Tracing the Origins of Yellowface
-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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Japonaise_(painting)#/media/File:Claude_Monet-Madame_Monet_en_costume_japonais.jpg
“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..
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 -
https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3a19319/