ABSTRACT
States everywhere utilize flags, emblems, royalty, and other symbols to visually present themselves in attempts to manage public perceptions. However, the “identity of the state with society is a mystification of political life even in the so-called ‘democratic’ societies and must be exposed as a practice of the sociology of fraud” (Welsh 1990: 400). Impression management by the state often involves closely associating elite aims with common causes. Moreover, in modern societies, because information about political events and economic conditions is indirectly, massively, and technologically mediated, the “more dependent an audience is on realities which are not available to perception, the more dependent people are on impressions and appearances” (Gillespie 1990: 392). 1 Countless examples of any “state’s presentation of self” could be given, and in his analysis of the invention of Japan’s imperial tradition, Fujitani employs Agulhon’s “folklore of a regime” (Agulhon 1981), which the former defines as the “homogenized, official culture fostered by the state, [including] various rites, symbols, customs, and practices” (Fujitani 1998: 101). Indeed, as Fujitani points out, as early as 1912, Basil Hall Chamberlain explicated how Japan’s ruling elite had invented religious “traditions” supporting “Mikado-worship and Japan-worship” (Fujitani 1998: 78; see also Chamberlain 1912). But a “state’s presentation of self” (Welsh 1990: 400) can also be more mundane, e.g., policy stances, white papers, reports, official pronouncements. In this chapter I explore how postwar royal weddings, as rituals, have been used by political authorities to manage the “face” of officialdom.
