My Objects All Sublime: Racial Performance and Commodity Culture

Domestic Deviance and the Japanese Object

The “senuous appeal” of Japanese imports reflected contradictions in the ways that the Japanese were considered a race. As Rotem Kowner describes, the racial identification of Japanese people by Europeans and Americans varied greatly over the period from the 1860s until the Second World War. Different visitors to Japan, including “specialists” (ethnographers, physicians, and archaeologists, who came to Japan mainly for research and provided most of the primary data on its people), “impressionists” (short-term visitors, non-“specialist” residents, as well as popular and travel writers) and “raciologists” (prominent scholars of race and anthropology, who has no close contact with Japan) gave differing, even contradictory accounts of how the Japanese might be categorized, often making such claims based on perceptions of Japan’s relationship to modernization and its power on the world stage.17 Most influential to Gilbert’s libretto and the first productions of The Mikado were those accounts that defined Japan’s contributions to art. These accounts defined a contradiction between the evident refinement of certain Japanese crafts and the perceived barbarity of the Japanese culture and people.

Anna Jackson notes that while Japanese art received high praise from Western critics for its beauty, it was also seen as “decorative” rather than “high art,” appealing to the senses rather than the intellect.18 The Japanese were seen as being in only the “first stage of progress”19 in the arts that would define their civilization. As testimony, critics pointed to their “seeming disregard for the human form” that “most seriously damned them as artistic barbarians.”20 Rutherford Alcock’s influential Art and Art Industries of Japan reminds readers of “the influence which Art and Art culture have exercised in developing national character and civilization in all ages of the world.” The Japanese, however, are “dead to any sense of beauty in the human figure,” and this “one fact seems to have determined the direction of their Art culture, and its degeneration into grotesque conceptions of humanity.”21

Not only was Japanese art considered to be devoid of appreciation for the human form; the Japanese people themselves were, in accounts such as Sir Rutherford Alcock’s Capital of the Tycoon, depicted as practicing bodily arts that rendered their own figures grotesque. Alcock comments on skin disease among working-class men, perhaps due to a perceived lack of hygiene in laundry and public baths: “The truth is, they wash their bodies often enough, but much less frequently their clothes, and there is a vast deal too much of promiscuous herding and slopping together at the baths of all the lower orders for much purity to come out of them, moral or physical.”22 Describing the penchant for tattooing among Japanese men, Alcock marvels,

to see them in their habitual costume (videlicit, a girdle of the narrowest possible kind), the greater part of the body and limbs scrolled over with bright blue dragons, and lions, and tigers, and figures of men and women, tattooed into their skins with the most artistic and elaborate ornamentation—“scantily dressed but decently painted,” as has been said of our own ancestors when Julius Caesar first discovered them—it is impossible to deny that they look remarkably like a race of savages, if not savages, in their war paint.23

Of Japanese women, Alcock remarks that many of them “might make some considerable pretensions to beauty” (“I have seen many as fair as my own countrywomen, and with healthy blood mantling in their cheeks”) and their elaborate hair “displays a marvelous amount of feminine ingenuity.”24 However, their practice of whitening their faces, blackening their teeth, and plucking their eyebrows renders them hideous:

When they have renewed the black varnish to the teeth, plucked out the last hair from their eyebrows, the Japanese matrons may certainly claim unrivaled pre-eminence in artificial ugliness over all their sex. Their mouths thus disfigured are like open sepulchers, and whether given to “flatter with their tongues” I can not undertake in this my novitiate to say, but they must have sirens’ tongues or a fifty-horse power of flattery to make those red-varnished lips utter any thing which could compensate man or child for so much artificial ugliness!25

The Mikado seems to present a much more palatable vision of Japanese people, even while referencing such details of bodily hygiene and adornment in descriptions of Nanki-Poo as “a thing of shreds and patches” and a “very imperfect ablutioner,” or in the adornment of Yum-Yum (“Braid the raven hair” and “dye the coral lip”) for her wedding. Katisha’s appalling appearance is much more evocative of such descriptions, combining the “artificial ugliness” of the hideously made-up Japanese woman with the grande dame of English pantomime. Yet The Mikado does highlight a deeper fascination with the perceived barbarity of the Japanese, a difference that attracts as well as repels.

In his account of the opera’s genesis, Gilbert comments that “our scenery is quite Japanese, and our costumes have been imported. . . . I am anxious about the clothes being properly worn . . . and have my doubts about the flat black hair.”26 Cellier is more direct in his statements that impersonating the Japanese would have been perceived as ugly rather than admirable:

To begin with, one of the most essential qualifications of Savoy actors and actresses was that of physical grace; the poise of each limb, the elegant sway and easy motion of the figure, the noble dignity of action which distinguishes the English stage. All this had to be undone again, only more so than had been necessary in the case of Bunthorne, Grosvenor, and their followers in the play of “Patience.” Every proud, upright, and lithesome Savoyard would have to be transformed into the semblance of a Jap who, to our Western eyes, was not the ideal of perfect grace and loveliness.

But Gilbert soon found a way out of that difficulty. Here were living models, real Japanese ready to hand. They should teach the ladies and gentlemen of the Savoy how to walk and dance, how to sit down, and how to express their every emotion by the evolutions of the fan. Confident, then in his ability to overcome all obstacles, our author applied his mind to the subject of Japan, read up the ancient history of the nation and, finding therein much from which to extract humour, soon conceived a plot and story.27

These accounts suggest that The Mikado’s fantasy of Japan is attractive because it is at least in part pointedly counter to “the noble dignity” of the English stage. The fascination with the racial grotesque, “the semblance of a Jap,” is integral to the opera. Such an idea is also alluded to by the reviewer who complimented Durward Lely, the tenor who played Nanki-Poo in the first production, on “his heroism in sacrificing some of his personal attractiveness to the exigencies of a Japanese make-up in the matter of hair and eyebrows.”28

The opera works within an existing contradiction. Opinions about Japan varied; its crafts were at once testimony to the height of its civilization, but at the same time it was considered a heathen and barbaric country. Thus what is “Japanese” brings together two opposing sets of qualities: the one primitive and uncivilized, and the other overly civilized and repressed. In the opera both the patrician and the primitive versions of the orient collide. Japan becomes a place where strict class hierarchies and rigid laws seem implacable, making cruel and unusual punishments—decapitation and death by boiling oil—inevitable. And yet these laws only give way to multiple acts of transgressing these roles. The love duet between Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum (“Were You Not to Ko-Ko Plighted”) emphasizes how the formal prohibition of flirting (“You must never do”) makes its enactment all the more deliciously arousing (“I would kiss you fondly thus”). Human impulse is under such restraint that any act of flirting, real or imagined, is punishable by execution.

The imagined Japan of the opera clearly satirizes aspects of Victorian society and fits a standard romantic formula in which young love triumphs over repressive law. However, the depiction of Titipu is more than a thinly disguised England. The racial image of the Japanese as a contradictory mix of civilization and barbarity allow for the censure of Japan as a country with aspirations toward modernization. Thus the opera comments on the display of cruel and strange customs by a people who are nonetheless convinced of their own civilization. Such pretenses are projected onto the character of the Mikado, who claims to be “humane” yet demonstrates a degree of bloodlust well befitting the oriental despot, albeit one made humorous. The opera’s Japan is defined by its strange and cruel customs, such as burying new widows alive, boiling prisoners in oil, and committing “The Happy Despatch.” This was not lost on William Beatty-Kingston, one of the opera’s early reviewers, for whom the characters

are carefully shown to be unsusceptible of a single kindly feeling or wholesome impulse; were they not manifestly maniacal they would be demoniacal. This view of them is rendered imperative by the circumstance that their dearest personal interests are, throughout the plot, made dependent upon the infliction of a violent death upon one or the other of them. Decapitation, disembowelment, immersion in boiling oil or molten lead are the eventualities upon which their attention (and that of the audience) is kept fixed with gruesome persistence; what wonder that their brains should be unsettled by such appalling prospects, or that their hearts should be turned to stone by the petrifying instinct of self-preservation? . . . Having resolved to deal with the grimmest subject ever yet selected for treatment from the comic point of view by any dramatic author, and to exhibit his fellow-men to their contemporaries in the most disadvantageous light imaginable, Mr Gilbert has done his self-appointed work with surpassing ability and inimitable verve.29

Sexual fantasies in particular run rampant in this world where punishment and desire go hand in hand. These erotic fantasies were openly racialized. From the “supple song” of Nanki-Poo to the Three Little Maids “who all unwary / come from the ladies seminary,” the erotic attractions of The Mikado are enhanced by its Japanese connections. The Japan craze included the import of relatively chaste items, but also objects accompanied by stories of geishas, customs such as the nude bathing of men and women, and shunga (Japanese erotic art, an explicitly sexual type of ukiyo-e) that created impressions of Japan as a place of sexual license, pleasure, and deviance. While many American and European artists painted respectable, upper-class women in kimonos as a sign of their fashion and good breeding, others such as van Gogh, Tissot, and Monet posed their figures in kimonos as courtesans or low-life entertainers.30 Monet’s La Japonaise, for instance, is a portrait of Monet’s wife Camille in a pose reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints of courtesans.31 The more openly transgressive Aubrey Beardsley freely borrowed from Japanese woodblock prints to create his own distinctive and sexually explicit style.32 Such eroticized images set the stage for later moments of interest in The Mikado.

As Sally Ledger suggests, late nineteenth-century caricatures of the New Woman as unwomanly and masculine were often accompanied by figures of effeminate men.33 In The Mikado, it is Katisha who is the figure of voracious and deviant female sexuality. Paired with the ineffectual executioner Ko-Ko, who never “even killed a bluebottle,” she finds “beauty even in bloodthirstiness”; their duet celebrates the morbid taste for violence and danger (“There is beauty in the bellow of the blast, / There is grandeur in the growling of the gale) as well as in the presumably unnatural enjoyment of elderly sexuality of which Ko-Ko sings:

There is beauty in extreme old age—

Do you fancy you are elderly enough?

Information I’m requesting

On a subject interesting:

Is a maiden all the better when she’s tough?

Of course the “fascination frantic / In a ruin that’s romantic” is not just Ko-Ko’s predilection. Aspects of the Japan craze became more generally suggestive of excessive luxury and a decadent attachment to oriental commodities. Collectors such as Edmond de Goncourt encouraged this association by their particular expressions of consumerist fantasy. Goncourt wrote of his mad passion for things Japanese; he vividly describes a particularly memorable spending spree:

We went to inspect the arrival of two shipments from Japan. We spent hours in the midst of those forms, those colours, those objects in bronze, porcelain, pottery, jade, ivory, wood and paper—all that intoxicating and haunting assemblage of art. We were there for hours, so many hours that it was four o’clock when I had lunch. After these debauches of art—the one this morning cost me more than 500 Francs—I am left worn out and shaking as after a night of gambling. I came away with a dryness in the mouth which only the sea water from a dozen oysters could refresh. I bought some ancient albums, a bronze . . . and the gown of a Japanese tragedian on whose black velvet there are gold dragons with enamel eyes clawing at each other in a field of pink peonies.34

Notorious aesthetes such as Whistler, Wilde, and Beardsley were likewise flagrant in their praise of Japanese objects and styles, thus marking this taste as deviant, as satirized by George du Maurier’s drawing “The Six-Mark Teapot” in Punch, where a newly married couple resolve to live up to their teapot (based on Wilde’s own famous quip, “I find it harder and harder every day to life up to my blue china”).35 As the aesthetic bridegroom and intense bride initiate married life, their ritual of consummation takes place through worship of things Japanese, evidenced by the vase and screen as well as the china teapot. The oriental object becomes a model for human perfection, an icon on which is placed both sexual desire and religious fervor. In du Maurier’s drawing, the “intense bride” touches the teapot; moreover, her rounded sleeves and the floral and avian patterning of her dress suggest that she has indeed become one with the object.

The revenge of the ordinary on the decadent, Japan-smitten aesthete is the subject of Gilbert and Sullivan’s earlier Patience, where the self-serving Reginald Bunthorne pretends to be a poet in order to win attention and admiration from Jane and the other “twenty lovesick maidens.” The women in turn despise their suitors, the Dragoon Guards, for being “fleshly men.” They urge the guards, whom they once favored (“since then our tastes have been etherealized, our perceptions exalted”), to change their red and yellow uniforms to “a cobwebby grey velvet, with a tender bloom like cold gravy, which, made Florentine fourteenth-century, trimmed with Venetian leather and Spanish altar lace, and surmounted with something Japanese—it matters not what!” The exaggerated romantic devotion of the lovesick maidens also satirizes a feminized and orientalized consumer capitalism. The maidens of Patience treat the men as objects to be consumed, and in so doing, rob them of their manly demeanor and dignity. Pretending to love “something Japanese,” such as the aesthete Bunthorne, is a sign of submission to a world of commodities with its fickle, feminine tastes:

Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen,

An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean!

Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band,

If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand.

And every one will say,

As you walk your flowery way,

“If he’s content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me,

Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”

Though a more general satire on the aesthetic movement, with figures like John James McNeil Whistler, Algernon Swinburne, and Gabriel Dante Rossetti, the “Japanese young man” of Patience was of course most linked with Oscar Wilde, whose 1882 American tour was financed by D’Oyly Carte. Wilde was carefully scheduled to appear in U.S. cities with the opening of the opera, acting, as Max Beerbohm suggested, as “a sandwich board for Patience.”36

Ultimately Bunthorne confesses his pretense (“I do not long for all one sees / That’s Japanese”) and in pursuit of the milkmaid Patience’s affections, turns himself into an “ordinary young man.” The dragoons finally appear dressed as aesthetes, posing laboriously in attitudes, whereupon the maidens pronounce them satisfactory: “perceptively intense and consummately utter.” This final posturing of Patience prefigures the opening men’s chorus in The Mikado; both sets of men pose as objects, either aesthetic or Japanese. But unlike the dragoons of Patience, who have difficulty “attitudinizing,” the “gentlemen of Japan” fully inhabit their difficult and “unnatural” postures, opening the opera with a racial display that again evokes strange, deviant, and grotesque bodies:

If you think we are worked by strings,

Like a Japanese marionette,

You don’t understand these things:

It is simply Court etiquette.

Perhaps you suppose this throng

Can’t keep it up all day long?

If that’s your idea, you’re wrong, oh!

The Mikado’s invitation to perform Japanese extended the consumer’s pleasure in the Japanese commodity, the thing that might add a frisson of the novel, the exotic, and even the transgressive to the British and American home. Mari Yoshihara describes how the consumption of Asian art and domestic goods transformed ideas about Asia “from what had been a highly specialized, esoteric knowledge of select male intellectuals to a popular commodity purchased and used not only in upper-but also middle-class American households, particularly by women.” It is the “material culture of Orientalism” that “packaged the mixed interests Americans had about Asia—Asia as seductive, aesthetic, refined culture, and Asia as foreign, premodern, Other—and made them into unthreatening objects for collection and consumption.”37 In making its characters resemble the docile objects of the parlor and dining room, their deviance was turned into quaintness. The Mikado, like the everyday world of the china teacup and the decorative screen it emulated, naturalized orientalism, making the “foreign” a standard aspect of the domestic sphere.

Playing Japanese in The Mikado

This tension between playing Japan as both refined and primitive was rigorously regulated in the acting style of the opera’s Savoy productions. This was in keeping with the rigid control the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company generally had over performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operas until the expiration of copyright at the end of 1961. No other professional productions were allowed, and all amateur productions had to pay royalties and base their productions on D’Oyly Carte orchestrations and promptbooks. But it was more than legal control that lent the company its authority. All improvisation was carefully controlled; later versions of the standard company contract included a clause to the effect that “the artist shall not introduce into his performance any material not previously approved by Bridget D’Oyly Carte (granddaughter of Richard and later head of the company) and shall not without such consent alter the music, words, or business of the part which he is playing.”38 Savoy productions of The Mikado remained remarkably consistent with Gilbert’s 1885 vision, with its most drastic innovations an overhaul of scenery and costume, redesigned by Charles Ricketts, in 1926.39 Gilbert’s direction was notoriously rigid; in one instance he complained to Carte:

I hear great complaints of [Rutland] Barrington’s gagging. . . . The piece is, I think, quite good enough without the extraneous embellishments suggested by Mr. Barrington’s brief fancy. Anyway it must be played exactly as I wrote it. I wont have an outside word introduced by anybody. If once a license in this direction is accorded it opens the door to any amount of tomfoolery.40

Some of this movement and gesture was developed by copying the dances and gestures of Japanese men and women employed at the Japanese Native Village that had opened in the suburb of Knightsbridge a few months before the opening of the opera. Cellier describes how both “a Japanese male dancer and a Japanese tea-girl” were employed to coach the Savoy players, and it was to

their invaluable aid in coaching the company it was mainly due that our actors and actresses became, after a few rehearsals, so very Japanny. . . . It was extremely amusing and interesting to witness the stage rehearsals, to note the gradual conversion of the English to the Japanese. One was sometimes inclined to wonder if the Savoyards would retain sufficient native instinct adequately to study the English music.41

What dance steps or movements of the fan were borrowed cannot be precisely determined, but any imitation of Japanese movement and posture was most likely translated into something more palatable. This movement was then codified into the disciplined and precise performance style that was characteristic of D’Oyly Carte’s company. This careful orchestration can be noted in promptbook notations such as those for Nanki-Poo’s entrance song, where the chorus is directed to “strike attitude” when Nanki-Poo addresses them as “Gentlemen”; “fan slowly in time” through the first four lines, put their fans away at the ninth line; and when Nanki-Poo asks, “Are you in sentimental mood?” “all assent / all sympathize.” The chorus clasps their hands at “lover’s fears,” touches their eyes at “sympathetic tears,” drops their heads at “Oh, sorrow, sorrow!,” assents to “patriotic sentiment,” and expresses delight with Nanki-Poo’s song of the sea, performing “rowing action four times / twice on stage and twice off / hauling eight beats / then smack & hitch.”42

The version of Japanese behavior produced for the first Mikado was carefully monitored in nearly every detail. But despite the strict control over the performers, some elements of improvisation inevitably crept in, and fans delighted in these familiar instances of clowning. Comic gags abounded in the history of the Savoy production, to Gilbert’s great consternation. Punch describes an incident in which George Grossmith, playing Ko-Ko, showed his legs, clad in white stockings, under his Japanese dress.

Forthwith the house felt a strong sense of relief. It had got what it wanted, it had found out accidentally what it had really missed, and at the first glimpse of George Grossmith’s legs there arose a shout of long-pent-up laughter. George took the hint; he too had found out where the fault lay, and now he was so pleased at the discovery that he couldn’t give them too much of a good thing. . . . From that time to the end of the piece there wasn’t a dull minute.43

In her autobiography, Savoy performer Jessie Bond confessed that when she played Pitti-Sing,

There was nothing much to single me out from the Three Little Maids from School, so I persuaded the wardrobe mistress to give me a big obi, twice as big as any of the others. . . . She did—I wonder she dared, or that the eagle eyes of the Triumvirate passed it—and I made the most of my big, big bow, turning my back to the audience whenever I got a chance, and waggling it. The gallery was delighted, but I nearly got the sack for that prank! However, I did get noticed, which was what I wanted.44

Thus The Mikado became a place where audiences could see a Japan of extreme contradictions, which demonstrated both the measured dignity expected of “civilized behavior” but also allowed the most blatant displays of erotic and corporeal humor. Such contradictions were absorbed into the overall fantasy of Titipu and would become central, as we shall see, to later productions of the opera such as the Swing Mikado and the Hot Mikado.

Mikado Rooms and Object Fantasies

The craze for Japanese things, and its important part in what historians have described as the culture of consumption that arose in both England and the United States in the later part of the nineteenth century, definitely set the stage for The Mikado’s success.45 But the opera initiated its own distinctive brand of yellowface performance that defined for many what it meant to play Japanese. To see this we have only to look at the descriptions of the Mikado rooms that became popular in the wake of the New York opening of The Mikado, as the New York World described:

Instead of putting fugitive Japanese ornaments miscellaneously about a house, stuck here and there like plums in a pudding, among all sorts of incongruous things, the latest is to set apart one room to be devoted to Japanese art and to call it the “Mikado room.”46

These rooms were “a revival, in one sense, of the former taste for Japanese art in decoration” but also a direct “result of the popularity of Gilbert & Sullivan’s opera.” “Mikado rooms” ranged wildly in expense. At the high end were the opulent room at H. G. Marquant’s Madison Avenue home, costing at least $150,000; the Japanese collections of Mrs. Morgan valued at $300,000; and the Mikado room of Mr. W. T. Walters of Baltimore, with a collection of swords “which are alone worth about $100,000.” But these rooms were also available at much more affordable prices, such as “a small room in an ordinary flat” for $25. The World finds, “That is the great beauty of Japanese wares. You can find the greatest diversity in values and all of artistic worth.”47

A similar story in the Chicago Tribune concludes, “Our best people have always had a sneaking regard for Japanese fiance [pottery] and curios,” with such “connoisseurs as Marshall Field, George L. Duniap, L. Z. Leiter and his nephew Barton Leiter, Mr. and Mrs. Bross, and dozens of others” who “have collected some of the finest specimens of Japanese art manufactures and feel a just pride in the possession of their beautiful curios.” Yet there is also a more egalitarian spirit in the Mikado rooms of Chicago:

The Mikado craze is tending to popularize Japanese art, and you will find in a very short time the inevitable fan, ranging in price from two cents to $20, will be as common in the homes of our people [of] all classes as was formerly the much-abused chromolithograph.48

In purchasing essential decorations such as fans, the Tribune assures readers,

There is no limit in the fanciful and beautiful specimens which a person of ordinary taste can secure at a comparatively trifling expense. . . . The beauty of it all is that it is inexpensive as compared with any other style of decoration. While the well-to-do mechanic can make a house, or at least one room, beautiful by a minimum of outlay, the wealthy merchant can furnish such a room at 100 times the cost, and each will be in its own style consistently and artistically attractive.49

Such sentiments are echoed in the pamphlet The Mikado Room and How to Furnish It, where Estelle Stoughton Smith discusses how “lots of interest in things Japanese has been stimulated by the production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado” and describes “a freak which the new opera has sprung upon us . . . ‘The Mikado Room,’ with ‘its odd-finical beauty and stiffness.’” In her self-published pamphlet she counsels readers on how to buy the proper outfitting for such a room, with crepe-paper pictures, hanging scrolls, a hanging cabinet for the display of old bronzes and “cloisome [sic],” porcelain vases, cups, teapots, rattan chairs, black wood tables, chintz draperies, umbrellas, and lanterns. She also assures readers that such a room “is inexpensive as compared with any other style of decoration.”50

The descriptions of these rooms with their particular attention to cost mark a transition from a more limited idea of oriental luxury, affordable only by the elite, to one configured for a variety of consumers. In New York before Chinatown, John Kuo Wei Tchen distinguishes between patrician and commercial forms of orientalism. In the United States, the associations of the Orient with luxury, wealth, and aristocracy originated in the taste of the landed gentry for Chinese porcelain and other fine goods, as epitomized by such prominent figures as George Washington, who cultivated a taste for fancy china. This patrician orientalism contrasted with the commercial orientalism that emerged later in the nineteenth century, as displays of oriental curiosities and monstrosities, such as Chinese and Japanese acrobats or the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, became part of the broader demand for new forms of entertainment.51 Marketed to the middle class, this more commercial orientalism revolved around the consumption of Asian objects and people:

Much in the way aristocrats and patricians engaged in travel writing, the urban middle classes could now consume a visual array of commercial “edifying curiosities” to discover their own personal relationship to other cultures, peoples, and parts of the world. To survey a panorama of China, a miniature of a primitive village, or a living animal or exoticized human on display or to witness an “oriental conjuror” all evoked a sense of wonderment and situated one’s place in the world.52

The Mikado had both its commercial appeal and its patrician elements; most important, it reconfigured the patrician orientalism associated with the connoisseurship of Japanese arts and crafts into a broadly popular phenomenon. In doing so, it fed the desire to see oneself as part of an elite even while catering to the casually curious spectator. Buying things Japanese retained some measure of patrician authority even while available to those of much more modest means. Thus tensions around class might be alleviated through the rhetoric of mass availability, and a supporting fantasy of democracy through consumerism—the idea that all can purchase equally—could be focused on the Japanese object. Importantly, the description of the Mikado room suggests that differences in wealth matter little in this new decorative scheme. The patrician tastes of the wealthy might still be accessible, as “you may spend any fortune you may happen to have, but many pretty things are really cheap.”53

By 1885, many Japanese goods were readily available to middle-class consumers in Europe and the United States. The shift to the mass consumption of oriental items led to the disdain of some connoisseurs such as Edmond de Goncourt, who declared, “The taste for things Chinese and Japanese! We were among the first to have this taste. It is now spreading to everything and everyone, even to idiots and middle-class women. Who has cultivated it, felt it, preached it, and converted others to it more than we; who was excited by the first volumes and had the courage to buy them?54 But The Mikado simply capitalized on this liberalization of orientalism. The opera was a boon to importers, for it made Japanese goods intelligible to a range of new consumers, prompting the ongoing purchase and collection of these objects. The description of how a Mikado room might work suggests multiple activities of acquisition and exchange that were colored by the opera; part of the “amusement,” according to the article in the World, is that “young ladies levy contributions on their friends, those with whom they are sufficiently intimate, to add to the attractions of their ‘Mikado rooms’ and it is not at all the proper thing to take a young lady to see the opera without sending her some Japanese curio as a souvenir of the evening and to be placed in her ‘Mikado room.’” Even after the opera was over, it invited further participation through acts of buying and exchanging souvenirs. These souvenirs then became indelibly marked as artifacts of The Mikado as well as imports from Japan. Their presence in the home, moreover, might give rise to future home performances that would recall the opera, whether through music, gesture, language, or most important, buying things.

The allure of the first productions of The Mikado was clearly tied to a familiarity with imported Japanese goods. But the popularity of the opera itself in turn generated a whole set of orientalized commodities, many of which were substantively different from those things imported directly from Japan. The seemingly limitless reproduction of Mikados and related items, especially in the United States where copyright law did not hold, gave images from the opera a reach on the imagination far beyond the stage. Unauthorized versions, both faithful and blatantly illegitimate, abounded. Sheet music made musical performances ubiquitous. The characterizations, dialogue, and movements of The Mikado were used to advertise everything from corsets to soap to thread.

In this proliferation of Mikados a distinctive tension between authenticity and fantasy emerges. These productions exhibited a marked casualness about their representational power, emphasizing yellowface as a kind of transparent disguise in which racial impersonation is performed simply by picking up the right objects. At the same time, a certain realism was put at a premium, suggesting a certain anxiety about the “authentic” that could not be so easily put off. This was particularly true in the hard-fought battle over copyright and ownership of Mikado productions in the United States.

American Knockoffs and Racial Imitations

In England, the presentation of The Mikado, like other Gilbert and Sullivan operas, was strictly controlled by Richard D’Oyly Carte and his Savoy company. In the United States, however, productions of The Mikado took on a life of their own, as H. L. Mencken described in 1910:

The people of the United States were “Mikado” crazy for a year or more, as they had been “Pinafore” crazy some time before. Things Japanese acquired an absurd vogue. Women carried Japanese fans and wore Japanese kimonos and dressed their hair in some approach to the Japanese manner. The mincing step of Yum-Yum appeared in the land; chopsuey, mistaken for a Japanese dish, became a naturalized victual; the Mikado’s yearning to make the punishment fit the crime gave the common speech a new phrase; parlor wits repeated, with never-failing success, the lordly Pooh-Bah’s remark about the “corroborative detail designed to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative”; his other remark, about the ultimate globule of primordial protoplasm, engendered a public interest in biology and sent the common people to the pages of Darwin, then a mere heretic and the favorite butt of windy homiletes.55

After his experiences with the many unauthorized versions of U.S. productions of Pinafore and Pirates of Penzance, D’Oyly Carte took great care to try to forestall similar imitations of The Mikado. But he did not, as he had with Iolanthe in 1882, plan simultaneous premieres in London and New York. The Mikado had its London debut on March 14, 1885, whereas its New York production was first anticipated for October. D’Oyly Carte had initially negotiated with two American managers, John Stetson and James C. Duff, for rights to the New York premiere. He eventually settled with Stetson, while Duff returned to the United States, intent on staging a production nonetheless. In the months following, D’Oyly Carte and Stetson made a series of moves to try to foil Duff’s plans. When Duff sent an agent to London for Japanese costumes, D’Oyly Carte bought up every Japanese costume available through major importers in London and Paris. Duff sent detectives to spy on Stetson and his theater, the Fifth Avenue; D’Oyly Carte advised Stetson to do the same to Duff and his Standard Theater. When Duff announced that his Mikado would debut on August 24, D’Oyly Carte quickly arranged for a company of Savoy players to travel to New York. The performers left under conditions of great secrecy, traveling under pseudonyms, to escape public announcement. They arrived on August 17, and Stetson announced that his New York production would take place on August 20. Duff countered by moving his premiere date to August 19, and Stetson declared that his opening would also be on the 19th. Duff relented, and moved his first night to August 24.

Stetson and D’Oyly Carte’s production was a great success, while Duff’s proved a critical failure. Duff’s performance did not use Sullivan’s orchestration but rather relied on imitations specifically designed to circumvent copyright. His costumes and scenery could not match the lavish treatment of the Savoy company, and his performers were criticized for their lack of acting skills. Ironically, however, when there was a hiatus in Stetson’s lease for January and February 1886, he, with D’Oyly Carte’s knowledge, paid Duff to move his production to Chicago as a licensed production so that the Savoy Company could use Duff’s theater space. The Stetson/D’Oyly production eventually moved back to the Fifth Avenue Theatre and ended its run on April 17, 1885, after 250 performances.

The earlier American productions of The Mikado were neither D’Oyly Carte’s touring production at the Fifth Avenue Theatre nor the rival production produced by James Duff. They began with a much more modest affair at a small theater, the Chicago Museum, in which a version of the opera performed by the Bijou Opera company competed for attention with other curiosities. Joseph Herbert, who played Ko-Ko, reported, “There were three attractions all at the Museum at the same time—Lucia Zarete, the Mexican Dwarf, 21 inches in height, a double-headed cow, and ‘The Mikado.’” Herbert later recalled, “The manager of the double-headed cow became upset with the amount of business being done by ‘The Mikado’ . . . and tried to claim a breach of contract. He used to take the cow to the door of the theatre, and then claimed that it was the cow and not ‘The Mikado’ which drew the crowds into the Auditorium. Finally, there had to be a compromise with the cow manager.”56 The New York Times later commented on this production, noting its “singers and actors, all of whom are unknown to fame in the East” and speculating on the terms of its piracy:

Undoubtedly the persons responsible for this unauthorized performance obtained a pianoforte score of the piece, such as may now be bought in the music stores, and had an orchestral arrangement hastily made. They did not have exact reproductions of the original scenes and dress, and probably supplied antics of their own in place of Mr. Gilbert’s carefully prepared “business.” As we have intimated, the Chicago Museum is not a fashionable theatre. The modest sum of 10 cents was asked as an admission fee for this performance, which may become historical, and the unanimous opinion of the intelligent persons in the audience was that the people on the stage could neither sing nor act, but it was a production of “The Mikado” all the same.57

The second American Mikado also took place in Chicago. Theater manager Sydney Rosenfeld brought The Mikado to the Grand Opera House on July 6, 1885, to great profit. When he announced his intention to produce the opera in New York at the Union Square Theatre on July 20, Gilbert, Sullivan, D’Oyly Carte, and Stetson appealed to the law. A temporary injunction was issued to prevent The Mikado from being performed until a trial occurred to determine American performing rights. Nonetheless, Rosenfeld arranged for the theater to be sublet to a friend, Edward J. Abrahams, and The Mikado had another production on July 20. The following day, warrants were issued for the arrest of Rosenfeld and Abrahams, who promptly fled to New Jersey and Chicago. Rosenfeld was eventually released after being fined $750. On August 10, Harry Miner also produced a version at the Harry Miner People’s Theatre, using a cast almost identical to Rosenfeld’s. Another judge refused to grant an injunction against Miner’s version, although he required him to enter into a bond. But D’Oyly Carte could not get an injunction against James Duff. A test case was heard by Justice Divver, of New York City, who issued the ruling: “Copyright or no copyright, commercial honesty or commercial buccaneering, no Englishman possesses any rights which a true born American is bound to respect.”58 The law ultimately supported the ruling that in light of the absence of international copyright law, theater managers in the United States could produce Gilbert and Sullivan’s work without permission or royalties. In the following year, the Berne Copyright Convention of 1886 brought together convention countries that reciprocally agreed to protect published works; the United States was not a participating country.

Eventually, Congress did pass the International Copyright Act in 1891; however, this was much too late to curb the spread of Mikados of all kinds. Hundreds of versions were performed in the few years following, with many variations, including children’s companies; a German version at the Thalia Theatre in New York that included characters such as Puh-Bah, Pisch-Tusch, and Pup-Bah; and a mostly female cast at Tony Pastor’s Theatre with a male Katisha.59 There were also, as we shall discuss later, numerous blackface minstrel versions. These often played concurrently; for instance, advertisements in the Chicago Daily Tribune for October 25, 1885, included several Mikados: one by Sydney Rosenfeld’s company (“The First Perfect Production yet given in Chicago of this Most Famous Opera”), the final performances of the Goodwin Opera Company at the Chicago Museum (“As the Company leaves by special train after the evening performance for Minneapolis”), and a burlesque by Haverly’s Home Minstrels, the “High-Card-O!” complete with “New and Gorgeous Costumes!” and “Characteristic Paraphernalia!” as well as characters such as “Yankee-Pooh,” “Ko-Ko Nuts,” “Poor-Boy,” “Sing-Sing” and “Peek-a-Boo.”60

The competition between these early versions brings out some of the tensions inherent in the transition from the patrician orientalism that connected The Mikado to the world of luxury commodities and legitimate theater on the one hand, and the commercial orientalism of theaters that were not fashionable on the other. Told of Sydney Rosenfeld’s version, John Duff declared that he was not worried about this first Mikado trumping his own unauthorized premiere: “It will be a Japanese burlesque and that is all.”61

Interestingly enough, Duff’s comment reveals how producers of these first U.S. Mikados were eager to claim a certain degree of verisimilitude in order to establish their versions as the most definitive. D’Oyly Carte’s version established a reputation for authenticity through its use of Japanese costumes as well as authorship. “Only Mikado” reads advertisements for the Carte/Stetson production: “Only Mr. R. D’Oyly Carte’s Company have the Composer’s Original Orchestration, the Author’s Original Stage Business and the Real Antique Japanese Costumes. All Other Versions are Unauthorized Imitations.”62 Arthur Sullivan commented on the Chicago version that “it is extremely annoying to have it put on the way it must be here by this fellow Rosenfeld, who got all he knows about Japanese customs, and everything else he knows about the opera, from a dollar score book. Why, do [you] know in London the rehearsals lasted for eight weeks? We went to the Japanese village in London and brought the people to the theatre, so that the production was true down almost to the inimitable Japanese gestures.”63 This dedication to making costuming, scenery, and acting more “Japanese” gave the Savoy productions more weight than the “Japanese burlesque” of their competitors. Comparing the D’Oyly Carte/Stetson version with the Duff one, a reviewer for the Boston Globe noted, “There is a distinct Japanese color to one representation, which, being absent in the other, is replaced by an individuality that belongs to the actors.”64 With the seal of approval of such Japanese specialists as Algernon Mitford and Sir Rutherford Alcock,65 The Mikado of the D’Oyly Carte versions successfully held on to a certain kind of authority as an “authentic Japanese” opera.

Claims to authenticity notwithstanding, most of what D’Oyly Carte was promoting in terms of its fidelity as a representation of Japanese people was not much different from its competitors. Real Japanese kimonos could be used and the scenery made as convincing as possible; heavy eye makeup and elaborate wigs could be carefully applied; the performers could be coached in mincing steps, fluttering fans, and exaggerated bowing. Nonetheless, at the core of all of these productions was a racial performance that appealed precisely because it was not wholly convincing as a representation. The formal stylization of movement and the care in costuming was undercut by multiple moments in which the characters themselves called attention to the ruse. “Sometimes I sit and wonder, in my artless Japanese way,” Yum-Yum muses, “why it is that I am so much more attractive than anybody else in the whole world.” The chorus hails Nanki-Poo’s volunteerism with “the Japanese equivalent for hear, hear, hear!” Ko-Ko tells the Mikado that Nanki-Poo’s name “might have been on his pocket-handkerchief, but Japanese don’t use pocket-handkerchiefs! Ha! ha! ha!” These jokes directly undercut racial impersonation with a certain insouciance, and The Mikado thus disavows any serious intention to represent Japan faithfully. Though Japan always served as the putative point of inspiration for yellowface practice, the opera could absolve the player from any errors of fact by claiming itself as a nonsensically humorous fiction.

The proliferation of American Mikados was enabled and encouraged by a certain style of playing intrinsic to the opera in which authenticity becomes a moot point. This is consistent with the opera’s commodity racism, whereby playing Japanese becomes a matter of associating oneself with objects that can be quickly disposed of. The Mikado’s yellowface supported playing Japanese as a style that performers might take on and off at will. Yellowface is thus performed as a flirtation rather than as a more lasting bodily transformation. Performers easily transform themselves into Japanese through formulaic racial gestures and iconic objects and just as easily retreat from these racial incarnations. The stories told of Grossmith and Bond’s clowning might well substantiate this; what audiences came to see was not real Japanese performing but their favorite Savoy performers pretending to be Japanese and at the same time still operating in the familiar comic modes that identified them.

This lightness became the quality by which these representations became known and famous in the following decades. This style of yellow-face had many advantages. It was affordable and accessible. It could be practiced with very little expertise on the part of the performer with a few strategically placed objects and with minimal translation. These practices of yellowface could also employ all the modern technological means of reproduction: photography, printing, recording, and, eventually, film, to allow its actors to capture and inhabit the spaces of this fantasy Japan. Cards, buttons, and fabric displayed images from the opera, and scenes from The Mikado appeared on scrapbooks, crazy quilts, hand-painted china, and pottery. Children could play with Mikado dolls and toy theaters. Kimonos, swords, and fans became common elements of masquerades for private photography sessions and parties. All of these became alternative venues for Mikado performance; the opera initiated what became a widespread practice of racial cross-dressing. It was these fantasies of cross-racial impersonation, rather than simply an idea of Japan per se, that caught the fancy of many who sought to have themselves captured  à la Mikado. As Yuko Matsukawa has noted, yellowface practices were spread by advertising as well as by performances of the opera. Many of these images were copied directly from cabinet photographs of the U.S. Mikado production as well as other popular works of art, such as Monet’s La Japonaise. These images consistently featured the transparency of this racial cross-dressing in which, as Matsukawa writes, white women playing Japanese “disseminated and naturalized the idea that the loose kimono, the oversized fan and Caucasian features were the hallmarks of Japanese womanhood.”66

Scholars have documented the importance of Japan as a site of aesthetic, literary, intellectual, and spiritual inspiration for Westerners. As T. J. Jackson Lears, Christopher Benfrey, and others have documented, a host of intellectuals, artists, and statesmen made Japan the locus of serious study and travel.67 However, the mass of Mikado audiences had neither the privilege nor the inclination to be this serious. Thus The Mikado marks a radical realignment of the Japan craze, a “lite” version of orientalism that, as suggested by Jeff Nunokawa, has an “ostentatiously theatrical character [that] relies upon and reproduces Japan’s reputation as pure artifice.”68 The Mikado did not demand an understanding of or even curiosity about actual Japanese culture. No expert opinion or Japan specialist was needed to certify the value of the Mikado screen or crazy quilt as racial representation.

Eventually, this imagined Japan even became the frame for the real one. A short film of the “Sarashe Sisters” performing an “Imperial Japanese dance,” produced by W. K. L. Dickson, was made by Edison’s Black Maria studio in 1894; although the women performing a traditional Japanese dance look nothing like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Three Little Maids, the Edison film catalog advertises that the film contains “a charming representation of The Mikado dance by three beautiful Japanese ladies in full costume. Very effective when colored.”69 Even informed travelogues such as G. Waldo Browne’s encyclopedic The New America and the Far East (1907), otherwise replete with a wealth of seemingly authoritative information about Japan, cannot resist titling a picture of three Japanese women “Three Little Maids.”70

In a milieu wherein Japanese objects had already become a familiar and ubiquitous part of everyday decor, The Mikado suggested that Japan could be known solely through the life of these things. The Mikado could safely banish anything that was ugly, sloppy, or inconvenient about actual encounters with Japanese people and instead substitute its own charming version of Japan; moreover, this conveniently packaged and easily digested version of cultural contact could be distributed to places where real Japanese never set foot. The Mikado offered a mode of musical performance that accentuated these attractions: the living, breathing, and singing inhabitants of Titipu, spectacular and harmonious, defined what was Japanese in ways that mere mortals could not.

If the commodity fetishism inherent in japonaiserie fosters fantasies of objects animated as if they were living and breathing, The Mikado imagines a reversal of this relationship, with characters imagined as real and living primarily through their proximity to and connection with these objects. Such a precedent invites Oscar Wilde’s famous remarks in “The Decay of Lying” (1891):

Now do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs. Dowdeswell’s Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.71

Within five years, Japan had finally become a “pure invention” of the artistic mind, an invention that seems to operate best without interruption from any real Japanese whose bodies do not conform to their artistic representations. In Wilde’s framing, as urged on by The Mikado, Japanese things magically appear without the human hands that make them and take on a life of their own. This, of course, is a defining property of commodity fetishism. For Marx, even the “ordinary, sensuous” table turned into a commodity “changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness . . . It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”72 The human hands that make the table are all but forgotten.

The Mikado populates its fantasy of Japan with familiar objects that sing and dance and in doing so seem to leave behind any sense of their Japanese origins. One particularly effective demonstration of this power comes in yet another set of instructions on how to decorate a Mikado room, as Estelle Stoughton Smith, the author of the self-published pamphlet The Mikado Room and How to Furnish It, elaborates on how to use the Japanese fan to enhance feminine attraction and to aid in courtship: “Soft whispers breathed from behind a pretty Fan,” she describes, “will only reach the ear for which they are intended. Hence the potency of the Fan in those delicious little episodes which lead to orange blossoms, the shower of rice and of slippers, and the honeymoon.” Smith also suggests how fans serve to keep records of these intimate encounters; the “society belle” uses the fan “to keep count of her conquests; of the compliments a single evening has brought from bearded lips” or as an autograph album, in which case “the latter days of that Fan are passed in ease and solitude. Its burden of pencil marks and the associations these have in the mind of its fair owner, render it too precious for continuous use. It is laid away among love letters and lavender.” Smith’s homage to the fan is clearly inspired by The Mikado: “Arthur Sullivan has shed a new luster upon the Fan; has added to its glories and increased its stock of laurels . . . His charming opera will come to mind wherever the Fan à la Japonois is fluttered, and wherever feminine beauty is enhanced by the rich colors and crown like head-gear of Yum-Yum or Pitti-Sing.” In her lavish descriptions, the object rules triumphant:

It is evident to all who keep their eyes open, and whose faculties are unclouded, that this is the Fan Age as much as it is the Iron Age. Be that as it may—to everyone this has been especially apparent, since Gilbert and Sullivan launched their tuneful “Mikado,”—that the Fan has become all-powerful in the realm of Society, in Music and the Drama.73

The Mikado’s style of playing Japanese through the object models itself on how commodity fetishism erases human relations in favor of objects. This erasure is double: in the absence of the Japanese labor that makes these objects and in the Japanese people that the objects might represent. The banishment of any real Japanese means that neither the reminder of work nor the grossness of actual bodies intrudes into this new intimacy with things. The Mikado, then, allows a particular desire—not just for possession but for inhabitation—to realize itself on a broad scale. What might easily step into the places of these absent Japanese are the white performers of yellowface, who are imagined as both the possessors of objects and as inhabitants of the fantasy world they represent. This confident act of racial performance has tremendous power. And yet, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is not quite all-encompassing.