Babson 1

Anne Babson

“A Japanese Young Man”: British Aesthetes Turning Japanese in Gilbert’s Libretto for The
Mikado

Josephine Lee, in The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado,

presents the work by Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert as an inherently racist undertaking. Lee

describes The Mikado as an exercise that brings “…Into relief the relationship between race and

commodity fetishism …called ‘commodity racism’” (xv). She cites as evidence of this

commodity racism a passage from the opening chorus of The Mikado:

…We are gentlemen of Japan;

On many a vase and jar –
On many a screen and fan… (345)

Lee points out that, “Mikado characters…not only inhabit a world filled with these

imported goods: their very being is understood as inseparable from these objects…” (5). In

other words, these are not gentlemen from Japan, the place on the map. They are, as the song

states, gentlemen of Japan, a Japan that is found on vases, jars, screens, fans – a place where

no Westerner may encounter a real Japanese person, only their stylized representation.

Lee further notes that “The Mikado…makes this intimate relation between character

and object an indispensable aspect of its yellowface” (7). The actors in the original production

of The Mikado were from England, and they wore yellowface. However, Lee points out that

these impersonations were not indeed of Japanese people, however derogatorily such an

impersonation might occur, but rather of gentlemen and ladies of knick-knacks popularized in

England during the Japanaiserie craze of the nineteenth century.

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By her own admission, Lee sees that, “The Mikado…defies charges that it is a racist

work.” (xiv). The Mikado has not fallen out of favor with production companies and is

performed by members of many different races, including Japanese performers for a Japanese

audience. How is this possible? If Lee’s fundamental argument is correct, one of two things

must be true – either we are really no less racist than the Victorians were, or something else

other than racism is at work in this text.

Let me concede two points of Lee’s argument: First, the British of the late Victorian

period were racist – not just against Japanese people, but against anyone who was not born

within their borders of a family that had been there since the Battle of Hastings. Second, The

Mikado is couched in commodity fetishism. Let no one suppose that Gilbert or Sullivan had

complex insight into Japanese life. They knew a song in Japanese, witnessed dances performed

by Japanese women, and beheld many, many objects. They, like so many others in Great

Britain, loved the objects despite their total ignorance of any reality of Japanese life.

Those two points conceded, where Lee points to a racially-motivated disconnect

between the love of the Japanese knick-knack and a disdain for the foreign hand that made it,

she misreads Victorian England’s attitude toward the working class. In Victorian England,

wealthy people adored beautiful things crafted by unacknowledged proletarians from their own

country, not just those who were working abroad. If one wanted to argue for a perspective of

“commodity classism” in Victorian England, one would be correct – the British saw barriers

between those who made objects and those who enjoyed the objects – but this was not a

matter of race for the British but of class.

 Babson 3

Hence, Lee’s overall argument doesn’t hold water because it pairs two things – the

racism with the commodity fetishism – incorrectly. In fact, rather than conflate Japanese

people with Japanese objets d’art, which would continue to impart a racist agenda to

audiences, The Mikado conflates British people, not Japanese people, with Japanese objets

d’art, and this presents a very different analytical problem, one not well illuminated by a strictly

post-colonial reading of the text. The Mikado, which is British at its core, was understood to be

so at the turn of the last century by its initial audience, who were not duped by its yellowface,

knowing that they were at a British masque. Because it is a farcical discussion of British life, not

a discussion of Japanese life, it has endured without any real censure from the public and fails

to arouse the sense of racial offense today that a work might that indeed did demeaningly

conflate Japanese people with Japanese objects.

A post-colonial argument fails to have sufficient historical underpinnings to present a

clear picture of the operetta. Said famously states that discourse about “The Orient,” a

construct of Europe, exists as a consequence of colonial hegemony. From a geopolitical

perspective, a relationship of relative equality existed between Japan and England at the time

of the penning of The Mikado. England did not colonize Japan. England had an egalitarian

trade agreement with the Japanese. Furthermore, this was not a trade between a dominant

superpower and a meek and subjugated backwater principality, but rather a trade pattern

emerged by the mid-1870s where Japan participated proactively in spreading the European

craze for its art and décor:

…The Japanese themselves…wished to exercise greater control over the supply

of modern Japanese manufactures….The Kiritsu Kosho Kaisha company, set up to
promote traditional craft industries… opened branches in New York (1876) and
Paris (1878) (49).
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The knick-knack launched Japan into an international commerce that was highly profitable. It

was not an exploitive relationship between nations where one society sets the prices for

another’s goods and trades for them by proxy. Wealthy Japanese merchants had their

boutiques open in Europe before The Mikado was written.

According to Jenny Holt, Japanese filial piety was portrayed as an instructive model for

British school children in juvenile literature (424). Whether or not these portrayals were

accurate is less remarkable than the idea that the children of a racist Britain were being told to

behave more like other-raced Japanese children. It simply does not fit Said’s model of a

colonized nation’s representation in literature.

Hence, in examining The Mikado, in light of the aforementioned contemporary notions

of Japan, treaties with Japan, trade agreements with Japan, cultural exchanges with Japan,

factors simply do not point to a Saidian colonial or post-colonial relationship expressed in

operetta form. Something else must be at work here.

The Dramatis Personae of Gilbert’s libretto suggests no attempt at an authentic list of

Japanese names. There is Peep-Bo, an obvious reversal of Mother Goose’s “Bo Peep.” There is

Ko-Ko – a homonym for “cocoa.” There is Yum-Yum, what one says as a child in Victorian

England when eating something scrumptious. There is Pitti Sing, a fanciful way of suggesting

there will be a tragic song ahead in soprano voice. Nanki-Poo takes his name from a way of

referring to handkerchiefs. Lee writes:

Ko-Ko tells the Mikado that Nanki-Poo’s name “might have been on his pocket-
handkerchief, but Japanese don’t use pocket-handkerchiefs! Ha! Ha! Ha!” These
jokes directly undercut racial impersonation with a certain insouciance.… (30-
31).
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Lee sees inherent errors in the racial impersonation. However, how is one to understand the

following text, in light of Lee’s central argument?

But the happiest hour a sailor sees

Is…with his Nancy on his knees…(emphasis added, 347)!

Why is a Japanese prince singing about a sailor’s beloved Nancy? If the other names are all a

thin veil, English children’s words made into character names, and then we hear about Nancy

sitting on someone’s knee, we may be in the land of the silly, but we are not in the land of

Japan.

If The Mikado is a fantasy with no attempt at ethnography, it is nonetheless a fantasy of

white people in yellowface. Lee writes, “at the core of all these productions was a racial

performance that appealed precisely because it was not wholly convincing as a representation”

(30). There is a veneer, thin as a layer of make-up, that makes this some kind of racial

impersonation, albeit one designed to fool no one. Hua writes about this practice of

transparent yellowface:

The ability for racial masquerade enables an experiencing of the other that
reassures and reaffirms the stability and normativity of whiteness….” (75).

Even if yellowface stabilizes whiteness, what can one make of yellowface that fools no one, that

is not designed to convince anyone of its looking like Japanese people? What was the fun of

watching performers pretending to be Japanese in a manner that did not convince anyone?

In examining the operetta within her argument, where fetishism of objects and racism in

the society equals commodity racism, Lee argues,

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The japonaiserie of 1885 promoted a fiction of Japan, the knowledge of which

was gained…by the possession of exotic objects. …These items were not valued
for their usefulness but…for their ability to transform the domestic space with a
touch of magic. This magic rubbed onto yellowface performance, whereby racial
transformation promised immediate pleasure… (71).

She further notes, “…The Mikado offers a way of inhabiting the beautiful world of Japanese

things, a mode of performance that served to alleviate anxieties about the ills of modern life

and to offer alternative ways of being” (72). Lee, however, does not attempt to answer the

question of why Victorian English people would want to subvert their personalities into foreign

things. What alternative ways of being that might be found in a shoji screen or an unfurled fan?

What kind of magic might Japanese objects produce?

It must have been inspiring to be surrounded by Asian objects, because Oscar Wilde,

famously said, to the laughter of many, “I find it harder every day to live up to my blue china”

(In Gere and Hoskins, 13). This notion of living up to one’s imported crockery caught the fancy

of the cartoonist, DuMaurier:

THE SIX-MARK TEA-POT

Æsthetic Bridegroom, “It is quite consummate, is it not?”
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Intense bride, “It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it” (n.p.)!

Oscar Wilde’s resemblance to DuMaurier’s “Aesthetic bridegroom” is obvious. Wilde

was the perceived leader of the Aesthetes, poets interested in the exterior, rather than the

murky psychological interior, of human experience. According to Gere and Hoskins, the

Aesthetes devoted “Much…energy …[to] the education of the ordinary householder, and the

intended outcome was an enlightened society with artistically decorated homes” (7). The

pursuit of beautiful objects from the East was part of the center of the movement’s ethos.

Wilde is parodied in Patience, the operetta that Gilbert and Sullivan presented the

season prior to the opening of The Mikado. Gilbert makes it evident that Wilde inspired the

creation of Bunthorne, who refers to himself as “a blue-and-white young man” (230), linking

himself to the quote by Wilde. If we take Bunthorne at his literal word, here, however, we see

him bizarrely identifying himself as a piece of porcelain, a blue and white tea pot. Even more

intriguing is his lyric immediately preceding this one that identifies him as a caricature of Wilde

– Bunthorne, always portrayed as an Anglo-Saxon, calls himself, “A Japanese young man” (230).

How can Bunthorne be Japanese? The only way to understand this (one year before

The Mikado was staged) is that he means to equate himself with a Japanese object, not a

Japanese person. He, a white man, sees himself as personified by an object from another

culture.

If Bunthorne is a work of Japanese art, then Oscar Wilde’s famous comment that one

should be a work of art becomes less flippant. If one should be a work of art, as in Wilde’s The

Picture of Dorian Gray, where true Dorian is encapsulated in a work of art, while Dorian the
 Babson 8

man is a falsehood (163), then the Aesthetes are saying that “real” people are not the reality of

themselves, that ideally, people will and subsume themselves in interesting objects made by

human hands. The possibility of this kind of escape into a world of things is alluded to by

Josephine Lee. However, she reads as racism the following comments from Wilde’s “The Decay

of Lying”:

… The Japanese people [as represented in art] are the deliberate self-conscious
creation of certain individual artists….In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure
invention….You will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down
Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not
see it anywhere (In Lee, 36). (Wilde 988)

Lee sees this as the denial of the genius of Japanese craftspeople and artisans and the

obviation of their personhood, but Wilde, understood in the larger paradoxical context of his

work, is not insulting the Japanese. He is seeking a self-conscious fantasy that does not ever

once offer the pretense that it is couched in any kind of reality – a landscape of the mind, and

his personhood, such as it is in “a work of art” is not an insult to any real people, even himself.

He is interested in erasing the English mundanities of his life but not in proving himself the

superior of any person outside his own culture. He is not denying the existence of real

Japanese people. He is only denying their participation in his imaginary world. His Japanese

effect, the one he says to look for in Piccadilly, is encapsulated in his poem “Symphony In

Yellow”:

An omnibus across the bridge

Crawls like a yellow butterfly…
And like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade

And flutter from the temple elms,
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And at my feet the pale green Thames

Lies like a rod of rippled jade (240).

His omnibus is a butterfly, his London fog a silk scarf. He sees his common elm trees as “temple

elms.” The Thames is made of jade, not murky temperate waters. He does not want to live in

the quantifiable England of Lloyds of London. He wants to live in the wonderland of his

Japanaiserie, an artificial place where his own complex personhood, not that of any particular

Japanese person or groups of people, can be forgotten.

This, I submit is the location of the town of Titipu, the place where the English aesthetes

want to become decorative objects. Lee gives us the following quote from a reviewer of the

first production of the operetta --

…The whole scene [of The Mikado] is drolly familiar. It is the every world of the
[Spode] “willow pattern” china, and these are our old friends of the dinner
service, the tureens and dishes and plates, who are forever crossing impossible
bridges, and sitting under ridiculous tress, and standing in unprecedented
postures… (In Lee, 7).

The reviewer here recognizes The Mikado as set among objects as well, and calls the

two-dimensional renderings of the dinner service plates’ characters “old friends.” He does not

think he has affair with Japanese people, only paintings on porcelain. As the reviewer states –

the trees are ridiculous, the bridges impossible, a funhouse mirror of the world. There is no

animosity here with these old friends. Everyone knows on opening night that they are not

having a colonial encounter, only an evening out with their porcelain to which they aspire to

live up. Even Lee makes a connection between Ko-Ko’s ballad, “Tit-Willow” and Blue Willow

pattern dinner plates manufactured in England, not Japan (6).. Is there commodity racism
 Babson 10

implied in a strictly domestic masquerade of a British man acting for a British audience like a

figure on a British dinner plate?

The British loved their china and their imported knick-knacks and wanted to live in their

fantastical expression of artifice, just like Wilde did. The fantasy of the East is a matter of the

mindset in the West, not anything like a true reflection of the people in the East. Indeed, there

are no Japanese people in The Mikado, only objects come to life.

Works Cited
Beckerman, Michael. "The Sword on the Wall: Japanese Elements and Their Significance in The Mikado."
The Musical Quarterly 73.3 (1989): 303-319. Electronic.
Bradley, Ian. "Gilbert & Sullivan and the Victorian Age." History Today 31.9 (1981): 17-21. Electronic.
Crowther, Andrew. Contradiction Contradicted: The Plays of W.S. Gilbert. Cranbury: Associated
University Presses, 2000. Print.
DuMaurier, George. The Six-Mark Tea-Pot. Punch. London, 1880.Electronic.
Fischler, Alan. Modified Rapture: Comedy in W.S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1991.Print.
Frith, William Powell. The Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. London.Electronic.
Gere, Charlotte and Lesley Hoskins. The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior.
London: Lund Humphries, 2000. Print.
Gilbert, W. S. "Patience or Bunthorne's Bride." Gilbert, W. S. The Complete Gilbert and Sullivan: Librettos
From All Fourteen Operettas. New York: Black Dog Publishers, 1960. 184-236. Print.
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Librettos from All Fourteen Operettas. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1960. 345-402.Print.
Gould, Stephen Jay. "The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent: The Strange Adventure of
Gilbert and Sullivan." American Scholar 69.2 (2000): 35-50. Electronic.
Grosrichard, Alain. The Sultan's Court: European Fantasies of the East. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso,
1998. Print.
Holt, Jenny. "Japan as an Exemplum of Social Orderin Turn-of-the-Century Britishand American
Educational Literature: Filial Paradise." English Literature in Transition 52.4 (2009): 417-439. Electronic.
Hua, Juliette. ""Gucci Geishas" and Post-Feminism." Women's Studies in Communication 32.1 (2009):
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Lee, Josephine. The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010. Print.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Print.
 Babson 11

Scholtz, Amelia. "‘Almond-Eyed Artisans’/‘Dishonouring the National Polity’: The Japanese Village
Exhibition in Victorian London." Japanese Studies 27.1 (2007): 73-84. Electronic.
Sullivan, Michael. The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Berkeley: University of California Press,
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Weisberg, Gabriel P. and Yvonne M. L. Weisberg. Japonisme: An Annotated Bibliography. New York:
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Wilde, Oscar. "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young." Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Oscar
Wilde. New York: Crescent Books, 1995. 855-856. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. "Symphony in Yellow." Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British
Poetry and Prose. Ed. Karl Beckson. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981. 240. Print.
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and Row, 1989. 988. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Dover Publications, 1993. Print.

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The Musical Quarterly 73.3 (1989): 303-319. Electronic.
Bradley, Ian. "Gilbert & Sullivan and the Victorian Age." History Today 31.9 (1981): 17-21. Electronic.
Crowther, Andrew. Contradiction Contradicted: The Plays of W.S. Gilbert. Cranbury: Associated
University Presses, 2000. Print.
DuMaurier, George. The Six-Mark Tea-Pot. Punch. London, 1880.Electronic.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markman. New York: Grove press, 1967.
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Press of Virginia, 1991. Print.
Frith, William Powell. The Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881. London. Electronic.
Gere, Charlotte and Lesley Hoskins. The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior.
London: Lund Humphries, 2000. Print.
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From All Fourteen Operettas. New York: Black Dog Publishers, 1960. 184-236. Print.
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 Babson 12

Gould, Stephen Jay. "The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent: The Strange Adventure of
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Jones, John Bush. "In Search of Archibald Grosvenor: a New Look at Gilbert's Patience." W.S. Gilbert: a
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Wilde. New York: Crescent Books, 1995. 855-856. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. "Symphony in Yellow." Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British
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