[JAPAN]

[Two Kawaraban Pictorial Broadsides Depicting Foreigners, Foreign Objects, and Foreign Coinage]

[Edo: c. 1860]. Two woodblock-printed Kawaraban broadsides on Japanese paper, each 9 x 11 5/8 inches.

Two late Edo Kawaraban broadsides recording foreign people, objects, coinage, dress, and material culture at the moment of Japan's accelerated contact with Europe and America.

These two Kawaraban belong to the popular printed culture that developed around Japan's encounter with foreign powers in the 1850s and early 1860s. Produced for circulation beyond official channels, such broadsides translated diplomatic and commercial contact into a form legible to a broad Japanese readership, combining image, caption, anecdote, and report. Their interest lies in the way they classify the foreign world through visible particulars: clothing, physiognomy, tools, coins, flags, animals, weapons, and curiosities. The first broadside is arranged in four compartments under a title describing Western products and curiosities. It includes figures identified as foreign visitors or crewmen, among them an English captain and a Black sailor, together with a Dutch-style optical instrument and a draped clay or stone figure, possibly a classical statue. The second broadside combines a portrait of a captain's wife with her dog, a depiction of a foreign flag, and examples of foreign coins shown obverse and reverse, including Russian coinage and coins dated 1843 and 1854. Here the focus is less on a single event than on the material signs by which foreign nations could be distinguished. The woman's dress, the dog, the flag, and the coins are presented as objects of information and curiosity, evidence of a public appetite for visual knowledge about the peoples then appearing in Japanese ports. Together, the broadsides show how Kawaraban helped mediate the experience of opening Japan to foreign trade and diplomacy. Their compact format and direct visual language made them effective vehicles for reporting and interpreting the unfamiliar, preserving a popular Japanese response to the presence of Westerners at a moment of rapid political and cultural change.

Item #34745

Price: $6,500.00