Hook or Fantasy?

The inside cover of a book serves both as an advertisement (especially with Promenades Japonaises, where the literal cover lacks even the title) and as a quick synthesis, or even a preview, of what lies within. Determining which aspects serve which purpose, however, is difficult.

Regamey’s illustration for the inside cover of Promenades Japonaises is an idealized image of Japan. Mount Fuji looms in the distance, a Japanese-looking tree leans off a mountaintop, and menial laborers in Oriental clothing gaze out at the landscape, awestruck. The viewer both admires the natural beauty of Japan and observes the small workers in the foreground.

In this illustration Regamey portrays a fictionalized, pre-industrial image of Japan. By 1876, though life remained much the same as before the Restoration for many Japanese, this sort of uninhabited, purely natural landscape would have been impossible to find. Most of all, the lack of a truly native population suggests a fanciful, undeveloped land almost yearning for exploration. The workers at the bottom are deliberately small in order to illustrate their relative unimportance compared to the greatness of 'uncivilized' nature, and they seem just as awestruck by the panorama as the viewer, suggesting their unfamiliarity with, or lack of appreciation for, their own country. There are no signs of modern civilization, or even life, and the image is dominated by the looming presence of Mount Fuji, a symbol of spiritual and traditional Japanese-ness.

Though Regamey’s drawing is idealized, none of the other drawings in the book display the same sort of artistic license: an entrance to a shrine, a particular person the pair met, etc., all carefully rendered. Did Guimet select this picture because of its exotic beauty, almost as a way of attracting a readership that had previously subsisted only on that sort of Orientalist fantasy? The picture is certainly symbolic, in that the viewer feels as though Japan is open before them. The hills on both sides in the foreground serve to frame the image of Mount Fuji, and the path between them is almost one that the viewer is encouraged to follow. As an advertisement, this inside cover draws the reader into the text by drawing the reader ‘into’ Japan.

But Guimet was also an idealist, particularly when it came to art. He studied the traditional Japanese arts because he saw them as more 'Japanese' than the contemporary Western-influenced art. He looked to Buddhism and Shinto to describe the 'religion' of Japan, rather than the national identity being developed through the national education system. Guimet was searching for the Japan of his childhood, the exotic Japan of Western fantasy. Untouched by Western civilization, or even civilization at all, Japan was a place to be explored, a pristine object to be preserved. Though hints of the changes come out through the text, the images, and this one in particular, served to reinforce a romanticized version of Japan's beauty and mysteriousness.