Let us shift our perspective for a moment. When we look at artworks in a museum, or encounter cultures at an exhibition—what if this very act of “seeing” is already deeply entangled with social structures and power relations?

The philosopher Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers in twentieth-century sociology and cultural studies. Through the concept of the “gaze,” he explained how power operates in modern societies. For example, in Madness and Civilization (1961), he described how madness was not only “isolated” but also transformed into a spectacle to be seen. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), he analyzed how illness came to be visualized as something hidden within the body, giving rise to the “medical gaze.” Furthermore, in Discipline and Punish (1977), he examined the Panopticon—a prison structure that made every inmate aware that they might always be watched. For Foucault, the gaze was not mere observation but an apparatus that creates order, classifies individuals, and exercises control.

From this perspective, the nineteenth-century World Expositions can be reinterpreted as sites where Japan was made visible under an “imperial gaze.” The display of Japanese crafts and women in kimono was not simply an act of cultural exchange, but a process of visualization that constructed the image of a “Japan to be seen.” In these exhibitions, the West observed, categorized, and systematized the East as knowledge—thereby reinforcing its own power relations.

A similar “apparatus of the gaze” can also be found in the rise of haute couture in Paris. Around the same period when Western collectors, painters, and writers began showing interest in Japanese art and kimonos, Charles Frederick Worth, Jacques Doucet, and Jeanne Paquin opened their fashion houses on the Rue de la Paix. These houses featured luxurious salons where clients could view the latest designs worn by live models. According to Hiroshi Kashiwagi (2000:34), these salons functioned as spaces of consumption in which models were constantly exposed to the clients’ gaze. The emergence of notions such as the “ideal body” and “balanced proportions” during this period marks the beginning of socially constructed ideals similar to those shaped today through mass advertising. Moreover, by dressing models in Oriental styles, these salons were transformed into spaces for “displaying exotic cultures,” turning “the East” into a spectacle much like the World Expositions. Thus, the haute couture salon also functioned as a symbolic apparatus that asserted Western cultural superiority.

By the end of the nineteenth century, publications such as Louis Gonse’s L’Art Japonais (1883) and Samuel Bing’s Le Japon Artistique (1888) laid the foundation for academic Japanology. This systematization of knowledge was itself part of the Western project of “visualization and control.” Behind the dazzling influence of Japonisme lay a complex relationship between seeing and being seen. When we gaze upon ukiyo-e prints in a museum today, our gaze may still trace the lines of that nineteenth-century imperial exhibition. To appreciate the beauty of cross-cultural exchange while also recognizing the underlying dynamics of power—that is the fascination of reading Japonisme through a Foucauldian lens.

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