Not long ago East was East and West was West, and barely the twain did meet. That division was especially acute for more than two hundred years in Japan, where the Tokugawa government effectively isolated the country from the year 1639, cutting off nearly all contact with the Western world.
Then Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1853 with his threat of American naval might and forced the opening of Japan. A current touring exhibition entitled Yokohama: Prints from Nineteen-Century Japan, which opened last summer at The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., vividly captures those early years of mutual discovery. The show is scheduled to travel to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco next month, then to the Los Angeles Country Museums of Art.
The eighty-five prints in the exhibition are arranged thematically - culled by Sackler curator Ann Yonemura from the collection of retired American diplomat William Leonhart and his wife, who served two tours of duty in post-World War II Japan. A beautifully illustrated catalog written by Yonemura and an edition of Asian Art, a lively quarterly produced by the Sackler, accompany the exhibition.
At a time a when “blockbuster” art exhibitions are the vogue, there is an insidious expectation that art must be “great” to be appreciated. But these charming prints are a delight unto themselves, worth studying both as historical record and as anecdotes of cross-cultural exchange, worth appreciating for their graphic design, bold colors, and frequently sly sense of humor.
Speaking of the Japanese printmakers, Leonhart himself writes in a catalog essay:
Whether their products are in the classical sense fine art . . . they have an enduring hold upon our admiration and affection. An enormously popular art, mass-produced and designed for an emerging middle class, they celebrated a rising democracy, illustrated women in new and independent roles outside their homes, and influenced and altered public attitudes in Japan about the outside world and about Japan itself.
En Masse Arrival
Perry returned in 1854 to negotiate the Treaty of Kanagawa, followed by American diplomat Townsend Harris who negotiated even more concessions from the Japanese. By 1858 four other Western powers - England, France, Russia, and the Netherlands - concluded similar diplomatic and commercial treaties. Officials, soldiers, and merchants of the so-called Five Nations arrived en masse the following year, bringing not only diplomacy and commerce but also new dress and customs, new architecture and technology, new language, and new ways of thinking.
The dramatic transitions of these years were enthusiastically limned by Japanese woodblock printmakers, who were churning out the pop art of their times and constantly on the lookout for fashionable subjects. They fed the enormous appetite of their compatriots for news about these strangers. They also created their own lore when their knowledge was imperfect - as was, understandably, often the case.
Basic misconceptions led to unintentionally hilarious illustrations. In
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