A Lesson to "the Western Barbarian": Culture and Civility in British and American Debates on Japanese Decorative Art during the Meiji Period

Everything Japanese is artistic, every step provides a new picture, every child in the street has an artist's eye. The little girls arrange their bouquets as though they were students of Ruskin, and each and all in Japan make the harmony of colour a perfect study.

—Kate Lawson, Highways and Homes of Japan (1910; 98–99)

the handful of studies that have considered the Victorian reception of Japanese art have generally used a Saidian critical paradigm to argue that writers invariably trivialize Japan and its people.¹ Anna Jackson, for example, states that influential texts such as Rutherford Alcock's Art and Art Industries of Japan (1878) and Christopher Dresser's Japan: Its Architecture, Art and, Art Manufactures (1882) depict Japanese art and design condescendingly as "quaint," "primitive," and "childlike" (249). Joe Earle remarks that Victorian critics made "extreme generalization[s]" about Japan, dwelling on "the unchanging, undifferentiated nature of Asian societies" and emphasizing "curiosity and craftsmanly ingenuity" rather than "content and form" (865). Meanwhile, Josephine Lee uses the term "commodity racism" (xv) to describe how Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (1885) conflates Japanese people with Japanese export goods, caricaturing them as figures "On many a vase and jar—/On many a screen and fan" (Gilbert and Sullivan 1.1.3–4) rather than as individuals with distinct personalities.²

Although this approach offers interesting observations, the consensus among Japanologists is that Saidian criticism ignores many aspects of Japan's relationship with the West.³ Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century observers were just as likely to hold Japan up as an example to the ostensibly decadent, degenerate West as to belittle it, and as it rapidly industrialized and modernized, respect for it grew. In 1906, Stewart Dick, art historian and lecturer at the National Gallery (Cotterill vi), marvelled at how those "Western nations" that in the 1850s had dismissed the Japanese as a "barbaric people" now realized that Japanese civilization was older and in some ways much more "advanced" than their own. Indeed, he proclaimed, Japanese aesthetics were "too subtle [and] too refined" for the Westerner to understand (1). For many art enthusiasts, the refined Japanese aesthete became the antithesis of the vulgar, bourgeois Western philistine whose house was filled with mass-produced bric-a-brac. In The Arts of Japan (1906), Edward Dillon, assayer at the Japanese Imperial Mint from 1873 to 1878 (Hanashiro 149), described how "Japanese connoisseur[s] looked with contempt" (192) on products designed for Western consumers. They deemed export goods made for foreign tastes, such as the "over-decorated porcelain of Imari" (fig. 1),⁴ fit only "for women and children—or for the western barbarian" (192). For these observers, Japanese art—and thus, Japan itself—was neither trivial nor purely decorative; it demonstrated how good taste could be used to engender a civil, moral society.

Japan plays an intriguing role in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about culture and civilization, and this article examines how Japanese design featured in discussions about how decorative art fostered social civility. In particular, I explore how members of the intellectual and artistic elite in Britain and the United States used Japanese art to critique the taste and behaviour of the politically active working classes and industrial bourgeoisie in their own countries—people who, they believed, were hindering the progress of

fig 1.

Arita plate, late Edo period. By permission of Mr. Tetsuo Maruyama.

culture and civilization. Focusing on texts written between 1863 and 1910 by figures influential in forming Western ideas about Japanese design and society, I demonstrate how, besides being a source of inspiration to artists and designers, Japan also became a model of secular civic virtue—a quality that could be instilled by cultivating "correct" taste and responsible habits of consumption. I also show how art enthusiasts began to frame concepts of culture and civilization in less Eurocentric, much more global, terms.

One key issue considered here is the role of class-consciousness in depictions...