Sueyoshi, Amy. "A Peculiar Obsession: The Chinese and Japanese Problem in the “International City"
1 2021-04-29T06:23:03-07:00 Angela Yon 72f2fd7a28c88ceeba2adcf2c04fee469904c6f1 38294 3 Citation page plain 2021-04-29T09:58:25-07:00 Angela Yon 72f2fd7a28c88ceeba2adcf2c04fee469904c6f1Pages cited: 15, 17, 30
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Afong Moy: The Museum and Commercialization of Chinese Bodies
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Americans such as George Washington and Phineas T. Barnum had embraced Chinese things and ideas to “suit their own agendas”8
Afong Moy – Commerical Orientalism
Due to America’s demand of Chinese goods, Captain Obear brought the first known Chinese woman Afong Moy aboard his ship the Washington to the United States as valuable cargo in 1834.9Merchants Francis and Nathaniel G. Carnes with Captain Benjamin Obear acquired Afong Moy from Guangzhou, China as a marketing strategy to exhibit her in order to help sell Chinese decorative merchandise goods to an eager American middle class. She was sold to serve as an advertising accoutrement alongside Chinese wares. The story is not clear due to China’s insulation and the confinement of Chinese women at the time - newspaper accounts and promotional materials explain that Obear reached an agreement with Afong Moy's “distinguished citizen" father in Guangzhou, China "residing in the suburbs of Canton (Guangzhou)." Obear received "large sums of money," from Moy's father to take her out of the country with the promise to bring his daughter home on the captain's next voyage to Guangzhou. The agreement specified Afong Moy would be away from China for about two years.10 However, there is no historical record that Afong Moy ever returned to China.
The image of the Chinese woman who was hidden from society equated to fantasy notions and exotic ideas from chinoiserie objects into Americans' collective consciousness. In patrician orientalism, the perceived Orient was one of exoticism, dignity, and revered history.11 The Carnes took advantage of this perception and promoted her beauty with a focus on her visual difference - her bound feet**(text note about bound feet) and clothing to market their goods. They established her as a lady of prominent rank.12
The Carneses opened a public exhibition displaying ancient Chinese artifacts alongside Afong Moy with everyday Chinese imports to market them to the middle class. In the accompanying catalogue they featured an exotic personification of Afong Moy. Her fame quickly spread with the US tour not only through her presentations but also in newspaper articles, children’s magazines and even in poems.13
The positioning of Afong Moy on a raised platform, seated in a prominent chair, and under a large canopy, indicated a person of royalty and prestige. This visual messaging encouraged visitors to attend the Chinese exhibit to view such a notable figure. American Sentinel, Philadelphia, February 17, 1835.14
Human exhibit appearances were common as amusements and curiosities during the 19th century. Moy's appearances are not especially different in the context of other human exhibits of the time. In 1810 Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, one of the "Hottentot Venus," was put on display in Europe. In the US, Moy's contemporaries included Chang and Eng Bunker, known as the Siamese Twins, (Chinese conjoined twins brought to the United States from Thailand in 1829 by a British merchant), Black Hawk, a warrior and leader of the Sauk Tribe, and Joice Heth, an African-American slave woman who was billed as George Washington's wet nurse and hence the oldest living woman.15
P. T. Barnum in 1835 featured the display of an elderly Black woman named Joice Heth, who he claimed was the 161-year-old enslaved former nurse of George Washington, publicizing her as “The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World.” He claimed doctors “examined this Living skeleton and the documents accompanying her, and all invariably pronounce her to be as represented 161 years of age!” This questionable verification was a common strategy later used by Barnum to assure the public of his subject’s authenticity but also to lure audiences to pay admission to view and judge the genuineness of the spectacle for themselves.16Polygenesis and the “American School” of ethnology was very popular among naturalists, anatomists, and ethnographers with the shared belief: humans were composed of five identified races of humankind - Ethiopian (i.e., African), Native American, Caucasian, Malay, and Mongolian, thus 5 separate species. Polygenesis was most widespread during this period in the 19th century.17
The visual ordering and hierarchy of racial identity contributed a profitable piece in commercializing the spectacle.18 This is noticeable in the descriptions of persons on display such as Afong Moy in the identification of her as "a specimen of oriental magnificence." The description below on the juxtaposition of Chinese women's bound feet and African women's calves in the public's imagination reduces them to body parts. The lioness reduces Afong Moy to an animal. Science and spectacle were interdependent activities.19
“Her ladyship has been imported expressly as a 'lioness,' for exhibition. The feet of the Chinese are fair, are the points of beauty, as the calf of the leg is with the belles of Africa" -New Hampshire Patriot, November 24, 183420
Merchant Philip Hone in his description of Afong Moy’s 1834 appearance described her as a figure on a Chinese decorative object with no intellect:
“Her appearance is exactly the same as the figures on tea chests a large Head, small features and a countenance devoid of expression . . . from want of Education . . . she is deficient in ideas.”21
The association of Afong Moy with an inert image on a tea chest was very common. Most Americans envisioned the Chinese from illustrations on their tea chests, china ware, fans, lacquer, or wallpaper.22Men in the audience tended to obsess on her small feet, as “anatomical fascination, moral disgust, or erotic pleasure.” Women were intrigued with her feet, but the superficial Chinese home furnishings and decorative objects also drew them. Men and women both intently consumed her performance but for very different reasons.23
One writer was positively enamored by Afong Moy:“At length her ladyship . . . presented herself in the rich costume of a Chinese lady—an outward mantle of blue silk, sumptuously embroidered, and yellow silk pantalets from beneath the ample folds of which peeped her tiny little feet, not over four inches in length. . . . Her head has a profusion of jet black hair, combed upward from her fine forehead and brunette temples, and filled on the top with bouquets of artificial flowers and large gold pins, which dress we suppose will be henceforward quite the ton. . . . Her features are pleasing, her forehead high and protuberant, and her face round and full with languishing black eyes placed with the peculiar obliquity of the outer angle, which characterizes the Mongolian variety of the human race. . . . She then walked without seeming difficulty to her cushioned chair . . . and there sat in . . . quiet repose for us to gaze at.”24
It was odd "to find a mainstream newspaper in the 1830s offering this much graphic description of a young female form. Of course, he could justify his suspiciously thorough physical description by pointing out that the extreme rarity of a Chinese person in America—and a lady, no less— demanded that extreme attention be paid to detail. Despite his scientific-seeming insight that the ‘peculiar obliquity’ of her eyes ‘characterizes the Mongolian variety of the human race,’ his interest in the Chinese Lady was almost certainly erotic in nature. Yet by camouflaging his mildly pornographic description in the garb of ethnographic observation, he could elude moral censorship.”25
Afong Moy functioned simultaneously as entertainment and enlightenment. The audience visually consumed her for their own thoughts and wants. They equated her presence to the Chinese decorative objects they bought for their purpose and possessions.
CHINESE MUSEUM - CHANGING PERCEPTIONS
Following the lucrative success of the Carnes and Obear’s exhibition of Afong Moy with her images and catalog publications to sell Chinese goods, trader Nathaniel Dunn published Ten Thousand Chinese Things in 1838 to accompany the opening of his Chinese Museum in Philadelphia. In 1845 John R. Peters printed a descriptive catalog for his Boston Chinese Museum. The fact that the Boston Chinese Museum’s opening occurred shortly after the 1844 Treaty of Wangshia signing**(add note America gained the right to trade in Chinese ports, and secured profitable additional legal rights inside China) by members of the treaty’s mission indicate its political agenda to promote trade with China. The museum contributed imaginary narrative fantasies and aggrandizement of China to promote Chinese commodification under the guise of cultural education.26
The objects shown in the museum similarly projected the same notion of royalty and prestige fantasy that Afong Moy exhibited in her presentations. The refreshed market of Chinese goods catered to the interests of American middle-class consumers. With the new treaty, providing access to objects and wares to a much larger population was now possible than in the past.27
Over 400 paintings in oil and watercolors filled the walls of the galleries, portraits of famous Canton merchants, floral paintings, and scrolls of Buddhist deities. The message projected the idea, “the Chinese had achieved a high level of cultural, if not artistic, production that clearly raised them above the primitive.” The museum contained porcelain, musical instruments, everyday material goods, and life-size wax sculptures of Chinese figures robed in imperial dress. The owners also included humans, two Cantonese men, Le-Kaw-hing and T'sow-Chaoong. They dressed in "native costume" and served as interpreters, played instruments, sang and demonstrated calligraphy.28
The museum was well received and attracted many visitors. The museum relocated to New York City and after fifteen months, P.T. Barnum, the famed promoter of difference, took over the museum in April 1850. He installed a Chinese lady, Pwan-Ye-Koo with bound two-and-a-half- inch feet in the "Chinese Family.” The act drew crowds and went on tour, while the museum later closed.29 This act held its own controversy on the origins of the performers, as it was with Joice Heth. Barnum had reported the family arrived on the vessel Ianthe from Guangzhou in April 1850, however none of the family members were on the Ianthe’s passenger list. It was reported that Pwan-Ye-Koo was born in New York City and the child of a Chinese father and Caucasian mother and reported in the newspapers. An observer also overheard Pwan-Ye-Koo speaking in a “low Yankee slang.”30 Furthermore, Soo-Chune, who was a musician with the family, had actually arrived in Boston six years before 1850 and worked as a musical performer alongside T’sow Chaoong at the Boston Chinese Museum under the name of Le-Kaw-hing. This may all be very plausible. Chinese and Chinese Americans in the 1850s had limited options for employment, but the theatrical arts were open to them. Both Chinese and American-born men and women presented their racial differences and lived and worked under terrible conditions.31Barnum knew the Chinese Family attraction would work, as he had already profited from the commercial market for Orientalist exhibitions a few years earlier. In 1847 the presence of the Chinese junk Keying from Hong Kong arrived in the port of New York that welcomed visitors for twenty-five cents to view Chinese objects in glass cases filled with specimens of “almost everything produced or used in the Chinese empire.” The Keying fostered commercial orientalism.32 Barnum jumped on the opportunity to bring Afong Moy back to the public eye, thirteen years after her initial arrival. However, for Afong Moy’s return, Barnum promoted her identity much differently than in the 1830s.The Keying’s public promotional pamphlet described the Chinese people as “false and faithless, trifling and shameless.”33
From this period until the early 1850s, Afong Moy performed under contract with Barnum. She shared the exhibition space with another Barnum performer, Charles Stratton, known as Tom Thumb, the famed American dwarf for several years. Their promotional pamphlet widely strays from the 1830s portrayal of Afong Moy and the Chinese with connections of enlightenment, royalty and prestige. Instead the description claimed “’her appetite for fancy goods, finery, and gold had induced her to escape China with her ‘advisors’ for the riches of America.’ According to the account, the potential for wealth, as well as a desire for fame in America, meant more to her than family, religion, or country. In this explanation, the volition to leave China came from Afong Moy herself, rather than from the American merchants. In this way, it absolved Americans from any wrongdoing.”34
The pamphlet also described Afong Moy as “vain, conceited, prideful, and shallow. She “reads little or nothing, as a very limited degree of education is bestowed on women in China, a few accomplishments making up the sum total of their intellectual training.”35
The commentary reinforced stereotypes of China and the Chinese. This unfavorable depiction of Afong Moy differs from the admirable depiction of Tom Thumb with his large personas of Frederick the Great and Napoleon. The text describes Tom Thumb with worthy qualities of politeness, humor and wit. This intentional comparison with Tom Thumb seemingly mocked Afong Moy and furthered the affirmation of the West’s superiority over the backward inferiority of China and the East.”36
The perception of Afong Moy with the Chinese took a negative turn not only because of P.T. Barnum’s management, but also due to the aftereffects of the Opium War and the increasing competitive labor climate in the country. While the United States did not participate in the Opium War (1839-1842, 1856-1860), the press monitored and reported the events. Before the war, Americans perceived China as a powerful nation and long-standing civilization. However, the newspapers reported quite the opposite about China in the coverage of the Opium War battles. The smaller, but technologically progressive British military advanced themselves successfully in naval conflicts against the outdated Chinese military. As a consequence, the British demanded and forced China to open four additional treaty ports and cede Hong Kong and smaller islands to Britain. The press influenced Americans to lower their opinions on China. Americans now perceived the West as the stronger, dominant power over the rearward Eastern Orient.”37 Around the same time, the number of Chinese immigrants looking for economic opportunities along the West Coast increased in the late 1840s due to possible discovery of California gold and the rise of the contract labor system. The Chinese labor populations were steadily increasing and American resentment started to form over job competition.38 This popular derogatory poem typified the new sentiment of mockery towards the Chinese in 1845:
“Mandarins with yellow buttons, handing you conserves of snails; Smart young men about Canton in Nankeen tights and peacocks' tails. With many rare and dreadful dainties, kitten cutlets, puppy pies; Birds nest soup which (so convenient!) every bush around supplies.”39
With these new perceptions on China, the public attitudes toward Afong Moy had declined. Afong Moy and the Chinese no longer represented prestige, but illogical, undemocratic, and backward ideas. Disdainful and mocking opinions with negative characterizations in the press about her and the Chinese became more common. To Americans, the stark differences Afong Moy now exhibited about the East and West proved not a novel curiosity, but demonstrative of America’s advanced superiority over China’s ancient inferiority.”40
RACIAL AND PHYSICAL DIFFERENCE
“Barnum’s shows exhibits combined the fetishism of racial difference and physical abnormality.”41Barnum commonly illustrated his subjects’ racial inferiority through the juxtaposition of performers. By doing so, he promoted racist and othering ideas onto the masses, as already constructed in printed discourse on racialized bodies of the period. Barnum exhibited his performers as objects to be commodified by the audience; he did not view them as persons, but specimens without any intellectual ability who fit his fabricated racial categorizations for profit.42This view changed with the presentation of two Chinese performers, Chang (Chang Yu Sing, Chang Woo Gow) the Giant and Che Mah, the Chinese Dwarf, in the early 1880s. Typical performances of Chang illustrated what Robert Bogdan has identified as the aggrandized mode. This aggrandizement emphasized the performer’s cultural or intellectual achievements rather than the physical abnormality.”43
A Barnum advertisement described Chang as "the Chinese Giant, not the ogre of Fairy Tales, but [a]Gentleman, Scholar and Linguist-the tallest man in the world."
A refined and wise Chinese person did not fit the popular American perception of the Chinese in the 1880s, and would have appeared threatening. In 1882 Congress passed the Exclusion Act, prohibiting immigration of Chinese laborers and the immediate years leading up to it, anti-Chinese sentiment and violence were rampant. To tarnish Chang’s image of kindness and intelligence, Barnum promoted him juxtaposed to another performer, Che Mah, the Chinese Dwarf.”44
Che Mah “is cunning, crafty and a diplomat, whose tact and ingenuity have been a source of great annoyance and bloodshed to his government. In Western China, on account of his diminutive physique and superior erudition, he became an oracle and was WORSHIPED AND SET UP AS A GOD! whose commands became law among his fellow men. Recognizing the threat represented by Che Mah's power, the emperor declared him a rebel and sent an army against him.”45
Barnum labeled Che Mah as a cunning, untrusting and dangerous Chinese man. The message of Che Mah with the Chinese reinforced the current anti-Chinese sentiment: the Chinese could not be trusted and with any agency, they will become dangerous. While the years following 1881, the circus still promoted Chang’s intellectual traits, it stressed more dominantly his race and physical differences. At an 1884 Ethnological Congress he was exhibited as "The Goliath of His Race and the Tallest Giant Alive" and led the circus opening with the Ethnological Congress into the big top.”46
Chang also led the inaugural procession for the Barnum Circus in 1886, as seen in the Barnum Budget or Tent Topics of The Season of 1886 route book:
Barnum sensationalized and reduced his performers to their race and body, deliberately strengthening notions of white supremacy to the audience. Chang commanded top dollar of the time from Barnum for his performances, at $500 a month.”47 Chang recognized his valuable attraction in circuses and exhibitions and it is most likely he was aware of Barnum’s tactics. However, it did not deter him from the industry. Even at retirement, he returned to the circus as a guest in London, as reported in the Gleanings at Olympia During the Winter Season of 1889-90, in London, England, with P. T. Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth route book:
The negative perception of the Chinese increasingly grew more widespread within America’s popular culture in the concluding half of 19th century well into the 20th century, not only projected through the circus, but in all forms of entertainment and media of the time. -
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Adored and Mocked: Japonisme in American Culture
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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 began to draw American popular attention. Americans perceived Japan through the lens of Japonisme and Japonaiserie .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.51Japonisme 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.56This 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.
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Tracing the Origins of Yellowface
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Yellowface: Playing Japanese
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.59 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 1885.60
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.61
“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 Chrysanthème62
Static human figures depicted on lacquer-trays, screens, plates, or vases, came to actionable human form in the Mikado.
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!63
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.”64
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.64
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.65
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 1886.66
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.
Madama Butterfly: Yellowface in the Opera
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.
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.67
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.68
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.69
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.”70
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.71
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.72
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.