The Formation of the Japanese Collections in the Peabody Essex Museum

By Christine M.E. Guth

Mosquito Net By Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) Wood-block print Height 37.6 cm, width 25 cm Peabody Essex Museum, E58,240 Collected by James Devereux, 1799

The Japanese collection in the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts is widely assumed to have been formed by Edward Morse (1838-1925) during the approximately three years (1877, 1878-79, and 1882-83) he spent teaching and travelling in Japan. Morse was a prodigious collector whose vision was instrumental in guiding the museum's acquisitions, but purchases he made in Japan constitute only the nucleus of its vast and diverse holdings. Some articles predate Morse's tenure as director. Others were bought in Europe and the United States long after his last visit to Japan. Still others were donated by or acquired with the assistance of individuals eager to promote American appreciation of Japanese culture, but holding widely disparate views of that country. The museum's benefactors included Japanese men and women whom Morse met in Japan, fellow New Englanders, and even people with no personal ties to him. By identifying the contributions and motivations of some of these little-known individuals, this article aims to draw attention to the wide range of cultural perspectives this important collection embodies. Morse served as director of what was then known as the Peabody Academy of Science for an exceptionally long time, from 1880 until 1916, but his almost legendary identification with its Japanese collection is due largely to his celebrity in Japan. Many of his writings have been translated into Japanese, and his keen observations of Meiji period (1868-1912) culture and society have made him the subject of both popular and scholarly publications. There have also been numerous exhibitions featuring selections from the `Morse collection'. Even children know his name, since he is honoured in school textbooks for his discovery, in the suburbs of Tokyo, of the so-called Omori Shell Mound, the first Neolithic site to be excavated in Japan.

By all accounts, Morse had a lack of pretension that endeared him to men, women and children alike. He captivated his students by enlivening his lectures and conversations with blackboard drawings and impromptu sketches, practices more commonly associated at the time with public entertainers and Buddhist preachers than university professors. Even as he promoted the study of Darwinian evolutionary theory, he displayed a wide-ranging curiosity about every aspect of Japanese society and daily life. (His publications include a study of Japanese latrines.) He participated enthusiastically in the tea ceremony, pottery identification parties and Noh chanting, cultural activities fundamental to the development of personal and professional relationships in Japan. These diverse enthusiasms are reflected in his unusual attentiveness to functional articles representative of Japan's vernacular culture.

Morse is best known today for his encyclopaedic collection of Japanese ceramics, now divided between the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Peabody Essex Museum. His acquisition and classification of examples of stoneware and porcelain representative of the major periods, styles and regions of Japan would not have been possible, however, without the advice and assistance of Ninagawa Noritane (d. 1882). A respected antiquarian who had participated in the Meiji government's first nationwide survey of temple and shrine treasures in 1872, Ninagawa was knowledgeable in many areas, but especially ceramics. Highly systematic in his approach, he distinguished each work he studied by region and age, within a 50 to 75-year period. Morse respected Ninagawa's views and adhered to them long after the development of new classificatory and connoisseurial practices in Japan.

In addition to studying clays, vessel shapes and glazes directly under Ninagawa's tutelage, Morse had the benefit of his Kwan-ko-dzu-setsu: Notice historique et descriptive sur les Arts et Industries japonais, a detailed, though by modern standards often inaccurate, study of Japanese pottery types from the Neolithic age to the Edo period (1615-1867). This five-volume work, published in Tokyo between 1876 and 1879, with texts in Japanese and French, was among the first art books published there to feature colour lithographic illustrations. The striking resemblance between a stoneware jar from Shigaraki near Kyoto, illustrated in Kwan-ko-dzu-setsu, and one in the PEM collection, underscores Morse's reliance on Ninagawa's guidance (Figs 1 and 2).

The bilingual publication of Kwan-ko-dzu-setsu reflected the flourishing international market for ceramics at the time. The Japanese display at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, coinciding as it did with a growing preoccupation with domestic culture, had made Japanese ceramics much sought after as tasteful decorative accessories for the American home. Morse himself was aware that such a collection might be a valuable financial and professional investment, and acquired many pieces that appealed to the tastes of those at home. Americans were especially taken by the seemingly accidental crackled glazes like that of the covered stoneware box illustrated in Figure 3. Many regional potteries in the United States later sought to imitate this crackle effect. The scholar William Hosley has suggested that even crazy quilts, so ubiquitous in Victorian homes, may have been inspired by this Japanese design feature (Hosley, p. 173). Ninagawa wittily conveyed his mentorship in a self-portrait he sent Morse after his return to Salem. It depicts the antiquarian dressed in formal Japanese attire, with a telescope held before his eye, peering intently across the ocean as the Morses unpack their ceramics (Fig. 4). This image is emblematic of the indispensable role that many Japanese antiquarians and dealers played in mediating the interpretation of their art and culture for Western collectors.

Morse also relied on other Japanese friends and acquaintances to collect articles of ethnological interest for himself and the museum. As he later explained in reply to a request by a man named Tsuji for information about its origins and growth:

I brought together a collection of 684 Japanese objects, many of them presented by Japanese friends and others purchased. These objects represented the life of the people. While some of them were of high value, the bulk of them were common objects used in the household, such as clothing, kitchen utensils, dolls, and games, etc.' (Undated letter in the PEM archives).

The handwritten museum registry compiled during Morse's tenure as director identifies the Japanese donors of even the most humble article. Not a few of them were women, who were no doubt unaccustomed to male attention to the details of their domestic life. Ninagawa's wife gave Morse a water dipper made in Yamato province, a region corresponding to today's Nara prefecture; a Mrs Dan (possibly the wife of Dan Takuma, who often served as interpreter to the American professor Ernest Fenollosa [1853-1908]) gave a portable needle cushion and a thimble; and a Mrs Ishikawa, a comb and a lidded basket for boiled rice (Fig. 5).

Similarly modest but informative donations continued to arrive in Salem long after Morse had left Japan. Tsuda Umeko (1865-1929), a graduate of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and founder of Tsuda University, the first women's university in Japan, sent a lacquer box containing a set of writing implements as well as an assortment of men's clothing. Curiously, her gift included `one white undergarment for gentleman's dress', believed to have belonged to Viscount Arinori Mori. Mori, who had travelled to Boston as part of the Iwakura Mission in 1872, and later served as Minister of Education, was assassinated in 1889. Dr Takenaka of the Medical Department of Tokyo Imperial University, whose family Morse had known in Japan, sent personal seals which he no longer used. The use of personal or official seals (insho or hanko) instead of signatures to endorse documents was a source of surprise and fascination to Western visitors. Both the Tsuda and Takenaka gifts suggest a desire to provide a window on aspects of Japanese culture they knew from their own experiences abroad to be unfamiliar to American viewers.

Other gifts were presented by Japanese who were well aware of their historical and cultural value within Japan, but had no way of knowing the framework within which they would be evaluated in Salem. Matsuura Takeshiro (d. 1888), an avid antiquarian and pioneer explorer of Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands, presented Morse with several bows and arrows he had collected during his travels. These were objects of the Ainu, an aboriginal people of northern Japan. In Matsuura's donation we may possibly recognize an unspoken acknowledgement of Morse as a collector of kindred tastes. Machida Heikichi, a dealer in swords and sword fittings, gave the museum his own shop sign as well as an assortment of sword furniture (Fig. 6). Since the wearing of the double sword, a sign of samurai status, had been banned, these articles no longer had any real functional value, but because of their symbolic overtones and craftsmanship, they were treasured by Japanese as well as Western collectors.

Morse's 1882 visit to the Tokyo Educational Museum (now the National Science Museum) was the catalyst for what may have been the first Japanese-American museum exchange. This transaction was mediated by Tejima Seiichi (1849-1918), who had studied in the United States from 1870 to 1874, and later became director of the institution. When Morse visited, he noted that a hall on the first floor was filled with `an extensive and interesting collection of educational apparatus from Europe and America - modern schoolhouses in miniature, desks, pictures, maps, models, globes, slates, blackboards, inkstands, and the minutest details of school appliances abroad.' With the exception of the `beautifully prepared and mounted fish', however, he thought the natural science collection on the second floor quite poor (Morse, vol. 1, pp. 281-82). This may explain his decision to send Tejima an assortment of rare corals. In return, Tejima sent traditional craftsman's tools as well as clothing, ceramics and other articles from the Ryukyu islands southwest of Kyushu. Roofers used the basket and bamboo nails shown in Figure 7 to hold down the cedar-bark shingles on Japanese houses.

Bunkio Matsuki (1867-1940) may have played a more important role in the museum's development than any of his fellow countrymen. Morse hired Matsuki to assist him in cataloguing his ceramics collection soon after his arrival in the United States in 1888. Matsuki's training as a Buddhist monk had given him the ability to read Chinese characters, a skill he put to good use in deciphering the identifying marks on Morse's pottery. He must have had some connoisseurial expertise in ceramics as well, since his family was involved in the antiques business.

Described by a local newspaper as `Salem's most prominent Japanese citizen', Matsuki sold and donated many articles to the museum, but perhaps more importantly, he personally promoted the vogue for things Japanese in and around Salem. He even built a Japanese-style house for his American wife and extended family next door to Morse's own house, on land Morse had sold him. His involvement in Salem's business community gave many local residents direct contact with Japanese culture and people that was unusual at the time.

An astute entrepreneur, Matsuki quickly developed a keen sense of the kinds of Japanese goods that appealed to New England tastes, and formed a partnership with a local merchant to procure and sell them in Salem. The success of this venture in turn led him to set up an independent business as an importer of Japanese fine arts. Matsuki's clients included Charles Freer (1854-1919) of Detroit, and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924); the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Despite Matsuki's claims that his merchandise was authentically Japanese and not made for export, many of the ceramics, wood-carvings and cloisonn‚ objects he sold were in fact made expressly for sale abroad. A pair of monumental cloisonn‚ vases acquired from him by the PEM is typical of the export wares popular in the 1890s (Fig. 8). Similar ones were much admired at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition.

Just as Morse's Japanese friends and acquaintances recognized that their donations to the Museum in Salem could help shape the way Americans perceived their country, so too many New Englanders hoped by their patronage to enhance their region's cultural prestige. This was an issue of special concern to Bostonians in the last decades of the nineteenth century, because of the city's waning political and economic status vis a vis New York and Chicago. The desire to establish Boston's reputation as a cosmopolitan cultural centre was the impetus behind the purchase of Morse's personal ceramics collection by the Museum of Fine Arts in 1892. The $76,000 required was raised by a fund drive fuelled by rumours that the collection might go to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Charles Goddard Weld (1857-1911) was especially generous to the PEM, possibly because of his family's ties to the China trade. He funded the construction of a new gallery to house Salem's growing Japanese collection, as well as providing a bequest to enable the museum to make new acquisitions. This wealthy Bostonian's personal involvement in collecting and promoting the study of Japanese culture in New England followed a visit to Japan in 1885. Weld was an adventurous sailor, and while in Japan, he and his friend Charles Appleton Longfellow (1844-93), son of the poet, sailed on a borrowed boat from Yokohama to Nagasaki. On the return to Yokohama, the boat was destroyed in a typhoon - fortunately while they were ashore. Although many of the Japanese swords and other goods the Americans had purchased en route went down with their boat, Weld more than compensated for this loss with his later acquisitions, some of which he gave to the PEM. These include a fine collection of tsuba (sword guards) as well as examples of arms, armour and horse trappings (Fig. 9). For Weld, like many collectors of his generation, the culture of the samurai was a source of special fascination.

Morse's friends in the New England scientific community also helped to add to the museum's collection. When Mabel Loomis Todd journeyed to Hokkaido in 1896 with her husband, an astronomer sent by Amherst College to view a solar eclipse, Morse gave her $50 to purchase Ainu tools, clothing and other artefacts. This commission reflected Morse's own interest as well as widespread American curiosity about the Ainu. Concern for the future of these people and their culture had been fuelled in part by Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (London, 1880), a lively account of the experiences of the intrepid British traveller Isabella Bird (1831-1904). In her own vivid and highly informative description of her journey, Todd also warned that `the gradual extinction of an entire race will be one of the pathetic features of further development of the Hokkaido.' (Todd, p. 350)

Preservation of the material culture of this `vanishing' people was no doubt a motivating factor in Todd's purchase of some 31 articles, ranging from clothing and weapons to necklaces. These included robes made from elm bark and decorated with cotton appliques and embroidery as well as garments made from fish and animal skins. Salmon was abundant in northern waters, and the fitted garments with flaring skirts fashioned from its skin are thought to predate the Japanese style kimono (Fig. 10). Negotiating the purchase of such articles, often handed down from `parent to child through several generations', was delicate, Todd wrote: `To buy any of the utensils, ornaments, or treasures from an Aino house requires tact and diplomacy even more than that necessary in purchasing old mahogany or blue china from some unwilling but hesitating elderly woman on a lonely New England country road' (Todd, p. 348).

In 1933, the Museum acquired 142 tenugui, purchased by Dr Harris Kennedy (1871-1914) and his wife while touring Japan in 1902 and 1904. This notable acquisition made the PEM's collection the largest of its kind. (The Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence has a slightly smaller collection from the same period.) Tenugui, a derivation of the Japanese phrase `to wipe the hands', are rectangular strips of decorated cotton roughly 85 to 90 centimetres long and 30 centimetres wide. Still widely used today as hand towels, scarves, or bandanas, they are generally stencil-printed in a limited palette of colours, usually indigo and black, with motifs advertising hotels, restaurants and famous scenic spots. During the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, some also featured patriotic propaganda. One example in the PEM collection even promotes the newly popular sport of baseball (Ota Kuritsu Kyodo Hakubutsukan, p. 24). The motifs of most of the tenugui the Kennedys collected testify to their special interest in Japanese flora and fauna. Both were avid gardeners, and while in Japan collected local plants, including the various kinds of irises for which their garden in Milton, Massachusetts, later became famous. They may have been attracted to the tenugui reproduced here because of the unusual perspective, flattened form and dramatic cropping of the leafy butterburr (Fig. 11). However, they were probably not aware that in Japan, the butterburr, which grows rapidly and luxuriantly, is an auspicious emblem associated with childbirth.

Why the Kennedys chose to collect tenugui is not clear, but it is likely that they were influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement. An influential force in promoting Japanese culture in New England, this movement fuelled American fears that traditional Japanese handicrafts were being rapidly displaced by shoddy machine-made goods. In 1905, an article in The Craftsman noted:

A collection of these inexpensive bits of cotton, varying in price from four to ten sen (two to five cents) is within the reach of even the modest collector, and is an acquisition by no means to be despised. They reflect the passing fashions of the hour, as did the once despised Ukiyo-e prints, which are now both rare and precious. More perishable than they, their season will be even more brief, and in a few years more, with the permanent installation of the man-made article, they will, in all likelihood, vanish forever. (Dyer, p. 230)

About the same time Mabel Loomis Todd was in Hokkaido, Schuyler S. White (1861-1939), a missionary sent to Japan by the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), was assembling an extensive collection of Shinto artefacts, which was later purchased by the museum. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Seminary, White was one of the many representatives of this organization working in Japan in the 1890s. He and his wife, a graduate of Oberlin college in Ohio, remained in Japan for nearly thirty years. They were based in Okayama, an area in which missionaries of the ABCFM had engaged since the 1870s in the founding of hospitals, clinics and orphanages, and with the assistance of Japanese converts, proselytizing in prisons.

Since a number of the `clandestine Christians' from Tsushima, an island midway between Japan and Korea, had settled in this area early in the Meiji era, the evangelical ground had been well ploughed before the arrival of these Protestant missionaries. Nonetheless, White himself found evidence of the official ban on Christianity enforced between the 1630s and 1873 in the form of a wooden placard prohibiting the practice of Christianity, and offering rewards for information about `secret Christians'. Although he believed this placard, now in the PEM collection, to date from the seventeenth century, such notice boards still stood at the entrance to many towns and villages in the early Meiji era.

White visited Shinto shrines throughout Japan, collecting talismans, votive plaques and popular religious prints and paintings. Most of the works he acquired are from central Japan, where he lived. Among these is an early portrait painting of Kurozumi Munetada (1780-1850) founder of a religious movement bearing his name that was later recognized as an official Shinto sect. The Kurozumikyo was founded in 1814, when, according to tradition, Munetada, a priest of a local Shinto shrine, was miraculously cured of tuberculosis by the sun goddess Amaterasu. His teachings, centred on faith healing, found many adherents in Okayama prefecture, where there was little opposition from rival Shinto sects, and remained a strong influence during White's years there.

Despite his self-proclaimed interest in comparative religion, White never overcame his provincialism, firmly believing that Shinto beliefs were evidence of the superstitious ignorance of the Japanese. In a letter to C.C. Everett, the Director of Harvard Divinity School, where his collection was exhibited in 1899 before its sale to PEM, he was especially apologetic about the phallic talismans he had acquired:

No Shinto collection would be entirely complete without its symbols...There are three distinctive phallic symbols, however, which I thought you might not wish to be on public exhibition. These are not referred to in the catalogue [a typewritten list which White had provided] for this reason, but I will enclose in this letter a brief description of them. Two of them are made of stone and one of wood. I placed them in the farther back corner of the cabinet behind the rolls, where I thought they would not attract attention...' (Letter of October 21, 1899, PEM Archives)

Near the end of his life, when asked about the history of the PEM collection, Morse claimed that before his tenure, the museum had only a few Japanese household articles, presented in 1821 by Samuel G. Derby, captain of the ship Margaret. He was apparently unaware that more than twenty years earlier, Captain James Devereux, a founding member of what was then known as the East India Marine Society of Salem, had given the museum a number of articles he had acquired in Japan.

Salem's maritime connections with Japan date to the period following the break-up of the Dutch East India Company and establishment of Batavia, in northern Java, as an independent republic in 1795. Growing fear that their ships might be attacked by other European powers competing for the East India trade led Dutch traders in Batavia to charter American ships for the yearly trip to Nagasaki, the sole Japanese port open to Western ships. Because the Dutch had exclusive rights to trade with Japan, chartered ships, including those owned by Americans, had to enter Nagasaki harbour under the Dutch flag.

When Devereux's ship Franklin returned from the Far East on 20 May 1800, its cargo included lacquered cabinets, baskets and other exotic goods for domestic use, as well as five Japanese wood-block prints; four depicting courtesans and one domestic scene, all issued only a few years earlier. At that time, such prints were regarded as curiosities, not as examples of Japanese art, so when they were entered into the East India Marine Society catalogue in 1821, they were not identified by artist or subject, but by the numbers 538 to 542 printed directly over the pictures (Fig. 12). It was in this way that in 1799, more than fifty years before Commodore Perry (1794-1858)), Devereux purchased in Nagasaki the first Japanese artefacts to reach the United States directly from Japan.

Identification of the many individuals involved in the formation of the Peabody Essex Museum's Japanese collection reveals that the label `Morse collection' creates an artificial homogeneity. Challenging this prevailing narrative does not diminish the importance of Morse's personal contributions, but allows us instead to see the collection as a mosaic created by many individuals with varying criteria for selecting, displaying and interpreting Japanese culture.