Meiji Japan

BLACK SHIPS & SAMURAI...editorial cartoons

                     

Black Ships & Samurai, an essay by John Dower, documents U.S. commodore Matthew Perry's encounters in Japan in 1853 and 1854, largely through images produced by Japanese and American artists. In this activity, you will analyze the art produced by artists during this historic encounter to see how different artists captured the same or parallel events.

The Black Ships & Samurai Essay is divided into short illustrated sections.
For this activity, you will be focusing on particular sections of the Essay—
“Perry”; “Encounters: Facing East” and “Encounters: Facing West”; “Portraits”; or “Gifts”. 

- Read at least one section of the Essay.

- Select one piece of artwork (by a Japanese artist) that when analyzing can be viewed from a particular perspective of a scene, event, or person.

- Be sure to think how this image could be used as a form of Editorial/Political Bias (or even Propaganda) and hopefully in some form of satire with obvious historical context.

- As you are selecting an image from the assigned website: BLACKSHIPS AND THE SAMURAI,

consider the following questions and answer them in a Google doc
-(share with Ms. Peterson - jepeterson@educbe.ca):

What draws your attention to the image?

What makes it funny, or serious, AND what it is referring to?

Who does the image(s) appeal to?

What does this tell us about Japanese society? Japanese traditions? Japanese worldview?