Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 21. (Budapest, 2002)

Monika BINCSIK: The Trade in Japanese Art during the Meiji Period with Special Reference to Lacquer, as Mirrored in the Collections at the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts, Budapest

toms; very often these were in a lacquered album embellished with maki-e. The Ferenc Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts preserves an album of photographs purchased by Ferenc Hopp presumably in Yokohama;

27 this contains 136 photographs coloured by hand. In the photographs Japanese landscapes and everyday scenes are captured. The shop windows of the art dealers must have afforded very appealing sights to travellers interested in Japanese art: Such quaint lines of merchandise as old porcelains, valuable bronzes, exquisite lacquerware and rare curios could be seen through the open front doors of the godowns [warehouses] in the leisurely process of being inspected and packed for export.

28 The art trade in Yokohama Images of Japan formed in the wake of world exhibitions, travel guides and travel descriptions were to a large degree determined by the Victorian world-view and Victorian aesthetics on the one hand and by images of Japan deriving from foreigners resident in the country - for example, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) - on the other. In 1880 Sir Rutherford Alcock (18091897) remarked that it was very important to understand what the "old Japan" was like in order to understand the new.

29 Of course, at this time ideas about Japan were still not based on historical and sociological observations and investigations that strove for objectivity. They stemmed much more from travellers spending short periods in the country, travellers who for their part regarded specialist literature on Japan that had been published a good deal earlier as their point of departure.

30 This tendency was manifest in the fact that travellers would seek out areas in the interior (sometimes they would be there for short periods only) and would afterwards idealise them as "the old Japan, unchanged for centuries", contrasting them with the world of the free ports where the influences of Western culture were to be found. As early as the 1870s anxieties were expressed over the annihilation of genuinely Japanese culture. It was not just the natural beauties of "little fairyland" or "tiny toyland" that drew tourists: the country's exoticism; stories about teahouses, "geishas" and samurais; and a desire for the art treasures available in Japan also represented major attractions for tourists. The ideas of many visitors about the country and its inhabitants derived from what they had read on the one hand and from Japanese woodcuts, porcelain and lacquered objects seen in Europe on the other. Moreover, Japanese artefacts already featured to no small degree in the works of European painters, owing to the impact of the japonisme. These visitors sought out the Japan of the paintings, decorative costumes and famous landscapes with which they were familiar, as well as the special, unique and fortunate Japan whose people had for centuries lived in unchanging harmony. Tourists arriving with this image of Japan were often put in mind of the classical Greco-Roman world.

31 There were, however, those who set out for Japan after seeing the operetta The Mikado, and these visitors were not invariably pleased by the reality they encountered.

32 The visual commonplaces through which Japan was represented for example, Mount Fuji-yama, cherry trees in blossom and "geishas" in kimonos - well characterised the general picture. After giving a description of arrival in Yokohama, the accounts written by tourists visiting Japan generally tell of visits to the enormous Buddha statue (Daibutsu) at Kamakura,

33 of the nakedness of the Japanese, of the temples at Nikko, and of the incredible Japanese curios. With regard to these curios, praise of the items available on Honmachi (Main Street) took pride of place, or else bitterness at the fact that Japan was being completely stripped of its art treasures and that nothing old and genuine now remained. For travellers wishing to discover the "old Japan", old art treasures may perhaps have given substance to what they were seeking, since they also served as evidence of the old culture's existence. At the height of the foreign hunger for art treasures, canny Japanese antique dealers discovered that following artificial ageing and ingenious framing, even onigawara tiles could easily be sold as curios.

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