Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award Winner 2025: Fabian Drixler and Reo Matsuzaki, for “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan.”

Aug 15

Written By IMM .

Winner: Fabian Drixler (Yale University) and Reo Matsuzaki (Trinity College) (2024), for “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan.” Politics & Society 53(1): 57–97.

Drixler and Matsuzaki’s “Façade Fictions: False Statistics and Spheres of Autonomy in Meiji Japan” (2024) addresses a puzzling empirical phenomenon: how could Japan’s high-capacity Meiji state allow pervasive infanticide to persist under the guise of stillbirths, and even record it statistically without intervention? The article challenges standard accounts of state-society relations by offering an interpretive theory of "façade fictions" - a mode of performative politics that reconciles conflicting normative orders through tacit cooperation rather than coercion. Drawing on Japanese notions of omote (façade), naibun (interior), and naishō (tacit agreement), the authors develop a novel framework that decenters state control and instead emphasizes negotiated autonomy within the household. Their counterintuitive finding, that falsified statistics were not signs of state weakness but expressions of a collaborative political settlement, forces a rethinking of state building, capacity, and legitimacy. Methodologically, the paper exemplifies interpretive political analysis through its close reading of silences, spatial metaphors, and semantic practices in archival and statistical records, offering a model for how deeply contextual cultural concepts can generate translatable theoretical insights.

Committee Members:

Sarah El-Kazaz (SOAS University of London, Chair)

Martha Belaguera Cuervo (University of Toronto)

Egor Lazarev (Yale University)