Interpretive Resource

Departmental Gallery Exhibition: Foreign Faces in Japanese Prints

Foreign faces—Korean, Chinese, and European—became a staple of Japanese popular arts in the Edo period (1615–1868). Print artists, whose livelihoods depended on market appeal, quickly recognized the public’s eagerness for images of foreigners, whether real or imagined.

Exoticized images of foreign scenes and faces emphasized their differences and helped to establish a coherent Japanese identity. Korean embassy parades were a favorite subject of these Japanese prints. Hishikawa Moronobu’s Korean ambassador, for example, sports lush whiskers that are contrasted with the clean-shaven face of his Japanese escort. Kitagawa Utamaro’s satire of a procession of Korean diplomats takes these depictions one step further—portraying geisha masquerading as foreigners.

Figures from Chinese legend are another type of alien face often encountered in Japanese prints. Fierce images of the legendary Chinese hero Shoki the demon-queller were pasted on doorposts to ward off disease as well as blazoned on pennants for the Boys’ Day festival to instill valor in young boys. In contrast to these ferocious images, however, the artist Suzuki Harunobu also transformed Shoki into a lover desperately seeking the affections of a young Japanese beauty, thus affirming the borderless appeal of Japanese womanhood.

Foreign faces offered boundless possibilities for parody and invention, a rich lode that Edo-period print artists were only too happy to mine.