Images 日本語で見る | Read in Japanese

At the heart of this website are four amazing sets of images:

a scroll drawn by an anonymous Japanese artist sometime between 1854 and 1906, “Request for a Good Relationship,” held in the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University;
Japanese scroll fragments owned by the Newport Preservation Society on loan to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island;
Lithographs showing Perry’s landing in Japan drawn by the expedition artist, William Heine, primarily from the Hay;
Broadsides, published in Japan, announcing Perry’s landing.

All the artists have the same subject — the first official U.S. expedition to Japan led by Matthew Perry in the middle of the nineteenth century — yet each artist works within a different artistic and cultural tradition. The artists also had different relationships to events, and chose to record different scenes. Together their work provides evocative pictures that help bring the nineteenth century to life.

We are interested in how to use visual images as historical evidence; in the different meanings attached to cultural exchange by the peoples involved; and in the cultural history of American-Japanese relations.

We sought to use new media to make these images available to more people so the conversation begun by the scroll and by the Heine pictures at Brown could be extended to other teachers and students.

“Request for a Good Relationship” Scroll

(Brown University Library)

Newport Scrolls

(Preservation Society of Newport County / Naval War College)

Heine Lithographs

(Brown University Library)

Broadsides & Other Prints

(Brown University Library)

The following is an essay written by research assistant Chris Suh, comparing American and Japanese student perspectives on the images:

Re-Envisioning the Perry Expedition (Suh)