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

Tracing the Origins of Yellowface


Japonisme and Japonaiserie fueled the creation of two admired operas, Gilbert & Sullivan’s The 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 and continue in present day due to the operas' popularity.  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 humanness and reality of the Japanese person are eliminated in these creations.53  
 

The Mikado - Playing Japanese and Yellowface

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 completely 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 the opera's wide acclaim and positive critical reception, at least 150 companies produced the opera to play throughout America and Europe by the end of 1885.54

 The Mikado is an example of Japonaiserie, a term that signals, unlike Japonisme, a lack of authenticity. Both Japonaiserie and Japonisme represent a larger combination of orientalism into Western decorative arts and thought. The Mikado shifted the desire for Japanese goods onto the stage with imaginary Japanese characters personified with decorative objects such as swords, fans, and screens. It disseminated the notion of racial impersonation with the use of objects, gestures and songs of the opera.55

In “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 cheeks.
- Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthème56


 



The static human figures depicted on lacquer trays, screens, plates, and vases became actionable humans in the opera.

In the opening lyrics of The Mikado, the characters announce:

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!57








 

The 1880s marks a shift in attitudes toward Japan where the image of an unreal Japan became firmly established and began to exert a broader influence. The late 19th century shift into a 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. 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. 58 







The success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s make-believe world in their comical opera initiated yellowfacing as an acceptable expression in society for Europeans and Americans. Japonaiserie crossed over to masquerading and playing Japanese in every day life. They socially dressed up in kimonos for entertainment as the aesthetic movement spread. "White women who bought fancy kimonos or dressed for Japanese-themed tea parties gained cultural capital as worldly women."59

 


The Mikado generated many parodies. Soon after the American production opened, Thatcher, Primrose, & West's Minstrels began a run of The Mick-ah-do on November 2, 1885 and other minstrel shows followed to profit from the opera’s fame. The Black Mikado later performed that year into 1886.60

The perceptions and references to The Mikado in daily life conveyed the widespread popular characterization and belief on real living Japanese persons. In this circus route book, the writer describes a Japanese circus performer not by his chosen name but as Nanki Poo, a character from The Mikado, yet there is no reference to a performance of the opera for the circus.

Madama Butterfly - Yellowface Prevailing

Madama Butterfly the opera by Giacomo Puccini first premiered in the US on February 11, 1907 in New York City. Three successful and well-received variations of the story from 1885-1900 existed prior to Puccini's creation. First was Madame Chrysanthemum in 1885 by French writer Pierre Loti; Madame Butterfly in 1898 by American lawyer and writer John Luther Long; and Madame Butterfly in 1900, a play production based on Long’s story. The plot involves the doomed relationship between a Western man and a Japanese woman and parallels the thoughts of the period, Western imperialism and dominance over the East, Japan specifically. The narrative reinforced the idea of the Asian person as an outsider and the consumption and disposal of the Asian female person; all acceptable and strengthened by Western government policies and laws of the period. Film versions followed after Puccini’s opera and it still continues to be popular and performed today.61

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly tells the tragic story of a Japanese bride, Chou-Chou-San who is married and abandoned by her American husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton in 19th century Japan. In the end, the bride commits suicide. Pinkerton is stationed at the same city Nagasaki that US Commodore Matthew Perry threatened to attack if Japan did not open their ports in 1853. Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues the opera also communicates exclusion-era ideas about Asian racial difference. The story involves the exclusion of Cho-Cho-San’s family from Pinkerton’s home. Chambers-Letson suggests this scene reflects the debates about Asian exclusion occurring in both federal and state courts at the turn of the twentieth century. The opera is an example of a place where law and performance blend together to promote the racialization of Asian immigrants as outsiders of the law and the nation. Aihwa Ong suggests the opera continues to contribute greatly to the collective thought about Asian and Asian American racial differences. Madama Butterfly has played a significant role in the shaping of cultural stereotypes of Asian races in US law and Asian feminineness.62

Changing Perceptions

The overwhelming success for the fantasized portrayals of the Japanese in The Mikado and Madama Butterfly ironically coincided with the rising anti-Japanese attitudes in America. While these two operas indicated the acceptance of "Japanese" stories and characters during this period, the opposite proved true for the human Japanese person living outside of this imagined and contained world.

Similarly to the Chinese, Japanese sentiments changed as their population grew due to 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 an aggressive imperial nation over trade and territorial agreements.63

In the 1912 film, Girl at Gate 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.”64

The same journals that had previously spoken favorably of Japanese masculinity now did the opposite. As Japanese men “invaded” U.S. farmland with little moral integrity, “poor whites” would be robbed of their financial resources to build families—the foundation of American morality. Many grew anxious about the “invading horde of brown men” who encroached on California’s “rapidly vanishing fertile soil.” Japanese “politeness” had deceived Americans. They had “cunningly” devised ways, such as the Gentlemen’s Agreement, to bring “their women” into California for “propagation.” An article on the Alien Land Law illuminated the distinct shift to villainize Japanese men in mainstream print.65



By the time World War II broke out, the Japanese faced heightened negative treatment but the Chinese now 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 improve the perceptions of Chinese Americans and the Chinese Exclusion Act was partially repealed on December 17, 1943.66 Simultaneously as the country's treatment on the Japanese worsened a racial divide developed 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.67 

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