“What Japan Really Is”? Tourism and the Modernization of Japan

Photograph from Frank Brinkley, ed., Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese (1897-98)

In 1897, Arthur Mundy, an American who had just returned from Japan, showed remarkable humility for a man of his time regarding knowledge of foreign cultures. He believed it was “almost impossible for an American or European writer to correctly interpret the motives or actions of the Japanese. The point of view is so different that motives are misjudged, and actions misunderstood… The attempt to describe the Japanese civilization in terms which we are accustomed to use in describing our own, must fail, because there is much in their nature that has no counterpart in ours… The foreign writer can tell only how Japan strikes a foreigner; he cannot give his reader an adequate idea of what Japan really is.”

Mundy’s words form part of the introduction to one of the most ambitious publications of the nineteenth century, Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese. Conceived by Boston publisher Josiah Byram Millet, the multivolume book was edited by Frank Brinkley, an Irish journalist, scholar, and former British Army officer who traveled to Japan in 1867 and resided there until his death in 1912. Financial backing for the project was provided by the Japanese government, and the text, according to the book, was written “mainly by Japanese writers.”

None of those contributors, however, is credited by name, and it is not clear how much of the text is Brinkley’s own or that of another Western writer. Investigating the book’s photographs reveals that they, too, are part of an elaborate marketing ploy. Despite its respect for Japanese culture, Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese is not entirely what it claims to be. In some ways, in fact, it is yet another example of Orientalism—the representation of Eastern cultures in an outdated, semi-fictional, or at best oversimplified way that, for some viewers, validated the expansion of Western power and influence.

Tamamura Kozaburo, a commercial photographer in Yokohama, supervised the production team that supplied the images, which, Mundy notes, were “carefully selected in Japan under Japanese guidance.” Nevertheless, much of the photography belongs to a genre called Yokohama shashin—staged scenes created for sale as tourist souvenirs in the days before personal cameras. In addition, the images were strongly influenced by the work of European photographers in Japan, particularly Felice Beato, an Italian-born British subject who worked there from about 1863 to 1884, and Austrian nobleman Raimund von Stillfried, who went to Japan in 1868 as a diplomat but became a commercial photographer instead. Some of the images have even been attributed to Beato and Stillfried rather than Japanese photographers. The book’s most prominent photos—original hand-colored prints—depict the usual tourist cliches of Japan: geisha, samurai, sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors, and so on. That is perhaps to be expected for a book produced for Westerners, and these elements of Japan's heritage certainly merit attention, yet it is conspicuous that the artists make almost no effort to portray the extraordinarily rapid modernization that Meiji-era Japan was undergoing by its own choice. Consequently, the images are unlike those commissioned by Sultan Abdülhamid to provide a counternarrative to faulty Western assumptions about the East.

Though at times the text and images seem to contradict each other, they may in fact be working together to portray Japan to Americans as rich in history and culture, and therefore worth taking an interest in, but ultimately less advanced than the West. For example, one photograph of a woman writing a letter is captioned: “Japanese calligraphy is artistic and beautiful… In comparison with it, the freest, boldest European hand is stiff and cramped.” In contrast, a passage near the end of the book hopes that Japanese speakers will abandon their complicated logographic writing system and adopt an alphabet. “It is impossible to believe that a people so essentially progressive as the Japanese will permanently condemn themselves to the use of script which renders their literature a sealed book to the whole world of the West and doubles the educational difficulties that their children have to overcome.”