests that in the current information age, exhibition visits continue to be social activities and that both dialogic and physical interactions amongst visitors are important forms of participation that we need to pay attention to. Chapter 4 expands upon the social aspects of exhibition going, revealing how some visitors volunteered to act as guides for their companions, while others engaged in dialogues, sharing ideas and feelings stirred by the exhibition with each other. Chapter  5, on the other hand, demonstrates how the ubiquitous use of cameras enticed visitors to engage in collaborative play thus facilitating a sense of bodily closeness and enhancing another form of sociality. Finally, many visitors also used the Internet to share photographs of their experiences beyond the boundary of the physical exhibition space through social media platforms, blogs and other forms of online communication. These are, of course, exciting new sources of information that expand our understanding of the impact of exhibitions on visitors. Although immersive or relational exhibits that require the participation of visitors may be mainstream in art museums,17 it has taken longer for these ideas to gain traction in more conservative (ethnographic or historical) museum settings. Still, in the last decade we can detect a growing openness (even though the change is slow and cautious) towards experiential exhibitions that focus not only on ‘knowledge transmission and learning’ but also include ‘enactment and experience’ (MacDonald and Basu 2007: 13–14) within these latter contexts too. A recent promising example of experimentation with ethnographic collections that draws on the laboratory paradigm is the Humboldt Lab Dahlem in Berlin. This large-scale exhibition experiment ran over four years from 2012 to 2016 and consisted of thirty collaborative projects that creatively explored how to display non-Western art and culture in the twenty-first century. The various experiments were envisioned as rehearsals that could inform the design process of future exhibitions in the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, soon to become the new home of both the Ethnographic Museum and the Museum of Asian Art.18 The initiative drew on the now well-established notion of the ‘reflexive museum’ that is ‘not only self-aware but confronts, critiques, questions and ultimately transforms itself and invites the visitor to democratically participate in this process’ [my emphasis] (Schorch 2009: 28). However, the majority of the projects focused on problematizing museum histories and collections, while the vision of the exhibition as ‘a democratic forum for participation’ (ibid., 31) was never quite realized.19 At Home in Japan also embraced the idea that exhibitions are incomplete ‘processes to be revealed rather than products to be presented’ (Schorch and Kahanu 2015: 242–43), but contrary to the Humboldt Lab, it was not shackled to any museum collection and had participation – of visitors but also of my research participants – at its core. My objective was not only to revisit the potential of the exhibition as an important interface between academia and the general public – as a dynamic space that can generate an understanding of research – but also to explore the notion of the exhibition as a collective

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form of knowledge production that starts long before the exhibition opening and may even continue after the end of any show.20 Anthropologists have of course confronted the politics of knowledge and the validity of authoritative frames since the 1980s. However, I agree with Calzadilla and Marcus that ‘any experimentation with the ethnographic form, beyond textual manoeuvres’ (Calzadilla and Marcus 2005: 95) has been (and still is) limited. One group of anthropologists who have advanced new ways of gathering, analysing and disseminating ethnographic research are those producing films, most famously Jean Rough (in the 1960s), and more recently those engaged in photographic and other image-based work (Pink 2005, 2013; Banks and Ruby 2011). However, when it comes to exhibitions, more promising synergies have developed between anthropology and contemporary art, and in the last twenty years an impressive body of work that combines ethnographic/anthropological practices and art practices has emerged. To date, the anthropologists Schneider and Wright have published several leading volumes about the art-anthropology field that list numerous examples of innovative exhibitions (Schneider and Wright 2005, 2010; Schneider 2013, 2017). However, it is fair to say that the majority of these projects are led by artists (or other visual practitioners) who creatively engage with anthropology to produce artworks, whereas there are very few examples of anthropologists, or other academics not attached to museums, who aim to bring alive (whether or not in collaboration with artists) their own ethnographies in exhibitions.21 One exception that, in my view, shows the potential of what I have called ‘living ethnography’ is Window Flowers, a temporary exhibition co-curated by Japanese anthropologist Tomoko Niwa, who studies the paper arts of the Shanbei people in Shaanxi Provence in China, and paper artist Nabo Shimonaka (Niwa and Yanai 2017). The show was held at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and Seikatsu-Kobo in Tokyo between October 2013 and March 2014. It focused on ‘window flowers’, ephemeral paper cuttings that Shanbei people decorate their houses with during the New Year. Like Sue and me, the curators wanted to make sure that visitors could ‘feel, materially, the sense of place . . . [and] feel close to Shanbei life not only by seeing but by doing’ (Niwa and Yanai 2017: 81–82). To make this happen they, like us, experimented with visual techniques such as projecting moving images onto the uneven surfaces of objects thereby intensifying the link between image and object or by reducing captions and allowing volunteer guides to play a more active, imaginative role. A final point of similarity between both exhibitions is the fact that they did not rely on ‘irreplaceable artworks that require permanent protection’ but ephemeral, mundane paper objects collected from research participants in China, which were not destined to form part of a collection and were allowed to decay over the duration of the exhibition (ibid., 83). At Home in Japan challenged the typical museum practice of displaying singular precious objects by producing exhibits consisting of assemblages of objects, images and narratives gathered during fieldwork, which were evocative of ordinary lived-in material and social worlds that visitors were invited to creatively engage with. Based on my ethnographic study of the exhibition, this book suggests that by liberating things and people from conventional practices that govern the making and the reception of exhibitions, and by encouraging a variety of multisensory practices and dialogic interactions in an evocative and dynamic but also challenging space, exhibitions may provoke playful exploration and thoughtful reflection that stimulate visitors’ imaginative capacities. Our findings demonstrate that although the effects of exhibitions will always be multiple and unpredictable, by reimagining them as immersive events, they have the potential to throw at least some visitors into a new conception of their lived and imagined worlds.

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THE AHJ BOOKLET: SPREAD 1

THE AHJ BOOKLET –

A practical tool to study exhibition visitors Over three months, two MS c students in visual and material anthropology, Laura Haapio-Kirk and Rosanna Blakeley, and I conducted an ethnographic study of exhibition visitors. At the start of each research day, Laura and Rosanna would be present at the entrance to the exhibition (often sitting on a bench placed close by), and as the first visitors started to arrive, they would each follow a visitor or group of visitors. The selection of people was completely random: based only on when a particular visitor arrived at the entrance to the exhibition. Only after visitors had exited the exhibition, and after giving them a chance to watch the photo collage of the cityscape close to the entrance, would we approach them, explain our study, ask them whether we could use the data we had collected, and if they would be happy to be interviewed. By comparing our observational data with the interview material for each participant, I was able to account for subtle discrepancies between what people did in the show and how they discussed these experiences afterwards. 25

The layout of the exhibition space facilitated observing visitors unobtrusively; the central corridor proved a perfect space to ‘hang out’ because we could (pretend to) be reading text or looking at the images while still being able to observe visitors’ actions and overhear their conversations. During busy periods this technique worked extremely well with us easily blending in with other visitors, but, when there were fewer people inside the spaces, some visitors became suspicious of our lingering presence. Those who inquired about our actions were of course informed about the study and asked whether they would like to participate in the project. Everyone gave us permission, while one couple in their early thirties, who realized that they were being observed, decided to go around a second time without us in tow. 26

I also designed a booklet, small enough to be carried in a jacket pocket, that contained a number of tools to gather data. Each booklet allowed us to study ten people, with the data for one person divided into three separate sections. Section  1 consisted of one page to write down general biographical information such as gender, age, nationality, whether people travelled alone or in a group, and the overall time each visitor spent inside. Section 2 was more substantive in that it listed ten different areas in the flat with space to write down what people did and looked at in the corresponding areas, what they talked about and the time they spent inside. We listed the following ten areas with keywords to remind us what to look out for:

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introductory area: slide show

2

entrance hall: removal of shoes, lucky owl display

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Western-style room: ‘kimono closet’22, drawers, film

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bathroom: towels

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Japanese-style room: removal of shoes, drawers

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living area: sofa, albums

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dining-kitchen area: counter, tableware, closets, food packages

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visitors’ book

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cityscape

10 other areas

In this same section we also included a map of the layout of the flat that allowed us to trace the routes that visitors took. These maps also assisted us in recording what we observed and conversations we overheard in situ, while at the end of each visit, we could draw on them to remember and write down what we had witnessed in more detail. Section  3 contained an interview guide that started with a short introductory section to explain the aim of the study, ask visitors for permission to use the data collected, and clarify that all names would be anonymized. After recording general bibliographical data such as age, gender and nationality, we would start the interview. Initially we listed nineteen questions, but after a few trials we realized that most visitors found this too timeconsuming and we only kept the following seven key questions: 27

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How did you hear about this exhibition? (a question suggested by the Geffrye team)

2

What did you expect to see in the exhibition and has your visit challenged/changed your previous held ideas about Japanese homes?

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Was there anything in the exhibition that struck you as similar to your own home?

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Which was the most ‘memorable’ and why? a. photograph c. space

b. object d. film

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Did you handle any of the objects, if so which ones?

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Did you remove your shoes: why or why not?

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Is there anything that you think would have improved the exhibition?

No one we followed through the spaces refused to be interviewed, but, depending on the level of engagement of each participant, interviews lasted between ten and fifty minutes. Initially, we had played with the idea of recording all interviews, but this seemed to put people off and we were also aware of the time and effort needed to transcribe these recordings. Instead, we noted down key words and phrases during the interview and we spent a considerable amount of time immediately after each interview terminated noting down as much as we could remember from the interview while also adding any extra information about the things that we observed. Only after this part of the process had been completed, would we start following the next visitor who entered. In order for me to be able to access and analyse the data that the two students had collected, they were expected to type up all the visitors’ entries from their booklets at the end of each research day. Initially, I had only planned to write one academic paper based on our visitors’ study (Daniels 2014), but, when it became clear how unusually rich the material was, I decided to embark on this full-length book project instead.

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Chapter 1 Representational and Performative Knowledge ‘Only Thatcher entered with her shoes on’

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Introduction: Space, haptic contact and embodied knowing The feeling of home is not represented by slippers but performed by them. HETHERINGTON 2003: 1939

The mundane arrangement of outdoor shoes left behind and homely slippers ready to be stepped into, depicted in the photograph above, can be found in entrance halls all over Japan. In my view, it is this everyday act of removing shoes before stepping up into the house that best encapsulates what it means to ‘feel’ at home in this cultural context (Daniels 2008, 2010, 2015). Indeed, the main aim of the At Home in Japan exhibition was to (re)create and evoke this sense of place, this feeling of home and belonging. Hetherington’s quote above about slippers is poignant in this context because it forms part of a larger discussion about the difference between ‘distal’ and ‘proximal’ knowledge, in which he argues that (moving) bodies do not experience place ‘as representation but as contact’. In his view, in the West seeing tends to be linked with knowing which ‘implies a broad, detached understanding based on knowledge at a distance or on a concern for the big picture’. By contrast, ‘proximal knowledge does not see the object as a totality . . . but it blurs boundaries between the body and the object’ (Hetherington 2003: 1933). The complex synaesthetic choreography involved in removing shoes and stepping up into the Japanese home is an example of embodied knowledge, described by Hetherington, that is all too often ignored in contemporary museums. These institutions, that are products of enlightenment thinking, tend to favour ‘the distant, objectifying gaze of modern occularcentrism’ (Meyer and Verrips 2008: 714–75). This most clearly manifests itself in the ubiquity of the ‘do-not-touch’ policy, in turn linked with the drive to collect, preserve and venerate authentic iconic objects. However, what would an exhibition that takes space, contact and the blurring of subject and object as its starting point look like? Would this need to be an environment that prioritizes touch (or any of the other senses for that matter) at the expense of vision? Hetherington is keen to steer away from associating different senses with different types of knowledge, and repeatedly stresses that sight can also be proximal, for example, when gazing intensively at something or glimpsing out of the corner of one’s eyes. Other researchers, especially those working within religious contexts, have similarly drawn attention to the ‘haptic gaze’.23 A well-known example is given by the anthropologist Chris Pinney who has written widely about darshan – the tactile, intimate reciprocity of vision between the deity and the Hindu worshipper – in which the eye is understood to be ‘an organ of tactility . . . that connects with others’ (Pinney 2004: 193). Pinney further argues that this Indian understanding of visuality resonates with the universal practice of ‘corporetics’24 or ‘sensory corporeal aesthetics’ which is a more complex concept than ‘aesthetics’ because it is expressed through ‘gestures and other phenomenological traces’ and doesn’t allow for ‘easy linguistic extraction’ (ibid., 200). Pinney’s thinking has been strongly influenced by Taussig’s rereading of Benjamin’s notion of ‘optical unconscious’, which he defines as ‘a visceral domain in which objects become sensorily emboldened in a magic technology of embodied knowing’ (ibid., 193). Interestingly for our discussion, in the same publication Taussig also explores the relationship between vision and embodied knowing in relation to space. In his words:

How do we get to know the rooms and hallways of a building? What sort of knowing is this? Is it primarily visual? What sort of vision? Surely not an abstract blueprint of the sort the architect drew? . . . [Do] touch and three-dimensional space make the eyeball an extension of the moving, sensate body? TAUSSIG 1993: 2625

Drawing on these ideas, we aimed to transcend sensory bias and create a multisensory, immersive space that did not deny visitors any kind of ‘haptic contact’. In the first meeting with in-house staff at the Geffrye Museum in the spring of 2010, I explained that in Japan feeling at home is intrinsically linked with shoe removal, and that we would therefore like to instruct visitors to exchange their shoes for slippers. However, at the start of 2011, less than three months before the opening, Sue and I were informed that it ‘had been decided’ (in an internal meeting) that we could not ask people to remove their shoes. The exact reason(s) for this decision remain obscure, but the following two concerns were voiced: firstly, large numbers of people bending down to take off their shoes might lead to overcrowding, and, secondly, shoes left behind in the entrance hall risked being stolen.26 Theft was an issue that regularly surfaced during our preparatory discussions. I wasn’t particularly concerned because I felt that we had enough stock to replace any stolen items. However, the staff’s apprehension should of course be seen in the light of their preoccupation with the safety of objects in 33

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their permanent galleries, where visitors are physically separated from the displays through red ropes hung in front of period rooms but also standard glass vitrines in which valuable objects are placed. In a recent edited volume about the ‘inbetweenness of things’ (Basu 2017), Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll argues that these ‘parergonic’ devices produce specific contexts for engagement that impact on our perception and understanding of exhibitions (von Zinnenburg Carroll 2017: 23–24). Through a historical examination of glass display cases, she shows that, since their introduction in the sixteenth-century European Wunderkammer, they have served to stress the extraordinariness of objects by separating them from specific lived worlds. Over time, this has resulted in what she calls Vitrinendenken or ‘thinking through vitrines’, whereby ‘glass walls . . . the most insidious kind of alienation: transparent but impenetrable’ create the ‘illusion of universalism and cosmopolitanism’ (ibid., 34). The fact that these security measures as well as patrolling guards and CCTV did not prevent some objects from disappearing, only strengthened Geffrye Museum staff in their belief that preventative actions against thievery such as gluing tableware to surfaces were necessary. Such a reaction resonates with Candlin’s assertion that ‘throughout the history of museums, the general public has been characterized . . . as a threat to both the preservation of objects and to other visitors’ proper enjoyment of the collections’ (Candlin 2007: 97). The curators we worked with seemed convinced that if visitors were given free access, (at least some) people would inevitably behave badly. Of course, potential damage or theft is not necessarily the only reason behind the standard do-no-touch policy. As Pye, for example, has shown, museum professionals might also be eager to protect their ‘privilege of touch’ from which they draw their authority and status (Pye 2007: 19). The anxiety about theft in AHJ proved unfounded. The only objects that disappeared in large numbers over the six-month period were toothpicks. These most unexpected of desirable objects were kept in a cowboy-boot-shaped holder on the dining table. The fact that the ‘thieves’ chose one of the smallest and least valuable items of material culture on display suggests that the toothpicks were probably taken as mementoes or ‘trophy-objects’, possibly by daring children or teenagers. I regularly refilled the toothpick boot and in July, just as stock was running low, the Kagemoris, the only Japanese participants in my research who visited the exhibition, brought several packets of toothpicks with them from Osaka. Another rather insignificant object that went missing was a small mirror attached with Velcro to the inside of a handbag that we placed in one of the drawers in the ‘kimono closet’ in the Western-style room. None of the more expensive pieces of tableware in the dining-kitchen area were stolen, but a small decorative shell, part of a pair used during the Doll Festival in March, that was kept in one of the kitchen drawers, ‘went missing’. Finally, parts of a miniature samurai helmet (kabuto) display, placed on a sideboard in the Japanesestyle room to celebrate Children’s Day on 5 May also disappeared. Again, the items in question were two tiny pieces of gilded plastic used as antlers, with no particular monetary value. However, this discovery was more tragic because the helmet-display had been a special donation from an acquaintance in Osaka, and because without the antlers the impact of the display was greatly reduced and it could no longer be used in a possible future exhibition. We decided to enter it in the raffle and it thus ended up on a display shelf in Jen’s bedroom in Leicester, a space that will be discussed in Spread 4 in Chapter 3. On many occasions I wrongly assumed that something had been taken only to find it had been left in a different location. The migratory patterns of the towels (tenugui), which we hung from drying racks in the bathroom, were particularly fascinating; some ended up on the free-standing drying rack in the Japanesestyle room, others inside the ‘kimono closet’ in the Western-style room, and still others on the kitchen counter. Some of the photo albums were also moved from the living area to the Japanese-style room, and

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a small recipe book placed on the kitchen counter repeatedly ended up on the coffee table, suggesting that visitors moved these items to have a closer look while sitting on the sofa or on the tatami mats. The fear of theft and museum security was also one of the key themes explored in Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art held at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1994 (Roberts and Vogel 1994). This seminal exhibition, curated by Susan Vogel and Mary Roberts and designed by Chris Muller, critically examined the process of producing and conceiving of an exhibition. Topics explored ranged from exhibition design and health and safety issues to curatorial authority and the politics of display.27 In one section of this show, visitors were confronted with ‘a disquieting display of the symbols of curatorial authority and lack of trust . . . [for example] a sculpture in a Plexiglas case, behind a velvet-rope stanchion, a guard standing beside [it], the whole scene swept by surveillance video camera’ (Roberts and Vogel 1994: 15). In At Home in Japan, we were able to release objects from these ‘layers of barriers’ (ibid., 15) or at least from the glass vitrines and the velvet ropes. A CCTV camera was in operation in the Westernstyle room, but it was not very visible and footage was rarely checked. A guard also patrolled the exhibition, but this person was generally preoccupied with checking whether visitors were wearing a red sticker, thereby proving that they had paid the entrance fee. Returning to shoe theft; in my view, the problems envisioned could have been easily addressed by providing the visitors with plastic bags to carry their own shoes around the exhibition. This same approach has been tried and tested at temples throughout Japan where visitors are obliged to remove their shoes upon entering. The method has also been successfully used in the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka for the 2002 Seoul Style exhibition that allowed visitors to freely wander around in a reconstructed Korean flat (see Chapter 2). The fact that the Geffrye is a historical museum might of course be another reason why staff were reluctant to introduce these Japanese practices. In order to prevent bottlenecks in the entrance hall, we could also have made the space bigger than usual and place a large bench inside for people to sit on and take off their shoes. By including this piece of furniture, we could have also addressed the fact that elderly people might find it difficult to bend over to take off their shoes. For the same reason, benches have become popular in the entrance halls of a growing number of Japanese homes. A series depicting the initial layout plans of the flat and the changes that were implemented as our preparations for the exhibition progressed is shown on the next two pages; a bench has been added to the entrance hall in layout plan 3.

EXHIBITION LAYOUT PLANS 1

2

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3

4

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In the end, visitors were only casually ‘informed’ through a small text on a panel in the entrance hall that read, ‘In Japan people do not wear shoes inside their homes’. Whether or not visitors read this message, the life-size copy of a photograph depicting a threshold with slippers placed on the inside and shoes on the outside – that we pasted on the floor and placed real slippers and shoes on – served to reinforce this idea, and most visitors understood that in Japan shoes are removed upon entering the home. Some visitors spontaneously took off their shoes; a British woman in her sixties, for example, tried on several of the slippers that we placed on a special shoe rack close to the entrance hall in the corridor, before deciding on a pair she liked, while a British couple in their early thirties first put on the wooden clogs for outside use ( geta) before choosing a pair of slippers which they briefly exchanged in the bathroom for the blue wetroom boots. No one we spoke to seemed the least concerned about their shoes being stolen. The only cautious person I came across was an academic who walked through the space holding on to her shoes, but this was on the opening night and hers were precious (and very pricey!) Jimmy Choo stilettos.

‘I suppose we should take off our shoes here’ The majority of visitors walked through the entrance hall into the flat with their shoes on. Most claimed that the absence of explicit instructions about shoe removal meant that they were unsure whether they were ‘supposed to do so’. Those who were familiar with Japan generally said that although they thought that they should, they didn’t remove their shoes because they ‘had expected to be told to do so’. A British woman in her twenties, who had spent a year in Japan, exemplified this attitude claiming that she did not remove her shoes because she ‘didn’t see anything telling her to’. In the absence of a sign or guards providing clear instructions, many decided to copy other visitors. Upon seeing a row of shoes in the entrance hall a Japanese woman in her thirties who visited with a friend, for example, remarked: ‘I suppose we should take off our shoes here’. Both exchanged shoes for slippers and in the interview they claimed that this action had made them ‘feel more at home’. We also observed a number of people who initially walked inside with their shoes on but, once they became aware that others were wearing slippers, they returned to the entrance hall to put some on themselves. Moreover, I also observed the impact of my own

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actions on other visitors. Again and again, when people noticed that I removed my shoes at the entrance they would follow suit. Moreover, once inside, upon seeing that I was wearing slippers or that I had left my slippers outside the tatami room, many returned to the entrance hall to exchange their shoes for slippers. Some who saw me refolding the kimono or putting other objects back in their original place, and therefore probably thought that I was a member of staff, asked whether they were supposed to put on slippers. In Japan shoe removal is intimately linked with the custom of sitting and sleeping on the floor, and for hygienic reasons certain spaces (in older homes often indicated by different kinds of flooring) are therefore treated with special care. People will, for example, change into special WC slippers when going to the toilet, but upon entering a tatami room it is common to remove house-slippers all together.28 This is not just a case of cleanliness or to prevent damaging the mats, tatami rooms also continue to have a ritual function linked with seasonality, religious celebrations and life cycle events such as weddings and funerals (Daniels 2010: 42). Walking on the mats with shoes on is paramount to sacrilege. The presence of a tatami room in the exhibition, thus, presented us with the following dilemma: if shoe removal was optional at the entrance to the flat, how could we prevent visitors from walking with their outside footwear on the mats? The in-house curators suggested that we could place a do-not-enter sign, possibly enforced by a velvet rope, at the entrance to the Japanese-style room. However, not allowing visitors to go inside this room went against the interactive spirit of the exhibition. Moreover, such an approach could have elevated the symbolic function of the mats, thereby inadvertently confirming widespread stereotypes about the minimal nature of the space. Another option proposed was to simulate a tatami room by only placing a few mats along the walls of the space. However, this would mean that we deprived visitors of the actual experience of walking and sitting on the mats as well as making it impossible to try the futon, which turned out to be one of the most popular exhibits (see Chapter 5). I suggested that, instead of asking people to take off their shoes at the entrance, we could provide them with protective covers (similar to the once used to prevent contamination in laboratories or swimming pools) to pull over footwear. This would allow us to replicate the experience of not bringing outside dirt into the home, but, more importantly, it would mean that people could walk on the tatami mats with their shoes on. Internet searches led to the discovery of an ingenious device that could be used to assist people in putting these covers on without bending down, thereby, making sure that elderly

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people could also participate in the performance. However, shoe removal remained non-negotiable; my suggestion raised further concerns about the potential harmful impact of plastic shoe covers on the environment, but even after I found a biodegradable version, the proposal was shelved. Michael Graham writing on the Diverse Japan blog expressed his surprise about the lack of clear instructions about shoe removal. In his words: ‘The next room is made to look like an entrance hall with a place to store your shoes. Although it was not necessary for visitors to take off their shoes, for some reason, I felt a little rude for not doing so’ (Graham 2011). Many other visitors also voiced a nagging feeling of guilt after consciously ignoring a cultural taboo. The curators of Exhibition-ism, the 1994 exhibition focusing on African art mentioned above, also addressed the transgression of cultural taboos in museum spaces. As Muller, one of the curators, puts it: ‘the freedom to contemplate and gaze in the museum, in the Western tradition, comes at the expense of breaking taboos of the culture in which the object was born’ (Schildkrout and Keim 1993: 20). Visitors who decided to walk on the tatami mats with their shoes on also imposed their own cultural practices on a foreign artefact. The British anthropologist Mike O’Hanlon described a similar dilemma with regards to cultural taboos while putting together the much-lauded exhibition Paradise about the Wahgi people from Papua New Guinea in the Museum of Mankind in London in 1994. In the exhibition catalogue, written several months before the exhibition-build started, he states that the only component of the exhibition the Wahgi felt strongly about were ‘the large stones, painted posts and cordyline plants which mark the entrance to an area that is in some way special or restricted’ (O’Hanlon 1993: 86). He had been given two such posts that were especially painted for this purpose. However, in the final exhibition design this indigenous mechanism for delimiting space was conspicuously absent because curators had argued that these objects would ‘obstruct the flow’. Monitoring visitors’ movement is a well-established technique used to avoid overcrowding (Serrell 1997, 1998; Bitgood 2002) that became part of the museum professional’s toolkit after the first visitor studies carried out in the 1930s (Melton 1935), but more recently has been enthusiastically (and perhaps also uncritically) embraced as part of the ever-increasing health and safety regulations. Indeed, in 2011 Geffrye Museum staff also cited ‘disruption of visitors’ flow’ as one of the main justifications for not enforcing shoe removal. Both examples thus illustrate how museum professionals tend to reduce complex multisensory, bodily movements of visitors to the abstract, more easily quantifiable and arguably controllable notion of flow. Rather than trying to unravel the mysteries of health and safety, I will explore the controversy surrounding shoe removal by focusing on different understandings of sacredness. In the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness amongst museum professionals that certain objects need to be treated with special care. Ethnographic museums have taken a leading role in these debates that tend to focus on ‘sacred’ objects (e.g. human remains) belonging to indigenous groups that are displayed and/or stored in museums associated with former colonial masters. A much-cited example is a collection of sacred objects belonging to the Tjurunga Aborigines tribe that are kept in a special room in the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, where only initiates and custodians (men who are circumcised and are fathers) are allowed to see them. Closer to home there is the example of the Ethiopian sacred wooden tablets that are locked away in basement room in the British Museum where only priests can look at them. Some commentators have strongly critiqued these policies surrounding sacred objects because they argue that museums should be places where ‘we can question and contest all ideas’ instead of ‘public access, research possibilities and academic freedom . . . being curtailed and closed down’ (Jenkins 2005: 1). This disagreement highlights the tension between religious taboos and discrimination and the notion of equal rights and democracy in contemporary societies (Claussen 2009: 267). Brown has linked these contentious issues with different interpretations of secrecy, arguing that liberal democracy tends to ‘treat

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secrecy as inherently corrosive’ while in most indigenous communities access to rituals and sacred objects is limited to certain groups of initiates in turn linked with internal status differentiations (Brown 2003: 30).29 Of particular interest for our discussion about shoe removal is Brown’s assertion that definitions about what is considered sacred may vary considerably. He, for example, shows that for the Hopi, utilitarian household objects are sacred and ‘even something like a digging stick could have a ritual use’ (Brown 2003: 20). As I have repeatedly argued (Daniels 2003, 2009, 2010, 2012), unlike Western definitions of religion based on a strict distinction between the sacred and the profane, in Japan the spiritual is considered to be present in all realms of life, and mundane everyday practices such as cleaning or functional objects such as tatami mats can also have ritual significance.

The zone of awkward engagement: Discomfort and non-participation

Photograph © Mick Williamson

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The idea of people walking with shoes on tatami was inconceivable to me, but in the end a compromise was reached by adding two explanatory texts to the display. A poster the size and colour of a tatami mat was pasted on the floor in front of the entrance to the room containing a life-size image of a pair of slippers and the text: ‘In Japan people never wear shoes on tatami mats’. A second text was printed at eye level on the wall next to the entrance, reading: ‘You are entering a Japanese-style room with tatami mats on the floor. Japanese people do not wear shoes inside their homes and they even remove their slippers to walk on tatami flooring.’ Our observational study shows that when visitors were confronted with these notices, especially the text pasted on the floor that one literally had to step on to enter the room, all paused, even if only for a very brief moment. They experienced what one woman called a ‘moment of uncertainty’. Initially, I thought that not giving visitors clear instructions about shoe removal would be a major setback, at odds with the immersive, participatory nature of the show. However, the ambiguity this caused offered us the unique opportunity to observe how visitors behaved in front of the tatami room when left to their own devices. In fact, 10 per cent of those participating in our study took their shoes off after reading the signs. A British couple in their thirties, who had never been to Japan, said that it was ‘obvious’ that you were supposed to do so. Another British couple, one of whom had lived in Japan, took off their shoes and walked inside saying: ‘I like the smell’, and afterwards in the interview she said that it was ‘just natural after living in Japan’. A British woman in her twenties who removed her shoes, although her companion just walked inside, thought that it ‘just didn’t feel right to do so’. When I ask Ali, the British Japan blogger who participated in our raffle study (see Spread 7 in Chapter  5), about shoes removal she, similarly, suggested that one had to make a moral judgment, saying: ‘I just did it because it felt like the right thing to do. Others didn’t, so I felt a bit stupid, but I also felt right.’ Like Ali, many visitors were affected by the actions of others. A couple in their twenties who had visited Japan, for example, took off their own shoes after they saw three pairs left in the corridor by visitors who entered before them. Some 14 per cent of those we observed decided against going inside and watched the room from the entrance instead. Several, including a Canadian student in her twenties, a British woman in her sixties, and a British man in his forties, tried to read the explanatory texts while standing in the corridor. However, it was virtually impossible to do so from this vantage point and most would, as they stretched out to read more of the texts, put first one and then the other foot on the mats before finally shuffling inside. Two Japanese women in their twenties, who only spent ten minutes inside, just looked into the Japanese-style room while standing in the corridor. However, most of the other Japanese visitors took off their shoes and if they visited with others they encouraged their companions to do the same. While a Japanese woman and her British husband removed their shoes, their four-year-old daughter called out with excitement, ‘can I take off my shoes as well?’ All three of them played on the futon while the mother handed the child one of the fans on display. An American woman in her forties and her ten-year-old daughter remained outside of the room while she commented that the ‘room smells good’. In the interview she explained that she knew about the importance of shoe removal because she had spent time in Japan and said jokingly that she ‘did not want to offend the spirit of the tatami’. Tatami mats may be treated with uttermost respect in Japan, but 76 per cent of participants eventually walked on the mats with their shoes on. That said, many were eager to postpone this transgression. The two most common strategies were firstly, to watch one of the films (which lasted only three minutes) on a screen hung from the ceiling at the end of the corridor, and, secondly, to enter the opposite room, the bathroom. Two women in their sixties from the US adopted this latter strategy. They both stood at the entrance to the tatami room and commented on how nice it smelled. Then, one of them decided to take off her shoes and go inside, while the other one turned around and walked into the bathroom. However,

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soon she was called over by her friend and she walked straight into the room without removing her shoes. A similar situation occurred when a Belgian man and his Indian friend (see Chapter 5), who spent seventy-five minutes inside, read the text on the floor in front of the Japanese-style room. However, in this case the man decided to go in without removing his shoes, while the woman remained outside and then walked into the bathroom. Like in the example above, she eventually joined her male companion in the tatami room while keeping her shoes on.

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Bob, a British man in his fifties who had lived in Japan for a year during the 1980s, and visited with two friends, offered an interesting variation of this practice (see Map 2). They spent more than forty-five minutes inside the flat but only after they had explored all the other rooms and had passed in front of the tatami room three times, did the group finally walk inside. The overall route they took was also unusual; at the entrance to the Western-style room, Bob split off from his two companions and went straight into the bathroom where he spent a few minutes reading followed by touching some of the objects and picking up the blue boots. In the living area he read for four minutes and then sat down on the sofa to watch the albums for another four minutes. The friends finally regrouped in the dining-kitchen area, where after reading the main panel (for four minutes) and the information about recycling (for two minutes), they all returned to the Western-style room. Here they read some texts and watched the film about the dolls, which was followed by them briefly opening the drawers of the ‘kimono closet’ and slightly unfolding some of the textiles inside. Next, the three of them walked straight into the Japanese-style room without the slightest hesitation! Bob opened one drawer of the IKEA chest and used one of the fans on display. He then started to read the text and said to one of his friends standing close by: ‘In Japan the room is designed around the tatami’, to which his friend responded: ‘so when you lived there, did you have tatami mats?’ He responded that he did not and then said: ‘I suppose that we should have our shoes off in here?’

Map 2

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Like Bob, many other visitors voiced doubts about walking on the mats with their shoes on, thereby attempting to negate some of the discomfort felt about consciously breaking a cultural taboo. A British couple in their fifties, who had been to Japan, and visited with a female friend, for example, stopped at the entrance to the Japanese-style room. While looking at the shoes left in the corridor by one of the research assistants, one of the women commented: ‘we should take our shoes off’. Subsequently, all three walked inside, while the same woman commented loudly that she didn’t know ‘whether or not they want us to take our shoes off’. In the interview the friend said that she had preferred to keep her shoes on, but the couple had been less at ease explaining that they would have liked some reassurance. Similarly, when justifying their reasons for walking on the tatami mats in the interview, others claimed that it ‘was not immediately obvious’ that one was meant to do. Visitors who were familiar with Japan but kept their shoes on were the most vocal in expressing feelings of guilt. Another example was John, a British man in his forties, who was married to a Japanese woman and who throughout the interview expressed his in-depth knowledge about Japanese houses (see Chapter 3). After he stood outside the Japanese-style room for a while, he eventually went inside with his shoes on. When we asked him about his actions in the interview, he explained that he felt ‘guilty’ and that he ‘should know better; I know that it is sacrilege’. However, like many others, he decided not to remove his shoes because he ‘did not see anyone else doing it’. Also interesting in this respect was the reaction of a British man in his twenties, who spent a year in Japan. After he explained the importance of tatami mats in Japanese culture to his two female companions, all three walked inside with their shoes on, while he commented: ‘you would never wear your shoes in here’. In the interview he clarified that he was ‘thinking about’ taking off his shoes because it would be a ‘huge no-no’ for a Japanese person. How then to explain the actions of two Japanese women, both in their thirties, who, without faltering, walked onto the mats with their shoes on. During the interview one of the women claimed that she had felt ‘really bad’ doing so, and at that moment she ‘realized that she was genuinely Japanese!’ Our study demonstrates that most visitors experienced some degree of discomfort in front of the tatami room. I have called this area the ‘the zone of uncertainty’, thereby alluding to another ‘zone’ that has dominated debates in the field of museum studies for more than a decade and has been enthusiastically embraced by anthropologists working in ethnographic museums, namely ‘the contact zone’. The term was first used by Pratt to refer to ‘the spatial and temporal co[-]presence of subjects previously separated by geographical and historical disjunctures’ (Pratt 1991: 6–7). It highlights a shift in thinking, whereby museums are reconfigured as spaces of encounter between the represented Other and local curators and audiences with the stress on ‘co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices’ (ibid., 8). This approach, has raised useful questions about the politics of display, and has resulted in indigenous groups being given increased control over how they are represented. However, the concept primarily had an impact on the making of exhibitions, while little attention has been paid to how (cross-cultural) contact is experienced in practice by visitors. Indeed, our study reveals that the ‘haptic contact’ visitors to AHJ were engaged in is a complex process that is wrought with ambiguity and conflict.30 I therefore feel more kinship with Anna Tsing’s notion of ‘zone of awkward engagement’ (Tsing 2000) which she uses to refer to the Indonesian rainforest, the setting of her insightful ethnography about global connections that highlights the frictions between different actors ranging from indigenous people and Japanese loggers to Canadian investors and international activists. In her monograph about this topic she defines ‘friction’ as the ‘awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (Tsing 2004: 4). This definition captures the range of conflicting activities that we observed in front of the tatami room in our exhibition.

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Most visitors to AHJ experienced some degree of discomfort when they were confronted with the dilemma of whether or not remove their shoes before walking onto the tatami mats. Some voiced their hesitation about breaking the taboo, but the awkwardness of the situation was also communicated through silent, bodily actions. The corporeal unease that we observed mimics the bodily discomfort felt when people’s habitus is momentarily shaken, for example, when travelling or moving abroad, but also when embarking on ethnographic fieldwork in a new cultural context (Daniels 2014). In recent years growing numbers of anthropologists have paid attention to embodied learning (Marchand 2010),31 but overall the focus of these studies has been on how through long-term, repetitive bodily practices particular groups (generally within the same cultural context) develop a professional skill. Typical examples are craftsmen, surgeons or professional athletes. The kind of bodily ‘learning’ that I am concerned with here – and learning is not quite the right word in this context – is emblematic of the initial phases of interacting with unfamiliar people, objects and environments; an experience that anthropologists are of course very familiar with, but that anyone is confronted with in a new cultural context. Thus, most people who visit Japan for the first time will experience some bodily discomfort or clumsiness when engaging in everyday interactions such as pouring a drink, exchanging business cards or removing shoes. Similarly, only over time does a Belgian new to the UK grasp where to stand on the escalator, how to queue in the post office, or how to pay a black cab driver. Of course, a similar kind of bodily adjusting or attuning also happens, although probably less blatantly and more instantly, within our everyday lives inside familiar environments. Thus, we may awkwardly adjust our bodies when a passenger takes the seat next to us on public transport, or we may look for bodily clues whether to shake hands, kiss or hug when meeting someone new. In ‘the zone of awkward engagement’ visitors sensed with their bodies some of the ambiguity characteristic of all (cross-cultural) interactions, and, as we will see next, like in ‘real’ life, people reacted and/or adapted in different ways.

‘Only Thatcher entered with her shoes on’ Most visitors were first faced with the ambiguity about shoe removal in the entrance hall and this is where they made an initial distinction between the space being ‘a real home’ or ‘a gallery’. Many claimed that they would have removed their shoes ‘if it had been a real house’. Moreover, those familiar with Japan argued in a similar vein that the presence of a step or raised platform in the entrance hall ( genkan) that ‘clearly marks off the space for shoes’ would have made their experience more ‘real’. Bob, introduced earlier, for example, commented while pointing at the photograph with slippers and shoes that we pasted on the floor: ‘You would expect there to be a raised bit here’. In the interview he, like others, claimed that it was because there had been no step-up that he did not feel inclined to remove his shoes. We were unable to recreate the raised step because of wheelchair access requirements, but, as I explained above, we simulated the threshold by placing Susan’s life-size photograph of a typical demarcation on the floor. This technique worked for a British man who visited with his Japanese wife as he claimed that he was tempted to take his shoes off at the entrance when he saw the change in flooring; one side shows shoes on a tiled entrance floor, the other side slippers on a pink carpet. However, he still followed his wife’s example who walked straight inside without removing her shoes. As a consequence, they felt they could not go into the Japanese-style room because, the man added, ‘we would never walk on tatami mats with shoes on’.

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A British woman in her fifties declared that she had been tempted to put slippers on at the entrance but wasn’t sure ‘whether they were just for display’. She then said that ‘in a real situation it’s different but this is a museum’, further illustrating her point saying how she would, for example, take her shoes off in a mosque. The comparison made between exhibitions and religious spaces merits further exploration, because one of the few other discussions about visitors’ spontaneous, multisensory engagements with museum displays, that I have come across, also concerns a religious context. The exhibition Saint in the City, co-curated by Mary and Allen Roberts, that opened at the Fowler Museum at UCLA but travelled to eight American cities between 2003 and 2008, recreated a number of typical Mouride urban spaces such as a Dakar city street or a Mouride home with a prayer room. The curators also published a richly illustrated book, based on long-term fieldwork in urban Senegal, with the same title as that of the exhibition catalogue (Roberts and Roberts 2003). Upon seeing the prayer room in this exhibition, many Sufi visitors spontaneously removed their shoes to enter it. They would ‘circumambulate the place and gently touched their hands across the foreheads of the sainted persons in the paintings’ hung on the walls (Roberts 2009: 93). Some would use the booklets of poetry on display in street stalls and start singing while others joined in. A famous Sheikh from Senegal entered the prayer room and inscribed a sacred poem on a blank prayer tablet. They also observed more unusual interactions such as a local Buddhist woman who brought her prayer circle to meditate in the room more than twenty times. Roberts clarified that she had requested32 that devotees who wished to touch images in the exhibition would not be stopped because it is not only ‘a common tactile practice in Senegal, but it would be a most powerful measure of the exhibition’s success to so engage Mourides themselves’ (ibid., 93). She concluded that ‘visitors are not ordinarily allowed to touch, pick up or write upon objects . . . When interactions are permitted and do occur, they demonstrate an authenticity that goes far beyond that of market value and connoisseurship’ (Roberts 2009: 94). Of course, most Europeans33 are accustomed to wearing shoes inside their homes, and we overheard a number of visitors (upon reading about shoe removal or seeing the slippers in the entrance hall) who complained about being asked to take their shoes off when visiting people’s homes. Historically, Europeans associated shoes with class (Matthews 2006)34 and elites considered the technological advance of footwear (together with the development of the chair) a mark of civilization (Ingold 2004). Hence, during the colonial era the usage of shoes (like clothing more generally) was often employed to indicate the distinction between civilized colonizers and savage natives, and those who did not wear shoes were, for example, denied access to official buildings. These ideas can traced back to the Enlightenment and are based on ‘an imagined separation between the activities of a mind at rest and a body in transit, between cognition and locomotion, and between the space of social and cultural life and the ground upon which that life is materially enacted’ (Ingold 2004: 321).35 The Kagemoris, the only Japanese participants who visited the exhibition, were surprised (and probably also Photograph © Yutaka Kagemori

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horrified) to see people wearing shoes on the tatami mats. This explains why Yutaka-san took several photos of people transgressing this taboo (see photograph on previous page). When I clarified that shoe removal had been a contentious issue, Noriko blurted out: ‘well, in the past it was the same with Thatcher’. My puzzled expression caused her to elucidate how during a summit in Tokyo in the 1980s the Japanese government invited all the dignitaries to visit a Japanese teahouse, and ‘although one wouldn’t expect anyone to know about shoe removal, only Thatcher entered with her shoes on’. She added that the incident wasn’t published widely,36 but she recalled reading how even the American delegates had been surprised about her mishap. At this point Yutaka-san suggested that Thatcher was the only foreign woman present, and ‘perhaps it was “ladies first”, so she couldn’t copy the other people’. But why didn’t anyone forewarn her or did they tell her and she forgot? Or perhaps she didn’t feel comfortable removing her shoes? Indeed, one final reason museum staff gave for not enforcing shoe removal was that it would make people feel ‘uncomfortable’. A handful of those who participated in our study unequivocally declared that they would not have removed their shoes if they had been asked to do so. Some explained that they felt embarrassed about dirty socks or smelly feet. Others thought that it was too much effort. A British woman in her forties, for example, said that she ‘couldn’t be bothered to take my shoes off and then lace them back up again’. These examples lay bare the fact that an exhibition that aims to question deeply ingrained cultural stereotypes through immersive, participatory activities relies on the visitors’ willingness to partake (see Chapter 3). Although many visitors embraced the differences and sensations of unease and discomfort associated with them, as the following example shows, some chose not to participate. A man, who was part of a trio in their fifties who entered the tatami room with their shoes on, justified his actions by saying that ‘I am not Japanese’. A woman in her thirties from New Zealand who lived in London claimed that she did not take her shoes off because she would ‘feel weird’ and ‘selfconscious’ about what other people thought, adding ‘it’s not my culture and this is not Japan’. Finally, a British woman in her thirties took off her shoes to walk inside while her Japanese husband decided to wait in the corridor. He later explained that he couldn’t be ‘bothered to untie his shoes’ and that he already knew ‘what tatami mats feel like’. There will always be those that prefer to stare at other cultures from a distance. A truly democratic exhibition should not try to suppress such antagonistic reactions (Bishop 2004: 78–79) but allow for conflict or friction to be part of the creative explorations of exhibitions too. Moreover, as we will see in Chapter  4, participation does not only refer to physical interaction. Visitors can also be actively involved if they are provoked into reflecting on or discussing the displays with others. That said, our findings suggest that the majority of visitors happily engaged with the displays in more embodied ways and most claimed that if prompted they would also have gone along with removing their shoes. I would like to end this section with another anecdote about a conservative British politician. On the opening night of the exhibition on 22 March 2011, I was to guide through the flat the then Minster for Culture, Jeremy Hunt. He had agreed to give the opening speech because the Japanese ambassador to the UK had to withdraw following the Tohoku earthquake, which happened only ten days earlier. I had removed my shoes and wore a pair of pink slippers to welcome Mr Hunt at the entrance to the exhibition. To my great surprise our honourable guest took off his shoes without any prompting and swiftly exchanged them for a pair of flowery slippers. I learned later that Mr Hunt had actually lived in Japan for two years, and in his speech, he even mentioned that it was when shoe removal became automatic that he realized he had been in the country for a long time.

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Discussion: ‘Please touch the items in this exhibition’ We relate to the world through the touch of the cornea of our eyes, the tympanum in our ears, or the sensors of our skin and/or our whole body. VERRIPS 2002: 39

Our experiment exposed the fact that for exhibitions that encourage an active, multisensory engagement with the displays to be successful, most visitors have to make an effort to change deeply ingrained exhibition-going practices. Although we did not give visitors to AHJ instructions about shoe removal, we did encourage them to explore the exhibition through touch. The text ‘please touch the items in this exhibition’ was printed in large bold font at the bottom of our introductory panel that all visitors encountered before entering the flat.37 Although we observed huge variations in intensities of touch, for about onethird of those studied, ‘touch’ merely meant opening and closing of drawers with ‘please open’ sign pasted on them. The use of drawers is well established in museums with visitors being encouraged to open drawers containing a variety of flat objects ranging from natural specimens and archaeological finds to stamps, postcards and textile patterns.38 In AHJ we included two drawers in the ‘kimono closet’ in the Western-style room and four more in two large tableware dressers in the dining-kitchen area. However, because few visitors actually opened these drawers, we decided to add ‘please open’ signs. Two free-standing, chests of drawers, bought at IKEA in London, were placed, without any texts, one each in the Western-style room and the tatami room. They contained everyday used household items such as blankets, clothes, towels, gifts and even cockroach repellent. Only the most adventurous visitors would look inside these kinds of drawers and even fewer would proceed to handle their contents. Indeed, opening drawers doesn’t necessary result in people touching or picking up items, let alone trying on the items placed inside. Natasha, one of the visitors in her mid-thirties who participated in the raffle study, told us that, although she loved the drawers, she was afraid to take things out. She explained that her reluctance to do so was also linked with the types of things placed inside: Opening and looking was ok; I’ve done that in museums in the past, but clothes especially – not so much the kitchen – but the clothes and kimonos seemed so delicate, so it was like opening someone’s underwear drawer. They were so beautiful, and silk; they were gorgeous. In other words, it ‘felt strange’ to touch somebody else’s clothes, especially since they were made of delicate materials. However, she also joked that once she and her partner had overcome their initial timidity they ‘had to touch everything in there’. Visitors who touched the least were often the most enthusiastic about the interactive elements of the show in their interview, but individual levels of interaction must be seen in the context of people’s previous museum experiences and expectations. A single Brazilian woman in her forties, who only opened the ‘please open’ drawers, for example, expressed her enjoyment of doing this as it was the first time ever that she visited an exhibition where this was allowed. The experience also varied according to age, with middle-aged and elderly visitors seemingly finding it the most difficult to change a habit of a lifetime. A British man in his forties who only opened the drawers with instructions, touched one of the photo albums and picked up a sitting cushion in the living area said in the interview that he needed ‘more

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prompting and clear instructions’. A couple in their fifties explained that they did not engage much because they were probably ‘too old to break a habit’. They added that the fact that they not only opened the drawers with instructions but also touched the towels and the curtain in the bathroom as well as taking a small Hello Kitty tin out of a drawer in the dining-kitchen area was already challenging for them. Similarly, another couple in the same age group said that it was great to be able to touch things but they ‘didn’t dare to’ because of ‘a certain habit’ of being in museums. Like the couple above, they felt that they were ‘too old’ to change now, but they also pointed out that the sign in the introductory area was not visible enough and that they hadn’t even noticed the additional texts because ‘they are hung so low’. By contrast, another British couple in the same age group told us that they felt secure that they would not be told off touching because they were ‘plenty of signs’ telling visitors to handle objects. Still, it appeared that many people managed to move through the space without noticing any of instructive texts, and when one of the research assistants inquired why a British couple in their thirties had been reluctant to physically interact, they exclaimed, obviously flabbergasted: ‘oh, so you can touch things’. The examples above suggest that despite the various ‘please touch’ signs in the space, visitors did not easily shed deeply ingrained inhibitions. Saunderson, similarly, argues that ‘so naturalized is this “hands off” attitude that it can be hard to break even with permission’ (Saunderson 2012: 168). She recalls how when she visited a Franz West exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2003 that although exhibits were clearly marked to be interacted with, it took some time for me to summon up the nerve to sit in one of the seats . . . other visitors would circle exhibits, repeatedly read the instructions that they were allowed to touch, and yet still seemed to have a guilty demeanour if they touched the artworks. SAUNDERSON 2012: 168

Just how entrenched this behaviour is became clear when we observed visitors who had brought along their children. The interactive aspect of the exhibition was an instant hit with the young who we frequently observed touching, picking up and handling things: trying on the wooden clogs placed in the entrance hall or lying on the futon in the tatami room were particular favourites. When left to their own devices, many children would enthusiastically nose through all the drawers (not only the ‘please open’ ones), and while doing so, they often discovered objects that we had hidden inside. One object that was particularly liked was a card game set (karuta), stored in a beautiful lacquered box that I had placed in the bottom drawer of an IKEA chest in the Western-style room. On several occasions I saw children playing with the cards, depicting colourful images of court ladies and noble men from the Heian period (eighth to twelfth

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century), sprawled out on the floor. Ali, one of the participants in our raffle study, won the game and the series of images above shows her playing with it in her home (see also Spread 7). Children might have been inquisitive, eager to discover what each room had to offer, but adults felt much less at ease in what felt like someone’s private space. Indeed, we repeatedly overheard parents scolding their offspring for touching things. Ali, similarly, described how she first felt awkward about ‘snooping around’ but then she slowly eased into this new experience, saying: I felt quite hesitant with the whole exhibition at first. I went around it a few times, and because at first it was like walking into someone’s home, and I felt in Japan that you couldn’t really poke around in people’s homes at all. You don’t go through someone’s cupboards, and you don’t look too much, and you don’t really stare at what’s on the shelf. But then when I realized that I could, I became a bit more like ‘I can get a peeping look’ and I sat down on the sofa. Other visitors also claimed that their initial apprehension was soon replaced by a ‘child-like’ delight in being able to discover things for themselves. Jane, a British woman in her sixties (who I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 4) visited on her own and liked being able to touch things but said that she could also understand that this might not be possible in the case of very valuable artefacts. She made a comparison with the ‘objects upstairs’ in the Geffrye’s permanent galleries, that reminded her of things in her family home, that were for display only and that she as a child was ‘not allowed to touch’. This comment highlights how both the layout of the museum and the proximity of permanent collections has an impact on how visitors experience exhibitions. In the Geffrye Museum, all visitors had to walk through a long, narrow corridor before they reached the temporary exhibition space situated in the basement of an annex. While moving through this space, people would regularly stop to gaze at displays of objects from the permanent collections both in cordoned off period rooms and in glass vitrines in special bays. The fact that visitors were first confronted with these objects, most of which they were prohibited to touch, would probably have had an impact on their ability to adapt to our ‘please-touch-everything’ philosophy. A sole male visitor in his forties contrasted the immersive experience in our exhibition with the permanent display rooms upstairs, saying that instead of being led through the space ‘in a one-way system’ he liked to ‘freely wander through the flat’ because ‘you are fully immersed, you feel like you are in it’. In other words, this visitor enjoyed

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sensing the environment with his whole body while walking through the space, instead of just touching things with his hands. This feeling of immersion and the sense of being present in a specific space, that many visitors experienced, will be explored in more detail in Chapters 2 and 5. Although the do-not-touch policy remains ubiquitous, growing numbers of museums have also begun to experiment with ‘touch’.39 This new museological approach is based on the assumption that through direct encounters with specific objects, instead of gazing at them from behind glass, visitors may gain a more intimate and empathetic understanding of the collections (Dudley 2012).40 Many museums, for example, produce handling collections, consisting of objects that are considered less fragile or copies of authentic items. These objects are employed in special sessions in museums or they are taken into classrooms or other learning environments.41 Although overall this focus on ‘handling’ is a positive development, in the museum context ‘touch’ seems to be rather uncritically equated with ‘touching with the hand’. The Power of Touch (Pye 2007), an edited volume that examines touch in museum spaces, is indicative of this trend. Most chapters start from the assumption that ‘touch’ is a distinctive sense associated with the hand, thus, reinforcing the separation of the senses, each with its own peculiarities, at the expense of a more inter-sensorial approach. Ingold (2000) is again instructive here as he questions common sensorial juxtapositions such as vision versus hearing or (especially within the museum context) vision versus touch. He starts by distinguishing between specific cognitive or symbolic models that may indeed prioritize a particular sense (i.e. the ocular-centrism in academia) and the way that all people experience the world haptically with their whole bodies (including their minds). He concludes that in practice all the senses are working together as an ‘experiential whole’ within a specific environment (Ingold 2000: 245). Thus, ‘the eyes are as much a part of the perceptual system for listening as are the ears part of the system for looking’ (ibid., 245). In the 2004 article that I have introduced above, Ingold specifically contrasts touching with the hand, being strongly associated with the mind and intellect, with the tactility of the feet or ‘pedestrian touch’, linked with haptic movement through space (Ingold 2004: 330). By paying proper attention to the feet, we inevitably become attentive to the fact that walking plays a major part of any exhibition visit. Indeed, if ‘what we perceive must, at least in part, depend on how we move’ (Ingold 2004: 331), then any study about exhibition visitors must properly scrutinize the kinds of walking different spatial layouts encourage. The rhythm of a standard exhibition walk tends to be structured by a given route. This kind of movement generally consists of bursts of forward motion interrupted by pauses to inspect certain things

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or to engage with the displays. If seating is provided, some visitors might be inclined to take longer breaks. However, if the exhibition space is crowded, the walk will soon resemble an impatient shuffle with movement constantly impeded by those ahead, depending on how fast they vacate the space in front of the displays. In AHJ , the spatial layout resembled the interior of a standard Japanese domestic dwelling with an entrance hall and a number of rooms off a central corridor. In theory, the presence of this corridor meant that it would have been possible for visitors to walk through the flat briskly while only briefly gazing inside each room. However, in practice the majority of visitors moved at a leisurely pace from room to room. Although people were free to choose their own trajectory,42 we observed that most followed a similar script. As shown in Map 3, upon entering the temporary exhibition space, most turned left and, after spending some time in the introductory area, they moved into the hallway. Then they walked into the Western-style room (the first room they encountered), followed by the Japanese-style room and the bathroom (or the other way around), then the living area and finally the dining-kitchen area before exiting through the textile curtain (noren) where many would stop to look at or contribute to the visitors’ book. That said, visitors who decided to put on domestic slippers had to return to the hallway to retrieve their shoes. There were some other exceptions to the standard route such as two visitors who went through the flat twice, while two lone middle-aged British women who after they had inspected the dining-kitchen

Map 3

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area, returned to the Japanese-style room and Western-style room and then existed through the entrance hall. Two other women within this age group returned to the bathroom after they had reached the end of the exhibition, while two Japanese visitors and an American woman in her forties with her ten-year-old daughter entered through the exit. On average people spent twenty-eight minutes inside the exhibition space.43 This seems to correspond with the claim made in the museum literature that visitors’ interests inside exhibitions remain at a high plateau for a maximum of thirty minutes (Falk et al. 1985).44 Apparently, after this time ‘visitors fatigue’, whether physical or mental, is likely to set-in; this is characterized by visitors’ reduced capacity to concentrate, and a change ‘from initial slow movement around the exhibits, to cruising around halls, and more selective stopping’ (Davey 2005: 17). Although this observation might be true for standard exhibitions that expect visitors to only gaze at displays from a distance while reading labels and other texts, we found that the interest of the majority of our visitors peaked twice; firstly, at the start of the visit in the hallway and the Western-style room, and, secondly, towards the end of their visit, in the diningkitchen area; the last room they reached. The fact that this was also the space where visitors were given the most opportunities to interact suggests that it was the immersive aspect that enabled us to sustain visitors’ attention for a prolonged period of time. Finally, as I have stressed throughout this chapter, walking inside these domestic spaces in shoes was of course a very different experience from (slowly) shuffling around in slippers.45 However, it was only a minority, who chose to enter the tatami room wearing socks or with bare feet, who were also able to experience the environment that we created with ‘the tactility of their feet’. Indeed, these visitors were pleasantly surprised by the softness of the straw mats under their feet and recalled how comfortable sitting and lying on them had felt, while some also commented on how they had liked the mats’ penetrating, earthy smell.46 The difference between walking on the tatami mats with bare feet and while wearing shoes or slippers nicely illustrates the various intensities of haptic engagement that the exhibition facilitated, and in the following chapter I will discuss in detail how we consciously designed multilayered, open-ended spaces to encourage a holistic multisensory engagement with the displays. I will also demonstrate how we experimented with photography to blur the supposed distinction between representational and embodied forms of knowledge.

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MIKE: SPREAD 2

Mike –

‘There is a connecting memory in my feet’ Mike is a British schoolteacher in his late thirties who teaches religious studies and philosophy. When Sue and I visited him in his airy one bedroom flat in west London in 2012, it soon became obvious that he had surrounded himself with souvenirs from his many travels and stays abroad. The majority of things on display were Japanese; colourful hanging textiles, more familiar woodblock prints, pottery and even a bath mat. On one of the walls a statement sushi clock took pride of place. Mike lived in Kobe for seven years teaching English but when he took us on a tour through his flat he frequently failed to ‘quite remember where things are from’. After all, it had been more than twelve years since he actually lived in the country. He had been back on several trips and each time brought back more ‘bits and bobs’, while he continued to receive an endless stream of gifts from Japanese visitors. A treasured collection of T-shirts and neckties covered in popular Japanese characters such an Astro Boy or Doraemon, the robot cat, are ‘much less worn now’. By contrast, his large Japanese CD collection had retained more of an active presence in his London life. Two other people who participated in the raffle and who lived for at least one year in Japan had also turned their

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private spaces into shrines for all things Japanese. In Chapter  3 I will introduce Jen, a woman in her midtwenties from Leicester, who has a BA in the anthropology of Japan and spent one year in Nagoya as part of her degree; while Ali, a Japan blogger in her thirties from London, who spent two years in Japan, will be discussed in Chapter 5. Returning to Mike; he visited At Home in Japan together with his Spanish girlfriend, and he enthusiastically showed us the exhibition pamphlet that he pasted in a scrapbook containing a range of tickets and other ephemera related to memorable events. He expressed his views of the show as follows: I liked the idea, I liked the ordinariness of it – the fact that it’s kind of real as opposed to some idealized version. . . . I remember repeatedly saying to my girlfriend that that’s exactly what it’s like – there was the bathroom, the feel of stuff, and the little tatami room, the drawers with photos; you know, I really liked it a lot; I thought it was very interesting. 58

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During the raffle Mike, like so many other people we spoke to, had his eye on the post box covered in stickers because he thought that it was ‘the coolest thing’. However, he was only about the twelfth person to be called and because he wanted something that he ‘could actually use’, he chose the lot containing four sitting cushions (zabuton), a rectangular bamboo mat and a white piece of textile. This latter item was the textile curtain (noren) that we hung across the entrance to the bathroom in AHJ , but that, as I mentioned in the Introduction, had been successfully transformed into a tablecloth in his girlfriend’s home in Spain. The four sitting cushions (zabuton), on the other hand, ended up on Mike’s sofa where they joined a colourful bunch of ‘Asian’ pillows: one Tibetan, one Nepalese and two Vietnamese. He recalls how he initially planned to use the pillows for practising meditation, but they were too thin, saying: ‘you wouldn’t find these kinds of pillows in England . . . I have experimented with mediation – these are mediation cushions. But there’s not enough there [squeezing one of the pillows]’. I explained that many items in the exhibition were bought cheaply because we were on a tight budget, but Mike did not think that this was necessary problematic, saying: ‘the Japanese love cheap stuff! They are real bargain experts’. He then reminisced about his time as a teacher in Japan, claiming that these are actually ‘the kinds of cushions you would find in Japanese schools’. Mike also received one of the forty unused pairs of slippers that we gave away at the end of the raffle. He wore these slippers, made from a heavy green textile with a large red flower pattern, throughout our visit. He claimed that he really liked how they fitted, but also joked that they were not ‘the style I would automatically choose . . . but I can just imagine an obachan (granny) wearing them’. Interestingly, Mike expressed how while touching the cushions with his hands but also while wearing and moving around with the slippers on his feet that he experienced a kind of bodily memory that ‘transported’ him back to Japan. As he eloquently put it:

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I guess in a way there is a kinetic memory – when I picked them [the cushions] up, when I touched them, there was something there from a long time ago, something I had completely forgotten about. Same with the slippers. There is a connecting memory in my feet – a very very mild one: it doesn’t conjure up extraordinary emotions, but it’s kind of yeaaah yeaah! Other visitors, who, like Mike, lived for a prolonged period of time in Japan also commented on how moving through the exhibition in slippers had brought back memories. However, this raises the question of how those who had never been to Japan and thus couldn’t draw on personal memories, who accounted for about 60 per cent of those participating in our study, experienced their visit. Although we provided general historical and cultural contextualization for practices that might occur in every room, we purposefully did not describe or provide textual information on labels for each individual object on show (see Chapter  4). Thus, Mike was right to suggest that ‘there were certain things that wouldn’t have been obvious to people if they hadn’t been to Japan’. In the next chapters, I will return to how the exhibition design tried to account for different levels of familiarity with Japan and examine whether or not this strategy was successful.

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Courtesy of the Geffrye Museum, London

Chapter 2 Photography, Exhibition Design and Atmosphere ‘I felt I could step through the photograph’

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Introduction: ‘Life-size photos set the scene’ One eye-opening moment was seeing that picture of what people have in the back of their house, which was a stuffed cabinet [laughing]. We would do that too, so that was really interesting. And the other thing that stood out very vividly was that one reason why it was like that is because you’re not supposed to get rid of the gifts people give you. And I remembered that, because you have this room full of stuff and just little things, you know . . . So those were some of the most vivid photographs – the real back of Japanese doors [laughing]. NATASHA, POLISH-AMERICAN WOMAN IN HER THIRTIES

The comments above were made by Natasha, one of the participants in our raffle project, while she focused on Sue’s photograph of bookshelves filled with books and documents, perfumes and a variety of small decorative trinkets, taken inside the Kagemoris flat in Osaka in 2006. We printed this image lifesize and mounted it on an MDF board that was hung floating off one of the walls in the Western-style room, the first room most visitors entered after passing through the entrance hall. When the Kagemoris were confronted with this photograph during their visit, they seemed visibly startled. However, surprise soon gave way to intrigue, and as Noriko Kagemori moved closer and inspected the image for a while she loudly proclaimed in English: ‘very messy’. Similarly, Natasha had been drawn in by the close-up view of the contents of the shelves; the image made her question her stereotypes about Japanese minimal aesthetics, because by drawing a comparison with her own storage practices, she concluded that everyday life behind closed doors is rather similar across cultures. After reading the texts about the importance of gifting and issues surrounding the disposal of goods on the image-text wallpaper in the same room, she also understood the specificity of the Japanese context. This particular example, thus, illustrates that our strategy to offer visitors layers of textual and visual knowledge, that they could engage with as they pleased, was successful in relaying both the specific and universal qualities of Japanese homes. In this chapter I will discuss how through our experimentation with photography we hoped to evoke the atmosphere in Japanese domestic spaces. We thereby questioned the standard uses of photos in (ethnographic) museum displays, where they either illustrate knowledge provided in texts or contextualize specific objects in use. I will focus on our use of life-size photos to ‘set the scene’, but first I will briefly consider the other types of images that we employed, that were placed on image-text wallpapers in every room. In Chapter 4, I will analyse the texts on these wallpapers, but here I will zoom in on our intention to produce a creative dialogue between texts and photographs. Over the last few decades, there have been a number of attempts by anthropologists to review the imbalanced relationship between image and text in museum displays. A much-cited example is The Ones That Are Wanted, an exhibition curated by the anthropologist/photographer Corinne Kratz, that was first shown in Nairobi in Kenya in 1989, and then toured to several cities in the US (Kratz 2002). Kratz juxtaposed her own colour photographs of Okiek people with comments made by locals about these images. She incorporated multiple indigenous perspectives to question cultural stereotypes about Africa, but the actual presentation of the photographs was rather unadventurous; they were shown as singular, framed objects produced in small sizes that were not that different from artworks in photographic exhibitions.

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Returning to the AHJ wallpapers, although photographs and other visual materials that were embedded in these posters functioned as conventional illustrations, we freed Sue Andrews’s photographs from standard museum framing practices by mounting them on MDF boards that were suspended on the wall. Moreover, these images were uncaptioned and strategically placed to encourage visual comparison with other images thereby telling their own story whether or not people read the texts nearby. In the photo below, that shows the wallpaper in the kitchen, for example, Andrews’s photograph of the family Takahashi sitting at their dining table in 2006 was mounted on MDF board (A2b). This image is visually linked, firstly, to a series of three black and white sketches that trace the changes in tables and their associated eating practices in Japanese homes over the past two hundred years (A2a). Secondly, the photo also relates to a full-colour sketch of a living-dining-kitchen area inside a temporary home built for the American occupation forces in Japan during the second half of the 1940s. This image is, in turn, paired with a photograph taken of a couple listening to records inside a living room with a sofa area inside an apartment from the 1960s. A2c, on the other hand, shows a cluster of three of Sue’s photographs of Japanese kitchen cupboards. These images are embedded in the wallpaper in the far-right corner, next to the actual kitchen cupboards that we created inside the dining-kitchen space. Finally, in the bottom band (C) of some of the wallpapers, we hung A4 documents that that visitors could unhook and look at in more detail. These either listed comments Japanese people had made about the photos taken inside their homes (C2), or they were pamphlets (C1) that advertised a range of consumer products. Our aim was to question text-based, meaning-driven approaches to exhibition design, and not treat photographs as subordinate to objects. Another ethnographic exhibition that also attempted to break with

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the standard, rather conservative use of photographs was Paradise, the 1994 exhibition about Papua New Guinean Highlanders curated by Mike O’Hanlon that I introduced in Chapter 1. It showed a number of lifesize, colour photographs of people and environments that were not secondary to either museum texts or objects (O’Hanlon 1993). In his review of the exhibition, James Clifford praised these photographs because they ‘are in bright, living colour. Enlarged and frequent, they work against the established tendency for museum objects, even new ones, to appear as collected treasures from another time’ (Clifford 1995: 99). Moreover, he rightly argues that these photographs, that make people, things and environments present, question the absolute focus on objects in museums that draws on a ‘distinction between object and context, figure and ground’ (ibid., 99). We did not respect this supposed distinction either and experimented with novel visual techniques to simulate an immersive sense of place. As the anthropologist Enid Schildkrout has argued, the way space is arranged and how photographs are used may completely alter the ‘feel’ of an exhibition. She illustrated this point by contrasting the impact of the exhibition African Reflections, introduced in Chapter 1, when it was held in New York and Washington as follows: In New York it had a kind of warmth, an alive feeling that I personally missed in Washington . . . we used photographs as objects and as context, not specifically as information. The designer very cleverly played with altering the size of photographs, so that in some places they worked as a kind of stage setting or diorama; in other cases, they were objects in themselves. SCHILDKROUT AND KEIM 1993: 14

Whereas in African Reflections visitors were expected to constantly move between looking at photographs and at objects in glass cases (Schildkrout and Keim 1993: 14), we went a step further by disentangling the photos we used from textual narratives and freeing the objects from their cases (or cages) altogether (see Chapter 1). In the introduction to a recently edited volume about the uses of photographs in museums, Edwards and Lien lament how the potential of photos is curtailed because they are either ‘subordinated to the logic and value systems of objects’ or they are used to ‘create a sense of the real and immediacy of content’ (Edwards and Lien 2014: 8). Although I agree with their first critique, I have been less impressed by their evaluation of ‘photomurals, panoramas, and enlargements’ that offer in their view ‘a sense of authenticity, ambience, memory and affect rather than specific information’ (ibid., 8). They argue that photographs should be primarily used as documents that allow us to ‘complicate’ the past (ibid., 9). This focus on the past is linked with assumptions that the role of museums is to ‘teach’ visitors about the meanings of treasures collected from another time. I will return to this issue in Chapter 4, but here I want to problematize the fact that Edwards and Lien overlook the potential role of photographs to enrich museum experiences that are ‘not oriented towards the object as such, but towards the environment generated by the museum as space’ (Bjerregaard 2015: 76). In a 2015 special issue of the journal Emotion, Space and Society that focuses on atmosphere, Bjerregaard makes an intriguing, although controversial, argument in favour of exploring the capacity of exhibitions to ‘generate a kind of embracing experience, wrapping the visitor in atmosphere’ (ibid., 75). In his view, both meaning making and the ‘presence effect’ of displays should be taken into consideration. He acknowledges that in recent years many museum professionals have critiqued textual, meaning-driven approaches (he cites Dudley as a positive example), which has resulted in a shift towards facilitating more intimate encounters between audiences and objects. The recent focus on touch in museums (albeit primarily touch with the hands; see Chapter 1), forms part of this development. However, Bjerregaard goes

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on to question the deeply ingrained ‘notion of the object in itself as the primary experience of exhibitions’ (ibid., 76), arguing instead that if we make objects part of a more general spatial immersive phenomenon, they will have a more lasting effect on visitors than the actual information they account for (ibid., 75–76). The veneration of ‘the object’ or one could also add, following Edwards and Lien, the ‘photograph as object’ remains widespread amongst museum professionals. However, a similar critique can be directed at the body of interdisciplinary social science research about material culture that has developed since the end of the 1980s in the UK . While these studies have been hugely successful in exposing the dynamic and dialectical relationships between people and things across times and cultures, they tend to ignore the specificity of (spatial) environments in which human–thing interactions occur. Moreover, both things and people (and occasionally places) continue to be construed as finite entities instead of ‘constellations of processes’ (Massey 2005). As I have previously argued in the same issue about atmosphere that the Bjerregaard article appeared in, ‘a focus on the concept of atmosphere offers a unique opportunity to examine the complex and often fluid affective relationships between people, things and environments, without prioritizing either human intentionality’ or so-called ‘material agency’ (Daniels 2015: 48). In what follows, I will discuss the different ways that we employed life-size photos in the exhibition as well as how visitors reacted to these images in order to examine how photography might be employed more creatively and effectively to ‘evoke’ a specific atmosphere and produce an immersive sense of place in the museum environment.

Photography, domestic space and immersive exhibitions Photography played a central role in exhibition design during the 1920s and 1930s when experimentation was widespread both in European and North American museums. In Europe avant-garde designers, driven by a socialist agenda, produced dynamic, interactive installations that aimed to ‘increase the legibility, accessibility and affective intensity of exhibits, and pointed towards the potential of exhibitions as democratic, participatory media’ (Henning 2007: 29). Contrary to the conceptualization of the museum as a ‘disciplinary institution, which polices and regulates visitors’, these exhibition designers employed affective new media such as photography and film as well as new participatory devices such as push buttons or peepholes to ‘magnify the viewers sense of autonomy and individual experience’ (Staniszewski 1998: 70). In Germany, members the Bauhaus group such as Gropius and Breuer were hugely influential in emphasizing the central role of the audience’s experience in exhibition design. However, here I will only be able to briefly discuss Bayer’s and Moholy–Nagy’s experimentation with photography. Herbert Bayer’s 1930s designs for the German installation at the Exposition de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, for example, was based on what he called ‘The Diagram of Field of Vision’ (see Sketch 1 overleaf). This scheme offered visitors various perspectives by arranging photo panels in relation to their field of vision rather than mounting them flat on the wall. For the 1935 Building Workers’ Unions exhibition in Berlin, he took this experiment a step further by creating walking platforms raised above the ground that gave visitors ‘the ability to scan the ceiling, floor, and wall panels’ (see Sketch 2). Moreover, some photos were composed of louvers that turned automatically and altered the images (Staniszewski 1998: 25–28). Experimentation with various perspectives was also characteristic of the New Vision Photography that Moholy–Navy’s work is associated with (ibid., 44). For the 1929 Film und Photo exhibition in Stuttgart, for example, he designed the much-discussed Room One that was filled with a multitude of photographs (commercial, scientific, news, artistic, anonymous) produced in a variety of sizes and shapes without any

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Sketch 1: Herbert Bayer, Diagram of field of vision, 1930. Courtesy of Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe

Sketch 2: Herbert Bayer, Diagram of 360 degrees field of vision, 1935. Courtesy of Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe

captions to demonstrate ‘the diverse ways of picturing the modern world that the camera could provide’ (ibid., 45). Moreover, in the Building Workers’ Unions exhibition from 1935, introduced above, he used peephole constructions as well as large-scale photographs to provide unusual close-ups (ibid., 44–45). The novelty and vitality of these photographic displays has been inspirational, but our approach differed significantly in that we did not conceptualize the audience as ‘viewers’, but as multisensory agents that move through an immersive environment (Chapter 1). During this same time period American exhibition designers also experimented with immersive, multisensory exhibitions, but the focus was more on the use of novel lighting and theatrical techniques in order to display objects within dramatic environments. Evocative examples are the pioneering installations created by D’Hanoncourt in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) in New York. I am unable to discuss D’Hanoncourt’s design innovations in detail here, but he saw the ‘museum as a laboratory in whose experiments the public is invited to participate in . . .’ (Staniszewski 1998: 115–16). Some of his ideas that we took on board in AHJ were: (1) making didactic texts ‘visually unobtrusive and kept to a minimum’ (ibid., 115), (2) creating non-linear layouts with no prescribed way for moving around,47 and (3) experimenting with illumination through the use of large-scale photographs mounted in light boxes that I will discuss in Section 4. Overall D’Hanoncourt aimed to evoke the feeling of a certain (cultural) environment through colour schemes and dramatic lighting, ‘the objects . . . carry with them something of the atmosphere of the places from which they come, something of the emotions which underlay the various cultural conventions which governed their making’ [my emphasis] (Bateson, quoted in Foster 2012: 145).48 In AHJ we also simulated the atmosphere of the specific environment where the objects concerned came from, but we focused on the spaces in which they were consumed, namely, Japanese homes. We filled the exhibition space with everyday used commodities and by paying attention to a

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variety of domestic consumption practices we were able to raise questions about the tendency of museums to frame objects as either art works or artefacts (Foster 2012: 149). Many of D’Hanoncourt’s innovations grew out of his openness to borrow display techniques from the commercial world of department stores, fairs and theatres (Foster 2012: 146–48). In other words, he was able to transcend the supposed distinction between art and commerce and show that exhibitions are not purely aesthetic experiences sealed off from other spheres of life. In his 1941 MoMA exhibition Indian Art of the United States, for example, he emphasized the commodity status of Indian arts and crafts transforming rugs, pots and other objects into expensive pieces of modern home decorations that became an important source of revenue for Native Americans. Some visitors to AHJ also came in search of inspiration for improving their homes and many singled-out objects that they wanted to purchase (Chapter 4). However, for the majority of people the gallery space emulated the multisensory experience of home, and next I will explore different ways in which museums have tried to convey the feel of domestic spaces. In 1949 the MoMA started the House in the Garden exhibitions, whereby a famous architect was asked to build a fully furnished home in the museum garden. It is telling that after two modernist designer homes, the third project, built in 1954, was a Japanese house called Shofuso. This building was first put together in Nagoya in Japan and then dismantled and shipped to the US where is was erected by a team of Japanese carpenters, plasterers and other workmen. Shofuso was based on elite architecture from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, characterized by the empty rooms that continue to be iconic in the West, especially in the design and arts community.49 One could argue that the MoMA , thus, propagated the myth of Japanese minimalism, but it is worth pointing out that the aim was never to focus on lived-in, affordable family homes and the two previous houses exhibited were also devoid of any traces of human occupancy. An eighteen-minute long film entitled A Japanese House50 accompanied the event (Museum of Modern Art 1955) www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq1YbjWzD78. In the film, viewers are first informed that the house was ‘presented to the museum on behalf of the people of Japan and accepted as a recognition of the unique relevance to modern Western architecture of traditional Japanese design’ (ibid., 1.50–2.02 min). The film explains key architectural elements such as the roof, doors and tatami mats. This is followed by a range of philosophical ideas linked with Japanese gardens as well as decorative alcoves (ibid., 8.25 min), and a number of (stereotypical) discussions about the ritualization of Japanese everyday life that focuses on the kitchen, the wooden bath and of course the much-beloved tearoom. However, the most interesting part of the film for our experiment comes towards the end when we are shown visitors moving through the spaces on slippers. This suggests that, contrary to our observations in 2011 London (see Chapter 1), shoe removal did not seem to be a big deal for curators and audiences in 1950s America? The process whereby whole buildings are transported from their original site to be reassembled elsewhere is also at the base of open-air, architectural museums. Generally, these sites consist of a large green space where a variety of historical buildings from different geographical areas and historical periods are dotted around. Numerous examples can be found across the world, but one of my personal favourites is Meiji Village, located north of Tokyo, where urban and rural houses from the Meiji period (1868–1912) have been reassembled within a seventeen-hectare park. Visitors are invited to enter the buildings, but the material culture of everyday life displayed inside can only be viewed from a distance; do-not-touch signs and barriers are ubiquitous. In these kinds of museums, it is also common to enliven the empty spaces with actors wearing period costumes who re-enact life as it used to be lived inside. Another

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common way to reproduce the feel of home is to transform people’s former homes, that have remained in situ in this case, into museums.51 One much-loved example in the UK is Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, where the Edes family opened up their house during their lifetime to allow the general public to view their art and crafts collection. This museum takes an unusual approach to conservation and visitors are ‘encouraged to sit on chairs and are able to walk on wonderful rugs’ because ‘the emphasis is on preserving the accessibility and original ambience of this domestic collection’ (Candlin 2007: 93). Similarly, in At Home in Japan we set out to reproduce the atmosphere inside a typical Japanese flat. However, unlike the examples discussed above, we did not transport and reassemble the physical structure of a specific Japanese house, but we reproduced life-size domestic spaces inside a museum. This is a common museum practice that may take a number of forms, including the period rooms that are widespread in historical museums. In the Geffrye Museum, for example, visitors are guided along a series of perfectly orchestrated rooms that reveal how the middle-class English home has changed over the centuries. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett compares period rooms with dioramas – although the latter tends to be occupied with habitat groups – that until fairly recently were standard in ethnographic and natural history museums (see Chapter 5). She calls both kinds of displays ‘a window or a realistic image that is “looked into” ’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 97). Another standard technique museums use is to build larger portions of the interior of actual houses inside their exhibition spaces. An example of this latter case is the Ainu house in the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. This building was produced with the help of Ainu elders, while a ceremony is held yearly inside the space to invite the spirits of ancestors inside. I agree with Kirshenblatt-Gimblett that both examples above are static displays that visitors can only wonder at from a distance, and next I would like to draw attention to a Japanese museum that demonstrates the power of immersive, multisensory environments. At the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living (Osaka Kurashi no Konjakukan), located on the top three floors of a modern building in the centre of Osaka, visitors can move around freely inside a reconstruction of an Osakan neighbourhood from the Edo period. One can enter a number of reconstructed traditional town houses (machiya) that sell goods ranging from books, textiles and dolls to cosmetics and drugs. Although some of the displays are off-limits, there are ample opportunities (especially in the back areas of the houses) to touch and pick up objects. The museum also offers a kimono rental service and on the day that I visited, several tourists (mainly Chinese families with children) enjoyed the exhibits dressed in kimono. The colourful kimonos but also the fact that the urban scene constantly changes from day to night adds to the overall immersive atmosphere of this museum (see photos on opposite page). Our priority in AHJ was to simulate the atmosphere inside the domestic spaces concerned, and similar to the production of a film set, we used objects, photographs, lighting and sound to do so. My approach was particularly inspired by a temporary exhibition held at the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka in 2002 entitled Seoul Style.52 This show, curated by the anthropologist/architect Sato Koji, was unique in that the whole content of an urban apartment, all the fixtures, furniture and the totality of possessions of one Korean family, the Lees, was moved from Seoul to Osaka. While staying in the Lee’s home for one week, Sato was given free access to every domestic space and he recorded the daily routines of each family member both inside and outside their home. In the exhibition in Osaka, visitors were invited, in this case only after they had removed their shoes, to move through the domestic spaces without restrictions, handle all the objects inside and use the furniture (Asakura and Sato 2002; Sato and Yamashita 2002). Seoul Style drew my attention to the potential of both interactive, multisensory displays and the medium of the house to convey the familiarity and similarity of everyday, lived experiences

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The Osaka Museum of Housing and Living. Photographs © Inge Daniels

across cultures in exhibitions. Moreover, it influenced my thinking in that this exhibition did not attempt to be representative of ‘Korean Culture’ with a capital C. Sato’s choice of the title Seoul Style refers to the fact that there are as many styles as there are people. Like AHJ , this exhibition, thus, aimed to show how the taken for granted mundane material culture of everyday life plays an important role in the creation and consolidation of urban life across cultures. Exhibitions that exhibit the totality of possessions of one family or individual have been more common in the art world. Already during the 1970s, Christian Boltanski, for example, created installations based on meticulous photographic records of the possessions of one person. However, I would like to end this section with another innovative art exhibition, Waste Not, about domestic possessions in the East Asian context. In this case, the Chinese artist Song Dong created an installation that consisted of more than 10,000 household items that his mother and collaborator, Zhao Xiangyuan, had gathered over the past five decades. The show was first installed in Beijing, but it subsequently travelled to Korea, Germany, England and finally New York. In each site, the objects were arranged according to type and visitors were only allowed to walk along a prescribed path without touching any of the worn, used and broken items displayed. Like many other art exhibitions that focus on the messy, material culture of everyday life, Waste Not demonstrates that, when artists move mundane objects into museum spaces, they tend to use display techniques that produce ordered typologies of things that are imbued with personal meanings and memories; the objects concerned are thus transformed into representations for visitors to look at, instead of focusing on touching and interacting with them. By contrast, our exhibition aimed to produce an immersive, spatial experience, that freed both visitors and objects displayed, and in the next section I will discuss how we drew on photography to achieve this objective in practice.

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Surface textures and spatial dynamics: ‘At first glance I thought that there was a real toilet’ In AHJ we experimented with life-size photographs in three distinctive ways. None of these photographs were accompanied by captions and it was fascinating to observe visitors’ reactions to and hear their comments about these images. The first techniques that we developed explored the ability of large-scale photographs to encourage haptic viewing both through producing spatial depth and through the use of textured surfaces. This consisted of mounting enlarged photos of a series of domestic features on MDF boards that were hung on a wooden frame a few centimetres off the wall in a number of rooms. Some of these life-size photos encouraged tactile, close-up viewing because they depicted the minutiae of everyday life in great detail. Two examples are a photo of the bookshelf, that we placed in the Westernstyle room, that I have started this chapter with, and a photo of a sink with all the accessories necessary for cleaning and grooming hung at the appropriate height in the bathroom. It was the multiple textures and surfaces in these photos that made the eye linger and drew visitors into the image. A second type of life-size photos that were suspended from the walls (that also stimulated embodied viewing but that worked differently) were images that depicted views into interior spaces that were taken from a distance. In this case it was the spatial dynamics inside the image that we hoped would make the visitors experience the image haptically. One example is a photo of laundry drying on a rack in a tatami room with a view onto a small bench in a corridor that was mounted on the wall in the Japanese-style room. A variation of this latter technique were photos taken through open doors that were developed lifesize and placed in recesses in order to augment the illusion of spatial depth. One such photograph of a toilet that we installed at the start of the corridor attracted a lot of attention. Ali, the Japan blogger, published a photograph of the toilet on her blog with the words: ‘The toilet was just a photograph – but

Courtesy of the Geffrye Museum, London

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at first glance I thought that there was a real toilet instead’. We observed how many other people were drawn in by the ‘realness’ of this image and then continued reading/looking at the accompanying imagetext wallpaper that contained two explanatory texts and another embedded photograph of a toilet. I had been wary of saying anything about the unusual high-tech features of Japanese toilets because of the obvious danger of exoticizing Japanese everyday life. However, we eventually agreed to add a smaller text in the band underneath the photograph of the toilet with the following information: Advanced Japanese toilet technology can offer quirky options such as jets blowing hot air or seats that are automatically raised. However, most domestic toilets are more humble, with what are considered more basic functions such as heated seats and a built-in bidet system. They all have a basin for washing hands that is cleverly located on top of the cistern, at the back of the seat. We overheard some people, who had not been to Japan, commenting on the toilets unusual technological features. The following exchange between two British female friends in their twenties was typical of the first type of reaction. One woman commented ‘Oh, it has buttons for jets of air’, while the other replied, ‘I thought that it was a disabled toilet – how weird’. Some were intrigued by the sink in the back; others saw it as an ingenious idea for recycling water and thought that something similar should be integrated into European toilets, too. Visitors who had been to Japan tended to focus on their own memories of using these toilets. A couple in their twenties who had recently visited Japan summed up this attitude by saying: ‘The toilet is fantastic, once you have tried it, you don’t want to go back.’ Another example was a British couple in their late fifties who had visited Japan and spent quite some time in front of the photograph, laughing and pointing at specific details. I observed this scene when I visited with the Kagemoris, but I had not given it much attention until later on when we were in the kitchen area and the woman of the couple discreetly came up to me to apologize for her husband’s laughter in front of the toilet. She explained that they had ‘just visited Japan and had quite some problems with the toilet’, but they were concerned that the Kagemoris might have thought that they were disrespectful. A second example of a life-size photograph placed within a recess to create depth of space was an image of the wet area in the bathroom. However, in this case we employed a hybrid technique combining a photograph with actual objects. Again, the blogger Ali astutely picked up on this writing that: ‘the bathroom was very cleverly done, with a combination of a photograph and some real items’. We employed a similar combination of a life-size image placed in an alcove with a variety of objects, referenced in the image, placed in front of it, to evoke the feel of a Buddhist altar in the tatami room. The photo concerned shows a detailed view of the various textures inside the altar taken in the Takahashis home in Nara, and our intention was to induce close-up embodied viewing. I had rather naively hoped that we would be able to enhance this multisensory experience by allowing visitors to burn incense and perhaps even light the candles in front of the altar, but safety regulations intervened. Upon seeing the altar, Noriko Kagemori pointed out that we should have placed a sitting cushion (zabuton) in front of it because ‘it would normally be there’. Later on, during our visit, she took one of the cushions placed around the coffee table in the living area and moved it into the Japanese-style room. The photograph of the Buddhist altar was taken inside the Takahashis home in Nara in 2006, and when I watched a power point presentation of the exhibition with the family in the spring of 2013, they got really exited upon recognizing the altar. Later that day over dinner, Mr Takahashi proudly told his ninety-six-year-old father, who lives with them, that I used their altar in my exhibition, adding that it was a pity that the ancestral tablet (ihai) of grandmother, who passed away the previous year, was not yet in it.

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‘A lively interplay between the two- and the three-dimensional’ A second innovative way in which we employed life-sizes photographs consisted of transparencies of images of domestic windows that were mounted in light boxes that were integrated in the walls of some of the rooms. The light boxes were meant to add to the atmosphere inside the rooms as well as expand the space by bringing the outside world in. The photograph below, for example, shows how by placing a light source behind the image of a closed paper window set inside a tatami room we were able to simulate the typical atmosphere in this kind of space. Moreover, by switching the ceiling light on and off visitors could further augment the dramatic effect of the display. Many visitors expressed positive feelings about this and other light boxes saying that they ‘opened up the space’ by allowing ‘a view of the outside world’. Some even suggested that we should have added more windows showing the outside scenery, and two visitors thought that we should have displayed photographs of urban public spaces behind the windows. In order to stress the link between the private dwelling, the neighbourhood community and the larger world outside, we also showed photographs of exterior spaces on some of the image-text wallpapers (see Chapter 4). Examples range from images of tourists as well as souvenirs on sale (in the Westernstyle room), to washing drying on balconies (in the bathroom), and graves and cemeteries (in the Japanese-style room). Moreover, outside the exhibition space close to the entrance we also hung a collage of fourteen photographs of urban spaces such as restaurants, streets, temples, and stations that

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were printed on four banners suspended from the ceiling (see photograph page 77). The collage is, of course, a tried and tested visual technique that conveys complexity because it does not try to give ‘some sense of completeness . . . [and it] acknowledges discontinuity, a new whole made up of several fragments’ (Schildkrout and Keim 1993: 14). Sue and I had initially planned to ‘visually’ connect these photographs with actual objects by hanging a range of urban garden images at the lowest level and create a real garden underneath. However, in the end, plants were only permitted inside the exhibition space, and so instead we used a sequence of three life-size photos of gardens under the title of the exhibition, which neatly morphed into a garden at the entrance to the flat. A couple in their fifties from Hertfordshire who had visited Japan spent more than five minutes looking at the life-size garden images and singled them out as their favourite photos in the interview because they ‘reminded them of their time in Tokyo and how people transform urban space into village spaces’, adding that they were amazed that ‘things in the gardens don’t get stolen’. By splitting up the cityscape and the urban gardens, the former felt slightly disconnected from the rest of the show. We observed that few visitors paid the collage much attention upon arriving. Yet, many stood still to have a closer look at the photos on their way out. Several people, who had visited Japan, mentioned that the images of exterior spaces looked very familiar. One female visitor in her twenties who lived for one year in Japan, thought that the cityscape photos ‘captured very accurately the special kind of lighting that you get in Japanese cities’ and this had brought back memories. Returning to the light boxes, many visitors praised these particular images because ‘they make the rooms look bigger’. Others described the uncanny feeling the light boxes had provoked, which was brilliantly put into words by Ali on her blog. She discussed her encounter with the light box/photograph of a sliding window leading onto a balcony as follows: ‘the balcony looked so real that I felt I could step through the photograph . . .’ (see photograph page 76). Another blogger, going by the name theloveofJapan, who visited the exhibition and also wrote a review, mentioned the same photograph. He commented on Ali’s blog: ‘My favourite bit is still that balcony photo. If I could get a photo of that the same size I think I would put it in my bathroom as it has no windows, lol’. Noriko Kagemori called the life-size photographs of views out of windows ‘damashi-e’ (trompe l’oeil or optical illusion) adding that ‘you really feel like it is a real view’. The reactions from visitors suggest that we were successful through illuminating life-size photos of windows from behind in encouraging embodied viewing, but how exactly did the light boxes achieve this? The work of Canadian artist Jeff Wall, who during the 1970s produced large-format images on transparent synthetic film mounted on industrial light boxes, offers some clues.53 It is the unique combination of image, object and light source that gives his photographs ‘a spatial complexity and illusionary depth’ (Vasuevan 2007: 566). The images make ‘a direct phenomenological appeal to the spectator’ (ibid., 570) because the illumination ‘poured out through the picture surface’ bathes the physical space in front of it in its ‘material presence’ (ibid., 566). Similarly, in recent years anthropologists have argued that this ‘presence’ created by luminosity plays a crucial role in the ‘atmospheric orchestration of space’ (Bjerregaard and Sorensen 2015). It is this existence of two worlds in one moment, worlds that spatially intersect in one image, that entices the viewers and draws them in. The photo on the right on page 76 also demonstrates the light box technique, but in this case, we illuminated a photo of a large garden window with a toddler with pigtails standing in front of it next to a cage with a cat lying on a platform inside. This composition created the feeling that visitors were looking over the shoulder of child into the garden, while the cat starred back at them. Although the reception of other life-size photographs was, on the whole positive, this particular photograph proved rather contentious:

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40 per cent of those participating in the interviews singled out this photograph for discussion, while only 10 per cent expressed positive views. Some highlighted the ‘striking visual features’, while others – more interested in its contents – highlighted the fact that it showed ‘particularly well how small and organized Japanese gardens are’. Graham, one of the reviewers online wrote: ‘Of all the scenes I saw, I really felt as though the view in this photo really took me to Japan; the effect really worked well’. Ali added another positive voice and on her blog she singled out this same light box, writing: ‘I also adore the photo at the end of the room, with the little girl looking outside.’ Moreover, when Sue and I visited her in her home and we went through all the photos that she took, upon seeing the light box she exclaimed: ‘I love that picture in the back! Gorgeous. I bought a postcard of it.’ Indeed, in the series of photographs she took of the exhibition this particular image appeared four times (see Chapter 5). The photograph of the child and the cat in the cage was also repeatedly selected by the media to showcase the exhibition both in print and on the Internet.54 The Geffrye in-house curators shared our enthusiasm for this photograph and it therefore appeared on the exhibition pamphlet (see image overleaf). It was also the only image selected to grace the front of the invitation for the exhibition opening.55 As I have mentioned above, many visitors took offence with this image; they particularly zoomed in on the fact that the cat was being held in a cage. Typical comments solicited were: ‘It’s awful!’; ‘It’s weird; what is the point of that?’ ‘How cruel; you can’t control animals like that’; ‘It is kept like an exotic bird’. A closer look at the visitors’ book offers further proof that many people were intrigued by this particular image, and that overall, they assumed that animals are treated cruelly in Japan. The following quote sums up the general mood: ‘Nice house, but not much fun if you are a cat’. A ten-year-old girl that visited with her mother was more optimistic, inquiring when they stopped in front of the photograph: ‘Maybe the cat is allowed out sometimes?’ Interestingly, although my ethnography suggests that these cages are

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Courtesy of the Geffrye Museum, London

quite common in homes with cats, some Japanese visitors participating in the research argued that they are unusual, while others denied their existence altogether. A Dutch visitor, who also happened to be an anthropologist, recounted to me how a Japanese friend had claimed that she never heard of cat cages. However, while they were going through some of her snapshots he spotted the presence of a cage in her own family home. The following entry in the visitors’ book shows a similar kind of denial; ‘We never keep the cat in the cage! A bit far away from the real life in Japan. Try again. Takuro’. However, another visitor who obviously disagreed with this statement had scribbled on the side: ‘This is real life! Don’t you know “rental cat” as well?’ Because this last comment wasn’t signed, I was unable to verify the nationality of the writer, but one could speculate that the person in question was familiar with Japan or at least read the muchpublished stories about ‘rent-a-cat’ cafes, where customers can pet a well-groomed cat for an hourly fee. In any case, the tone of the response suggests that the author viewed both renting out cats and putting them in cages as evidence that Japanese people are cruel to animals. It is therefore worth stressing here that the cats in these cafes are in fact treated very well and that the practice is most popular with cat-lovers who are prevented from keeping cats themselves because of strict housing regulations or allergies. The Geffrye Museum staff told me that during guided tours ‘the cage question’ would inevitably surface and, in hindsight, we should probably have included a text about pets inside Japanese homes on one of the wallpapers in the dining-kitchen area. To elucidate the mystery of the cage: the device is

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Courtesy of the Geffrye Museum, London

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actually used to protect visitors that might not like or are allergic to cats. This particular case shows that the lack of textual information offered some people the opportunity not only to revert to existing stereotypes but also to produce new ones. John, a British man in his forties with a Japanese wife, discussed in Chapter 3, for example, claimed that ‘cats are always kept in cages; they don’t let them out really, apart from once a day maybe. They are really only there to keep housewives company’. In practice, I have rarely seen cats being placed inside their cages. The cat in the photo was caged because the inhabitants of the house weren’t sure whether or not Sue liked animals. The photo below shows the same cat, eight years later in 2014, being happily carried around by Akaru-chan, the girl with the pigtails now an energetic ten-year-old. The third photographic technique that we employed was, in my view, both the most imaginative and the most successful in evoking the atmosphere that I encountered during my fieldwork inside Japanese homes. It consisted of life-size photographs of domestic interior features that were paired with assemblages of objects, similar to those depicted in the image. The photographs and objects thus directly referenced each other in an attempt to blur the distinction between two- and three-dimensionality, between representation and embodiment. The Buddhist altar in the tatami room and the wet area in the bathroom, both discussed above, illustrate this technique, but other examples are the lucky objects on top of shoe storage cabinet in the entrance hall (see Chapter 3) and the slippers and shoe on top of the life-size image of a domestic boundary (see Chapter 1). However, here I would like to pay special attention to the two photographs below because they demonstrate the huge potential of a more extreme application of this technique. The photo on the left overleaf depicts a life-size photograph of a kitchen counter to which we literally attached an arrangement of objects such as a steel grid with sponges, ladles and other kitchen utensils and a rack with cooking pots, pans and plastic storage containers. We used this same technique to create a ‘kimono closet’ in the Western-style room. In this case, two real drawers filled with kimonos, obis and accessories protruded out of a life-size photograph of the inside of a ‘kimono closet’ (photo on the right overleaf). Griffiths (2008) mentions a similar technique to invite immersive looking in her discussion of the circular panorama of the Battle of Gettysburg created in Boston in 1883. An ‘optical disjuncture’ was created between a 2D painted background and a 3D faux terrain filled with objects, and it was unclear ‘where the real ends and where the work of the brush begins?’ (Griffiths 2008: 60–64).56 Our object/images worked in a similar fashion, with the boundary between the 2D photograph background and 3D objects in foreground being blurred. Such visual devices invoked what Griffith calls a ‘revered gaze’ whereby ‘the screen might disappear in favour of a boundless experience of absorption in the surface’ (ibid., 286). She adds that there is also an element of fantasy (or imagination) involved ‘whereby the viewer desires to be elsewhere without actually going anywhere’ (ibid., 286). Some of the people who reviewed the exhibition online enthusiastically discussed our combination of photographs and objects to create a visual illusion. Paul Kilbey, for example, wrote on the website Culture Wars, the online review of The Institute of Ideas in London: ‘The combination of photograph and object makes for an original conceptual approach, more interesting than either just photos or just things would Photograph © Inge Daniels have been’ (Kilbey 2011). In the paragraph below, he paid special

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attention to three image-object displays; the kitchen counter and the ‘kimono closet’, that I have introduced above, but also the shoe-slipper mat that we used to create the threshold between inside and outside spaces, that I have discussed in Chapter 1. In Kilbey’s words: On the floor at the entrance to the exhibition, for instance, is a photograph of a welcome mat with several pairs of shoes. And on top of this photograph are several real pairs of shoes, clearly chosen to resemble closely (but not exactly) the shoes in the photo. This lively interplay between the two- and the three-dimensional can also be found in the kitchen, with its photo of a sink area with a real drying rack sticking out of it, and also in the ‘Western-style’ bedroom (so called because of the lack of tatami mat). This one was my personal favourite moment: an actual-size picture of a cabinet and chest of drawers which, after a minute or two, you realize contains two drawers, filled with sheets and pyjamas [my highlights]. KiIbey also describes the moment of surprise, lasting ‘a minute or two’, that many other visitors experienced when they encountered not only image/objects but the light boxes and perhaps to a lesser degree the other life-size photographs we employed. Unsure about whether they were dealing with 2D representations or 3D presences, many had to do a ‘double take’, often literally by moving in closer to have a better look at the display. Particularly interesting in this respect was the reaction of two American women in their sixties when they saw the image/object of the slipper mat in the entrance hall of the flat. The women spent thirty-five minutes inside the exhibition space and were preoccupied with chatting to each other. In the entrance hall, one of them pointed at the floor saying: ‘look a photo of slippers built into the mat’, followed by, ‘Is that what they actually have in Japanese houses? Did you see that in Japan?’ In the interview she returned to the photograph and asked whether people actually have ‘slipper mats’ in their homes, adding that they were ‘hilarious’. Contrary to common practice in museums, this woman did not interpret the photograph as a representation of a step-up into a Japanese home, but she defined it as an object, a slipper mat, that people used in their everyday lives.

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This example, even if rather unusual, demonstrates that photographs not only ‘represent’ a specific content whether referring to people, places or things, but that they are also objects that are ‘present’ in space and time. It is this dual quality of photographs that we drew on in order to encourage ‘embodied viewing’. In his review of the exhibition on the blog Diverse Japan, Michael Graham argued that it was the combination of the life-size images and sound that enabled us to reproduce the feel of Japanese homes (Graham 2011). In his words: ‘with the added audio of conversations and the sounds of people having a meal, it really did put me right slap bang in the middle of an authentic Japanese household for at least an hour or so’. The audio that he refers to accompanied one of the two films that we created using Sue Andrews’s still photographs. These films are another example of our experimentation with still images in order to create immersive, spatial environments. Kilbey commented on the website Culture Wars that ‘several videos playing on a loop gave the whole space a gentle, ambient fuzz’ (Kilbey 2011). The first film, that we showed in the Western-style room, focused on the ubiquitous presence of dolls in Japanese homes linking them with domestic displays for seasonal events such as the Doll Festival on 3 March and Children’s Day on 5 May and with certain female things that are kept in the home such as kimonos. The soundtrack consisted of Okinawan music played by Yasuko and Yuko Takahashi and Mr Sakai singing a song about the 5 May celebrations. Overall, this film received few reactions although those who commented mentioned that the music either added to the atmosphere or they found it ‘alien to our ears’. The second film was more popular; it consisted of a four-minute sequence of Andrews’s still photographs that guided the visitor through the Kagemoris urban apartment in Osaka. We projected this film on a screen placed high in the corridor in the exhibition flat. This film successfully challenged many stereotypes often held about Japanese homes, with a British woman in her fifties saying that ‘it has really challenged my ideas about Japan’ which she associated with ‘simplicity’, ‘order’, and ‘cherry blossoms’, and not ‘this much stuff’. For two women in their twenties, this film was their favourite because it showed ‘real homes and real mess’. The sound track of the second film consisted of a taped, informal discussion in Japanese between the family and myself inside their home, while a number of sound effects such as the whistling kettle, mentioned above, or clinking glasses, were later added. For many visitors these sounds, that filled the spaces with muffled voices and other everyday domestic sounds, enhanced the homely feel inside the flat. Jane, a British woman in her sixties who visited on her own (see Chapter 3), specifically commented that the audio added ‘warmth and ambience’; she liked hearing ‘the whistling of the kettle’; it reminded her of a ‘sound that you don’t hear anymore’, it made the flat feel ‘homely’. Ali, the London-based Japan blogger, also discussed the soundtrack on her blog, saying: My favourite room was the kitchen/dining room. Before I entered, I actually expected to find people in the room chatting and making tea or something. I could hear voices and the sound of cups clinking. It was just a soundtrack, but it made a wonderful addition to the atmosphere. MUSKETT 2011 The soundtrack might have worked well in London, where the majority of the visitors were non-Japanese, but when I showed the same film after a presentation in Osaka in the spring of 2013, the voices seemed to distract the Japanese audience’s attention away from the photographs because they were trying to understand what exactly we were talking about.

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Discussion: ‘I actually felt like I was in a Japanese film’ Film is grasped not solely by an intellectual act but by the complex perception of the body as a whole. MARKS 2000: 145

I remember the feeling, the ambience of the exhibition. Walking into the Japanese home and the atmosphere was so well created. And I was really excited about everything, because it was Japan and it was real. ALI, JAPAN BLOGGER , 2012

Whereas in Chapter 1, I have focused on the ‘haptic contact’ that visitors experienced through their feet, this chapter has explored the way people viewed and engaged with life-size photographs (but also films of still images) that we employed to evoke the atmosphere inside Japanese homes. Our study shows that while looking at these images, that blur the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality, many visitors, contrary to the widespread assumption that vision creates a controlling distance or detachment, felt drawn inside and were enclosed by the images of domestic spaces depicted. According to Natasha, the Polish-American women in her mid-thirties who participated in the raffle, these images encouraged visitors to project themselves inside the everyday spaces depicted. In her words: ‘I am a photographer, so I probably noticed more than most people . . . but I actually felt like I was in a Japanese film quite often’. Laura Marks, a professor in film studies, has similarly argued that film viewers tend to ‘place themselves “in” the screen and its images and so become directly – even ontologically – engaged with them’ (Marks 2000: 162). She formulates a theory of haptic visuality by drawing on the concept of mimesis arguing that through ‘an indexical relation of similarity’ viewers are able to ‘call up the experience of the other materially’ (ibid., 138). Marks critiques other scholars who have associated this mimetic faculty either with children (Benjamin57) or with times and places that did not endure the alienating impact of capitalism (Adorno58) and she argues instead that people in contemporary industrialized society can also be viscerally affected by images. Particularly interesting for the research presented here is Marks’s detailed discussion of how specific types of visuals may affect the viewer differently. She draws on the distinction that the Austrian historian of textiles Alois Riegl made between haptic and optic images at the end of the nineteenth century. Riegl argued that haptic images ‘invite a look that moves over the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what he or she is beholding . . . it evades a distanced view, instead pulling the viewer in close’, while optic viewing ‘depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object’ (Marks 2000: 162). Marks rightly critiques Riegl for assuming a historical progression from haptic to optic perception in the Western art world, that culminated in the development of Renaissance perspectivism. In her view, haptic images continue to exist both in the West and elsewhere; she cites examples such as eighteenth-century rococo art but also weaving, embroidery and other forms of domestic arts. One example of haptic images mentioned by Marks, that is of particular relevance to our use of life-size photographs in the exhibition, are seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings (Alpers 1983) that ‘invite a small, caressing gaze’. Indeed, some of the life-size photographs, such as the image of the sink that we employed, depict domestic spaces filled with a multitude of mundane objects; they depict a level of detail that invites tactile, close-up viewing, whereby ‘the eye lingers over innumerable surface effects . . . instead of being pulled into centralized structures’ (Marks 2000: 6). This might also

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explain why many visitors recounted how they, at least at first, felt disorientated by the material presence depicted and lost themselves in the image. These ideas about visual hapticity, which can be traced back to Riegl, are useful for understanding the effect some of the life-size images that we employed had on visitors. However, another influential theory of the haptic put forward by Schmarsow, a contemporary of Riegl with a special interest in architecture and space, offers an alternative explanation of how haptic images work. He coined the term ‘haptic spatiality’ and argued that it is while physically moving that ‘the body learns, through the accumulation of “sense memories”, what space feels like, and consequently what a space (and its contents) will probably feel like based primarily on visual information acquired at a distance’. (Pigott 2013: 51). Thus, whereas Riegl highlights the importance of the surface textures that required close-viewing, Schmarsow stresses that the spatial dynamics or ‘illusionist depth’ (ibid., 52), that exist inside an image, may allow visitors to haptically experience the space remotely. I argue that visitors to our exhibition engaged in both kinds of haptic viewing when confronted with the three types of life-size photographs that we employed. Like many other visitors, the reviewer Paul Kilbey, who I introduced above, emphasized how the films and photographs made the project ‘un-voyeuristic’ because he felt like a ‘welcome guest’ instead of ‘intruding into somebody’s home’. These comments correspond with Marks’s statement that ‘voyeurism relies on maintaining the distance between viewer and viewed’, while haptic images blur the distinction between figure and ground whereby ‘the viewer relinquishes her own sense of separateness from the image’ (Marks 2000: 184). She further argues that the image can never be fully possessed and that the feeling of losing oneself may abruptly shift to the mastery of optical vision (ibid., 184). This ‘abrupt’ change might account for the ‘double take’ that several visitors recounted when confronted with life-size images in AHJ . Another explanation might be that these visitors experienced a ‘nonrepresentational moment between perception and cognition’ (Rycroft 2005: 363). Rycroft draws on Thrift’s discussion of the ‘half-second delay’ that happens when we perceive an object for the first time (Thrift 2000: 34). Within this moment, when visitors first glance at the photographs, the non-cognitive embodied consciousness ‘take[s] one by surprise; . . . [it is] sudden, swift, fleeting, elusive, and enigmatic and, in terms of representational practice, impossible to prolong or recapture’ (Rycroft 2005: 363). Returning to Marks; she argues that seeing always involved a ‘dialectic movement’ between optic and haptic perception and, importantly for our discussion, in her view this dialectic is linked with the ambience of a place. Efal, also influenced by Riegl’s ideas, nicely summarizes this process, as follows: ambience is the embodiment of the relation between the attention given to causal relations among things at the nearer environment and the attention directed towards larger causal chains: It thus embodies the synchronism of the near-view and the wider, distanciated view. EFAL 2010: 16

Again and again, visitors mentioned that they felt that the life-size photographs added significantly to the atmosphere of the space, which based on the ideas expressed above, could be said to be the direct result of the dialectic relationship between being drawn into the photographs, either because of the minutiae of everyday domestic lives or the spatial dynamics depicted, and taking a more distant view that distinguishes between figure and ground.

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SUE: SPREAD 3

Sue –

‘Photography students have been very surprised to learn that what appears to be an actual window is in fact an illusion’ A CONVERSATION BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHER (SUE) AND ANTHROPOLOGIST (INGE).

Photography of a selection of Japanese homes by Andrews adds authenticity to the exhibition. It gives it a richer sense of place where individual objects and a setting could not. It is through these images that the cluttered and mismatched aesthetic of the real Japanese home shines through, pointing to a shifting aesthetic of constant change. . . Ordinary life in Japan is not just bonsai trees and whitewash. STYLUS MEDIA GROUP 2011

INGE: The image of the child with the cat in the cage was the favourite image of most visitors. You took it in the Nishiki’s family home in Nara in 2006, but can you remember anything about that day? SUE: This house was one of the most spacious that we visited and whilst retaining some traditional Japanese features, such as a traditional garden and the tatami room with the Buddhist altar and photographs of the ancestors (which on our visit also contained a plastic slide), the house felt modern and many of the items in the home would be very familiar in the West. The photo of the cat in the cage occurred as a response to a moment in time that revealed itself to me; an anthropologist might describe this reaction as ‘being open in the field’. The image depicts a Japanese garden bathed in sunlight seen through a floor to ceiling window, with a small girl, her back to the viewer, scanning the garden. Meanwhile, a cat in a cage, gazes at the viewer with its back to 85

the garden. What the photograph does not show is the fact that outside several young boys are playing and it is this activity that holds the girl’s interest; she is too young to be allowed outside for unsupervised play. A similar situation unfolded when we visited the Kosaka family in Orpington where, once again, child and cat animated the interior living space (see 4 images opposite). INGE: Why did you choose to take this particular photo, what do you think are the strengths of its composition, and why do you think people liked it so much? SUE: Seen in the West, there is something about the photograph that is at the same time exotic and familiar: exotic in the wonderful, Japanese garden design and the cat occupying a cage, and familiar in regard to the situation – a small girl with bunches in her hair looking out longing, imagining her future, unconstrained by the adult world. The cat, also temporarily constrained, but for the benefit of the anthropologist and photographer, confronts its situation with disinterested languor. Additionally, the photograph has a strong, vertical divisions which underscore the separation of child and cat, interior and exterior. I think the public probably responded to the photograph because it was in some way satisfying due to these compositional and narrative elements, combined with something unexplained regarding the cat and the child, which absorbed the viewers. INGE: Of all the photos you took of this particular scene why did you choose this specific one for use in the book? SUE: On the day, two shots were initially taken of the cat in the cage by itself, four shots were taken of the little girl and the cat consecutively, and two close-ups of the girl by the window were taken at different times during the visit. 86

Of the four consecutive shots of this situation, the girl is initially in the shadow of the curtain, barely discernible, and the cat is moving around in the cage. The subsequent two shots are almost identical, depicting the small, semi-silhouetted girl looking outwards and the cat looking directly back at the photographer; it’s difficult to choose between these two images. I probably shot one after the other to be sure that I had properly recorded the situation, that I hadn’t shaken the camera and had framed it carefully enough. With children and animals, things are in constant motion and I wanted to be sure that the moment was well captured. This particular shot was chosen because it described a relationship between child, cat, interior and exterior. INGE: This particular image was not only chosen to be on the cover of our book and the invitation to the exhibition but it also was turned into a life-size light box in the exhibition. Could you say something about the effect this technique had on the image and the

space that it was put in, and how it might have changed the way people perceived it? SUE: Light boxes have a history commercially, particularly for their use as point of sale advertisements in stores and at bus stops, etc., where due to their light source they are seductive and visible both day and night. More recently, probably from the end of last century, the technique has become a popular technique with artists, notably Jeff Wall, Catherine Yass and Damien Hirst. The idea of using light boxes (or more accurately in this case ‘light apertures’) in the exhibition to represent the window spaces seemed particularly fitting as they gave context to the interior, conveying a sense of authenticity to the living spaces created within the museum by implying the presence of the external world. The scale and the seductive quality of the light box version of this particular image allowed the visitor to really engage with content of the photograph. Light boxes were used in several other rooms and proved a very effective means 87

of suggesting the outside space. In fact, when I’ve shown images of the museum installation to photography students they have been very surprised to learn that what appears to be an actual window is in fact an illusion created by the technique. INGE: Another innovative visual technique that we used were the so-called image-objects whereby lifesize versions of photos you took in people’s homes where paired with objects depicted in the image. These images were very successful in creating a visual illusion, but I am curious to hear your thoughts about them? SUE: I agree that the image-object technique was very interesting. In certain cases, the image represented the object and functioned mainly as a stand-in, for example, for the ‘kimono closet’ with its opening drawers. However, in other cases, such as the Buddhist altar, the kitchen sink and the owl image with the lucky objects, the role of the image in relation to the objects was more complex. I think you are correct that at times the distinction between 2D and 3D did temporarily disappear and this raised interesting questions about the relationship between the actual and its representation. In some ways the two forms reinforced one another’s status: the photograph adding authenticity to the object by representing an image of it in the context of a real home, whilst the presence of the object in relation to the photograph affirmed its actual existence in the physical world. The interplay between the 2D images and 3D objects offered the viewer another level on which they could engage with the installation.

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Chapter 3 Similarities and Stereotypes ‘They are able to squat a lot lower than I can’

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Introduction: ‘When the stereotype disintegrates, the human being emerges’ The Western stereotype of the Japanese house makes us think of large empty spaces devoid of people and things. By offering insights into how everyday Japanese lives are lived behind closed doors, this exhibition aims to dispel that myth of minimalism. INTRODUCTION PANEL , AT HOME IN JAPAN , 2011

The photograph on the previous page depicts owls on display in an entrance hall in a home in Osaka. It brilliantly captures the ordinary, ‘messy’ aspect of lived-in Japanese interiors that the exhibition aimed to recreate. The collection of owls is not easily identifiable as Japanese and it could be representative of the banal mundane nature of everyday life everywhere. This specific image was also one of only six of Sue Andrews’s 2006 photographs that were turned into postcards on sale in the museum shop; it was extremely popular and it quickly sold out. We used a life-size version of the same photograph to recreate the displays on top of a shoe storage cabinet inside the entrance hall to the exhibition flat, pairing the owls in the photograph with a display of ‘lucky’ objects (see photo opposite). The 2006 photograph also featured in a number of exhibition reviews such as in Blueprint magazine, while the photo of the owls in the exhibition installation appeared on the cover of the journal Home Cultures. The interior decoration magazine Stylus inserted the photo of the owl display together with another of Sue’s images showing two stuffed teddy bears sitting on a miniature sofa next to a globe wrapped in plastic on top of a piano, to illustrate the ‘similarities between Japanese and Western living’ (Stylus Media Group 2011). The design and lifestyle blog Avocado Sweet was also intrigued by the focus we placed on similarity, raising questions about national stereotypes. Again, the image of the ‘lucky owls’ took pride of place accompanied by the following text: ‘Hazard a guess which country these interiors are from? Japan would probably be your last choice because it’s not the minimalist interior you expect and probably love’ (McWilliams 2011). In this chapter I will examine whether and how the aim of the exhibition to challenge cultural stereotypes by stressing similarities between ordinary domestic lives in different cultural contexts was met in practice. The conflicting statements made about the exhibition in the two quotes above illustrate the huge difficulties we encountered in trying to dispel stereotypes about Japan. My experience of doing research about Japan for over twenty years had made me acutely aware of the challenges we would face. However, I had hoped that by adding ‘beyond the minimal house’ in the title of the exhibition and by clearly defining our goals in the introductory text, we would plainly communicate to the audience that the show aimed to question the Japanese ‘myth of minimalism’.59 Nevertheless, the stereotype of the empty Japanese house was what many visitors, especially those with a special interest in Japanese culture or who were ‘in love with the Japanese’, took away from the exhibition. Some 40 per cent of visitors to At Home in Japan who participated in our study had some connection with Japan: 10 per cent were Japanese nationals, while 30 per cent could be divided into those who had visited Japan as tourists (18 per cent) and those who had experienced a more prolonged stay (12 per cent). London has a growing population of Japanese people, especially east London where the Geffrye Museum is located, and where in recent years many young Japanese have opened businesses such as

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restaurants, cafes and hairdressers. As Littlewood has argued, ‘if people are not visible and have no voice in a specific society it is easier to sustain stereotypes’ (Littlewood 1996: 42). The presence of Japanese people in London (including bloggers and newspaper journalists) not only added an extra incentive to avoid stereotypes, but the Japanese visitors, who participated in our study, also provided us with a very useful reality check. Many of the remaining 60 per cent of visitors, who had never been to Japan, told us that they had been enticed to visit the exhibition because of their rich imagination about Japan fuelled by the neverending stream of representations in books, films, animation, video-games and more recently also Internet-based media. Others told us that they learned about Japan through friends and family members who had visited the country.60 The O’Donnells in Kent, who participated in the raffle study, volunteered examples of this latter kind of knowledge transmission. They had never been to Japan because ‘it would be too far in terms of cost and size of our family (they have four children)’. However, they had heard stories about the country from friends who had been on holiday there; one friend used to work at the British embassy in Japan and Mr O’Donnell’s brother regularly goes to Okinawa, the group of tropical islands in southern Japan, for business. They recalled the following three anecdotes that, like the majority of these kinds of accounts, stressed ‘how they are different, the cultures’. Firstly, Mrs O’Donnell recalled that one of their friends who is very tall told them that he had ‘all these teenage girls chasing him’.

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Courtesy of Blueprint Magazine

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Cover image of ‘Home Cultures’ Vol 9 Issue 1 (2012) reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com

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Her husband, then, told a story about business cards with English on one side and Japanese on the other, saying that apparently people would be ‘offended if you handed over the card in English’. And finally, that you should not ‘pour wine on your own’. These stories draw on a number of well-rehearsed tropes about Japanese society that confirm several stereotypes. The first story refers to the diminutive nature of the Japanese, the uninhibited nature of Japanese women, and the desirability of the Western male (see Littlewood 1996: 46 and 113–14), while the other two relate to the extreme levels of ritualization of Japanese everyday lives and the supposed oppressive consequences of conformity (ibid., 54–55). Still, the family ended on a more positive note, informing us that when their two sons were little, during the late 1990s, they were really into Pokémon and that this interest had actually motivated them to start reading. The card game Pokémon as well as manga and anime more generally were also mentioned by many other visitors and participants in the raffle as positive experiences that stimulated their interest in Japan. One such example was Jen, a student in her mid-twenties from Leicester who participated in the raffle (see Spread 4). She was introduced to anime at the age of nine by her best friend and started to learn how to draw in this particular style. When Sue asked her whether she still had her original manga drawings, she showed us a story that she drew at fourteen and redrew later when she had improved her skill. She remembered how Pokémon introduced manga and anime to the mainstream, and how it would drive her ‘insane’ that other children would look at her drawings and say: ‘Oh, Pokémon’. Her ongoing interest in manga and anime led her to choose to study the anthropology of Japan for her BA . At university she got into cosplay, referring to the popular practice of dressing up as manga/anime characters, and she regularly attended conventions. She singled out a number of figurines placed on a bookshelf in her room whose costumes she has made and showed us an album with photographs taken of her dressed up like them. She would upload similar photographs on the Cosplay Island website, but she is currently less involved in the cosplay scene because it is expensive to stay the whole weekend and

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very time-consuming to make the outfits. She revealed that many others she knew into cosplay had generally also tried their hands at drawing manga, and that this is for many a motivation to start learning Japanese. However, as her own knowledge of Japan increased while studying for her BA degree, she ‘started getting quite annoyed at people who were going to these conventions and saw Japan as this perfect Mecca. And they love Japanese, and basically Japan can do no wrong’. Japan as the ‘perfect Mecca’ is also one of the stereotypes about the country discussed by Ian Littlewood (1996) in his impressive historical overview of persistent popular stereotypes about Japan in Europe and North America. I plan to draw on his ideas throughout this chapter, but here I will only briefly summarize some of his main points. Littlewood traces the following four familiar images of Japan; ‘warriors in masks, women in kimono, temples in a poetic landscape and ordinary Japanese . . . marked always by an ineradicable difference’ (Littlewood 1996: xii). He links these images with four overarching categories, respectively Samurai, Butterflies, Aesthetes, and Aliens. Amongst visitors to our exhibition, stereotypes falling within the latter two categories were the most prevalent. According to Littlewood, the depiction of the Japanese as Aliens has been present since first contact in the 1540s when Japan was described as atypical or ‘a paradox’ because it is a society ‘both the opposite of Europe and at the same time cultural and rational’ (ibid., 4). The Japanese as Aliens stereotype, on the other hand, highlights the fact that Japanese people are ‘not quite human’; they are unmoved by emotions; their world is diminutive and organized; they are like-robots, mechanical and monotonous. Many visitors to At Home in Japan referred to the image of the Japanese as strictly conforming to rules, but it was particularly favoured by those who had some familiarity with Japan and acted as guides to friends or family who had not been to the country. I will discuss this group in Section  3 of this chapter. The Japanese as Aesthetes stereotype, enthusiastically embraced by ‘Japan-lovers’ like the cosplayers mentioned by Jen above, had also taken a powerful hold of some of the visitors we studied. The fact that the exhibition focused on Japanese homes, a setting where the circulation of stereotypes related to

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Japanese aesthetics has been particularly fruitfully pursued, is of course important. Littlewood again demonstrates how already in the seventeenth century, when the term ‘Japan’ became used for the lacquerware found in homes of the elite, the Japanese became known for their aesthetic perfection. He shows that these same ideas are the reason why contemporary Japanese designs and technologies are given ‘an aesthetic cachet enjoyed by no other country outside Europe’ (Littlewood 1996: 85). The ubiquity of these ideas has also led to the tendency amongst Europeans and North-Americans to stress the need to protect Japan, or better the aesthetic fairyland frozen in time, from the corruption of the West (ibid., 69–72). This might, for example, also explain why so many Western architects have descended on Japanese cities such as Kyoto to protect its old townhouses (machiya) from destruction caused by gentrification and commercialization (Brumann 2009). Karp and Kratz argue that when we study stereotypes we need to pay attention to the complex dialectic of simulation and difference or what they call ‘the poetics of similarity and difference’, because both processes play an equally important role in the production of cultural identity (Karp and Kratz 2000: 199). Many Japanese stereotypes are grounded in elitist distinctions between high and low culture, based on the assumption that only the former is ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ and therefore worth preserving. This has resulted in a scarcity of accounts about ordinary Japanese practices. By focusing on everyday domestic life, our exhibition aimed to address this imbalance. Because homes are situated at the intersection between the personal, the social and the national, they are unique microcosms through which we can explore both historical and cultural specificity and universal constraints, hopes and desires; both difference and similarity. In this chapter I will, thus, test whether by highlighting the similarity of everyday life across cultures, at least some national stereotypes might be undermined. As Littlewood puts it: ‘the only prospect of real change lies in the gradual humanizing effect of individual contact . . . when the stereotype disintegrates and the human being emerges’ (Littlewood 1996: 212).

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Japan-lovers: ‘It would have been good to have an actual bath’ Many visitors who had a long-term relationship with Japan moved through the space in pairs or small groups and I will turn to their experience inside the space in the next section. However, three people within this group visited alone; they were an Indian-American woman in her twenties, a British woman belonging to the same age group who lived in Japan for one year, and a man in his forties who had a Japanese wife. I will return to the first two visitors in the next chapter, where I will focus on the experience of singles in the exhibition. However, here I want to pay special attention to the third visitor, John, who lives in Oxford and is married to a Japanese woman. John spent forty-five minutes inside the space. He initially followed a standard route and upon entering each room he alternated between reading some of the texts and watching the photos or films. However, apart from opening the ‘please open’ drawers and briefly picking up one of the sitting cushions in the living area for inspection, John did not the handle any of the objects. He also stood out because after he left through the dining-kitchen area and had a brief glance at the visitors’ book, over the shoulders of some people who were writing in it, he reentered the exhibition. During his second round, he was preoccupied with photographing the life-size photos in the LDK area (see Map 4). After he watched the film about the flat for three minutes, he returned briefly to the introductory area, where he leafed through the book and he ended his visit with reading the message about the 2011 Tsunami. The fact that he made a special effort to take photographs of the images on display confirmed our observations (made during his first round) that he seemed particularly interested in the visual aspect of the exhibition (see Chapter  5). Moreover, in the interview he further corroborated this fact, saying that he liked the photographs because they reminded him of his time spent in Japan; they were ‘very familiar’ because he had stayed at the home of his Japanese in-laws many times.

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Overall, John’s assessment of the exhibition was rather negative, but his participation in our study offered us an opportunity to delve deeper into what makes those who eagerly embrace Japanese stereotypes tick. For many European and North American visitors, Japan continues to symbolize the quintessential exotic Other. Whereas access to this supposedly ‘mysterious’ culture may once have been limited, in more recent decades consumer goods associated with the ‘cool’ Japan, ranging from manga and anime to Japanese food and fashion, have become ubiquitous. Moreover, in the last ten years it has become more affordable to travel to Japan – again and again comments in the visitors’ book alluded to previous and future trips! Growing numbers of Westerners have experienced living and working in the country too, while some have ended up settling more permanently, often through marrying a Japanese national. Although one would expect that any initial fascination with foreignness wanes over time, curiously, it seems that those who have lived in Japan for a prolonged period of time, who I have called ‘Japanlovers’, are often the keenest to keep the mystery alive. Our study also suggests that the expectations of these people were eerily similar to those who had never visited the country. This was particularly clear in comments made about the bathroom which both groups told us was their favourite space. Many of those who had never visited Japan, found it most memorable because of its strangeness; a Canadian woman in her twenties thought the space was ‘most alien’, while a Brazilian visitor in her forties thought it a ‘very strange’ environment. John thought that the bathroom was one area that would have benefitted from a ‘more in-depth’ approach; he had expected to be given more information about doing the laundry and drying things, with details about what he called ‘the twin-tube system’ whereby people use ‘bamboo poles and big pegs that don’t crease or leave marks’. He then narrated how Japanese baths are ‘quite different from the UK ’ because they are ‘deeper and made more for sitting in’. This was followed by a eulogy, in the Japanese as Aesthetes tradition, of cedar wood baths elucidating that the wood changes the water; ‘it makes is softer and it is not reflective’. He also reflected on his own enjoyment of bathing

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in these kinds of baths by saying that they are filled with too much water and made to overflow so there is ‘a moment of pleasure’ when you get in and the water is displaced. This finally led him to conclude that ‘it would have been good to have an actual bath’, which aptly demonstrated his less than realistic expectations of what an exhibition, especially one on a tight budget, could possibly achieve. Interestingly,

Map 4

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like John, a number of other middle-aged British men who had lived in Japan focused on the bathroom to express cultural difference. Alex, a British man in his fifties thought that ‘a real bath from Japan’ would have added authenticity, while Michael, who was in his late thirties, also drew attention to the bath saying: ‘they are square, quite a different shape from here; they are not for lounging in.’ He added that ideas about cleanliness and personal hygiene are very different in Japan and that it would have been good to convey this. The difference in attitude between the two types of visitors discussed above and those who had visited Japan only briefly as tourists was pertinent. Those within this latter group tended to be primarily in search of further explanations or contextualizations of things they had seen and experienced while visiting Japan. This is exemplified by a couple in their forties from Australia who had been on holiday to Japan. Because they primarily stayed in Western-style hotels they had never before seen the interior of a Japanese home and they therefore found it particularly interesting to be able to be ‘nosy’ and see what things are ‘really like’. The woman thought that the exhibition explained a number of things that she had been wondering about during their trip such as the bathing practices and the wet and dry area as well as the separation between indoor and outdoor and the removal of shoes. The exhibition had made her eager to look into going on another holiday to Japan but she admitted that she was also put off by ‘the nuclear situation’. Similarly, a couple in their fifties who visited the exhibition with a female friend, who lived locally, thought that the exhibition filled in the gaps, because during a visit to Japan they had

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stayed in (Western-style) hostels rather than in ‘traditional Japanese houses’. Of course, having visited a place as a tourist doesn’t necessary mean that one is familiar with the outlook of local domestic spaces. Moreover, because in Japan the home is considered to be very private and most socializing tends to take place outside the home, it is rare for outsiders to be invited into someone’s home. A British man in his fifties, who lived in Japan for some time, for example, expressed his surprise upon entering the LDK area because he had never been invited into a Japanese kitchen. One could argue that the private nature of Japanese homes has assisted in propagating the myth of the minimal house that continues to occupy a special place in the West but also in Japan. Indeed, many Japanese people participating in my 2003 research, for example, asked me what other people’s homes actually looked like. Amongst those who had never been to Japan, Westerners seemed particularly attracted to the exhibition because of its promise of ‘simplicity and order’ and many were surprised to learn that Japanese homes are filled with a large number of things. By contrast, Asian visitors within this group were keen to stress similarity. One such example was Shanti, an Indian woman with a strong interest in Japan (see Chapter 5). After she and her male Belgian companion watched one of the films about Japanese dolls from start to finish, she commented that in India they also have a festival where dolls are given to boys and girls, and that they are arranged on ‘steps’ in the same way as in Japan. The towels (tenugui), which she touched in the bathroom, were in her view also very similar to Indian ones because they are ‘very thin, and they absorb water a lot and they dry very quickly’. Finally, she remarked that in India people also remove their shoes but they do not provide slippers for visitors to wear. That said, Shanti also expressed difference drawing on the Japanese as Aesthetes stereotype, stating that Japanese homes are ‘serene, nice and beautifully organized’, while, by contrast, Indian homes of the same standard are ‘kitsch and horrible’: things are ‘stored in suitcases’ and everything is ‘piled on top of each other’. Leo, a Taiwanese man in his twenties who spent only ten minutes inside, similarly started off by stressing cultural similarity saying that he knew what to expect as ‘Japanese houses are very similar in style of living, culture and design as in Taiwan’. He added that he did not bother going into the bathroom because he ‘already knew what they are like’. However, this didn’t mean that he came to the exhibition without strong preconceptions and he soon revealed that his visit was driven by an interest in how Japanese people ‘store things’, especially small pieces ‘that do not get used often’. In his view, the Japanese have a special ‘technique’ which he was eager to learn. During the interview he constantly reverted to design speak saying: ‘they categorize species of things’ and he was also convinced that things are ordered from left to right according to size. These are, of course, all variations on the popular Japanese as Aesthetes theme. Even if this is a positive image that does not stress the ‘lack’ of the Other, as generally is the case, it still is a stereotype and as we will see next, this particular essentialist trait has also been hijacked by Japanese elites. Perhaps Leo has read a few too many coffee table books about Japanese minimalism, but the idea that Japanese people and by extension their homes are orderly was repeatedly voiced even after visitors had seen the exhibition. The persistence of this stereotype is epitomized by the sweeping statement, made by a British woman in her fifties, that ‘Japanese people are more disciplined, ordered, joyful, happy and content’. The Japanese penchant for orderliness was often linked with the assumptions that their everyday lives were comparatively more ritualized. Thus, a British woman in her seventies claimed ‘Japanese are orderly people’ whose everyday lives are ‘ritualized’ citing shoe removal rules and the recycling poster as examples. A British man in his twenties also mentioned the poster (which depicted a

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form of recycling that he thought would be impossible to impose in the UK !), ‘the ceremonial removal of shoes’ and ‘boundaries marked by lucky charms’ as examples of how in Japan everyday life is ‘ritualized’. One explanation for these persistent references to orderliness might be sought in the fact that understandings of messiness are variable, and many thought the flat was orderly in comparison to their own homes or what they considered to be the standard domestic look in their own countries. A British woman in her sixties liked the flat because of its ‘simplicity and minimalist lines’ adding that she realized that the exhibition was trying to question minimalism but nevertheless it ‘is minimal in comparison to my own house’. A Canadian student in her twenties thought that Japanese homes are ‘more ordered than Canadian ones’ and things are ‘neatly laid out in drawers’. The discussion above shows the difficulties involved in questioning stereotypes when people have set their mind on finding difference. Over the past twenty years of doing research in Japan, I have learned (often the hard way) that, however convincing one’s findings, no amount of in-depth research will change the views of those determined to hang on to these stereotypes. I would like to give the last word to a Japanese woman in her thirties, who upon hearing her British friend exclaim that ‘the flat makes me think of MUJI and Japanese design’ reprimanded her by saying that ‘in real homes not all objects are intended to be pretty . . . it is just what Japanese homes are like for ordinary people. We like to have order, but we are messy too!’

Cultural brokers: ‘They are able to squat a lot lower than I can’ Some of the ‘Japan-lovers’ discussed above visited on their own, but most visitors who had spent a considerable amount of time in Japan visited in pairs or groups. They tended to act as guides to their companions and they thus engaged in a form of cultural translation based on their own experiences in Japan, whether by spontaneously offering commentary about the displays, the photography or the texts, or by answering questions raised by those they visited with. Many of these visitors also felt inclined to re-enact certain practices while encouraging others to copy them. Examples ranged from exchanging shoes for slippers and putting on kimonos (or using the others as mannequins), to showing how to squat or how to use chopsticks. In this section, I will focus on the trajectories of four British visitors Bob, Elizabeth, David and Andrew, who each had lived in Japan for at least twelve months, and who during their visit settled into the role of cultural broker. Like the ‘Japan-lovers’ introduced above, all four were very positive about their time in Japan, but overall they were more appreciative of the exhibition than the former. Bob, in his mid-fifties, who had lived in Japan for several years during the 1980s and who I have already introduced in Chapter 1, spent fifty minutes inside with two male friends. The group was very active; reading and touching more than average (see Map 5). In the interview Bob explained that the flat had made him feel nostalgic and that picking up certain objects had brought back memories. Elizabeth and Andrew, who were both in their early thirties and had worked for one year in Japan teaching English on the JET programme, thought that it was ‘a fair representation’ and ‘accurate and nice’. Elizabeth visited together with her husband and a female friend for forty minutes, while Andrew, his wife and a female friend left after twenty-five minutes. Finally, David, who was in his late thirties and visited with a male friend for twenty-three minutes, said that the exhibition had matched his expectations.

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Map 5

In the introductory area, both Bob and Elizabeth first joined their companions reading for five minutes. Then Bob’s group started to interact with the displays; opening the post box and moving the wind bell (furin) that hung outside the flat during the summer months. Next, they watched the slide show, and, when one of the men picked up a pamphlet advertising homes, Bob began a discussion about house prices in Japan. Elizabeth and her female friend started by looking at the map of the Kansai region showing the homes studied, while she cried out: ‘This is really exciting!’, and then, turning to her husband: ‘Can we go to Japan next year?’ The two women continued watching the slide show about the demolition of the house and discussed the contents saying: ‘they knocked down the old house and built a new one’; to which the other replied, ‘they build them so quickly.’ In the meantime, one of the men read the text panels to the right and told the others about the upcoming raffle. The slide show was for many male cultural brokers a first prompt to offer extra information. David, for example, explained to his male friend that what they saw on screen was not true for all buildings; older buildings, for example, those from the eighteenth century, would be preserved. Of course, cultural brokers could relay any information about Japan, whether or not it was grounded in reality, because their companions would most probably not be able to question anything they said. The entrance hall offered a number of opportunities for demonstrating Japanese cultural capital. Elizabeth encouraged her husband to remove his shoes and put the wooden clogs ( geta) on saying:

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‘come on, try these on. You are not allowed shoes in the house.’ The man obeyed putting the geta on and wandering up and down in front of the entrance before putting his shoes back on. The text about shoe removal compelled David to add that ‘it’s quite tricky as you have to do it whilst not putting your barefoot on the lower level and keeping your shoes off the upper level’. When asked about the lucky charms by his friends, Bob replied that he did not remember seeing those, which is surprising considering that charms are paramount, and then he said jokingly: ‘perhaps they are protecting against the spirits of smelly shoes’. Then, the group moved into the corridor where Bob commented about the first light box image of a window with rolled up curtain: ‘I couldn’t be bothered to roll it up. I like the ones that you can just pull up and down.’ Being able to transmit knowledge about kimonos was another distinguishing trait of the cultural brokers. For some, such as David this simply consisted of showing that he was aware of the existence of kimonos in the home and upon entering the Western-style room he exclaimed: ‘Oh, I was hoping there would be some kimonos’, and then while opening the ‘kimono closet’, he uttered, ‘ah, here they are’. Generally female visitors showed much more of an interest not only in explaining but also in performing the uses of kimonos. Andrew was an exception in that he was the only male guide who tried on one of the kimonos to pose for some photographs. Elizabeth really took the opportunity to demonstrate her in-depth knowledge about the garments. She was the first to open the top drawer and select one of the kimonos to try on, while the others bombarded her with questions such as ‘So, are they not made to a specific size?’ and ‘Is it formal wear?’ and so forth and so on. She explained that kimonos are worn for weddings and graduations, but that people also have everyday ones. Then the group discussed the textiles kimonos are made of, the mix of old and new, and their use to express Japanese identity. The female friend was visibly enthralled saying ‘it is so exciting!’ When they found some obis (a large piece of fabric used as a belt) in the second drawer Elizabeth declared: ‘this is what I was looking for’ explaining how ‘they tie it in a special knot’ while putting it on her husband, who seemed happy to play the role of mannequin. Then they placed the obi back and surprisingly the woman who had never been to Japan was able to neatly fold the kimono squarely (according to the proper method) and put it back into one of the drawers. This group really enjoyed the performative possibilities of the displays and the kimono dressup was followed by all three of them practising bowing, while Elizabeth explained that you ‘are meant to bow from the hip’. Next, Elizabeth watched the film about the dolls, while the others commented on the dolls in the display cases asking what they were for, adding: ‘they are strange looking’. Then, spurred on by the text panels they discussed the obligation to bring back gifts and compared it with similar customs

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in the UK . Elizabeth was keen to stress that social obligations are ‘deeply ingrained’ and that they are different for men and women. This bizarrely led to a long-winded discussion about the Japanese car industry that Elizabeth concluded with the words: ‘the Japanese think extremely highly of themselves as a race.’ This group spent more than fifteen minutes in the Western-style room. Moreover, at the end of their visit Elizabeth decided to return to this room to read the photo-elicitation sheets while crouching down, and when she inadvertently knocked one off the wall, she picked it up to read it. Next, after they briefly entered the bathroom, all three stood for a moment inside in ‘the zone of uncertainty’ (see Chapter 1) at the entrance to the tatami room. The couple decided to take their shoes off and go inside but after commenting on the nice smell of the mats they quickly moved outside again. Still, in the interview Elizabeth claimed that this was her favourite room. For Andrew, the Japanese-style room offered an opportunity to tell his two female friends about the significance of tatami mats in saying: ‘You would never wear your shoes in here . . . it makes you feel at home’ with your shoes off. Followed by one of the women saying: ‘don’t your feet get cold?’ Cultural brokers really came into their own in the dining-kitchen area where there were a large number of objects to interact with. Bob and his friends, for example, spent most of their time (nineteen minutes) in the dining-kitchen area touching and talking about the tableware (see Map 5, highlighted area). In front of the kitchen cupboards, they opened the drawers and took out several items for inspection. Bob was really in his element in this space explaining the usage of utensils, pots and pans. At the kitchen counter he picked up the cooking pan and exclaimed: ‘This is so light, it must be aluminium. You’d get Alzheimer using this’. While at the table he comments on the lacquer bowls saying: ‘They do quite well to make things look like the real thing – this is plastic made to look like lacquered wood – it’s less expensive’. Later, in the interview he admitted that he had actually never been in an LDK area because in the homes he visited in Japan ‘socializing was kept out of the kitchen’, but he was accustomed to the utensils and tableware through eating Japanese food. The presence of the dining table set for a meal encouraged many to enact eating together. David, for example, encouraged his friend to sit down at the table, where he taught him how to hold chopsticks and mimic gasshô (a gesture whereby the palms of both hands are brought together in front of the chest while saying ‘itadakimasu’ – literally, to receive or accept – to express gratitude before eating a meal). Returning to Elizabeth’s group after the Japanese-style room, they entered the dining-kitchen area where they spent eleven minutes interacting with the displays: they first opened the drawers and picked things up. Elizabeth’s husband read the information about the recycling poster, and then joined his wife who read some of the pamphlets, which were hung low on the wall, saying: ‘they are quite interesting, these.’ They continued reading the main text panel for four minutes, and then Elizabeth’s husband joined their female friend who had found a spot on the sofa in the living area. When he decided to sit on one of the cushions on the floor, the friend initially did the same, but after they had both looked at the wedding album for a while, she decided to return to the sofa. They later singled out the photo albums for being ‘evocative’, and Elizabeth thought it was amazing that people felt they could give them away. The sofa area offered Andrew another opportunity to transmit some of his embodied expertise. While his female friend sat down on the sofa to look at the albums, he crouched on the floor demonstrating how a Japanese person would squat while uttering: ‘they are able to squat a lot lower than I can.’

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Japanese visitors: ‘These are really common’ I think that for us it was all quite familiar, but for Europeans it is different because they have no information about everyday life in Japan. . . . Thus, lay people never see how people similar to them live [in Japan]. NORIKO KAGEMORI, 2013, OSAKA

Noriko Kagemori, the retired university professor in her early seventies, uttered these words when I asked her what she thought of the exhibition. She continued explaining that when non-Japanese people report about Japan they tend to focus on special, unusual issues because ‘everyday things do not become news’. She thought that even if people might not really be interested in mundane things, ‘when you show it to them in this way, they will think: ah, I didn’t know that this is how people really live’. Only 10 per cent of visitors we studied were Japanese and the majority of these were women in their twenties and thirties. On average they spent only twelve minutes inside the flat. One exception was a Japanese woman, her British husband and their three-year-old daughter whose visit lasted for thirty minutes. Overall reading was kept to a bare minimum, but this does not come as surprise because these visitors would of course be familiar with the look of Japanese homes and the material culture placed inside. Familiarity might have also resulted in the Japanese visitors interacting less than the others. A couple in their twenties, she Japanese and he British, who visited together with their young child, thought that the exhibition was ‘accurate (they mentioned the room sizes), authentic, and familiar’ and that it would be really good for people who do not already know Japanese houses and culture. They added that the flat was very similar to their own home and they ‘were looking for more’. Although this comment indicates a degree of disappointment with the ordinariness of the flat (something I will return to below), the majority of Japanese visitors were actually very appreciative of this aspect of the exhibition. The couple had been curious about how a ‘non-Japanese’ person would represent their culture and they expressed their delight about the level of detail that the show had provided. This comment brought back a suggestion made by Mike, the schoolteacher who lived for seven years in

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Kobe, who thought that the exhibition would have been interesting for Japanese people (see Spread 2). He tried to place himself in their shoes, saying that ‘I would be curious to see, curious to remind myself of things I would have seen every day and I no longer see or I would also be interested to see how these . . . curators are curating my culture’. The same sentiment was also shared by some Japanese visitors who wrote the following comments (in Japanese) in the visitors’ book: ‘I will soon be returning to Japan. Thank you for letting me see Japan from a very different perspective’ or ‘Before I arrived in London I would never have imagined to be able to see Japanese ordinary life (on display). It was very interesting!’ Some Japanese visitors in their twenties and thirties thought that the flat wasn’t modern enough. This was in sharp contrast to a number of non-Japanese visitors who told us that they were disappointed that the flat was so ‘modern’ because they had expected to see a ‘traditional’ home. Two women in their mid-twenties thought the flat felt ‘like a true Japanese home, but more like my grandmother’s’. They added that some of the objects displayed – especially those in the kitchen like the small lunch boxes – were more like things one would find in the home of the older generation. Similarly, two Japanese female friends in their thirties claimed that the flat ‘did not feel modern’ as it reminded them of ‘their parent’s home, or flats of twenty years ago’. There might be a degree of truth in these observations, because although some items were purchased in 2009 and 2010, the objects in the exhibition that were donated by the families were generally part of an excess of utilitarian goods – particularly tableware and kitchen utensils – that had accumulated over time. Moreover, we also used tableware and utensils from my personal collection that dates back to the late 1990s. Of course, homes that had been built within the last ten years and that had consequently been lived in for a relatively short period of time would contain newer and to some extend more ‘modern’ domestic objects. However, my observations suggest that the kitchen drawers inside these homes also contained a mixture of old and new. Interestingly, two other Japanese women in their thirties, who were both from Tokyo, commented that they noticed the ‘difference between homes in east and west Japan’. This is an important point as my research corroborates that there continues to exist a degree of regional variation in the interior style of Japanese homes with those in Tokyo being generally more modern than those in other areas of Japan. A number of Kansai-based Japanese architects confirmed this trend and linked it with the more affluent lifestyle of those living in the capital (see Daniels 2010). All Japanese visitors travelled in pairs or small groups. However, it is important to distinguish between those travelling in Japanese only groups and mixed groups, because in the latter case the Japanese visitor tended to take on the role of guide, similar to the cultural brokers discussed above. Below I will focus on two case studies to discuss these two types of Japanese visitors; Yasuko and Yuko were two friends in their twenties from Osaka who were currently studying in London, while Tanaka-san, was a Japanese woman in her mid-thirties from Tokyo who lives in the UK and visited with a British female friend of about the same age. Yuko and Yasuko only spent ten minutes inside the flat and they took a rather unusual route because they entered the flat through the exit (see Map 6). They spent their first three minutes inside leafing through the visitors’ book while reading and discussing other people’s comments. They only spent seven minutes inside the flat. Four minutes were spent reading; one minute in the dining-kitchen area, one minute in the living area and two minutes in the introductory area. For the remaining three minutes, they engaged with the tableware found in the kitchen cupboards and on the dining table and they opened the ‘kimono closet’ in the Western-style room too. In the interview they noted that they really liked the kitchen because it ‘felt very Japanese’. This particular case study shows that the amount of time spent inside the exhibition space does not necessary correlate to the satisfaction with the visit or the appreciation of the experience more generally,

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Map 6

an issue I will discuss in more detail in Chapter  4. Considering that they only spent such a short time inside, the women were still able to list a number of objects that had evoked strong reactions. Indeed, our findings more generally show that Japanese visitors tended to single out specific objects that had evoked the ‘feel’ of home for them. Firstly, Yuko singled out a postal parcel, that we placed on the floor next to the shoe storage cabinet with the owl display in the entrance hall (see photos on page 115), because her mother sends her food from Japan in exactly the same box. The carton box concerned shows a wrap around, life-like image of the well-known yellow and green truck with its black cat (or ‘kuroneko’) symbol associated with the Yamato delivery service. Other Japanese visitors similarly expressed their delight upon seeing this familiar box because it was the container in which food and other items from home would frequently arrive. Noriko and Yutaka Kagemori, the only Japanese participants in my study who visited the exhibition in July 2011, were also intrigued by the presence of the ‘kuroneko’ box because they had actually used this particular box to post extra slippers for the exhibition to me. The photograph on page 114 shows two such boxes in front of the entrance to their flat in Osaka; Sue took this photo when we visited their home in 2006 (see Daniels 2010: 69). Ali, the Japan blogger who lived in Japan for two years, was the only non-Japanese visitor who also referred to the postal package. She published a photograph of the box in her online review of the exhibition with the following text: ‘As I said, the house was full of knick-knacks and small details . . . The ornaments on this shoe cupboard were interesting, but I was more

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taken with the “kuroneko“ box in the corner – a detail which I expect would pass some people by’ (Muskett 2011). Other visitors who had lived in Japan also raised questions about how those who had never been to the country would experience their visit. These are genuine concerns (that were also expressed by the in-house curators) and the significance of objects such as the postal parcels could have easily passed by those who had never been to Japan. The same was also true for the seasonal objects in the show that I changed about once every month. At the entrance to the flat, for example, a carp streamer put up in May, was replaced with a Tanabata branch with wishes in July and a wind bell (furin) in August. Other examples of things that were hidden from view were those we placed inside two IKEA chests of drawers; one in the Western-style room contained towels for everyday use as well as four unused towel sets still in their gift-boxes. The card game set (karuta) discussed in Chapter 1 was also kept in this chest. The things we kept in the IKEA chest of drawers in the Japanese-style room were a large orange blanket as well as a box of cockroach repellent. This latter object was again spotted by Ali who uploaded a close-up photograph of the item concerned on her blog with the following explanation: ‘When I opened one of the drawers in the tatami room, I was surprised to find this box of cockroach repellent. Surprised, but only because it was above and beyond the detail I would have expected’ (see Chapter 5). The fact that that the text on the package was in Japanese did not help transparency, but we felt that the photos of cockroaches also made the purpose of the content of this box kind of self-explanatory.

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From the start I had been aware that in order for the show to be successful we would need to accommodate the various degrees of familiarity with Japan our prospective visitors would have. We aimed to address this issue by creating different layers of knowledge through explanatory texts, images and films, but also by providing various levels of detail in simulating a homely atmosphere inside the flat, that would speak to the expectations of different kinds of visitors. Although we added textual and visual context to explain key practices that would usually occur in each room (for example, bathing, storing, eating, sleeping, cooking and so forth), we did not describe or provide information on labels for each individual object on display. Our main aim was to simulate the ambience inside Japanese homes and my concern was that by labelling the objects inside we would have turned the rich, multifaceted material fabric of everyday Japanese life into an ordered 2D abstraction. Instead, we opted for creating assemblages of objects that were either framed by storage devices such as the tableware or the ‘kimono closet’ or by specific areas inside rooms such as the sink in the bathroom, the counter and the pantry in the kitchen or the Buddhist altar in the tatami room. This technique does not emphasize the specific iconic pieces, as is often the case when objects are placed in glass cases. On the contrary, it enabled us to highlight the material connections between objects and thereby mirror the intricate, often messy material fabric that surrounds most (Japanese)

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Photograph © Ali Muskett

Courtesy of Ali Muskett

people inside their homes. Anthropologists studying the home have shown how rather than surrounding themselves with singular objects imbued with special memory, people tend to create configurations or families of objects that are connected both through their material and social relationships (Clarke 2001). When I gave a presentation about the exhibition in Japan in March 2013, for example, one of the Japanese women who simultaneously translated my talk, pointed out that she had been pleasantly surprised to see a ‘religious’ calendar (with festive days based on the ‘old’ lunar calendar) as well as a well-known charm to protect against fire that forms part of the standard material fabric of Japanese kitchen counters. Similarly, next to the kitchen counter we created a pantry filled with (empty) Japanese food packages. Again, there were no individual labels but the photos and text (often in romaji or Romanized Japanese) on the boxes clarified most of the content. The pantry was singled out by many Japanese visitors because the display of popular foods evoked strong memories. Tanaka-san touched many the food packages and then exclaimed, while holding one up: ‘Oh! This is my favourite! It’s sponge cake – so nice, so soft.’ The food was also evocative for some of the non-Japanese visitors who had spent time in Japan and Priya; an Indian woman who grew up in Japan, for example, selected the food packages, which she

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called the ‘snacks in the pantry’, as her favourite objects because they made her nostalgic about her childhood. Returning to Yuko and Yasuko, they also expressed a strong appreciation for the Buddhist altar and the objects placed inside saying that ‘most homes have these’ and that they both missed seeing them. Tanaka-san, the Japanese guide in her thirties introduced above, also claimed in the interview that she had enjoyed seeing both the tatami room because it was ‘calm and relaxing’ and the altar saying that ‘many people have these in their homes’. She then distinguished between Christianity and Japanese religion saying that instead of praying to God ‘you can just talk to your grandmother’. For other Japanese visitors, the altar also evoked a feeling of home; it being an intimate space shared with the extended family, including the ancestors (Daniels 2010: 81–100). The altar was also mentioned by a small number of non-Japanese visitors but, in this case, it mainly served to show cultural differences, providing proof for the ritualized nature of Japanese everyday life. Yasuko and Yuko also commented that they really liked the fireman’s bucket in the entrance adding jokingly that it was very ‘authentic’. Interestingly, throughout their visit both women laughed out loud, while pointing at certain items, and they mentioned in the interview that they really appreciated the humorous elements. Their sighting of the blue plastic shoes used to clean the wet area in the bathroom resulted in a particularly long burst of hilarious laughter. Similarly, two other Japanese women in their thirties commented on the ‘sense of humour’ that they appreciated ‘especially the very detailed and precise displays

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of objects in the kitchen’. Similarly, Tanaka-san, a Japanese ‘cultural broker’, who visited with a female British friend for about twenty minutes found certain objects entertaining. One of the items that caught her attention was a nameplate we placed next to the front door, which was a generous donation from the owner of a small engraving shop in Kyoto. This was a display sample that carried the name of a famous Japanese actor and it was this what had made Tanaka-san laugh. In the interview she added that she had also liked seeing the blue plastic boots in the wet area in the bathroom, which she laughingly said were ‘very accurately displayed’. Herzfeld (2005) has shown how humour can play an important role in the creation of cultural identities. It exposes the tension between the denial and recognition of certain truths thereby generating ‘cultural intimacy’ which is essential for the successful reproduction of national sentiments. Unlike many of the Western cultural brokers, Tanaka-san was eager to stress the ordinary nature of flat that she saw as being representative of most Japanese homes. In the interview she added that the exhibition had lived up to her expectations as it was ‘very truthful to what contemporary homes are like’. During their twentyminute visit, the pair would first read for one or two minutes in each room and then Tanaka-san would make some comments. In the introductory area, a map showing the locations of the homes that were part of my 2003 study prompted her to add more detailed information about the Kansai region. Upon entering the flat, she touched one of the paper strips with wishes written on them, that hung from the bamboo branch we had put up for the Tanabata festival on 7 July, saying ‘maybe other visitors have written these messages’. Yutaka and Noriko Kagemori had brought the (plastic) bamboo branch with decorations from Japan. After I removed the carp-streamer display that had decorated the entrance since May, they helped me to erect the branch that we subsequently

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decorated with paper strips and each of us wrote a wish; the two of theirs in Japanese and mine in English. Upon my weekly visits, I saw that other people had added more wishes, both in Japanese and in English, to the branch. In the entrance hall Tanaka-san explained that wearing slippers is ‘restful and healthy’ which prompted her friend to say, ‘so, we have to take our shoes off?’, and they subsequently did. In the Westernstyle room she was drawn in by Sue’s life-size photograph of a bookshelf, while commenting, ‘In Japanese homes there is no space – so much stuff.’ They opened one of the drawers of the ‘kimono closet’ but did not touch any of the things inside. They stood still in front of the image of the toilet, and when the British woman said that this was ‘unusual’, Tanaka-san answered that ‘these are really common’. In the tatami room, they only opened one drawer of the IKEA chest, while in the living area, they sat quietly on the sofa for two minutes to look at the photo albums. Like the groups guided by Western cultural brokers, it was in the dining-kitchen area that most time was spent interacting. They picked up a number of the objects from inside the kitchen drawers such as a large pestle and some bamboo tofu picks, while the nonJapanese woman repeatedly asked her friend: ‘what is this?’ Surprisingly, it was the latter who explained to her Japanese friend that a small aluminium pan-shaped object with a lid could be used for roasting nuts and heating sesame seeds. In the interview she explained that she had recognized this object from a shop in New York called Kiosk that sells themed international home interiors. She even added that the exhibition reminded her of this shop. The link between museum going and other consumption practices such as shopping will be further explored in Chapter 4.

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Discussion: ‘The Japan of the little tradition’ The whole of Japan is pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. OSCAR WILDE, 1889

It is a country of ordinary people with ordinary desires, people neither more nor less efficient than anyone else, neither more nor less individual, neither more nor less given to feudal arts and formality. PATRICK SMITH, 1998

The first quote above was taken from Oscar Wilde’s 1889 The Decay of Living, already mentioned in the Introduction, in which he discusses the role of the imagination in the making of great art. Wilde, like Patrick Smith, a journalist who lived in Japan for more than a decade, who provided the second quote above more than one hundred years later, reminds us that people’s ordinary lives across cultures tend to be very similar (Smith 1998: 33). Most stereotypes about Japan are grounded in the supposed distinction made, both by foreigners and by (elite) Japanese, between refined high and ordinary low culture, with the former being associated with authentic Japanese practices and the latter being largely ignored because considered non-traditional. The anthropologist Gordon Mathews has shown how the ubiquity of these ideas impacts on contemporary creative practices in Japan whereby artists ranging from jazz musicians to oil painters are critiqued for being inauthentic because they are supposedly engaging with a ‘foreign’ art form. He states that: 120

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Japaneseness is not simply a matter of Japanese tradition, but of Japanese life as it is actually lived today . . . . it is all but impossible to grow up in Japan today without being exposed to pizza and jazz, thanks to radio, television and fast food outlets. High Japanese culture . . . has not been actually seen by most people, except perhaps on educational television for an instant before changing the channel. MATHEWS 2002: 34

Smith adds that many Japanese people express frustration with this ongoing state of affairs and he mentions how the Nobel-prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe has repeatedly lamented the lack of mainstream accounts about his country, or what he called ‘the Japan of the little tradition’, which is not ‘the old Japan of samurai and Zen gardens, and the new Japan of gadgets and efficiency’ but ‘the blank, where the Japanese live’ (Smith 1998: 33–34). AHJ aimed to offer a glimpse into ‘the Japan of the little tradition’. However, by opting for this approach we experienced resistance from those keen to keep the stereotype alive. A number of Japanese visitors as well as ‘Japan-lovers’ expressed their concern about the fact that visitors from other countries might not grasp ‘the uniqueness of Japanese culture’. This resonates with comments made in preliminary meetings by some Geffrye Museum staff members who suggested that it was paramount that we introduced well-known aspects of ‘traditional’ Japanese arts, especially the tea ceremony, in the exhibition. The tea ceremony is, of course, a key example of elite culture and the aesthetic purism of the performance has over the centuries captured the Western imagination. The person who was most vocal about this issue spent a few weeks in Japan as a tourist and attended a number of tea ceremonies. This experience had made such an impact on her that she questioned my assertions that none of the ‘ordinary’ 121

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Japanese participating in my study were actively involved in these traditional arts, even if some of them may have done so when they were younger or possessed some of the utensils necessary to enact such performances. It soon became clear that the museum also has strong connections with a number of Japanese people working in the arts and design, who live in London and who were eager to sustain the Japanese as Aesthetes stereotype. Indeed, Japanese artists and designers living abroad have for decades played a pivotal role in actively promoting the country’s ‘high traditions’. Similarly, the wives of diplomats, university professors, business leaders and so forth, who accompanied their husbands abroad, have kept themselves preoccupied with organizing tea ceremonies, flower arrangement (ikebana) sessions and kimono demonstrations. At the conference Anthropology in the World held at the British Museum in June 2012, two fellowpresenters in a panel about ethnographers who curate their own exhibitions made reference to how locally based elites may try to interfere with how their culture was depicted. The first example was offered by Shelagh Weir who discussed the depiction of the contemporary Middle East in museums focusing on her own exhibition of Palestinian dress at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She revealed how Londonbased Israelis had sanctioned some of the displays.61 Anna Portisch, who curated an exhibition about Kazakh craft women and their textiles at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS , provided the second example. She pointed out how Kazakh dignitaries insisted that certain ordinary objects in the exhibition were replaced with more high-end examples such as an elaborate tea set to entertain guests with. Similarly, I suspect that some Japanese elite living in London, who had a long-term relationship with the Geffrye Museum, might have lobbied to include certain practices, and in the end the tea ceremony did feature in some of the educational events accompanying the show. To be clear, I am not challenging the fact that traditional Japanese arts, grounded in a complex allencompassing aesthetic philosophy, were and still are fascinating pursuits. Moreover, whereas once they were the sole preserve of the Japanese elite, in the post-war period these practices were actively

Courtesy of the Kuwahara family

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propagated through the educational system and gained currency as a fundamental part of the standard skill packet expected of the well-rounded bride-to-be. During the 1980s they were further transformed into a hobby beloved amongst suburban housewives. My concern is with the level of resistance faced by anyone who dares to question the relevance of these practices for the majority of contemporary Japanese. I have experienced this first hand on many occasions over the past twenty years. During a lecture I gave in Oxford in 2010, for example, an elderly Japanese lady with strong links with the local art community, criticized me for showing a slide of three teenagers dressed in kimonos on their first visit of the new year to a local shrine (hatsumode) in Osaka (see photograph opposite on the left). The focus of her discontent were the sausages on sticks that the girls were eating. This is a popular snack that can be bought at stalls lining the approach to religious centres during festive occasions, but, in her view, ‘Japanese women do not eat this kind of food while wearing kimono.’ The photograph was actually part of one of the girl’s photo diaries, which she had agreed to compile for me during the course of one year in 2003. In other words, this was how this particular young woman wanted to be depicted; wearing a kimono while having fun with her friends during the New Year’s period, irrespective of what the canon for a wearing kimono might dictate. Many anthropologists are drawn to study this discrepancy between ‘ideal’ and ‘practice’ or ‘the blank’ that makes aesthetic purists shiver. However, as Kratz has rightly argued, because of their ambivalence stereotypes are ‘vexingly resilient and unresponsive to empirical disproof and experience’ (Kratz 2002: 105). The role museums play in the creation of stereotypes is also the focus of an earlier publication that Kratz wrote together with Karp (2000), another key figure in museum anthropology. The authors draw on the same quote by Oscar Wilde about the invention of Japan, referenced above, adding that ‘museums and exhibits are instruments of such invention. Through them, imaginary Japanese are invented along with imaginary cultural selves to accompany them’ (Karp and Kratz 2000: 194). They argue that museums tend to be guided by the following two opposite representational strategies, whereby stressing ‘similarities produces an assimilating impression, creating both familiarity and intimacy . . . Assertions of unbridgeable difference, on the other hand, exoticizes by creating relations of great spatial or temporal distance, perhaps the thrill of the unknown’ (ibid., 198).62 Our exhibition also drew on this dynamic between familiarity and Otherness; although we stressed the similarities of mundane practices across different cultures, we did not deny difference either. Our visitors’ study demonstrates the ‘cognitive tenacity’ or resilience of stereotypes. Many non-Japanese visitors, both those who had never visited and those who had spent a prolonged time in the country, found confirmation of their previously held ideas about the unique minimal aesthetics of Japanese domestic life. Still, some visitors were made to question their preconceptions, and the show, thus, made a worthy contribution to encourage a more sophisticated understanding of social life in other cultural contexts. The next chapter will continue to explore the link between national identity and stereotypes by focusing on different conceptualizations of authenticity.

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JEN: SPREAD 4

Jen –

‘I was very interested in anime and manga’ Jen, who is in her mid-twenties and lives with her parents in Leicester, has a BA in anthropology with a focus on Japan as well as an MA in museum studies. She chose to study Japan because she ‘wanted to be somewhere else, experience something else and learn another language’. And while she would have ‘liked to go to Norway or France or wherever’, because she was very interested in anime and manga, she thought ‘I hear Japanese more than any other foreign language and it would make it slightly easier.’ Jen spent one year in Nagoya in 2008–2009 as part of her BA programme, and, when I asked her whether it was a good experience, she replied that it is really difficult to sum up, adding, ‘it’s so varied: there were very, very polite people; there were very rude people’. Through her studies she became really interested in stereotypes, questioning ‘this projection of an alien land’. Jen did not see the exhibition but she attended the raffle because one of the interns at the Geffrye Museum, who was on the same MA with her, informed her about the event. She liked a number of plates and bowls, but her lot was called quite 125

late and ‘most of the stuff that I was looking at was completely gone’. This is how she described the object she won to us: I won a model of a samurai helmet. It’s not complete. I’m not sure . . . It came in a fancy box and it has a magazine and then you can see it’s meant to have these big horns. It looks to me like when you subscribe to a magazine that you get [a piece] each month, and [then] you get to build up a model. She actually ended up with the miniature samurai helmet without the stolen antlers (see Chapter 1). Jen explained that she only chose this item because by the time it was her turn all her favourite lots had gone. Once home, she placed it in on a shelf in a large bookcase in her bedroom that she called her ‘cabinet of curiosities’. In this new location it became part of an already well-established collection of souvenirs such as Saharan sand and a Coca-Cola bottle from the London 2012 Olympic Games. The same storage device also contained Jen’s collection of Japan-related DVD s, books and photo albums. The overall aesthetic of the room was produced with an excess of Japan-related objects. Indeed, on her bed Jen had arranged a collection of ‘character cushions’, and on another shelf in her bedroom she displays a large group of anime figurines. Our questions about this latter display revealed 126

that Sue and I were clearly not very clued-in about the anime world, and Jen explained that: ‘it’s an homage to games or cartoons you really like, or you like it so you want to be part of it’. Most are characters from Symphonia, a role-playing game, which she used to play on the Game Cube. She recently reduced her collection but kept these figurines because they are related to her ‘cosplay’, referring to the popular practice whereby people dressed up as their favourite anime characters. Since 2004, she has been going to cosplay conventions, held at universities every summer, but she is currently less involved in the scene because it is expensive and very time-consuming to make the outfits. Jen, like the other two people who lived in Japan for a prolonged period of time, Mike and Ali, surrounded herself with large quantities of objects that she had either purchased herself in Japan or that were given to her by Japanese friends. Her raffled helmet, like Ali’s card game (see Spread 7) and Mike’s cushions (see Spread 2), fitted into an overall decorative scheme. Ali revealed how the Japanese objects in her home not only brought back personal memories, they also served as conversation pieces that allowed her to recall and expand upon stories about her time spent in Japan. However, even those who had never been to Japan, such as the Waghorns in Kent (see Chapter 5), valued the novelty value of their raffled objects, because, at least initially, they piqued visitors’ curiosity and resulted in people asking questions about them. For those who had spent time in Japan, these objects also became part of a 127

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material resource that they could draw on to share aspects of their life-changing experiences in Japan. These Japanese objects allow them to actively manipulate memories to fit into ongoing, changing narratives about the self (Van Dijck 2007). While in the three examples discussed above, the raffled objects became easily absorbed into interiors already consisting of large numbers of Japanese objects, in other homes, the raffled objects caused people to make changes to their interiors. One such example is the lucky owl figurine, that we displayed on the shoe storage cabinet in the entrance hall, that was part of one of the lots the O’Donnells received. As I mentioned in the Introduction, the cute baby-owl was given a special place on a display shelf in their teenage daughter’s bedroom,63 where it triggered the purchase of more owl-shaped objects such as a set of owl bookstands. This phenomenon, whereby new goods that enter the home force people to purchase other items, similar in aesthetic style, in order to maintain an overall symbolic unity of space, is well known amongst researchers studying the material culture of the home and is generally referred to as the ‘Diderot effect’ (Daniels 2010: 117).64 The practice demonstrates that objects are not only imbued with meaning by people, but that through their material combinations with other objects they may have the power to shape our worlds too.

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Chapter 4 To Learn or not to Learn? ‘Harrods knick-knacks went down a treat in Tokyo’

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Introduction: ‘IKEA furniture didn’t convey Japanese aesthetics very well’ John, the British man married to a Japanese woman, who I introduced in the previous chapter, expressed his overall disappointment with the exhibition, but he was particularly negative about the ‘IKEA furniture that didn’t convey Japanese aesthetics very well’. Some visitors, however, were pleasantly surprised to encounter familiar IKEA products, and a British couple in their thirties, for example, happily declared that they possessed an identical chest of drawers. Others were prompted to highlight similarities between Japanese and Scandinavian design more generally. Still, overall negative associations were more common. Two British women in their twenties, for example, felt that having the IKEA furniture was ‘cheating’. One of them took offence because she had exactly the same IKEA sofa in her home, saying that it made the display feel ‘less authentic’. The IKEA furniture was also an eyesore for a British man in his forties who felt that using ‘this kind of furniture’ made the rooms look ‘tatty’ and ‘basic’. He had expected something different because the Japanese are regarded ‘in high esteem for style, etiquette and cleanliness’. These opinions correspond with a specific (British) middle-class view that associates IKEA

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with cheap and not particularly tasteful furniture, and the inclusion of such IKEA goods in our exhibition thus raised questions about the supposedly superior aesthetic sensibility of Japanese people (see Chapter 3). The specific focus of John’s discontent was the IKEA dining table we placed in the kitchen. He compared this piece of furniture with ‘traditional (Japanese) tables that have natural edges’. This reference to the ‘natural’ qualities of Japanese furniture also surfaced when he discussed the cedar wood ‘Japanese’ bath, which apropos nobody in the homes I studied possessed. These days most tubs are made of that most dreaded of materials, plastic! Value judgments about specific materials are entrenched in Western notions about authenticity, while the ongoing romanticism surrounding handmade objects is common not only amongst laymen but also in the museum community and academia. Indeed, once it became clear that our budget would not allow us to ship large pieces of furniture from Japan and I suggested that we could buy IKEA furniture in London instead, staff at the Geffrye Museum also raised concerns about authenticity. The following question summed up the issue: Could an IKEA table be called a Japanese table? Initially, I was quite taken aback by the suggestion that there was such thing as a ‘Japanese table’. Nobody had ever asked me whether I use a Belgian or English table in my home? With a bit of a stretch of the imagination the ‘Japanese table’ could of course refer to the low Japanese-style (wafu) tables placed in tatami rooms featuring the ‘natural edges’ described by John above. These kinds of tables would be placed in minimal tatami rooms that are (and have always been) unattainable for most Japanese (Daniels 2010: 131–51). The only tables that Japanese people participating in my research possessed were, firstly, a large dining table with chairs and, secondly, a coffee table accompanied by a sofa set, that could also double as a low table to crouch around while sitting on the floor. Both kinds of tables are sold en masse in furniture stores throughout Japan, but their origin is difficult to trace. Would it be enough for the company producing the object concerned to be Japanese? Would one need to show that all the disparate parts were made in Japan or that the device was assembled by Japanese workers? Quite an impossible task as many parts for household goods are produced in other Asian countries, with China being probably the most likely site of production. In the museum context the value of objects tends to be linked with the historicity of their production and design processes. However, a question that I argue is equally important, but is often overlooked by museum staff, is whether the quest for authentic origins, or in our case the ‘Japaneseness’ of things, actually matters to the people who employ these items in their everyday lives. Most participants in my study didn’t care where their tables came from. The only exceptions were some women under forty who were interested in interior design and therefore eager to point out that it was an ‘Italian’ or a ‘French’ table that adored their kitchen. Of course, within this international setting the ‘Swedish’ IKEA table would not look out of place. That said, some of the families I worked with were eager to convey to me the importance of imparting knowledge about more ‘traditional’ kinds of aesthetics; about what they themselves considered to be more ‘tasteful’ homes, to my prospective Western audience. The Kagemoris in Osaka, who tirelessly assisted me with shopping, packing and shipping most of the objects, repeatedly expressed concerns about

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the fact that the majority of the household goods that I had selected were cheap and ‘made of plastic’. I assured them that visitors would be informed that in most homes one would find of greater variety of objects (and one of the texts in the introductory area conveys this information). However, they were not quite convinced that this would suffice. They, thus, spent an afternoon showing me examples of exquisite pottery and lacquerware that they used in their home, and decided to donate a number of their beautiful ceramic serving bowls and trays. Yutaka-san also made a special effort to take me to a local tableware store to purchase more expensive tableware that, like their donated bowls, we placed on the dining table in the exhibition. As I have mentioned in the Introduction, one of the Kagemoris pots ended up in the O’Donnell’s family home in Kent, where it was used to store keys, while one of the trays for serving fish I bought with Yutaka-san was transformed into a plant pot in the Waghorn’s home. Ironically, these mundane appropriations of the Kagemoris ceramics negated the family’s attempt to introduce Westerners to the more refined aspects of Japanese domestic food culture. Questions such as what makes a table ‘Japanese’ reveal deeply entrenched assumptions about the authenticity of objects in the curatorial community. Although, many museums continue to stress the authentic aura of iconic objects, more recently there has been a marked shift (especially amongst visitors) towards a conceptualization of authenticity based on ‘mimesis or the faithful reconstruction of reality’, through imagining the actual use of objects displayed (Williams 2011: 39). In the next chapter, I will pay attention to how ‘mimetic authenticity’ gives visitors a more active role in the meaning-making process and destabilizes the authority of the museum. In this chapter, I will focus on issues surrounding the production of material authenticity that makes objects, brought to life by the expertise of curators, ‘the stars of the show’ (ibid., 47). Through a detailed discussion of the objects that we employed in AHJ , I will, first, query the value museums place on the historicity of objects. Next, I will explore the effectiveness of textual narratives in translating the meanings of artefacts. Museum texts embody the expertise of curators and by extension the authority of the institution. Their presence in exhibitions is connected with the educational remit of museums, but I will scrutinize this focus on learning in museums and contrast it with the variety of motivations that drive visitors. I will pay attention to the following three groups who engaged with texts in different ways: (1) those who experienced the exhibition on their own and therefore read a lot; (2) parents who drew on the texts to disseminate the knowledge provided to their children; and finally (3) visitors who used the texts to start conversations about a range of topics that were or were not related to the exhibition theme.

Objects are ‘the stars of the show’? Standard museum practices of authentication are based on the reification of a specific moment in the ongoing history of an object. This immediately raises the question of how it is decided which instance in an object’s career should be valued most: do objects need to be in pristine condition, as close as possible to their ‘original’ state, or does the patina of use add value? Many Western museums have a long, often troubled, history of collecting that prioritizes the historicity of objects. Items that were collected during the colonial period such as African masks were often selected because they showed traces of use, but perfect examples of their kind linked to a distant moment in time, whether or not they were actually used, were valued too.65

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The history and politics of collecting differs greatly according to cultural context and the reverence for objects imbued with history is, for example, less pronounced in other parts of the world. One such example is the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka that opened in 1970 as part of the world expo held in the same year. This museum offers fascinating insights into what might happen if objects were not valued for a specific moment in their past. Because their collections were commissioned (and they could thus be reproduced if necessary), curators in this institution were freed from many of the constraints that those dealing with ‘old’ artefacts face. In other words, in Minpaku objects were not subjected to the usual regimes of preservation that transform them into valuable museum pieces that need to be protected from visitors behind glass. Instead, new display techniques that highlighted material relationships between objects and that allowed visitors opportunities to touch the displays were introduced.66 Material authenticity grounded in the historicity of objects continues to be valued highly by most museums because it forms the backbone of their expertise and authority. If objects were no longer treated as ‘the stars of the show’, one would need a thorough rethink of the ‘mission of museums to protect and conserve artefacts for prosperity’ (Williams 2011: 42). In AHJ , we primarily employed ‘new’ objects, whether they were bought in commercial venues or donated by Japanese participants in my research. Moreover, we did not select iconic pieces that were locally produced and thus easily construed as repositories of memory, history and heritage, but we collected everyday used, mass-produced, consumer goods. The use of commodities such as the IKEA furniture introduced above allowed us to problematize the distinction between objects linked with commerce and the categories of art or artefact that have ‘come to stand for or symbolize a discrete culture rather than the intercultural circumstances and interactions through which the object has moved’ (Foster 2012: 149). Finally, visitors were encouraged to engage with these objects within their original context of everyday consumption instead of focusing on their production and design processes.

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The fact that most of the objects in AHJ had been donated by research participants, whether they had been stored away or were in active use, and many continue to be found in homes throughout Japan, also questioned the tendency to perceive ‘museum objects’ to be static and primarily associated with the past. Bouttiaux calls this the ‘deadening effect’ of museums, similar to monographs written in the ‘ethnographic present’ that freezes the people studied in time (Bouttiaux 2012: 35). She points out that in standard exhibitions, visitors are often ‘trapped by the allure of the exotic; the viewer’s eye is often drawn to what remains connected to the past, rather than contemplating how some [objects] continue to lead vibrant lives in the present’ (ibid., 43). Bjerregaard takes this argument a step further by arguing that more attention should be paid to the ‘presence effect’ of the museum space because, in his view, it is the particular atmosphere that an exhibition evokes that can ‘throw us into a new conception of the world’ (Bjerregaard 2015: 78). By breaking ‘away from the supremacy of the object’ (Bonetti 2007: 171) and instead inviting visitors to AHJ to interact with the displays, we hoped to emphasize ‘the profound dynamism of every living culture’ (Bouttiaux 2012: 44). I have already mentioned some of the sources of the four hundred objects we used in the exhibition, but below is a more comprehensive list: 1

Large pieces of furniture were bought at IKEA . The fact that the Swedish giant has been very popular since its (second) opening67 in Japan in 2006 was a real godsend for our project.68 We ordered a two-seater sofa, a rug, a coffee table, a large wooden dining table with four chairs, and two chests of drawers from our local IKEA store in London. I first selected pieces based on styles, colours and materials that I had seen in Japanese homes on the IKEA Japan website and then consulted with Japanese participants. The sofa and the rug were easy and I actually found a sofa identical to the one used in one of the homes studied. However, to my surprise, purchasing wooden furniture proved more challenging because the colours of the wood on offer in both countries didn’t match; a particular mahogany colour ubiquitous in Japan, for example, was unavailable in the UK . However, eventually we settled for cedar wood for the chests of drawers, a dark oak colour for the coffee table and a black painted wood for the dining table set. Another unexpected problem was that most coffee tables at the IKEA store in London were too high for sitting around on the floor and this was clearly not one of its anticipated functions.

2

Kema-san, a long-term friend and amateur ethnologist in her mid-fifties living in Yokohama, collected a variety of mundane objects for the show. These included fans, handed-out for free during the summer months; pamphlets, advertising seasonal foods distributed to homes in her neighbourhood; and packages of foods, drinks and other consumables. Amongst the items she contributed was a special collection of hundreds of rectangular cotton towels ( tenugui ), to commemorate special events; these had been collected by one of her acquaintances over a period of more than fifty years. One of these towels that commemorated the 1964 Tokyo Olympics took pride of place in the bathroom.

3

Several Japanese families who participated in my 2003 ethnography donated domestic items that they possessed a surplus of.69 The majority of these were ceramic tableware, cutlery and cooking utensils, but I also received kimonos, towels, lucky objects and dolls. Some of the latter type of objects had been in the families concerned for many decades, but most had no strong

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sentimental attachment to them. They had only kept these objects because they felt obliged to care for them (Daniels 2010) and once they heard of my exhibition they happily gave them to me. Examples of such items include the two Ichimatsu dolls that we received from the Tsumuras in Osaka. These dolls, representing little girls in traditional dress, are presented to baby girls by their maternal grandparents to assist them in growing up healthy and safe. The Tsumuras’ dolls were originally given to their two daughters, who in 2010 were twenty-four and twenty-six years old, and who both had married but left their dolls behind in their parental home. The dolls were given to me on the understanding that we would take care of them after the exhibition, and as result Sue and I are now the (happy?) guardians of one doll each. The photographs below show the dolls in their new habitat in our offices in Oxford (on the left) and in Cambridge (on the right). 4

We also used religious objects, tableware, seasonal items such as fans and kimonos from my personal collection put together over the last eighteen years and stored away in boxes in Oxford, London and in my parents’ attic in Belgium.

5

During shopping trips with participants in 2009 and 2010, I bought functional goods such as futons, tatami mats, curtains, garden tools, light fixtures and slippers. I also purchased some second-hand kimonos and accessories at a temple market in Kyoto.

The Geffrye Museum’s prime focus is on the history of the English home and from the start the museum had shown no interest in creating a collection of Japanese domestic objects. On the contrary, the fact that the museum would not be responsible for the objects after the closure of the show was actually one of the conditions to host the exhibition. Because the AHJ objects were not destined to become part of a collection, we were able to break with conventional museum practices (see Chapter 1) and allow visitors free access. It also allowed us to give most items away in a free public raffle. Next, I will explore how we aimed to further destabilize the aura of museum objects by not using texts in the conventional ways.

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‘I liked making discoveries for myself’ [Text] usually acts as a mediator, translator or interlocutor between viewer and the object. To frame an object by writing is to imply that the viewer will be unable to comprehend or fully assimilate that object without help. ROBERTS AND VOGEL 1994: 76

Most museums continue to interpret the objects they display on behalf of visitors through the use of one-way textual messages produced by experts. These written testimonies play a key role in producing ‘material authenticity’; they translate ‘intensive research experience into descriptive and interpretive representations’ and in the process both objects and experiences are transformed into texts (Karp and Kratz 2000: 204). In our exhibition we also used expert texts, based on my ethnography inside Japanese homes, but we employed a number of strategies to reduce their authoritative voice. I, firstly, tried to avoid writing in an overly didactic style and kept the length of each message to a minimum in order to ‘give visitors the experience of other cultures rather than to lecture from the authority of experience’ (Karp and Kratz 2000: 205). Secondly, all texts were accompanied by images in order to create a creative dialogue between the two. In each room at least one wall was covered with an image-text wallpaper. These wallpapers acted like conventional museum panels in that we provided an array of textual information, but our approach differed because we tried to inverse the hierarchy between text and images. In Chapter 2, I discussed the visual aspects of the wallpapers; the images did not just illustrate the text, but they were carefully laid out in order to entice visitors to first study the visual material and then turn to the texts. In this chapter I will explain the different kinds of texts we used. In the dark brown, top level band, we wrote the name of the particular room in large bold font both in English and in Japanese. This was followed by a smaller bold text explaining the history of the space and its main function today. At the same level we also showed a number of historical and contemporary images related to the space concerned that were in dialogue with each other. In the middle of the wallpaper we produced a band in a light grey colour, which was only one-third the width of the top band, that contained two kinds of texts: firstly, cultural and historical contextualization of practices that would generally occur in the space, and, secondly, text, in smaller print that acted like captions for visuals that were embedded in the wallpaper (see photograph on page 65). In order to avoid the kind of textual ‘framing’ referred to by Roberts in the quote above, we did not label any individual objects, and it was the absence of this standard guiding voice that allowed people to

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produce their own interpretations. As a consequence, many visitors who had some familiarity with Japan felt confident to offer their companions their own ‘creative’ explanations of the displays (see Chapter 3). Overall these cultural brokers did not read much, but the non-didactic, open-ended nature of the texts also enticed some to question the information provided, even if they had only briefly visited Japan. A good example of this attitude was a woman in her forties from Sydney, who visited together with her husband, for twenty minutes, while they were on holiday in the UK . Although she had only briefly visited Japan as a tourist upon reading the text about gender roles in the Western-style room she told her husband: ‘hmm, I don’t think much about the commentary!’ In the interview, she elaborated that she thought it was an old-fashioned depiction of gender, although she also conceded that ‘perhaps things are really like that’. However, this did not keep her from saying that reading the texts taught her a lot about ‘things she had been pondering about’. Specific examples were: (1) bathing practices and the separation between wet and dry areas, (2) the creation of inside–outside boundaries and the removal of shoes, and (3) the contemporary uses of tatami mats. The information about the use of different slippers and the distinction between wet and dry areas in the bathroom also stuck with many other visitors. Moreover, some people made positive comments about the style in which the texts were written. A British man in his late twenties, for example, said that they were ‘nicely written-up’ and ‘critically engaged’. In his view, they offered the ‘right insights’ because they were written by an anthropologist.

Photograph above © Shinji Tsumura. Other photographs © Inge Daniels 

Although it would have been possible to experience the space without reading, most visitors absorbed at least some of the texts. This activity was the most pronounced in the Western-style room where visitors read on average for four minutes. This might have been due to the fact that it was the first room people entered once they passed through the entrance hall, and at the start of their visit most might have been more eager (or able?) to engage with (con)textual information. Another reason might be that this space had the largest amount of texts because two walls were covered with image-text wallpapers. The room also contained the fewest number of objects to interact with. Sue and I had hoped to place a desk and chair with a packed bookshelf, integrated into the life-size image showing a bookshelf on one of the walls, to allow people to sit down and read some books or watch the film. However, in the end, this idea was ‘shelved’ because the space would become too congested.70 The absence of furniture meant that this space did not quite convey the atmosphere of Western-style rooms as large dressers, chests of drawers, pianos and desks would normally protrude into the space. Visitors also commented on the empty, minimal feel of the room saying that it had ‘more of a gallery feel’, while others pointed out that the focus was too much on reading and the ‘kimono closet’ being the only interactive element. It therefore came as no surprise that those visitors who didn’t read much spent hardly any time in this room. Our study suggests that those who travelled on their own, or one-third of the visitors we studied, spent most of their time inside the exhibition reading. Overall, these sole visitors also spent the least amount of time in the flat, generally between ten and fifteen minutes, but there were some notable exceptions, and five single visitors, all British, stayed for forty-five minutes or more. Four were women; two were in their twenties and the other two were fifty plus. The only man in this category was John, the ‘Japan-lover’ whose experience I have already discussed in detail, and who I will only return to briefly here. Although he already possessed an unusually high degree of knowledge about Japan, he was still on a quest for more detailed information, lamenting that ‘there is so much more depth that you could go into when it comes to Japanese houses’. He could be described as an extreme example of what Rounds has called an ‘extrinsically motivated museum-goer’ who is in search of ‘deep, systematic, and consistent’ knowledge (Rounds 2004: 393). The fact that he spent the most time in the introductory area, where he read the background information and leafed through the book, is also revealing in this respect. The four women who travelled alone were also eager to learn and they took their time reading and interacting with the displays. However, unlike John, they seemed less interested in gathering ‘deep’ knowledge. They particularly enjoyed the element of discovery and exploration that the exhibition promoted. As one of the girls in her twenties who spent a year in Japan put it, ‘I liked being able to search 142

through the flat, looking through private objects and being able to make discoveries for myself’. Alison, a woman in her fifties, who moved around in fifty minutes, watched both films from start to finish, but apart from briefly opening and closing the ‘please-open-drawers’, she didn’t touch anything. Throughout her visit she focused on the texts, even reading all the photo-elicitation texts hanging at the bottom of the image-text wallpapers. Unlike most other sole visitors, she did not sit down on the sofa, but only

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looked at the image-text panel in the living area for one minute and then remained standing while picking up the photo albums from the coffee table. In the interview she commented that the texts were very useful, and she had particularly enjoyed learning about kimonos. She then equated visiting an exhibition with learning things, saying jokingly ‘that is why you come isn’t it?’ Based on the amount of reading that she had engaged in during her visit, one would assume that this visitor would be aware of our objective to challenge stereotypes such as the minimal Japanese house. However, in the interview it soon dawned that the exhibition had only reaffirmed previously held ideas about Japan. Thus, she talked about Japanese people as being ‘more disciplined, ordered, joyful, happy and content’ which she linked with their houses being ‘less cluttered’, something that she herself hoped to get better at. These comments also confirm just how powerful the Japanese as Aesthetes image, discussed in Chapter 3, continues to be. Jane, in her sixties, also read a lot but unlike the other three women within this group, she interacted more with the displays (see Map 7 on previous page). At the entrance she tried on slippers, in the bathroom she touched the door curtain (noren) and the towels, and smelled soaps, while in the Japanese-style room she picked up several items on the Buddhist altar. Like the two younger women she took her time in the living area; reading for five minutes and looking at the albums while sitting on the sofa for another five. She admitted that she had expected to find more ‘traditional’ items such as ‘low tables and traditional clothing’ but was pleasantly surprised to see many ‘personal items’ such as the objects in the bathroom. Her interest in ‘traditional’ Japanese culture also resulted in her entering the Western-style room twice. On her second visit, she opened one of the drawers of the ‘kimono closet’ and took out a kimono to have a better look at it. She later explained that she was trying to figure out ‘how easy it was to assemble them’. Still, Jane seemed most intrigued by the dining-kitchen area where she read the image-text panel and the photo-elicitation texts for ten minutes and then explored the objects on the counter, the table and in the closets for more than five minutes; she picked up some of the bowls on the table, touched some of the items hanging above the sink and looked very closely at the food packages. She later commented that she had liked this space the most because she could ‘compare it with my own experiences’. The ceramics were her favourite objects as they were

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‘beautiful and practical at the same time’. She had not expected to see so many familiar things on the dining table and around the kitchen sink. After her long stay in the dining-kitchen area, she had another look at the photo albums, walked into the Japanese-style room a second time with her shoes on, and inspected the dolls in the Western-style room before existing through the entrance hall. Overall, Jane thought that the exhibition felt ‘friendly and relaxed’ and more ‘normal’ than the permanent galleries upstairs. Finally, Laura, in her mid-twenties, followed a conventional route through the space (see Map 8 overleaf). Of the fifty-eight minutes she was inside the flat, most time (forty-five minutes) was spent reading texts: two minutes in the entrance hall and corridor, six minutes each in the introductory area and the bathroom, seven minutes in both the Western-style and Japanese-style rooms, and ten minutes in the dining-kitchen area. In the living room she started off reading for five minutes but then sat down on the sofa and looked through the photo albums for ten minutes. She told us that she really enjoyed doing this and thought that the people in the photos looked ‘sweet’ and that one could ‘glimpse their past lives’ though the photos. Although she also remarked twice that it would have been good to be given more information about the people depicted. In our preliminary meetings, the in-house curatorial staff had stressed the importance of having a quiet area where people could sit down to catch their breath, have a more intimate look at something, or observe other visitors. The sofa area, which formed one part of the communal living-dining-kitchen space, performed this function extremely well. It contained an IKEA two-seater sofa with a low coffee table placed on top of an IKEA rug, as well as a four sitting cushions (zabuton) spread around the table. It is common to see this arrangement in Japanese homes with many people preferring to sit on cushions on the floor while using the sofa to rest their backs against. On the coffee table we placed four different types of photo albums donated by participants in my study. Firstly, the Matsui family in Nara donated their wedding album produced by a professional photo studio in 1996. Secondly, a set of five small photo albums, the kind that customers used to receive for free when they had their photos professionally developed, belonged to Yuko Takahashi, who was in her late twenties at the time. They contained snapshots of her trip to Guam with three female friends in 2009. A third example was a box containing

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Map 8

several small albums of photos taking by the Fujii family in Osaka in 1986. The fourth were two graduation albums belonging to Miyako Matsui; one commemorated her graduation from a rural elementary school in Nara in the late 1970s, and the other one she received upon graduating from high school in 1986. More than one-third of the visitors paused to pick up and explore at least one of these albums. Some decided to stand while flipping through the albums, but, if the sofa was vacant, most would sit down. Time spent sitting down varied between one and twenty minutes. Only a minority decided to sit on the cushions on the floor, and these were primarily people who had some familiarity with Japan, who probably wanted to demonstrate that they knew that Japanese people would also sit in this way on the floor. Jennifer, who visited for sixty-four minutes, spent almost half this time in the living area; after standing for ten minutes in front of the image-text panel reading and looking, she sat for sixteen minutes on the sofa while going through the photo albums. In the interview she claimed that she had really enjoyed doing this and said that the photos were expressions of ‘real life’ and ‘very intimate’, and she thought that it was significant to know that the families had donated them, something that we explained on the image-text panel nearby.

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Of all the items we placed inside the flat, the albums received some of the most contradictory reactions. Mark, a Belgian man and Shanti, an Indian woman, both in their forties, stayed for seven minutes in the living area (see Chapter  5, Map 10 on page 174). While he looked at the text panel, she sat down on the sofa and quickly leaved through some of the albums. When he joined her, seemingly paying more attention to each album, she remained seated while in turn reading the texts on the panel. In the interview, Mark remarked that he felt a bit like ‘intruding’ into other people’s private lives, but they ‘were fun to look at’ too. Shanti, by contrast, was more critical and said that the albums didn’t work for her because it reminded her of annoying experiences she had while living in India; she further elucidated this by saying: ‘When visitors come around, people thrust their photos on them and you have no choice but to look at them.’ Similarly, a British woman in her sixties who spent thirty minutes in the space, was critical of the albums containing ‘holiday snaps’ because they could have been ‘from anyone, anywhere and were not particularly Japanese’. However, she also off-set this remark by expressing her delight with the wedding album – implying that the more ‘traditional’ images it contained were more to her liking. By contrast, an American woman in her forties who visited with her husband and their ten-year-old daughter felt that the albums belonging to the families brought her ‘closer to the families who donated the objects’. She was intrigued by the graduation albums saying: ‘who are these sweet people?’ Finally, a British couple in their thirties, who sat on the sofa for ten minutes looking at the albums and who had also picked up an album that was left in the Japanese-style room by a previous visitor, said in the interview that this was their favourite part of the exhibition. The woman thought that one of the albums depicted a family holiday, possibly to Hawaii (these were the holiday snaps taken in Guam). She was very fond of the graduation album because she could see that Japanese children had ‘normal’ childhoods, ‘like children anywhere in the world’. In her view, the photos could have been of children of any nationality, but she added that in the background it was still possible to see typical Japanese settings and landscapes – which she liked. The examples above demonstrate that the same photos were both liked and disliked for their universal qualities. Some were frustrated with albums that showed banal snapshots found in (middleclass) homes around the world, while the wedding album was generally liked for its unfamiliarity and ‘Japaneseness’. However, other visitors detected subtle differences within similar, cross-cultural practices, which was one of the main goals we set out to achieve with the exhibition. It seems appropriate to conclude this section with a quote from two female friends who were particularly interested in the use of photography throughout the exhibition. They thought that the albums were: ‘amazingly unforeign’.

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‘Mom, I am rocking these shoes!’ The exhibition texts were not only read and interpreted by individual visitors, they were also employed to create sociality. The two most common ways in which this was done were, firstly, by parents transmitting this textual knowledge to their children, and, secondly, by those travelling in pairs and groups referencing the texts to start discussions about a wide range of topics. The show was visited by a large number of school groups and families with children were also common. Williams has argued that the strong educational remit of most museums has resulted in performative elements being often seen as an ‘addon . . . mainly suitable for children or for entertainment purposes’ (Williams 2011: 46). A good example of this practice is offered by many science museums that provide an excessive array of buttons to push, levers to pull and computer screens to touch. The Geffrye Museum ran an educational programme linked with our exhibition71 that included a number of child-focused activities such as using the objects in the flat as cues for craft sessions teaching children how to make Japanese masks or fans. That said, the exhibition itself was not child-orientated; in other words, we did not adapt any of the texts or displays to specifically suit children’s needs. Still, children took very quickly to the unusual performative opportunities that the exhibition offered. As I have already pointed out in Chapter 1, children were much less inhibited than their parents; they were often eager to explore the tactile elements of the show, trying on shoes, lying on the futons or nosing through the kitchen closets. Moreover, we regularly observed youngsters who, when left to their own devices, engaged in a kind of pretend-play, acting as if they actually lived in the flat.

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The four children that we observed throughout their visit were accompanied by their mothers. These visits were highly interactive and characterized by touching, picking up and trying objects, but the parents also found it necessary to educate their children in a more formal manner by reading at least some of the texts and relaying the contents to their children. Suzy, a British woman in her forties (see Map 9) who visited with her ten-year-old daughter, Heather, repeatedly drew on the exhibition texts in this way. The pair spent about thirty minutes inside, and in each room, Suzy would read some of the texts for two or three minutes and then summarize the information for her child, who was clearly more interested in interacting with the displays. In the entrance hall, she read the text about lucky objects, while Heather picked up one of the lucky cats placed on the top of the shoe storage cabinet. In the Western-style room, Heather opened one of the drawers in the ‘kimono closet’ and said, ‘look it is a kimono’, while her mother read the texts about kimonos; while in the bathroom they both smelled the soaps and touched the towels. At the entrance to the Japanese-style room, Suzy noticed that one of the research assistants was wearing slippers, so they both went back to the entrance to also put a pair on. They then returned to the Japanese-style room and opened some of the drawers in the IKEA chest. Next, the girl pointed at the futon, which was spread out on the tatami mats on this occasion asking: ‘do people really sleep on this?’ Her mother answered that it was a good idea to have a bed that one can roll up to make more space in a small flat. In the living area they both sat down on the sofa for three minutes to look at the photo albums, while Heather commented: I find it weird! Who are they?’ Suzy, who spent about two minutes in front of the image-text wallpaper with the relevant text on it, then, suggested that ‘perhaps the albums were found at Japanese charity shops’, or ‘people might have given them away’, or that perhaps they were ‘from a home clearance following a death’. They spent the longest time in the

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Map 9

dining-kitchen area, reading texts for about four minutes, while engaging with the displays for six minutes. They picked up a number of objects and looked extensively in the drawers while guessing the function of some of the objects inside. The girl clearly enjoyed this and said laughing: ‘We are really nosing through it!’ In the interview the mother said that they had really loved being able to be ‘nosy’ as if going through an actual person’s home. Hilary, an American woman also in her forties who visited with her ten-year-old daughter, Sally, spent forty-five minutes inside. They were initially joined by a man (the child’s father), but after about ten minutes he decided to go back upstairs. The girl was very enthusiastic about engaging with the objects and the mother followed suit. They took an unusual route as they entered the exhibition through the exit. In the dining-kitchen area, they began to open the kitchen drawers, without reading any texts, and take some of the objects out. At the table the girl picked up a pair of chopsticks saying: ‘I think that these are children’s chopsticks’. Next, they walked through the corridor looking briefly at the film and reading some of the texts, before going into the entrance hall where they spent five minutes reading texts and trying on slippers. Hilary took a photograph of her daughter wearing the wooden clogs who exclaimed: ‘Mom, I am rocking these shoes!’ Hilary had spent some time in Japan and in the interview she said that she particularly remembered the texts about the lucky objects because she had always thought that they ‘were for decorative purposes’ only. They spent the longest amount of time, thirteen minutes, in the

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Western-style room where they watched the whole of the film about the dolls, read the texts, and opened not only the drawers of the ‘kimono closet’ but also all of the drawers of the IKEA chest. Hilary said that she was really glad to learn more about kimonos and claimed that it had made her think about the contrast between traditional Japanese clothing and their everyday clothes. She read some texts in the bathroom and then stood at the entrance to the tatami room for a while looking inside as well as watching the film of the flat. They did not go inside the room but Hilary tried to read some of the texts straining her neck from inside the corridor and said to her daughter: ‘Did you see the tatami room? It smells good!’ They ended by reading the texts in the living room and flicking quickly through the photo albums. In the interview, Hilary said that she felt the exhibition had succeeded in recreating ‘the feel of a typical Japanese flat’ and that the smell of the tatami mats had been particularly evocative of Japanese homes. Her favourite space was the LDK ; she remarked how it felt similar to the dining area in her own home and that she had a similar sofa. She liked the fact that it felt like a ‘complete room’ containing ‘lots of stuff’ and she would have also liked to have seen more furniture in the other rooms. The other two children who we observed visited with their Japanese mothers and British fathers. Unlike the two examples above, they rarely glanced at the texts and focused on interacting with the objects instead. The first couple were in their late twenties and their daughter was about seven years old. They spent a lot of time in Japan and thought that overall the exhibition offered a ‘nice summary’. They added that the flat was very similar to their own home, especially ‘the cupboards are similar, and similar contents’, and it would be really good for people who have no prior knowledge about Japanese houses and culture, but because they are so familiar with Japan ‘they were looking for more’; like John, discussed above, they were in search of ‘deep’ knowledge (Rounds 2004). Another mixed couple in their midthirties, who visited with a slightly older boy, spent thirty minutes inside. Like the family introduced above they read very little and focused on interacting with the displays. They loved the fact that visitors were allowed to touch everything, saying that ‘it is good when you have kids, otherwise you end up spending most of your time stopping them from touching things’. Throughout the visit they made an effort to involve their son. In the Western-style room, for example, the dad held him up to play with the lightswitch, turning it on and off, while they all removed their shoes to enter the tatami room where the mother played with him on the futon and handed him one of the fans. Finally, all three moved onto the sofa area where the parents looked at the albums while the son placed the sitting cushions under the coffee table. Next, father and son went into the kitchen, while the mother stayed on the sofa. He read one of the advertisements while the boy showed an interest in one of the devil-shaped masks. At the end of their visit they allowed their son to draw in the visitor book. Unlike the use of texts by parents for educating their children discussed above, many adult visitors travelling in pairs or groups loosely drew on the texts to engage in a kind of open-ended chatter that provided an acoustic backdrop to their visit. A typical example of how these ‘chatterers’ experienced the exhibition was offered by Glenda and Abby, two American women in their sixties who both live in London, and who spent thirty-five minutes inside the flat. Most of this time they chatted to each other inside the Western-style room. Upon entering the introductory area, they read the main text and talked about how the exhibition tried to ‘dispel the myth of minimalism’. Then, while watching the slide show, Abby asked whether it was about ‘taking down a house or building a new one’; they also looked at the activities panel and discussed the raffle. Upon entering the flat one of them opened the mailbox and touched the carp streamer (koinobori). When they entered the entrance hall, Glenda, while looking at the lucky owl display, exclaimed that she ‘raided Harrods for knick-knacks which went down a treat in Tokyo’, thereby, revealing that she had been to Japan. They then discussed Japanese gift exchange and what might be considered

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appropriate gifts, while one of the women kept on mentioning her Harrods-story. Throughout their visit they returned to the topic of gifts and each pointed out to the other whenever she saw more ‘knickknacks’. Neither of them took their shoes off as they progressed into the Western-style room where they were immediately drawn in by the life-size photograph of a bookcase, again commenting on the many ‘different knick-knacks’ displayed on the shelves. They then moved to the image/text panel on the wall opposite and Abby read aloud that ‘this is a Western-style room’ while Glenda replied: ‘so, this is one of the rooms!’ (She probably meant as opposed to it being a gallery space?), which prompted Abby to explain that ‘rooms are multifunctional’. When the wedding photographs caught their attention, they started talking about how ‘people are doing this in parliament square’, and this prompted one of them to ask: ‘didn’t someone just die there?’ (perhaps referring to a protester who had been at parliament square for ten years and had recently died of cancer). This latter, rather convoluted, exchange demonstrates how some visitors used the texts creatively making associations with events that were happening in their own locality that were not necessarily related to Japan. Next, both women started to watch the film about the dolls, and Glenda, who had been reading the nearby text, commented that ‘dolls are given by grandparents at birth and they have a protective role for children as they grow up.’ She then added, ‘paraphernalia (a word we used in the text concerned) actually has another meaning’, explaining that dolls are not just stuff, but that everything has a meaning. Abby opened the drawers of the IKEA chest and pointed out that there was some ‘linen inside’, adding ‘with all those dreadful, little teddy bears on them of course’. They picked up some snoopy towels and Glenda then commented: ‘I am surprised that it is not Cath Kidston’ (which is indeed very popular in Japan). Although in recent years the ubiquity of Japanese ‘cute’ material culture such as Hello Kitty might have become positively embraced by youths worldwide, for others, like these two middle-aged women, this is considered to be a negative trait that only confirms the Japanese propensity for childish behaviour. The comments are also an example of the self-righteous sneering at the Bambie-look of Japanese women, and more generally the sexism inherent in Japanese society, that Littlewood links with the Japanese as Butterflies stereotype (Littlewood 1996: 109–14). The women’s animated discussions about gifts continued inside the Japanese-style room and the bathroom. Indeed, after they left the Western-style room, they stood for a while at the entrance to the

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Japanese-style room and commented on ‘how small’ it was. Eventually, Glenda took off her shoes and went inside while Abby decided to go into the bathroom first. However, soon enough she was called over by her excited friend (and she joined her inside without taking her shoes off), who read aloud parts of the text about gift giving; saying that ‘gifts are functional objects’ and they are ‘crucial in social relations, to both create and maintain them’. Again, they seemed to pay little attention to anything else in the room and moved swiftly into the bathroom where they touched some of the towels, and again they highlighted from the text panel that ‘they are gifts’. The multiple texts about gift giving on the wallpaper in the Western-style room were singled out as particularly memorable by many of the other visitors too. A couple in their thirties, for example, said that they liked the text about ‘obsessive gift giving’ in the Western-style room, while the same text led, Bob, discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, to explain to his two friends that he saw ‘halls and halls of pre-packaged gifts’. In this room, the text about the contemporary uses of dolls, linked both with the two Ichimatsu dolls in glass display cases that we placed on an IKEA chest of drawers and the film about dolls we showed, also drew people’s attention. A Canadian student in her twenties who walked through the flat in twenty minutes, for example, said that she had read most of the texts in large print but had found the information about dolls and weddings intriguing because they were very different. Others, also remembered what they had read about Japanese weddings and the everyday use of kimonos. Another observation we made while following the two American women, that corresponded with the actions of other visitors (see Chapter 3), was that they repeatedly related what they read and saw in the exhibition to their own experiences. In the entrance hall, for example, Glenda read the text about shoe removal aloud which prompted Abby to say that ‘these days people always offer to take their shoes off at my house too’. In the Western-style room, on the other hand, Abby noticed that ‘actually the room size is not that different from my home’, followed by Glenda pointing out ‘well, there isn’t any furniture in here’, which in turn lead to Abby to reply that she ‘had to measure extremely carefully to fit my furniture inside’. They also compared the bathroom with the size of American bathrooms (our bathroom was twice the size of what it would normally be for access reasons), and one of them exclaimed that they ‘have tiny tubs for huge people’. Finally, in the dining-kitchen area, they compared the space with small English apartments ‘where you have no room’. They picked up a number of items from the tableware dresser and asked each other what they were. They pointed at similarities to how ‘dishes are arranged’, claiming ‘the drawers are exactly like mine at home – I also have such a drawer for things’. In the interview the same woman also said that she thought that the flat was very different from her own home apart from ‘the number of dishes, which was very similar’. She explained that she lives alone, but she still has four to six items of everything for when she has guests around for dinner. The behaviour of the ‘chatters’, but also parents with their children, underscores the fact that museum visits are social experiences. Most visitors not only talked and interacted with the people that they came with (Chapter 3), they also checked what strangers were doing and possibly adapted their own behaviour accordingly. Moreover, we also observed that some strangers started to talk with each other around the displays. One example was a British woman in her late fifties who started to quiz two Taiwanese students in their early twenties, who were picking up ceramic items from the tableware dresser in the kitchen, about what they thought particular items might be used for. I thus agree with Williams that ‘the work of interpretation is a group process as well as an individual one’ (Williams 2011: 44). The interpretation of texts is particularly interesting in this respect because reading is assumed to be a solitary activity whereby individuals absorb information/knowledge in silence. However, as I have shown above, many of our visitors employed the texts we provided to create sociality while enjoying a day out with family or friends.

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Discussion: ‘It’s written for a club of people, but not really for me’ Walking through a museum becomes analogous to reading a book. MACDONALD AND BASU 2007: 53

Critics have tended to analyse museums as if they were texts, with great emphasis placed on words written on the panels and labels, and relatively little attention given to other display technologies (particular those of a visual nature), and to the fact that a visit consists of physical movement in a space, quiet unlike reading chapters of a book. MERRIMAN 1999: 5

The first quote above is taken from a recently edited volume about experimentation in exhibitions in which the editors critique the widespread application of narrative theory to museum design, whereby the multisensory museum space is ‘read’ like or reduced to a two-dimensional, sequential text. The second quote questions this widespread analogy between museums and books/texts by stressing that unlike texts these are multisensory spaces that we move through with our bodies (see Chapter  1). The prevalence of textual approaches in museums is further exacerbated by the way that exhibitions have been studied with a focus on catalogues, labels and other texts that remain after the end of a show. An underlying assumption is that interpretation primarily consists of reading messages that transfer ‘curatorial knowledge into an accessible format’ (Williams 2011: 29–30). Visitors are thus reduced to passive consumers who can often only access this information if they are from the right background and possess the appropriate level of knowledge. One of the participants in our raffle project, Natasha, who visited the exhibition with her partner on the last day and who I will return to in more detail in the raffle case study at the end of this chapter, expressed her frustration with this rather standard treatment of visitors as follows: Usually when you read the text, it’s just really deadly dull, isn’t it? I mean, in a museum. And it’s not written for ordinary people . . . . sometimes, I have to force myself to read those things – it’s written for a club of people, but not really meant for me . . . . a lot of times I find that you just skip that stuff. Since the late 1980s there has been an important shift in thinking in museum studies which has resulted in reframing visitors as active, meaning-making consumers. Although this is a more holistic approach, it still conceptualized spaces as texts that are ‘readable’ (MacDonald 2002: 219). Moreover, there is a tendency to think of visitors as rational actors who are primarily motivated by learning. The fact that the preferred method for researching visitors remains the large-scale survey that aims to measure ‘learning impacts’ should also be seen in this light (see Introduction). By contrast, our exhibition aimed to be ‘revelatory’ (Williams 2011: 31): it allowed visitors to ‘make discoveries for themselves’ by making ‘creative’ connections not only between texts, images, objects and spaces in the exhibition but also with the outside world. The ‘chatters’, discussed above, are particularly interesting in this respect because for them the texts functioned as catalysts for a range of different conversations, comparing what they read and saw not only with their own experiences but also with events that happened elsewhere. Many other visitors also linked their experience inside the museum environment with other arenas of life such as politics or pressing social issues, but also with the world of commerce to which I will turn next.

Spread from the Evening Standard’s Home & Property, Wednesday 11 May 2011.’Japan and the urban space guide’ by Corinne Julius. Reproduced with permission of Evening Standard.

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For some visitors their experience of AHJ resembled visiting a store. Some 10 per cent of those participating in our study told us that were primarily looking for ideas to decorate their homes. The reader may recall Leo, the Taiwanese man in his twenties, who lives in London and hurried through the whole exhibition in ten minutes (see Chapter 3). He hoped that his visit would give him inspiration to ‘imitate Japanese order’ in his own home. Another good example of the exhibition visitor as shopper was a British couple in their early thirties who visited Japan and spent twenty minutes inside the flat. They hardly read any texts but in each room the woman took many photographs. During the interview she flipped through her photos on the camera’s viewing screen to remind herself of what she had seen. They spent most time in the living area where the man sat for about four minutes on the sofa to look at the albums, while halfway through he was joined by the woman who continued taking photos. Only at the end of their visit, after they looked briefly at the visitors’ book, the event panel and the letter about the earthquake, did they decide to go back to read some of the introductory texts. During the interview it became apparent that, because they were about to buy their first house, the main motivation for their visit was ‘to get ideas’ for their new home. They revealed that they already sleep on a futon and that they brought a lot of stuff such as fabrics and kitchenware back from Japan. They clearly ascribed to the Japanese as Aesthetes stereotype and would like to ‘turn our own home into a Japanese house’. In Japan they had particularly liked the smell of the tatami mats, and their favourite room was the Japanese-style room. They seemed to associate a ‘real’ Japanese home with the presence of tatami rooms – that this is no longer the case was explained in one of the texts that they had clearly failed to read – but they thought that it would be difficult to actually live in this way because they have cats ‘that would wreck the mats’. Other people similarly mentioned that they had visited the exhibition to shop for ideas for their home. As one anonymous commentator put it in the visitors’ book, ‘Very inspiring, has given me great ideas for my home. THANK YOU ’. Amongst the innovative exhibitions from the 1930s that foregrounded audiences as active was Useful Household Objects that was first held at the MoMA but travelled to seven other locations (see Chapter 2). This exhibition merged the shopping and the museum experience, by allowing visitors to handle massproduced mundane objects (with the manufacturer name and price tags attached) that were displayed in interiors which simulated both the home and the store (Staniszewski 1998: 160). The exhibition space as an inspirational place where one can gather useful interior decoration ideas was also taken as the starting point for a review article about AHJ in the Evening Standard. The text illustrated with some of Sue’s photos was paired with a check list of objects that people could purchase to give their home a Japanese feel. Because this newspaper is distributed for free, its main source of revenue is advertising and the reference to these products should primarily be seen in this light. However, interestingly, the objects chosen ranged from elegant raku-vases to hanging textiles, none of which were actually on display in the exhibition, but which referenced the well-known and well-loved ideal Japanese aesthetics of simplicity (see Chapter 3). The majority of the objects sold in the museum shop during the duration of the exhibition seemed to be selected with the same Japanese as Aesthetes stereotype in mind and sales figures confirm that these are the kinds of Japan-related objects people want to buy; the three top sellers were: a set of lucky cat magnets (202 items), a folding fan with stand (191), and ceramic chopstick rests (157). That said, many visitors who were interested in gathering and adopting Japanese interior design ideas also expressed a desire to own particular objects that we displayed that did not fall into this stereotypical category such as the slipper rack and the mailbox covered in stickers. Participants in our raffle study also mentioned these same objects as their top favourites because, in Natasha’s words, ‘it was something unusual, not possible to find in the UK ’.

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Although many museums want to retain an artificial boundary between themselves and the economic world, in reality, these are huge commercial ventures that like any other businesses, whether shopping centres or theme parks, link learning with leisure and consumption practices. In Foster’s words: Given the deep historical connections among museums, fairs and department stores, one wonders how the idea ever emerged that the display of art (or artefact) ought to be hermetically sealed from the display of commodities. FOSTER 2012: 148

In this chapter I have shown how in AHJ we cultivated rather than severed the connection between commodities and artefacts/art. We did this, firstly, by filling the flat with mass-produced easily available commodities, and, secondly, by stressing the importance of consumption practices in the creation of value in people’s everyday lives. Museums might continue to promote themselves primarily as places of ‘knowledge transmission and learning’, but I agree with Bhatti that we cannot reduce exhibition going to two opposing motivations; learning and entertainment (Bhatti 2012: 168). In her ethnography of visitors to the National Museum in Lahore she shows that visitors’ actions and interpretations differ significantly from the ‘museum’s authorized knowledge and visual pedagogy’ (ibid., 151). She gives a range of examples such as schoolboys giggling at nudity or couples taking advantage of the seclusion the museum space offers, but also, and more relevant for my discussion about the interpretation of texts above, a father showing off his knowledge gained from label texts to his children and wife or middle-aged men in dialogue about what they are viewing and reading. Our ethnography of visitors, similarly, revealed a complex ‘repertoire of interpretations’ and activities (MacDonald 2002) that transgress the supposed dichotomy between learning and entertainment, and in the next chapter we will see that ‘for the public there is no clash or unease’ between the two, with them ‘stating that they wish to do both’ (Bhatti 2012: 168).

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NATASHA: SPREAD 5

Natasha –

‘And I have been putting them in the dishwasher!’ Natasha is in her mid-thirties and works in book publishing although she also trained as a photographer. She was born in Poland but grew up in New York, and in early 2011 she moved together with her partner to east London. Natasha has never been to Japan, but she told us that it is a country that she is intrigued by and would like to visit in the future. Like many other people who we talked to Natasha was drawn to the simplicity of Japanese aesthetics that she had assumed was ubiquitous. However, the exhibition had really challenged these presumptions. In her words: So we came for a sort of an aesthetic experience, and when we were actually there it was actually a much more interesting experience. It was not just aesthetic, it was about how people really live. There was something just heart-warming and calm about it, because you could relate to somebody as a human being, as opposed to here’s the architecture. They noticed the message advertising the raffle while exiting the exhibition and admitted that they had ‘an ulterior motive’ for participating in the event. They had only moved a few months before and because they were only able to bring very little form the US , they thought ‘it would be just another way to get some practical things for the house’. They ended up winning a set of six blue-and-white ceramic cups with lids 159

as well as six small wooden plates. They placed both sets inside a wooden ‘1950s’ display cabinet in their living area surrounded by a selection of other objects that have special meaning in their lives such as a large set of china (a variety of plates, serving dishes, and unusual containers such as a large soup terrine) that used to belong to Natasha’s grandmother. This heirloom was one of the only things that Natasha brought with her from New York. Natasha offered us another example of how the introduction of raffled objects into UK homes directly impacted on the actions of inhabitants. It was the arrival of the cups and plates that had prompted her and her partner to buy the cabinet for their growing collection of treasured objects. After I explained that the wooden plates where given to me while I conducted my PhD fieldwork on Miyajima Island, south of Hiroshima, in 1997, while the cups were bought on a shopping trip with participants in my 2003 research in Osaka, Natasha joked, ‘Oh that’s so interesting! And I have been putting them in the dishwasher!’ She then countered that they were actually really careful with the objects they won and that they ‘probably treat them nicer than we do our own things’. One reason for the special treatment of the raffle objects was that she felt that she had ‘really worked for them . . . It’s not like I picked them up in a shop – I waited, and I almost didn’t get them’. This last exchange suggests that Natasha primarily valued the objects because of the effort or work she had put into acquiring them. 160

Although the raffled objects had become part of a complex set of inalienable objects that Natasha stored away in their new sideboard, they were not transformed into display items. On the contrary, the cups and plates were in use most of the time. While Sue photographed the objects, Natasha pointed out that ‘they’re never altogether [inside the sideboard]. There’s always two that are out’. Interestingly, only one functional object that we were able to track was completely taken out of use and became primarily valued for its aesthetic qualities. This fate had befallen a set of five ceramic cups with lids covered in an unusual abstract pattern won by Steven an American student of art history who now lives back in the US (see Introduction). Although their new owner had initially imagined to eat soup from the cups during special occasions such as dinner parties, his continuous changing circumstances had meant that they ended up being stored/displayed amongst photographs and other treasured objects in a glass cabinet in his childhood room in his parents’ home. Returning to Natasha, she loves to cook and, like a number of other people participating in the raffle study, the couple told us that they particularly liked Japanese food. She then pondered that they spent ‘an awful lot of time’ in the kitchen in the exhibition, saying: ‘there was a drawer and you opened it and it was full of stuff – we love that stuff! We were like – we hope we get some of this stuff! It was wonderful, it was really practical – little bowls, tiny bowls, chopsticks’. When they prepare Japanese food, they put 161

the miso soup in the ceramic cups and when they eat sushi they will also use the wooden plates, because ‘they are really nice’. The cups are also used when they eat fruit, ‘especially cherries and things like that’. When we visited their home for the second time, we asked Natasha to show us the raffled objects in use. She put some seaweed on one of the wooden plates: a left-over from a sushi take-away that they got a few days ago. Some of the cups were filled with sauces: one Italian oil-based sauce and the other a Vietnamese dipping sauce. She explained that they will usually have the latter sauce with something like noodles with pork balls, but ‘it’s pretty accurate. It’s pretty much how we use these guys’.

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NATALIA AND MOLLY: SPREAD 6

Natalia –

‘It is in our shower because it is very useful’ Molly –

‘It is something I found and can’t give away’ Natalia and Molly are two women living in London who participated in our raffle study. Like Natasha, neither of them had visited Japan, but they had developed an interest in the country through befriending Japanese people living in London. Molly is an American woman in her seventies who lives on her own in Hackney, while Natalia, in her late forties, is from Poland, but has lived in London working as a translator for more than twenty years. Natalia’s husband, Gary, is a teacher from London and their daughter, Thalia (depicted in the photo above on the left) is in her late teens. Thalia used to be friends with one of the 165

daughters of a Japanese-English family who lived below them in the same block of flats and the children exchanged manga and anime. Later during our visit, Thalia showed us a summer kimono (yukata) that she received as a gift from this same family and I ended up helping her putting the garment on to pose for some photos. Molly (depicted on the previous page on the right) has lived in London for forty-six years. She likes ‘things Japanese’ and explained that: ‘I’ve never been to Japan, maybe will never go, but I am very impressed by the culture’. She used to have a Japanese lodger who studied art, who was also a ‘very skilled seamstress’. She gave Molly some items of clothing that she made from kimono fabric sent to her from Japan; a simple design in ‘a lovely silken fabric’ is one of her best dresses now. During our visit, it soon became clear that these pieces of clothing are 166

extremely precious to Molly, and while tenderly draping them over her sofa, she revealed that her Japanese friend had recently taken her own life. She also posed for Sue with a photograph of her Japanese friend together with a close male friend who recently passed away at the age of 102. Molly, Thalia, Natalia and Gary only received functional items in the raffle. Some items were kept but many were given away. This was primarily because the objects concerned had not been the ones they would have chosen if their number had been called sooner. In the case of Natalia’s family, only Thalia won the item that she really wanted: a pair of pink toilet slippers with WC written on them. The other lots were all bathroom items, ‘little towels and sponges’, and there were ‘lots of bars of soap as well, and we used them all’. The family specifically mentioned two other objects for the bathroom, saying: One item we found useful, that is permanently in use, and one that’s waiting to be used. . . . One is a little metal stand on rubber legs. And it’s in our shower because it’s very useful because we don’t have any hooks on the sink. And the other one was an extendable white shelf to put on the bath. But we rarely take baths because we have hot water problems. One of the bathroom sets came with some towels, that I bought in a ‘100-yen’ shop in Osaka. These are stored away in a plastic bowl in a cupboard in one of their bathrooms. Natalia compares these towels with what are called ‘Chinese towels’ in Poland 167

because they are much thinner and more absorbent than Western towels. The family seemed to delight in the fact that the bathroom objects they received were actually made in Japan, but they had no qualms about using up the toiletries in their everyday grooming practices or wearing out the towels through frequent use. When I asked Natalia if she would be willing to give her remaining raffled objects on loan for a future travelling exhibition she immediately replied: ‘Yes, of course, would you like to take them today?’ Similarly, many other participants had no misgivings about breaking up their lot and only keeping those items that they really wanted. The most extreme example was Ali, who will be discussed in the next chapter. She didn’t even bother taking home the objects (a doll and a wooden measurement) that accompanied the item that she really wanted; a 168

lacquered box containing a Japanese card game. Still, it was more common for people to divest themselves of unwanted items after they had returned home. Molly, also won ‘a set of bathroom aids’ and decided to give away those items that she had no use for. She only kept three things. A pair of ‘clear plastic shoes’, outdoor slippers that we placed in front of the balcony light box in the exhibition, that she thought she could use around the swimming pool. However, she admitted that the shoes were too small for her and she would probably end up giving them away too. The two things that she would definitely keep were ‘a little beater for mats’ which she sometimes uses to clean the mat in her hallway, and ‘a little cloth hanging sign’. When she found out that the sign informed people in public spaces that ‘cleaning was in progress’, she decided to keep it in a cupboard in her hallway. She explained that the sign

‘amuses me. I don’t use it per se, but . . . it has meaning for me – it is something I found and can’t give it away’. Natasha, the protagonist of the previous case study, and Ali, who I will be discussed in Chapter 5, similarly, claimed that they valued their raffled objects because they had put in the effort to find them. These explanations resemble the satisfaction many people, who frequent second-hand retail spaces, describe when finding an unusual object, even if its monetary value is trivial (Gregson and Crewe 2003). Returning to Molly, she also linked her delight in finding the textile sign with the fact that it embodied her quirky sense of humour. The object was stored inside a cabinet in her hallway where it was paired with a poster, declaring: ‘Hackney – England’s worse council’, used in a demonstration in Hackney that she took part in. This example further illustrates how some raffled items were treated like gifts people find in second-hand retail spaces, ‘where prices are negligible and small finds become amusing mementoes, a source of shared jokes’ (ibid., 178).

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Chapter 5 Photography, Performance and Play ‘We were having fun together’

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Introduction: ‘A feeling of being there?’ Why is to call something theatrical to denigrate it? Why does it mean cheap, fake – instead of realizing that it is the truest metaphor for life? Life is performance, settings, costumes, scenes. CONKLIN, QUOTED IN ROBERTS AND VOGEL 1994: 77

The photograph on the opposite page, shown to us by Tony Waghorn on his computer in his home in Kent, was taken by his wife Rachel when the family visited the exhibition. It shows Tony and his two sisters dressed in kimonos that they took out of the drawers of the ‘kimono closet’ in the Western-style room. When in the spring of 2013, I gave a talk about the exhibition at a seminar in Japan, this particular photo was singled out by an American visual anthropologist to express his concerns about the dangers involved in allowing visitors to experiment freely with the displays. In his view, contrary to the aim of the exhibition, this photograph revealed how visitors had actually employed the material culture of everyday life to confirm their stereotypes about Japan. These comments form the starting point for this chapter because they raise important questions about the role of ‘authorized’ interpretations in the production of authenticity in exhibitions. In line with the visual anthropologist introduced above, the museum anthropologist KirshenblattGimblett has also pointed to the dangers of mimetic displays that might be so dazzling in their realistic effects as to subvert curatorial efforts to focus viewer’s attention on particular ideas or objects. There is the danger that theatrical spectacle will displace scientific seriousness, that the artifice of installation will overwhelm ethnographic artifacts and curatorial intention. KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT 1998: 21

The idea that exhibitions cannot successfully combine scientific earnestness with spectacle and amusement is well established in Western museology. As Griffiths has demonstrated in her historical study of immersive environments, critics already feared in the late nineteenth century that popular entertainment and interactive technologies such as lantern slides would ‘contaminate the scientific seriousness of the exhibit and the institution’ (Griffiths 2008: 5–6). In AHJ we tested this deeply ingrained assumption by creating an environment that combined science and spectacle. Although we provided (on image-text wallpapers) narratives that contextualized practices that might occur inside each room (see Chapters 2 and 4), we also reduced curatorial authority. Moreover, in order to shift the focus from the authenticity of single objects, we did away with vitrines (Chapter 1) and with labelling (Chapter 4). We thus offered visitors the opportunity to ‘play’ a more active role in the meaning-making process, and, as we will see in this chapter, for many people photography formed an integral part of this experience. As Bella Dicks (2003) has argued, contemporary visitors tend to look at exhibition displays with a ‘camera perspective’ that is informed by television and cinema. However, more recently, the Internet has probably had a stronger impact. She adds that visitors are thus in search of a new kind of authenticity ‘that is not dependent on aura but on mimesis, or the faithful reconstruction of reality’ (Dicks 2003: 20). Mimetic

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authenticity can be linked with a shift in focus from object to visitor; it privileges the visitor experience instead of the objects enlivened by knowledge provided by curators (see Chapter 4). Left to their own devices, many visitors to AHJ took photos of the displays. The exhibition took place before the selfie phenomenon took root and overall the photos taken can be divided into two categories. These were, firstly, photos taken of people, often those that one travelled with, while they enacted bodily practices inside the flat, and, secondly, photographs devoid of people that depict either particular spatial features or specific objects inside the exhibition. The latter type of photos, most common amongst sole visitors, were often inspired by Japan-related interests or hobbies. A British woman in her forties who liked Japanese pottery, for example, took a series of close-ups of pots and other tableware in the dresser in the kitchen. Another, related motivation for taking photos was to sample ideas for creative projects ranging from home decoration to teaching materials. A British primary school teacher in her sixties, for example, photographed the two Ichimatsu dolls in their display cases and the textual information related to the Doll Festival on the image-text wallpaper in the Western-style room. She explained that she planned to integrate the Doll Festival into her teaching because ‘celebrating femininity would be very positive’. A couple in their late twenties, who had visited Japan, told us that they hoped to find ideas for decorating a new home that they were about to buy. The woman was wielding the camera, taking photos of every room, and during the interview she went through the photos on the small screen on the back of her camera to talk us through what she had seen. Finally, those who visited with the aim of blogging about the exhibition online also tended to take photographs without people and I will return to this kind of photography below.

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Map 10

As I have previously explained, two-thirds of the people participating in our study visited in pairs or groups, and next I will focus on how some of these visitors experienced the exhibition through their cameras. A typical example was Shanti, an Indian woman in her forties who spends half her time in London and the other half in Belgium. She visited the exhibition with Mark, a male Belgian friend. They take it in turns to visit each other and Mark, who found AHJ on the Internet, wanted to surprise Shanti because he knew that ‘she really liked Japan and had an interest in Japanese culture’. The couple spent seventy-five minutes going around the exhibition and throughout they were chatting to each other (see Map 10). Shanti, who has never been to Japan but learned a lot through ‘Japanese films’, took it upon herself to act as their ‘cultural’ guide. In the interview she was very positive about the exhibition saying that she already had ‘a picture of Japan’, but that she learned many new things and it was ‘very enlightening’. Mark brought his camera and he took photographs of Shanti in almost every room. They spent ten minutes in the introductory area reading and looking at the displays, followed by Mark taking his first photograph of Shanti stepping through the front door into the entrance hall of the flat. They spent four minutes in the entrance hall looking/reading the image-text wallpaper before walking into the corridor with their shoes on. Then followed a series photographs that focused on Shanti re-enacting particular domestic scenes while using Sue’s life-size images as a backdrop. In the bathroom, for example, Shanti pretended to

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wash her hands in front of the life-size photograph of the sink, while in the dining-kitchen area she took the frying pan from the shelf above the counter and acted as if she was cooking a meal. Apart from using objects displayed as props in the photographs taken, the couple generally interacted with the displays more than the average visitor. Examples included Shanti turning the light on and off in the Western-style room and touching the towels in the bathroom; or Mark taking the futon beater off its hook and pretending to use it next to the light box photograph of the balcony in the LDK area. Shanti and Mark, like many other visitors, favourably compared their experience to other museums where you are not allowed to touch anything because they claimed that these bodily interactions helped them to ‘get closer to a feeling of being there’. In this chapter I will explore the role of the camera in producing this ‘feeling’ of closeness and participation. We repeatedly observed that it was the presence of the camera that spurred visitors on to touch and interact with the displays. Thus, rather than creating a distance between the viewer and the displays, the camera facilitated a sense of immersion. Like Shanti many other visitors re-enacted domestic scenes in front of the lens. Four key camera moments that we observed were: (1) putting on slippers or wooden clogs in the entrance hall, (2) trying on the kimono in the Western-style room, (3) pretending to sleep on the futon in the tatami room, and (4) sitting down for a meal at the dining table. Some more adventurous visitors also picked up the plastic futon beater and pretended that they were airing the futon, or they tried on the blue plastic boots in the bathroom, while a few also sat down on the bathroom stool pretending that they were soaping themselves before taking a bath. In what follows, I will analyse three full sets of photographs that were taken by visitors. These visual documents may offer us a unique insight into their chosen camera angles, but they may also reveal various trajectories photographs embark on after they were taken. Indeed, photographs are not timeless and passive artefacts but ‘blocks of space-time that have effects beyond the people or place or events to which they refer’ (Larsen and Urry 2011: 1113). My analysis will concentrate on the Waghorns, a family from Kent who also participated in the raffle study; the Kagemoris, the only Japanese participants who visited the exhibition; and Ali, a blogger who lived in Japan for two years and who reviewed the show online (Ali is also the focus of the raffle case study at the end of this chapter). The motivation of each photographer and the audiences that their photographs were meant for impacted on the number and the kinds of photos they took. Ali photographed the exhibition in the knowledge that she would later publish a selection of her photos on her blog. The Kagemoris were keen to document their own and their friends’ contributions to the project because they expected to show these photos to family and friends once they returned to Osaka. The Waghorns took photos of playful performances of family members taken on an outing to London, which they later circulated online.

‘Dressing up is controversial’ The Waghorns offer an example of a child-focused family visit, but unlike the examples discussed in Chapter 4, this was an extended family group consisting of five adults and one two-year-old boy. Tony and Rachel Waghorn, both in their mid-thirties, with their son Samuel were accompanied by Tony’s two sisters, one of whom brought her husband along. Rachel organized the visit as a surprise for Tony’s birthday, following a recommendation from a friend. Tony works for a Christian charity with its main base in South East Asia. Their church had always been very small in Japan, but after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami the charity started to provide help in the affected area. Tony has an interest in design and over

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Map 11

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the past few years he has been managing the communications team producing a magazine, websites and exhibitions. He has visited Japan for his work and he views the country as ‘a kind of an Asian Switzerland – very well developed’. During our home visit, he recalled how visiting the exhibition brought back memories; when he walked to the station from the guesthouse that he stayed at in Ichikawa City (east of Tokyo) for example, he saw the same fire bucket that we placed at the entrance to the exhibition flat. In this section, I will retrace the Waghorn’s visit based on their comments about the sequence of thirteen photographs they took on the day. Map 11 shows the trajectory of the family inside the exhibition space, while the photos placed underneath correspond to seven different camera angles. When we visited them their home in Kent, Tony showed us these photos on his desktop computer. The first two photos were of the projector, placed high up against a wall in the dining-kitchen area (Map 11, Camera angle 1) and the screen that we employed to show the film of the Kagemoris’ flat (Map 11, Camera angle 2). Both images reflect Tony’s interest in exhibition design and in the interview, he added that he liked the ‘false wall, up above’, referring to the projection screen which could indeed be thought of as being one of the walls in the flat. His interest in design also led him to choose the hard cover copy of my 2010 monograph, that had been on display in the introductory area, in the raffle. He thought that ‘it would be a nice way of not having just one item, but the layout and what was behind it’. During our visit he asked Sue and me to sign his copy, which has a large hole in the top left-hand corner used to chain the book to the wall. The third photograph in the Waghorn’s series shows a close-up of the slipper rack we placed next to the inside–outside boundary mat in the corridor (Map 11, Camera angle 3). This was Rachel’s favourite object in the exhibition and she was also the lucky winner of the rack (together with three pairs of slippers) in the raffle, adding: ‘I was like, I neeeed that rack!’ In 2012 the slipper rack was placed close to the door in the hallway in its new home. Camera angle 7 in the series depicts another object that Rachel was fond off; in this case, the hanging curtain (noren) that we used to cover the exit out of the flat. Four photographs show Samuel, the Waghorn’s two-year-old son, trying on the wooden outdoor clogs ( geta) that we placed on the image/object mat in the entrance hall (Map 11, Camera angle 4). The first photo in this series illustrates that one of Tony’s sisters had first tried the clogs, but she then helped – with one foot still in a clog – her nephew to put them on in order to pose for some photos. Initially, Samuel seemed a bit unsure about his new footwear but soon he stands tall and poses with confidence. Tony explained that all of them took off their shoes to try on the wooden clogs ( geta), but they did not take ‘them off and leave them off, sorry!’ This photo of Samuel wearing clogs also prompted Rachel to say that she liked that ‘nothing was kind of off-limits. There were drawers and you could look into everything in there and . . . yeah, it was quite nice to dig around . . .

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There were little surprises in different places’. Many people took photos of the ‘slipper mat’ that we used to create the boundary between the inside and the outside of the home, while some focused on visitors trying on clogs or slippers. Photos of children trying on the footwear was a variation on this theme, and Hilary, mentioned in Chapter 4, for example, also took a similar photo of her daughter wearing the wooden outdoor clogs. Indeed, during our visit to their home, Rachel also showed us a photo of Samuel trying on the blue plastic boots on her iPad. This image was sent to her by one of Tony’s sisters. Trying on the kimono was another popular photo moment as the ‘controversial’ photograph introduced above shows. In this photo (Map 11, Camera angle 5), the three siblings are dressed in kimonos standing in front of the ‘kimono closet’ in the Western-style room. When, during the photo-elicitation session I express my surprise at seeing that all three of them had put on a kimono and asked how they had managed to tie the obi belt, Tony replied ‘that is my sister’s influence’. The sister concerned, Lucy, works in a museum and it was she who had encouraged the others throughout their visit to interact with the displays. This particular photograph clearly demonstrates how the presence of the camera impacted on visitors’ behaviour. Indeed, it was the camera that spurred both of Tony’s sisters on to strike a pose pressing their hands together in front of their chest as if in a prayer. This gesture (gasshô) is employed in Japan (generally together with a bow) to ask for forgiveness or a favour, or to say thank you for a meal (see Chapter  3). In the Waghorn’s case, the gesture served to complete their pose thereby possibly mimicking images of Japanese women in kimonos that they would probably have been exposed to through the media.72 However, as we have seen in Chapter 3, in practice (young) women in kimonos would probably be much more likely to pose striking the V-sign. Many other visitors who travelled in groups also felt enticed to try on the kimonos and pose for photographs taken by one of their companions. As I have shown in Chapter 3, these performances were often initiated by so-called cultural brokers (people who had lived in the country for a while). However, these, often exaggerated, performances in front of the camera do not necessarily demonstrate, as some concerned visual anthropologists I started this chapter with suggested, that visitors, when left to their own

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devices, inevitably produce disrespectful, stereotypical appropriations of the ‘Other’. It is no coincidence that this concern about stereotyping was expressed in relation to putting on other people’s ethnic clothing; in Littlewood’s words, ‘in holding the line between one culture and another, clothes are usually a decisive factor’ (Littlewood 1996: 25). As I have shown in Chapter 1, most museums’ understanding of ‘touch’ remains limited to ‘touch of the hand’, while touching with other body parts, for example, with the feet after removing shoes, but also with the whole body such as when putting on clothing (but also when sitting of furniture and sleeping in beds or on a futon), is generally frowned upon. This kind of bodily engagement is often only deemed permissible as an add-on for children (see Chapter 4). Negative attitudes towards performative interactions inside museum spaces draw on the assumption that the immersion in Otherness is inauthentic. The literature about historical enactments is insightful here. The Dutch anthropologist Petra Kalshoven, for example, shows that in the case of European Indianists, who ‘seek to bodily engage with the materiality and sensoriality’ of Native American life, outsiders generally find crafting replicas acceptable, but ‘dressing up as ethnic others’ and ‘playing and acting “as if” is considered insincere’ (Kalshoven 2010: 61–62). By contrast, for the Indianists themselves, wearing costumes is an expression of respect and admiration that allows outsiders to experience another reality ‘in the flesh’ (ibid., 62). Kalshoven traces the negative views about dressing up to Western ideas about personhood, based on seventeenth-century enlightenment thinking that locates one’s true self within an inner core. The ongoing romanticizing in Europe and North America of this ‘deeper authenticity’ (Theodossopoulos 2013) has resulted in the production of an inner/outer dichotomy with outer appearances associated with bodily decoration such as make-up but also clothing being linked with inauthentic expressions of the self.73 Within such a dichotomous worldview, bodily performances like the kinds we observed in AHJ would be considered to be a form of ‘deception, a trickster world of false impressions, of acting’ (Larsen 2005: 422). However, social sciences studying performances, from Goffman (1959) to Butler (1990) to Thrift (2008),74 have successfully questioned these ideas, and today most anthropologists would agree that all social entities whether cultures, families or individual persons constantly need to be performed. As Schieffelin puts it: ‘performativity is not only endemic to human being-in-the-world but fundamental to the process of constructing human reality’ (Schieffelin 1998: 205). Returning to the Waghorns; Camera angle 6 (see Map 11) shows one of Tony’s sisters pretending to be sleeping on the futon in the Japanese-style room, while Samuel happily plays along. Instead of interpreting this image as showing visitors re-enacting insincere stereotypes of Japanese people, we could also view these scenes in front of the camera as creative, imitative play that forms part of a larger transformative experience. Kalshoven (2010), similarly, concludes that the aim of dressing up is not to produce an exact copy, but it is a form of playful experimentation in order to achieve a transformation. In other words, the family were ‘having fun together’ instead of ‘making fun of’ Japan or Japanese practices. The last photograph in the series in which the extended family enjoys a ‘birthday’ picnic together in the park in front of the museum confirms this. However, the Waghorns also spent a considerable amount of time in each space reading texts, which further demonstrates that we cannot reduce visitors’ motivations to either entertainment or learning.

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‘It was a big surprise to see that people were so interested’ The photo below is the second photograph that was the subject of negative comments uttered after a talk I gave. This time it was a curator working at the Pitt Rivers Museum who compared the Kagemoris sitting at the table with the much-maligned ‘habitat groups’ that used to be a common element of ethnographic displays in the past. I was rather taken aback by the suggestion that my friends, Yutaka and Noriko, could in any way be compared with indigenous people, who were often forced to leave their countries by colonial powers to perform in front of Western audiences in expos, circuses or even zoos. On a superficial level one might detect some similarity between the image of the two Japanese people inside the exhibition and the representations of ‘live groups’ placed in realistic settings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that museum professionals are familiar with. Indeed, both are ‘in situ’ displays defined by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as immersive, experience-centred displays such as ‘dioramas, period rooms, and other mimetic re-creations or settings’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 3). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett discusses one early example of such a display, an 1823 exhibition in London put together by William Bullock that made visitors feel like they were in Mexico by using panoramic paintings of Mexico City on the wall . . . and to bring the spectator actually amidst the scenes represented, [he presented] a fac simile [sic] of a Mexican cottage and garden, with a tree, flowers, and fruit; they are exactly the size of their natural models, and bear an identity not to be mistaken. KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT 1998: 44

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The overall realistic effect of this display was completed with an Indian youth placed inside ‘who acted both as specimen and docent’ (ibid., 44). This young man was the forerunner of what would at the end the nineteenth century, during the boom years of the world fairs, become a well-established display technique whereby groups of ‘living’ indigenous people were employed to supplement object displays. Photograph © Yutaka Kagemori Aaron Glass, for example, describes how for the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago, Franz Boas used a troupe of fifteen Native Americans, who lived on the fairground for nine months, to demonstrate craft techniques, sing songs and perform dances (Glass 2009: 93). Although Boas soon began to experiment with wax or plaster figures placed inside dioramas, which became the norm in many museums, the use of living people did not disappear completely and remained common in mainland Europe until the late 1920s. Glass also discusses a hybrid display from 1904 at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History that consisted of a group of Native American wax figures enacting an iconic Kwakiutl dance scene, that was enlivened with the presence of a ‘real’ native called Charlie Nowell. Charlie describes this experience as follows: They got me to stand inside the case – a big glass room – and explain the thing to people that come, and to answer their questions. Some people would come up and shake hands with me, having money in their hands which they gave to me, beside what I was paid which was $7.50 a day. GLASS 2009: 107

Returning to Noriko and Yutaka Kagemori, the only Japanese participants in my original 2003 research who were able to visit the exhibition in 2011. Both were in their early seventies at the time and I was overjoyed when they agreed to make the arduous journey from Borneo, where they were residing at the time. Calling the Kagemoris ‘research participants’ does not do justice to how instrumental they (and their daughter Shigeko) have been to the success of the exhibition. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that without these generous friends there would have been no exhibition. The Kagemoris allowed me to use their home as a model for the flat that we built in London. We employed many of the photographs Sue took inside their home in 2006 to create some of the life-size photographic displays as well as the main film that I have described in Chapter  2. Moreover, they donated many domestic objects and encouraged their acquaintances to contribute unwanted goods to the project too. Finally, in 2010 one room in their tiny flat was turned into a temporary storage space, where all the objects were carefully packed by Yutaka-san before they were shipped to London.

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Unlike the nameless groups of people who were instructed to perform certain actions, whether or not in exchange for money, to enhance and enliven the objects displayed in museums, expos and other settings at the turn of last century, Yutaka and Noriko were invited to visit the exhibition to see and experience the fruits of their hard work first hand. Moreover, their generosity was officially acknowledged on a special panel placed in the introductory area and during their visit to the museum they were treated as special guests; an in-house curator gave them a tour of the permanent exhibition before Sue and I guided them through the show. The performance at the table, captured in the photo on page 180 was instigated by Noriko, who repeatedly expressed her delight at seeing other visitors actively engaging with the displays. The pose that the couple struck referenced a similar shot Sue had taken of them inside their home, that we also used in the film and that was projected on a wall above the entrance to the diningkitchen area (see photo on page 181). We were all curious to see how visitors watching the film would react when they saw the Kagemoris re-enacting the same scene in front of their eyes. Although most visitors soon realized that the Japanese people sitting at the table were the same as those they were watching in the film, some came up to me and asked for confirmation. A mother with her young son pointed from the film to the Kagemoris at the table saying: ‘how lucky that we have come to see the exhibition today’. Towards the end of our visit, as we sat down at the dining table and opened a bottle of sake that I had managed to smuggle into the exhibition, Noriko saw another opportunity to engage in mimetic play. As I cleaned some sake cups taken from the kitchen cupboards, she spontaneously started to invite visitors, who happened to be in the dining-kitchen area, to sit down at the table with us. A middleaged British woman and two Taiwanese students, who I had earlier observed striking up a conversation with each other in front of the tableware dresser, gladly obliged. Noriko was really in her element as she showed these visitors how to hold their cups when sake was being poured – she is a retired ‘docent’ after all – and enthusiastically answered any questions about Japanese food and drinking habits. When, during the photo-elicitation session in Osaka in 2013, we came across Sue’s photographs of this event, Noriko vividly remembered the occasion claiming that this was an experience that they ‘would probably never forget’. During their one-week stay in London, we ended up visiting the Geffrye Museum twice. Although both Yutaka-san and Noriko-san carried a digital camera with them, the photographic series I discuss in this section consists of the eighty-seven photos Yutaka-san took with his SRL Canon over the two days; thirty-four during the first visit and fifty-two during the second. We made a second visit because the Kagemoris had felt rushed the first time round. This was probably due to the fact that we ended up celebrating at the dining table far too long, but we had also spent quite a while putting up a (plastic) bamboo branch, decorated with colourful paper strips with wishes on, that they had brought with them from Osaka to celebrate the Tanabata festival held on 7 July. The first six photos were taken outside the Geffrye Museum, showing the street with a large banner advertising the show, the exterior of the building and me and Noriko meeting up with Sue, who they hadn’t met since 2006. At the ticket desk, Yutaka took three photos; one of the same banner and two zooming in on a red-cross donation box and a sign asking visitors to make a donation for the victims of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. This was followed by two photos of the permanent exhibition space; one showing an in-house curator giving us a tour of the displays, and the other showing a twentieth-century period room. I had assumed that Yutaka had been interested in the series of Japanese woodblock prints decorating the walls, but he later explained that: ‘It is all about the fireplace. After all, this is characteristic of English homes’.

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Map 12

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Map 12 shows the Kagemoris trajectory inside the exhibition during their first visit. I have reduced the twenty-one photos that Yutaka-san took to fourteen camera angles. He started with taking three photos of the cityscape banner on display outside the entrance to the exhibition (Map 12, Camera angle 1), while I used his camera to take two photos of the Kagemoris in front of the display. They recognized a photograph of the pot plant standing in the fire escape in front of the entrance to their flat, and Noriko said laughing: ‘ah, this is a very familiar landscape!’ Yutaka-san took one photo of the entrance to the exhibition, while the next photo jumps to the owl display in the entrance hall. In the hallway, they were immediately drawn to the postal package saying ‘ah, Yamato’s black cat’, referring to the name of the delivery company, Yamato, and their well-known ‘black cat’ symbol (Map 12, Camera angle 3). As I have shown in Chapter 3, the same object was also positively received by other Japanese visitors and by those who spent a considerable amount of time in Japan because of its mundane everydayness. Upon seeing the image/object of the slipper mat on the entrance floor, Noriko-san automatically removed her shoes and placed them inside the shoe storage cabinet saying; ‘this is what people do’. By contrast, Yutaka-san just walked inside with his shoes on. Their different behaviour in the entrance hall set the tone for the rest of the visit (see Chapter 1) with Noriko-san one hundred per cent in ‘performative-mode’ and her husband treating the flat as a ‘purified’ museum space (see Chapter 4) and adapting his gaze and actions accordingly. The next three photographs were taken in the Western-style room; two show the Ichimatsu dolls that were donated to us by the Tsumuras, who are close friends of the Kagemoris (Map 12, Camera angle 4). They planned to show these photos to the generous donors on their return home, and on their second visit, Noriko-san also photographed the acknowledgements panel carrying the names of several of their friends for this purpose. Camera angle 6 shows a view from the Western-style room towards the life-size photo of a toilet and the accompanying image-text wallpaper with a photograph of their own toilet. This series ends with a photograph of me going through one of the drawers filled with kimonos that we bought together at a flea market in Kyoto, while one kimono was donated by Mr Nitta, another friend of the Kagemoris. Yutaka-san primarily took photographs of components of the displays that were associated with himself and his family and the next three photographs bring this point home because they depict different sections of the four-minute-long film that slowly guides viewers through their flat. Once the couple caught a glimpse of the film they watched it several times, laughing while repeatedly uttering, ‘how interesting!’ This was also the point in the visit when I was finally able to relax; although the exhibition had received numerous positive reviews and comments, at the end of the day the Kagemoris impressions mattered most to me. Yutaka captured the following three film scenes; the exterior of their apartment block (Map 12, Camera angle 8), them sitting together with their daughter and Fujii-san, a close family friend, around their dining table (see photo on the page 181), and the architectural plan of their flat. During a photo-elicitation session in their flat in Osaka in 2013, these photographs made them muse about how much their home and their lives had changed in the seven years since the photos were taken; the façade of their block had recently been cleaned and it ‘looked different’. Halfway through both visits, Yutaka-san’s focus shifted towards people’s interactions inside the spaces. He captured these interactions in a number of photos including two photos of Noriko, Sue and I inside the Japanese-style room (Map 12, Camera angle 9), two of three visitors in the dining-kitchen area, the same people who will later join us for a toast at the dining table, and one photo of Noriko-san and me sitting on the sofa going through the photo albums (Map 12, Camera angle 12). The second part of the second visit also focused on people. Three photos of visitors talking with me in the dining-kitchen

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area are followed by three more photos of two female visitors and their two children, including them standing at the entrance to the tatami room, and them walking (with their shoes on) on top of the mats. There are six more shots of interactions with this same group of visitors in the dining-kitchen area. The next six photographs depict unknown visitors looking at the image-text wallpapers. Comparing both visits, it is clear that during their second visit, Yutaka-san had more of an agenda. Of course, he had been able to evaluate the photos he had taken during their first visit and had considered what kind of photos he would like to shoot the second time round. The fact that the second set of photos focused more on the making of the show suggests that future audiences in Osaka were probably on his mind. The first series of photos prioritize structural elements such as the portable large-format text with information for those with visual disabilities, the introduction text in English and Japanese, and each of the two image-text wallpapers in the introductory area. Then Yutaka-san took three photos that focus on the message that the Kagemoris wrote, in Japanese as well as my English translation, to express their views about the disaster and urging visitors to visit both the exhibition and Japan. The next four photos show different pages from the visitors’ book with some messages written in Japanese (Map 12, Camera angle 14). Both Noriko and Yutaka Kagemori spent a while sitting on the sofa watching other visitors inside the space, and as we looked at the photos Yutaka-san had taken of some of these people, Noriko-san mused: ‘You know, it was a big surprise to see that people were so interested in the exhibition’. She then confessed that they initially had reservations about my exhibition plans because in their view there ‘was nothing special about the topic, and who would like to go and see that?’ They also admitted that this concern about the potential failure of the show had motivated them to bring the Tanabata branch and decorations with them to London. They hoped that this object would allow visitors to at least experience to some degree ‘what it feels like to be in Japan’. The Kagemoris were anxious about whether exhibiting the quotidian would be of much interest to museum visitors in London, but they needn’t have worried because as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has rightly argued ‘one man’s life is another man’s spectacle’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 47). Our visitors’ study shows how the mundane, taken for granted, everyday lives of people living in different cultural contexts can easily become exoticized (see Chapter 3). However, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett further argues that such encounters also ‘force us to

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make comparisons that pierce the membrane of our own quotidian world, allowing us for a brief moment to be spectators of ourselves, an effect that is also experienced by those on display’ (ibid., 48). Similarly, our findings revealed that by allowing visitors to engage in imaginative ways with the quotidian material worlds of others, many people made comparisons with and asked questions about their own everyday lives, and for some such explorations led them to at least (re)consider some of the mutual similarities too.

‘I was surprised to find this box of cockroach poison’ In the two case studies above, I have elucidated the role that cameras played in instigating playful performances inside the exhibition. The next example will offer us an insight into how the widespread use of the Internet and networked photography impacts on visitors, especially those travelling on their own. Increasing numbers of exhibition-goers ‘document’ their visit and share these experiences with future audiences online. I will draw on Ali’s visual engagement with the exhibition in order to show how this kind of photography that bridges ‘physical spaces, fantasylands, and media worlds’ (Larsen 2005: 431) enables new forms of sociality. Ali is a British woman, born in 1981, who lived in Japan for two years, and wrote a review of the exhibition and the raffle on her blog Haikugirl’s Japan (http://haikugirl.me). She became part of our raffle study and, in the process, she also agreed to share all the photos that she took of the exhibition with us. Ali started her blog in 2007, but it really took off when she moved to Japan in 2009. At first it was a kind of diary, ‘a sort of message back to my family and friends . . . this is what I am doing in Japan, these are my friends’. However, over time it became more like a travel guide and ‘instead of just saying “I went to this place”, I would say “I went to this place and this is how I got there, this is how much it cost”; if you want to go there too, this is how you can do it”’. And people really appreciated this because in Japan there’s not always the right information’. Through her blog Ali made friends with a strong community of people blogging about Japan across the world. Ali visited the exhibition on 15 July and posted her review online on 17 July. She took forty-eight photographs but the first ten were taken outside the exhibition space. I condensed the thirtyeight photos taken inside to twenty-seven camera angles that are shown on Map 13. The first photo was of the collage of photos of public spaces, the ‘cityscape’, that hung just outside the exhibition space (Map 13, Camera angle 1). However, it was the photo taken from Camera angle 2, that Ali chose to start her review of the exhibition with on her blog; it shows part of the title of the exhibition, with a sequence of three large photographs of urban gardens underneath. The next photograph (Map 13, Camera angle 3) was selected for her blog too; it shows a close-up of the garden we created in front of the flat with particular attention paid to a bamboo branch with colourful paper wishes, which I have already described in detail above. On the blog this photograph is accompanied with the following text: ‘At the entrance to the “house” there was a plant, and here’s an example of the amazing attention to detail. Hanging on the plant were Tanabata wishes and decorations’. The next series of photos were not used on the blog (Map 13, Camera angles 4–5); they show the introductory text and two more close-ups; one of a specific Tanabata decoration and the other of the post box, one of her favourite objects on display. She then took two photos of the shoes and slippers boundary but chose to publish the one that included a full view of the slipper rack (Map 13, Camera angle 6). The next photo, an overview shot she took of the shoe storage cabinet shows the lucky objects on top and Sue’s life-size photograph depicting owls (originally taken in an entrance hall in a home in Osaka) hanging

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Map 13

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Courtesy of Ali Muskett

behind; the photo also captures the ‘black cat’ (kuroneko) postal package that was placed on the ground beside the cabinet (Map 13, Camera angle 7). In Chapter 2, I have already referred to how she described on her blog the different visual techniques that we used in the exhibition. Here, I will therefore only briefly list the photos in the series that were linked with these discussions about how we, in her view, successfully employed photography in the design of the show. These are a photo of a toilet in a recess in the corridor, a photo that portrays the image-object combination technique in the bathroom, and photos that depict the light box technique in the Japanese-style room (Map 13, Camera angle 17) and the balcony off the dining-kitchen area. During our visit to her home, she praised the exhibition more generally by saying: ‘It wasn’t like . . . I can imagine if some English or Western people tried to recreate a Japanese home it would be so clichéd and cheesy’. By contrast, another Japan-related exhibition held at the Sainsbury Institute that she went to had been disappointing. The curators had aimed to recreate the room of a Japanese high school girl, but Ali thought that the room ‘was just over the top – it’s like they got everything that has to do with Hello Kitty and put it into one room’. In her online review, Ali further praised the interactive element of the exhibition explaining that there were ‘signs actively encouraging the visitors to touch and open things’. She illustrated this point with two photos of the ‘kimono closet’ drawers (Map 13, Camera angle 10) and the text ‘when I opened this drawer I found some beautiful kimonos; and in the next drawer there were obis and other kimono wearing accessories’. Towards the end of the review, two of the four photos that she took of open drawers in the kitchen cupboards were selected and accompanied by the following text: ‘Again, in the kitchen opening drawers was encouraged: the drawers were full of all sorts of interesting items that would be typical to a Japanese home.’ Although Ali was someone who was quite familiar with Japan, the exhibition had offered her an opportunity to ‘poke around in someone else’s house’, something that she explained she had never experienced in Japan.

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Another element of the exhibition that Ali appreciated was the ‘amazing attention to detail’. Like the Kagemoris, she noticed the ‘black cat’ postal package in the entrance hall (Map 13, Camera angle 7), and one the Tanabata decorations (see Chapter 3), but she also took close-ups of the stickers on the post box, a Hello Kitty sponge placed in a plastic basin in the bathroom (Map 13, Camera angle 12) and a wooden tray with tea pot and cups and sweets in the shape of geisha placed on the counter in the kitchen. However, most surprising was her close-up of a box of cockroach repellent that I had hidden in the bottom drawer of the IKEA chest of drawers in the Japanese-style room. Her explanation read: ‘When I opened one of the drawers in the tatami room, I was surprised to find this box of cockroach poison.’ During our visit, Ali singled out her two favourite photos that she shared on her blog. Firstly, she admired the photograph of the girl with the cat in the cage that we used as a light box and she took four photos of this image (Map 13, Camera angle 20). I have already discussed her reaction to this photograph in Chapter 2 and next I would like to focus on a second photograph in the exhibition that she felt drawn to (top photo below). This was a photo Sue took in 2006, that depicted three generations of Takahashis sitting around their dining table in Nara. We displayed this image on the image-text wallpaper in the dining-kitchen area (see Chapters 2 and 4). In her words, it ‘reminded me a lot of the “family” photos I have been in when I’ve visited homes in Japan’. She published this image on her blog followed by a similar photograph of herself sitting around a crowded table filled with dishes in a family home in Japan. The fact that she provided this additional personal photograph suggests that Ali, like many of the other exhibition visitors, was not particularly interested in gazing at authentic objects. Instead, she was in search of ‘mimetic authenticity’ and was eager to test the feel of home we created in the exhibition space against her own experiences while living in Japan. Taussig is instructive here because he elaborates on how this complex mimetic process is ‘not about mimicry but it is linked to a visceral experience based on a relation between one’s self, one’s own body and the objects or images of the world’ (Taussig 1993: 38), In his words, it is ‘not the mind’s eye that reaches out to grasp or grope the image or space before me – it is my embodied self locating, placing myself in the world which I am viewing’ (ibid., 25). Similarly, by posting a photo of herself in a scene almost identical to the one we used in the exhibition Ali ‘placed herself in the world which [she was] viewing’. Some might interpret this action as an attempt to show off her Japan-related cultural capital, but as I have argued throughout this book, the inclusion of this photo also showed Ali’s ‘willingness to imagine herself into the Other’s position’ (Leach 2015: 270). This tension between focusing on the self and imagining the point of view of the Other is a point I will return to in the Courtesy of Ali Muskett conclusion.

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Discussion: ‘Be part of art!’ In the twenty-first century, the digital camera (or more precisely in the last five years the camera phone) has become an integral part of most people’s everyday lived experience and it therefore comes as no surprise that growing numbers of visitors to exhibitions expect to be able to engage with the displays through photography. Like Ali, the Japan blogger discussed in detail above, most visitors shared their photographs online and a large number of images of the exhibition thus circulated on blogs, Facebook and as email and text attachments. Visitors of all ages enacted domestic practices in front of the camera, but these performances were particularly popular amongst those in their twenties and thirties. I have already identified four key camera moments – putting on slippers, trying on kimonos, reclining on the futon and sitting at the table – but we also observed many other examples. A married couple in their late twenties, for example, took photos in the bathroom with the man putting on the blue plastic slippers and holding up one of the cleaning tools while standing in front of the photograph of the wet area in the bathroom. Another couple within the same age group took photos of the man’s feet on the slipper mat and him using the fans in the Japanese-style room. In a series of seminal papers about the performativity of tourist photography, the geographer Jonas Larsen (Larsen 2001, 2005; Haldrup and Larsen 2010; Larsen and Urry 2011) argues that photography is ‘part of the “theatre” that people enact to produce their desired and expected self-image but also togetherness, wholeness and intimacy with their partner, family and friends’ (Haldrup and Larsen 2010: 129). I am unable to do justice to Larsen’s rich body of work here, but I would like to focus on some of his key ideas that are relevant for my discussion of exhibition visitors’ photography. In line with the findings presented in this chapter, Larsen argues that ‘cameras make one act’, they make people acutely aware of their bodies and encourage posing, playing, and acting (Larsen 2005: 425). In his view, photography is ‘an embodied gazing practice (Larsen and Urry 2011: 1114) that is ‘a source of pleasure, creativity and sociability in itself’ (Haldrup and Larsen 2010: 126). He further shows that such playful bodily performances in front of the camera not only turn a place visited into a stage, but also, and more importantly for our discussion, transgress ‘the distance between humans, material environments and objects’ (ibid., 425). Many participants in our study also alluded to this blurring of boundaries between people, things and spaces, arguing that through their camera they felt ‘closer to’ or ‘more involved with’ the exhibition (see Chapter 2). The positive effects that the camera had on visitors’ experiences raises questions about the nophotography policy that continues to be common in so many museums, whether reasons given are to protect valuable objects on display from damage or to guard against copyright infringements and the potential loss of income. Ali, the Japan blogger, nicely summarized the dual frustration many visitors mentioned when they were confronted with the no-photography rule. She pointed out that it generally results in her walking around ‘thinking I can’t really get involved in this’, while getting ‘annoyed’ with other visitors who do not respect the no-camera signs. She, then, contrasted this experience, common in many larger museums in London with visiting a tiny gallery in east London, where one can freely take photographs, and ‘get really into it’. Change is in the air, however, and in the past few years many mayor museums have reviewed their policies regarding photography. In July 2014, the National Portrait Gallery in London, for example, decided to allow visitors to take photographs inside their exhibition spaces because the recent introduction of free Wifi (and the release of a free app to explore the collections) made it: ‘increasingly difficult for our Gallery Assistants to be able to distinguish between devices being used

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for engagement with the Collection, or those being used for photography’ (National Portrait Gallery 2014). In other words, even if photography is prohibited, guards struggle to differentiate between somebody using their mobile phone or iPad to learn about the collections or take a photo of the displays. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, in Asia, we can witness the unstoppable rise of so-called ‘Trick Art’ museums. In Seoul alone, for example, there are three such museums where people are actually encouraged to take photos of themselves and others while becoming part of 3D displays. Although the recent enthusiasm for Trick Art is clearly linked with the ubiquity of networked mobile phones with camera functions, the concept itself has a much longer history in the region. Forerunners of these devices are life-size, cut-outs of famous people or characters linked with tourist sites with a hole instead of a face that people can poke their own faces through in order to have their photo taken. The photo below on the right shows such a display still in operation close to a famous temple in the centre of Osaka, while the photo on the left illustrates the use of the same technique at a recent exhibition in Japan. The original Trick Art museum – found in Takao, a small town one hour by train from Tokyo – opened in 1996 before the digitalization of photography. Its main attractions are 3D trompe d’oeil displays of Egyptian themes that visitors can pose in to have their photographs taken. On the museum’s website, visitors are encouraged not only to take photographs, but also to transgress many standard museum practices that visitors have become accustomed to, such as

Photograph © Etsuko Kitano

Photograph © Inge Daniels

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Don’t forget to bring your camera! It may surprise you, but a number of things that are usually discouraged at museums are allowed at the Takao Trick Art Museum. Taking pictures, coming in contact with the works on display, talking aloud and feeling free to make noise are considered accepted ways of enjoying the museum, as long as it does not disturb the fun of other visitors. Go ahead and become your own movie director. TAKAO TRICK ART MUSEUM 2006

The success of this museum has been such that copycat enterprises, that offer photo-ops in front of stereoscopic paintings, have popped up all over Japan. One recent example is the Trick Art museum in Nasu that focuses on famous Western paintings and has a whole hall dedicated to Michelangelo’s creations including an optical illusion of the Sistine Chapel (Takao Trick Art Museum 2006). Moreover, similar displays have also being installed in a range of public spaces – for example, the photo below shows me engaging with some displays that were erected in a popular underground shopping arcade in Namba in the centre of Osaka. In the Introduction, I mentioned the growing popularity of immersive installations in European museums, but in recent years there has also been a rise in 3D visual illusions projects in non-museum contexts in many European cities too. One such example was an installation in east London called Dalston House by the Argentinian artist, Leandro Elrich, that drew large crows in the summer of 2013. On a vacant lot in Dalston, Elrich recreated the façade of a Victorian terraced house that once stood there. The construction was laid out horizontally on the ground but with mirrors positioned overhead, and the reflections of visitors interacting with this display thus gives one the impression that they are standing on, suspended from or scaling the building vertically. Moreover, Trick Art has also been successfully integrated in the cityscape to beautify derelict sites or abandoned plots. Although immersive installations and exhibitions that offer creative photo opportunities are popular with audiences worldwide, most Western critics tend to see this as a negative trend. A good example of this negative attitude is Larson’s review of Sugar Baby, a gigantic statue of a reclining nude, black woman made out of sugar, which formed part of an exhibition created by Kara Walker in a derelict Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn in 2014, in which he expresses his dismay at witnessing yet another group of young men taking selfies while pretending to hold up the statue’s huge breasts. He thus laments; ‘when did we lose a sense of self-awareness when addressing art objects’ (Larson 2014: 505). He links this behaviour with a ‘deep human need to insert “the self” into every situation’ (ibid., 511) as opposed to the ability to let go of the self, which he argues is characteristic of most spiritual practices. Larson clearly assumes that selfies, in line with stories circulated in the mass media, are a form of narcissistic self-expression. However, the emerging social science research about this Photograph © Shigeko Kagemori novel genre of photography argues that the

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most common purpose of selfies is to acknowledge friendship; it is ‘something to do together for fun’ (Miller and Sinanan 2017: 28). Leaving aside whether or not visiting exhibitions should or could be equated with experiencing the sublime, our study suggests that by playfully immersing themselves in the displays in order to pose for a photo, visitors may have a transformative experience that can be as powerful as the wonder supposedly resulting from more detached contemplation of iconic objects (Greenblatt 1991). I would like to end this discussion with the wise words of the German anthropologist Köpping who, based on long-term research into Japanese religious rituals, questions the assumption held by many anthropologists (but also other scientists and museum professionals) that ‘immersion in Otherness can only be seen as a fake’ (Köpping 2002: 195). He concludes that we should refrain from overemphasizing detached knowing and embrace bodily participation and immersion because all social interaction is a form of play (ibid., 212).

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ALI: SPREAD 7

Ali –

‘I never found England a very interesting place’ Ali is a thirty-year-old British woman who, when we visited her in her flat in north London in 2012, worked for an online communications agency producing corporate websites. In the late 2000s, she lived in Japan for two years teaching English, and in her free time these days, she writes a blog called Haikugirl’s Japan that provides information about Japanese culture as well as a variety of Japanrelated events in London. Like Jen who featured in Spread 3, Ali’s interest in Japan started while she was still at college, when she developed an interest in Japanese haiku, but she only got really into all things Japanese when she started playing computer games. A friend who she previously worked with (who now lives in Oxford with a Japanese wife) had encouraged her to eventually move to Japan. When I asked her to clarify what she liked so much about Japan she said: 195

There is something about Japan that is just so different to this country. I mean, there’s lots of things I like about it. . . . It’s clean, it’s safe. But there’s just something about it there that feels like home. This answer seems rather contradictory because how can a place so different to the country one grew up in feel like home? However, Ali continued our conversation saying: ‘I’ve always been interested in things that aren’t English I suppose. I never found England a very interesting place’. In other words, because she never felt at home in England, she had made Japan, a country that she considered to be very different, her surrogate homeland. Like many other people, Ali was drawn to the post box covered in stickers, but this lot went very quickly, and she thought that the card game set (karuta) was really special too. She explained: I thought – this is the gift I want; I don’t have any need for anything else. . . . When I saw the kimono in the raffle I sort of thought it would be a beautiful thing to have but I don’t need it and I knew that it probably would be valuable, but what would I do apart from putting it in a suitcase or a box? I knew that at least with the karuta I could at least do something with – read it, play with it. Thus, although Ali knew the (potential) monetary value of a kimono, she, like most other participants in our follow-up study, was in search of things that she could use in her everyday life in London. Still, she was probably one of the only people present at the raffle who knew that the imitation lacquered box containing a series of rectangular cards was in fact a popular Japanese card game played during the 196

New Year’s period. Its aim is to match different cards containing poems, and the person who is the fastest in doing this, wins.75 Ali admitted that she cannot play the game herself because she does not have the required Japanese language ability yet, but this is an incentive for her to continue studying hard. By 2012 the card game set (karuta) had become part of an array of treasured Japanese objects that Ali, like other participants in our raffle study who had spent a significant amount of time in Japan, surrounded herself with. The box sits on the bottom shelf of a large bookshelf that is filled with Japanrelated books interspersed with small decorative items that she brought home from Japan. Ali loves Japanese films and anime, and in one corner of her flat she displayed the complete Ghibli collection, saying: ‘sometimes I get a little Japan-sick feeling, and if I’m feeling like that, I just get a movie on.’ On one wall hangs a map of Japan covered in pins representing all the places she has visited. She also showed us two of her favourite objects, both gifts from friends in Japan; a teapot and a hot water bottle cover in the shape of the Japanese cute bear character, ‘rilakkuma’ (or ‘relax-bear’). She described her flat to us as follows: Now I feel like I am in a place where I feel I have all my treasures around me, like a real collector (giggles) I like to have nice objects and things with memories. When someone comes around and says, ‘What’s this? What’s the story?’ The karuta fitted so well with this, because many people have asked me about it. 197

The karuta box was wrapped in a colourful cloth (furoshiki), depicting a famous ukiyo-e scene by Hokusai, which was a ‘precious’ farewell gift from one of her Japanese students when she returned to the UK . Ali told us that she regularly takes the cards out of their box to admire them and study the texts which explains the fact that she noticed that one of the cards was missing. I am not sure whether the set was incomplete from the start or whether this was another thing to add to the list of ‘disappeared’ objects (Chapter 1). Ali was clearly very fond of her raffle object and she answered my question about possibly giving it to me on loan for a future exhibition with a ‘maybe’, adding: ‘You get so attached to something. If you asked What would you take if there was a fire? This is certainly one of the things.’

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Conclusion Exhibitions as Technologies of the Imagination

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So, after all that, what did our experiment tell us about exhibitions and how might these findings assist in rethinking the role of exhibitions in the twenty-first century? Aware of the fact that people visit exhibitions for a myriad of reasons and in order not to privilege one particular register of knowledge, we opted for an open-ended, multilayered design that could accommodate a multitude of potential motivations, backgrounds and interests. To achieve this, we reduced curatorial authority; keeping the one-way transmission of sanctioned knowledge through texts to a minimum and abandoned policing visitors’ movements and interactions. Instead, we encouraged people to make their own ‘creative’ connections while freely moving through the exhibit; they could decide whether or not to draw on the contextual information provided and choose the degrees of immersion in the displays they felt comfortable with. Again and again people expressed their appreciation of the imaginative acts of discovery that they were thus able to engage in. Our findings show that these were rarely solitary activities, but that they formed part of complex social processes that mixed knowledge-making with a range of other practices (see Chapter 4), whether people interacted with friends and family, dovetailed, overheard or copied strangers in situ, or shared their experiences with others online. As I have shown throughout this book, we were only able to conduct our experiment because we populated AHJ with objects that would not be entered into a museum collection. The sustainability of (public) museum collections is of course a pertinent topic within the current context of economic uncertainty and austerity politics, and a number of other anthropologists have recently proposed alternatives to conventional museological practices. One example is Were and King (2012) who have argued for a different kind of collecting, called ‘extreme collecting’, that focuses on objects ‘that are at the fringes of what is normally considered acceptable’ ranging from relics and extinct animals to oversized objects or fragile, ephemeral items such as food (Were and King 2012: 3–4). However, I have found Fiona Candlin’s fascinating book about micro museums more inspiring (Candlin 2016). Throughout, she corroborates how small, independent, single-subject museums, although they are also collectionsbased, pioneer innovative models of curation and visitors’ experience. The much-liked Bakelite Museum in Dorset is one particularly insightful example that invites striking parallels with the design and reception of AHJ . Its lavish displays of inexpensive commodities, which are carefully laid out without textual framing or security measures, allow visitors to experience a heightened ‘sense of discovery and exploration’ (Candlin 2016: 122–24). In AHJ we, similarly, combined abundant displays of inexpensive objects with novel uses of life-size photography to produce an environment that invited undirected exploration. Candlin concludes that the exploratory activities offered by any exhibition based on valuable collections will by comparison always be ‘extremely limited in scope’ (ibid., 126). However, in recent years, some art museums have successfully experimented with computer technology to transcend curatorial limitations associated with valuable objects. Two examples from 2015 are, firstly, the Van Gogh Alive experience, that produced larger than life 3D projections of the artist’s masterpieces that visitors could move through while viewing the work in great detail and from unexpected angles (Van Gogh Alive 2015), and, secondly, the Tate Sensorium exhibition that drew on new technologies to engage the public with artworks through sound, touch, scent and taste (Tate Britain 2015).76 Although these exhibitions illustrate how multimedia displays can increase access to delicate objects, the success of AHJ demonstrates that by revisiting and improving analogue display techniques already at our disposal, exhibitions may achieve similar positive results. Another encouraging example is mentioned by von Zinnenburg Carroll in her paper about the history of ‘vitrine thinking’ in Western museums (von Zinnenburg Carroll 2017). She shows how (in 1940) the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, in anticipation of the return of El Penacho, a sixteenth-century

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feather headdress linked with the Aztec King Montezuma currently (still) displayed at the Museum of Volkerenkunde in Vienna, created a vitrine containing an exact copy. However, unlike the original that is laid at a forty-five-degree angle with vertical glass reaching high around it, the headdress in Mexico is displayed vertically at a height that invites visitors to photograph themselves as if wearing the crown. This is proof that even the most conservative framing devices can be creatively reimagined to enable audiences to physically and socially interact with and (re)discover the items kept inside (von Zinnenburg Carroll 2017: 30–31). This example also shows how by using copies of valuable objects (and advances in 3D printing will certainly revolutionize current copying technologies), we may also break the ‘spell of protection and preservation’, and make participatory exhibitions achievable for object-based museums too (ibid., 34). In a special issue of the journal Museum Anthropology from 2014, that sets out to explore what museum collections might look like in the twenty-second century, Rotenberg makes the controversial suggestion that museums should develop new collecting strategies that mirror the tactics ordinary people employ in their everyday lives such as the ubiquitous domestic use of assemblages of objects, for example, sets of plates, glasses or other tableware (Rotenberg 2014: 36). He argues that this would necessitate a shift in focus from the protection of the singular object to understanding ‘how material agencies combine’ through use (ibid., 37). AHJ also took inspiration from how ordinary people ‘curate’ their everyday, lived-in social and material environments. Thus, we did away with glass vitrines and labels, but arranged groups of objects in framing devices that are common in most domestic settings such as closets, photo albums or kitchen counters (see Chapters 2 and 4). While specialist curatorial practices, whether enacted by Euro-American specialists or non-Western elites and elders (Kreps 2003),

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tend to focus on the protection of iconic objects and practices linked with heritage, history and community identity, in the domestic arena, care and curation comprise not only activities linked with preservation (displaying, cleaning and storing) but also those linked with consumption (using up) and circulation (gifting and divesting). During the conceptualization and the design of the exhibition, we were inspired by this dual aspect of ordinary curatorship and the raffle at the end of the show foregrounds the importance of divestment and the destruction of form in the (re)production of social life. The popular 2014 art installation Blood Swept the Land and Seas of Red that was temporarily erected at the Tower of London to commemorate the Great War drew on a similar concept. Close to 900,000 ceramic poppies, which stood for the number of British soldiers that had died, were displayed at this iconic site, and after the exhibition, each poppy was sold for twenty-five pounds to raise funds for charity. Three years later, the art initiative ‘14–18 Now’ created a website where owners could plant their poppy on a digital map and share their stories (14–18 Now 2017). We didn’t have the resources necessary to set up a website to track AHJ objects after we gave them away in a free raffle at the end of the show. However, Sue and I were able to follow the journeys of ten lots into their new homes. Our findings highlight the importance new owners placed on use when engaging with and making sense of these items. Indeed, all claimed that on the day of the raffle they had been most attracted to objects that they could imagine ‘actually using’. Their temporary stay in the Geffrye Museum did not impact much on how these objects were valued, while the fact that they were sourced in Japan only mattered to those who spent a long period of time in the country and who

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associated them with ‘cool’ things that they had seen and/or used in situ. Those who had never been to Japan, similarly, valued their potential future functionality but it was also important that the objects were ‘unusual’ and ‘difficult to find in the UK ’. All stressed the effort that they had put into ‘finding’ the raffled objects while any monetary value was considered negligible. It is important to reiterate that all the lots consisted of ‘assemblages’ of domestic objects such as garden tools, bathroom supplies or sets of tableware. These latter objects were often containers in different shapes and sizes that many transformed into storage units for keys, plants and so on. Some of the raffled objects had a very short life span in their new homes as they were passed on to friends, relatives or charity shops; others were lost, broken or destroyed (by the family pet). A few were slowly being used during meals or while bathing. Over time all items, even those that had initially instigated stories and memories, became absorbed into the familiar material and social fabric of people’s homes. In our exhibition experiment we especially wanted to test what might happen if we acknowledged experience and use as an important source of knowledge. Such an approach questions standard views about learning and the transmission of knowledge in exhibitions based on the ‘premise that there is one objective reality and that it consists of a discontinuity of mutually exclusive entities and kinds’ (Scott 2016: 479). Instead of displaying singular iconic museum objects to be contemplated from afar and thus producing the typical ‘museum effect’ (Alpers 1991), we drew on an abundance of inexpensive, massproduced objects (together with a variety of other visual and spatial design elements) to create immersive environments that visitors were encouraged to have direct contact with, whether through physical

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immersion (Chapters 1, 3 and 4) or through embodied viewing (Chapters 2 and 5). Many people told us that they were ‘moved’ by these displays, but the effect was more subtle and mundane than the pathos generally associated with wonder. This latter concept has been at the centre of museological debates about the effectiveness of exhibitions since the 1990s when Greenblatt most famously made a plea for the importance of ‘wonder’, defined as ‘the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks . . . to evoke an exalted attention’ (Greenblatt 1991: 42).77 Such visual force, thought to emanate from the minimal displays of isolated objects, differs significantly from the aesthetic pleasures experienced by visitors to AHJ , who expressed being taken in by the spatial ‘feel’ or ‘atmosphere’ evoked by the show. Our findings thus confirm Bjerregaard’s observation that we need to pay more attention to the ‘presence effect’ of exhibitions whereby a particular atmosphere produced might ‘throw us into a new conception of the world’ (Bjerregaard 2015: 78). Like Ali, the Japan blogger discussed at length in Chapter 5, who repeatedly voiced being ‘surprised’ or Rachel Waghorn, one of the participant’s in our raffle study, who recalled that there were many ‘little surprises in different places’, many other visitors drew on the idiom of surprise to describe their experiences inside the exhibition. In his seminal study about skill and craftsmanship, Sennett defines surprise as ‘a way of telling yourself that something you know can be other than you assumed’ (Sennett 2008: 211). He links this sentiment with the imaginative work of sympathy and draws on eighteenthcentury thinkers such as Hume and Smith to argue that ‘entering into others’ lives’ requires ‘imagining ourselves as another, in all his or her difference’ (Sennett 2008: 92–93). Similarly, our exhibition did not deny differences (between cultures) but it drew on the tension between the familiarity and alterity (Chapter 3) in order to encourage visitors to imagine life from the vantage point of another. My inspiration for creating such an exhibition came from my own experience conducting several ethnographies. As the British anthropologist James Leach has recently argued, what drives anthropologists is to imagine ‘an alternative to the way we live and understand’ (Leach 2015: 269). However, the aim of the ethnographic project is not ‘to become another, to usurp their place’, but our field site is a ‘space of possibility; a shared space for new things to emerge within’ (ibid., 271). One unexpected outcome of giving visitors free rein inside AHJ was that many felt compelled to engage in imaginative play, and, as I have shown in Chapter 5, it was often the camera that instigated a range of interactive performances. Most museum professionals and academics that I shared my findings with reacted negatively towards this ‘ludic’ element of the show; they assumed that the frivolity associated with play would inevitably negate any serious ‘objective’ knowledge production. Because these dismissive attitudes towards play have such a long history in Western thinking, it should come as no surprise that these ideas also had a very strong hold on many exhibition-goers. Indeed, as I have shown in Chapters 3 and 4, a number of visitors found it difficult, often after years of socialization into the sanctioned, ‘serious’ ways of engaging with exhibition displays, to embrace the playful aspects of the show and many preferred to watch from a ‘safe’ distance instead of exposing themselves to Otherness. These findings thus remind us that even if we create exhibitions that aim to mould visitors’ ‘imaginative capacities’, their effects are always incidental, and outcomes can be both positive and negative (Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2009). Our experiment revealed that if people are not restrained by any rules, some may eagerly participate and perform, while others really value the fact that withdrawal or ‘non-participation’ (Butler and Mirza 2013) is an option, too. This was exemplified by the fact that visitors chose to employ different intensities of touch (including not touching anything at all) depending on what they felt comfortable with (see Chapters 1 and 3). However, when they were confronted with more challenging dilemmas such as shoe removal, visitors expressed stronger feelings of strangeness, unease and antagonism.

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I, thus, agree with Bishop that truly participatory exhibitions should therefore not only evoke the ideal of empathy and togetherness but also leave room for boundaries, conflict and non-identification (Bishop 2004: 65–66). Butler and Mirza have called such exhibition spaces that ‘allowed for subversion, imagination and insurrection . . . zones of conflict’ (Butler and Mirza 2013: 95), but ‘zones of awkward engagement’ describes more accurately the subtle display of discomfort and embarrassment that we observed in our exhibition. Because we drew on a mixture of ethnographic methods (not only interviews) to study visitors, we were able not only to record verbal expressions of discovery and wonder but also to witness corporeal manifestations of surprise that all visitors, whether they were critical of the show or not, experienced in the ‘pause between passion and reason’ (Guyer 2013: 286). I have already mentioned the bodily puzzlement many felt when faced with the cultural taboo of walking with shoes on tatami mats (Chapter 1), but another example is that visitors were momentarily shaken by the trompe-l’oeil effect of the life-size photography (Chapter 2). By blurring the distinction between two- and three-dimensionality, these latter images disorientated and confused visitors with many having to do a ‘double take’. These subtle bodily surprises thus cause, in whatever small a way and even if only temporarily, ‘a destabilization’ (Scott 2016: 476) of the everyday lived world that most visitors take for granted. To conclude, I want to stress that I am not arguing that all conventional museums should give people free access to their valuable objects nor am I proposing that they desert their educational mandate. This book merely highlights the possibilities of exhibitions that are envisioned as technologies of the imagination. The kind of imagination that I am referring to is not about fantasy or projection but it is ‘an exploration of mutual possibilities and mutual difference . . . grounded in particular relational emergence of knowledge between people’ (Leach 2015: 268–69). In recent years, some social scientists have begun to challenge negative views about play and re-evaluate it as a form of knowing that emerges ‘directly from the indissoluble relations that exist between minds, bodies and environment’ (Marchand 2010: 2). Morelli is an anthropologist who supports this view and based on her ethnography with Matsés children in Peru, she argues that play (in her case drawing) is ‘a dynamic activity through which the imagination is carried out and brought into view’ which enables ‘accessing an elsewhere beyond the limits of the habitual’ (Morelli 2015: 222). It follows that by paying proper attention to how people play we can actually study and try to improve our understanding of the ‘external, social workings’ of the imagination. In AHJ visitors from a range of different backgrounds entered into a multitude of imaginative explorations with their material surroundings and with each other. By paying attention to these undirected, playful engagements and disengagements, we were able to observe how visitors’ imagination about everyday life elsewhere became mixed with their own and other people’s experiences, and these activities in turn made each person both engage with and reimagine the world they themselves live in.

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Notes

1

Visitors are led on a walk through time from the seventeenth century until the 1980s along a series of period rooms, that reflect changes in style, taste and fashion as well as larger social and economic shifts.

2

It formed part of a strategy to expand the remit of the museum to the study of the house and garden worldwide. Topics that were previously explored included West Indian front rooms (2006), gardens of elderly people (2007–2008) and eco homes in the UK (2009–2010).

3

In other words, we problematized ‘cultural alterity’ by stressing the ‘difference within and similarity between cultures’ (Pinney 2002: 356).

4

In June 2015 a multisensory Japan-related exhibition experiment that encouraged visitor participation attracted news coverage worldwide. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts invited visitors to try on a kimono like the one worn by Camille Monet in her husband’s painting La Japonaise, from 1876, and be photographed in front of the original (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2015). However, because of criticism on social media and activists’ protests inside the museum, the kimono try-ons were cancelled less than two weeks after they started and replaced by a static display of the same garments that visitors were only allowed to touch (see Valk 2015 for a detailed discussion about the controversy).

5

During the 1960s and 70s some researchers questioned these approaches by paying attention to the socio-economic aspects of exhibition going. A well-known example is Bourdieu and Darbel’s ([1969] 1991) comparative study of art museums in France, Holland, Poland, Spain and Greece.

6

This preference for quantitative data also explains why many museums have started to collect ‘big data’ whether by asking visitors to wear a tracking device directly linked to the Internet or by compiling data gathered through websites and online platforms. Van Dijck (2014) has critiqued ‘dataism’ arguing that the huge amounts of data gathered still need to be interpreted and it is difficult to know which aspect is actually meaningful.

7

This study resulted in the development of a time-per-square-feet figure that allowed for comparisons to be made between exhibitions of different sizes.

8

It is, however, advisable to apply some level of ‘methodological asceticism’ (Candea 2007: 169) and contain complexity by framing the field site within certain boundaries.

9

Ethnographies about heritage sites conducted by archaeologists are more common. Butler’s 2007 study of Alexandria is one example, but again her focus is not on visitors but on the complex relationship between various local and global actors in the creation and maintenance of this site (Butler 2007).

10 Over the past thirty years, driven by larger geopolitical changes as well as reflexive critiques from within the discipline, anthropological fieldwork and research topics have changed dramatically. Questions have been raised about whether a ‘holistic’ approach is possible and what ‘community’ actually means in an increasingly transnational world where supposed boundaries between local and global, urban and rural, off line and online, are porous. 11 Only sixty-six were complete data sets, because eight participants refused to be interviewed due to time constraints. 12 I avoided putting visitors into categories based on previously identified museum traits, but we distilled some general information about those we studied that might be of interest to the reader. For example, 70 per cent 211

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were women, 53 per cent were between twenty and forty years of age, while 35 per cent belonged to the forty to sixty age group. Moreover, 65 per cent were British, 10 per cent were American and 10 per cent Japanese, while another 15 per cent were a mixture of European nationals, Canadians, Australians and Taiwanese. 13 The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk offered this provocative statement in an article about museums as institutions that facilitate both positive and negative experiences with the unfamiliar; whether it is delight in the new and sympathy with the Other or contempt and repulsion (Sloterdijk 2014: 441–42). 14 Most contemporary Japanese no longer wear kimonos and the only reason why I included them in the exhibition was because during my fieldwork I came across large numbers stored away in ‘kimono closets’. These kimonos belonged to women who married pre-1990 when the kimono still formed part of a standard trousseaux, but many were painfully aware that when they passed away their bridal wealth would be disposed of. 15 In an early study about the use of new technologies in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC , Isaac argues that touchscreens actually separate visitors from the artefacts placed in glass cases (Isaac 2008: 297). 16 The study also showed that touchscreens were considered to be fun, useful to engage children and offer a welcome escape from reading exhibition texts (Kidd 2014: 100). That said, visitors also complained that the technologies used were too slow and dated compared with devices that people use in their everyday lives (ibid., 92). 17 Art that triggers participation has a long tradition from experimental German theatre in 1930s to 1970s performance art (Bishop 2004: 62). 18 Details of all the projects are available from the Humboldt Lab Dahlem online archive (Humboldt Lab Dahlem 2012–2015), while key findings were also published in a richly illustrated volume entitled The Laboratory Concept (Heller, Scholz and Wegner 2015). 19 Noteworthy exceptions were an exhibit that enticed visitors to arrange their own coats, bags and other accessories in glass vitrines at the museum entrance and an installation that evoked the atmosphere of an African beauty parlour that visitors could walk around in. 20 A growing body of literature discusses the impact of exhibition participation but the focus tends to be on individuals external to the museum who contribute to the development of an exhibition. Examples range from collaborations with indigenous communities (Peers and Brown 2003) and young people (Giersing 2012) to academic experts (Lynch and Alberti 2010). Of course, Sue and myself were also experts who collaborated with in-house curators, but, although I will discuss this kind of participation in Chapter 1, my focus in this book will be on exhibition visitors. 21 Some contemporary art practices are also informed by ethnographically grounded research and both disciplines can learn a lot from each other, but art often lacks the complexity and theoretical depth of ethnography (Calzadilla and Marcus 2005: 95). 22 A ‘kimono closet’ is a dresser with shallow drawers, traditionally used to store kimonos. 23 Research that pays attention to how embodied vision works with regards to secular items of material culture and environments remains sparse, but there have been some noteworthy exceptions such as Marks (2000) or MacDougall’s (2006) work about film that I will return to in Chapters 2 and 5. 24 Pinney originally mentioned ‘corporetics’ in a publication from 2001 defining it as ‘the sensory embrace of images’ (Pinney 2001: 198). Another researcher studying religion who has enthusiastically embraced ‘corporetics’ is David Morgan. He demonstrates how in the American Bible Belt Christians express ‘visual piety’ by exchanging the gaze of (as well as speak to) Sallman’s ‘Head of Christ’ image (Morgan 1998). Mary Roberts discusses the same concept within the African context, arguing that according to the Luba the eyes can also ‘function as organs of touch’, creating a relationship of embodied sensation between viewer and image (Roberts 2009: 79–80). 25 This resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the tactility and reversibility of vision. He argues that ‘since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world . . . every vision takes place somewhere in the tactile space’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 134).

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26 In her study of the Lahore Museum in Pakistan, Bhatti mentions that instances of shoe thefts during the colonial period indicates that at least some people were removing their shoes before entering the museums (Bhatti 2012: 155). She links this action with the existing social practice of removing shoes when visiting a temple (ibid., 155). 27 Exhibition-ism (Roberts and Vogel 1994) was also the title of the accompanying publication, based both on papers given at a 1992 symposium about the same topic and interviews with key people in the field of museum studies and African art in 1994. 28 In most public spaces in Japan people tend to keep their shoes on and it is common to do so when visiting an exhibition, but people wear slippers inside religious institutions, buildings used for formal occassions such as weddings or funerals, and at the doctor’s and dentist’s practice. 29 However, Brown also demonstrates that honouring ‘indigenous rules of secrecy’ is extremely complex because these are generally not shared across different groups. 30 Schorch and Kahanu also critique the notion of the contact zone and argue that the Hawaiian concept muliwai which is ‘a place where fresh water and salt water meet; where the river flows into the sea’ offers a more fruitful understanding of exhibitions as ‘areas of creative dissonance’ where knowledge is co-created across (cultural) boundaries (Schorch and Kahanu 2015: 246–47). 31 In 2010 a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute edited by Trevor Marchand was devoted to this topic (Marchand 2010). Most contributors focus on craft practices such as lace-making, weaving or woodworking, but the training of medical students in stethoscopic listening and the every day practice of walking are also discussed. 32 It Is not clear whether or not the visitors where informed about this at the entrance or whether it was completely left to their own judgment. 33 Although in places with a lot of snowfall such as the Scandinavian countries shoe removal is common. 34 ‘The solid, well-kept soles of a man’s boots gave him the right to be called “well-heeled” or affluent’ (Matthews 2006: 119). In Japan footwear became common amongst all strata of the population during the seventeenth century, and like in Europe shoes were indicators of social class with distinctions made between clogs ( geta), sandals (zori) and shoes (kutsu) that covered the whole foot (Chaiklin 2006: 171). However, outdoor footwear was never worn inside (ibid., 163). 35 Ingold links wearing shoes with the Western, detached, scientific attitude, while he mentions Japan as a society that is more ‘grounded’ drawing on the custom of squatting on the floor, craft techniques and child rearing (Ingold 2004: 325). However, since the end of the nineteenth century modernizers have tried to persuade people to change from foot or floor-based to hand or chair-based living. The ubiquity of tables, chairs and sofas in contemporary homes attest to the success of these policies, but in practice most continue to simultaneously enjoy the relaxing sensation of squatting or sleeping on the floor (Daniels 2010). 36 My search of Japanese databases to find articles or photographs related to the event have been unsuccessful. 37 A few weeks after the opening we decided that identical bold texts should be added to the image-text wall paper in each room, but because these texts were hung below eye level they were not immediately visible upon entering. 38 Griffiths introduces us to a predecessor of these drawer technologies, namely, the Rotary Cabinet from 1907 that allowed visitors to turn a handle to rotate different drawers for display (Griffiths 2008: 179). 39 This shift has been influenced by two developments in academia since the late 1980s; firstly, a renewed interest in the agency of objects and a growing concern about the tactile qualities of things since the late 1980s (Miller 1987; Spyer 1998; Graves-Brown 2001), and, secondly, the so-called ‘sensory turn’ that highlighted the importance of the senses in memory creation as well as everyday lived experience (Stoller 1989; Seremetakis 1994). Moreover, outside academia, calls for increased public accessibility, from people with disabilities and others, have also been important, while the growing use of new media and the widespread availability of mobile technologies linked with the Internet have been further drivers of change.

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40 The widespread use of gloves in handling sessions in order to prevent damage or premature wear and tear negates the promise of a more sensual experience because the layer of textile creates a barrier, however thin, between the visitors’ hands and the objects’ surface. 41 See for example Jacques (2007) about reminiscence sessions with elderly people in Lincolnshire or Trewinnard-Boyle and Tabassi (2007) about resource boxes linked to the National Curriculum used in schools in Nottingham. A variation of these practices is offered by ethnographic museums giving indigenous people tactile access to certain objects in their collections while ethnographic objects might also travel to their place of origin to be reunited with the groups that they originally belonged to. Peers and Brown’s (2003) Blackfoot shirt project offers an example of the latter practice whereby five Blackfoot shirts (collected in 1841) held in the Pitt Rivers Museum collections temporarily returned to their home in North-America where their were employed in a variety of local outreach activities (Pitt Rivers Museum 2010). 42 Referring to what is called the ‘right-turn bias’ in museum management literature, the museum staff insisted on placing the introductory space on the left-hand side after entering, but apart from this we did not try to influence the movement of visitors. 43 The shortest visit lasted ten minutes and the longest ninety-five minutes. 44 Serrell argues that visitors stay engaged for less than twenty minutes (Serrell 1997, 1998). 45 Because the slippers were standard Japanese size, which meant that anyone with a shoe size over 40 would have their heels, rather uncomfortably, hanging over the back. 46 The smell of the mats changed considerably over the six months of the exhibition. Initially, they emanated a organic, grassy smell, but as time progressed and more and more people walked on them with their shoes on, the mats absorbed the dirt and dust carried inside, and towards the end of the exhibition a rather unpleasant, ‘wet dog’ smell hung in the room. 47 D’Hanoncourt stressed visual comparison between objects through the use of vistas, while specific objects were dramatically displayed such as feathers on clothing were made to flutter by adding a small fan (Foster 2012: 134). 48 Bateson expresses the idea that objects are primarily imbued with value during their production that was current at the time and remains popular in the museum world today. However, since the 1990s numerous ethnographies have demonstrated that most people create value in their lives through consumption practices. 49 In 1956 Shofuso was dismantled and rebuilt in West Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, which already had a Japanese garden that was created for the 1876 expo. Since the end of the nineteenth century the Japanese authorities and Japanese companies have donated (minimal) Japanese houses, but also tea huts, gardens and pagodas to other countries (or cities). While these gifts tend to be construed as gestures of goodwill to further understanding of Japanese culture, they also sanction deeply ingrained stereotypes about Japanese minimal architecture and garden design (see Chapter 3). 50 The film was produced by Sidney Peterson and narrated by John Hughes. 51 Of course, the Geffrye museum is a kind of a hybrid example of this transformation in that the original alms houses were turned into a public museum about the house and home with close links to the local community. 52 Thanks to a generous grant from the Japan Foundation and the support of the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, I was given the opportunity to study this particular exhibition at the museum in 2009. 53 Wall produced these images as a direct reaction against the dematerialization of art propagated by conceptual artists at the time. Moreover, his illuminated photos depicted staged scenes of everyday life in order to critique capitalism, which also differs from the objectives of our exhibition. 54 The same photograph was also my favourite image resulting from my collaboration with Sue Andrews in 2006 and we decided to use it as the central photograph in a collage on the cover of my 2010 monograph (Daniels 2010), that functioned as the concept and catalogue for the exhibition. 55 Although it is important to mention here that both in case of the book and the exhibition invitation the selection of this image had not been straightforward. For the book cover, I emailed the designers all the photos that we used in the book, but I was shocked to find that the initial, two design options put forward confirmed the exact

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stereotypes that my book set out to disperse. Of the nine photographs selected, two depicted sparse rooms covered with tatami mats, two portrayed traditional Japanese dolls, while one photo showed a close-up of a kimono. 56 This combined use of both 2D and 3D is best illustrated in a scene of a soldier on a stretcher carried by two men, whereby the first man is part of the painting while the second man is a cardboard cut-out standing in the faux terrain (Griffiths 2008: 62–63). 57 See Walter Benjamin’s 1933 essay, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (Jennings, Eiland and Smith 2005). 58 See O’Connor’s discussion of Adorno’s understanding of mimesis (O’Connor 2013). 59 Two anonymous reviewers of The Japanese House on Amazon chose a more upfront warning by writing: ‘WARNING : [this book is] not for those who are looking for an exoticized Japan’ (Taylor 2011) or ‘Japan-lovers beware!’ (CedMidl 2011). 60 According to a poll held by the Sunday Times newspaper in 2011 and 2012, Tokyo was voted the number one city that travellers from the UK would like to visit. 61 This also calls to mind Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s collaboration in After the Last Sky; a collection of photographs and essays about ordinary Palestinians that was commissioned for an exhibition at the International Conference on the Question of Palestine held at the UN in Geneva in 1983. However, Arab nations participating in the event only allowed the display of the photos without any written explanations, because ‘considering the Palestinians as a people (that is with a story, a text, an argument) was unacceptable’ (Mitchell 1995: 312–16). 62 However, they also critique Euro-American museums for too often stressing the ‘Other’s lack’, thereby representing cultures in ‘a hierarchy that reproduces inequalities of power’ (Karp and Kratz 2000: 221). 63 As I have demonstrated elsewhere, in the Japanese context the distinction between the aesthetic and functional qualities of lucky charms (as well as other spiritual commodities) is blurred, and all owl-shaped forms are also supposed to invite good luck (Daniels 2003). 64 In the essay ‘Regrets of Parting with My Old Dressing Gown’ from 1769, Diderot describes how upon purchasing a new elegant scarlet dressing gown, the chaotic aesthetics in his office no longer felt right. This led him to change his desk, then the tapestry on the walls, and eventually everything else in the room, too. 65 In 2015, most ethnographic collections also reflect change over time and they therefore contain at least some ‘new’ objects that have either been specially commissioned or bought in their places of production to become part of a collection. 66 While working in this museum for two months in 2013, it was brought to my attention by several anthropologists/curators that because many objects are now more than forty years old, preservation has become an issue and stricter do-not-touch policies, similar to the ones common in Western museums, could be implemented in the near future. 67 This actually was IKEA’s second attempt to gain a foot in the Japanese market. In 1974, it had also tried to establish itself by embarking on a joint-venture with a local partner but this project had failed. 68 Initially, because some of the participants in my study possessed MUJI furniture, I had hoped to purchase some items in MUJI London, but the prices where so inflated that we decided against it. 69 Mr Nitta, a doll wholesaler in Osaka, who participated in another project I conducted in Japan from 2010 until 2015, donated the miniature samurai helmet (kabuto) put on display in most homes for Children’s Day (formerly known as Boys’ Festival) on 5 May. 70 Our observations suggest that this fear was actually unfounded, because the room was never crowded. 71 In total, 235 young people attended these sessions (from eight primary schools, one secondary school, one higher education college, and one special educational needs school). 374 people attended the Adult Education and Learning programme, while eleven community outreach sessions were attended by 242 participants, both adults and children. The programmes supported part of the secondary school curriculum for geography (QCA Unit 2) ‘What sort of homes do people live in today?’ and (QCA Unit 22) ‘A contrasting locality overseas’. Finally, 1,478 children and 1,150 adults participated in 125 holiday creative activities.

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72 The prayer gesture could also have been a reference to a generic respectful form of greeting associated with Asian people that spread in the West through yoga classes. 73 In his research about photographic practices of visitors to Gun Hill, or famous tourist resort in India, the visual anthropologist David MacDougall (2006) highlights the distinction being and appearing, based on the supposed dualism between authentic real worlds and inauthentic worlds of performance, that remains widespread both in Western scientific theories and popular discourses about authenticity. He shows that Indian tourists like to dress up as characters associated with films before having their photo taken because ‘assuming another identity for a photograph is no treat to one’s own’, whereas Western tourists prefer to be photographed without costumes ‘as they are’ (ibid., 168). Our study of visitors to AHJ , by contrast, found no such clear distinction and visitors from a variety of cultural backgrounds were eager to perform another identity in front of the camera. 74 Goffman (1959) claims that the self is calculating and strategic in presenting itself in socially sanctioned performances, while for Butler (1990) the self is produced by reiterating powerful pre-existing social scripts, and finally Thrift (2008) stresses the importance of pre-choreographed everyday, bodily enactments in producing the self. 75 The karuta game, derived from the Portuguese ‘karta’ or card, has been popular since the 17th century. It generally consists of two sets of cards; ‘reading cards’ and ‘grabbing cards’. The game is (or used to be) primarily played during the New Year’s period, but children often play it in schools, using a simplified version, as a kind of literacy exercise. 76 Some of the interactive experiences did not depend on technological devices and Francis Bacon’s 1945 Figure in a Landscape, for example, could be enjoyed while eating freshly made chocolates placed in front of the painting. 77 Greenblatt stresses that in order for an exhibition to be successful, it needs to provide both wonder and resonance that supposedly emanate from an object because of its link with the larger world and ‘the complex, dynamic cultural forces from where it has emerged’ (Greenblatt 1991: 42).

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224

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations. A Japanese House (film), 69 Abby (visitor), 152–3 access, 5 accuracy, 110 African Reflections exhibition, 66 agency, visitors, 154 Alex (visitor), 102 Ali (blogger), 57, 72–3, 73, 75, 81, 112, 113, 127, 169, 175, 186, 187, 188–9, 188, 189, 190, 195–8, 195, 198, 206 amusement, 172 Andrew (visitor), 106–9, 107 Andrews, Susan, 2, 65, 81, 85–8, 85, 91, 92 anime, 96–7, 96–7, 98, 125 anthropological approach, 20–2, 211n10 anthropologists, 115, 206 apprehension, visitors, 52 At Home in Japan – Beyond the Minimal House exhibition, 2, 2–5, 3, 5, 8 aims, 2–4, 21–2, 32 exhibits, 22 immersive environment, 3–4 layout, 4, 4, 26, 36–7 map, 4 objects, 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 35 setting, 4–5 At Home in Japan – Beyond the Minimal House monograph, 2 atmosphere, 66–7, 68–70, 81, 83 attractiveness, 8 audio recordings, 5 authenticity, 134, 172, 173, 189 material, 134–5, 135, 136–7, 138–9, 140 authoritative voice, objects, 140 awkward engagement, zone of, 45, 207 Bakelite Museum, 202 Basu, Paul, 10, 34

bathroom and bathing, 100–3, 102, 153, 167–8, 167 Bauhaus group, 67 Bayer, Herbert, 67–8, 68 Benjamin, Walter, 32 Bhatti, S., 10, 157, 213n26 big data, 211n6 Bjerregaard, P, 66–7, 138, 206 Blakeley, Rosanna, 10, 25 blogs and blogging, 21, 173, 186, 187, 188–9, 188, 189 Blood Swept the Land and Seas of Red, 204 Blueprint magazine, 92 Bob (visitor), 44, 106–9, 107, 153 bodily adjustment, 46 bodily memory, 60–1 bodily practices, 46 Boltanski, Christian, 71 booklet, 10, 25–9, 26, 27, 86–7 bookshelf photograph, 72 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 211n4 Bouttiaux, A., 138 Brown, M., 40 Bruner, Edward, 10 Buddhist altar photograph, 73, 88, 117 Building Workers’ Unions exhibition, 67, 68 business cards, 96 Calzadilla, F., 22 cameras, 5, 10, 21, 35, 68, 87, 156, 172–5, 177, 178, 179, 182, 184, 186, 190–2, 206 Candlin, Fiona, 34, 202 card game set, 50, 52, 52, 53, 113, 168, 197–9, 198 cat in the cage photograph, 75–7, 76, 77, 78, 79, 79, 85–8, 86, 87, 189 categorization, 5 ceramics, 15, 16, 18 chatterers, 151–3, 154 chests of drawers, 49, 50, 113 225

226

child-focused activities, 148 children, 50, 52, 148–51 Clifford, James, 66 closeness, feeling of, 175 cockroach repellent, 49, 113, 189 collaborative play, 21 collecting, history and politics of, 135 collection-based museums, 20 Colonial Williamsburg, 9 community, 20 conference Anthropology in the World conference, 2012, 122 conservation, 5 Contested Representations, 5 contextualized practices, 172 corporetics, 32 cosplay, 96–7 cultural alterity, 211n3 cultural brokers, 106–9, 107, 118, 141 cultural capital, 107–8 cultural identities, creation of, 118 cultural stereotypes, 48, 64 cultural taboos, 40–1 curatorial authority, 202 curatorial knowledge, 154 curatorial practices, 203–4 curators, 2 darshan, 32 data collection, 10, 26–7 dataism, 211n6 David (visitor), 106–9, 107 detail, attention to, 189 dialectic movement, 83 Diderot effect, 127 digitalization, exhibition design, 20–1 disappointment, 110 discomfort and non-participation, 42–6 discovery, sense of, 142–4, 154, 202 display strategy, 11 distal knowledge, 32 dolls, 153 do-not-touch policy, 34, 53 dressing up, 172, 173, 175, 177–9 educational programme, 148, 216n71 Edwards, E., 66, 67 effectiveness, 206 Elizabeth (visitor), 106–9, 107 Elrich, Leandro, 192 embodied knowledge, 3, 5, 55 embodied learning, 46

Index

embodied vision, 212n22 Emotion, Space and Society (journal), 66, 67 empathetic understanding, 53 empathy, 207 engagement, 48, 135, 154–7 imaginative, 186 Japanese visitors, 118–19 and knowledge transmitting, 148–53 multisensory, 49–51, 52–5, 154, 211n4 photographs and photography, 64, 82–3, 190–1 entertainment, 179 and learning, 157 ethnographic research, 22 ethnography definition, 8 visitors, 8–11 exhibition design digitalization, 20–1 photographs and, 65 exhibition pamphlet, 77, 78, 87 exhibition space, 9, 52 exhibitionary practices, 20 Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art exhibition, 35, 40 exhibitions, role of, 202–7 expectations, 100 of visitors, 2 experiential exhibitions, 20, 21 experimentation, 154 explanatory texts, 42 exploratory activities, 202 fieldwork, 10, 20, 46 Film und Photo exhibition, 67–8 films, 69, 81, 83 follow-up study, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 15, 16–18, 18–20, 19 Foster, R., 135, 157 Fujii family, 146 Gable, E., 9 Geffrye Museum, 2, 4, 10, 11, 15, 35, 40, 52, 70, 77, 121, 139, 148, 214n51 gender roles, 141 gifting, 64, 108–9, 151–2, 152–3 Glass, Aaron, 181 Glenda (visitor), 151–3 Graham, Michael, 40, 79, 81 Greenblatt, P., 206, 216n77 Griffiths, A., 79, 172 guided tours, 77 Guyer, J., 207

Index

Haapio-Kirk, Laura, 8, 10, 25 habits, 50 Handler, R., 9 haptic contact, 33 haptic gaze, 32 haptic spatiality, 83 health and safety regulations, 40 Henning, M., 67 Herzfeld, M., 118 Hetherington, K., 32 Hilary (visitor with children), 150–1 historical enactments, 179 historical museums, 70 Home Cultures (journal), 92, 94–5 House in the Garden exhibitions, 69–70 Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin, 21 humour, sense of, 117–18 Hunt, Jeremy, 48 identity, 20 IKEA furniture, 132–4, 132, 133, 135 image-object displays, 79–81, 80, 88, 88 imagination, 207 imaginative play, 206 immersive environments, 3–4, 172, 205–6 immersive experience, 52–3, 70, 192, 193 immersive installations, 192 immersive phenomenon, 67 immersive space, 33 inbetweenness of things, 34 Indian Art of the United States exhibition, 69 Ingold, T., 53, 213n35 instructions, 38 interactive aspect, 50, 52, 188, 206, 212n15, 212n16 Internet, 21 Internet, the, 172 interpretation objects, 140–7, 154 repertoire of, 157 interviews, 9, 99, 141, 156 engagement, 28 guide, 27 shoes and shoe removal, 45 Jane (visitor), 52, 144–5 Japan cool, 100 as perfect Mecca, 97 shoes and shoe removal in, 213n27, 213n34, 213n35 stereotypes about, 120–3

227

visitor connection with, 92–3, 96–7, 99–103, 106, 151–2, 195–8 Japan of the little tradition, 120–3 Japanese Culture, 3 Japanese food, 14 Japanese minimal house, the, 2–3 Japanese visitors, 42, 151, 180–6, 180, 181 and stereotypes, 110–15, 112, 117–19 Japaneseness, 14 Japan-lovers, 99–103, 106, 121 Jen (raffle study participant), 125–8, 125, 126, 127 Jenkins, T., 40 Jennifer (visitor), 146 John (visitor), 45, 99–102, 101, 132, 133, 142 Kagemori family, 34, 47–8, 64, 73, 75, 110, 112, 118–19, 133–4, 175, 180–6, 180 Kahanu, N., 21 Kalshoven, Petra, 179 Karp, I., 98, 123, 140 Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 70 keywords, 26–7 Kidd, J., 20–1 Kilbey, Paul, 79–80, 81, 83 kimono closet, 34, 44, 49, 79–80, 80, 88, 108, 114, 119, 144, 149, 151, 178, 188, 212n14, 212n22 kimonos, 14, 108, 178–9, 212n14 King, J., 202 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., 70, 172, 180, 185–6 kitchen counter, 114 Klonk, C., 20 knowledge curatorial, 154 different layers of, 114 distal, 32 embodied, 3, 5, 55 production, 22 proximal, 32 representational, 3, 5, 55 transmitting, 108, 148–53, 205–6 Köpping, K., 193 Kratz, Corinne, 64, 98, 123, 140 Larsen, Jonas, 10, 190, 192 Laura (visitor), 145 Leach, James, 206, 207 learning, 46, 144 and entertainment, 157 stress on, 10 Leo (Taiwanese visitor), 103, 156 Lien, S., 66, 67 light boxes, 72, 74, 74, 75–7, 79, 87–8

228

lighting, 68 Littlewood, Ian, 93, 96–7, 98, 152 living ethnography, 22 MacDonald, Sharon, 9, 21 MacDougall, David, 216n73 manga, 96–7, 96–7, 98, 125 Marchand, T., 207 Marcus, G., 22 Mark (Belgian visitor), 147, 174–5 Marks, Laura, 82–3 Massey, D., 67 material agency, 67 material authenticity, 134–5, 135, 136–7, 138–9, 140 material culture, 67 materially, 82 Mathews, Gordon, 120–1 Matsui, Miyako, 146 Matsui family, 145 memory bodily, 60–1 kinetic, 61 Merleau-Ponty, M., 212n25 methodology, 5, 9–10, 207 Meyer, B., 32 Michael (visitor), 102 micro museums, 202 Mike (visitor), 57–8, 57, 58, 59, 60–1, 60, 61, 63, 110–11, 127 mimetic authenticity, 134 mimetic displays, dangers of, 172 Mohr, Jane, 215n61 Molly (raffle study participant), 165–9, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169 Morelli, C., 207 Morgan, David, 212n24 motivation visitors, 10, 179, 202 visitors photographs and photography, 173, 175 Muller, Chris, 35, 40 multimedia displays, 202 multi-model approach, 5 multisensory engagement, 49–51, 52–5, 154, 211n4 museological approach, 53, 202 Museum Anthropology (journal), 203–4 museum collections, sustainability, 202 museum objects, perception of, 138 Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, 202–3 Museum of Mankind, London, 40 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 68–70 museum shop, 156 museum studies, 154

Index

museums deadening effect, 138 future of, 203–4 mission, 135 role of, 123 Natasha (raffle study participant), 12, 18, 49, 64, 82, 154, 156, 159–63, 159, 165–9, 166, 167, 168, 169, 169 National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, 70, 135 National Portrait Gallery, 190–1 New Year celebrations, 6, 8 Niwa, Tomoko, 22 non-participation, 42–6 O’Donnell family, 12, 19, 93, 96–7, 127, 134 Oe, Kenzaburo, 3, 121 O’Hanlon, Mike, 40, 66 Ones That Are Wanted, The exhibition, 64 optical disjuncture, 79–81 optical unconscious, 32 ordinariness, 57, 110, 111, 118–19 Ordinary Lives: After 2002 Seoul Style (Sato and Yamashita), 8 Osaka Museum of Housing and Living, 70, 71 overcrowding, 40 owls, 91, 92, 93 Paradise exhibition, 66 parergonic devices, 34 participant observation, 5, 9 participants, raffle study, 11, 12–13, 14–15 participation, 48, 206–7, 212n20 participatory devices, 67 performative interactions, 108, 190 negative attitudes towards, 179 performativity, 190 period rooms, 70 photo albums, 145–7, 145, 147 photo-elicitation session, Osaka, 2013, 182 photo-elicitation sheets, 109 photographs and photography, 5, 55, 64–84, 172–5, 190–3, 207 and atmosphere, 66–7, 83 authentic, 216n73 blogs and blogging, 186, 187, 188–9, 188, 189 bookshelf, 72 Buddhist altar, 73, 88 captions, 72 cat in the cage, 75–7, 76, 77, 78, 79, 79, 85–8, 86, 87, 189 as documents, 66

Index

dressing up, 172, 173, 175–9, 177–9 engagement, 64, 82–3, 190–1 and exhibition design, 65–6 exterior spaces, 74–5 habitat groups, 180–1, 180, 181 Japanese visitors, 180–6, 180, 181 Kagemori flat, 64 key camera moments, 175 kimono closet, 79–80, 80, 88 kitchen counter, 79, 79–80, 80, 88 light boxes, 72, 74, 74, 75–7, 79, 87–8 mountings, 65, 72 and objects, 66, 88, 88 optical disjuncture, 79–81 performativity, 190 placement, 8 positive effects of, 190–1 and real items, 73, 79–81, 80 realness, 73 role of, 67–71, 85–8 scenesetting, 64 selfies, 192–3 spatial dynamics, 72–3, 72 standard uses, 64, 66 textures, 72 toilet, 72–3, 72 of visitor interactions, 184–5, 185 visitor motivation, 173, 175 visitor reactions, 72–3, 75–7, 79, 82–3 visitor routes, 176, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188 visitors, 172–93 wallpapers, 65, 65, 73 Pinney, Chris, 32, 212n24 Pitt Rivers Museum, 180 play, 21, 206, 207 please touch signs, 50 Pokémon, 96–7 Portisch, Anna, 122 postal parcels, 112–13, 113 practices, re-enacting, 106 Pratt, M., 45 presence effect, 138 provenance, 14 proximal knowledge, 32 Pye, E., 34, 53 quantitative data, 211n6 questionnaires, 9 raffle and raffle study, 11, 12–13, 14–15, 16–18, 18–20, 19, 60, 125–8, 125, 159–63, 165–9, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 204–5

229

religious spaces, 47 representational knowledge, 3, 5, 55 representational strategies, 123 research participants, 181 reviews, 79–80, 92 Riegl, Alois, 82 Ritual Year, the, 6 ritualization, 96 Roberts, Mary and Allen, 35, 47 Rotenberg, R., 203–4 Rough, John, 22 Rycroft, S., 83 sacred objects, 41 sacredness, 40–1 Said, Edward, 215n61 Sainsbury Institute, 188 Saint in the City exhibition, 47 samurai helmet (kabuto) display, 34, 126, 127, 215n69 Saunderson, H., 50 Schieffelin, E., 179 Schildkrout, Enid, 66 Schneider, A., 22 Schorch, P., 21 Science Museum, London, 9 Scott, M., 205 Scottish Highland diaspora tourism, 10 seating, 54 secrecy, 40–1 security concerns, 33–5 security measures, 34 Sennett, R., 206 sensorial juxtapositions, 53 sensory bias, 33 sensory corporeal aesthetics, 32 Seoul Style exhibition, 35, 70–1 setting, 4–5 shadowing, 10 Shanti (Indian visitor), 147, 174–5 Shimonaka, Nabo, 22 shoes and shoe removal, 32, 32, 33, 33, 35, 38, 38–41, 38, 39, 41, 55, 106, 177, 207 antagonistic reactions, 46–8 cultural brokers, 109 discomfort and non-participation, 42–6 in Japan, 213n27, 213n34, 213n35 Japanese visitors, 119 and transgression, 46–8 shopping, and the museum experience, 156 sight, 32 similarity, 3 similarity and difference, poetics of, 98

230

Index

slippers, 60, 61, 144, 149, 167, 167, 168, 178, 214n45 Sloterdijk, Peter, 11, 212n13 Smith, Patrick, 120–1 social aspects, 21 social experiences, 153 social media, 21 sociality, creating, 148–53 Song Dong, 71 soundtracks, 81 sources, objects, 138–9 souvenirs, 6, 57 space arrangement of, 66 sense of, 20–1 spatial dynamics, photographs and photography, 72–3, 72 spectacle, 172 spreads, 8 Staniszewski, M., 68 static displays, 70 stereotypes about Japan, 120–3 challenging, 92–123, 144 circulation of, 97–8 concern about, 179 confirmations, 96 cultural, 48, 64 cultural brokers and, 106–9, 107 gifting, 108–9 Japanese as Aesthetes, 97–8, 100, 156 Japanese as Aliens, 97 Japanese as Butterflies, 152 and Japanese visitors, 110–15, 112, 117–19 and Japan-lovers, 99–103, 106 museums and, 123 poetics of similarity and difference, 98 questioning, 106 ritualization, 96, 103, 106 size, 96 sustaining, 93 women, 96 surprise, 64, 206 Suzy (visitor with children), 149–50, 150 synaesthetic choreography, 32 tactility, 55 Takahashi, Yuko, 145–6 Tanaka-san (Japanese visitor), 111–13, 112, 114, 117, 118–19 tatami mats, 42–6, 48, 55, 109, 117, 214n46 Tate Modern, 20 Taussig, M., 189

tea ceremonies, 121–2 textual context, 114 textual framing, 140–2 textual information, 79 textures, 72 Thatcher, Margaret, 48 theatrical techniques, 68 theft, concerns about, 33–5 Tjurunga Aborigines, 40 toilet photograph, 72–3, 72 touching, 49–51, 50, 52–5, 52, 53, 66–7 touchscreens, 212n15, 212n16 tourist performances, 10 towels, 34 tradition, 120–3 transformative experience, 193 Trick Art museums, 191–2, 191, 192 Tsing, Anna, 45 uncertainty, zone of, 45, 109 understanding, empathetic, 53 unexpected, the, pleasure o, 10 Useful Household Objects exhibition, 156 Van Dijck, J., 211n6 Van Gogh Alive experience, 202 Vasuevan, A., 75 Verrips, J., 32 viewing, embodied, 8 visit duration, 54, 55 visitor access, 5 visitor experiences, 10 visitor movement, monitoring, 40 visitor numbers, 8 visitor participation, 21 visitor reactions, 3, 42–6 Japanese visitors, 111 photo albums, 147 shoes and shoe removal, 42–6, 46–8 visitor routes, 26, 27, 27, 44, 44, 101, 107, 111, 112, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149–51, 150, 174, 183, 184 visitor studies, 8, 40 Visitor Studies (journal), 8 visitors, 9 agency, 154 apprehension, 52 connection with Japan, 92–3, 96–7, 99–103, 106, 151–2, 195–8 ethnography, 8–11 expectations, 100 expectations of, 2

Index

experience, 154–7 familiarity with Japan, 114 imaginative capacities, 206 information about, 211–12n12 Japanese, 42, 110–15, 112, 117–19, 151, 180–6, 180, 181 motivation, 10, 179, 202 observing, 26 photographs and photography, 172–93, 173 reframing, 154 as shopper, 156 transformative experience, 193 visitors’ book, 77, 99, 111, 156 visual context, 114 visual experimentation, 8 visual hapticity, 82–3 visuality, 32 vitrine thinking, 202–3 Vogel, Susan, 35 von Zinnenburg Carroll, 202–3 voyeurism, 83 Waghorn family, 13, 14, 15, 18, 127, 172, 173, 175, 177–9, 206

walking, 53–5 wallpapers, 64, 65, 65, 73, 140, 142, 153, 172 Waste Not exhibition, 71 Weir, Shelagh, 122 Were, G., 202 white cube model, 20 white piece of textile, the, 15, 15 Whitechapel Gallery, 50 Wilde, Oscar, 120–1, 123 Williams, P., 135, 148 Window Flowers exhibition, 22 wonder, sense of, 206, 216n77 wooden plates, 159–63, 163 World Exposition, Chicago, 181 Wright, C., 22 Yasuko (Japanese visitor), 111–13, 112, 117–18 Yuko (Japanese visitor), 111–13, 112, 113, 117–18 Zhao Xiangyuan, 71 Zinnenburg Carroll, Khadija von, 34 zone of awkward engagement, 45, 207 zone of uncertainty, 45

231