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).⁵⁰

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.⁵¹

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.⁵²

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, 1867⁵³

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.⁵⁴

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.”⁵⁵

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.⁵⁶

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.⁵⁷ “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.”⁵⁸

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.”⁵⁹

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.”⁶⁰

 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.”⁶¹

“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.”⁶²
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.”⁶³The 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.