I'd like to spend a few minutes to look back, remember what we've learned, and try to pull together some of the many threads that connect the word and the image in 19th-century Japan. We've gone through four modules. The first two were separated by theme, what was being represented, portrayed, in the painting, print, or photograph. First of all, we looked at samurais. Then, painted beauties, so called beauties, beauty images, bijin-ga, as illustrated and inscribed upon. The third and fourth modules, we move towards the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th. The new Western-contrived technology of photography, what that meant, what the challenges, possibilities that opened up to Japanese writers, and illustrators, and consumers of culture, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'd like to take a look at each of the modules separately. First of all, the samurai, leaders of society, paragons of ethical virtue, or at least that's what they aimed to be, or that's what their status implied. Then depicted in portraits, often done to commemorate, or to celebrate birthdays, 40, 50, 60, and so forth. We took a look at Satō Issai's portrait at the age of 50, brilliant work by Watanabe Kazan. Himself a samurai, author, and painter. First, we began by looking at the distance between the portrait itself and the way that he looked at his portrait. The words that Satō Issai inscribed upon seeing himself portrayed in a very Western, realistic sort of way. What Japanese intellectuals at this time were thinking, when they looked at themselves, when they saw each other or they saw themselves portrayed in portraits like these. We then move to the last decade of the Edo period. The troubled years during the so-called bakumatsu era before the Meiji Restoration. One of the most active and influential, young intellectuals, Yoshida Shōin, who, having been arrested and was just about to be sent to prison in Edo, from his hometown in the west of Japan, had one of his disciples paint his image, and then at the same time produce a number of copies. Seven, eight, or nine copies of this painting on which he inscribed in classical Chinese, messages for each of the recipients of his portrait. Which he knew would probably be delivered into their hands or would be hang up in their room on the walls after he had been executed in Edo, and his prediction as we learned, came true. Yoshida Shōin's portraits began as paintings. In other words they were copied, but they were copied among a very closed community of like-minded young men. But in the last years, before the end of the Edo period, his portrait, the image that we see right here, was transferred onto woodblock print images. Here we have a close up of the portrait, which was taken from the portrait that we just saw and woodblock printed, placed into the book of his sayings that he wrote down before he was executed and was actually brought into battle. This book itself was carried into battle by young men from his domain. So we can see the propaganda or the ideological impact and the effect of the human visage, the face, and the words, in this case written by, and in the hand of, the man who's portrayed here. So this sort of synergistic dynamic or relationship between the written word and illustrated face, or continents, of a human being. Is something that we see developing and moving across media in the years preceding this but especially leading into, after the Meiji Restoration. Our second module concentrated on painted beauties, how women -the figure of women as portraits, in other words as actual existential beings in society, but also as abstract images- so-called beauty images were mass-produced in the Edo period and were also very often written upon and carried their own stories. They carried their own sort of histories, and stories, and parameters within which these usually young women were said to have lived. We took a look at Kitagawa Utamaro's print of a young woman reading in 1802. And saw how that was drawn as a model later on in the Edo period, and through into the Meiji era as one sort of set piece, so to speak, of women being gazed at in one of their most intimate situations. Reading, becoming absorbed in a book itself. Again, inscribed, filled with words which describe them, but also delineate them and limit them, describe the parameters within which these young women were expected to live in civil society in urban Japan in the early 19th century. Here I gave a sample of illustrative fiction of a ghost tale from the late 1880s before the war with China in which a Chinese woman is portrayed as she's sold into a brothel and dies a very, very sad death. But then her portrait is, so to speak, rescued and brought to Japan and protected within Japan. She falls in love with this young samurai, here it's a sort of period piece, and he protects her. We can read this in the context of the conflict going on, this sort of geopolitical situation of modernizing Japan and late Qing Dynasty situation in the late 1880s and the 1890s. So again there's not a word written on this illustration but it's surrounded by words and the fact that she removes herself and moves out of the painting into real life also gives us one clue to how, especially young men readers, would observe and view and what they expected from images depicted in words and in illustrations of women. At the end of our module, we took a look at a very rare photograph of the niece of the United States president, which was given as a gift to one of the Japanese samurai visitors in 1860 at the White House. And how this young man transformed this extremely modern, highly social, visual medium into something that's closer to his own tradition, his local literacy being able to to sort of challenge it and play with it and use the photograph of the young woman as a sort of template to create his own poetry and respond to the image itself.
