Men in Metal

Reviewed by: Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan by Sven Saaler Ran Zwigenberg (bio) Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan. By Sven Saaler. Brill, 2020. xii, 356 pages. €105.00, cloth; €105.00, E-book. Sven Saaler's Men in Metal came out in October 2020. For a work that focuses mostly on prewar and wartime Japan, the book was unexpectedly and dramatically relevant. Throughout the summer of 2020, across North America and beyond, statues were pelted with paint, decapitated, and smashed. In at least one instance, in Raleigh, North Carolina, on June 19, 2020, a statue was hanged from a street post. Summer 2020 utterly disproved Robert Musil's dictum, with which Saaler strongly disagrees, that "nothing goes unnoticed as public monuments" (p. 103). Statues, as recent events show, and as Saaler's work thoroughly demonstrates, are far from transparent. One might argue that the veracity of Musil's dictum is very much a matter of timing and geography. Japan does not feature much in recent conversations on public statuary and neither do statues figure prominently in the scholarship of Japan. But, as Saaler shows, although no statues have been recently toppled in Japan, the country has had its share of incidents involving statues. In Kobe in 1905, angry protestors pulled down a statue of Itō Hirobumi and dragged it through the streets. The protestors were unhappy about the Meiji oligarch's role in the peace treaty with Russia and thought that for Itō to supposedly equate himself to Kusunoki Masashige, whose statue was on the grounds of the same shrine, was a travesty (p. 219). [End Page 263] Sixty-four years later, in 1969, for very different reasons, the Wadatsumi no koe statue at Ritsumeikan University, erected in 1953 as a symbol of peace, was destroyed by Zenkyōtō student activists. The students damaged and defaced the statue before toppling it to protest Japan's victimization of Asians. As Saaler notes, similar iconoclastic violence was feared toward statues in China and the Japanese colonies, and such actions were used by the Japanese for propaganda purposes. Controversy was in general a major feature of the life of sculptures in modern history (pp. 232–33). Most of Saaler's book, however, deals less with iconoclasm and more with the erection, purpose, and usage of statues in Japanese and, to a lesser extent, colonial public space. Statues, Saaler argues, "function as symbolic personifications of the nation" (p. 6). Drawing on Lewis Austin, Saaler argues that "modern states, many of which are based on highly abstract ideas of nationhood, are in desperate need of symbolic representation and personification of the nation" (p. 4). Statues satisfy this need. They demonstrate to citizens that their nation's past was filled with examples of "great men" (ijin) and that commemorating these was "essential to creating a tangible bond between the individual and the collective" (p. 6). It is exactly that bond that protestors attack (arguing for a different past and different bonds to be celebrated) and that nations seek to create. Saaler's book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the beginning of statues in modern Japan. The second part is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of statues based on an impressive database Saaler has created, and the third part deals with statues in wartime and postwar Japan. The book begins by examining the origins of public statuary and early debates, especially about the role of the emperor and his representations (or lack thereof). Saaler argues for a shift in the way that statues were seen in Japan, from figures such as the Ashikaga effigies, which were intended to impress other elites, toward statues that aimed at impressing the masses (p. 20). Though Saaler does not dwell much on the topic (he is focused much more on the erection of statues than on their demise), the decapitation of the Ashikaga effigies by imperial loyalists might be seen as a symbolic turning point in this regard. The loyalists, not all of whom were samurai, displayed the heads on the banks of the Kamo River for all to see, commoners as

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Bronze · Nothing · Political science · Scholarship · Sculpture · Statue · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy