“My Artless Japanese Way”: Japanese Villages and Absent Coolies

Veritable Japanese Villages

On January 10, 1885, several months before the opening of The Mikado, a Japanese Native Village managed by Tannaker Buhicrosan opened in the suburb of Knightsbridge outside of London. Over a hundred Japanese, twenty-six of them women and children, inhabited the interior of Humphrey’s Hall, which was fully rebuilt to imitate a Japanese street full of shops. One commentator notes that these buildings were “not mere painted fronts but well-built apartments of varied appearance, each with its own characteristic ornamentation of parti-coloured bamboo, on solid panels, with shingled or thatched roof, and with sliding trellis-shutters and translucent paper screen to serve as a substitute for glass in cold weather.” These structures were decorated with “effective landscapes, in which the world-known Fusi-yama appears now and again, . . . painted by native artists, whose clever manipulation of two brushes, one in each hand, will be seen with astonishment by many.”7 Visitors could see Japanese artisans at work making fans, pottery, baskets, barrels, lanterns, trays, cabinets, pipes, and umbrellas; weaving and embroidering silk, satin, and crepe; carving wood; and painting screens and scrolls. They could drink tea at a tea shop staffed by Japanese women as well as walk through a Japanese garden and view a Buddhist temple, “a place of worship . . . something like a temple, or at all events an inclosure devoted to a hideous idol, before which two lanterns burn continually.”8 At the temple, they could witness two Japanese priests “perform their devotions at suitable hours”; however, the London Times reports that “it is satisfactory to know that there is no intention of making a show of their religious ceremonies.”9 They could hear Japanese music, watch stick fighting and wrestling, and conclude these entertainments by viewing “a dance, or rather the fantastic posturing of three girls in slow measured time to a thrumming accompaniment kept up by some of the women on small stringed instruments played with a broad pecten, two of the number chanting in a high key.”10

The Mikado playfully references the Japanese Native Village, as a desperate Ko-Ko explains to the Mikado that his son has gone “abroad [to] Knightsbridge”! Many have commented that the initial success of The Mikado might have been enhanced by the Japanese Native Village opening earlier that year, and that some of the inhabitants, perhaps these three dancers, served as models for Savoy performers. Yet the relationship of the Japanese villagers to their yellowface counterparts in The Mikado is more complicated than either advertising or inspiration suggests. These villagers presented a dilemma of how to reconcile the real bodies of Japanese people with the fantasy of The Mikado. Although their presence tends to be absorbed into the general history of the opera as proof of the opera’s Japanese authenticity, they in fact disrupt the fantasy of the easy consumption and inhabitation of Japanese things and people.

Newspaper accounts of the Japanese Village registered curiosity about the Japanese, as well as predictable accounts of their racial difference. But unlike The Mikado, these seemed based at least on a desire for firsthand observation. The village itself was constructed to convey the sense that one had indeed traveled to Japan. The Illustrated London News reports,

The experiment of transporting a complete village with its shops, tea-house, theatre, and place of worship, as well as their inhabitants, from warm, sunny Japan to murky London, during the coldest and dullest months of the year, has been a very bold, but an entirely successful one. The almond-eyed artisans are encamped in Humphrey’s Hall, Knightsbridge, and look most wonderfully at home there. The planks for their shops, the platforms on which they sit, or rather squat, and the low desks, or tables, at which they work, have all been brought over bodily; and if only the sunshine, the blue sky, and the tropical foliage could have been added, the picture of Japanese life would have been perfect. As it is, the men and women evidently enjoy the joke immensely, glance up at their visitors with quick bright eyes, make remarks about them to one another in their strange, but not unmusical tongue, and go on with their work in the unhasting yet unresting manner which so eminently distinguishes the oriental from the western races.11

And yet the sensation of travel is mediated by the awareness that this is England, not Japan. If the observer notes that “the Japs tuck their feet up under them in the most comfortable fashion” and hears “a sound of barbaric, but not discordant, music [that] comes in single notes from the annex, where a vocal and instrumental performance is going on,” at the same time he sees not only Japanese, such as “a remarkably pretty woman, with a complexion of roses and lilies and a sweet happy expression of face,” who “flits about from stall to stall, inquiring how her compatriots fare in their new quarters.” The observer also sees English people, describing “a couple of tiny children, with an unmistakably English nurse,” who “toddle about in their warm long-sleeved blue frocks.12

The stated purpose of the exhibition was charitable rather than commercial. The London Times reported that the profits would be given to Mrs. O. Buhicrosan, “a Japanese who had embraced Christianity, and who, having been 20 years absent from her country, was anxious to return and to organize a mission there with the special object of improving the social position of women in that country.”13 Her book Japan: Past and Present; The Manners and Customs of the Japanese was made available to visitors for one shilling. The book gives a detailed description of Japanese history, geography and climate, customs, and culture of Japan, with an eye toward educating the reader about Japanese progress toward modernization. Mrs. Buhicrosan expresses her hope that the recognition and respect of Japan as a nation might indeed emerge with admiration of its craft:

My readers will, perhaps, kindly bear in mind that a quarter of a century ago Japan was known to exist as it were only on a map; the Japanese were thought of (if indeed they were thought of at all) as being a semi-barbaric race, and it was only through an established intercourse with civilized and powerful nations that they became known, and that their Art Manufactures and products were introduced to, and admitted to be worthy of notice by, the representatives of Western Powers. At the same time I feel assured that many may be interested to glean some information concerning a people, who have during the last few years made progressive strides towards civilization and, by untiring energy and enterprise, have succeeded in raising themselves from comparative obscurity to a position of eminence in the eyes of Europe.14

The book reminds its Western readers that Japanese people were indeed worthy of being considered equals: “I have endeavoured to write impartially concerning my country, and to prove that the Japanese are worthy in many respects of being classed in the same category with great Western powers.”15 Mrs. Buhicrosan makes a special case for missionary work in Japan with regard to bringing about reforms for women. Her discussion of the problems of marriage is particularly impassioned:

From the moment a Japanese maiden becomes a wife her troubles commence. . . . Hence, after bringing children into the world, it becomes her duty to attend and wait upon them as a menial, she being always a slave to her husband and her mother-in-law; her own parents she must scarcely think of. Should her husband ill-treat her or be guilty of infidelity she must not complain, but still toil unceasingly on; and should he even tire of his patient, suffering wife, and live in a state of concubinage, she can only humbly submit to the will and caprice of her lord and master.

Her book is geared to raise awareness of the need for reform, proposing that “marriage should no longer be looked upon in Japan as a civil obligation, but should be regarded in the light of a solemn religious ceremony placing both the husband and wife on an equal footing, and celebrated according to the rites and ceremonies of the Christian faith.” Until marriage laws can be reformed, she insists, “civilized Europe will still look coldly upon Japan.”16

Ironically, although the aim of the Knightsbridge Japanese Village was ostensibly to support the improvement of the status of Japanese women, Japanese visitors to the Knightsbridge exhibition such as Yano Fumio deplored how the Japanese were exhibited on a par with “Hottentots, or inhabitants of Madagascar or Sudan” and objected in particular to the display of women, music, and dance in the village. Sensitivity to these concerns by Japanese government officials, as Ayako Kano notes, made it increasingly difficult for Japanese performers to obtain visas for travel in the years following the exhibition.17

Thus the Knightsbridge Japanese Village had its foundations in nationalistic promotion, education, and cultural exchange; its connections to promoting the commodity fetishism of Japanese goods were more indirect. Newspaper accounts as well as the book insisted on the noncommercial function of the exhibition. One reviewer wrote, “Disappointment will assuredly be felt by some of the lady visitors when they see the quaint and fanciful productions of the hairpin makers and other artificers of pretty trifles, by the determination of the management not to permit anything to be sold, at all events until near the time for closing the exhibition. It has been thought best, however, not to make the affair a bazaar.”18 Although the framing of the exhibition reflected a desire to see the enterprise as in the service of cultural exchange rather than of profit, there was nonetheless inevitably a strong interest on the part of attendees in Japan arts and crafts. Though “the single-stick and theatrical performances attract large numbers of spectators . . . the most abiding interest seems to be that taken in the shops and artisans.”19 Mrs. Buhicrosan’s book finishes with sections on each of the crafts demonstrated, with technical descriptions borrowed from Christopher Dresser’s Japan: Its Architecture, Art, and Art Industries and Sir Rutherford Alcock’s Art and Industries of Japan.

Japanese commodities did in fact carry weight in demonstrating, if not the advanced civilization, then at least the potential for civilization of Japan. Alcock, a former British consul-general to Japan and a noted expert on Japanese crafts, paid such a tribute in the inauguration ceremony:

The admiration and popular demand for every kind of Japanese work—fans, baskets, lacquer, bronzes—all were there, unrivalled in beauty and cheapness. . . . [He thought] the surpassing superiority of the work . . . was principally due to the painstaking character of the workmen. Their love of the work itself and constant desire to make each article the best of its kind and the excellence which resulted mutually aided each successive effort in their daily avocation, and left them with little desire of other greater enjoyment. There might be, no doubt, workmen in Japan, as elsewhere, who scamped their work and did not care how imperfect or fraudulent it was, but all he could say was that the conclusion he arrived at after living several years among them was that such cases were rare, for the main characteristic of all Japanese work was its conscientious perfection of detail in every particular, in that which was hidden as well as in that which was exposed to the eye, and this might be seen in the cheapest and most trifling toys almost as well as in the costly lacquered cabinet or the enameled cloisonné.20

The appeal of the Knightsbridge Japanese Village was in its display of the production of crafts and of the ever-diligent and dedicated workers. Unlike previous exhibitions, such as that of Japanese crafts at the 1862 World’s Fair, and unlike the Japanese acrobats popular in the following decades, the emphasis was not just on the display of objects or on spectacular, exceptional bodies, but on the performance of work. This seems akin to what Bill Brown has described of anthropological displays, those museum and exhibition tableaux that became popular in the late nineteenth century. Such displays arranged figures in “occupational groups” that “constellated person, place, and thing into an absorbing drama, supposedly bringing a local culture to life.”21

These were the exhibits that wrested anthropology away from natural history and insisted that the meaning of things is disclosed by their function within a specific environment, not by their place within a history of technology. . . . Together the sketches and the exhibits help disclose the logic—or the synecdochal magic—whereby an object emanates an aura of culture, whereby an everyday object becomes a cultural thing. The tableau is an especially simple and thus powerful mode for producing such magic, and it shows how much the cultural thing depends on our willingness to accede to what political economy would call the labor theory of value—to believe that what is “cultural” about a human artifact is what it tells us about the history of human work.22

Despite the overwhelming emphasis on labor and work, newspaper accounts of the Knightsbridge exhibition also expressed some concern about the inhabitants, calling them “guests.” A correspondent reporting on the construction of the village in December 1884 finds, “The whole of the village will be under cover, and the weather will not, therefore, interfere with the pursuits and entertainments of its inhabitants, who are un-acclimatized to London fog and humid cold.”23 Newspaper articles on the Knightsbridge exhibition stressed that the treatment of the workers was humane and imagined that the workers might be there for the purposes of cultural exchange and perhaps even mutual benefit. The Illustrated London News expressed a desire for “kindness” that goes beyond the terms of “business” when describing the

Japanese men, women, and children—one hundred, we believe, in number who are now amusing the public at Knightsbridge, [who] display, although in a foreign land, the cheerfulness characteristic of the race. If they feel their temporary exile, they show no signs of homesickness, and seem as much amused as the spectators with their work and entertainments. The pleasure they are giving so many visitors daily makes one wish it were possible to give them some real pleasure in return before they leave the country. How this might best be done is a matter for discussion and arrangement. We do not know what would give the Japanese the greatest enjoyment and leave the most lasting impression on their minds; but this can be readily ascertained. And one would like them to see that even in this business-loving country there is a disposition to show a little kindness that is not business-like to strangers from the Far East. It may be remembered, by the way, that Mr. Buhicrosan’s Japanese village is not a commercial speculation, but has been promoted with a charitable object.24

Despite these concerns, the Japanese Village became the site for tragedy in May 1885 when it caught fire. One Japanese man, “a young Japanese woodcarver named Ennemi,”25 died in the blaze, which spread to the surrounding buildings. The artisans were temporarily relocated to Berlin, where the response was on the whole negative, especially regarding the “ugliness of the women.”26 The Knightsbridge exhibit reopened December 2, 1885, in a space that was “twice as large,” and the improved village was reported to be “very much larger and more attractive than the one which met with such an untimely end.”27 The village ultimately closed in 1887, and the members dispersed.28

The Knightsbridge Japanese Native Village and its emphasis on working conditions presents a contrast with The Mikado, which highlights the magical qualities of the Japanese commodity without the more sordid aspects of the human work that produced it. Notably, in the opera itself there is a marked absence or devaluation of labor. Ko-Ko is both a tailor and an executioner, but never actually carries out either of those duties; in fact, his job as Lord High Executioner is imperiled when he is actually confronted with his duties as such. Nanki-Poo disguises himself as a second trombone, but declares himself no musician, a fact that Yum-Yum herself suspects “directly I heard you play!” Pooh-Bah has a multitude of official duties, but his quick assumption of each in fact renders these offices, from Lord High Exchequer to Groom of the Back Stairs, ridiculous. This undermining of work is consistent with imagining Japan as more aesthetic than material.

The Japanese Native Village in Knightsbridge and its American counterparts, which opened that following winter and spring, staged Japanese arts and crafts as the products of very human hands rather than as magical objects ready for consumption. Interestingly enough, the influence of The Mikado was felt on how these Japanese exhibitions were received in the United States. The Japanese Native Villages in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia were financed by the San Francisco–based Deakin brothers rather than being a presumably charitable enterprise. These backers had experience with both the import business and the stage. Walter and Frederic Deakin were the first to import Japanese goods to San Francisco in 1871; Frederic Deakin subsequently went to Japan, and the firm opened a manufacturing branch and emporium in Yokohama that exported and sold the products of three hundred workmen. Joined by their brother Harry Deakin, a theatrical manager who formerly ran Deakin’s Academy of Music in Milwaukee and Deakin’s Liliputian Opera Company, the brothers opened different versions of “A Veritable Japanese Village” on December 4, 1885, in New York’s Madison Square Garden and subsequently in 1886 in Horticultural Hall in Boston and in Philadelphia.29 Not surprisingly, these exhibitions were unabashed in their commercialism. The New York Times reports of the Madison Square Garden exhibition, “The exhibition is unique and interesting, and it is likely to attract much attention in the city, to be a source of amusement and instruction for the people, and of profit for the managers.”30

The Mikado plays an important role in making the American versions of the Japanese Native Villages intelligible. As the New York Times notes:

The first sensation experienced upon entering the gaily-decked inclosure, with its two long rows of booths, is one of surprise that the busy artisans in their loose-fitting attire seem so familiar to us. We have all had the Japanese craze lately. We have been reading up on Japan, buying more or less authentic Japanese curios, and seeing “The Mikado”; so the obliging Kakemono painter, the newly married tailor working away at a blue crape kimono for his pretty bride, the industrious coppersmith, and the patriarchal silk weaver seem almost like old friends.31

A lengthy book by Mrs. Buhicrosan was the offered accompaniment to trips to the Knightsbridge Village; in contrast, those viewing the American versions were guided by short pamphlets with an eye toward increasing the consumer’s appreciation of each exhibit. References to The Mikado abounded throughout these guides. The tea house, in particular, and the serving women within, were described:

Very Japanese indeed, from the picturesque point of view, is the bamboo house with its thick, soft matting, and pot of tea boiling cheerfully in its box of coals. As the visitor advances, he is met by the pretty little woman with her shining hair and sweet smile, and offered a tiny cup of the Oriental beverage. All the romance of this domestic drama centers on this bamboo bower. Here are the representatives of the “Three little maids from school,” and the chorus, who, doubtless, have many a little comedy of their own.

These “ladies of the Tea-House” were described as “very pretty, even to our ideas”; and directly compared with Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing, and Peep-Bo: “As a race, they are naturally inclined to pose, and here are to be found the most picturesque attitudes, which, if they could be introduced into the opera of ‘The Mikado,’ would make it of intrinsic value from a realistic point of view.”32 In the description of the tailor’s shop, “the comic opera of ‘The Mikado’” is credited for the “sudden discovery that the Japanese costume is capable of great beauty as a matter of adornment.”33

At the same time, the presumed familiarity with The Mikado presented its own problems. At least for some observers there was a tension between the relentless commercialism of the village and the fantasy world of the opera. One notes that the presence of the “three little maids . . . tend[ed] to heighten the quaintness and romance of the scene—an effect that lasts until you see the best looking of the three draw from some mysterious spot in the folds of her gown a dirty white bag into which she drops the coin that that you give.”34 Another visitor to Boston’s Japanese Village openly resented the commercialism, noting the “small, ridiculous trade in tiny teapots, painted paper and rice-flour carrots” as well as the “strong flavor of advertisement of a certain firm in Yokohama, Japan.”35

In both England and the United States, Japanese Native Villages were sites of management, negotiating the discrepancy between the admiration of beautiful objects and the work needed to produce them. While Alcock’s lauding the Japanese craftsman’s “painstaking character” suggests superior diligence and skill, the descriptions of the Japanese craftspeople in the United States highlight their “primitive” or exotic methods of production. The pamphlet noted that “there are some queer things connected with Japanese sewing” insofar that the tailor “with his lap full of crape, sits and slides his needle through, much as we put in a drawing string . . . In a straight seam he wastes no time drawing the needle out at arm’s length, but keeps it sliding through the cloth with considerable dexterity, meanwhile making use of his feet to hold the cloth in place.”36 Another description rendered the work of the cabinetmaker equally strange:

Now he must use his saw. Is he going to put his work on a saw horse, or carpenter bench? Nay, this is not Oriental. He lays the board upon the floor, a little raised on his block, holds it firm in place with his left foot, and bending his head down to the floor, and making a singular loop of his entire body, he saws away free and unconstrained in this peculiar attitude.37

These workers, while not pictured as completely brutish and uneducated, were described nonetheless as far from equally civilized. Their practices were seen to demonstrate Japanese racial inferiority, such as the descriptions of the “old weaver and his wife, a quaint looking pair . . . For weeks they labor setting these silken threads in the loom; one by one, in the most primitive fashion, regardless of time, have they been placed and stretched across the bamboo poles.”38 Their “primitive methods” are depicted as “fascinating” in showing “the processes of mind by which man came up from his childhood in the ages long ago. To be without steam power seems to us to-day as the distinguishing mark of a race still in its childhood.”39 Such descriptions of the exhibits simultaneously present the Japanese craftspeople as geniuses at their craft and as part of a simple and primitive race. The terms of The Mikado are ultimately reflected back onto the “queer and quaint” workers of the Japanese Villages.

Little was made of actual working conditions or the relationship between the Japanese inhabitants and their American viewers; rather, accounts emphasized how different crafts were magically produced by enigmatic people with remarkable Japanese powers. The guide relates, for instance, how the visitor might enter the “mysterious realm of the potter, with his fascinating wheel and obedient mass of clay, responding to his faintest wish, and rising before him into mystic shapes at will.”40 The description marvels, “What a world of patience must exist in an Oriental nature when he can devote himself to these details of ornamentation.”41 The same holds true for the glorious embroidery or decorative design rendered by the Japanese embroiderer or the Shippo designer. The former is praised for the choice of colors (“this race excels in the blending of hues, having an Oriental eye for gorgeous color effects”);42 the latter is described as “an artist of skill and genius” for his drawing on the copper vase “the thousand and one teeming fancies of his brain—the delicate and multitudinous tracery of a Japanese imagination.”43 The idealization of what is Japanese as being decorative rather than useful is clearly at play.

Thus Japanese workers were framed both as romanticized artisans and representatives of a primitive culture that magically produced rare and beautiful objects. Any glimpse into other dimensions of their working lives were momentary interruptions to the buzz of commerce that surrounded them. And yet one comment from the Boston edition of the guide does suggest that some anxieties might have intruded:

The finest skilled labor in Japan has been specially gathered—doors, mats, samples, wares and tools, of a thousand descriptions—amounting in all to fifty tons, the whole being transported and produced in its present condition, at enormous expense direct from Japan.

Not the least of the difficulties connected with this enterprise has been the human side of the question—the management of the little brown people so busy at work. That they may be contented, their wives, and, in several cases, their children, have been brought along, and when any of them becomes homesick, he is immediately returned to his native land, and another sent to take his place.44

The “human side of the question” is addressed, only to be quickly appeased. American viewers might well be contented with the assurance that these workers were humanely treated, much more humanely, in fact, than other oriental laborers whose skills were not so refined. In closing, the same pamphlet also comments on the courteous behavior of the workers.

“As polite as a Japanese,” is an expression already being formulated among us, and falling from lips daily, as a result of coming in contact with the courteous artists and artisans of this little village. Perhaps it might not be so flattering to know what they think of us. Indeed, it would not be strange if the potter at his wheel should have some very queer ideas of the greedy little hands held out and waved under his very eyes for “just another vase.”45

Because the Japanese people are treated as exotic mysteries, the possibility that these workers might have “some very queer ideas” of their American spectators is voiced, only to be left unanswered. Ultimately, these Japanese workers are framed as “courteous artists and artisans” who never can speak directly to their working conditions or treatment. However, their very unintelligibility or silence keeps doubts alive. Unlike The Mikado, Japanese Native Villages provided a space of actual contact between white viewers and Japanese performers, exposing the inherent tensions within commodity racism’s fantasies.

Oriental Exhibitions and the Absent Coolie

If even the carefully managed display of artisans in the Japanese Native Village could unsettle some of The Mikado’s fantasies, then more gritty depictions of labor presented an even deeper challenge to its “queer and quaint” Titipu. Interestingly enough, in Gilbert’s original conception for the opera, he set the initial scene in “a Japanese market place” with a chorus of both “Japanese noblemen and market people (men and women) discovered.” This idea was subsequently altered, “for scenic reasons,” to a palace courtyard. But though the new setting erased any direct allusion to commerce, Gilbert did make another intriguing revision in changing the chorus of characters from “market people,”46 to “School-girls, Nobles, Guards, and Coolies.” While the other roles have stated functions in the libretto, the “Coolies” are the only group who seem to have no discernible role. That Gilbert specifically listed coolies in the cast offers some speculation; The Mikado’s list of characters departs from other Gilbert and Sullivan operas, whose choruses may include more humble members such as “villagers,” “citizens,” and “pages,” but nothing that specifically refers to the equivalent of the coolie. Perhaps the coolie signals only the rigid yet picturesque social hierarchy imagined in Japan; travel accounts often included references to and drawings of farm laborers or rickshaw operators. Yet the opera’s plot offers no significant enactment of menial labor (though many productions fill out their casts with dancers or other performers transporting Katisha and the Mikado onto the stage) and only light-hearted references to work of any kind. The Japan of the opera is a fantasy not only of culture but also of magical work, a setting animated by characters whose connections to their occupations are arbitrary at best; thus a “cheap tailor” might be elevated to the Lord High Executioner, Pooh-Bah might serve in every other official capacity, and the Mikado’s son might become a second trombonist (who, moreover, wanders with ballads and “native guitar” in hand) without any demonstrable musical ability.

This reference to coolies serves no crucial purpose for the opera’s plot or characterization; such a dismissal acts as a reminder that those who do the lowest forms of work are conspicuously unimportant in the opera. In this the coolie differs from the craftspeople who inhabited the Japanese Villages and who were dignified, at least, by the public’s appreciation of their craft. A coolie is not one of the picturesque “market people” first envisioned by Gilbert, but rather seems understood in the context of servant or laborer. Such servitude, as Vijay Prashad has pointed out, is commonly associated with field labor on the plantations of early capitalism. After the end of chattel slavery in Australia, South Africa, and the Caribbean, as well as South America, planters tried to hire convicts and freed slaves and then finally turned to thousands of British Indians and Chinese emigrants: “The word coolie entered the European lexicon in the context of imperialism to index a person of inferior status who simply labors for hire.”47 The term reminds us, Prashad suggests, of the most basic and degraded form of human labor:

Coolie is a word that produces, among Indian and Chinese people, the same gut response as does nigger among blacks. It has no established etymology; some place it from the Tamil kuli (“hire”), others find it in the use in sixteenth-century Portugal as Koli, after the name of a Gujarati community, still others notice that it sounds like the Chinese ku-li (“bitter labor”) or like the Fijian kuli meaning “dog.” One way or the other to be called a coolie is to be denigrated, and to be considered at best as a laborer with no other social markers or desires. The word coolie operates, then, like the nineteenth-century English word for factory worker, hand (where the entire ensemble of human flesh and consciousness is reduced to the one thing that is needed to run the mills of industrial capitalism).48

Including coolies in the list of characters in The Mikado seems strangely inconsistent with the opera’s overall fantasy of Japan, evoking, as it does, the discrepancy between beautiful objects and menial labor. Even in the carefully managed space of the opera’s fantasy, coolies are present but not accounted for.

We might contrast the decorative characterizations of The Mikado with a very different image of the Japanese as coolie labor and a racial threat, which came to a head in the United States with successive laws that limited and then barred Japanese immigration: the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan, the 1917 Immigration Act that created the Asiatic Barred Zone, and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. But it would be a stretch to say that the association of Japanese immigrants with despised and feared coolies had any impact on early productions of The Mikado, even in the United States where anti-Asian sentiment was high. By the time Japanese immigrants arrived in large enough numbers to be deemed an economic and political threat to white interests, the opera was well established in its success. Yet we might dwell just a bit further on the relationship between how The Mikado stages the desire for Japanese objects and how it disavows the figure of the coolie, the lowest class in the imagined race to which these objects are intimately connected.

We begin by using this mention of coolies in The Mikado to shed some light on the relationship between japonaiserie and its predecessor chinoiserie. Though it is hard to find direct contrasts between the playful fantasies of The Mikado and depictions of Japanese immigration, there is a much more immediate parallel in the stark contrast between two comparable racial images: the equally popular and quaint objects of chinoiserie and racial stereotypes of the Chinese coolie that helped mobilize strong anti-Chinese sentiment, particularly in the United States.

Chinoiserie provided a space for japonaiserie and in turn for The Mikado. In Europe and the United States, interest in Chinese products created a lasting market for oriental objects in both the public square and the domestic space of the home. As David Porter has noted, the fantasies of chinoiserie drew from a “hedonistic conception of a mythical Cathy detached from time or place and given over to an anarchic abundance of disjointed images and delightfully meaningless signs” and played into “an aesthetic of the ineluctably foreign, a glamorization of the unknown and unknowable for its own sake.”49 The inaccessibility of China, commercially and politically, increased the perception of these objects’ rarity, novelty, and value. Chinoiserie set a precedent for collecting Japanese objects and associating them with mystery, exoticism, and sensuality; it also gave them value as signs of luxury and wealth. Thus it is not surprising that elements of traditional Chinese style and décor inevitably make their way into productions of The Mikado. This confusion does not so much comment on the considerable influence of Chinese culture on Meiji Japan as it is about the larger racial categories into which both Chinese and Japanese are placed, categories created through the meaning and value placed on objects as well as on people.

From the history of chinoiserie we learn not only about its affinities with japonaiserie but also about the conditions under which one became less valuable and the other more so. Chinoiserie was on the wane by the time a more popular interest in Japanese objects began to rise. Dawn Jacobson suggests that chinoiserie’s fall from favor had to do not only with a fashionable weariness but also with the interruption of the fantastical Cathay by a real China where familiarity bred contempt. In the mid-nineteenth century, China suffered great political losses to the British in the Opium Wars. China was defeated at Nanking in 1842, followed by the Treaty of Nanking by which Hong Kong was ceded to the British and four ports, including Shanghai, were opened to foreigners; Jacobson notes that “China was widely seen throughout Europe as a country of liars and fools, whose defences were pitifully weak and whose emperor’s claims to universal sway were absurd and meaningless.”50 Chinoiserie also came to be associated with middle-class mass markets, losing something of its patrician value. In 1842, a London exhibit of Chinese art, financed by a rich American China-trade merchant, Nathan Dunn, “removed the last remnant of China’s mystery”:

A specially built hall erected at Hyde Park Corner housed an immense array of the arts of the newly vanquished nation. Sections of temple, houses, rooms and shops were on display, fully furnished and available for further inspection. There were models of Chinese figures from all walks of life, together with the tools of their trades. There were hundreds of Chinese paintings and a number of architectural models. Anyone could walk in and see the real China; over 100,000 catalogues were sold at the door.51

Chinoiserie could no longer claim prestige through association with a powerful, inaccessible empire, nor, as this cheapened display suggests, could it claim to be the purview of the wealthy and cultural elite.

Japan’s opening to the West provided a valuable decorative surrogate. In his writings on Japan, Sir Rutherford Alcock remarked on the “dead level mediocrity and immobility of the Chinese mind” and that Japan, like China, was “profoundly stirred up in its depths by the sudden contact of Europe” but might respond differently, since it was “not so steadily bent on a collective mediocrity.”52 Such a sentiment seems borne out by responses to both Japanese and Chinese exhibitions at late nineteenth-century world expositions. The Japanese exhibit at both the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition helped popularize Japanese crafts in the United States. In 1876 Japan had a large and expensive exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial, with 17,831 square feet in the main building, 284 separate exhibitors, and one of the nine foreign government buildings.53 Observer James McCabe notes of the Philadelphia Japanese exhibit, “It is about three times as large as the Egyptian space, and is filled in every part with a rich and valuable display, the variety and beauty of which are one of the great surprises of the Exhibition.”54 McCabe describes many features of the Japanese exhibit with admiration, including “a number of bronze vases . . . which are the wonder and admiration of all visitors,” and finds that “the work is unique and cannot be reproduced by the most skilful artificer in either Europe or America.” The porcelains too draw superlatives: “The display of porcelains in this single department surpasses in beauty of forms and ornamentation the combined exhibit of every other nation in the building. One must see the collection here to realize this, but few will doubt the statement, having once made the comparison for themselves.” McCabe ultimately concludes:

The visitor who makes even a hasty inspection of the display of which we have given but a mere outline, must amend his ideas of Japan. We have been accustomed to regard that country as uncivilized, or half-civilized at the best, but we find here abundant evidences that it outshines the most cultivated nation of Europe in arts which are their pride and glory, and which are regarded as among the proudest tokens of their high civilization.

The smaller Chinese exhibit, on the other hand, does not draw the same praise. McCabe notes, “[It] is enclosed by a pavilion, the entrance to which is a copy of the portal of a celestial pagoda, gaudily painted and ornamented with hideous curled-up dragons, which, though ugly, are well carved.” For McCabe, “Every part of the enclosure is of the gaudiest character, and here and there rise tall pagodas and towers, ornamented with the most brilliant colors. All the show-cases are in the Chinese style of architecture, and are as gay and odd-looking as the pavilion itself.” He describes the lacquerware as “also very beautiful, but not equal to those in the Japanese collection.” McCabe describes other Chinese objects with more enthusiasm; the silks are of the “finest quality” and the display of inlaid tables and stands and other articles of household use is found to be “as handsome and as well executed as anything of the kind in the Japanese section, which is saying a great deal.”55

The rise of interest in Japan “at a time of Chinese decline was, perhaps, not accidental,” as Rotem Kowner states:

The opening of Japan facilitated its role to replace China and to be favourably perceived by the West: a charming, exotic, and relatively developed country. Japan, at least, seemed less stagnant than China, and its willingness to emulate the West was gratifying. Moreover, it was reputed to be a land of great beauty, and was much admired for its aesthetic style in certain artistic circles in the West. . . . Harold Isaac’s chronology of Western attitudes toward the Chinese suggests that whenever China was despised, Japan was in favor, and vice versa, and that this pattern was to repeat itself even after the Second World War.56

However, relating this pattern to the relative valuation of Chinese and Japanese objects by the West is not so simple. China’s prominence may have suffered decline, but in the second half of the nineteenth century Japan also was under Western domination, rising slowly into political and military strength only in the new century.

We might explore another dimension of the decline of chinoiserie and rise of japonaiserie. One significant difference, at least around the time of The Mikado’s opening, was in the visible and politically sensitive presence of Chinese immigrant labor and the relative absence of Japanese coolies. In the United States in particular, the interest in chinoiserie as a signal of privilege and luxury collided violently with the actual presence of Chinese immigrant labor. By the time of The Mikado’s premiere in 1885, the large-scale immigration of Chinese had already begun to inspire the anti-Chinese sentiment that so easily extended to anti-Japanese feeling later in the twentieth century. As Robert Lee states, Chinese immigrant labor was designated “coolie labor” in order to alleviate the tensions felt after wage labor declined in value after the 1870s:

The myth of the Chinese coolie laborer allowed white American workers, both native-born and immigrant, to racialize a stratum of wage work equated with wage slavery while reserving for whites a semi-artisan status within the wage labor system. . . . The construction of coolieism was an attempt to insulate the white working-class family from the worst consequences of proletarianization by defining the lowest stratum of menial work as fit only for the coolie or the nigger, and preserving the ideal of artisan labor, with its hope for upward mobility, for the white working man and his family.57

Such a myth would prove formative in the legislation against Chinese immigrants that barred both their entry and their ability to settle as landowners, husbands, and citizens. The anti-Chinese movement framed the immigrant as posing a threat not only to white working-class labor interests (a main force behind the eventual success of anti-Chinese legislation in the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882) but also to the domestic space of the home.

The degraded racial status of the Chinese coolie could not be reconciled with the more patrician forms of orientalism. This is illustrated clearly within the lyrics of Septimus “Sep” Winner’s “The Coolie Chinee” (1871), a comic song that clearly references the familiar stereotypes of the anti-Chinese movement. The song portrays a “Coolie Chinee” with “skin . . . the color of coffee and milk,” and a “queu . . . that reaches way down to his knee.” Using a chorus of gibberish “Hong Kong, Oolong; Hari Kari, ding-a-dong” in “a nasal tone,” the song details the oddities of the “elegant,” and yet “terrible,” “troublesome,” and “cunning” figure who is employed as a cheaper option for domestic work than the Irish immigrant or African American servant (“We sent off our Biddy and also our cook / Because that their wages were high”). He serves his employers “our little pet cat” and a “cussed old rat” for meals, accompanied by “a cup of steaming hot tea”; likewise, when the family buys him “a silk hat and a duster so neat / To keep off the sun and the dirt,” he confuses these items: “But the hat for a basket to market he took, / And the duster he wore for a shirt.” Ironically, some of the greatest faults of the “Coolie Chinee” are that he misuses his Chinese counterparts, the imports that also might trace their origins back to China. Ultimately, the final words of the song urge the listener against the hiring of the “Coolie Chinee”:

Oh never be foolish, dear people, I pray,

Oh never be silly like me,

And if you need help, in the future, I pray,

Engage not a Coolie Chinee.58

The allure of Chinese objects contrasts with anti-Chinese sentiment, and the figure of the Chinese American immigrant laborer is associated with cheap labor, unintelligible manners, and the disruption of the easy consumption of Chinese imports.

During his 1882 D’Oyly Carte–funded tour of the United States, Oscar Wilde commented on the incongruity of the juxtaposition of beautiful china with a brutish Chinese worker:

If everything is dainty and delicate, gentleness and refinement of manner are unconsciously acquired. When I was in San Francisco I used to visit the Chinese Quarter frequently. There I used to watch a great hulking Chinese workman at his task of digging, and used to see him every day drink his tea from a little cup as delicate in texture as the petal of a flower, whereas in all the grand hotels of the land, where thousands of dollars have been lavished on great gilt mirrors and gaudy columns, I have been given my coffee or my chocolate in cups an inch and a quarter thick. I think I have deserved something nicer.59

Even though Wilde suggests a degree of refinement for the “great hulking Chinese workman,” he clearly was not above declaring him worthy of exclusion. During his lecture at San Francisco’s Platt’s Hall, he is reported to have quipped to a receptive audience, when praising the beauty of Whistler’s Peacock Room, “But don’t borrow any Chinese art, for you have no need of it any more than you have need of Chinese labor”—a piece of advice that was hailed by the anti-coolie esthetes near the door with loud applause.”60

Christopher Bush noted that the Chinese laborer was associated with “the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor,” representing “the horrors of modernity by embodying both its abstractness (as faceless working mass) and the unfortunate realities of the actual conditions of ‘free’ labor.” The Japanese worker, in contrast, was “imagined to be a kind of atavistic remainder of something very much like the noble Anglo-Saxon medieval handwork whose final traces were being lost to industrial modernity,” suggesting the lure of what is figured as “premodern, a utopian modernity of consumption, one in which beautiful things are cheaply available to all, with no alienated labor at the base of the economic pyramid.”61 In the Japanese Native Villages or other exhibitions, Japanese workers could still be seen as the ideal of artisan labor rather than as the “hulking” worker representing wage slavery. McCabe’s description of the Chinese exhibit at the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876 assumes familiarity, even homeliness: “Two elaborate bedsteads are exhibited, which are very handsome, and show that John Chinaman has an eye to solid comforts in the midst of all his love of gaudy colors and gingerbread ornaments”; it also smacks of real encounters with a not-so-dignified clientele: “a number of almond-eyes, pigtailed celestials, in their native costumes, are scattered through the enclosure, and you may for a moment imagine that you have put the sea between you and the Exhibition and have suddenly landed in some large Chinese bazaar.”62 In his description of the Japanese exhibit, however, McCabe describes only an imagined gentry: “The Japanese gentleman takes great pride in his collection of screens, which embody the best pictorial art of his country, and regards them as the European or American does his gallery of paintings.”63

Other spectators at the Philadelphia exhibition also did not hesitate to compare the Japanese positively in comparison to both the Chinese exhibits and the Chinese bodies they supposedly represented. Marietta Holley’s fictional and folksy commentator Samantha concludes that “China and Japan are both queer, but Japan’s queerness has an imaginative artistic quirl to it that China’s queerness don’t have.”64 Edward Bruce comments that if Japan was China’s student, “the pupil has surpassed the teacher.”65 One might attribute the negative light that China was cast in to the relative inferiority of the exhibits, the novelty and quality of Japanese craftsmanship, and a perceived deterioration in Chinese imports; the Chinese exhibit simply may not have been as remarkable as the Japanese exhibit was clearly felt to be. But in these and other responses, there is clearly something more than an artistic judgment at play. One newspaper account concludes, “We relegate the Chinese to the half-civilized class without hesitation, or without feeling that any indignity has been offered, and this fact shows what an important difference there is between Japanese and Chinese civilization.”66 Notably, observers of the exhibits at the Chicago exhibition also reiterated this difference. Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son) found Japanese art humorous and lively, but Chinese humor reminded him of a “weird grimace,” and he assumed the Chinese were “without souls” in their “worship of antiquity and their earthly everlastingness.”67 For Mrs. D. C. Taylor, China was a “strange, cold, homeless, heartless, heathen land” filled with “down-trodden women, priests, and tyrant-ridden men,” and a “strange depression of mind and sickness of heart” came over her when she thought of the Celestial Kingdom. Japan, however, was quite different for her, and the “suave, smiling” Japanese just the opposite of the “pigtailed, avaricious Chinese.”68 Finally, H. G. Cutler reflects, “The Japanese have not the staid, placid dispositions of the Chinese. They are more light-hearted, and even at table often enliven the simple courses with music upon the guitar.”69 The musical turn of this attribution contrasts with the New York Times description of the Japanese workers building the official pavilion for the Philadelphia Centennial decades earlier: “Contrary to what has been observed of the Chinese in California and the mining regions, the children of the Flowery Land do not burst into song when plying the implements of carpentry, but work away in absolute silence.”70

In the United States at least, the intense admiration of the beauty and exoticism of the oriental object was clearly at odds with the revulsion and fear of oriental bodies that prompted exclusion laws and violence. If the Chinese immigrant body detracted from chinoiserie’s value, perhaps the relative invisibility of the Japanese immigrant worked to favor japonaiserie as a satisfactory replacement of oriental décor. The popularity of Japanese things was related not only to Japan’s aura of novelty and mystery and the high quality of its products, but also to the conspicuous absence of its people. At the time of The Mikado’s U.S. premiere in 1885, the wave of Japanese immigrant labor had yet to arrive, with only 2,039 Japanese on the U.S. mainland in 1890. Within two decades, the Japanese would surpass the Chinese in number, 72,257 to 71,531; after twenty more years had passed, with Chinese exclusion firmly in place, the Chinese population had remained virtually constant, while the Japanese had nearly doubled to 138,834.71 Japonaiserie’s value for at least several decades would be secure from contamination by the actual presence of laborers whose bodies could not be easily aestheticized. The Mikado could breathe easy in a space only casually interrupted by the presence of the artisan and relatively free from the threat of the hulking laborer and the servile coolie.