Books: You Were There

THE BLACK SHIP SCROLL by Oliver Statler. 80 pages. Tuttle. $5.

When Commodore Matthew Perry’s U.S. flotilla pried open the door of hermetic Japan in 1854, the world gasped delightedly at the treasures within. The quaintness of Japanese life and the beauty of its art affected interior decoration from New York to Paris, influenced the course of modern painting, launched a flood of books and operas. What, while the West marveled, did the Japanese make of it all?

The question is partially answered by this slim, elegant volume that has been assembled by Nipponologist Oliver Statler, author of Japanese Inn (but no kin to the U.S. innkeeping clan). Half of the book, and its heart, consists of 40 color plates taken from two Japanese scrolls of the time. Such scrolls, which unrolled horizontally up to 40 ft., served as the picture books and newsreels of feudal Japan. To document Perry’s arrival, and satisfy their feudal masters’ incorrigible curiosity, Japanese artists swarmed aboard Perry’s six black ships, sketching virtually everything in sight with swift brush strokes on mulberry-bark paper. Their captions are often as eerily strange as their pictures, which confirmed the Japanese notion that all Westerners had enormous noses and were covered with hair. Cleanshaven Commodore Perry is shown as a slant-eyed demon, heavily mustached and bearded, with eyebrows as thick as bagels.

In you-were-there fashion, the scrolls faithfully capture the Americans in every conceivable pursuit: tippling, hunting, surveying Shimoda harbor, laundering their clothes at the beach. They also suggest that U.S. sailors have not changed very much. One picture depicts a tipsy seaman dallying in an inn with five tarts, and the dialogue is suitably arch: “Oh, come a little closer to me!” “I say, I say, it seems you’ve had too much and can’t stand up!” Japanese casualness about sex convinced Perry that they were “a lewd people.” When the shogun’s commissioners complained that a U.S. naval officer had left some religious books in one of the temples, Perry responded by protesting against “the obscene books which the Japanese had given the sailors.” But after a desperate effort on both sides to understand each other, this first encounter between two great nations of the Pacific ended amicably. As Perry prepared to sail for home, the Japanese came out to his flagship with the last of their presents, three small spaniels for President Millard Fillmore. ‘They now thrive in Washington,” he reported later, not unlike Lyndon Johnson’s Him and Her.