The Other Within
Georges Bigot (1860–1927), a graduate of L’École des Beaux-Arts, arrived in Japan in 1882 to study woodblock printing and collect materials for the journal L’Art Japonais, which served a burgeoning readership of European artists and collectors interested in Japanese art. Bigot’s short visit became a seventeen-year residency supported, for the most part, by his prodigious output of comic illustration. His often racially charged caricatures and wry political satire appeared regularly in Japanese newspapers and in numerous publications of his own creation.1 Bigot relentlessly critiqued Japan’s late nineteenth-century efforts to modernize, especially its willingness to abandon its indigenous culture. Like many foreigners residing in Japan at the time and the hordes of tourists arriving in ever-increasing numbers, Bigot exhibited a preference for cultural traditions that were disappearing with Japan’s rapid acquisition of Western technologies, social institutions, and customs. But Bigot also recognized that Westerners in Japan were agents of the very changes he so vehemently decried. Among the regular cast of Japanese characters featured in his comic illustrations, foreigners appear as racial and cultural others whose presence complicates both the social critique and the humor he intended.
An eight-panel lithograph Bigot designed near the end of the nineteenth century follows the misadventures of one such foreigner (fig. 5.1). The first scene takes place on the deck of a ship about to set sail for Japan. We meet our traveler chatting with the ship’s captain as a deckhand hauls his luggage to a stateroom. We don’t know what the captain is saying, but the traveler clearly seems intrigued. Whatever curiosity or enthusiasm the traveler displays in the first panel quickly disappears in the second. He vomits over the side of the ship as it tosses about in high seas, while a bemused crewman, sea legs firmly planted on the heaving deck, calmly smokes his pipe. Scene three shows the traveler negotiating transport with a jinriksha coolie upon his arrival in Yokohama. The Westerner’s expressive face and hand gestures reveal his attempts to communicate, but they elicit only an uncomprehending openmouthed stare from the coolie. The fourth through seventh panels convey the traveler’s exasperation as, having arrived at a traditional Japanese inn, he stumbles through a series of awkward encounters with Japanese culture and customs. He is perplexed when the proprietor of the inn and a maid pry apart his legs and forcibly remove his shoes before he steps on the tatami-matted floor (panel four). Unable to sit on the floor Japanese-style, he crashes through the fusuma (sliding room dividers). The proprietress of the inn comes to his rescue with a proposal for makeshift furniture constructed with wooden boxes (panel five). Perched atop the wobbly stack of crates, our traveler suffers yet another indignity: he spills his meal as he struggles through his first attempt to eat with chopsticks (panel six). Traditional Japanese bedding in the form of a futon spread out on the floor and a hako-makura (elevated pillow) dash any expectations our traveler might have of a well-deserved night’s sleep. His suffering is compounded by a shoji (sliding door) open to the night air and a brightly lit oil lamp that invites a host of flying insects into his room. The maid arrives with mosquito netting just as our traveler realizes that fleas, not mosquitoes, will keep him scratching through what is sure to be a long night (panel seven). In the eighth and final panel, our would-be adventurer rushes back to the port. The tricolore flying off the back of a ship beckons him home.
Most readers of this essay have probably traveled to a foreign country and suffered through unpleasant experiences roughly analogous to those of Bigot’s traveler: bad flights, language barriers, different customs, and poor accommodations, all of which led us to wonder why we were foolish enough to leave home in the first place. We sympathize with Bigot’s traveler because we know his plight firsthand. But our willingness to empathize in no way prevents us from smiling or perhaps even laughing at our traveling companion’s expense. The ease with which we move from empathy to laughter raises several questions about Bigot’s lithograph specifically, but also about visual humor generally. For convenience, I group these issues into four broadly conceived but interrelated inquiries.
The first concerns viewers and viewing contexts: who empathizes, who laughs, and why? While perhaps analogous, the basis for empathy among Bigot’s late-nineteenth-century viewers was undoubtedly far more specific than ours, thus the need to examine the historical context in which viewing took place. The second addresses the medium that facilitates empathy and laughter. Here I refer not to lithography or even illustration (although we need to recognize Bigot’s skill with both), but rather to visual narrative. Visual because Bigot did not title this work, nor did he caption any of the eight panels; whatever empathy viewers feel with our traveler and any humor his predicament elicits are conveyed through visual means. Narrative because none of the eight panels viewed independently affords the same degree of engagement as the full sequence. Every panel occasions a humorous response, but the cumulative degradation of the traveler’s poise and dignity delivers the punch line. Bigot’s narrative centers on the traveler, but it relies on a wide range of supporting characters, most of whom are Japanese. They serve the narrative as the primary source of the traveler’s vexations, and they also provide visual others against which the traveler’s race and ethnicity are read. The third line of inquiry thus addresses the racial and cultural differences Bigot exploits so effectively in the visual presentation of his narrative. As the creator of this visual narrative, Bigot must also be a focus of concern. While the traveler’s tale may aspire to universal appeal, its claims rest on preoccupations Bigot developed during his seventeen-year residency in Japan. This chapter explores these four lines of inquiry independently, but also and perhaps more importantly in relationship to each other.
FIGURE 5.1. Georges Bigot, Untitled, c. 1899–1905. Lithograph, 32 × 22 cm. Kawasaki-shi Shimin Museum, Kawasaki, Japan.
Bigot’s visual narrative possesses, among many qualities, elements of what we might regard as situation comedy—humor that emerges from the experiences of a character forced to deal with unusual or unexpected situations. If television is any indicator, situation comedy relies on the affinity viewers establish with the characters over several weekly episodes. We return to the same sitcom week after week because we enjoy watching the characters we have come to possess, and perhaps even inhabit vicariously, respond to awkward situations. Bigot’s lithograph does not offer weeks of viewing pleasure, but it is episodic, and its main character carries the narrative from scene to scene. We might even claim that Bigot’s narrative, presented as eight scenes on a single page, easily lends itself to reruns. Turn-of-the-century viewers likely looked over the lithograph several times at their leisure, a viewing behavior in which they could easily develop affinity for Bigot’s traveler.
But how likable is our traveling companion? His oddly proportioned body consists of an oversize balding head perched atop a barrel-chested torso supported by underdeveloped legs. The prominent features of his face include a large nose, bulging eyes, and a mouth that appears from behind his mustache and goatee only when it is vomiting, shouting, and eating. Indeed, our traveling companion possesses few redeeming physical qualities—he is hardly endearing. But comic heroes do not need to be beautiful to elicit sympathy. And in situation comedy, viewer subjectivity does not necessarily require identification with the physical body of the comic protagonist. The physical traits we find quirky and unlikable are in fact our traveling companion’s greatest comic assets. His ungainly body is the primary site where Japanese customs wreak havoc, and his oversize face is a perfect canvas on which to register his confusion, displeasure, and disgust.
How, then, might we understand Bigot’s approach to the other characters? He endows all of them—even the Japanese—with essentially the same body type and oversize head as his traveler. Are these also comic assets? If so, how are they used in both the visual and narrative sense? And if empathy and the viewer subjectivities it engenders are critical to the humor conveyed by this narrative, then how would viewers react to Bigot’s visual presentation of Japanese people? Responses to these questions first require an understanding of Bigot’s late nineteenth-century audience.
Bigot’s lithograph affords an insightful glimpse into one of the late nineteenth century’s most intriguing sites of cross-cultural interaction and exchange—the treaty ports of Japan. Opened to foreign residents in 1859, Yokohama, Nagasaki, Hakodate, and later Kobe and Niigata became popular destinations for European and American merchants, entrepreneurs, diplomats, and missionaries. But Japan’s late nineteenth-century encounter with the West was markedly different from that of other Asian countries, and her treaty ports were quite unlike those of nations colonized by Western imperial powers. A fierce persecution of Christian missionaries in the early 1600s, followed by a well-managed exclusion policy, kept the West at bay and spared Japan from foreign intervention for more than two hundred years. Although Japan was eventually opened to foreign trade by the threat of force (an ultimatum delivered by U.S. naval commodore Matthew Perry in 1853), the government in power at the time wisely agreed to accommodation. From the outset, exploitation of this arrangement would never be as one-sided as it was in other centers of the late nineteenth-century colonial world. Foreigners were confined to the treaty ports, and travel outside the borders required passports issued by the Japanese government. While containing the foreign presence, Japan embraced policies of westernization and rapidly transformed itself from an isolated feudal backwater to a modern industrialized state in slightly less than fifty years. Victories in wars with China in 1895 and Russia in 1905 elevated Japan to world power status with an imperialist agenda as aggressive as any pursued by European nations in the previous two centuries. Japan’s treaty ports thus bore little similarity with what Mary Louise Pratt termed contact zones: “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”2 This concept, so useful in colonial and postcolonial studies, holds true for Japan only if one recognizes that the asymmetrical relationships in treaty ports often favored the Japanese.
Nowhere was this asymmetry more apparent than in interactions between Japanese and Western tourists, particularly globetrotters—a new species of traveler that frequented Japan in ever-increasing numbers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Thomas Cook, founder of the travel company that still bears his name, initiated the globetrotter phenomenon in the early 1870s when he led a party of eight adventurous souls on the first round-the-world tour. They departed Liverpool on September 26, 1872, and returned 222 days later. Their Japan leg included Yokohama, which they used as a base to tour the sights of Tokyo before continuing by boat to Osaka and Nagasaki.3 News of Cook’s successful venture sparked widespread interest in round-the-world journeys. Much competition ensued as rival companies quickly developed their own routes. Adventurers and enterprising journalists vied to complete the trip in the shortest possible time. In 1890, Nellie Bly, a reporter on assignment for the New York World, broke the eighty-day benchmark fictionalized in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days.4 George Griffiths broke this record in 1894, completing the journey in sixty-five days. He booked his entire itinerary through Thomas Cook’s company.5
William Elliot Griffis was the first to apply the term “globetrotter” in a Japanese context. Writing in The Mikado’s Empire, published in 1876 but based on his residency in Japan between 1870 and 1874, Griffis noted that several steamship lines were bringing increasing numbers of “circummundane tourists” to Japan. He states that they “have become so frequent and temporarily numerous in Yokohama as to be recognized as a distinct class. In the easy language of the port, they are called ‘globe-trotters.’”6 The exponential growth in globetrotter visits to Japan in the 1880s inspired Basil Hall Chamberlain to include a tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of globetrotters in his 1889 Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan. His classification system ranked globetrotters according to their financial assets and motives for travel. Upper ranks included the globe-trotter elegans, whom Chamberlain characterized as “provided with good introductions from his government, generally stops at a legation, is interested in shooting, and allows the various charms of the country to induce him to prolong his stay.” But as the following examples illustrate, Chamberlain was far less complimentary of most of the subspecies in his taxonomy. “Globe-trotter communis: sun-helmet, blue glasses, scant luggage, celluloid collars. His object is a maximum of traveling combined with a minimum of expense.” “Globe-trotter desperatus: expends his utmost farthing on a ticket to Japan with the hope of making a fortune there, but who, finding no situation, has to be carted home by some cheap opportunity at the expense of his fellow-countrymen.” “Globe-trotter dolosus: travels under some high-sounding name and with doubtful banking account, merely in order to put as great a distance as possible between himself and the home police.” “Globe-trotter locustus: the species that travels in swarms, perpetually dragged around the universe by Cook, or the likes of Cook.”7
For Griffis, Chamberlain, and other Westerners who, through lengthy residencies in Japan, came to know and appreciate Japanese culture, the term “globetrotter” was a pejorative that connoted a superficial engagement with the places, people, and culture encountered on commercial tours. Did Bigot share these sentiments? Is this what motivated him to portray so vividly the travails and frustrations of a traveler’s—perhaps a globetrotter’s—first encounter with Japan? Bigot’s biography suggests an affirmative response. Shortly after his arrival in Japan, he found employment as an art instructor at the Army Cadet Academy in Tokyo. When his two-year contract expired he ordered an etching press from Europe so he could support himself selling printed souvenirs to foreigners visiting Japan. In 1887, he began publishing Toba-e, a bimonthly journal of humor targeted at the roughly three thousand foreign residents of the treaty ports and whatever tourists might happen to be passing through. He contributed to several Japanese news publications, including Marumaru Chimbun, a humorous weekly with a circulation of fifteen thousand, and Kaishin Shimbun, for which he provided images of Tokyo’s famous sites. He illustrated Japanese translations of Western novels and Western translations of Japanese novels. He married Sanô Masa in 1894, and his son Morris was born a year later.8 Bigot clearly fits the profile of Chamberlain’s globe-trotter elegans, someone who “allows the various charms of the country to induce him to prolong his stay.” We can probably assume that Bigot, like Griffis, Chamberlain, and other permanent residents of the treaty ports, held a disparaging view of globe-trotter locustus, “the species that travels in swarms, perpetually dragged around the universe by Cook, or the likes of Cook.” It is against this background that we must read Bigot’s visual and narrative treatment of the Japanese characters in his lithograph.
Chamberlain’s Things Japanese takes the form of an encyclopedia with the entries arranged alphabetically. It includes an entry titled “Books on Japan,” under which he describes and recommends reliable publications on Japanese history and culture. He also commented on poor or inaccurate sources, among them travel books, which he refers to as “ordinary low level of globe-trotting literature—twaddle enlivened by statistics at second hand.”9 Bigot’s lithograph parodies many tropes of globetrotter literature. Panel one conveys the excitement and expectation as the journey begins, while panel two documents the ravages of sea travel, a common juxtaposition in globetrotter travel accounts. Globetrotter authors waxed most eloquent when describing the experiences Bigot includes in panel three. Mount Fuji, a spectacular presence on the horizon, greeted globetrotters as they sailed into Yokohama harbor. From the port, globetrotters booked their first jinriksha ride, often the subject of meticulous and sometimes gendered description. Bigot’s coolie is modestly dressed, but during the hot summer months, sandals and a loincloth were preferred, much to the delight—but sometimes to the disgust—of Victorian-era women who were treated to close-up views of magnificent full-body tattoos and the sweaty buttocks of young Asian men. Removing one’s shoes before entering a residence, unfurnished rooms that required sitting and sleeping on the floor, Japanese cuisine and dining protocols, and the seemingly endless variety of insects with voracious appetites for human flesh occupied the attention of nearly every globetrotting author who visited Japan.
Bigot also incorporates globetrotter perspectives on Japanese people in his visual narrative. Men are uniformly given less favorable treatment than women. Apart from the middle-aged gentleman in panel six, Bigot accentuates their toothy mouths in ways that makes them appear coarse and, in the case of the jinriksha coolie, unintelligent. The policeman in the final panel, a special case discussed in more detail below, projects a sinister threat of violence. Conversely, globetrotters were enthusiastically enamored with Japanese women. They found them physically attractive, accommodating, pleasant, and well-mannered—precisely the traits Bigot enhances visually and in their contributions to the narrative.
Bigot’s depictions of Japanese as racial others also conforms to globetrotter preoccupations. Globetrotter authors often adopted the essentializing language of ethnography when relating their first impressions of any nonwhite people they encountered during their travels. Visual differences such as dress and coiffure were often the starting point of their description, but body type and facial structure typically received the most emphasis. As noted above, all the characters in Bigot’s lithograph—even the Japanese—have the same oddly proportioned body type as the traveler. But whereas the traveler’s oversize head is used primarily as a means to convey his frustration and anxiety, the large faces of the Japanese perform several visual and narrative tasks in which humor and racial difference come together in an uneasy balance.
As with his traveler, Bigot uses the large faces of his Japanese characters as comic assets—they serve as sites on which he records their reaction to the traveler’s foibles. But there are no reactions apart from the bemused smile seen on the face of nearly every Japanese character in the narrative. The traveler’s distress receives no empathetic response. Instead, his failed attempts to communicate and acculturate make him the object of spectacle in every panel. Even the incidental Japanese characters peopling the background of the Yokohama scenes focus their attention on the traveler. This lack of reaction, or to be more precise, the same reaction on the part of all the Japanese characters, enhances the traveler’s alienation. His experiences become all the more vexatious, but more importantly, all the more humorous, because here everyone looks at him. These internal gazes also function as a clever visual device that cues viewers to enjoy the spectacle and smile along with the Japanese at the traveler’s expense. In effect, viewers temporarily become Japanese, and the traveler becomes a racial other within his own community of non-Japanese viewers.
But when, as a matter of visual and narrative expediency, Bigot turns every Japanese face toward the viewer, he also enhances the display of racial difference. He forces viewers into the role of globetrotting ethnographers. And once viewer subjectivity is established along this vector, Bigot’s Japanese characters become objects of racial spectacle open for direct comparison with the traveler. The Japanese may share his disproportionate body type, and their oversize faces may similarly serve as comic assets, but only the traveler has an individual identity and personality. The ubiquitous bemused smiles of Bigot’s Japanese characters—their comic asset—become racialized masks that make them inscrutable and unknowable. They remain others within the narrative in spite of the vital work they perform generating and sustaining its humor.
Because they are not circumscribed by textual constraints, visual narratives readily lend themselves to multiple interpretations. While the globetrotter narrative constitutes Bigot’s primary message, he offers another possible reading, subtly cued by details in the first and last panels of his illustration. The narrative begins and ends in seaports where the traveler encounters men in uniforms: a ship’s captain and deckhand in the first and a police officer in the last. Bigot’s portrayal of these figures is an exercise in contrasts. The French officer is friendly and helpful; the deckhand seems easygoing and amiable. The menacing countenance of the Japanese police officer lacks entirely the pleasant demeanor of the French or, for that matter, the proprietors and staff of the Japanese inn. The eight-panel narrative also implies the passage of time; Bigot takes advantage of this potential to heighten the contrast between the French crew and the Japanese police officer. In the first panel, the traveler glances left, toward the future, toward Japan and the sequence of experiences he will encounter in the next six panels. In the last panel, he casts a harried and fearful glance backward over his shoulder and the previous six panels. These directional glances effectively frame the traveler’s narrative while isolating the policeman outside its chronological frame. The policeman thus represents both a future as yet unrealized and an alternative reading of the narrative.
What, then, is the future to which Bigot alludes? Prior to the opening of the treaty ports, Japan consisted of roughly 260 domains (han), each of which was controlled by relatively autonomous local samurai governments. Leaders of these heavily militarized domains submitted to the rule of the shogun through feudal-style allegiances and personal oaths of loyalty, but they retained primary responsibility for managing and policing the affairs of their territory. Commodore Perry’s threat of foreign occupation in 1853 and the unequal treaties Japan was forced to sign with Western governments in 1859 brought about the rapid dissolution of the shogunal government and the feudal relationships on which it relied. The new administration that emerged in 1868 recognized the need for national institutions of governance modeled on the West. By decree, a conscripted military with a centralized command superseded the need to maintain independent militaries in the provinces.10 Similarly, centralized control and command of local police forces was legislated in 1885. The uniformed police officer in the last panel of Bigot’s narrative represents the product of these developments.
Foreign residents of the treaty ports had little complimentary to say about Japan’s new police forces, which were particularly prone to abuse their authority. Bigot’s predecessor, Charles Wirgman (1832–1891), frequently pilloried them in his caricatures. Wirgman arrived in Japan in the early 1860s as a reporter and sketch artist for the Illustrated London News. In 1862 he began publishing the Japan Punch, modeled on the British humor magazine of similar title. Its earliest woodblock-printed versions were issued irregularly, but Wirgman switched to lithographs in 1883 when demand had grown enough to publish on a monthly basis. Wirgman’s illustrations primarily poked fun at life in the treaty ports, but by the mid-1880s he began to critique some facets of Japan’s modernization. Japanese policing frequently drew his ire. His satire often commented on their unkempt appearance and lack of discipline.11
When Wirgman ceased publication of Japan Punch in 1887, Bigot filled the void with Toba-e. Like Wirgman’s work, Bigot’s satirical illustrations for this self-published journal of humor frequently took issue with the disagreeable aspects of Japanese modernization. Bigot’s satire tended to be more aggressive than Wirgman’s in both its choice of subjects and its methods. Recognizable personalities in Japan Punch tended to be members of the foreign community. Japanese were, for the most part, presented as generic constructions. Bigot also had a cadre of stock Japanese characters, much like those that appear in the lithograph, but his Toba-e caricatures frequently included important politicians, people of considerable social standing, and even the emperor. The police were also one of Bigot’s favorite targets, but he may have had more personal reasons than Wirgman. Bigot’s antigovernment and antimodernization views made him the subject of police investigations. His notoriety became somewhat of a media sensation. The December 11, 1886, edition of the newspaper Chôya Shimbun included the following: “The French artisan Bigot, who has been living in our country these last few years and is presently residing somewhere in Kojimachi 5-chome, is said to call into his home rag-pickers loitering in the streets of Tokyo, as well as other trades people such as jôruri chanters. He sketches these most impoverished examples of Japanese lowlife and sends the pictures back to his home country. Might there not be some way to prevent this practice as it will invite contempt of foreigners toward our national customs?”12
Many of Bigot’s Toba-e illustrations were autobiographical; he appears as a harlequin with vaguely Japanese features. Police harassment of this alter ego recurs as a frequent theme, and Bigot’s uniformed tormentors look strikingly like the specimen in the last panel of the traveler’s narrative: sinister, threatening, menacing.13 Bigot’s unpleasant engagement with Japanese law enforcement suggests that this figure is more than just a member of the Japanese cast of supporting players. There may be another, perhaps autobiographical reading of Bigot’s globetrotter narrative. In fact, the traveler looks strikingly like Bigot (fig. 5.2). But if this is indeed the artist, how do we reconcile the traveler’s narrative of alienation, anxiety, and frustration with a seventeen-year residency during which Bigot appears to have adapted fabulously to Japanese life and customs?
FIGURE 5.2. Anonymous, Georges Bigot, 1899. Photograph, dimensions unknown. Nihon Manga Shiryokan, Tokyo, Japan.
The first international test of Japan’s modernization came in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Following the model of Western imperialism, Japan sought to expand its sphere of influence on the Korean peninsula. China objected, claiming that Korea was traditionally a tutelary state under its control. A succession dispute within the Korean royal family provided the occasion and sufficient rationale for Japan and China to go to war. Westerns nations predicted a resounding victory for China, but within six months Japan decimated the Chinese forces in Korea, forcing China to relinquish its claims.
Bigot became a correspondent for the English news magazine the Graphic with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. He produced photographs and illustrations documenting battlefield action in Korea, as well as fervent expressions of patriotism on the home front. Among the latter, his illustrations include depictions of the Japanese police arresting Chinese nationals living in the treaty ports. Throngs of Japanese spectators enthusiastically express their delight at these events.14 Bigot’s images of the Chinese are as racially essentialized as any he ever made of Japanese, but as someone who had invested much time and energy critiquing Japan’s modernization, and who had suffered police harassment because of his views, Bigot, we can assume, sympathized with the victims, rather than with the perpetrators or their adoring fans.
Japan used its victory in the Sino-Japanese War and the international respect it garnered to renegotiate the unfavorable treaties it was forced to sign with Western nations in the late 1850s. The war marked Japan’s emergence as a modern nation deserving equal status with Western imperial powers, and the treaty revisions amounted to official international recognition of Japan’s modernity. Bigot divorced his wife, Masa, in 1899 and returned to France with his son a month before representatives of Japan and the Western powers signed the treaty revisions. The last panel of the lithograph thus becomes a site where several competing narratives collide. The generic globetrotter, our traveling companion and the source of much delight, becomes Bigot, an individual with particularly strong views on Japan’s emergent modernity. The globetrotter narrative and whatever humor it embodies confront a militarized, imperialist, modern Japan with its own emergent forms of racism. The inscrutable bemused smiles that so vexed the traveler but helped us laugh at his expense now seem comparatively innocent when compared to the face of the policeman. The traveler, who is also Bigot, rushes to the port to escape not the past but the future.
1. For an introduction to Bigot see Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print (New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 185–194. For a more thorough treatment of his career and oeuvre see Shimizu Isao, Meiji omokage Furansu-jin gaka Bigô no sekai (Tokyo: Yamagawa Shuppankai, 2002).
2. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4.
3. Verne completed the novel in December 1872 while Cook was still en route, but Verne family records indicate he was inspired by a leaflet Cook had published to promote his trip. See Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), 150.
4. Bly departed from Hoboken Pier on November 14, 1889, at 9:30 a.m. and returned—to much celebration—seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds later. See Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (New York: Times Books Random House, 1994).
5. See Brendon, Thomas Cook, 152.
6. William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire (New York: Harper & Bros., 1876), 339. The steamship agencies included, from America, the Pacific Mail and the Oriental and Occidental; from England, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company; from France, the Messageries Maritimes; and several local lines that plied the ports of China and Southeast Asia.
7. See Basil Hall Chamberlain, Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan (London: Keagan Paul, Trench, Trubner; Kelly & Walsh Ltd., 1891), 212–214.
8. See Meech-Pekarik, World of the Meiji Print, 85–186.
9. See Chamberlain, Things Japanese, 64.
10. In 1871 the han were replaced by provinces administered by the national government. Universal military conscription began in 1873.
11. For a discussion of Wirgman’s activities in Japan see Shimizu Isao, Waguman: Nihon sobyôshû (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004). See 106–107 for reproductions of his Japan Punch cartoons showing policemen. Meech-Pekarik, World of the Meiji Print, 179–180, provides a brief English-language introduction to Wirgman.
12. Quoted in Meech-Pekarik, World of the Meiji Print, 187.
13. For reproductions of Bigot’s Toba-e illustrations showing police harassment see Shimizu, Meiji omokage Furansu-jin gaka Bigô no sekai, 45–47.
14. For Bigot’s war photographs and illustrations see ibid., 81–112.