Ueno Park during Meiji Times – a Mirror of its Time: Discursive Space and Symbolic Representation of Modernity

With the Great Council of State‟s 16th decree, the Meiji administration introduced the neologism kōen, „public park‟, to the Japanese language and the administrative system. One of the re-named parks was today‟s Ueno Kōen, which during the Meiji period changed with regards to character and appearance. It came to house the first modern museums, the first modern zoo, and the first public library. Industrial fairs were to be held in Ueno Kōen and a train station was built, connecting the rural north with Japan‟s capital. Meiji politicians re-designed the park grounds, in which today not only institutions of education, industry and modernity are located, but the highest number of homeless people in any one place in Tōkyō is to be found.

The research question, „What kind of space was constituted in the place Ueno Kōen during Meiji time?‟ is to be answered with the discourse theory of the German sociologist Reiner Keller and the theory on the social construction of space offered by the German sociologist Martina Löw. The article will show that Ueno Park was to become a spatial representation of Japan‟s modernisation process and of the policies of „enlightenment‟ and „rich country, strong army‟, bunmei kaika and fukoku kyōhei.