Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868–1952

Book excerpt: Envisioning the Empress illuminates dynamic and powerful empresses who impacted not only women in their own time but whose influence extended to later generations of royalty, creating a greater role for imperial women and elevating the status of women’s roles at a crucial juncture in Japanese history. The central focus of this book is visual monarchy, exploring how the empress’ biographies were primarily expressed in visual culture and how their images worked in support of Japan’s imperial policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book begins with a brief overview of premodern and modern imperial women to orient the reader. In each chapter, different media, audiences, and distribution channels for constructing the narrative of feminine imperial power in Japan are addressed alongside biographical information. It is argued that the ultimate purpose of all of these images was to elevate the empress and promote her image as a conventional role model for modern women, but one with enough celebrity cache to maintain popularity. The images of the modern empresses, as distributed by the Imperial Household Agency, strike a balance between propaganda and popular media, noble philanthropist and upper-middle class role model, celebrity and mother of the nation. The modern empress image was crafted to be both exalted and approachable and worked to establish individual biographies while simultaneously establishing the position of the empress as timeless in the public eye. Envisioning the Empress introduces students of royal studies as well as modern Japanese history and art history to this fascinating element of the history of monarchy and women’s history more broadly.