Meiji-mura, Japan: Negotiating Time, Politics, and Location

摘要

While there have been critical debates concerning urban landscapes renovated 'in situ', the open-air museum represents a less examined strategy in the negotiation of time, space, and politics of a city-what Henri Lefebvre calls the 'spatial practices of society'. Meiji-mura is an open-air museum containing infrastructure projects and buildings relocated from Japanese cities and towns since 1965. The purpose of this paper is to reveal how Meiji-mura's museum landscape: 1) naturalises its artefacts in their new context, and at the same time provides a village-like environment that is neater, more sanitised, and planned than the real cities where the artefacts derived: 2) incorporates theme park-like elements which contribute to a vagueness about the social histories that the artefacts elaborate: and 3) appropriates the idea of the museum as a means to devolve the political and religious powers imparted by artefacts so they can be appreciated as Art.