Agency through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875-1925

Adored and Mocked: Japonisme in American Culture

After treaties of the 19th century ended Japanese isolation, a fascination began in all things Japanese in both North America and Europe. The opening of the ports fostered an active market in screens, fans, vases, kimonos and other Japanese goods. Few Americans had a clear understanding of Japanese culture just as Japonisme began to draw popular attention. Europeans and Americans alike perceived Japan through the lens of Japonisme and Japonaiserie .41

Everyone was going to the famous Paris Exposition- I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition…If I met a dozen individuals…who were not going to Europe shortly, I have no distinct remembrance of it now. 
– Mark Twain, 186742

The Exposition Universelle in 1867 was a showcase for international progress and attracted over ten million people all around the world from royalty to common citizens. Acrobats and jugglers also traveled from Japan to perform for the Exposition's crowds. Coinciding with the beginnings of Japonisme, Japanese acrobats and peformers introduced themselves to the Western audience and brought a new spectacle diversity to the entertainment industry.43Japanese acrobat troupes grew very popular in circuses and variety shows in the 1860s. Blackface minstrelsy also took part in the popularity of Japanese acrobatics, either adding actual Japanese troupes or performed by their blackface imitators to the minstrel performance. Minstrel companies advertised this new act as “jap-oh-knees”, “The Flying Black Japs” or the single word “Jap.”44

Thomas Dilward  (1842-1887) was an actor initially known as Little Tommy in minstrel shows, but with the popularity of Japonisme, changed the name to Japanese Tommy. He was reported to be of Native American and African American ancestry. His name referenced Tateishi "Tommy" Onojirō Noriyuki, an admired young interpreter for the Japanese diplomatic embassy, who was frequently reported in the newspapers. Japanese Tommy presented in acts such as the “Japanese Ballet” with slapstick humor. Dilworth performed with white minstrel troupes and was one of the only two African American men to do so before the Civil War.45

This cultural prestige for Japan, novelty of Japanese acrobats and Japonisme would not equate to acceptance of Japanese persons in America; like the Chinese, they also endured anti-Asian discrimination and violence.46 “The Japanese were regularly referred to as saffron-colored, copper colored, swarthy, ugly, oily, and small, and the children as 'little monkeys.' If referred to postively, it was often with a condescending type of cultural humor. Reporters reflected their readers’ fear of and disdain for many aspects of Asian culture, including food, dress, fashion, and music.”47

An account in the New York Times, May 11, 1867:

On the whole, it can’t be nice to be a Jap. Setting aside the hari-kari business, and the color and the hair and the grease and the prevailing notions in regard to clothing, there are insuperable objections connected with their ideas of privacy – brother, sister, another man and wife, a third man and two boys, all sleeping in a little box for a room – their tastes in food, their habits of squatting, their infernal music, and all that sort of thing…which would forever interfere with the naturalization of a genuine Yankee into a regular-built Jap. These specimens are civil, quiet, orderly; kind and peaceable- - they certainly are wonderful in their line of art but beyond that nothing.48

The Chinese American population dropped soon after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. “With the rise of Japanese immigrants, studies on race presume that contempt for Chinese transposed itself onto the Japanese as the new “Oriental.” Anti-Chinese sentiment, too, had originally been a transference of anti-Black sentiment in the wake of emancipation. White supremacists with little creativity had simply overlaid old hatreds onto new people.”49 


Commercial Orientalism and Commodified Bodies

During this period, exhibits, circuses, theaters, such as the Exposition Universelle in 1867, and the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair  (Louisiana Purchase Exposition) promoted the commodity of racialized bodies. These fairs offered the middle classes a commercial orientalism, Asian objects and people for consumption.


Much in the way aristocrats and patricians engaged in travel writing, the urban middle classes could now consume a visual array of commercial 'edifying curiosities' to discover their own personal relationship to other cultures, peoples, and parts of the world. To survey a panorama of China, a miniature of a primitive village, or a living animal or exoticized human on display or to witness an “oriental conjuror” all evoked a sense of wonderment and situated one’s place in the world.50







In the performance of The Geisha and the Knight by the Kawakami Troupe in 1899, reviews reported a conversation between two women, "she looks just like a picture on a fan," and “describing the Kawakamis as kakemono (wall hangings) come alive or as animated figurines, thus objectifying the actors as commodities available for purchase.”51The comparison clearly displays the dehumanization of the performers for the audience’s pleasure. The viewers allowed themselves permission to impose this critique upon persons in the guise of appreciation of Japanese art and aesthetics.







 

Japanese-ness was associated with commodity objects, and how the performance of Asian-ness by white female bodies often erased or commodified actual Asian women.52

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