Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan (review)

Cultural identities, consumerism and its varied impacts on discourses in art history, and the male body as canvas for personal expression are among the many topics addressed in Christine Guth's immensely engaging new book, Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan. The Longfellow referred to in the title is not the famed American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but his conflicted son, Charles. Thanks to the stature of his poet-father, Charles Longfellow's effects, including a rich collection of souvenir photographs and correspondence, have been preserved at Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through these and other personal effects, Guth places Longfellow among early travelers who visited Japan during the formative years of that country's opening to the West.

Charles Longfellow makes an interesting case study for examining the interactions and cultural transactions made between Japan and the United States. Longfellow traveled to Japan in 1871, just a few years after the inauguration of the Meiji era (1868) and at a time when elites in the United States were identifying destinations more unusual than Europe for travel. Longfellow ended up spending two years in Yokohama and Tokyo, where he then returned once more in 1885. Guth employs his letters, souvenir photographs, and other personal effects of the 1871–73 sojourn to recount Longfellow's exploits and to situate them in larger cultural contexts. Longfellow, as Guth explains in her introduction, is unlike other Americans previously studied for their travels to Japan because he was neither an art expert nor a professional in any standard sense. He was a tourist, plain and simple, and what he encountered, spoke of, and collected speaks to the average tastes of American elites fascinated by the potential exotic destinations held for adventure, freedom from accustomed social responsibilities, and the purchase of enviable trophy objects. Longfellow's collection, covering a range of objects prized by Victorian tastes, offers interesting contrasts to collections formed by Western connoisseurs studied in the history of fine art.

Situating Longfellow within broader cultural contexts transports this book from one that is biography driven to one richly revealing of life in 1870s Japan and the American Northeast. As the title of the book indicates, Guth discusses the tattoos Charles Longfellow acquired in Japan, but this is actually a relatively short discussion. Charles Longfellow, his travels in Japan, and the products of that travel are the subjects of this book, and Guth's work examines these experiences in ways valuable to our understanding of the period overall. Among her many topics, for instance, is Longfellow's collection of souvenir photographs. In exploring these, Guth discusses commercial photography in Japan, the impact of photos on foreigners' itineraries, the relationship of tourist sites to the Japanese tradition of meisho, the esteem foreigners had for these photos as mementoes and as art objects made unique by their hand coloring, the motivations of both the Japanese and the Westerners who had themselves photographed, and the social uses made of photo albums in American parlors. She treats domestic objects, world travel, tattooing, and more in similarly nuanced ways.

Guth employs a wide range of primary sources to contextualize the experiences of Americans in Japan. Works written by the early "Japan hands" are well known, but Guth adds the accounts of more casual travelers and in doing so opens the topic considerably. Her discussion in general does something quite formidable: she bridges her topics, connecting contemporary Japan and the United States. As Guth explains in her introduction, there is scholarship on Meiji Japan and on the growing taste in the United States for things Japanese, but very little that brings these two together. The reader gains insight into Longfellow's Japanese-made tattoos, for instance, by understanding their social significance in both Japan and the West.

Guth's first chapter on the many meanings of world travel sets the stage for Longfellow in Japan. In approaching this subject, Guth addresses issues of social class, gender, and...