We spent the last couple of lessons thinking about how images of women in the later part of the bakumatsu, or troubled decade or decade or so before the Meiji Restoration, how those images were used to convey something, a meaning, a political, economical, moral message through allegory. In the next lesson I'd like to think about, not just the content of the message that these portrayed women were carrying with them or trying to convey. But at the same time, how images of women portrayed as portraits or in photographs, in lithographs, were used to express the innovation or the renovation of media. The first decade of the modern era after the Meiji Restoration, in other words in the 1870s into the 1880s, brought dozens of new ways of expressing, different modes of expression, certainly musical, artistic, literary, linguistic, perhaps culinary, as well, all kinds of different influences from the West, which had grown up and accumulated, changed in the West over centuries. All flooded into Japan in a very, very short period of time, in about one decade, and were processed and digested, often rejected, and then localized into some things which we can recognize today as specifically Japanese forms of expressions. I'd like to start our lesson today with one painting, which was created by one of the very earliest oil painters in Japan in the Meiji period, Takahashi Yuichi. This picture that I've put up right here, was painted by Yuichi in 1872, the fifth year of the new Meiji era. The title is A Courtesan. Just by looking at this picture, this is the entire image itself, we don't really know who she is, her age, where she might've worked. It's painted in a very strictly Western format, so that there's no verbal information on the work itself, so that we know what she's about, who she is—as opposed to something like the Geisha portrait by Watanabe Kazan, which we took a look at earlier. This portrait was one of the earliest oil paintings, and is very, very popular, very well known here in Japan, because it came at the beginning of the tradition of Western painting here in Japan. Takahashi Yuichi, the painter, had as his competition, in other words in order to develop the market and to convince people that this new form of visual art, oil painting, which most Japanese people had never really seen up close, was something viable and something valuable, he had to convince everyone that having an oil portrait made of oneself is better than a photograph. In other words, his competitors were photographers. The photograph, which had come into Japan slightly earlier than the oil painting, had already sort of spread out. They were were independent by 1872. There were many independent photography studios in Tokyo itself. And so he wanted to emphasize the superiority as a visual medium of oil painting over photography. Of course, oil painting and photography have several things in common. One of them is that they're both used to express shapes and forms, landscapes, the human figure, realistically. Yuichi didn't have that so much in mind as the stability of the medium itself. He wrote a lot of treatises during this time. And we can see from his letters as well that he's trying to convince his patrons and prospective customers that having an oil portrait stabilizes and sets, fixes one's shape throughout eternity. Photography at this time was still considered, and in fact was, an unstable medium. We only had black and white, there was hand-tinting done, of course. But the colors were very, very limited. The range of colors was very, very limited. And photographic images faded very, very quickly and were known to do that. They were rather ephemeral. In the same way that ukiyo-e, printed polychrome images, were as well. If you exposed them to the light, the colors begin to flee, and so forth. And so Yuichi convinced the first generation of Japanese oil painting connoisseurs and clients that his work, any oil work, could fix the image of the sitter through eternity. Now, this image here that we have of a courtesan, we know from contemporary newspaper articles who she was, where she worked, and how old she was. I'm going to sort of fill you in on some of the facts, some of the things that are going on behind this painting. Her name is Koina, a courtesan of very, very high rank at a brothel in Yoshiwara, the sole publicly recognized or regulated brothel district in Tokyo at the time. Each of the women who worked, the courtesans who worked at these brothels were associated there. They could only work at each of them. And they had very, very strict ranks or hierarchies, depending on how popular they are, but also how talented the women are at music, dance, and other usually performing arts. Koina, in 1872, we know was 18 years old. She looks a little older than that in the portrait perhaps. Yuichi was commissioned to paint this portrait by someone whose name we don't know. I suspect that it was someone having to do with the running or the operations of Yoshiwara themselves. Perhaps a brothel owner or someone who spent a lot of their time and money there, and was interested not just in having a good time in the brothel districts, but in preserving the culture, which had been handed down from the 17th century up until this period.
