| This dissertation investigates the visual representation of foreigners in the Japanese popular art of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) during the Edo and Meiji periods. Foreigners found their niche in the Japanese cosmology even during the period of "national seclusion" (sakoku, 1639-1853), typically through the stereotype of Tojin (Tang Chinese). The popular imagery of Tojin, with its distinctive and extensive characteristics, formed a general category of foreigner that included both Westerners and non-Westerners, and served as a travesty of the Japanese.;Tojin was a temporally, spatially, and socially specific product of Japanese other-making, the combination and variation of numerous Others within a rhizomic network connecting multiple entries and exits through interchangeable traits drawn from specific foreigners, marginalized Japanese groups, and mythical beings. Different from the depiction of Iberians in late 16th-century Nanban screens, and Dutch and Chinese traders in Nagasaki-e, the imagery of Tojin gradually developed into a popular presentation that homogenized the traits specific to different groups into a single image that served to place the Japanese within a world order different from the one fabricated by the government. This domestication of the Other primarily occurred in the absence of real interaction with foreigners. Nevertheless, it involved production and consumption in many ways, including Tojin enactment by itinerant entertainers, kabuki actors, and festive commoners, each production and subsequent consumption creating new combinations of traits and new social meanings.;The arrival of Commodore Perry's "black ships" in 1853, and subsequent experience with real foreigners, forced the Japanese to re-evaluate their notion of the Other and adjust the imagery of Tojin accordingly. Tojin came to refer exclusively to Westerners while the anti-foreign ideas presented them as frightful barbarians. But Yokohama-e , prints focusing on the treaty port of Yokohama opened in 1859, responded to the intense curiosity about foreigners by presenting them as ijin ("different people"). A more neutral representation than Tojin, ijin placed a whitened and westernized Japanese Self into a West-centered world order that incorporated Western and Asian Others into a colonial hierarchy of race and civilization, laying the visual groundwork for Japan's imperial ambitions. |
