Adored and Mocked: Japonisme and Yellowface
Japan experienced isolation from the rest of the world for over 200 years since the 17th century under the Tokugawa period (1603-1867). Any impressions Americans may have created about Japan in the early 19th century would have come indirectly from China or Holland, countries that had limited interaction with the Japanese. United States Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 expedition to Japan ended the country’s isolation. Perry threatened the Tokogawa Shogunate into a trade agreement with the threat of a naval attack on the port city Nagasaki. The Japanese, due to their years of isolation, had no navy with which to defend themselves, and were forced to agree to the demands of the United States. In 1854, under the Treaty of Kanagawa, Japan permitted trade and opened Japanese ports to merchant ships. Shortly after, Japan had trade treaties with Britain, Holland Russia and France in 1858.
In both North America and Northern Europe, after the treaties of the 19th century that ended Japanese isolation, there began a fascination in all things Japanese. 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 (note - an aesthetic movement that embraced Japanese culture for its artistic value, French term coined in the late nineteenth century to describe the craze for Japanese art and design in the West) began to draw American popular attention. Americans perceived Japan through the lens of Japonisme and Japonaiserie (note - a style in art reflecting Japanese qualities or motifs, also : an object or decoration in this style).
Similarly to the Chinese, Americans' view about Japan and the Japanese came from their commodification and feelings on Japanese decorative arts and objects. Aristocrats enjoyed Japanese ceramics during Japan’s period of isolation, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But a full-fledged Japan craze for Japanese arts and crafts such as prints, pottery, bronzes, china, fans, silks, swords, parasols, and kimonos, increased by Japan’s opening to the West in 1853 and exhibitions at world fairs in Paris, London, and Philadelphia.
Japonisme flourished in both academic and commercial circuits. These Japanese goods had a particularly profound impact on the arts. Most famously is the impact on European artists and the Impressionism movement.
Everyone was going to the famous Paris Exposition- I, too, was gong 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, 1867
The Exposition Universelle in the summer of 1867 was a showcase for international progress. It attracted over ten million people from around the world, from royalty to common citizens. While not officially part of the Exposition, Professor Risley’s Imperial Japanese Troupe arrived to perform for the same audience. Coinciding with the beginnings of the Japonisme movement, Japanese acrobats introduced themselves to the American and European audience. Japanese performers brought a new spectacle diversity to circuses, variety shows and theater.
Japanese acrobat troupes from Japan 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.”
Thomas Dilward (1842-1887) was an actor initially known as Little Tommy in minstrel shows. With the popularity of Japonisme, he took the name Japanese Tommy. He was said to be of Native American and African American ancestry. Dilworth was best known for his acrobatic tumbling, burlesques, dancing and his size as a dwarf. He took his name referencing Tateishi Onojirō Noriyuki, a popular young interpreter who was a member of the Japanese diplomatic embassy that had come to the United States in 1860 to ratify the first commercial treaty between the two countries. Newspapers typically reported on Japanese visitors, and especially on Tateishi, "Tommy" due to his popularity. “Japanese Tommy” performed 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
This cultural prestige for Japan, popularity of Japanese acrobats and Japonisme, would not equate to acceptance of the Japanese people in America, as like the Chinese, they also endured anti-Asian discrimination and violence. “The Japanese were regularly referred to as saffron-colored, copper colored, swarthy, ugly, oily, and small, and the children as “little monkeys.” Even when they were referred to positively , 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.”
On May 11, 1867, an account in the New York Times
“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.”
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.”
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.”
Igorots (Philippine natives) Village - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b27319/
1904 World's Fair: Exhibition of the Igorot People | Asian Americans
link to Igorot PBS video 1904 World’s Fair https://thinktv.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/1904-worlds-fair-exhibition-of-the-igorot-people/asian-americans/
JAPANESE VILLAGE PICTURE
“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.”
Image - https://www.thefanmuseum.org.uk/collections/fan375450 Fan from Japan 1870
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 troupe members as commodities available for purchase.” The comparison clearly displays the dehumanization of the performers for the audience’s pleasure.The American viewers gave themselves the entitlement and permission to impose this critique upon the persons in the guise of appreciation of Japanese art and aesthetics.
YELLOWFACE – PLAYING JAPANESE
-poster 1885 of Mikado production
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mikado_-_Weir_Collection.jpg
The popularity of Japonisme and Japonaiserie fostered the creation of two popular operas, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado in 1885 and Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly in 1904. Both instill fantasized, imagined racial perceptions of the Japanese people and culture. These operas were performed in yellowface - white actors playing Asian-identified characters. The racial interpretation manifested in the performance imparts imaginary ideas of what Japanese meant in everyday life and in the unconscious and conscious minds of the audience. The human-ness and reality of the Japanese person are eliminated.
In 1885, Gilbert & Sullivan created an imaginary, fictional Japan for their comic opera the Mikado with white actors. Setting the opera in a faraway place from Britain, the exotic Japan, allowed Gilbert and Sullivan to satirize British politics and institutions. The costumes, settings and decorations were Japanese. The Mikado takes place in a make believe Japan with stereotypical attitudes, and comical "Japanese" names like "Nanki-Poo" and "Pooh-Bah," Due to its overwhelming popularity, at least 150 companies had productions of the opera playing throughout America and Europe by the end of 1885.
The Mikado is an example of japonaiserie, a term that signals, unlike japonisme, a lack of authenticity and mockery. Both japonaiserie and Japonisme represent a larger combination of orientalism into Western decorative arts and thought. The Mikado transferred the craze for Japanese goods onto the stage with imaginary characters whose Japanese personification was identified with familiar decorative objects such as swords, fans, screens. It disseminated the notion of racial impersonation that relied on the use of objects, songs, and gestures of the opera.
– pic of monet painting, Monet’s La Japonaise
“Our Captious Critic: Gilbert and Sullivan’s New Opera,” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, March 28, 1885
Heavens! why, I know her already! Long before setting foot in Japan, I had met her, on every fan, on every teacup with her silly air, her puffy little face, her tiny eyes, mere gimlet-holes above those expanses of impossible pink and white - Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème
Static human figures depicted on lacquer-trays, screens, plates, or vases, came to actionable human form in the Mikado.
Image - illustration of Mikado characters on stage https://review.gale.com/2019/11/22/the-mikado-cultural-appropriation-or-satire/
In the opening lyrics of Mikado, the characters announce that they are indeed the same as the figures on decorative arts :
If you want to know who we are,
We are gentlemen of Japan;
On many a vase and jar—
On many a screen and fan,
We figure in lively paint:
Our attitude’s queer and quaint—
You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!
As Toshio Yokoyama suggests, the 1880s marks a shift in attitudes toward Japan whereby “from about 1880, the image of an unreal Japan became firmly established and began to exert a broader influence.” Second, the late nineteenth-century shift into mass consumer culture increasingly makes commodity fetishism a part of everyday life.”
Yellowface is a transparent disguise in which racial impersonation is performed simply by picking up the right objects. Toys, dolls, Kimonos, swords, and fans became common elements of masquerades for private photography sessions and parties. Yuko Matsukawa has noted, “yellowface practices were spread by advertising as well as by performances of the opera.” Many of these images were copied directly from cabinet photographs of the U.S. Mikado production with no racial representation. Japan had become an invention of one’s creation, no real Japanese representations or bodies, just things. This is a defining property of commodity fetishism. The white performers of yellowface step in as possessors of the objects and lead the fantasy the things represent, an unabashedly racial performance.
-popularity to dress children
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MdtnMikado.jpg
Advertisement in newspaper for opera in Marshal, TX 1897 - shows widespread popularity
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/76323279/
The success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s make-believe world in their comical Mikado opera initiated yellow facing as an acceptable form for Europeans and Americans to express themselves in society.The popularity of Japonaiserie crossed over to masquerading and playing Japanese in every day life. Americans and Europeans on trend with Japanese-ness, dressed up in “kimonas” to liven up their leisure lives. Japanese femininity enhanced white people’s personal lives on a very public level as the aesthetic movement popularized in America. The masquerades provided fantasy to enhance their intimate and leisure lives while staying securely white. Many white women who bought fancy kimonos or dressed for Japanese-themed tea parties, saw themselves to be worldly and cultured in their society..
#/media/File:Claude_Monet-Madame_Monet_en_costume_japonais.jpg){kind=link}
https://chinasage.info/chinoiserie.htm
The Mikado generated many parodies. Soon after the American production opened, Thatcher, Primrose, and West Minstrels began a run of The Mick-ah-do on November 2, 1885 and other minstrel shows followed to profit from the opera’s popularity. The Black Mikado later performed that year into 1886.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black-mikado.jpg Black Mikado album cover 1886
The perceptions and references to The Mikado in daily life convey the widespread popular characterization and belief on living Japanese persons. In this route book, to describe an accident to a Japanese performer , they are referenced by a character from the Mikado, Nanki Poo, even though there was no performance of the Mikado listed in the circus’ season.
https://digital.library.illinoisstate.edu/digital/collection/p15990coll5/id/1481/rec/2
MADAMA BUTTERFLY OPERA YELLOW FACE
Giacomo Puccini produced the opera Madama Butterfly during the Japonaiserie craze in Europe and United States in 1905. There were multiple versions of the narrative before Puccini’s opera’ narrative, all overwhelmingly popular and successful. In all variations, the story parallels the thoughts of the period, Western imperialism and the dominant power over the East, in particular in these stories, Japan. Specifically, it reinforces the idea of the Asian person as an outsider, the consumption and disposal of the Asian female, acceptable and strengthened by Western government policies and laws. The basic premise in all is the doomed relationship of a Western man and a Japanese woman. First was Madame Chrysanthemum 1885 by French writer Pierre Loti, Madame Butterfly 1898 by American lawyer and writer John Luther Long, Madame Butterfly 1900 a play based on Long’s story, Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly 1904, all variations were very popular. Puccini’s opera still continues to be popular and performed today. These stories were produced at a period of growth for the US and Western imperial expansion into the exotic Pacific. The Western expansion and dominance most likely assisted in garnering praise and success for the opera.
image - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.34698/
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly tells the tragic story of a Japanese bride, Chou-Chou-San, in nineteenth-century Japan who is married and abandoned by her American husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton. In the end, the bride commits suicide. The imaginary figure of Cho-Cho-San reflects the feminization of Asian nations ready for conquest and Pinkerton represents masculine dominance of the US military. In the story, Pinkerton is stationed at the same city Nagasaki that US Commodore Matthew Perry threatened to attack if Japan did not open their ports to the US in 1853.The opera also acts as the continued transmission of exclusion-era ideas about Asian (Japanese) racial difference. The story begins with a dispute about the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s family from Pinkerton’s home. This argument reflects the legislative debates about Asian exclusion occurring in both federal and state legislatures and courtrooms at the turn of the century. It is an example of a place where law and performance blend together, continuing to contribute to the racialization of Asian immigrants as outside the law and deserving of a place outside the nation. Ong suggests the opera continues to exert significant power in the process of representing collective thinking and collective fantasies about Asian (and Asian American) racial differences. Madama Butterfly has contributed significantly to the knowledge and shaping of cultural stereotypes of Asian racial difference in US law and Asian femininity.
Transitory changing views - according to the government’s agenda
Competition for jobs and a depression in the 1870s all led to a racist backlash against the Chinese. Eventually Chinese immigration was ended with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Widespread anti-Chinese attitudes and violence led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, an immigration act that excluded a group of people explicitly on the basis of race or ethnicity. The Chinese American population dropped soon after, and by the 1890s America’s widespread anti-Chinese sentiment had paused.
During the 1880-1890s, the Japanese personified feminine civility and artistic refinement. By 1900, the representations would switch as the Chinese became civilized, educated men who valued education and the Japanese became aggressive fighting entities. The sentiments changed as the Japanese population grew, fear of competition for jobs and agricultural land. Also contributing was the fear of Japan’s rise as an international military power, as they defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The United States government now viewed Japan as a threat and aggressive imperial Asiatic nation over trade and territorial agreements.
Referenced in 1912 Girl at Gate film a Japanese spy is depicted as the domestic version of the “Yellow Peril.” A white character states that
the Japanese are “bright alright but they don’t remain servants!” and “There’s only one thing worse than a Jap!...another Jap.”
The same publications that had not so long ago spoken positively about the Japanese now did the exact opposite. Japanese men now “invaded” U.S. farmland with no moral integrity, “poor whites” would be robbed of financial resources to build families. Anxiety was constructed around the “invading horde of brown men” invading on California’s “rapidly vanishing fertile soil.” The Japanese had “cunningly” tricked Americans with their “politeness”. The Gentlemen’s Agreement wrongly allowed them to bring “their women” into California for “propagation.” An article on the Alien Land Law (forbidding "all aliens ineligible for citizenship" from owning land). This law targeted Japanese who were becoming successful farmers. This law later expanded to include a prohibition on leasing land as well, and twelve other states created similar laws. The shift now was to criminalize Japanese men in the media.
Image - 1921- Oct. 14 Two performances. Japanese are excluded from Porterville, notice being posted on lot at city limits as follows: "Porterville is a White Man's Town. No Japanese Wanted." https://digital.library.illinoisstate.edu/digital/collection/p15990coll5/id/7761/rec/1
By the time World War II broke out, the Japanese faced increasing negative treatment, yet a shift had occurred, the Chinese were treated more positively. To suit the US government’s agenda to keep China as an ally in the war, President Roosevelt’s administration quickly worked to mend and improve the perceptions of Chinese Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed on December 17, 1943.This was really a gesture as many aspects of the exclusion law were still in place.The law was not fully dismantled until 1965 during the Civil Rights era. Only 105 Chinese were allowed to enter the United States a year. However with the repeal, Chinese already in America were now allowed to become naturalized citizens if they met the requirements.
However, the treatment of the Japanese increasingly worsened and created an ethnic divide with the Chinese. After the Pearl Harbor bombing, President Roosevelt enacted an Executive Order which placed any person of Japanese descent on the West Coast into internment camps.
Image -