Art History paper based on article

The Meaning of Western Perspective in Edo Popular Culture Author(s): Timon Screech Source: Archives of Asian Art, Vol. 47 (1994), pp. 58-69 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20111244 Accessed: 05-01-2018 20:44 UTC

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The Meaning of Western Perspective in Edo Popular Culture

Timon Screech SOAS, University of London

Vanishing-point perspective, which had evolved through decades of trial and error in the West, arrived in Japan all in a moment, as a fait accompli. When this oc curred is unclear. It is possible?indeed likely?that an element of perspectival study had been carried out in the Jesuit painting school set up by Giovanni Niccolo (i 560 1626) in 1601, but the evidence of pictures produced at that time suggests that the technique was not systemati cally applied. It remained for the second quarter of the eighteenth century to witness the rise of a recognised manner of depiction identified as Western perspective. It is the purpose of this essay to assess the meaning of this

mode in the popular culture of Japan; a precise plotting of chronologies cannot, here, be essayed, nor can we offer more than one strand in the interpretation and de ployment of perspective in Japan.

THE ARRIVAL OF PERSPECTIVE

Japanese terms for the new kind of representation were various. Uki-e* (floating pictures, but not to be confused with ukiyo-eh) was a common designation; kubomi-ec (sunken pictures) was also used, though perhaps only in joking contrast.1 Both words stressed how the picture interacted with its viewers, seeming either to fly up from the page to envelop them, or plunge them down into its deep recesses. Only the former term is used in modern scholarly discourse. Western art has traditionally considered the "discov

ery" of perspective as one of its greatest feats. Ever since Vasari, historians have extolled the line of heroes who devised an accurate means of repeating "real" space in two dimensions. In Japan too, many ways of simulating the third dimension had been known since antiquity, but the calculation and rigid application of such techniques had never been thought the definition of good art, much less the primary objective of representation. Brunelleschi hung a net in the doorway of the Duomo

in Florence and drew the Baptistry through it; Northern artists were said to have reproduced outside views by looking through the leaded squares of their casement

windows. But Japanese architecture has neither door nor window in the Western sense, and the novel device of

perspective, when it arrived in Japan, convinced few with its pretensions to offer a uniquely compelling win dow onto the world.

Perspective in Japan was hailed as marvellous, but as a marvellous invention, not a discovery. The distinction is crucial: in it lies determination of whether perspective pictures are deemed to be real or merely observing of codes. The enormous number of conventions that had to be followed by an artist who depicted in perspective militated against acceptance of the style as in any way natural; and the viewer too was hedged about by numer ous rules dictating how to view the image properly. Using a perspective picture was, in fact, a complex pro cedure quite unlike viewing open, empirical space. Shiba K?kand (1747-1818), an early experimenter in Western styles, visited the Dutch East India Company's trading station (or Factory) in Nagasaki with the object of find ing out more at first hand. He wrote in 1799 after his return to Edo,

Western pictures operate on a highly theoretical level, and no-one should view them off-handedly. There is a correct way to look, and to this end, Western pictures are framed and hung up. When viewing them, even if you only intend a quick glance, stand full-square in front. The Western picture will always show a division between sky and ground [the horizon line]; be sure to position this exactly at eye-level, which, generally speaking, will entail viewing from a dis tance of five or six shaku [ca. 180 cm]. If you observe these rules, things shown near at hand and things shown far off?the foreground and the rearground?will be clearly distinguished and the picture will appear no different from reality itself.2

K?kan, a convert to the style, stresses the verisimilitude; but intricate and convoluted, these pictures apparently also needed exegesis?even policing?to have much value.

K?kan wrote two treatises on European art, the Essay on Western Pictures (Seiy? gadane) (from which the above statement is taken) and the Laws of Western Pictures (Seiy?

gah?{) of six years later.3 These were not the earliest such theorisings. The first attempts to formulate the rules of

Western depiction had been made by Satake Yoshiatsug (1748-178 5), daimy? of Akita in the north of Japan, in a pair of short essays (one illustrated) completed in 1778.4

Yoshiatsu, thirty at the time, was a man of considerable

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political weight, for his domain was one of the largest in the land, and his family one of the oldest. The young daimy? went on to learn the Western manner, achieved fame in it, and is nowadays best known by his artistic sobriquet, Shozan.h Where Lord Satake derived his knowledge is debated.

Hiraga Germai1 (172 8-1779), a polymath of Westernist leanings who like K?kan had been to Nagasaki, visited

Akita in 1773. This is likely to have provided the stim ulus, although the daimy? had been interested in painting of other sorts since long before.5 More circumstantially, a significant study on perspec

tival drawing had been published in China in 1729 by Nian Xiyaoj (d. 173 8), a high official and former provin cial governor; this was entitled the Guide to the Study of Vision (Shixue jingyunk);6 the work was enlarged and re issued six years later. It is tempting to speculate whether this work may have been known in Japan. Nian Xiyao's book was in fact the adaptation of a slightly earlier Latin treatise, the Perspectiva Pictorum et Architectorum of Andrea Pozzo (Putteus, decorator in 1691-1694 of the Jesuits' headquarter Church of the Ges? and teacher of the Italian ?migr?e to China Giuseppe Castiglione). The Perspectiva appeared in Rome only six years before Nian's first edi tion. The Guide cannot be proven to have come to Japan, but it was circulating in China, and any Japanese of edu cation could read Chinese.

Satake certainly owned a copy of one study of Western art, and that in its original unexpurgated form. The book concerned, the Gro?te Schilderboek of 1707, was an intro ductory manual to painting fantastically popular in Eu rope at the time.7 The author, G?rarde de Lairesse, had been a pupil of Rembrandt, but by his time of writing he had repudiated him to espouse a high and airy French baroque. Lairesse's book was imported to Japan in sev eral copies, and much studied. Satake, as a man of wealth, was able to procure one, but even K?kan, a commoner and not of samurai status, obtained a copy (he called it the Konsuto shikirudo b?ku), although quite how it fell into his hands is unclear.8 Lairesse explained in detail how to use lines of recession and vanishing points, as well as a host of other aspects of the Western style, such as shading and the depiction of reflections in

water.

Yet Japanese experimentation with perspective can be shown to have predated arrival of these formal treatises by some four decades. Masanobu1 appears to have arro gated to himself the title of "Inventor" (kongenm) of uki-e, although Torii Kiyotada11 may in fact be more deserving of the name. In either case, the close of the 173 os would seem a plausible moment for the first inno vations to have occurred, possibly in several places at once. It seems likely that artists worked on a strictly ad hoc basis, copying and adapting imported pictures with out considering overmuch the mathematical implica

tions and laws. Early perspective views suggest that trial and error was the prime didactic tool. Japanese architec ture (as said) was radically different from that of Europe, but in some ways ideally suited to essays in perspective: most eighteenth-century buildings were of post and lin tel type, affording plentiful obliques and parallels that could be taken as ready guide lines; woven tatami mats (the usual floor covering) provided straight markers down which recessions could be easily plotted. Outside space remained more of a challenge, though, as can be seen from, for example, Masanobu's Taking the Evening Cool by Ry?goku Bridge0 (Fig. i).

Perhaps for this reason, indoor scenes predominate in the first uki-e, and sum? tournaments, kabuki plays, and brothels became frequent; their subject matter, note, is also slanted towards the world of popular urban enter tainment (a point to which we will return).

Statistical assessment would probably find kabuki scenes to be most numerous during the early period: there was already a huge market for actor prints (yakusha-ep) and it was not unnatural that uki-e should have been partially subsumed into it. But other reasons have been offered for the prevalence of stage depictions. Edo theatres began to be roofed only in 1718; tiles were first used from 1724 and only by perspectival rendition could the new ceilings be shown.9 At any rate, the ability to draw ceilings (from above or below) was much ap proved of by Lord Satake, who lamented their absence in most Japanese work; he felt uneasy that "foreigners seeing [our] pictures must certainly conclude that palaces in this country are roofless, and wonder how, if they are all like that, we ward off the rain and snow."10

Theatre prints are dated on the evidence of the actors appearing on stage or inscriptions on pillars, and assum ing this data to be accurate, the first extant example is

Masanobu's interior of the Nakamura-zaq showing a performance of 1745; the first uki-e may, of course, be considerably earlier than the first extant one.11 Interest ingly, Nian's Guide included lessons on how to depict theatres, although from a different angle than that adopted by Masanobu.12

THE PROBLEM OF THE MEDIUM

Two initial conclusions ought now to be drawn. Firstly, early uki-e were overwhelmingly associated with the world of townspeople's relaxation, particularly in Edo. Secondly, perspective manifested itself less in painting than in prints?certainly, prints vastly outnumbered paintings in the long run. The two issues are, in fact, related: the sum?- and kabuki-going public was more likely to be in the print-buying than the painting-buying bracket.

In Japan as elsewhere, prints were in essence images for those who could not afford paintings. Lord Satake owned some Western etchings which he appears to have

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Fig. i. Okumura Masanobu, Enjoying the Cool at Ryogoku (Ryogoku yusuzumi uki-e kotigen) (ca. 1745), woodblock print, H. 30.1, L. 44.3 cm. Kobe City Museum.

treasured, but a samurai home could not properly be ornamented with such things. An urban commoner home, a restaurant, or a teashop, though, could. Modest townspeople pinned or pasted prints to their walls and woodwork without sacrificing their aplomb. Since few European paintings ever arrived in Japan it was inevitable that the Western style (perspective included) was as sociated almost exclusively with prints.13 This led to an assessment of the foreign style as pertaining mostly to low-grade products. Had more paintings been imported (Lairesses, Rembrandts, or anyone else's), perspective

might have been taken more seriously. The fact is, it generally was not. Gennai told K?kan how "several hundred Dutch copperplate pictures" (certainly all exe cuted in impeccable perspective) had been offered for sale in Japan, but no-one showing the least interest in them, all had been shipped back.14 Such a fate would not have befallen European easel works.

It was surely for this reason that Tani Bunch?r (1763 1841), attendant (tsukes) to the Chief Minister of State

Matsudaira Sadanobu* (1758-1829), wrote, I used to have a large number of Western pictures in my collection, but I tend to find them . . . short on real meaning (imiu). When you try to appreciate a Western picture on a profound level you always feel there is something lacking.15

While Bunch? says "pictures" (gav) he must be referring 60

to prints. He finds them trivial. Devoid of brush work, in East Asian terms they lack meaning, disqualifying them in a way which no amount of illusionistic space creation could ever over-rule. Perspective was tarred with the perceived limitations of the medium of print.

The association of the Western work of art in general with the print was almost total. Take the case of an entry in the Lexicon of the Primitive Language (Bango-senw), a Japanese-Dutch pocket dictionary published in 1798: the book was the work of Morishima Ch?ry?x (1756 1809), a high-ranking samurai who had thumbed

Lairesse thoroughly, associated with Gennai, and who knew more about the West than most. Yet Ch?ry? trans lated gakuy (framed picture) aspurento (print), disregard ing the phenomenon of painting completely.

If an innate prejudice against prints worked to the detriment of perspective's status, there was also a prob lem of the kind of print imported. Copperplate repro ductions of what in the West would have been regarded as bona fide art were as rare in Japan as European paint ings in oil. The majority of the imports were single-sheet townscape views in the genre known as veduta prints (Fig. 2). In the home context too, these brightly coloured and attractive pictures were essentially disposable pieces aimed at the ordinary citizen; they provided instant en joyment, but were not billed as great art.

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Fig. 2. Vue d'optique, St Mary-le-Strand and Somerset House, London (ca. 1770), hand-coloured copperplate print, H. 24.2, L. 39.8 cm. Private Collection.

Veduta themes represented, for the most part, cele brated parts of the cities of Europe, or those far-flung places of empire to which the viewer would never go. They offered an experience of travel to those who could not themselves move. Veduta were at the banal end of

what Canaletto was providing for the wealthier classes who actually made tours. Canaletto too, of course, was pooh-poohed in most refined circles, and extolled to a high degree only in England, where visual taste was no toriously crude. His works were often made into prints too (the subtler connoisseur would have thought that the better genre for him anyway).

Veduta prints of Jakarta, say, or Venice were consumed casually in the drawing rooms of Europe from Berlin to Dublin; now the same pictures were enjoyed in Japan too. Extreme perspective was a hallmark of the eigh teenth-century veduta style. They exaggerated the mag nificence of the vista, the more to excite the viewer, even if at the cost of truth. To see an actual place after becom ing acquainted with it from a perspective print is often to witness a sad reduction. Many Japanese assumed these slight pictures to be the sum of landscape art as under stood in the West, and perspective townscapes were held to define much of what art meant to Europeans. In his Lexicon Ch?ry? translated seiy?-keiz (Western view) as

perusupekuchifu (perspective), adding, to aid the user, the Japanese gloss uki-e.

The centrality of the veduta to Japanese interpretations of Western pictures must be stressed. The near equation of the two can be seen in the context of a comic illustrated

story in the kiby?shiaa genre by Hirazawa Tsuneyoshiab (1735-1813), a samurai and none other than Lord Satake's official representative in Edo (rusui-yakuac). Tsuneyoshi, using his penname H?seid? Kisanji,ad pub lished the book in 1777, just as his daimy? must have been completing the two treatises on Western art. The story, Nandara the Monk and His Persimmon Stone (Nandara h?shi kani no tane*e), tells of the exploits of a certain Indian cleric who begins the story by stealing a magical fruit stone that his master, a painter of religious icons, had

miraculously received from the Buddha. When ground up and mixed with pigment a little at a time, the stone creates an ink that allows the user to paint with peerless skill. Nandara, possessed of the stone, determines to take advantage of his new-found facility to become adept at foreign styles. He goes at once to Holland to study the elements of Western art. Kisanji's illustrator, Koikawa Harumachiaf (another samurai, known in his workaday life as Kurahashiag) depicts Nandara at this point in a European setting receiving instruction from a (rather

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Fig. 3. Koikawa Harumachi (ill.), Nandara the Monk and His Persim mon Stone (Nandara h?shi kaki no ta?e) (1777), p. 3 verso, h. 18.0, L. 13.0 cm. National Diet Library, Tokyo.

Japanised) Dutchman (Fig. 3). A large perspectival work rests on an easel, while Nandara copies a miniature por trait roundel. Those are apparently paintings, but the teacher instructs Nandara in the true hierarchies of West

ern art: he stipulates that only after nozoki-eah have been mastered can painting be attempted.16

PEEPING-PICTURES

Nozoki-e, literally "peeping-pictures," are largely iden tical with uki-e. They are crucial to understanding the popular gloss put on perspective in Japan. Nozoki-e are what in the West were called vues d'optique. These were a sub-set of veduta prints relying for the full effect of their perspectival scheme on a piece of apparatus known as an optique. The device was a kind of table-top peep box into which the print was put. A lensed viewing aperture permitted the viewer to see the image inside in isolation, all familiar surroundings cut away and the en tire field of vision taken over by the printed scene. Vues d'optique were not viewed directly through the lens, but

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Fig. 4. Pierre Edouard Fr?re (i 819-1886), Girls Looking at Prints (nineteenth century), oil on canvas, size unknown. The girls arc using a zograscope. The Brooklyn Museum, 21.123.19. Bequest of William H. Harriman.

at once remove, reflected in a mirror mounted obliquely. These combined to enhance the clarity of the image and give a sense of really "being there, " but it meant the scene had to be printed in reverse.17 Optiques were on sale right up to the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States, and were common house hold furnishings, eventually marketed under the name of zograscopes (Fig. 4).

The optique arrived in Japan with the perspective print, though no doubt in smaller numbers. The records of the Dutch Factory in Nagasaki mention the import of a perspectieff cas in the winter of 1646. Quite what this was is unclear, but that it was some sort of peeping apparatus is obvious.18 K?kan commented on the preva lence of optiques in Japan in his day, and Harunobu (d. 1770) showed one in use by a boy and a young girl in a

male brothel (Fig. 5).19 Harunobu's device appears to be French, for an identical one made in Paris is still extant in Japan;20 the print being used with the optique is domestically produced, and represents part of Mt K?ya.

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Imported optiques were set up at fairs and amusement areas, and people flocked to use them at so much a look. Kodera Gyokuch?31 (active 1818-1837), an indefatigable recorder of popular exhibits in his native city of Nagoya, noted that "peeping glasses brought over from Holland" were on display at the Temple of Daisu-zanaj in the 1820s; these could be used for sixteen mon a time. In 1788,

K?kan had charged exactly double to look through an optique he had devised himself, although whether he was extorting, or the price dropped over time (or whether he offered more pictures to go inside his machine) is hard to tell.21

Many Japanese writers on Western art in the latter part of the eighteenth century took it for granted that not only were imported pictures generally veduta scenes, but they were actually mirror-image vues d'optique. K?kan, by no means ill informed on the subject, held the crowning success of his attempts to master Western styles was his ability to replicate copperplate etching and thereby to simulate absolutely a European vue d'optique. By contrast, the simulation of oil paint occupied for him a position of less prestige. K?kan 's first etching was an Edo view (Mimeguriak in the east of the city), but prob ably the next year, 1784, saw him making pictures of the Serpentine Lake in the English stately home of Stowe (Fig. 6), and of a Dutch hospital. These views were not just replications of the medium of etching (as has long been acknowledged), but were surrogates of the totality of a Western vue d'optique, for they consciously showed precisely the sort of view then being created for use in optiques all across Europe. Indeed, so close is each of K?kan's images to the original scene depicted that pure

Fig. 5. Suzuki Harunobu, Optique in Use, from the series Mutamagawa (before 1770), multi-coloured woodblock print, H. 27.6, L. 20.6 cm. Kobe City Museum.

Fig. 6. Shiba K?kan, The Serpentine, Stowe (1785), copperplate print, h. 25.5, L. 37.1 cm. Kobe City Museum.

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imagination is precluded, and he must have copied the two plates from imported images (although only the former has been traced to a convincing source).22

In the same year that K?kan broke the European monopoly on vues d'optique, he explained himself: he stated of his perspective copperplate efforts that, "the principles governing my pictures (garial) are identical with those of the West." This was a statement of triumph, made, note, with exclusive reference to his ability to fabricate pictures for use in optiques. K?kan was pleased to have cracked the difficult task of etching on metal, but his comment is directed only to the re versed peeping-picture genre. K?kan's remark in fact appears on a single-sheet copperplate print illustrating the three types of optique most current. He went on,

[Europeans] represent human figures, landscapes, and everything else in the form of uki-e. Pictures are positioned under the optique back to front [as in Harunobu's illustration] . . . and you view them reflected in a mirror.

Then he added the hoary summary, "[thanks to this] the landscape and vegetation look just as they do in real life. " The Japanese term for the optique, "peep-glasses" (nozoki-meganeam) was soon substituted for the more

memorable "Dutch glasses" (Oranda meganean). Uki-e themselves could be called "glasses-pictures" (megane-e) ? "glasses" meaning not spectacles but optiques.23

TECHNIQUES OF VIEWING

Large numbers of such megane were made in Japan for use with European prints, or with their Japanese deriva tives. The many kinds replicated pretty much the variety to be seen in Europe. The emphasis, though, was differ ent for the most common sort in Japan was not the zograscope but a larger device known in English as a raree-show, and in Japanese as a peeping-karakuri (nozoki-karakuriao); karakuri means something like a contraption.24 (Below, I use "peeping-karakuri" inter changeably with "peep-box.")

Scrolls showing the funfairs of Edo and elsewhere routinely depict a peeping-karakuri in action, with crowds gathered to see the views inside. The machine was appropriate for group settings, since unlike the zog rascope it was suitable for use in the open air and by several people at once. The box was fully enclosed, with a row of apertures pierced along the front allowing mul tiple access into the interior. A showman, called the saiku-ninap (clever-device operator) ran the box, and had a reputation for being somewhat bullying with the pun ters: no longer a private affair, these Dutch-glasses were

money- making concerns, and economic viability had to be considered; the peeping-karakuri must have cost something to set up. The Takeda Omiaq company of automaton makers in Osaka fabricated machines, al though many must also have been jerry-built by their individual operators. But there were still the pictures to

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Fig. 7. Santo Ky?den, Goods You Know All About (Gozonji no sh?baimono) (1782), p. 7 recto, h. 18.0, l. 13.0 cm. Department of Literature, Kyushu University, Fukuoka.

be procured. All this meant a swift (and sanitary) cus tomer turn-around had to be maintained. As a senryuar verse had it,

"Give your nose A proper wipe!" They say, staring in. Hana o yoku kami-nasai yo to nozoki ii.25

Santo Ky?den,as a best-selling writer in the same comic genre as Kisanji, and a person much given to satirising contemporary fads, referred to the peeping-karakuri as something, "otherwise known as the 'do-please-pass along-at-the-front-there!'"26 If people were inclined to linger over perspective pictures the showman shooed them on.

One peep-box is conveniently illustrated in a story by Ky?den entitled Goods You All Know About (Gozonji no sh?baimono*1), published in 1782 (Fig. 7). One of the "goods" was the peep-box. Up to six customers can view the scene together, and a child is seen crouching down to look. This was the normal posture, which, in

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the words of an indelicate senry? writer, meant, "look ing as if you're trying to fart" (heppiri-goshi).27 The images are lit through paper screens set horizontally over the top. The drum-beating saiku-nin sounds the roll-up as a jack-in-the-box pops from behind a candle-shade to announce the commencement of the show. The opera tor, who will probably narrate the scenes, is perched on a case labelled "uki-e. " This box (even down to the jack) seems entirely typical of the sort to be seen in urban centres in late eighteenth-century Japan. But the foreign derivation of the booth is stressed, for the advertising board shows a Dutch-like scene of a waterfront with

Western figures and a dog (probably it was after seeing such boards that Harumachi made up the easel painting illustrated in Nandara).28 The wings of Ky?den's sign reiterate the imported nature of the vision, reading, "Great Dutch Karakuri" (Oranda ?-karakuri).

The peep-box became so popular that the sesquipeda lian "nozoki-karakuri" was abbreviated, in Kyoto to nozoki and in Edo to karakuri;29 the peep-box, then, became quintessential of both the "peep" and the "con traption, " with perspective implicated under either term.

It is a vexed question what exactly was to be seen in these Japanese perspective boxes. The totality of Euro pean vues d'optique would probably not have made it to Japan, but then, domestic uki-e added a host of new indigenous subjects. Extant uki-e show a bewildering range. It is interesting to recall that perspective prints were being made in China at this time too, especially in the Suzhouau area, and although they were not normally of dimensions suitable for use in a peep-box, they may have been emulated locally in smaller formats.30

Literary sources suggest more varieties of imagery still. Shikitei Sanbaav (1776-1822), a rival of Ky?den for the accolade of Edo's favourite novelist, transcribed a peep-box showman's cry in his Barber's Shop of the Float ing World (Ukiyo-doko ), a long-ish work published in instalments over eighteen months from 1813 :

Now then everyone, come and have a look! Here's the Factory of the [Dutch East India] Company in Jakarta! There's its look-out post with two pine trees, and you can see right back to those three girls over there. All this contrived inside a little box. And there's more! A Chinaman stands to greet someone from his window; there's a maple tree and a big thick pine. Well? How is it?31

It was wonderful, of course. Western, Imperial, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean

scenic views were all to be seen. But given the swift and semi-secret nature of the karakuri peep (those who had not paid up and squatted down would never know what was within), it was perhaps inevitable that more illicit sights were shown too. Pornography may have been a staple. As early as 1730, Hasegawa Mitsunobuax re

marked of the state of affairs in Osaka that, "although children are said to be the likely clients, viewers are in fact apt to be young ladies hiding their faces behind hats. "

Fearful of being spotted or hiding their blushing cheeks, the women nevertheless cannot forbear to take a scurri lous look.32 A single box contained large numbers of images

stacked up and viewed in sequence either to construct a story, or else just as a random pot-luck of exotica. The pictures (we might call them scenes or sets in English), were known as tei?y in Japanese. The selection was sus pended out of sight behind the advertising board on top of the box, which in fact doubled as a baffle or a mini-fly tower; the showman dropped the sets down one in front of the other, as appropriate, by pulling cords emerging from the the side of the booth.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century an addi tional feature was incorporated; this had great bearing on the popularity of uki-e. I refer to the adoption of a light ing trick allowing sets to be alternately front-lit (the nor

mal way) or back-lit. Hidden slats were fitted beneath the paper roof and swivelled to direct light either before or behind the picture?a technique common in European raree-shows. When used with cut-out pictures whose depicted windows and lamps were snipped away, a day time scene could turn suddenly into night, with light seeming to shine from inside the buildings. Ky?den

mentioned this feature in his Goods: "the set shows people enjoying the cool of the day at Shij?-Kawara, but in a flash it will change, and night-time lanterns burn. "

Lighting tricks brought sites of nighttime revelry into the domain of uki-e. The pleasure districts of Kyoto (such as Shij?-Kawara) or Edo (the Yoshiwara) were often shown in perspective, and even when cut-outs were not actually used, the scene could be plunged into crepuscular conditions with breath-taking effect. Events from history and literature which had taken place at night entered the repertory. Ky?den's protege, the novelist Takizawa Bakinaz (1767-1848), told excitedly of having seen in a peep-box in Nagoya an illustration of the Night

Attack from the famous play the Treasury of Loyal Retain ers (Ch?shingura.ba)33 This event was in fact depicted in perspective by many, including Kitao Masayoshibb (1764-1824) and Maruyama Okyobc (1733-1795). Jip pensha Ikkubd (1765-1831), another much-read comic writer, recorded some peep-box scenes in a compilation of Edo showmen's cries published in 1818. He begins with the saiku-nin in full tilt; the first scene mentioned is the same that Bakin had viewed,

Well now, well now! Next comes the Eleventh Act of the Treasury of Loyal Retainers, after that it's the suicide of O-shichi the greengrocer's girl, and the tragic journey after the Battle of Ichi-no-tani. In the distance you will see Asukayama and nearby there's Itsukushima in Aki. Then it will change to night-time scenes with lanterns, flaming torches and stars; there'll be the ring-hunt held on Mt Fuji, and the firework displays of the Tama-ya and the Kagi-ya.34

The show moves apace from Ch?shingura to the famous love-suicide of O-shichi, to an episode from the Tales of

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the Heike (Heike monogataribe), to a view in Edo, to the floating shrine of Miyajima near Hiroshima (one of the Three Most Beautiful Places?sankeibf?in Japan), to Yoritomo's famous battue (makigaribg) of 1193 at which the Brothers Soga took their extravagant revenge, until finally the show closes with night-time depictions of the pyrotechnic extravaganzas hosted annually by two res taurants at Ryogoku in Edo.35

The sets replaced each other in the box with proverbial rapidity, as the saiku-nin tugged away at his cords. The speed and frequency of the change-overs in fact was the stuff of legend. Ky?den used the peeping-karakuri as a

metaphor for all changeability, and he warned his readers that the human heart (particularly, he says, woman's) is just like a booth in its protean fickleness,

Just when you think you see Pusan Harbour [in Korea], there it goes, and it's changed to a view of Miyajima in Aki. "Now it's a picture of Paradise!" you say to yourself, but then it shifts to Hell.36

The vue-d'optique is a flibberty-jibbett that offers no vi sion of any substance. Ky?den sums up: "People's hearts change as fast as autumn skies. Let each be on his guard. " Five years later, K?kan appealed again to this metaphys ical peep-box, If you were to pull the cords of the human heart, you would see changes swifter even than those of [sets in] a karakuri. This is the wages of fortune. Let no-one lower his guard!37

This anthropomorphic booth occludes real distinc tions, whether between right and wrong or heaven and hell, and by jumbling all together in an unstable slew, it erodes the authority of difference.38 The Western per spective print has been turned into a spokesperson for vanity and flux, and for precisely, appearances over real ity; the optique has become a means for viewing the vapid hearts of Edo.

PERSPECTIVE AND REALITY

That perspective was thought to be the principal feature of the Western style will, I hope, now be accepted. Lord Satake regarded the prime brilliance of Western represen tation that "the place at which the power of the human eye gives out is captured," that is, a vanishing point is shown.39 But other commentators were worried by this too-close equation of Western pictures and uki-e. As the association became all but complete, some cavilled. The uki-e being things of the piccaresque world of the fair ground, some felt them liable to bring Western art in toto into disrepute. K?kan himself, despite having done so

much to bring the vue d'optique into the Japanese arena, was ambivalent,

People tend to think that Western pictures are only uki-e, but the opinion deserves to be laughed to scorn.40

Of course not all Western pictures in Japan were done in perspective, and those who looked could find exam ples in plenty where the technique was haphazardly 66

applied, or not applied at all. But the rationale for K? kan's objection was that Western art (in his words) "cap tures reality" (shaseibh) or "copies truth" (shashinbl), and perspective alone will not be equal to that unless sup ported by other stylistic conventions. Perspective was just one gun in a well-stocked arsenal. K?kan feared that the epistemology of shashin might be compromised by the over-popularity of uki-e as they galloped far ahead of the rest of the Western technical cannonade. Uki-e were fun, but Western representation was not to be seen, as K?kan put it, as "toys" (ganry?bj).

Perspective as practised in Japan was indelibly asso ciated with flippant subject matter, and with the chaotic conditions of viewing of the peep-box. Sanba's Barber's Shop referred to perspective as creating a "ten-league European gaze,"41 that is, the pictures even if not of the West, entailed looking in a Western way. This was a con voluted, anti-empirical gaze, often found to show a to tally spurious expansiveness that was precisely counter factual. Uki-e tended to represent precisely what was not true or not real. Perspective can exaggerate a small space into a large one, and all too often uki-e were found to be in cahoots with boastfulness and swell. Many is the illus trated story that runs comfortably on using traditional Japanese spatial configurations only to switch to Western perspective when a flashy or insolent interior is in voked.42

Far from replicating life, perspective might establish an inflated sense of space that life might then foolishly learn to aspire to. "Reality" might seek to match itself up to the false majesty of uki-e. The Mitsuibk shop in Suruga in Edo was built on a street specially constructed to align with Mt. Fuji, so that anyone walking down

would see the shop receding into the distance with the sacred mountain rising above; this looked so much like an uki-e that the scene was routinely depicted as one.43 Turning the fabric of the shogunal city into a mechanism for one's own aggrandisement was arrogant.

Sukeroku,bl the swashbuckling hero of kabuki legend (and role-model for all of overweening pride), high lighted the propensity of uki-e to pander to hubricious

mortals. In a play performed in 1779, the eponymous hero turns his body into a notional peeping-karakuri, making all the world his uki-e: calling upon his cronies to look through the curl of his cue as if it were the viewing hole of a peeping-karakuri, Sukeroku rants,

A head-band of Edo purple winds about my hair and when you look through my cue you see Awa in Kazusa appearing like an uki-e.44

Bluster and uki-e go hand in hand. Hokusai's view of Fuji from Nihon-bashi from the

series Thirty-Six Views ofMt Fuji (Fugaku sanj?rokkeibm) represents an antithesis to this proud and over-blown uki-e (Fig. 8). The print shows the world as it should be, not as the rough and boisterous would have it. The hub

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Fig. 8. Katsushika Hokusai, Nihon-bashi in Edo (ca. 1832), from the series F?gaku sanju-rokkei, multi coloured woodblock print, h. 24.4, l. 36.5 cm. British Museum.

bub of the city is seen on the bridge in the foreground, rigidly confined and pinned into its proper subordinate scale; the lowly are arranged transversely so as to be unsusceptible to perspectival treatment. Beyond, the pompous warehouses of the city's merchant ?lite extend into the distance bearing their identifying markings; these are in perspective, which is not amiss for over blowing is the merchants' nature, and, importantly, the exaggeration of serried godowns of supply heralds plenty, attesting, in fact, to authority's smooth running of the land that has ensured such generous provision. At the rear of the print, though, the turrets of the shogunal castle and the peak of Fuji, the two great symbols of the realm, are discerned; not things of pride or vanity but the noble hubs of the Japanese state and of ancestral culture, these elements remain precisely not included in the perspective scheme: Castle and peak, creatures of an altogether grander dispensation, are shown as inaccessi ble by way of any of the parallels that unite what dwells beneath. The populace is crushed below, the Nation and its monuments spread out above; Western perspective is

what governs the middle echelons. As Hiraga Germai put it in 1763, "when seeing an

uki-e, you think of the Jar Sage."45 He was referring to the sage who was said to have found a huge paradise inside a little bottle, and to have taken that, not reality, as his dwelling. Peeping into the karakuri box one might find a Heaven, but more likely one would see only an illusionary picture, a nothing of dreaming and displace

ment, delineated in the mocking sea-logic of imported Western perspective.

Notes

author's note: The material presented here was gathered while on a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Japan Foundation in 1990-1991. I wish to express my thanks to that body, as well as to

my supervisors, John M. Rosenfield and Kobayashi Tadashi. Henry Smith provided a detailed and extremely useful commentary on an earlier draft of this article.

1. Kubomi-e is attested only once, in Ishino Hiromichi, Esoragoto (1802).

2. Shibo K?kan, Seiy?gadan, in Nihon shis?taikei vol. 64(Iwanami, J976), p. 494. This essay is also translated in full in Calvin French, Shiba K?kan (Weatherhill: New York and Tokyo, 1974), Appendix III. All locations of publication are Tokyo, unless otherwise stated.

3. Seiy? gah? constitutes a section within K?kan's lengthy Oranda ts?haku.

4. Satake Yoshiatsu, Gah? k?ry? and Gazu rikai, in Sakazaki Tan [Shizuka], Nihongaron taikan, vol. 1 (Arusu, 1929), pp. 97-103 (illus trations not included).

5. Satake, like many of the group who became the "Akita Western ists, " was already working in the Nagasaki style.

6. Where no reference is made to a modern publication, works are available only in their original editions. Julian Lee, The Origin and

Development of Japanese Landscape Prints, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Washington, 1977), has argued for Shiyuejingyuns being known in

Japan, pp. 224fr.

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7- Translations of the Gro?te Schilderboek into numerous Western languages were made: German (1729), English (1738), and French (1787).

8. Kokan was himself responsible for sowing the seeds of confu sion, for he claimed that the Gro?te Schilderboek had been a gift to him personally from the Dutchman, Isaac Titsingh, when the two had met in Nagasaki in 1789; see Seiy?gadan, p. 492. However, Titsingh was not in Japan at that time. K?kan (an inveterate self-mythologiser) had probably gained access to the book earlier.

9. Lee, Origin and Development, pp. 65-67. 10. Satake, Gah? k?ry?, p. 101. 11. Kishi Fumikazu, "Enp? ni-nen no p?supekuteibu," in Bijut

sushi 132(1992);228ff discusses the dating for these other early images, and mentions another Masanobu theatre print of 1743.

12. As Pozzo's original put it, the scene showed, "a theatre repre senting the Marriage in Cana of Galilee, erected in the Jesuits Church in Rome in the year 1685, for the solemn exposition of the Holy Sacrament. " Pozzo notes that Italian and German theatres differ in

construction; see text to plate 70. 13. Two Western oil paintings by the Dutch artist Willem van

Royen were to be seen in the Gohyaku Rakan-ji in Edo; see Timon Screech, "The Strangest Place in Edo: the Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats," in Monumenta Nipponica 48(1993); one supposed Rembrandt was also in Japan (authenticated by K?kan and certainly a late seven teenth-century piece, but since rejected as by Rembrandt himself); see Michigami Toshii, "Watashi no Renburanto: Mangetsu no zu," in Geijutsu shincho i8i(i965):i02-i09. For details of the de-attribution see Calvin French, Shiba K?kan, p. 185, n. 59. Reverse-glass painting (garasu-e) was quite abundantly imported from the West; see below note 16.

14. Shiba K?kan, Seiy? gadan; see above note 2. 15. Bunch?gadan, in Nihon shogaen, vol. 2 (Kokusho Kaigy?-kai,

1916), p. 189. 16. The teacher specifies oils and glass painting. The latter, a rococo

infatuation (biidoro-e in the text) was extensively emulated in Asia, including in Japan by (among others) K?kan.

17. The reversing of prints was common practice; compare, for example, Fig. 2 above with fig. 93 in Megane-e to T?kaid? goj?-san tsugi (Kobe City Museum, 1988); in that case, the Kobe illustration is a veduta but not a vue d'optique since it shows the scene the correct

way around. 18. Nagasaki Orandash?kan nikki, vol. 22 (Iwanami, 1956), p. 133;

modern Japanese critics refer to this instrument as a t?shi-bako. 19. Male prostitutes (kagema) dressed as girls, sometimes (though

not necessarily) with the addition of tassels on their sleeves. This picture is filled with covert references to the ninth-century prelate K?b? Daishi, founder of Mt K?ya and patron saint of man-boy love (nanshoku).

20. One of several optiques preserved in the Kobe City Museum was made in Paris.

21. For Gyokuch? see his Misemono zasshi, in Zoku zuihitsu bungaku sensh? (Hakubunkan, 1928), pp. 355-356; for K?kan see his Saiy? nikki, which mentions many demonstrations. The fee is recorded under 29th of 4th month 1788; see K?kan Saiy? nikki (T?y? Bunko, 1986), p. 35.

22. The scene of the Serpentine Lake at Stow has recently been traced to the series A New Display of the Beauties of England, vol. 1, published in 1776. This scene had previously been assumed to repre sent the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park in London.

23. The exact connexion between uki-e and megane-e is prob lematic. The terms seem essentially impossible to disentangle, and this essay uses the former throughout. Recently, Oka Yasumasu has argued emphatically for the division of the terms, Megane-e shink? (Chikuma, 1992), p. 65 and passim, and while Oka is right technically speaking (by strict definition megane-e ought to be printed in mirror image to compensate for the reflection) in practice unreversed uki-e

would no doubt often have been put in optiques too and the terms conflated as much then as now. Interestingly, K?kan produced a copperplate of Ryogoku Bridge both reversed and right way around. In English, vue d'optique was sometimes translated as "perspective view" and optique as "diagonal viewing machine," but I retain the French.

24. A painting in the collection of the Kobe City Museum by the otherwise unknown Nagasaki artist Nishi Kuraku depicts a Dutch raree-show in action, attesting to the fact that the nozoki-karakuri

was known to come from the West.

25. Yanagi dam (Ky?iku Bunko, 1988), vol. 10, no. 152. 26. Santo Ky?den, Komon gawa, in Tani Minez? (ed.), Asobi no

dezainu (Iwasaki Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 1984), p. 16. 27. Quoted in Furukawa Miki, Sh?mingein? (Y?zan-kaku, 1983),

p. 247. 28. An example is in Ky?den's Ko wa mezurashiki misemono-gatari

(1801), illustrated by Kitao Shigemasa. 29. Kitagawa Morisada, Klnsei f?zoku shi, quoted in Ono Tada

shige, Garasu-e to doro-e, 2nd ed. (Kawade Shob? Shinsha, 1990), p. 66.

30. Suzhou prints are mostly in the large hanging-scroll format. More likely, Chinese scenes are to be accounted for by the import to Japan of Western vues d'optique representing China (of which there were many). Peep-shows were known in China, however, and were called la yangpian, "Western-piece stretchers."

31. Shikitei Sanba, Ukiyo-doko, in Share-bon, kokei-bon, ninj?-bon, Nihon koten bungaku zensh?, vol. 47 (Shogakkan, 1971), p. 289. I differ from the editors of that volume, who believe that the last part of this passage does not refer to the showman's cry but to that of a rental telescope salesman. The racist term "Chinaman" is used to capture the flavour of the original t?jin.

32. Hasegawa Mitsunobu, Ehon otogishina kagami; this is quoted in most sources relating to uki-e; see, inter alia, Oka, Megane-e, p. 96. I follow Julian Lee in understanding this to imply pornographic pic tures were in the box (Origin and Development, p. 54). Erotica, though,

was probably not shown in perspective. 3 3. Takezawa Bakin, Kiry? manroku, quoted in Fukamoto Kazuo,

Karakurigeijutsu shiwa, 2nd ed. (Fuji Shuppan, 1982), p. 136. 34. Jippensha Ikku, Kane m?ke hana no sakariba, p. 5. 35. Uki-e are not extant for all these places and events, but for the

fireworks at least, see the version of Masayoshi in Timothy Clark, "The Rise and Fall of the Island of Nakazu, " Archives of Asian Art

XLV (i992):Fig. 6. 36. Ky?den, Hitogokoro kagami no utsushi-e (1796), p. 12 recto. 37. K?kan, Ko wa mezukashiki misemonogatari, ed. Fujisawa

Yoshihiko (KokinKisho Kangy?-kai, 1935), pp. 26-27. 38. For more on this theme, see Tanemura Hidehiro, "Nozoki

karakuri no toposu, " in his Hako-nuke karakuri kidan (Kawade Shob? Shinsha, 1991).

39. Satake, Gazu rikai, p. 103. 40. K?kan, Seiy? gadan, p. 492. 41. See above, note 28. 42. This switch from traditional to Western is often seen in the

context of illustrated popular stories, for example, Koikawa Haru machi, Kinkin sensei eiga no yume (1775), illustrated by the author, pp. 3 verso-4 recto.

43. Several examples of the scene of the Mitsui shop are preserved in the Eisei Bunko, Tokyo.

44. James Brandon, "Sugeroku: the Flower of Edo," in his Kabuki: Five Classic Plays (Harvard, 1975), p. 61; I have amended the transla tion in line with Kishi Fumikazu, "A View Through the Peep-hole:

A Semiotic Consideration of Uki-e," in Kyoto daigaku kenky? seika h?kokusho (March 1993): 15.

45. Hiraga Gennai, Nenashi-gusa (1763), in F?rai Sanjinsh?, Nihon koten bungaku taikei, vol. 55 (Iwanami, 1961), p. 77.

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