| Research Abstract |
This project deals with a comparative study of German, British and Japanese monarchies in the light of royal ceremonial.
It had been considered that royal ceremonies were traditions "invented" and evolved by political elites in the late 19th century. Facing the dangers of popular democracy, governing statesmen tried to devise pragmatic solutions in coping with social unrest and class conflict.
However, the evolution of rituals should not be ascribed merely to "machinations" of political elites. It was one of the crucial processes that a monarchy tried to adapt itself to a newly role in a changed political environment, hence rituals reflected self-images of the public people who accepted royal ceremonies.
Although in each country royal ceremonies were highly evolved at almost the same time, there were so many diversities. International circumstances, personalities of monarchs, or complicated power balance between the monarch and the government characterized each evolution. For instance, the process in Britain was closely associated with a changing political power balance, and a shift of the parliamentarism into popular democracy. Both in Germany and Japan, royal ceremonies had more nationalistic appeal. German rituals were so much influenced by queer characters of William II,while Japanese monarch had less individual power and less influence on shaping Japanese ones.
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