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A Gastronomical Production [Scroll 8]

Rebecca Melsky, Brown '03

Japanese hosted banquets in honor of each other and the recently completed treaty negotiations. This panel depicted the Japanese banquet held in the Treaty House in the Edo Bay. Before this banquet, the Americans had hosted the Japanese to an American feast of lamb, beef, game, and hard alcohol. In his journals, Commodore Perry noted the good humor with which the Japanese left the American feast and believed them to be quite taken with American delicacies and liquor.1

But the Americans did not like the Japanese food offered to them. The Japanese artist of this scroll, and most likely many of his Japanese companions, saw the Americans at the Japanese feast as foolish. The American soldiers on the left side of the panel look disgusted, confused, and ignorant. The panel shows one of the soldiers holding a chopstick in each hand apparently without a clue as to how to use them. The pale men in blue uniforms looked quizzically at each other as if they were asking, "What is this food and how do I eat it?" while the Japanese on the opposite side of the panel sat evenly without eating.

This Japanese artist accurately observed the Americans' reaction to the Japanese feast. Both Commodore Perry and William Heine discussed the banquet in great detail. The Japanese served many courses of soup to the Americans and most were made with fish or seafood.2 Tomes lightheartedly remarked that soup "seemed to be the staple article of the entertainment."3 Perry was far less enamored of Japanese food than was Heine. Perry remarked that the, "Japanese diet seemed particularly meager in comparison with American fare, and soup, however desirable in its proper place, was found to be but a poor substitute for a round of beef or a haunch of mutton."4 Heine acknowledged that the food was "good tasting but of so refined a delicacy that our palates, being those of barbaric sailors, could neither understand nor evaluate them."5 Sake and tea were also both plentiful in cups that were quite small, but refilled often enough that, as Perry noted; they "lost nothing for want of larger goblets."6

In the panel itself, the trays placed in front of each of the soldiers are accurate representations of Japanese serving trays. According to traditional Japanese table settings, the red bowls on the trays most likely held soup and rice, the blue dishes on the left side of the trays held pickles, and the white dishes held a side dish. Although there are no teacups on the tables, the Japanese man on the right side of the panel held a teapot, demonstrating the importance of tea at the banquet. The small black tables in the center of the room were most likely charcoal braziers with red-hot coals or rocks in their center.

 

References

1. Matthew Calbraith Perry, Narrative of the expedition of an American squadron to the China Seas and Japan: Performed in the years 1852, 1853, and 1854, Under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry (Washington, D.C.: United States Navy, by order of the Government of the United State, 1856); Matthew Calbraith Perry, The Japan Expedition, 1852-1854: The Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, ed. Roger Pineau. with an introd. by Samuel Eliot Morison (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968).
2. William Heine, With Perry to Japan: A Memoir, trans. and ed. Frederic Trautmann (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 125.
3. Robert Tomes, The Americans in Japan: An Abridgment of the Government Narrative of the U.S. Expedition (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 244.
4. Ibid., 245.
5. Heine, With Perry to Japan, 46.
6. Tomes, Americans in Japan, 244.