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Rice [Scroll 10]

Anne McClain, Brown

Commodore Perry and his crew experienced a multitude of new sights, tastes, and ideas while negotiating with the Japanese in Uraga. One rather hilarious event is depicted here, on the tenth picture of this scroll.

The Americans provided the Japanese with a demonstration of the telegraph, railroad, pistols, and alcohol. The Japanese presented the Americans with silks, trays, and porcelain cups made of Japan's famous lacquered ware. These items showed the Japanese sophistication in artistic craftsmanship, in contrast to the technological prowess exhibited by the American gifts. To demonstrate just how mystified the Americans were by the Japanese gifts, Robert Tomes, the official transcriber of the voyage to Japan, even drew a picture of the "Fish Present": salted fish wrapped in seaweed and tied with an envelope.1

The event that shocked the Americans most was the generous Japanese gift of two hundred sacks of rice. It was necessary to ask for the assistance of sumo wrestlers to put this amount of rice on board the ships. The figures of the sumo wrestlers were a great surprise to the American sailors who only knew the Japanese to be small in stature. Their astonishment was evident in statements such as "they were all so immense in flesh," and "monstrous fellows who came tramping down the beach like so many elephants."2 The sumo wrestlers were depicted here as carrying two sacks at a time, some even demonstrating tricks. One wrestler held a sack of rice between his teeth, while another turned somersaults.

When compared Tomes' account to the Japanese depiction on this scroll, it is easy to see how the cultural phenomenon of sumo wrestlers was misunderstood. In Japan, the wrestlers were considered athletes. The Americans, however, encountered the wrestlers for the first time, thought of them more as brutes. Tomes wrote: "the Commodore accordingly attempted to grasp his arm, which he found as solid as it was huge, and then passed over the enormous neck, which fell, in folds of massive flesh, like the dew-lap of a prize-ox. As some surprise was naturally expressed at this wondrous exhibition of animal development, the monster himself gave a grunt, expressive of his flattered vanity."3

Another misunderstanding of this exchange is in the gift itself. The Japanese believed rice to be a food with significant meanings. As a staple food in Japan, the Japanese considered this generous amount of rice important in sustaining the Americans while at sea. The scroll depicted the Americans to be standing around casually, seemingly unimpressed by the enormous amount of rice offered to them. They talked amongst themselves and almost viewew the rice as a burden to ship home. Along with the sumo wrestlers, the gift of rice was but one cultural misunderstanding that happened in during Perry's visit to Japan.

 

References

1. Robert Tomes, The Americans in Japan: An Abridgment of the Government Narrative of the U.S. Expedition (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 232.
2. Ibid., 233.
3. Ibid., 234.