Baron Stillfried in Japan

Japonisme and Photography

The terms Near East, Far East, and Middle East are all Eurocentric terms because they situate the
speaker in the West, assumed to be the geographically superior position, the site from which the
imperial gaze sweeps the world. The term discovery is another Eurocentric word, such as the
discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, suggesting that until the explorer bumped into the
continent, it did not exist. In a similar fashion, Japan was also discovered, accidentally, by
Portuguese traders who were lost at sea. For nearly a century, variousJapanesedaimyo or the feudal
lords in power were willing to exchange conversion to Christianity for European guns and an
astonishing number of Japanese were converted to theCatholic faith. However, the government
power in Japan shifted to a new family, theTokugawa shogunate,and the trade with Portugal and
technological knowledge derived from Dutch and English travelers was athreat to its power. This
shogunate, which lasted from 1603 to 1853, is also known as the Edo period or the golden age of
Japans culture,sought not only supreme power but also a kind of cultural purism expressly hostile to
Christianity which placed God above earthly rulers.In 1635, theTokugawa regime issued an Edict
Closing Japan. Under Sakoku(closed country), no Japanese ships were allowed to travel to foreign
lands and if a Japanese person attempted to visit a Western nation or attempted to return from a
forbidden land, death was the result. The members of the warrior class, the Samurai were not
allowed to purchase Western goods. The Southern Barbarians, the Westerners, were also forbidden
to traffic in Christianity. For two hundred and fifty years, Japan was totally sealed off, closed, locked
up, isolated.
The isolation ended when closed Japan was opened at gunpoint by the United States in 1853 under
Commodore Matthew Perry. America, barely fifty years from being a colony itself, was not a major
player in the Pacific, that role was held by Great Britain. England had its eye on Japan, but, given
that it had an important treaty with Hong Kong, opening Japan was more trouble than it was worth.
America needed Japan as an intermediary way station between its northwest territories and China.
England was perfectly happy to sit back and wait for their former colonyopen a territory that had
spent so much time in isolation that it now had little importance except as a stop over. But ending
the closed door policy of Japan had many unexpected consequences, from the nations unexpectedly
swift and effective embrace of Western technology to the excitement in Europe and America for all
things Japanese, a phenomenon called japonisme. Photographers, such as the Austrian expatriate,
Baron Raymond von Stillfried-Rathenitz(1839-1911), flocked to the city especially built for
Westerners, Yokohama. Once an unimportant fishing village blessed with a suitably deep harbor, the
small town became a big city port with Western conveniences installed to accommodate European
and American businessmen.

Utagawa Hiroshige III. The opening of the rail line from Tokyo to Yokohama in 1872, an example
ofkaika-e(pictures of modernization) (1875)
The Opening of Japan for trade and diplomatic relations was less a matter of a forceful or
threatening American fleet of gunboats but more a response to internal politics in the nation. Over
the centuries, the rule of theTokugawa dynasty had weakened to the point that the samurai class
wanted reform, meaning a powerful group wanted to join the rest of the world and take part in

modernity. Under the guise of strengthening the role of the Emperor, a political shift took place
during a ten year period and by 1868, the Edo period had come to an end and a Meiji emperor
assumed power over the shogunate. The Japanese were well aware of how the British had forced the
Chinese to assume a subordinate position as a non-equal trading partner and in the Treaty of
Kanazawa (1854) struck a more balanced agreement with the United States and other nations. What
makes the Japanese situation unique is that, according to the late Marxist historian,Eric Hobsbawm,
Japan was the first non-white nation to successfully modernize and absorb Western ways.

The Meiji Emperor in Western Military Dress

In an astonishingly short time, Japan absorbed certain Western political ideas, sought to be educated
in the Western manner, and, by the end of the century, was competing with long-standing European
powers in the region. The proof of the extent of modernization and industrialization was the
Japanese defeat of the Russian Empire in the Sino-Russian War of190405. Japan was the first Asian
power to defeat a European power, seizing territory in China claimed by Russia and, apparently
incidentally, took over Korea, beginning an occupation that would last until 1945. It is against this
background of modernization and Westernization that the Europeans are, in turn, impacted by
Japanese aesthetics. Japonisme, a term coined in 1872, when industrialization of Japan was well
under way, by a French art critic, Philippe Burty (1830-1890), in the magazine La renaissance
littraire et artistique.
The term, Japonisme, referring to Japan,is slightly different from a similar term Chinoiserie, which
refers to China. Chinoiserie is Chinese dcor, a style of decoration that had been popular in Europe
since the eighteenth century. In contrast, Japonisme is a much broader concept, indicating a strong
interest in the broader Japanese culture that would encompass the Ukiyo-e prints of the Edo era, the
beautiful silk kimonos, the elegant vases, the graceful fans. In addition, unlike Chinoiserie, the scope
and impact of Japonisme was wide enough to inspire Parisian artists, such as the Impressionists, to
emulate the abstract designs of the images of the Floating World. Artists from James Whistler to
Claude Monet not only painted Japanese motifs but also collected Japanese objects. James Tissot
pictured women shopping for Japanese vases in a Parisian shop and Mary Cassatt made a beautiful
set of prints that emulated the prized Ukiyo-e scenes. The result of the exchange between East and
West was a straight-forward reversal: the Japanese received industrial modernization, while the
French and the English admired a world whose time had already passed into nostalgia. By the
1870s, the Meiji regime had decisively ended the old feudalistic practices, but incorporating the
myths and legends of all things uniquely Japanese. Photography in Japan was pure Japonisme on two
fronts, first, photographers, such as Stillfried, capitalized on the Western curiosity about a culture
previously secretive and obscure by re-creating what were historic customs in the studio and
second, because society is more slow to change than politics, photography also grasped the last
dying moments of the old days of Edo, extinct politically but remembered socially.

Stillfried worked during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) in Yokohama, an artificial city, and was mostly
confined to his studio. Although during the early years of integration, the British controlled the port
city, the Japanese guarded their interior. During the early decades of Japans gradual integration
with the outside world, only a few ports, Tokyo and Nagasaki, along with Yokohama received
foreigners and not unit the 1870s and the building of railroads was the restriction of travel outside a
twenty-five mile radius loosened. The Japanese who came to Yokohama did so to cater to the
Western businessmen and diplomats and must have been in the odd position of being on the front

line of modernization but also being expected to respond to Western ideas of what Japanese
consisted of. The Western culture in these ports was largely male. Only occasionally did a Western
woman venture so far afield and the lack of Western women had an impact upon the homosocial
environment similar to but different from that of India. Japan was not being colonized, nor was it
being ruled by the West, and the relationship was close to that of equals joined together for financial
exchange in a capitalist system that was now global. Therefore, the Western men stationed in Japan
were temporary visitors and, like the soldiers and diplomats took temporary or substitute wives,
mistresses of color who would be left behind. The Japanese custom of celebrating geishas or women,
who were dedicated to the art of serving men, fit very well in the European males desire for a
subordinated woman, with a dainty woman in a kimono and paper umbrella replacing the previous
fantasy of the compliant white slave in an Oriental harem. In a gender parallel, Westerners also
imagined Japanese men as being part of a warrior class, the honorable and loyal samurai, and
photographers obliged local visitors and the overseas market alike with a collection of images that
were example of Japonisme or a nostalgic version of the Edo culture, recreated for Meiji times.

The extent to whichStillfrieds work must be read as photographic constructions manufactured in a

very unnatural context becomes evident when his images are compared to those of John Thomson,
who was allowed to roam at will throughout his Chinese territory, where he photographed the
Chinese in their natural habitat, living on their own terms. Another telling contrast is that between
the studio set-ups staged by Stillfried and the popularity of the Yokohama prints preferred by the
Japanese themselves. The Yokohama prints were contemporary examples of Japanese artists
depictingthe Westerners in the city and reveal the Japanese fascination with modernization and
especially with the European women, whose presence was overrepresented in these prints.
Conversely, Stillfried recreated a vanishing Japan reenacted by compliant actors but Japanese
people who actually lived in Yokohama lived in a liminal society and existed on a threshold between
history and the future and East and West quickly adopted European clothes and manners, shedding
the Edo fashions for frock coats and corsets. It is in the face of the rapid changes clearly visible in
Yokohama that the practice of Stillfried can be understand as similar towhat Christopher Pinney
described in his 1997 work on photography in India,Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian
Photographs,where a salvage paradigm, which applied to what were perceived to be fragile tribal
communities.. But the analogy can be stretched but so far. As Pinney continued to explain: Official
photography was enveloped in a discourse of scienticity and indexicality.. while at the same time
altering reality to coincide with Western expectations of the savage. That said, Stillfrieds
photographs, while faithfully following European desires and predilections, from a need for the
exotic to a taste for mile pornography, were not official and were strictly commercial, implying but
lacking the indexical function.

Baron Stillfrieds predecessor in Yokohama, Flix Beato (1832-1909), foundedhis businessin 1862 and
established the convention of costume photography and the relatively new practice of hand-coloring
the images. Arriving in Japan fresh from his time with the ill-fated Austrian adventure in Mexico,
Stillfried purchased not only Beatos business but the mode of production as well. In her 2011
book,Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-century New England Photography Collections,Eleanor M.
Hight described the noble and military background of the Austrian photographer and his
experiences as a businessman and then diplomat in the Far East and, reading between the lines, it
seems strange that a privileged aristocrat in possession of a rare commodityexpertise in Japanwould
leave behind such potentially powerful positions in government service of a more precarious private
business. But even more oddly, Stillfried was joined in the photography business by his brother,

another Baron, Franz. The two brothers, with their military backgrounds, seem to be adventurers,
and may have come from a more impoverished branch of the Bohemian nobility. In his article, Views
and Costumes of Japan.A Photograph Album by Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz,Luke Gartlan
proclaimed his imperial credentials as royal photographer to His Austrian Majestys Court and noted
thatIn acknowledgment of his services in aid of the Austro-Hungarian Expedition, Stillfried received
the prestigious Franz Joseph Order on 15 March 1871. It seems that Stillfried phased out of his
service to the Habsburgs, was decorated for his work and became a commercial photographer. As
was discussed earlier, Yokohama was a city where Western men of means could build their own
private fantasies of living in a harem of Japanese women and, over time, Stillfried had become so
accustomed to the geisha way of life that he made the mistake of transporting it to Vienna, a city
remarkable for its sexual repression. As Gartlan recounted, Eager to expand his enterprise, he
transported a seven-room Japanese teahouse to Vienna for the World Exhibition and contracted
three Japanese women to serve tea to the Viennese public. Accused of managing a bordello under
the guise of an ethnographic display, Stillfried returned to Yokohama near bankruptcy, his
reputation tarnished by the entire sordid affair.

Stillfried worked in Japan until 1881, producing photographs as souvenir, whether sold individually
to tourists putting together collections of mementos or as elegantly bound albums that he had
composed into a single volume. Building on a combination of his own technical ability as an excellent
photographer, he commanded a large staff of local workers. The handsomely bound albums with
their elegant metal clasps were inscribed in English, the international language used in China and
Japan. The aristocratic and educated background of the photographer is evident in his studio studies
of pre-modern Japan. Some of the images are in the tradition of portraiture while others are
reminiscent of genre paintings, scenes of everyday life. And indeed, there are intimations of class
distinctions imposed upon an Asian society. Stillfrieds recreation of types in old Japan cannot be said
to be anthropological studies of an existing society but as examples of Japonisme, the photographic
equivalent of the Ukiyo-e prints ofUtagawa Kuniyoshi, for example. Frozen in front of studio
backdrops, imprisoned beneath dedicated hand-applied colors, the Japanese actors play on a stage
catering to a kind of Western curiosity that does not require information but satisfaction of imperial
desires.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette andArt History Unstuffed. Thank you.
[emailprotected]
http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/baron-stillfried-in-japan/