Conference on Façade Politics

From colonial Southeast Asia to authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, scholars have identified dissimulation as a key instrument in the politics of domination and resistance. In this conference, we would like to consider an additional possibility: that the enactment of façades can be a collaborative act for managing conflicts and achieving compromise.

The aim of the conference is to take the emerging scholarship on Tokugawa and Meiji Japan as a starting point to challenge and expand our broader theoretical understanding of façade politics. In 2012, Luke Roberts’ Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan uncovered the pervasive operation of the concepts of omote and naishō in the politics of Tokugawa Japan. Fabian Drixler and Reo Matsuzaki have attempted to generalize them in their recent essay, “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan,” and demonstrate their applicability in a modern state. We propose that the type of political performances analyzed by scholars of Japan are not unique to the Japanese historical and cultural context. Similar dynamics may be found in various other parts of the world. It is our hope that the recent discoveries in Japanese history provide tools for the analysis of other times and places.