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Request for a Good Relationship

Wen-Chuan Dai, Brown '06

…When I saw this scroll, I could not stop lamenting.

—Wang ZhiBen

So comments the highly educated and well-traveled Chinese calligrapher, Wang ZhiBen, on the final page of a thirteen-paneled scroll drawn by an unknown Japanese artist during or after American Commodore Perry's second voyage to Japan. In plain language, Wang describes his sense of foreign aggression and conveys an urge to protect his "descendants" from the like intrusion he assumes will come to Japan. Hardly the literature one would associate with a scroll titled with the characters, "Good Relations."
Wang carried a unique cultural identity. As a skilled calligrapher and expert in what is referred to in Japanese history books as "Chinese studies" — ranging from knowledge in Chinese history and literature to artistic training and talent — Wang became an official envoy to Japan and was first invited to Japan for scholarly study in 1877, as a 42-year-old. Wang's commentary on the scroll is dated 1906, which would suggest he was writing one year before his death, and as a seasoned 61-year-old who had already made at least two prior trips to Japan, traveling to many regions throughout the country. Interestingly, in his account on the scroll he refers back to his own childhood days in China's Zhejiang province — and describes parallel incidents of foreign intrusion. As a native Chinese scholar who had accumulated much knowledge, experience and undoubted reverence for Japanese studies as a result of his several visits to Japan, it seems Wang saw Chinese and Japanese as "descendants" facing the arrogance and intrusion of Western explorers.

In stepping back and viewing all thirteen panels, the scroll does in fact depict many more American sailors and soldiers than it does Japanese soldiers, fishermen, or civilians. The panels, although titled as representing a "good relationship" or "Peace Treaty," offer snapshots of Americans encroaching upon Japanese land, covering the Japanese coastline with their cannon-blasting gunboats and swarming the pale sand in bright blue uniforms in large military exercises. The first panel, depicting an American soldier holding a Japanese fisherman at gunpoint, is the least subtle in revealing the role of the American as the aggressor and the Japanese as the somewhat weaker defender.

Perry's own journal reveals his disappointment with Japanese maps, or lack thereof, and his goal of re-charting the Japanese coastline and newly mapping inner coastlines known only to Japanese sailors who drew only elementary maps "constructed after a plan of their own, without meridian or scale…" (Matthew Calbraith Perry, The Japan Expedition, 1852–1854: The Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, p. 155). Wang notes the "intrusion" of American sailors into the Japanese inner sea in order to "measure and draw marine charts."

Today, we can read Perry's journal and try to imagine his motives and dreams as an undaunted, eager explorer of the foreign. But when we look at the scroll today and consider Wang's hundred-year-old account of the Perry expedition, we see what Perry and his men perhaps missed in their exploration of the Japanese coast. We see through the eyes of those acceding to the wishes of foreign explorers, learning much from the introduction of a new culture and its new technologies, yet at the same time losing pieces of their own stability as people of a land contained, before the Perry expedition, from the West. Only if "Peace" denotes the exchange of culture and goods between countries without warfare — rather than the continued stability of a contained land — then does the scroll appear appropriately titled, after all.