About This Site 日本語で見る | Read in Japanese 
“Perry In Japan: A Visual History” began as an examination and digitization of a more than one hundred year old Japanese scroll held by the John Hay Library at Brown and grew as a website which came to feature other images, published accounts of nineteenth century explorers, and student writing. The latest version of the website (2011) highlights the ways in which new media changes teaching, learning and scholarship.
On this website, we explore new ways of narrating the story of one of the first American travelers to Japan. The popularity of Pokemon, anime, and Tokyo Disneyland remind us that the cultural interaction between Japan and the United States remains important to both countries and we investigate how it began, a century and a half ago.
The nineteenth century visual images available on the website may be its most appealing feature but the writing, by college students at the University of Tokyo and Brown University (as well as by high school students in Niskayuna, New York), provide the most important contribution as they disagree about what the images contain and mean. The site asks questions about historical evidence by showing how students in the United States and in Japan interpreted the same images very differently.
So, the website consists of a nineteenth century visual record of two different cultural views and a twenty-first century written record about those two different sets of visual images from two different cultural viewpoints.
We divided the materials on the website into three sections:
but we know that the three categories are interconnected, actually interactive, in ways that the web makes evident.
More about the process of putting together the web site and the classes of which it has been a part can be found by following the links below.
- "A Student's View" (Heather Velez, Brown University '05)
- "A Professor's View" (Susan Smulyan, Professor, Department of American Studies, Brown University)
- "A Curator's View" (Peter Harrington, Curator, Anne S. K. Brown Collection, Brown University Library)
- "A Comparative View" (Chris Suh, Brown University '10)
- “A View from Japan” (Yujin Yaguchi, Associate Professor, The University of Tokyo)
- “Course Syllabus of AC190.29, "From Perry to Pokemon: Japan in the U.S.; The U.S. in Japan"
(Taught by Susan Smulyan, Department of American Studies, Brown University, Spring 2003)
