Samurai and Guerrillas: The First Official Japanese Visit

In June, 1860, a Japanese diplomatic mission visited Washington, DC, and then toured Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. The first official Japanese visit to a Western nation, the delegation was composed of seventy-seven samurai. They created a sensation with their exotic clothing, not least for throwing the rigid male-female gender dichotomy and racial order of mid-century America into turmoil.

Scholar Ikuko Asaka writes that news coverage of the mission used already-established orientalist tropes of “feminine” “Asiatics.” Matthew Perry’s 1853-1854 expedition “opening” Japan had “spurred orientalist analogies that likened Japan to a woman and Japanese men to women.” Among other examples, she quotes the literary and lifestyle magazine Home Journal in 1856: Japan was the “fairest of the Eastern feminine nations,” the “Island Belle” the US had won in a courtship battle with “John Bull” (Britain) and the Russians.

The 1860 mission was written about in the same vein as newspapers obsessed over the silks, sleeves, and sashes of Japanese male attire. “A disproportionate number of reports on the mission represented the Japanese men as sartorially feminine (that is, as wearers of clothing items associated with women) or downright called them effeminate in mind and demeanor.”

Another theme in the press was the large number of white women who thronged the delegation. White women were fascinated by these embodiments of exotic fashion—and exotic eroticism.

After crashing a presidential reception—the official event was intended to be serious and male—the “ladies” started being castigated in the press for “their intrusion into formal diplomatic arenas and excessive presence around and closeness to the Japanese in informal public spaces.” The New York Herald, for one example, referred to women in “predatory bands” in crinolines who “made guerrilla charges upon the illustrious Orientals.” (The Japanese, however, saw it all as a fairly successful process of goodwill-making.)

While orientalist fascination drove white women to the streets and federal buildings, white men (the press) quickly devalued both the agents and objects of such fascination as unqualified to conduct diplomacy on par with white men.

But, because the Japanese had “strictly male duties at the heart of the federal government” as diplomats, they “undercut and subverted the press’s feminization of Japanese men and devaluation of white women’s political capacity.”

Diplomatic needs prevented white men from letting feminization do its usual work—that of justifying and solidifying race-based subjugation and exclusion by relegating nonwhite radicalized peoples outside the bounds of normative manhood. Effeminate nonwhite men in silk dresses performed male privilege and authority, transcending the era’s gender dualism.

The actual work the delegation did, the “male gender performances by the dress-clad foreign dignitaries,” disrupted the efforts to feminize them and Japan as a whole.

“White women’s desire for physical proximity to Japanese men,” meanwhile, “conjured specters of women’s interracial eroticism.” Seventeen-year-old Tateishi Onojiro, an interpreter-in-training and the youngest member of the delegation, especially became something of a heartthrob. He was nicknamed “Tommy” from “Washington Heights to East Broadway,” as Vanity Fair had it. There was even a “Tommy Polka” written in his honor.

The New York World trumpeted a sex scandal between Tommy and a “popular actress at Niblo’s [theater].” The scandal was interracial desire, even though he was portrayed as a “woman-like man,” “wearing loose and long garments” just like the ladies. The New-York Commercial Advertiser denied any affair between Tommy, “an excellent boy” and the actress, “but still implicitly recognized Japanese men’s ability to excite women’s sexual desire.”

Non-white men in “dresses,” as the American press insisted on characterizing formal attire for Japanese men, igniting desire among the “crinoline mob,” the press’s disparaging label for women—the Japanese visit only lasted a month, but it sure stirred things up.

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