Word: namban
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...Portuguese merchants who had arrived before him were viewed with well-bred distaste by the Japanese. What could one make of such odd-colored, hairy, round-eyed barbarians? "I do not know whether they have a proper system of ceremonial etiquette," one Oriental lord wrote of the Namban-jin, or "people from the south." "They eat with their fingers instead of chopsticks as we do. They show their feelings without any self-control...but withal they are a harmless sort of people...
...precarious foothold in traditional Japan; they were expelled in the 17th century and did not return for two centuries, until Commodore Perry's expedition in 1853. How did the Japanese see us, as we gingerly landed from our exotic vessels? Such is the theme of two delightful exhibitions: "Namban Art" at Manhattan's Japan Society and, as a footnote, "Foreigners in Japan," a show of 19th century Yokohama prints at the Philadelphia Museum...
Europe had its fashions in things Oriental: chinoiserie in the 18th century, Japanese screens and lacquer at the end of the 19th. But the Namban-ga, or "paintings of the southern barbarians" (the route from Europe lay round India, to the south), are a rare example of such a vogue in reverse. The very fact that, by the early 17th century, some feudal lord had commissioned a World Map and Four Major Cities of the World (see color), painted on twin eight-fold screens, is significant; his ancestors would not even have been curious, confidently locked as they were...
...turned the Alban Hills into something like the landscape around Kyoto, he faithfully retained the details -and mistakes-of the original, itself probably drawn by a man who had never been to Rome either. European engravers, in fact, provided a constant flow of information for Japanese painters of Namban-ga. The demand among the castle lords for paintings like A Western Prince on Horseback stemmed partly from the princes' recognizably military splendors; these gorgeously caparisoned Western samurai must have fitted the opulence of the Momoyama period's taste down to the last tassel and square foot of gold...