Exhibit highlights complex media portrayal of Japan
It's an exhibit of artifacts "not meant to be saved" -- old postcards and magazines hidden in attics and sold thoughtlessly at garage sales and flea markets or on the Internet.
Japan-in-America: The Turn of the Twentieth Century opens on Sunday (April 2) at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at IU Bloomington.
The artifacts, collected over 13 years of treasure hunting, tell a unique story featured in Japan-in-America: The Turn of the Twentieth Century, a new exhibit opening at Indiana University Bloomington's Mathers Museum of World Cultures on Sunday (April 2). The exhibit highlights America's portrayal of Japan in newly emerging forms of media at a time (between 1890 and 1913) when Japan's emergence as a global power captivated and troubled the imagination of Americans.
Greg Waller, chair of IU's Department of Communication and Culture and curator of the exhibit, said the artifacts show the complexity of viewpoints held during that time period.
"It's not enough to talk about a couple of stereotypes," Waller said. "If you look really closely at the images, you see a pretty complex picture of contradictory images. One can look modern and one can look archaic right next to each other."
The most resonant and durable image of the Japanese woman from the turn of the 20th century has been Cho-Cho-San, the doomed young female character in Madame Butterfly. The figure of Madame Butterfly resurfaced in a host of other formats, from postcards and cigar labels to advertisements and sheet music. Above: sheet music of "Yosan: A Japanese Intermezzo Two-Step" by Al W. Brown from McKinley Music Co. (1904).
Hundreds of original artifacts, including sheet music, magazine covers, magic lantern slides, postcards, photographs, editorial cartoons and children's books, all gathered by Waller, will be on display until Dec. 20.
Some of the items show how media outlets portrayed American anxiety about Japan's increasing military power, said Waller. Others highlight how Americans expressed their admiration of Japan's extraordinarily quick rise to modernization and industrialization at the turn of the 20th century and its fascination with Japan as a "pure" nation at a time when race complexities were growing in the United States.
In addition to showing how Japan was imagined by the United States through images of the time, the exhibit is also designed to show the richness of media outlets and how they've ushered in the world we now live in, Waller said.
A detailed Web site -- an example of today's emerging media -- is the second component of the exhibit. The site, http://www.indiana.edu/~jia1915/, features images and information about several of the exhibit's artifacts, including entire books that can be downloaded for free. Waller said he uses it as an archival tool and hopes others will use it for teaching.
This photo ("Youthful Mothers of Japan") is an example of a stereoview, a 3-D photograph designed to be viewed through a hand-held or mounted stereoscope. Japan as an exotic foreign locale regularly figured as a prime subject for the major companies that marketed stereoviews, which were fixtures in many middle-class American homes.
Waller began collected materials for the exhibit after studying film and newspaper history and continually running across images of Japan. He hopes to write a book on the subject.
Visitors can view the exhibit Tuesdays through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. when IU classes are in session. Admission is free. The museum is located at 416 N. Indiana Ave. in Bloomington.
Waller said he thinks visitors will be surprised by the variety of materials on display.
"We often tend to think that in the past people were stuck in pretty simple stereotypes," he said. "There's a wide range of images that complicate the idea that there are a couple of ideas that explain everything."
For more information about the exhibit and the Mathers Museum, visit http://www.indiana.edu/~mathers.
