Warlords, Generals, and Emperors:Branding Fushimi-Momoyama in Modern Japan

The town of Fushimi is rarely seen as a part of Kyoto. Yet, from the fall of Toyotomi's Hideyoshi’s Momoyama Castle in 1600, to the Battle of Toba-Fushimi in 1868, the town’s history was key to the fate of Kyoto, and Japan. In the twentieth century, the Meiji emperor was buried on the grounds of Fushimi Castle, the Nogi Shrine was dedicated nearby, and the imperial army took over large swathes of the town, making Fushimi an important site for military and imperial pilgrimage and activities. Before 1945, a visit to Fushimi was an important site for school groups. Much of this history disappeared in the post-war era. Military bases became university grounds, shrines and museums disappeared from tourist routes, and the Momoyama Castle site was transformed into an amusement park with a complete (and completely fantastic) reconstruction of Hideyoshi's castle keep, now abandoned. Our paper examines both the history and the memoryscape of Fushimi from the Meiji era to the present. Fushimi, we argue, was a much more malleable space than central Kyoto, and served as a blank canvas on which elites drew the links that bound Kyoto into national modernity, while supposedly leaving the city itself untouched in its “antiquity.”