University of Wisconsin - Madison
Silent Instruments: Images of European Instruments in Japanese Yokohama-e Prints, ca. 1860
Woodblock prints
and illustrated books from 1850s and ‘60s Japan often included flashy images of
European fashion and technical culture, like steam engines, hot-air balloons,
and stovepipe hats, aiming to elicit the interest of the country’s large
reading public. Musical performance was a well-established subject for Japanese
printmakers, and European music, especially brass bands and string soloists,
became a staple of these new prints of the West, known as “Yokohama-e.” Curiously,
these music-themed images circulated widely among a Japanese public that had no
first-hand knowledge of what Western instruments sounded like.
This
presentation will investigate the iconographic style of Yokohama-e prints and
draw from diaries and diplomatic records that discuss music performances in
Japan around 1860 to uncover the process of cultural translation the silent
musical prints aided. Even the factual inaccuracies in such images reveal that
the artists’ aims were to demystify foreign habits and make them more legible
to the Japanese public, thus providing a rare case where flawed depictions of “Others”
aspire to familiarity and understanding.
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