Shashin and the narrow road to the exterior: a discussion of the extent to

which the early photography of Japan is a photography of the nonJapanese

C.J.A. Perriam

The first Japanese tourist photography by native and non-native artists alike was
both a result of, and an encouragement to, exploration of a previously isolated
geographic and cultural nation. This article outlines the superimposition of Western
expectations on Japanese identity through the camera lens, and the uneasy
equilibrium between tradition often created tradition and modernity, with
reference to several synecdochic images, which simultaneously affirm and contest
cultural types. Initially the product of a hastily-prepared class presentation, the article
is bookended by a surprisingly illuminating comparison of nineteenth-century
Japanese photography to the haibun of that celebrated seventeenth-century
Japanese poet, Bash.

A lively cherry
In full bloom
Between the two lives
Now made one.
Matsuo Bash1
A verse from Matsuo Bashs 1694 account of six months wanderings in northern Japan,
undertaken during the early Tokugawa shogunate period, may seem an incongruous means by
which to begin an article dealing with the photography of that country almost two centuries
later. Upon reflection, however, Bashs Oku no Hosomichi, commonly translated as
Narrow Road to the Deep Interior, provides numerous opportunities to draw parallels with
that later art form. This masterpiece of haibun, a blending of lyrical prose and haikai poetry,
is perhaps the best-known work of a Japanese poet, both in modern-day Japan and in the
West. It suggests, like the tourist photography of Yokohama in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, a complex relationship with the construction of tradition [] especially the
refiguring of cultural memory2. Furthermore, the poets chosen locale of the North was
largely an unexplored territory, and it represented for Bash all the mystery there was in the
C.J.A. PERRIAM is a third-year undergraduate at the University of St Andrews. Although an English
student, he has taken courses in disciplines ranging from History of Art to History of the Bagpipes.
Upon receipt of his degree he intends to pursue a career in finance or writing whichever seems more
lucrative. He enjoys chamber music and tenpin bowling.
1

M. Bash, trans. N. Yuasa, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other travel sketches (London,
1966), 62
2
H. Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bash (Stanford,
1998), 8.

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universe.3 Such a description could well be applied to the nascent photographic medium in
nineteenth-century Japan, as well as to Japan itself, as viewed through the eyes of the
aesthetically alive Europeans and Americans when they discovered Japan during the
nineteenth century, painting through their artistic hegemony an illusory picture4 as they
did so, and conflating their culture with the Japanese: two lives |Now made one.
The Nihonjin term shashin, generally taken to denote a photograph, can also be interpreted
as meaning image, memory, copy of truth. In the course of this article, I shall attempt to
assess the ways in which the shashin of early Japanese photography specifically the tourist
photography, both studio and landscape associated with the treaty port of Yokohama during
the 1860s and 1870s, present cultures and truths, and the extent to which such truths are
predicated upon notions both of the Japanese and of the West. To this end, I shall focus in
particular on the European photographer Felice Beato, and on the work of his Japanese
contemporary Uchida Kuichi, exploring the visual presence of Japan and the West in certain
of their pieces, with reference to other photographers besides.
Any discussion of photography in Japan must first begin with the story of the mediums
arrival in that nation. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whilst much
of eastern Asia was being divided up amongst the European colonizing powers, Japan
maintained her sovereignty. Whilst Dutch traders and explorers in particular had maintained
an isolated outpost in Japan since the 1600s, the generally xenophobic foreign policies of the
inveterate Tokugawa shogunate (an era known as the Edo period) had preserved much of
Japans cultural selfhood. This was to change during the middle of the nineteenth century,
with a series of cultural invasions5 accelerated by the so-called Meiji Restoration of 1867,
whose Charter Oath stated that Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world in order to
strengthen the foundation of imperial rule. 6 Japan sought to assume her place on the
international stage, and one branch of knowledge that was no exception to this striving for
modernity, alongside progressions in infrastructure and the like, was the novel technology of
the photograph.
First imported to Japan in the 1840s, by the time of the opening of Yokohama to Westerners
as a trade port in 1859, the camera had become a familiar object to the Japanese particularly
3

M. Bash, trans. N. Yuasa, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other travel sketches,
Introduction, 37.
4
R. Storry, A History of Modern Japan (London, 1960), 70.
5
J-P. Lehmann, The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850-1905 (London,
1978), 21.
6
Ibid., 23.

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their scholars. With the relaxation of previous strict rules governing alien entry to Japan at
least, regarding certain locales such as that of Yokohama there began an influx of
Europeans and Americans keen to explore this hitherto uncharted archipelago. Alongside this
new tourism of the globe-trotter sprung up opportunities for commercial photographers to
offer their services in providing souvenir pictures both describing and, as we shall see,
prescribing travellers experiences of Japan.
Among the first of the Western photographers to establish a major photographic practice in
Yokohama was Felice Beato (1832-1909). A roving Italian-British practitioner who had
previously documented the Crimean War, he joined the Illustrated London News
correspondent Charles Wirgman who, interestingly, went on to marry a Japanese woman
in Yokohama in 1863. Together, they created luxury souvenir albums targeted towards
Western globe-trotters, combining both text and image in a way which addressed the desire of
their market to experience a Japan simultaneously exotic and familiar 7 . They created
Eurocentric images their customers wanted to see.
One illustrative example of this practice is Beatos 1870 photograph, The Original Grecian
Bend. Much of his studio work depicted supposedly authentic Japanese characters in
apparently traditional garb, such as his numerous portraits of samurai costumes, in the
Western salvage paradigm of attempting to capture an anachronistic tradition. Ironically, of
course, the camera by which such documentation was possible was symptomatic of the very
modernization which threatened this Japanese cultural trope. Isobel Crombie notes the
complex and creative hybrid of reality8 embedded in this presentation of what Westerners
expected of Japan, whilst Luke Gartlan raises the point that the very semantics of Beatos
own term costume suggests a self-conscious understanding of the photographers theatrical
presentation of Japanese society.9 What is clear is that, rather than depicting the authentic
Japanese, Beato was in fact creating, or contributing to, a Western idea of Japan through his
studio portraits. The Original Grecian Bend, however, takes this cross-cultural exchange one
step further. Beatos photograph shows two Japanese women, in traditional costume, adopting
a pose familiar to Western customers as being one associated with Western females,
especially those of the higher classes. In utilising this posture, Beato appropriates the cultural
identity of the Japanese women, incorporating them into a specifically Western tradition;
albeit one tied to contemporary modernity. Thus, a portrait which might otherwise simply

C. Guth, Longfellows Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting and Japan (London, 1967), 53.
I. Crombie, Shashin: Nineteenth-Century Japanese Studio Photography (Melbourne, 2004),
Introduction, 6.
9
L. Gartlan, In Search of Arcadia: Souvenir Photography in Yokohama, 1859-1900, ibid., 14
8

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present an essentialising view of Japanese femininity becomes a study in Western hegemony,

as well as a generalizing, or even an anthropological through Wirgmans choice of the word
Original take on cultural homogeneity.
Beato worked closely with Japanese artists, who often hand-tinted his work, adding an
attractively localizing quality to his photographs. Even this uniquely Japanese tradition,
however, was exploited to maximize the commercial value of pieces for the Western client, as
studio staging of scenes was further convoluted in the post-production process. Western
fascination with indigenous tattooing customs was exploited as Beatos artists painted extra
ink on the photographic bodies of Japanese subjects, highlighting the fact that customers
purchases did not necessarily represent what those who acquired them had actually seen.10
The presence of the non-Japanese in even the most Japanese of images is again evidenced in
Beatos 1865 photograph of The Tokaido Road. An important highway between Edo
(Tokyo) and Kyoto, the Tokaido was a familiar and synecdochic image of Japan both to its
people Bash featured it prominently in his works and to Westerners, thanks to Utagawa
Hiroshiges widely-disseminated 1833 series of woodcuts, 53 Stations of the Tokaido. Many
globe-trotters venturing into Japan would have travelled it, and thus desired its inclusion in
their souvenir albums. Beatos photograph, however, is self-consciously artistic in its
composition, depicting a famous image of Japan in a way which is evidently informed by a
romantic, distinctly European Picturesque tradition made popular by the painter Claude
Lorrain. By such ways, Christine Guth postulates that globe-trotters attentions and
remembrances of Japan were measured by a Western mental yardstick.11
It was not only Western photographers who set up photographic practices aimed at the
emerging tourist market in Yokohama; nor was it only Western photographers who
contributed towards a photography that is as much a record of Western attitudes as it is of the
Japanese. Among the most respected of portrait artists at the time was Uchida Kuichi (18441875), who opened his studio first in Osaka, before moving the business to Yokohama in
1866 and then Tokyo three years later. Perhaps Uchidas most famous commission was that
of photographing the Emperor Meiji (known as Mikado to Westerners), first in 1872, and then
again the following year. Crucial to these images is the way in which they present the young
Emperor, as well as the purpose for which they were destined. Following the Meiji
Restoration, Japan was, Mikiko Hiriyama asserts, anxious to impress the West that it

10
11

Guth, Longfellows Tattoos, 58.

Ibid., 65.

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deserved a place in the international political arena,12 and in keeping with this desire for
modernity a term at the time synonymous with Westernisation 13 the Emperor, from
around 1872, began to dress in European habiliments.14 Uchidas portrait of the Emperor in
that year shows him stiffly posed in traditional Japanese garb; yet, the Portrait of the
Emperor Meiji of 1873 presents a different figure entirely. Sporting a moustache and
cropped haircut of a distinctly Western nature popularised following the Iwakawa Mission
of that year15 the Emperor is shown slouched in a chair of European origin, on a European
carpet, and wearing a uniform consciously designed to align his personage with a European
tradition of military, masculine command, and to underline his pre-eminence.
The figure thus represented is one of ambiguity. Whilst the physical body of the Emperor had
previously been shrouded in secrecy, to the extent that to look upon his face was supposedly
fatal, here the most important person in Japan is shown not as a Nihonjin at all, but rather a
Western military leader. It could be said that his pose reflects the slight uneasiness of this
self-conscious figure of modernity, albeit a modernity couched in centuries of European
military and monarchical tradition; the Emperors hands and feet are somewhat
uncomfortable16 in their positioning, and Mikiko Hirayama believes that he looks rather
meek.17 If there is unease and ambiguity in the visual properties of the photograph, however,
these were, in the view of the Japanese government, outweighed by the importance of such a
representations existence, as it was distributed throughout the prefectures of the nation in an
imperial statement of ownership and omnipresence, as well as to the foreign courts that Japan
wished to impress with this image of their modernity and associated power. Indeed, this
modernity or Westernisation of dress and presentation reflected a broader schematic shift
throughout the Japanese populace; there was an indiscriminate infatuation with all things
Occidental18 in the 1870s, and Uchidas own self-portrait of 1873 shows the photographer
himself dressed in a self-consciously Western manner. Whether this demonstrates an
appropriation of the Western into a new and discretely Japanese mode, or simply an imitation,
is moot. What is certain is that a hybrid of East and West had been created that was
irreversible.

12

M. Hirayama, The Emperors New Clothes: Japanese Visuality and Imperial Portrait Photography
in L. Gartlan (ed.), Photography in Nineteenth-Century Japan, History of Photography 33, no. 2 (May
2009), 172.
13
Lehmann, The Image of Japan, 25.
14
H. Cortazzi, Victorians in Japan (London, 1987), 81.
15
Hirayama, New Clothes, 172.
16
E. M. Hight, Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections
(Farnham, 2011), 134.
17
Hirayama, New Clothes, 172.
18
Lehmann, The Image of Japan, 36.

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In this article I have discussed a number of photographs illustrating the pervasive presence of
the non-Japanese in the photography of Japan, without having even begun to touch upon the
jinrikisha tradition or the works of the many other photographers, both Western and Japanese,
operating from Yokohama in the 1860s and 1870s. Western photographers of the time, by
nature of their globe-trotter customers, and due to their own cultural heritage, inevitably
included European and American elements in their art to a wide extent, whilst we have seen
that the Japanese photographers were themselves bound over not only by their clientele but by
the drive of modernization a drive which included the very technology of the foreign
camera itself to present much in the way of the non-Japanese in their photography. Whether
this infiltration was positive or negative is moot; the studios of Yokohama were, as Luke
Gartlan states, capable of the affirmation and contestation of Japanese cultural stereotypes.19
Yet, photography of the region was eventually to go on to create new cultural tropes in time,
with todays strong associations of the camera and Japan, evinced by the ubiquity of such
brands as Nikon and Canon, fulfilling Count Alexander von Hubners belief that the
Japanese are perfect masters of this art.20 Perhaps this is no surprise; after all, Matsuo Bash
himself travelled in order to seek a vision of eternity in the things that are, by their own very
nature, destined to perish21. Such is true not only of the subjects of the photograph, but of the
photograph itself.

19

L. Gartlan, Bronzed and Muscular Bodies: Jinrikishas, Tattooed Bodies and Yokohama Tourist
Photography, in J. Codell (ed.), Transculturation in British art, 1770-1930 (Farnham, 2012), 102
20
Count Alexander von Hubner, A Ramble Round the World, 1871, vol. 1, 457, quoted ibid, 106
21
Bash, Narrow Road, Introduction, 37.

132

Uchida Kuichi, Portrait of the Emperor Meiji

(Albumen silver print, 1873)

133

REFERENCES
Bash, M., trans. Yuasa, N., The Narrow Road to the Deep North and other travel sketches
(London, 1966)
Cortazzi, H., Victorians in Japan (London, 1987)
Gartlan, L., Bronzed and Muscular Bodies: Jinrikishas, Tattooed Bodies and Yokohama
Tourist Photography, pp. 93-110, in Codell, J. (ed.), Transculturation in British art, 17701930 (Farnham, 2012)
In Search of Arcadia: Souvenir Photography in Yokohama, 1859-1900, pp. 12-17,
in Crombie, I., Shashin: Nineteenth-Century Japanese Studio Photography
(Melbourne, 2004)
Guth, C., Longfellows Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (London, 1967)
Hight, E. M., Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections
(Farnham, 2011)
Hirayama, M., The Emperors New Clothes: Japanese Visuality and Imperial Portrait
Photography, pp. 165-184, in Gartlan, L. (ed.), Photography in Nineteenth-Century Japan,
Special Issue of History of Photography 33, no. 2 (May 2009)
Lehmann, J-P., The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850-1905
(London, 1978)
Shirane, H., Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bash
(Stanford, 1998)
Storry, R., A History of Modern Japan (London, 1960)

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