"Japanese Views of East and West: Imprinting the Other in Meiji Eyes," takes up just one small room in the Princeton University Art Museum. In spite of its size, however, the exhibition has a lot to say about Japan's period of transition from historical isolation into a trading nation with diplomatic ties to the United States and the countries of Europe.
Curator Sinéad Kehoe's first exhibition in the Princeton University Art Museum, it came about because of some puzzling images in the museum's collection: one in an album of woodblock prints and several from a series of colorful 19th century woodcut illustrations.
Ms. Kehoe, assistant curator of Asian art at the museum, was asked to explain their meaning. "I had no idea," she recalled. So, she did what any respectable academic would do, she began researching.
With the help of an expert, the album image by the artist Toyohara Chikanobu (1838-1912), from the period of the Emperor Meiji — spanning 1868 to 1912 — was identified as showing a shrine festival parade complete with locals costumed as Korean foreigners and a large cloth elephant.
One of several prints in the album titled About and Beyond the Outer Precincts of Chiyoda Palace, a gift to the University by the late Dorothy Ellice Edwards Mart, the image "deploys a Western-influenced lens for a historical depiction of Japanese commoners masquerading as an embassy from Korea before the shogunate in the heyday of its power."
"It's an intriguing event," commented Ms. Kehoe. "Elephants were first known in Japan when the Dutch sent one there as a gift."
Western Virtues
As for the colorful illustrations, Ms. Kehoe discovered that they originated from a book by a British author, Samuel Smiles, that had been translated into Japanese. Their vivid hues result from the use of new Aniline dyes manufactured in and imported from Europe, that are brighter than their vegetable counterparts.
A prolific author and reformer, Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was born in Scotland, the eldest of eleven children. He was a staunch campaigner for parliamentary reform and worked as a journalist and editor, contributing to the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle and editing the Leeds Times, and advocating then radical causes ranging from votes for women to free trade.
Known today for books extolling the virtues of self-help and biographies lauding the heroic achievements of engineers, Samuel Smiles is identified with works that exemplify Victorian values to contemporary readers.
"Smiles's book, The Lives of Engineers, which was translated and disseminated all over the world, had an enormous impact in Japan," said Ms Kehoe. "The biographies were meant to inspire hard work and self-sacrifice and their messages resounded in the Japanese psyche at a time when Western Industrialization was the goal. Japanese youth took to their studies in order to work toward the development of a modern nation."
In 1873, as part of its strategy to Westernize Japan, the Ministry of Education produced series of woodblock prints depicting the Biographies of Great Persons in the West, with educational themes for young people by the thousands.
The exhibition shows several scenes that depict pivotal moments in the lives of Western innovators with their biographies, inspired by Nakamura Masanao's translation of Samuel Smiles' Self Help, of which over 55,000 copies were sold in Britain and thousands more in translation abroad.
The Japanese translation of his book, Thrift, suggested that women should be in charge of the finances. "This became a great thing in Japan," said Ms. Kehoe, "where the women of Japan were the ones keeping the books with their husbands having to ask for spending money."
Besides a work ethic, the illustrations show an interesting dynamic between men and women, said Ms. Kehoe, who was born in Pennsylvania and moved with her family to Japan when she was in her teens. After attending high school there for a year, she studied at Yale and is now a graduate student at Princeton University.
In depicting Britain's William Lee, inventor of a machine for making stockings, for example, the story is told of his frustration at consistently finding the young woman he has come to call upon busy at her knitting. With his device, she would have more time to spend with him. At least that was his plan, but the illustration on display shows him, pacing the room while his love is shown busily — and happily it seems — working away, producing even more stockings.
Richard Arkwright of spinning machine fame is depicted showing his wife the door after she had destroyed his models in frustration at the time and money he was "wasting" on his inventions.
According to Ms. Kehoe, Smiles is still influential in Japan. She noted a new translation of his work on a recent visit to that country.
Sailing Ships and Trade
In addition to these, Ms. Kehoe has included prints of the Sino-Japanese war from the graphic arts section of Firestone Library, as well as images of battleships with cartouche, a battle scene from the Ruso-Japanese war.
Ms. Kehoe's one-page commentary, available on site, provides a brief background history of the period in which the prints were produced.
In 1853, four United State military vessels entered the bay of the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) to make demands for trade with a military regime that had enforced a policy of national isolation since the middle of the 17th century, successfully deflecting would-be visitors from abroad. "Known as the black ships of Perry, perhaps because of their black hulls or because of their black smoke, these large ocean-going vessels captured the Japanese imagination," said Ms. Kehoe.
The fleet gave the Japanese authorities pause for thought, and official diplomatic ties with the U.S. were established the following year.
Although Perry's aim was to change the policy of isolation either by persuasion or by force, he wasn't very diplomatic, said Ms. Kehoe. "He sent a letter to his Japanese counterpart in which he enclosed several white flags, for use in the event that the Japanese did not consent to his requests," she reported.
After months of negotiations, the Japanese agreed to allow access to two ports. Within several years, five countries had signed trade agreements with Japan. Yokohama became a commercial port with accommodations for foreigners whose presence gave rise to an internal Japanese tourist industry fostered by "Yohohama prints," produced between 1860 and 1861, showing the customs of the many foreigners who visited that bustling city.
When the new young Emperor Meiji (1852-1912) was installed in 1868, active engagement with the outside world began in earnest along with the hope that the new civil government would settle Japanese fears of being taken over by foreign powers.
As part of a civilization and enlightenment campaign promoting Westernization, numerous prints showed the Emperor and his family wearing Western clothes and enjoying Western customs, as seen in the example of the Empress and the Emperor with concubine.
Much of the art of the time reflects fast-paced social change. Woodblock prints, which could be produced quickly and distributed widely, show changing perceptions of foreigners and foreignness, both Eastern and Western. One extraordinary image shows "red-skinned" Native Americans bedecked in feathers through the eyes of an artist who had never been to America.
One Yokohama print by Hashimoto Sadahide (1807-1873) produced in 1861, when there were few foreign residents, shows westerners in a famous Yokohama house of entertainment in its most popular red light district.
This image is of particular interest, said Ms. Kehoe, because of its reference to an 11th century book, The Tale of Genji.
Depicting the 19th century version of dinner and a show, it shows Westerners enjoying their meal while watching the "Gankiro," Butterfly Opera. Genji sits with three courtesans and serving girls while several foreigners peer in through the window.
"It's a sophisticated commentary on foreignness, in which the artist has signed himself as "the Chinese guy," said Ms. Kehoe.
The work of another artist besides Sadahide — the figures in foreground were executed by special commission by Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865) — this print involves a degree of double entendre, working on many levels of contrast: background and foreground, inside and outside, old and new, foreign and domestic. It is Ms. Kehoe's exhibition favorite.
In order to preserve the prints from light damage, the show will run only a short period. "Japanese Views of East and West: Imprinting the Other in Meiji Eyes," opened in September and will continue until January 7, 2007.