Magazine: Summer 2012

In the print, a shipwrecked sailor, charged with escorting the Japanese consul's sister-in-law across the United States, is on a train ambushed by Native Americans. Kusserow analyzed this Meiji period print, noting: "Just as the Japanese travelers have adopted Western dress, the artist has adopted an American attitude toward Native Americans as brutal and aggressive." Andrew Watsky, professor of Japanese art in the Department of Art and Archaeology, added that this work was produced soon after Japan had reopened to the West‚—in fact, a delegation of Japanese government officials arrived in San Francisco in 1872 to travel across the country by train. And so the conversation continued: Michael Hatch, a graduate student in Art and Archaeology, observed that the Native Americans are wearing Portuguese dress; Wendy Belcher, who teaches African literature for the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for African American Studies, commented that they may be dressed specifically as Jesuit Portuguese, who were missionaries in Japan during the sixteenth century. Like many other works... [denoting] encounters, the print, Kusserow said in closing, is about depicting the racial other.