Jessica Yamada: Hairy Perry
Hairy Perry: Japan and the Southern Barbarians
In 1854, the year after Commodore Perry steamed into Edo Bay with several hulking gunships and pleasantly asked Japan to open its ports, a kawaraban (broadsheet) portrait of the great man himself was printed. Allegedly, it is “A true likeness of the commanding officer from the Republic of North America” – a caption which from the outset inspires skepticism.[1] Additionally, Perry is pictured with alarming amounts of facial hair, an elongated nose and ears, and other assorted distorted features. Meanwhile, an 1856 photo of Commodore Perry depicts him as clean-shaven and much less grotesque.[2] Why the disparities?
Perry’s expedition was not the first time the Japanese had interacted with Europeans – or rather, the “southern barbarians,” but after the institution of the sakoku (closed country) policy, Westerners were something of a mystery. Naturally, then, the Japanese used their imaginations to fill the dearth of knowledge, giving rise to “a subculture of fabulous stories about people inhabiting faraway places…figures with multiple arms and legs, people with huge holes running through their upper bodies, semi-human creatures feathered head to toe like birds, and so on.”[3] These misguided and fantastical conjectures explain many aspects of the kawaraban portrait. For instance, Perry’s simian-like hairiness stems from the moniker “hairy barbarians,” a “derisive sobriquet for Westerners,” and in similar portraits serves to render his visage “transparently barbaric and even demonic – as if the American emissary were truly one of the legendary demons or devils…that old folktales spoke about as dwelling across the seas.”[4] Meanwhile, his prominent proboscis mimics the “large, long-nosed goblin figures” called tengu.[5] So why would a portrait purporting to be an accurate representation of someone so important be so inaccurate?
Kawaraban were cheap, mass-produced prints meant to report “newsworthy content” for “short-term enjoyment” through “entertainment and satire.” [6] They were also technically illegal, as they were “published without government authorization” by anonymous authors, so the “truthfulness of the kawaraban is difficult to measure.”[7] In essence, then, Kawaraban belonged not in the courts of Edo or the discussions of scholars, but in the hands of the peasants. Its primary goal was not to educate, but to entertain – to capture the masses’ attention with recognizable images which invoked pre-established cultural constructs. Consequently, as both a southern barbarian and threat to Japan’s wellbeing, Perry was all too easily connected to the frightening, warlike demoniacal figures of Japanese lore.
Furthermore, one does not peruse mass-produced, short-term-enjoyment-oriented periodicals to find accurate information; one does so to find drama: scandals, rumors, gossip, and of course, exaggeration. Sensationalism sells. And a portrait of a grumpy-looking middle-aged man is far less eye-catching than the fearsome image of a hirsute, goblin-like countenance.
Admittedly, in many of the course readings, Americans were portrayed less as unholy demon spawn and more as rather admirable beings, and the existence of documents which present such views and more importantly, operated with the same scope and accessibility as kawaraban would complicate matters. But if most kawaraban similar media were depicting Westerners in such a terrible light, thus playing to Japan’s worst fears, it seems that the work of Commodore Perry and other Americans and Europeans had only just begun.