Even as Chūemon participated in the international marketplace and (at times) helped spread foreign goods and ideas into his home province, we can also—in spite of his innate conservatism—see him being shaped by the new ideas circulating in Yokohama. This is most evident in his developing understanding of nationality and nationhood. Like most people in Japan’s two-hundred-plus domains, Chūemon identified first and foremost with his local and regional communities. For the majority of people, this meant the village. Villagers depended on one another for mutual assistance, labor cooperation, communal water and other resource supplies, and contributions to the payment of the village tax burden. While wealthier Japanese were remarkably mobile by the mid-nineteenth century, probably most villagers had seldom if ever been beyond their nearest provincial town. The decisions that were made and the actions taken within the village community could mean the difference between subsistence and destitution. Next to the village was the domainal administration. Villagers paid their taxes to the domain, and the domainal authorities held the power of life and death over them. The domainal lord was the ruler to whom villagers and townsmen owed both tribute and loyalty, and for most, their identity was closely tied to their domain and its ruling family.
Beyond his village of Higashi-Aburakawa, Chūemon belonged to Kōshū. Kären Wigen has shown how the historical provinces of Japan, which were meaningful administrative units in ancient times but had long since been replaced by feudal domains (of which there might be several in any one of Japan’s sixty-six historical provinces), were reconstituted in the Tokugawa era as units of regional identity. This was based on imagination more than political reality (except in a few domains where the domain and the province were coterminous) and abetted by mapmakers and others who were promoting regional consciousness, often for economic reasons.105 Certainly for Chūemon the province of Kōshū was the primary location of his identity beyond his village of Higashi-Aburakawa. The name of his shop was Kōshūya, he described himself as representing the products of Kōshū, he hosted and represented visiting merchants from Kōshū, and when in his letters he referred to his “country” (kuni), he almost always meant Kōshū.
It is much harder to assess how people like Chūemon understood the concept of “Japan.” Mitani Hiroshi has written of a “protonation-state” arising in the eighteenth century as educated Japanese under the long and peaceful Tokugawa reign began to conceive of an “imagined community” of the Japanese nation through the influence of extensive domestic travel networks and the distribution of nationalistic publications.106 Certainly, most people had some sense that they were not just domainal subjects but also “Japanese”—Nipponjin. Even villagers would have understood their connection to other Japanese through language, history, highways and commerce, sites of spiritual power and pilgrimage, and perhaps even through some concept of political unity. But “Japan” itself must have been a fuzzy notion. Did it mean loyalty to the emperor? Did it mean obligations beyond those demanded by regional feudal authorities? Did it mean common beliefs and symbols? While nationalist ideologies were gaining traction among the educated classes, it is hard to imagine that most villagers would have understood or cared much about the implications of a Japanese national identity.
Chūemon was a subject of a directly administered shogunal domain and he had lived in the shogunal capital, so for him, if “Japan” meant anything, it probably meant the realm of the shogun. Yet Chūemon’s encounters with foreigners in Yokohama, and especially the political clashes of the early 1860s, must surely have pushed him to rethink his identity. In his letters, the foreigners remained ijin (aliens) until the very end of the decade, when he began to use the politer gaikokujin (foreigners). But as Chūemon became comfortable with the idea and also the reality of the ijin, he must have come to understand that the word had real meaning only when contrasted with an implied “us.” And Chūemon’s experiences in Yokohama must have made it starkly clear to him that the “us” was not “people of Kōshū” or even “subjects of the shogun” but “Nipponjin,” or Japanese people. The evolving political crisis of the mid-1860s forced him to develop a new understanding of the meanings of “Japan” even as the social and political structures of his country were falling into chaos and collapse. It is no coincidence that Chūemon’s first use in the surviving letters of the term “Nipponjin” came at the moment of greatest conflict with the West, as the shogunate braced for a massed attack by a foreign naval alliance (described in chapter 2).
We can see something similar happening in the guidebooks to Yokohama, which wrote of the foreigners as an exotic “other” in Japan’s midst but which also portrayed an implied “Japaneseness” in contrast to that other. To be “Japanese” meant to be justifiably uncomfortable with the consumption of meat, drunken behavior, the enslavement of blacks, or the disregard for elegance and good taste; but it might also mean to be behind in technology, unadventurous, unable to afford the comforts that foreigners expected, unaware of time and punctuality, and to acknowledge the need to question long-held assumptions about food, clothing, medicine, or Japan’s place in the world. Yokohama stimulated new concepts and understandings of the meanings of “Japan.” This reformulation of national identity was a vital bridge to the new world of national unification and imperial loyalty that emerged from the overthrow of the shogunate in 1868.
Even more than Chūemon, his children must have become accustomed to foreign ways of living from relatively early in their lives. For Naotarō, who arrived in Yokohama at the age of twenty-two, and even more for his younger brother Katsusuke, who came to join his father at the age of seven, the international community of Yokohama with its varied lifestyles and global connections was a part of the fabric of their lives, which they probably more or less took for granted. They were the children of a new global era, for whom distinctions between “Japanese” and “Western,” “traditional” and “modern” might have seemed a little quaint and outdated.
In the West, too, the outpouring of information and artifacts from Yokohama prompted new assessments of “Japan” and its meanings. There was a fascination with the mysterious, hidden country that was now reluctantly allowing its secrets to be pried open (at least, this was how many foreign commentators perceived it). At times it seemed that any visitor to the treaty port of Yokohama was required to write an account of his or her experiences. Some of these contributions were humble: Francis Hall, an American merchant, sent regular dispatches to his hometown newspaper, the Elmira Gazette. Others were more grandiose: Rutherford Alcock, English minister to Japan, wrote a wordy two-volume memoir, prompting one of his subordinates to lament that “he would have been a greater man if he had never written a book about a country which he did not understand.”107 In the earlier part of the 1860s, writers tended to focus on the dramatic murders of foreigners, the antiforeign sentiment in Japan, and the duplicitous dealings of Japanese officials, while illustrators showed scenes of official negotiations, Japanese government leaders, and violent scenes such as the foreign attacks on Kagoshima and Shimonoseki. But foreign readers also clamored for vivid descriptions of Japanese daily life and social mores.
Certain themes quickly became standard attributes of the Japanese as portrayed to Western audiences. They included alluring and exotic physical appearance, gorgeous clothing, medieval martial display, a casual lack of concern about public nudity, unawareness of time or the pressures of modern life, and unusual skills such as storytelling or paper folding. These attributes combined to create an exotic and sometimes erotic image. This would have been a familiar combination to foreign audiences. Many colonized regions were similarly exoticized and sexualized, in ways that tended to reinforce the audience’s sense of the “otherness” and difference of the colonized peoples and of its own power and superiority over those peoples. In the case of Japan, there was particular interest because the country for so long had successfully prevented itself from being put on global display. Now, there was a sense that Japan could be “opened,�
� “revealed,” “bared,” and indeed this was in many cases done with literal representations of naked Japanese.
Charles Wirgman was one of the most prolific commentators on Japan through his regular contributions to the influential Illustrated London News. Wirgman often used Yokohama as a model of “Japan” in miniature. In addition to political news and the occasional travelogue, when the opportunity arose, Wirgman submitted frequent sketches of daily life in words and pictures, based on scenes he observed in Yokohama. Such sketches might be a miscellany of seemingly unconnected details, as in a lithograph titled The Storyteller (a Daily Scene) in Yokuhama (sic) with its accompanying commentary: “He takes up his post on a table every afternoon, and recites to an admiring audience who stand and squat around him; sometimes he accompanies himself on the banjo, as I have shown … The men for the most part have their towels round their heads, and are not remarkable for pegtops or, in fact, any breeches at all. The girls are on their wooden pattens, and they seem to find no difficulty in running in them.”
The lithograph illustrates some of the themes described: the near nakedness of many of the men, the towels around their heads, and the sense of timelessness as a leisurely audience gathers unhurriedly for the daily performance.108
FIGURE 3.5 Charles Wirgman, The Storyteller (a Daily Scene) in Yokuhama (sic). Illustrated London News, August 10, 1861
Wirgman’s partner, Felice Beato, contributed to the creation of an exotic and erotic image of Japan through his souvenir photography. His studio portraits were generally taken using paid models, and they might include images of women at the toilette, often partially clothed; naked porters and grooms, sometimes heavily tattooed; samurai in armor; and artisans such as carpenters or printmakers pursuing their craft. Already by the time the albums were produced, many of the customs they portrayed were falling into disuse. Warriors preferred guns to swords, and by the end of the 1860s, the wealthy preferred to travel by horse-drawn carriage or Japan’s newest contribution to public transport, the rickshaw, rather than the palanquins portrayed in the images. Like his prints, which he fixed with chemicals to capture an unchanging image for decades to come, Beato and other artists were deliberately preserving and immobilizing a culture that already existed more in the artist’s imagination than in the realities of daily life. These images of a “traditional” Japan helped create an imagined past that remains with us to this day.109
However, Beato also helped develop appreciation for Japan’s highly developed artistic and craft traditions, as he used Japanese artists to turn each of his black-and-white prints into an individual work of art.110 As the number of visitors to Yokohama increased in the later 1860s and beyond, Beato began concentrating on the production of souvenir photographic albums that combined hand-tinted photographic images, printed commentary, and gorgeous bindings in leather and lacquered wood. The artifacts that he produced were exquisite examples of Japanese craftsmanship, and they helped produce an image of Japan as a place of refined and sophisticated artistic sensibilities.
FIGURE 3.6 Felice Beato, Betto (groom), tattooed à la mode (ca. 1863–1867). Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-14496
Japanese cultural entrepreneurs also participated in the creation of an exotic “Japan.” In his Yokohama photographic studio, Shimooka Renjō catered to both Japanese and foreign customers. For the benefit of foreign customers, Renjō followed Beato’s lead, hiring female models and photographing them in a variety of poses. Like Beato, he had many of his photographs hand tinted by Japanese artists. His friend Samuel Cocking recalled that “when [Renjō] first started in business, instead of receiving payment from his sitters he was obliged to reverse the operation and pay them to come, and has given as much as twelve shillings to a good-looking Japanese lady to have her portrait taken. But even this upside-down state of affairs answered his purpose very well in a commercial sense, as he used to sell copies of such to foreigners at three dollars each.”111
This trend toward portraying exoticized and sometimes eroticized images of daily life in Japan mixing Western and Japanese artistic styles became a distinctive genre, centered in Yokohama and aimed at presenting a commodified image of Japan for sale to the outside world.
At the same time, however, Japanese photographers like Renjō were able to add their own inflections to the developing image of “Japan.” Although Renjō catered to the foreign taste for the exotic and the erotic, he also used his art to reflect a more robust and assertive image of “Japan,” one that might even have something to teach the rest of the world. Many of his portraits show Japanese people engaged in aesthetic practices such as flower arranging and the tea ceremony, while also incorporating into his work techniques derived from his training as a painter and lithographer. His promotion (both as artist and patron) of a variety of Japanese artistic traditions contributed to the rapid assimilation of Japanese artistic and aesthetic traditions in the European and American arts, which, beginning in the 1860s, were swept up in a wave of japonisme.112
Like Renjō’s portraits, traveling exhibits of Japanese arts, crafts, and manufactures also showed a dual agenda of portraying a richly exotic “Japan” to feed the Western imagination and profiling the excellence of Japan’s manufacturing and craft traditions—as well as, at times, highlighting Japan’s rapid adaptation to new techniques.
Japanese art, crafts, literature, antiquities, and daily life were placed on display at galleries and exhibitions in cities in Europe and America. After the immense success of London’s Crystal Palace exposition of 1851, international expositions became a regular feature of the European capitals: there were two major expositions during the 1860s, the Great International Exposition at London’s Crystal Palace from May to November 1862 and the Exposition universelle d’art et d’industrie in Paris in 1867.
At the time of the Great International Exposition, London was experiencing a burst of Japan fever. More than a dozen books on Japan appeared during the course of the year, including Sir Rutherford Alcock’s ponderous two-volume memoir of his stint as Britain’s envoy to Japan. Meanwhile, the shogunate’s first diplomatic mission to Europe arrived in London on April 30, 1862. The members of the delegation lodged at Claridge’s Hotel and visited the London Docks, the Tower of London, and Kew Gardens, as well as taking trips to Liverpool and Birmingham to inspect industrial and naval facilities.113 During their visits they were photographed, drawn, lithographed, and painted: they were as much an object of display as the exhibits of Japanese arts and crafts that were springing up around London.
FIGURE 3.7 Shimooka Renjō, Woman with Pipe (ca. 1865–1875). Courtesy of Tom Burnett Collection, New York
On May 22, John Wilson put Shimooka Renjō’s massive collection of panoramic paintings on display at the London Polytechnic, advertising it as “Wilson’s Grand Panorama, painted in oil, by Japanese Artists, on 9,000 feet [sic] of canvas, and showing with scrupulous fidelity the Costumes, Temples, Streets, Bridges, Scenery, and Rivers of the Japanese Empire. This unique and curious Panorama was painted secretly by native artists, who would, if discovered, have incurred the penalty of death, and it is exhibited Daily, at 1.30 and 5.30. Admission, 1s.”114 The Illustrated London News reported on the exhibit: “Japan, once a sealed book, is now unclasped, and we may freely inspect its treasures. It not only permits travellers to visit it, but has sent its Ambassadors to visit us. These are now amongst us, and may examine these pictures for themselves, and learn how vain were the State precautions that were taken to prevent such a result … The state of Japanese art is exemplified by the various pictures presented, which in that and other respects will prove highly instructive to European visitors.”115
Although the Japanese representatives did not visit the “Grand Panorama” (and they would certainly not have wished any harm to the artist, since the images betrayed no state secrets, conveying in fact a desirable image of Japan as a peaceful, beautiful, and cultured nation), they did visit the Great International Expo
sition at the Crystal Palace. This lavish display of the diverse arts and manufactures of the nations of the world attracted six million visitors over the course of its six months. It was a showcase for national pride and national aspiration. While the shogunal government—still reluctant to engage in international relations—was not a formal participant in the exhibition, the British envoy, Sir Rutherford Alcock, had provided a large collection of Japanese artifacts from his personal collection. They included examples of Japanese crafts such as personal accessories, paper manufactures, porcelain, arms and armor, and printing, as well as samples of Japanese money, drugs, and medical implements.116 Many of these would certainly have been purchased in the curio shops of Yokohama’s Japanese quarter. In an admiring review, the London Times praised the exquisite craftsmanship of the miniature sculptures—probably netsuke (belt ornaments) and inro (containers for personal belongings)—while also commenting on their “comic genius.” The objects of porcelain on display were “if anything, almost thinner than egg-shell. Even the renowned specimens of this china made at Worcester are mere earthenware compared to them.” Similarly, the swords on display—which included one of the swords used in an assassination attempt on Alcock himself—were “of a most exquisite temper.” And the Japanese skills in papermaking “have undoubtedly obtained an excellence and skill of which we in Europe know nothing.”117
Five years later, the shogunate was an enthusiastic participant in the Paris exposition of 1867, sending a large consignment of arts, crafts, and manufactures there for the show. This exposition was on a colossal scale. Occupying a one-hundred-fifty-acre site in the Champs de Mars, it attracted fifteen million visitors during its six months of display. Now anxious to show itself as a worthy aspirant to join the community of modern nations, the Japanese government sent the younger brother of the shogun to represent Japan and to receive his education in France. But the shogunate’s message was muddied by the fact that the domains of Satsuma and Hizen also submitted competing exhibits. While the shogunate was attempting to claim a position among the “civilized” powers that shared their industrial products at such events, the multiple exhibits vividly highlighted Japan’s lack of national unity.
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