Our next lesson, again, another image of a young woman which we know was owned by and cherished by a young samurai. In this sense, in this instance, a photograph, a photograph not of a Chinese or a Japanese woman but of an American, a Caucasian young woman who's wearing a very, very formal dress and is portrayed in a photographic studio in a very, very formal portrait. And as I've written here on the top, we know that this is a photographic portrait of Miss Harriet Lane, who is the niece of the current contemporary United States President James Buchanan. James Buchanan was single, he didn't marry, and Miss Harriet Lane was basically his First Lady, and she's often referred to as the first First Lady in American history. She is very, very striking. She had a very, very striking physical presence, very, very shiny black hair, white skin, and was an extremely social or sociable woman and became very, very well known in Washington and throughout the diplomatic corps in Washington for her social skills as well. The Japanese government, under the Tokugawa bakufu, before the fall of the bakufu, sent out three different emissaries or missions to the United States and Europe before the Meiji Restoration – one of them in 1860 was to the United States. A group of samurai still wearing their samurai kimono clothes and not, you know, sort of designing or cutting their hair in a Western form, looking, in other words, like traditional Japanese samurai just off the boat, came to visit Washington, pay their respects to the president and deliver a letter to him as well. They met with President Buchanan, but we also know that Harriet Lane was there as well. One of the reasons that we know that she was there is that one of the young members of the emissary, a young samurai named Morita Okatarō, was given a small calling-card-sized photograph, portrait photograph, of Miss Harriet Lane. And the image that I'm showing you here is a reproduction of the photograph which he actually carried back with him on the boat to Japan. That makes sense. I mean, it's an honored guest from a foreign land being given a portrait of a very, very, very beautiful, very striking young woman at the White House. Of course, he would carry that back with him. But I have to say, this is actually not the entire artifact itself. The photograph looks like this, but let's take a look at what he did with it. He pasted it – we don't know when – but we know that he pasted it on a piece of paper to make it rectangular, in size, long and on the white area of the paper, he wrote with a brush a classical Chinese quatrain. In other words, he saw this picture of her, imagined it or conceived of it as a portrait of a beauty, not just the American President's niece but of a beautiful young woman, of the sort of image which he would have been used to seeing. It would have been very literate and known how to in his own sort of social ways deal with and look at it. So, what he did with this calling card portrait of Harriet Lane was to turn it into a sort of hanging scroll, a traditional picture, an image of a beauty with his own words upon it. Step back and take a look just at the words themselves. Here at the end, we see his name that's written there and where it was that he wrote it, and the central part of it there is this quatrain. This is the image itself with the characters on it. I've transcribed what the characters here are and translated it into a legible sort of Japanese text right here. I think that most of our students today are not able to read either the cursive script on the photograph or the Japanese version of it, so I'm going to try to to look at it through English, translate it as accurately as possible. This is what the poem says on top of her image. "An American beauty: they call her Lane." The word for Lane here is a kanji or a Chinese character pun, two characters which mean cool and voluptuous and when you read it aloud, it sounds like rei-en, which sounds like Lane to a contemporary Japanese speaker. "Her arms are draped with jewels; pearls pierce her ears. Complexion fresh, no need for any rouge. Skin white as the snow is exposed on both of her shoulders." A very formal rhyming, very, very formally accurate quatrain dedicated to a photograph, a photographic image of a Caucasian woman, something which most Japanese poets didn't really have much access to in 1860 before the Meiji Restoration. So it's obviously a very exotic image and he's inscribing on the image itself a very, very traditional, very, very local form of his own expression. In other words, we can imagine this photograph being, as being localized by the addition of this white paper and the characters, the poem that he inscribes on top of it, the words themselves. She described that the aspects of the photograph that draw his attention are the jewels draped all along her arms. The fact that she has pierced ears since no one in Japan at this time had pierced ears, men or women. And he goes on to describe her fresh complexion and the fact that she doesn't need any makeup. He saw her in person, so perhaps she was very, very lightly made up or didn't have make up at all. We can sort of think of this as a sort of historical document of what she actually looked like perhaps. Skin white as the snow, this is a very typical way of expressing admiration for a woman's very, very sort of clear, unblemished skin. And so, what is exposed on both of her shoulders, the exposure of her shoulders, the fact that she's got pierced ears, her name, the sound of it, Lane, he immediately transfers that over into a Japanese word. It's a word that's not used very often but could be used or thought of a sort of pun, an orthographic pun, to describe her itself being very, very sort of cool but voluptuous at the same time. I think a fascinating example of localizing, of turning a foreign, very, very exotic, very, very new and innovative but innovative, but also at the same time very, very distant form of representation and bring it close to one's self, bringing it into the local culture itself in order to understand it and enjoy it in a very sort of light and very humorous sort of way.
