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Welcome to the new books network. And welcome back to another episode of New Books on Japanese Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I am Jean-Louis from the University of Arizona. Today, I will guess as Dr.
Swenzdaller, a professor of Japanese history at the University of South University. His new book, Men in Metal, a topography of public bronze statuary in modern Japan, was published earlier this year by Briel. So this beautifully made book examines how bronze statues were made to construct the iconography of national heroes since the late 19th century. It also discusses the historical controversies surrounding statuary building.
So welcome, Dr. Salah. Thank you so much for joining us. Hello, and thank you for inviting me.
Thank you. So this book reads really more like a more, it's more than just history. It's art and political history as well, feels like to me. So could you tell us a bit more about your research areas and how you came to working on this project?
Yes, thank you for that question. When I was a PhD student, I was mainly studying the history of Japanese foreign relations and I still have a research project going on in this field. But as you and your listeners probably will be aware of since the 1990s, memory studies has become a growing academic field. And in the year 2000, I happened to take up a research position in Tokyo.
And at that time, historical revisionism was a major issue that many stories were discussing. So I got interested in these topics and joined these discussions, publishing a number of articles and eventually a book on the history textbook, controversy, and the debates about the commemoration of the war that was in 2005. And while I was exploring these issues of history, education, and the use of memorials as tools of education, I realized that memorials dedicated to historical personalities, most commonly in the form of statues, where a ubiquitous element in Japan's memorial landscape. So there were so many of them, I just got curious about whether this was the result of a planned or systematic process.
And if so, who planned these statues and why and who paid for them. So lots of questions came up. And I also began to realize that books were starting to come out on the public statuary in other countries, such as the United States, but also Europe, Paris, France, and Germany. And when I realized that hardly anything had been written about Japanese statues, definitely not in English, but at the time, not even that much in Japanese, I decided to take a closer look at this genre of memorials in modern Japan.
That's very interesting. And that's actually the first question that came into my mind when I saw the title of this book, because when talking about Japan statues, a lot of people are probably more familiar with Buddhist statues that were mostly made of wood. Could you give us a brief introduction of how bronze was introduced to Japan as material for statues, as well as whether there are differences in the choice of statue materials between wood and bronze or any other material? Yeah, thank you.
So right, my book focuses on a Bronx statue because in modern Japan, they are by far the majority of memorials dedicated to historical personalities or individuals. In many European countries, in addition to Bronx statues, you can also find large numbers of marble statues, for example, or monuments made simply of stone, but also other materials. But in Japan, we see different materials being used only during times of metal shortages. So particularly during the war, during the war, the usage of metal for art, including Bronx was regulated.
So no statues were built after the 1940, made of Bronx. But other materials were used at that time. And also we find in Japan, some statues where the local conditions required the use of specific materials such as stone, because stone or something else was readily available in a given location. But Bronx also was a material that was traditionally used for religious statues, of course, for Buddhist sculpture.
The early Buddhist sculpture is more often a vote, as you say. But of course, like the two big Buddhas of Nada and Kamura Kamakura, they are Bronx statues and some smaller Buddhist statues. And also many statues of Buddhist saints are often made of Bronx. If you go to a temple in Japan, today, you will often find Bronx statues of Buddhist saints, for example.
And although this kind of Buddhist culture gradually declined after the 16th century, the new fashion of public memorials dedicated to historical figures took up this Buddhist Bronx tradition. And that's almost all public statues of individuals we find today in Japan are made of Bronx. Wow, that's very interesting. So to return to the what you said a bit earlier, was there any pattern in choosing whether wood or bronze, when the sizes of the statues are different, because the two statues you mentioned, the one in Nada and the one in Kamakura, they are relatively huge.
Yeah, so in pre-modern Japan, when it comes to a Buddhist statues, although I'm not an expert of pre-modern Buddhist statue, but it seems to be the case that the really large statues were generally made of Bronx. There are even other cases even modern Buddha statues, for example, in the city of Takahoka, which is actually traditional Bronx making center in the prefection of Toyama. There is a big Buddha several meters high, which was cast in the 1930s, and it's also made of a Bronx. So usually the larger statues and the larger sculpture would tend to be in Bronx, while the smaller one would be in.
But we have exceptions too, we also have relatively large wooden Buddha statues, of course. So yeah. Well, thank you. I learned a lot from that.
So although the subject, this bronze statue subject may sound narrow, as your book shows, it actually covers more than a century, and Japan is not the only subject studied here. So before we get into the contents of the book, could you give us an overview of what the structure of this book is like? Yeah, so the book starts with the major period, with the 1870s, because as we've just discussed in pre-major Japan, there are really rare no public statues showing historical or contemporary person personalities. There were some wooden sculptures, again of famous feudal lords in temples where the graves of these lords would be located.
But these sculptures were objects of private worship for family and for retainers. So they were usually not shown publicly, not even accessible publicly, and also they were in terms of their function, they were not set up to indoctrinate the general populace with any specific idea or ideology. But this changed after the mid-resurration of 1868, when Japan began to construct a national history, and for the first time, began to explore methods to disseminate the nation's historical narrative among the population. This was done, of course, first of all, through formal education in schools, but also through social education in the public sphere.
And this is where the public space and where statues and also other monuments in public space, of course, come in as a medium through which the narratives of Japan's national history would be propagandized. But since the idea of the nation is a rather abstract idea, and it is kind of difficult to communicate statues of figures of persons that symbolize, that represent the nation and its values. They're very important in this process of what George Mozzer has called the nationalization of the masses. So this is also one of the concepts I use in the introduction of the book.
Today, we are witnessing lots of debates regarding statues worldwide. And in Japan, we have to keep in mind, it was also, there were also a lot of debates and controversies about statues during the process of planning a statue and building a statue was often accompanied by intense historiographical debates, which you also refer to in your question. So the first chapters of the book are mostly case studies in which I trace how discussions about statues were related to the historiographical debates concerning the historical figure to be presented. But sometimes also, this would even extend to discussions regarding historical events or even an entire historical epoch.
So this is very, very broad by product of statue building or maybe the other way around statue building is a product of these historiographical debates. But the book in later chapters is not only about the building of statues, it's also about how statues were instrumentalized in education, as I already said, but also in mass festivals, which of course also have a head agogic function and in war mobilization campaigns. And in the last part of the book, I then look at the post-war resurgence of statuary because most of Japan's destroyed during the war. And after 1945, again, more than several thousand statues were actually built, which are standing today all over Japan.
And this is not counting statues of abstract notions such as pieces, statues, or statues of mangaka characters. So there are several thousand statues only dedicated to historical personality, which are today occupying Japan's public spaces. I have so many questions about what you said, but I guess I'll just start from the first section of your book. So you mentioned that the bronze statues in modern Japan are usually full Imperial members or national heroes, and that the abstract concepts or cartoon figures are a recent thing.
So in the case of Imperial members, you specifically discuss the invisibility, rather than visibility of modern Japanese empress. Can you talk more about this invisibility and how that can be contextualizing the historical background of Japan's modernization? Because the entire purpose of making a statue is so that people can come see it and worship it, right? But your book, you said they were kept hidden for quite a while.
What happened? Why was that? Yeah, thank you. That was indeed one of the most difficult tasks to tackle.
And I think even in the final form of the book, it has remained somewhat ambiguous issue. So maybe let me answer that in two parts. So first of all, the early statuary, if we look at the early statuary, we can clearly see that it is connected to the theme of Imperial Restoration. And this is obviously related to the midi restoration being at least supposedly the restoration of the emperor to direct power, but also the establishment of the empress supreme command over the military.
Both of these developments were astonishing, but in particular, the latter was a really difficult cell, given that the warrior families had monopolized the military sector for several centuries, right? And now suddenly, the emperor, who was traditionally a part of the civilian court aristocracy, was supposed to be the military commander in 1968, 69, the sounded like a very unlikely scenario. So as a result of that, we can actually see that Imperial Japanese army got involved in many statue projects, most of which either showed contemporary members of the imperial house, who occupied military positions. Actually, every male member of the imperial family had to become a member of the Imperial Japanese military.
All these statues showed a pre-modern empress who held military functions, all the third category, warriors who allegedly had fought loyally for an emperor in the past. So all of these figures were now put up in the public in order to demonstrate that the imperial family somehow always had been in charge of the military sector, and that this fact had just been forgotten for a while, like for a few centuries, if not for a millennium. So it was a very far-fetched idea in a way, but that is why the Imperial Japanese army and to a smaller degree also the navy was so engaged in a statue building in the early phase of the midi period. Then the invisibility of the current emperor.
So throughout the midi period, we can see a process of transforming midi emperor into a sacred being, which of course culminates in the 1889 constitution, in which the midi emperor or the emperor is defined as a sacred being, who is inviolable. While there were also some efforts to bring him closer to the people, for example, through the famous progress that midi undertook in the 1870s and 1880s, permanent representations of the empress image remained quite restricted until the 20th century. For example, the famous portrait of the emperor, which you and your listeners might think about now, this portrait was strictly regulated and it was mainly distributed to state institutions. As an individual, you could not own, you could not have an imperial portrait and it was not officially sold.
But due to the development of a black market, on which these portraits were sold illegally, the government gradually relaxed these rules, for example, publishers of lithographs found ways around this official ban because they started selling lithographic portraits, which aren't exactly photographic portraits. So strictly speaking, they did not fall under the ban, although this was eventually up to the authorities to decide. But more and more on the authorities were turning a blind eye on these things and they realized a bit by bit that actually emperor worship might not be such a bad thing. So basically, after the Russell Japanese war of 1905, they really let it go and after an item of five, we have lots of photographs and other images of emperor, Meiji in journals on lithographs and even in newspapers, at least by the 1910s, for example, on the occasion of the emperor's funeral in 1912.
But in statuary, it is crystal clear that the emperor, Meiji emperor, is basically invisible. So until 1968, and that's 1968, so 100 years after the Meiji restoration, which was of course the centennial, right? And there were some festivities to mark the centennial of the Meiji restoration until then, no statues of Meiji-teno were set up in public space. There were only a couple of statues in memorial sites, in memorial halls, so they stood inside and these halls were even out of rage from the larger population centers and they were protected and everything.
But his image was considered too sacred to be put up in the public in the direct reach of the common population and in danger of being vandalized or even worse. Interestingly, this did not apply to other imperial figures. For example, Jimouteno, the founder of the Japanese emperor, who's of the Japanese Empire, whose statues were built in various locations of Japan. These statues were obviously built in order to compensate for the lack of Meiji statues and in some cases, actually Jimoutenos actually looked more like Meiji statues.
So here we see quite clearly that the idea was to compensate for the lack of Meiji statuary. But yeah, maybe we can talk about this again later. Yeah, that sounds quite odd that they would make a statue for a person or god or for the Jengwenpere that nobody had ever seen, rather than making a statue of Meiji emperor. But would you say the invisibility of the imperial members changed after their second board war?
In one way or the other, yes. So it's in a way the old patterns were preserved. So as is very well known, Shorla did not after that would do, also went to travel all over the country. So he did in a way what his grandfather did in the 1870s and 80s, he went on well, pro-cresis.
We don't call it progresses, I think, with reference to Shorla then. But he still visited, I think almost every single Japanese prefecture, actually apart from Okinawa, for which there's probably good reason, but that's maybe not in the frame of today's topic. So Shorla then did these trips and he also approached the people more closely than Meiji tenor did, because when Meiji traveled all over Japan, he was actually still hidden away. People were not actually able to look at him and there were regulations that if people came to see the progress of Meiji tenor, they were supposed to look down or struck, so to say, and not stare at Emperor Meiji.
There's a great book, of course, about this by Fujitani Takashi, Splendid Maunaki, which has explored this part of Meiji tenor's visibility or partly invisibility. But as far as the statuary is concerned, we see very similar patterns even in the post-war period. So as I said, in 1968, in order to mark the centennial of the Meiji restoration, there were these big festivities, and Nick Kapoor has recently published a very interesting article about that. Actually, as a part of these festivities, there was also a plan to build a huge statue of Meiji tenor.
Actually, the plan said a big statue of Meiji tenor, not just any statue, but they wanted to build a really big statue of Meiji tenor, but at one point it was deleted from the list of projects, so it was not materialized. But then there was this private nationalist activist who said, well, if the authorities are incapable to build this kind of statue, which Japan really needs, he thought, then I will organize a even bigger project building 100 Meiji statues all over the country. It's quite interesting that at that point, it was not like Japanese progressives who started to complain. It was actually the very conservative circles and the gatekeepers of the image of the emperor, including the Meiji shrine, but also the Imperial Household Agency.
These organizations issued statements saying, oh, this kind of inflationary use of the emperor's image is not desirable. So this project to build 100 statues did not materialize, about one dozen or statues were actually built. So today in some statues, in some Japanese cities, you can find statues of Meiji tenor, but the plan still failed to entirely materialize because of the opposition of the Imperial Household Agency. So obviously, it still remained long after the war, and in a certain degree, as I said, to the until today, there is a general hesitancy to put the emperor's image into the public.
That's such a fascinating story. And I guess we can sort of see the complicated connections to to to to politics to socialize behind bronze statues. So instead in these modern bronze statues, what what were some of the social dynamics that were involved in the planning, designing and construction of these statues? Who were the you just mentioned, there were social activists and they were the conservative parties.
Who else? What other social dynamics were involved in this? Yeah. So because there were so many statues all over the country in each prefecture, basically without exception, initially, I thought that there must have been some kind of master plan or some central institution behind this growth of public statuary in modern Japan.
However, I eventually found that this was not a planned or systematic process at all. There were some leading institutions, such as Imperial Army, as already mentioned, but and then there were also some influential families who had sufficient financial resources and who seemed to have a sense of mission regarding the achievements of their own forefathers, so that they would set up statues of former Daniel of feudal, feudal lords in their hometowns. Generally, however, the statue building became a widespread fashion throughout all parts of Japanese society, and it was often indeed grassroots initiatives from which plans for a statue emerged, and which also collected donations to realize them and which later organized festivities relating to the statue or the character depicted in a statue. The central and pre-factual governments, if anything played only a regulating role.
There were a number of laws since the mid-period that mandated that if you wanted to build a statue, you had to apply for permission through the local police office, then to the pre-factual government and at the end to the whole ministry in Tokyo. But overall, the government seems to have taken a hands-off approach and only very few statues where rejected. Actually, I found quite a number of examples of rather questionable statues that eventually realized, and the whole ministry sometimes overlooked quite always problems with some statue plans. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen.
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But yeah, it's now that just what you said about the the eruption of numbers of statues just reminded me of that. That's interesting. I actually went to SAGA to witness an in-organization ceremony, an unveiling ceremony a few years ago. And I also looked at other statues, but I don't remember going to this park with, yeah, interesting.
It was creepy if you ever get another chance to go with it. Okay, so now moving on to part two, where you present a quantitative study of bronze statues. So what do you look for when you, in this quantitative study, what do you look for and what are some of the results that you were able to summarize from them? Yeah, so the quantitative analysis, I think, is quite a unique feature of this book.
Most studies of memorials in other countries are limited to case studies. So it would be a collection of case studies of three, five, or yeah, about that, case studies of a statue project. But given the large number of statues in Japan, I created a database in which I compiled relevant data regarding statues, such as the year in which a statue was built, its location, the person depicted in a memorial, his or her background and function, as well as the group that initiated the building of a statue. This database includes the data of more than 2000 statues, so it is not complete.
But because the data is, because the data is sometimes not easily available. But I think this was a sufficiently critical mass that allowed me to come up with some meaningful conclusions. So amongst others, I came up, for example, with cycles in the intensity of statue buildings, years in which many statues were built, periods with a particularly low degree of statue building. But I could also find out which regions were particularly into statue buildings and those that are not.
And I also came up with a categorization of statues looking at what kind of personalities were particularly often represented in statuary. And I also came up with something like a top 10 of historical personalities depicted in public statuary. Another result from this quantitative research also concerned the gender of statues. And this is of course one of the easiest to determine characteristic of a statue.
And the result was that probably unsurprisingly, statues of female figures are very rare. And quantitatively, it would be about 5% overall from major Japan to today. 5% of Japanese statues would show a female person, a female historical figure. And yeah, 95% would be men.
And that is also partly why I thought, well, the title of the book, Men in Middle. Although I had already some feedback saying why men are there no women. But yeah, the point is it's 5%. And to be fair, Japan is not an exception here if we look at other countries.
I found a member regarding the United States and the US it seems to be 8%. So Japan is not a total outlier in this respect. This is of course a result of the 19th century great man view of history. Right?
And the 19th century is also where this idea of statues that represent the nation is coming up. So it is connected to this man make history men are a great man that make history and they are also represented in the public statuary far more often than great women. Indeed, it's the number is just a reflection of the, well, I wouldn't say inequality because in the 19th century really can't talk about equality to men, but that's the number is still quite shocking. So interesting, you know, today we have all of these discussions about statues, right?
And I mean, the most common thing is today was called theme is about whether a statue should be preserved or not, because the person in question is related to the history of that country and its colonialism, right? Or in the United States slavery. That is a big discussion now actually a discussion about needing more statues of women is still not very widely heard, I think. So in Britain and in Belgium, it's mostly about the legacy of colonialism, including facets of genocide in the United States, it's mostly about the history of slavery.
But yeah, the gender of statues hasn't become a major issue so far, although in the US the situation is pretty much the same with a very small minority of statues only that represent women. Yes, I know of some scholars that are really pushing hard to for many countries, not just Japan, to establish more statues of conflict. And it's definitely, yeah, I sure hope that we see more statues of women in the future. Now, as we're delving to Japan during the Second World War, as your study shows, the construction of bronze statues was deeply affected by the war, especially by the tight control of raw materials around this time, so much so that the government would melt statues to get the materials from them.
I thought it was very interesting because one would imagine that the country would need more historicized heroes or ethnography for the purpose of nation building during such a time, but apparently the need for raw metal was more important. Was that more like a changing process? And what was done after the war when some of these national heroes statues were repurposed? Did anybody rebuild them?
Did they replace it with a wood one or anything? Yeah, thank you for that question. So yeah, World War II, I mean, obviously brought lots of hardships to Japan and the Japanese people, but it was also a highly destructive moment for the country's public statuary because the majority, as we've discussed before, was made of bronze. The government in 1943 decreed the collection of most statues and almost all statues were then taken down from their pedestals, melted down and recycled mostly into ammunition for the production of which you obviously need copper and bronze.
In 1940, around 800 statues, bronze statues, stood in public spaces all over Japan, and less than 100 of these statues survived this mobilization campaign. So about 700 statues, all over Japan, bronze statues were taken down from their pedestals and then destroyed. So in 1945, when the occupation period begins, public spaces were actually quite empty, which also did lead to statues not becoming a major issue between the allied occupation of Japan and the Japanese government and administration. There were only very few cases where the occupation forces ordered that a statue would be taken down.
In most cases, there weren't even destroyed, they were just relocated. And most of the statues that had survived actually were statues of imperial figures. So the imperial figures were exempted. And this is exactly what you are referring to in your question because you need in war, not only motivation through national heroes, you don't need only dramaturists.
You also need this motivation through national heroes. And that's why about 100 statues were left, and these were the most important statues that are signified, either the military command of the emperor or the loyalty to the emperor. After the war, many of the statues were rebuilt. So although they all had disappeared by 1945, over the years, almost all statues, with some exceptions, were rebuilt.
They were of course a number of categories in post-war Japan that didn't match the post-war identity of Japan anymore. So for example, obviously, statues of military figures did not fit the pacifism of post-war Japan anymore. So military statues, statues showing military officers or soldiers were not commonly rebuilt. And in post-war Japan, a lot of new statues were built.
So statues that did not exist before 1945, first of all, symbols of Japanese culture. For example, today in Japan, there are several dozen statues of the poet Basho. And Basho in post-war Japan was seen as an expression of post-war Japan's identity as a culture state, right? As a bunga kokka.
And this category is clearly much more prominent in post-war Japan than it was in pre-war Japan. Oh, that's very interesting. I happen to be reading about the Basho boom in the 1930s. So I won't have imagined them to make Basho's statue around that, but I guess he was not motivating enough.
Yeah, I will talk to you a little bit about that. Don't think a single statue of Basho was built before the war. I think it's purely a post-war phenomenon. But when you say 1930s, this is of course already when the war began.
And before the statues were destroyed in 1943-44, there were already regulations since the late 1930s that this allowed artists from using metal for the production of art, and that included sculpture. So since 1937, in particular, artists were not allowed to produce statues anymore. And then 1943, the destruction was the next level. But in the 1930s, very, very few statues were actually built.
Wow, that is so interesting. And then after talking about the regulations during the war, you then talks about Japan's legacy in its alt territories during colonization. What were some of the places and what kind of bronze statues were left behind? Yeah, so actually, Bronx statues were built all over the Japanese Empire, so including Taiwan, the south of Sahelin, or Carafto, as it was called in Japanese, but also Korea.
And even beyond that, even in the Japanese, the least territory of Southern Maturia, the Leodong Peninsula. And also in some of the cities alongside the South Maturia and Railway zone. So all the way up to Harbin in Central Maturia, we find Japanese statues. And the subject matter is very similar to the statuary in Japan on the Japanese islands.
So it is national heroes, very often war heroes, very often generals that held building the Japanese colonial empire, for example, generals from the Rasso, Japanese war. And interestingly, while all statues on the Japanese main islands were destroyed, the statues in these colonial territories were not affected by the 1943-44 mobilization campaign. But as you can imagine, in most places, these symbols of Japanese colonial rule and oppression were not particularly welcome anymore after 1945, after Japan's defeat and surrender. So in Korea and China, Japanese statues were taken down from their pedestals now and most likely destroyed.
Most of them disappeared without much of a trace. Only in Taiwan, as far as we know, some statues survived. Many years ago, I visited the hometown of the politician Goto Shimbae in Yivate prefecture. And the people at the Goto Shimbae Memorial told me that in Taiwan, two pre-war statues, including one of Goto, had survived and were now exhibited at the Taiwan National Museum.
I didn't have a chance to visit Taiwan since that while I have photographs. And it appears that these statues today are exhibited within the museum. So they have not been put back on their prominent position outdoors in public space, but they are exhibited within the museum as a part of the exhibition regarding the history of the island under Japanese colonial rule, which by the way, is a pretty good way to deal with controversial or outdated statues without throwing them, say, into the sea or destroying them, otherwise entirely. That is fascinating.
And I wonder what the other areas would have done with those statues. But now that we're running out of time, the most important conclusion of this book is that bronze statues in early modern or pre-modern and modern Japan have more social and political meanings than its artistic values sometimes. How would you situate your analyses of these bronze statues in a changing historical background from the 19th century to the 20th century to Japan? Yeah, thank you.
So first of all, even though sculpture obviously is a form of art, when we look at the primary sources, they clearly tell us that the main consideration was whether a political message would come across, namely the message of Japan being a great nation and a great nation as personified in the great person that the viewer was looking at. So statues in the 19th and 20th century in Japan, but in other countries as well, where therefore instruments to disseminate the idea of the nation and to make this abstract notion of the nation more accessible to the population. That is a function that statues have been fulfilling from the 19th century until continuously. So this part of their function, I think, has not fundamentally changed, although the notion is today probably more controversial than it was, say, in the 19th century.
But in the case of Japan, what has changed somewhat is the contents of the national identity and the values that are being transported and communicated by statues. So before 1945, as we have discussed before, important values would include military prowess, military virtues, loyalty to the emperor, and even the sacrificial spirit to die for the emperor, if necessary. Fingers for presenting these values, as I explained before, included medieval warriors, the members of the movement to restore the emperor in the 1860s, but also so just sacrificing their lives in the wars of modern Japan. After 1945, this set of values was not useful anymore.
It did not match anymore with the post-war identity of Japan as a pacifist nation, as a peace state, Heva Koka. And because Japan was trying to distance itself from its militarist past, new personifications of the nations had to be produced, and these were the representatives of Japanese culture, but also signs and more recently even sports as leads. So there is a change in the subject matter, but not so much in terms of the function, maybe the indoctrination of the people with the idea of the nation and with nationalism. But even in terms of the subject matter, we can see one continuity because one of the characteristics of Japan's public status, that results from this focus on the nation is almost obsessive focus on the history of the Meiji Restoration.
That is something we can see in previous statery, and it continues in post-war Japan as well, and it was actually re-vigorated in the late 1960s as a result of the festivities marking the centennial of the Meiji Restoration. It's amazing that you paid attention to this entire historical context behind these statues that we may just see out of a translation nowadays. It's really amazing. I actually had a lot more questions from reading the book, but I guess I'll just ask this one last question.
In your study, what was the perfector that made the most run statues? Yeah, that is one of the results that my quantitative analyzes resulted in. Number one is clearly Tokyo, and that doesn't necessarily say a lot. So basically, I think we can see in the top 10 prefections, we can see two groups.
One of them can be simply explained, namely the affluent urban center. So Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, that is not only where the politics is concentrated, but also where the money is. So in these cities, it would be the easiest to raise donations to pay for a statue. The second category, that's probably more interesting, but also fits in with what I just explained at the end after your last question.
The second category is the prefections that are extremely proud on their role on the role they played in the Meiji Restoration. And that is Yamaguchi and Kagoshima. First of all, the former social and satsuma field domains, they come in number four and five or six or so in the ranking, they have large numbers of statues, and Saga to which you were referring is a little bit of an outlier there. They have relatively few statues.
It might have to do, of course, with Saga being, of course, economically, not particularly affluent, I suppose. But Yamaguchi and Kagoshima also obviously see this as a priority, so they don't belong to the richest prefections in Japan, but they have made the preservation of the Meiji Restoration, and they are rolling that in a real priority. So that's why you can find dozens of statues in these two prefections relating to the history of the Meiji Restoration. Wow, that is so interesting.
Next time, if I go to Kagoshima, I'll keep it nice for these statues. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. Thank you, and for our listeners to learn more about Brown statues in 19th and 20th century Japan, make sure you check out this book Men in Metal, a topography of public bronze statuary in modern Japan by Sven Sawa.
This is Jing Yi from New Books on Japanese Studies, and I will see you again in our next episode. Until then, goodbye.