Yokohama kaiko kenbun-shi/ Things seen and heard at the Yokohama Open Port

The major Japanese Utagawa school artist Sadahide (1807-73) came to fame with his bijin-ga (images of beautiful women) and diversified into landscapes and warrior prints. However, he remains best known internationally for his depictions of exotic locales and events (e.g. the First Opium War), and he particularly focussed in the late 1850s and early 1860s on the port of Yokohama, which he also mapped in panorama form. Still a sleepy fishing village at the time of Commodore Perry’s mission in 1853-54, it rapidly expanded from 1859 as Japan’s sole open port, with permanent foreign residents as Japan’s key open port.

Sadahide soon recognised the popular interest in growing intercourse with the west. As the Yokohama foreigners’ quarter was established, he moved to the port town, remaining there to document the construction of a new city to accommodate the arrival of foreign traders and diplomats, and subsequently their families. His print designs surveyed the changing face of the town. His panoramic aerial vistas offered newcomers practical guides through the topography of the town, its separate Japanese and western areas, and its moated brothel quarter, customs house, wharves and adjacent rice fields. More especially, however, his Yokohama kaikō kenbun shi publication compiled a record of the developing patterns of encounter, settlement and negotiated space over a four-year period in two separate volumes. The three fascicles of volume 1 were published in 1862; those for volume 2 - seen here - were published in 1865.

The difference is significant. In the first, Sadahide’s illustrations focus on the curiosities of early encounter: sailors and traders, new architecture and commercial enterprise, ships and wharf scenes reveal the arrival of the foreigners, uncomfortable meetings between hard-drinking American sailors and the establishments they visited, and the dominance of men in the new influx of settlers. They document scenes of walrus hunting and whaling in the vicinity, and even include images of ‘the Emperor of the India’. By 1865, Sadahide was able to record the families of traders and diplomats, often in intimate views of domestic settings and activities. Images of wives and children in their homes, of habits of dress, leisure and play must have surprised, puzzled and delighted Sadahide’s Edo viewers. Intimate pictures of women at their toilette must have shocked them. His illustrations take us to the most intimate moments in the western quarters, such as his illustration of foreign children being bathed. Japanese viewers would have been bemused at a scene so alien to their own habits of washing prior to relaxing in hot tubs or communal baths, and to the sheer chaos in the room.

Sadahide’s inclusion in this publication of both Japanese characters within each pictorial composition and English-language text on separate pages reflects a rapidly growing awareness of the importance of multilingual capacities for informing the changing activities of diplomacy and commerce. The combination certainly enhanced the capacity of volumes like these for informing New World readers of American activities in these exotic lands.

Source: David Bell, 'Floating world at Te Papa: the Heriot collection', Tuhinga, 30 (2018), pp. 56-81.