In the back room, cooks prepare a large piece of meat. A stairway leads to a second floor, a rarity in early Yokohama...
...salesroom activities in this busy Western mercantile company.
Sadahide The Observer:
Mercantile Firm
Back room activities are separated from...
...“There were not more than half a dozen two-storied buildings in the foreign portion of the town,” wrote an eye-witness.
Western-style
horizontal writing is portrayed...
...in contrast to Japanese, which is written with a brush in vertical columns.
Leather bound books...
...frame a Japanese merchant of high status who oversees a transaction.
Hand gestures supplement a limited knowledge of each other’s languages.
An Indian servant
prepares duck...
A huge elephant picture decorates the wall behind a Chinese man who displays goods, presumably silk.
...while a laundress
washes clothes.
Prints are gifts of Ambassador William and Florence Leonhart, reproduced courtesy
of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
“Yokohama Boomtown” Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2008 Visualizing Cultures
A Project of Professors John W. Dower and Shigeru Miyagawa
Based on the catalogue of the 1990 exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Yokohama: Prints from 19th-Century Japan,
by Ann Yonemura. © 1990 Smithsonian Institution
On viewing images from the historical record: click here.
Design and production by Ellen Sebring, Scott Shunk, and Andrew Burstein
