Vitale, Judith (2021). The destruction and rediscovery of Edo Castle: ‘picturesque ruins’, ‘war ruins’. Japan Forum, 33 (1), pp. 103-130. 10.1080/09555803.2019.1646786

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Castles were an important symbol of the Tokugawa state order, signifying the realm of daimyo as well as the privileges conferred by the Tokugawa shoguns. Edo Castle was the largest, representing the supremacy of the Tokugawa house as the head of the warrior elite of Japan. After 1868, the progress of the Meiji Emperor into the castle amounted to a ‘metaphor of action’ that introduced a new political era. The remnants of the old castle walls, however, retained an ambivalent meaning by circumscribing the imperial residence as well as being an emblem of the former stronghold of the shoguns. This article explores photographs of the ruins of Edo Castle and the shifting interpretations pertaining to these pictures as reminders of Japan’s ‘feudal’ era between the time of their making in the early 1870s and their republication in the late 1920s.

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