A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [234]
This is an image the Japanese themselves have sometimes wanted to project, and it is how the most famous of all Japanese images, The Great Wave, is sometimes read. This bestselling woodblock print, made around 1830 by the great artist Hokusai, is one of his series of thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. The Museum has three impressions of The Great Wave. The one shown here is an early one, taken when the woodblock was still crisp, which means it has sharp lines and clear, well-integrated colours. At first sight it presents a beautiful picture of a deep blue wave curling above the sea with, far in the distance, the tranquil, snow-capped peak of Mount Fuji. It is, you might think, a stylized, decorative image of a timeless Japan. But there are other ways of reading Hokusai’s Great Wave. Look a little closer and you see that the beautiful wave is about to engulf three boats with frightened fishermen, and Mount Fuji is so small that you, the spectator, share the feeling that the sailors in the boats must have as they look to shore – it’s unreachable, and you are lost. This is, I think, an image of instability and uncertainty. The Great Wave tells us about Japan’s state of mind as it stood on the threshold of the modern world, which the US was soon going to force it to join.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution began, the great manufacturing powers, above all Britain and the United States, were aggressively looking for new sources of raw materials and new markets for their products. The world, these free-traders believed, was their oyster, and it was one they intended to force open. To them, it seemed incomprehensible – indeed intolerable – that Japan should refuse to play its full part in the global economy. Japan, on the other hand, saw no need to trade with these pushy would-be partners. Its existing arrangements suited it very well.
The country had closed almost all its ports at the end of the 1630s, expelling traders, missionaries and foreigners. Japanese citizens were not permitted to leave the country, nor could foreigners enter – disobedience was punished by death. Exceptions were made only for Dutch and Chinese merchants, whose shipping and trade were restricted to the port city of Nagasaki. There goods were regularly imported and exported (as we saw in Chapter 79, the Japanese were quick to jump into the gap in the European porcelain market left by political problems in China in the mid seventeenth century) but on terms of trade laid down solely by the Japanese. In dealing with the rest of the world, they called the shots. This was not so much splendid isolation as selective engagement.
If foreign people could not enter Japan, foreign things most certainly could. We can see this very clearly if we look closely at the composition, physical and pictorial, of The Great Wave. We see a rather traditional-looking Japanese scene – the enormous wave curling over the long, open fishing boats, dwarfing them and dwarfing even Mount Fuji in the distance. It is printed on traditional Japanese mulberry paper, just under the size of a sheet of A3, in subtle shades of yellow, grey and pink, but it is the deep, rich blue that dominates – and startles. For this is not a Japanese blue – it is Prussian blue or Berlin blue, a synthetic dye invented in Germany in the early eighteenth century and much less prone to fading than traditional blues. Prussian blue was imported either directly by Dutch traders or, more probably, via China, where it was being manufactured from the 1820s. The blueness of the Great Wave shows us Japan taking from Europe what it wants to take, and with absolute confidence. The Views of Mount Fuji series was promoted to the public partly on the basis of the exotic, beautiful blue used in its printing – prized because