Writings: Comparative Essays | Re-Envisioning the Perry Expedition
Chris Suh, Brown ’10
More than a century and a half has passed since the American Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry first landed in Japan, and, since then, encounters between the two countries have become increasingly more frequent. Yet the ways in which Americans and Japanese picture that initial contact differs today as much as it did in the nineteenth century. Examining the nineteenth century images of the Perry expedition and the twenty-first century student essays about those depictions — both featured on this website — helps us see how our understandings of the initial contact remain limited in scope and how cross-cultural collaborative scholarship and teaching could broaden out the scope.
William Heine, the official American artist of the expedition, portrayed the initial contact as if it were a scene from an epic, showing the American navy gallantly venturing into the heart of the Japanese fleet. He even drew a parallel between the soldiers of Julius Caesar entering Rome and those of Matthew Perry entering Japan, as he gave his lithograph the title, “Passing the Rubicon: Lieut. S. Bent in the ‘Mississippi’s’ First Cutter Forcing his way through a fleet of Japanese Boats while surveying the bay of Yedo, July 11, 1853.” On the other hand, an anonymous nineteenth century Japanese artist depicted the American navy as anything but gallant. In the first panel of the scroll held at Brown University, the artist reduced the same event to a small scene involving an armed American solider and an unarmed Japanese man, the two of them stuck on a small boat with the entire Japanese coastline as a backdrop. As the painter saw it, the American solider bullied the Japanese man with his modern weapon, forcing him to his knees to beg.
Essays written by students at the University of Tokyo and Brown University reveal the continuing differences between the ways in which the two sides envision the initial contact. Even as students from the two countries make the same observation in the same painting, their interpretations remain different. For example, Benjamin Boas, the Brown student who examines the Japanese panel depicting the exchange of umbrellas, carefully picks out a rather inconspicuous scene in which an American officer is pointing a gun at a Japanese man. He thinks that this particular interaction is “amicable” just as everything else in the panel appears to be, and he writes that the American soldier “playfully threaten[s] a samurai with his gun as he covers his laughter with his other hand.” Yuki Kato, the University of Tokyo student who takes note of the same detail, sees the scene from a completely different perspective. She writes, “the Japanese is raising his hands in front of him as if to calm the American down, or as if he is asking for mercy . . . [t]he expression of the Japanese man is stiff, and this suggests that they are not simply joking.” Unlike the American student, she does not believe the scene is as friendly as the rest of the panel. She writes, “[t]he artists may have put this [interaction] in the drawing as a hint of the reality, and deliberately hid it among the amicable exchanges, so that only the observant viewers would notice.”
There are other examples that illustrate the continuing difference in perception of the Perry expedition. Students from the two universities differently gauge the historical significance of Perry’s miniature train, which, according to University of Tokyo student, Kazuma Mizokoshi, is usually considered the most important symbol of the first contact in Japanese textbooks. Whereas Brown student, Matt Forkin, believes that the train “impressed the Japanese who soon began to realize how a train system could help modernize, unify, and strengthen their nation,” Mizokoshi argues that “Japanese people did not necessarily think that Western technology was excellent [or] should be introduced to Japan.” She further comments that the train was “more like an entertainment than a cultural threat.” Students also disagree on how the panels in the anonymous scroll should be titled. Brown student Rebecca Melsky named the ninth panel, “A Gastronomic Production,” because of the feast that takes place in its foreground. University of Tokyo student, Mari Takeuchi, believes that the panel’s main subject is not in the foreground but in the background, where a serious negotiation takes place. She compares the panel with another Japanese depiction of the same event and concludes that the artist of the anonymous panel downplayed the intensity of the negotiation by deliberately placing it behind the comparably sanguine scene of gastronomical exchange, for the Japanese government that patronized this scroll “did not want to show any anxiety about diplomacy.”
Comparing the essays leads us to question the extent to which different cultural and intellectual backgrounds shape the ways students today think about the first contact. When students from the two countries interpret the nineteenth century pictorial depictions, they tend to hold favorable opinions of the people from their own countries. This tendency stems from nationalism as well as from the fact that their views have been framed by different secondary sources from which they first learned about the Perry expedition. The two groups of students simply have more information about their own cultures. When one Japanese student, Madoka Matsumoto, looked at a Heine lithograph, she noticed in the lower right margin a group of commoners, including women and children, who were non-existent in the Japanese scrolls. In her essay, she argues that the Japanese artist must have excluded the commoners from his panel since they were “on the fringe of the political scenes.” When we look at the footnotes to the student essays, Japanese students rely heavily on Japanese secondary sources and American students on American. Many of the arguments that Japanese students make also rely on the journal of S. Wells Williams, the official American translator of the Perry expedition, who is not mentioned in any of the American essays. It makes sense that Williams is better known in Japan than he is in his own country; his journal, though written in English, was first published in Japan in 1910 and was not printed in the United States until 1973 by an obscure academic press.. From the lower right margin of the nineteenth century painting to the bottom margin of twenty first century student essays, comparing the student essays helps both groups learn something new about the images.
Reading the two sets of essays together not only enables us to see just how differently the other group thinks about the event, but also gives us perspective on our own viewpoint. More concretely, cross-cultural collaborative scholarship pushes us to encounter documents that we might not have known existed. Newly found documents, such as the journal of S. Wells Williams for Americans and that of Robert Tomes, an American cabin boy, for Japanese, could help revise the existing scholarship in both countries on their first official contact. Scholars and students working on transnational subjects need to work from both cultures, and collaboration often provides a new perspective on events we thought we knew. The important thing is that, every time we discover something new on this website, we need to document it as I have done here. I hope this essay can serve as the beginning of a more complete scholarship of cross-cultural exchanges.