Source 19.6: A Critique of Westernization

Not everyone in Japan was so enthusiastic about the adoption of Western culture, and by the late 1870s and into the next decade numerous essays and images satirized the apparently indiscriminate fascination with all things European. Source 19.6, drawn by Japanese cartoonist Honda Kinkichiro in 1879, represents that point of view. One caption that accompanied the drawing reads as follows: “Mr. Morse [an American zoologist who introduced Darwin’s theory of evolution to Japan in 1877] explains that all human beings were monkeys in the beginning. In the beginning — but even now aren’t we still monkeys? When it comes to Western things we think the red beards are the most skillful at everything.”5 A second caption in English below the drawing further develops this theme.

Questions to consider as you examine the source:

Critique of Wholesale Westernization

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Critique of Wholesale WesternizationLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Notes

  1. Quoted in Julia Meech-Pekarik, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization (New York: Weatherhill, 1986), 182.