Commerce and Culture at the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition: Centenary Perspectives

This volume, intended to complement Hotta-Lister’s original 1999 study, marks the centenary of London’s 1910 great Japan-British Exhibition, which was held at White City, Shepherd’s Bush, and attracted over eight million visitors during its six-month stay. While the initiative came from Britain, the Japanese Government was the major source of funding for the Japanese side of the Exhibition. Using the Anglo-Japanese Alliance as its springboard, Japan – at the time a new colonial power – hoped to bring about a greater understanding of its cultures and traditions and thereby stimulate trade and commerce between the two countries.In the event, the Japanese press, unlike the British press, took umbrage at what they considered the trivialization of Japanese culture, thus in part frustrating the positive cultural, commercial and political outcomes that were hoped for. Eighteen months later, Emperor Meiji died and the Great War of 1914-18 followed soon after, thereby relegating the exhibition – its origins, composition, relevance and impact – to oblivion until recent times. The papers in this volume, therefore, drawn from four ‘centenary conferences’ held in London and Tokyo, offer an important spotlight on the exhibition’s legacy – specifically in the contexts of commerce and culture. The contents include the following themes: The Exhibition and domestic conditions in Britain and Japan; the Exhibition and Japan’s economic background; selling the ‘backward’ Japanese economy; imperialism and the Exhibition; the Japanese media and the Exhibition; the arts of Britain and Japan; Ainu in London; Japanese fine art; the human legacy; Japanese gardens. This book has wide inter-disciplinary relevance for students in modern East Asian Studies, but especially in the context of colonial and economic history, inter-cultural exchange and Anglo-Japanese relations.

The fifteen chapters of Commerce and Culture at the 1910- Japan-British Exhibition analyze divers aspects of the exhibition from multiple academic perspectives. […] the papers of Ian Nish, Peter O’Conner and Keiko Itoh are of special interest as they place [the exhibition] in a broader context. […] This reviewer learned a great deal from Commerce and Culture at the 1910- Japan-British Exhibition. Sano Mayuko in Japan Review Nr. 28 (2015), pp. 261-261.

Ayako Hotta-Lister, Ph.D. (1995) , London School of Economics and Political Science, Universityof London. She is the author of The Japan-British Exhibition of 1910: Gateway to the Island Empire of the East (Japan Library, 1999), and has contributed to Japanese Emvoys in Britain (Global Oriental 2007), and Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits Vol. I (1994) and V (2005).Ian Nish is Emeritus Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science and honorary senior research associate of the Suntory and Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD). He is known internationally for his scholarship relating to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japanese foreign policy and Anglo-Japanese relations in the twentieth century. His most recent writings include Japanese Envoys in Britain, 1862-1964: A Century of Diplomatic Exchange (2007) and The Japanese in War and Peace, 1942-48: Selected Documents from a Translator’s In-tray (2011).