As Others Saw Us

By R.H.

When San Furanshisuko Saberyusu, as the Japanese called the Spanish Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, landed at Kagoshima in 1549, he was not quite the first Westerner to enter Japan. But the Portuguese merchants who had arrived before him were viewed with well-bred distaste by the Japanese. What could one make of such odd-colored, hairy, round-eyed barbarians? "I do not know whether they have a proper system of ceremonial etiquette," one Oriental lord wrote of the Namban-jin, or "people from the south." "They eat with their fingers instead of chopsticks as we do. They show their feelings without any self-control...but withal they are a harmless sort of people."

The missionaries were more recognizable, being priests (albeit of an odd religion), scholars and men of action. In the next 90 years, Occidentals got a precarious foothold in traditional Japan; they were expelled in the 17th century and did not return for two centuries, until Commodore Perry's expedition in 1853. How did the Japanese see us, as we gingerly landed from our exotic vessels? Such is the theme of two delightful exhibitions: "Namban Art" at Manhattan's Japan Society and, as a footnote, "Foreigners in Japan," a show of 19th century Yokohama prints at the Philadelphia Museum.

Europe had its fashions in things Oriental: chinoiserie in the 18th century, Japanese screens and lacquer at the end of the 19th. But the Namban-ga, or "paintings of the southern barbarians" (the route from Europe lay round India, to the south), are a rare example of such a vogue in reverse. The very fact that, by the early 17th century, some feudal lord had commissioned a World Map and Four Major Cities of the World (see color), painted on twin eight-fold screens, is significant; his ancestors would not even have been curious, confidently locked as they were in the isolation of Japan. A world map represented as great a jump in thought for Japan as the first photo of the earth from space did to us. The Japanese artist who painted the Four Major Cities had never been to Europe, but he had access to an engraved view of Rome in a book published in Cologne in 1572.

Though he turned the Alban Hills into something like the landscape around Kyoto, he faithfully retained the details --and mistakes--of the original, itself probably drawn by a man who had never been to Rome either. European engravers, in fact, provided a constant flow of information for Japanese painters of Namban-ga. The demand among the castle lords for paintings like A Western Prince on Horseback stemmed partly from the princes' recognizably military splendors; these gorgeously caparisoned Western samurai must have fitted the opulence of the Momoyama period's taste down to the last tassel and square foot of gold leaf.

Cherubs. The Christian missions founded by Xavier and others flourished in Japan (there were 300,000 converts by 1600, and religion and trade were inseparable) until the priests' meddling in Japanese political life enraged the Tokugawa government and persecutions began in 1612. In 1637, a rebellion of Christian peasants was crushed, 37,000 of them were killed, and Christianity was extinct--along with all further contact with the West. Most Namban religious art also perished, except for some rare tea bowls decorated with the cross or an occasional lacquer pyx.

Such devotional paintings as survive are poor--routine ecclesiastical art, whose only interest is that its Sacred Hearts and puffy cherubs were done by Japanese, not Neapolitan hacks. But in its genre scenes, Namban art excelled. It seems that the 16th and 17th century artists were better observers than their 19th century successors. Hiroshige's American Woman on Horseback in the Snow, in Philadelphia, is the vaguest generalization probably based on a garbled story he had heard about Red Indian squaws; its charm is inaccuracy.

But when an artist of the Kano school (1543-90) produced the magnificent screens of Namban traders arriving in Japan that the Imperial Household Collection lent to New York's show, he took great care with detail: the cloaks, the baggy pantaloons, the rakish curly-brim hats, the mustaches and the grotesquely long noses of the foreign barbarians are meticulously set down. To us, it looks like caricature at first. To the lord Tokugawa, who is believed to have commissioned it, it almost certainly did not.

The foreigners may be odd, but they are dignified; the screen is full of the charitable assumption that, despite their quaint and bristly appearance, Occidentals are human too.

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