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Writings: Student Essays     日本語で見る | Read in Japanese 日本語で見る | Read in Japanese

A few years after Brown University students wrote about the images in “Request for a Good Relationship,” Professor Yugin Yaguchi, of the University of Tokyo, used the website in one of his English language courses. You can read about his experience here. 

The University of Tokyo students were much more skeptical about these peaceful, charming images, than the U.S. students. Their reactions seemed similar to those of the Chinese scholar, Wang Zhiben, who examined, titled and wrote on the scroll in 1906. His summary questioned the motives of the American soldiers, saying they “swaggered” and were “arrogant.” Brown students dismissed this description as biased. But many of the University of Tokyo students read the images the same way. Are the differences the result of the differences between Asian viewers and American viewers? Or because visual texts are open to multiple interpretations? Or because the world changed between 1906 and the twenty-first century?

Funded as an Undergraduate Research Assistant, Chris Suh, now a PhD student in history at Stanford University, carefully read each student essay and addressed these questions. Chris wrote that the essays, “written by students at the University of Tokyo and Brown University, reveal the continuing differences between the ways the two sides envision the initial contact.”

While Americans, if they know about Perry at all, remember the voyage as a moment of friendship, the Japanese, for whom the “black ships” in which Perry arrived are an integral part of their cultural history did not see the Perry voyage (then or now) as a neutral “visit” but rather as a frightening threat of a potential invasion. These culturally different viewpoints inform the way in which the students understood the, seemingly, neutral images.



“Request for a Good Relationship” scroll commentaries (Brown University Library):



Heine lithographs commentaries (Brown University Library):

  • Landing of Commodore Perry… ( Sehgal )
  • Landing of Commodore Perry… ( Matsumoto )
  • Excercise of Troops… ( Sehgal )


Comparing the views from the U.S. and from Japan



High School Student Essays