Julius Bright Ross: Whalers at Ōtsu

Depiction of English whalers in 1824. From the personal collection of Katō Shōra.

Julius Bright Ross

           “In the fifth month of the seventh year of Bunsei (1824),” an English whaling ship landed in Ōtsu, in the Mito domain.[1] The whalers were imprisoned only to be released, unharmed, two weeks later. The Ōtsu Incident, as it came to be known, resulted in a set of sketches found in the private collection of one Katō Shōra.[2] One particular sketch of three whalers (left), is a remarkable representation of the curiosity many Japanese citizens felt about the ‘hairy barbarians.’[3]
           

           The sketch evokes the elegant simplicity of an encyclopaedia entry: leaving out a background, the artist brings the viewer’s eye to specific details he/she wants to point out. And specific they are, with labels for even the simplest things. Keeping with the theme, one page is labelled “foreigner walking” and the other “foreigners at rest.”[4] The care given to observing the foreigners’ every detail is remarkable.

            It is remarkable enough, in fact, to beg closer scrutiny. For two centuries, Japan had been almost completely isolated from the outside world and the advent of interactions with foreigners sparked curiosity in the Japanese; yes, the outside world was a “crude, rapacious place full of hairy barbarians,” but it was also for many a place of “curiosities…that dazzle the eye.”[5]^,[6] To Tokugawa citizens, simple leather caps and woolen garments were ‘dazzling’ enough for the artist to label the whalers’ caps and woolen garb three times each. The encyclopaedic essence of the drawing demonstrates that the ‘barbarians’ “had no context, no tactile background;” the Japanese, therefore, had to learn about them in an encyclopaedic fashion.[7] Even Aizawa Seishisai, a vocal and later influential xenophobe, recognized the need to study the Westerners if Japan was to survive the incoming barbarian tide. [8]

            Throughout Japan, the end of the Tokugawa period coincided with an increase of interest in foreigners. The sketch of the whalers illustrates the extent to which the ‘hairy barbarians’ became an oddity to be studied. Although later in the period (after Commodore Perry had opened Japan to trade at gunpoint) such blatant Western curiosity could have been dangerous due to high xenophobic tensions, at the time of the Ōtsu Incident it was nothing out of the ordinary.[9] The Japanese were to be sorely tested by foreign powers over the next century, but for the time being the Great Eastern Sea held wonders—in the form of leather hats and woolen shirts.