The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 33 (2022)

Copyright © 2022 The Japanese Association for American Studies. All rights reserved.

Freaky Asian Junks: Herman Melville andAntebellum Exhibition Culture

Shogo TANOKUCHI*INTRODUCTIONIn Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), when Ishmael has his firstencounter with the whaling vessel Pequod, his curious gaze settles on theantiqueness and the strangeness of the ship while he notes foreign shipsof “square-toed luggers[,] mountainous Japanese junks [, and] butter-box
galliots” (MD: 69).1 In this list, the junk is “a sailing vessel of a kind usedin East and South-East Asia.”2 The Asian sailing vessel appears again inchapter 50, “Ahab’s Boat and Crew—Fedallah,” in which Ishmael first sees
Ahab’s harpooner and his Asian crew. Although he is astonished at “thesubordinate phantoms,” his sense of “wonder” soon fades because people
on the whaling vessel often see such “queer castaway creatures” who seemto have drifted from “blown-off Japanese junks” (MD: 191). Immediately
afterward, Ishmael reveals his prejudice toward the Asian world, where they
still have “the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations” andhave “indulged in mundane amours” (MD: 191).3 In Moby-Dick, Japanesejunks are used to show racial diversity on the whaling vessel as well as
Ishmael’s racial fear of Asia.
The transnational turn in American literary studies has drawn more
attention to the Pacific Ocean.4 In the current trend, the Pacific in Melville’s*Assistant Professor, Waseda University

151

152

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

writings has been interpreted as a subversive space where US imperialism,
driven by commercial desire, is destabilized.5 In this article, I examine
the Asia-Pacific region in Melville’s writings from a politicocultural
perspective. More specifically, I scrutinize the interconnection between
US imperialism and antebellum exhibition culture, arguing that the actof enjoying racial others as curiosities served to form and destabilize US
imperial subjectivity.
Edward Said defined imperialism as a narrative of “sustained possession”
based on the relentless imagination of the empire to conquer “far-flungand sometimes unknown spaces” and to own “eccentric or unacceptable
human beings.”6 Building on this definition, scholars have examined “theimperialist gaze” of the white protagonists in Melville’s South Pacificnarratives, discussing how the act of seeing helps them visualize andthen possess the racial others through their romanticized imaginations.7
According to Homi K. Bhabha, however, such colonialist imagination
always contains an “ambivalence” (italics in original).8 Through “theproduction of knowledges,” the colonizer tries to create “a space for a‘subject’ peoples,” in which the colonized are stigmatized as “a populationof degenerate types” to justify their control.9 Yet, while seemingly regarding
the colonizer as superior and the colonized as inferior, the stereotyping of
racial others ironically reveals that these images are just “an ‘impossible’
object.”10 In other words, the act of seeing the racial others (de)stabilizes
white subjectivity and its superiority.
Nineteenth-century America saw the rise of a type of exhibition culture
from Peale’s American Museum to the Smithsonian. The exhibition of
artifacts and material objects in the museum embodied the Anglo-American
belief that “superior cultures produced superior things.”11 My focus ison Barnumian freak shows of this era, which naturalized the hierarchicalrelationship between the white spectator and the nonwhite curiosities.
During the period of the openings of China and Japan, the curious whitegaze worked to label these countries as populated with uncivilized freaks.
Written during the golden age of freak shows, Melville’s works demonstratethat the whites’ curiosity forms the colonial dichotomy between the UnitedStates and the Asia-Pacific region. By investigating, through the historicalcontext of his lesser-known short pieces “On the Chinese Junk” (1847) and“The Piazza” (1856), I argue that Melville’s complex figurations of Asianjunks reflects the ambivalence of US imperialism. While reproducing the
racial stereotypes of Asians that enforced white superiority, Melville’s
freaky Asian junks also erase the reductive dichotomy between the imperial

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

153

spectator (the US) and the odd curiosities (China and Japan).
I.

BARNUM AND MELVILLE: THE ART OF EXHIBITION

In 1841, P. T. Barnum bought Scudder’s American Museum on thecorner of Broadway and Ann Street in downtown New York and began
his career as a showman. The central attractions of Barnum’s American
Museum were freak shows, in which people with physical and behavioral
anomalies were exhibited for amusement and profit. The museum’s list
covered many different exotic curiosities “from wild men of Borneo to
fat ladies, living skeletons, Fiji princes, albinos, Siamese twins, tattooed
Circassians, armless and legless wonders, Chinese giants, cannibals, midget
triplets, hermaphrodites, spotted boys, and much more.”12 Barnum instantly
achieved astonishing success through his curiosities, including Joice Heth,the Feejee Mermaid, and General Tom Thumb, to become the pivotal figureof American exhibition culture.13
The uniqueness of Barnum’s exhibition was in manipulating information
to rouse people’s curiosity so they would actually visit his museum. For
instance, in a letter to Moses Kimball he conveyed his idea to advertise
the Feejee mermaid, offering opposite perspectives about the authenticity
of his exhibition. Whereas the owner said the mermaid “has been taken
alive [in] the Feejee Islands,” “scientific persons” insisted that it was“an artificial product” and “its natural existence claimed to be an utter
impossibility” (italics in original).14 Barnum did not clarify what was fact
or fiction; rather, he left that decision up to the audience: “At all events
whether this production is the work of nature and art it is decidedly themost stupendous curiosity ever submitted to the public for inspection. If it
is artificial the senses [of] sight and touch are ineffectual—if it is naturalthen all concur in declaring it the greatest Curiosity in the World” (italics inoriginal).15 As Neil Harris analyzes, “The operational aesthetic” worked at
Barnum’s exhibition as he “narrowed the task of judgment . . . to a simple
evaluation” of “real or false, genuine or contrived.”16 The showman attainedcommercial success by turning the decision of whether or not his curiosities
were authentic into a participative game.
Tracing the history of exhibiting human curiosities, Rosemary Garland
Thompson inspects the social role of “freak discourse.”17 In previous
times, people thought that extraordinal bodies bore “evidence of God’s
design, divine wrath, or nature’s abundance.”18 As time went by, thedevelopment of medical science came to label bodily anomalies as

154

SHOGO TANOKUCHI“atypical” and brought them into freak shows.19 Yet, excluding people withbodily abnormalities from the standardized society, the freak discourse
reveals society’s “anxieties, questions, and needs.”20 The freak body, being
exhibited for “someone else’s purposes,” becomes a “politicized” object
on which the viewer reflects “national values, identity, and direction.”21 In
Anglo-American society, Barnum’s freak shows drew considerable attention
by deliberately packaging racial ideals: African Americans were displayed
as “missing links” and played aboriginal roles; Native Americans performed
wild rituals that identified their primitiveness; and Asians adopted asedate demeanor.22 As Linda Frost suggests, the Barnumian freak show“naturalized a sense of the slave-as-spectacle as well as the ‘rightness’ ornaturalness of the white gaze.”23 In such shows, white spectators enjoyedracial others as exotic freaks in order to confirm their own superiority.
Barnumian freaks, however, also undermined the stable relationshipbetween the viewer and the viewed. The first edition of Barnum’s
autobiography introduces an interesting episode. In 1835, “an ex-memberof Congress” and his family went to the Joice Heth Exhibition at Boston’s
Concert Hall.24 The congressman’s old mother, listening to the explanation
by Barnum’s assistant, Levi Lyman, scrutinized the supposed ancient nurseof George Washington. She expressed astonishment at what Lyman said:
that Heth was an automaton, and her heart beats with the same principle
as “a pendulum to a clock.”25 The former congressman felt “evident
embarrassment” when he saw his old mother totally deceived in front of theaudience.26 In that moment, a “half-suppressed giggle ran through the roomand the gentleman and his family soon withdrew.”27 For James W. Cook,
this episode narrates the “artful repositioning” of the audience “from therole of observers to observed.”28
The subversiveness of the Barnumian freak show suggests the possibilityof corroding the racial hierarchy as well as the viewer-viewed relationship.
Indeed, Barnum later recollected his experience of losing his white identity
in his own show. In 1836, he presented his first travelling company inCamden, South Carolina. A performer, who planned to give a blackface
performance, suddenly left him, and none of his company “was competent
to fill [his] place.”29 Thus, Barnum painted his own face black and sang
the advertised songs such as “Zip Coon.” His performance was highly
applauded. Yet, one white man mistook him for an actual black person andpointed a gun at him, crying, “You black scoundrel! How dare you use suchlanguage to a white man.”30 According to Eric Fretz, Barnum’s experience
was due to the nature of the minstrel show that “confuse[s] the empirical

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

155

boundaries between black and white.”31 As this episode indicates, while
having naturalized the dichotomy between the white as observer and thenonwhite as observed, the Barnumian freak show undermined such a racialhierarchy.
Writing in the golden age of freak shows, Melville makes allusions to
Barnum in works from Typee (1846) to The Confidence-Man (1857).32
His essays that were submitted to Yankee Doodle, which was known as
the American Punch, noticeably involved the Barnumian art of exhibition.
One impressive example is the “Authentic Anecdote of ‘Old Zack,’”
published from July 24 to September 11, 1847. This comic essay satirizes
US jingoism during the Mexican War (1846–48) by making fun of Gen.
Zachary Taylor. During one episode, Barnum tries to obtain profit by hiring
the hero of the Battle of Buena Vista as a curiosity in his museum. The
showman’s “impertinent letter” arranged a plan to exhibit General Taylor
as one of his curiosities along with “the venerable nurse of our beloved
Washington [Joice Heth] and the illustrious General Tom Thumb” (WHM
9: 225).33 Barnum impudently urges Old Zack, “Think General, of yourself
reclining on the poop of the Chinese Junk, receiving the visits of yourfriends” (WHM 9: 225). If he “adopt[s] this course,” Barnum foresees,
Taylor will attain more popularity and “must be elected President” (WHM
9: 225).
The Barnumian freak show in Melville’s text inverts the racial hierarchy
by displaying a white person as a living exhibit, a position originallyassigned to a nonwhite individual. Barnum says at the end of his letter that
Taylor’s black servant, Sambo, has given permission to make his masteran exhibit: “I [Barnum] have already sounded Sambo and he appears tohave no objection” (WHM 9: 225). Sambo serves to realize Barnum’s planby selling “various articles of dress and furniture belonging to General
Taylor” (WHM 9: 224). While the black servant acknowledges andauthorizes Barnum’s plan, the white general almost becomes an exhibited
object. Influenced by the Barnumian freak show, Melville’s aesthetics of
exhibition indicates an ironical subversion of the racial hierarchy between
the white and the nonwhite: the white individual is required to abandon his
prestigious position as the observer and become the exhibited curiosity.
II. THE CHINESE JUNK AT AN EXHIBITION
A 160-foot Chinese vessel, the Keying, sailed into New York Harboron July 9, 1847 (Fig. 1). This three-masted junk ship sailed from China

156

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

around the Cape of Good Hope to the United States and England from
1846 to 1848 to celebrate the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanking that
opened up China to Western colonialism. Under the command of British
captain Charles Kellett, the crew of the Keying consisted of about twenty
Europeans and forty Chinese, one of whom was a mandarin named Hesing.
The Keying served as a floating museum, as Kellett intended to exhibit itat the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The junk was loaded with awide range of Chinese curiosities: clothing, household furniture, weapons,maritime artifacts, temple accoutrements and statuettes, a part of Canton’scity walls, a whole tray of opium pipes, and the Chinese crew themselves.
The arrival of the Keying aroused transatlantic enthusiasms. In London, theship became a star attraction, visited not only by Queen Victoria and theroyal family but also by the famous novelist Charles Dickens. Likewise,
New Yorkers flocked to the harbor to see what the Morning Courier and
New York Enquirer welcomed as “one of the most remarkable curiosities
ever witnessed in the United States.”34 During the junk’s four-month stayin New York, four thousand people visited it each day, and its earnings
amounted to one thousand dollars a day.35
In the great response to the Chinese junk, John Rogers Haddad sees “theBarnumization of China.”36 Suspended in an “unreliable hybrid of fact andfiction,” the visitors to the Keying enjoyed the junk “for its amusement
value and scrutinized it to determine whether it truly was what it purported

Fig. 1. A lithograph of the Keying by Nathaniel Currier in 1847. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

157

to be.”37 This response could have originated in the fundamental change
in China’s image after the First Opium War (1840–42). China had been
adored as a wonderful country advanced in culture and filled with abundantoriental luxuries. Yet, the war revealed its weakness to the world, turning“the object of admiration” into “the object of a laugh or the subject ofa pun.”38 Newspapers and magazines produced several stereotypes thatmade fun of China and its people: Chinese males as “effeminate fops”; theChinese as people who enjoyed bizarre food, such as rats, dogs, and cats;
the Chinese as heathens who “worshipped strange deities”; and Chinese asopium addicts.39 China’s defeat in the Opium War impaired its authority andstigmatized it as a country of strange, uncivilized, and grotesque freaks.
Exhibitions manifested the radical change in China’s image. In 1834,
Afong Moy, a Chinese woman with bound feet, was brought to New York
City by Nathaniel and Frederick Carne and exhibited in a parlor-like hallas “the Chinese Lady.” Moy was seen as a being secluded from society
and not someone to be exposed to the public gaze. The audience could
have associated her bound feet with China as a closed nation into which
foreigners’ curious gazes could not penetrate.40 By contrast, the open
structure of the Chinese junk represented China’s openness after the First
Opium War. Whereas the visitors could not approach the Chinese Lady,
they could invade the territory of the Chinese junk and freely view its
interior. Owned and commanded by a British captain, the Chinese junkimpressed on the observers that China had finally opened up and become apossession of Western nations.41
The curious gaze on Asian curiosities validated the white society. For
instance, Dickens’s report on the Chinese junk, issued at the time of theGreat Exhibition, stressed that England had achieved rapid progress withingenious inventions such as the spinning machine and the locomotive.
On the contrary, Chinese inventions, represented by the Chinese junk, hesaid, “have made no advance and been of no earthly use for thousandsof years.”42 Dickens’s comparison between “the greatness of the English
results” and “the extraordinary littleness of the Chinese” embodies theimperialist discourse that emphasized the progressiveness of his country
and the backwardness of China.43 Yet, “[m]easuring oneself against theexoticized and the alien,” John Kuo Wai Tchen points out, was a “means
toward stabilizing, destabilizing, a sense of belonging and normalcy.”44
The whites’ gaze on the Asian others not only confirmed the virtue of theirown society but also revealed that such a proclamation can be made only bystigmatizing Asians and their society as vicious and inferior.

158

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

Echoing the great fanfare for the Keying, Melville’s comic essay “On the
Chinese Junk” was serialized in Yankee Doodle from July 17 to September
11, 1847. This essay shows the way the white gaze turned the Asian junkand its crew into Barnumian freaks, suspended between authenticity andduplicity. In fact, the narrator, Yankee Doodle, vouching for the genuinenessof the junk inextricably raised suspicion. Yankee Doodle gets a letter fromthe Chinese emperor that asserts the Keying “is a genuine junk” and thecrew are true Chinese: “[A]ll the pig-tails are all that they look to be”(WHM 9: 437). Yet, the letter’s authenticity is impaired by Yankee Doodle’s
narration: its sender is the “Emperor of the Celestials,” who is the “brotherto the Constellation of the Great Bear” and has “the little star in his tail”(WHM 9: 437). One audience member from “the State of Connecticut”
doubtfully observes the Chinese junk and its crew and asks the mandarin“Ke-sing” whether he is a real “Chanyman” (WHM 9: 433, 434).
Melville’s essays, composed of humorous cartoons and passages asreports, reproduce the racial prejudices against the Chinese. In reports 7 and
12, Yankee Doodle satirizes the Chinese crew’s bizarre taste for rats anddogs as well as their heathenism (WHM 9: 437, 441). More impressive, headds a caricature of the pigtail (Fig. 2). By suggesting that the Asian crew
ascend and descend boats with their pigtails, the cartoon impressed on thereaders that Asians were weird aliens. Furthermore, as seen in Dickens’s
essay, Yankee Doodle’s comparison of the Chinese junk with the American
clipper the Sea Witch underlines the backwardness of Chinese civilizationand the superiority of American civilization. Although appreciating theKeying’s “grace and beauty in [her] naval architecture,” the narrator
affirms that “in a question of speed, it may not be presumptuous to claim
a superiority for our own,” which takes only “81 days” to sail from China(WHM 9: 435).
Racial bias hides the true picture of the Asian other. Report 10, entitled“The Opium War Revived,” describes the Chinese crew’s strike against
the captain for higher wages (WHM 9: 440). Yankee Doodle attributes
the cause to the crew having “been indulging in rather strong opium thatmorning” and satirically narrates that “these foreign gentlemen” could
not “come to tea in the evening” because they had been carried to “theTombs,” that is, the New York City jail (WHM 9: 440).45 This episode wasbased on a disturbance that had actually occurred. As the New York Herald
reported on August 31, 1847, when Captain Kellett went on board “to pay
the crew their monthly wages,” they were “under the effects of opium” and“turned their combined force against the captain.”46 Yet, as later revealed

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

159

Fig. 2. “Chinese Method of Hauling up the Stern Boat.” Yankee Doodle, July 31, 1847, 164.

in court, the riot had resulted from the white captain’s brutal mistreatment
and nonfulfillment of their contract.47 Along with the newspaper article,
Melville’s narrator seems to stand on the side of the white authority andorder, defining the riot as antisocial behavior and the captain as a victim ofbarbarity.
Melville’s essay, however, undermines such a racial dichotomy withwhat Leslie Fiedler calls the affective power of “the true Freak.”48 Whenseeing “the true Freak,” audiences recognize that “he is one of us, thehuman child of human parents,” not just “fabulous monsters.”49 Struckby “both supernatural terror and human sympathy,” audiences realize that“the distinction between audience and exhibit, we and them, normal andFreak is . . . an illusion.”50 In his first interview with Ke-sing, Melville’s
narrator asks about his life in New York. The Chinese mandarin, yearningfor his lush, green country, says “so muchee peoples—plenty Flun-kees

160

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

come to junk” and “me no like all these many Flun-kees” (WHM 9: 433).
This “Flun-kee” seems to be a pseudo-Chinese word for “flunky,” a person
who “behaves obsequiously to persons above him in rank or position.”51
Here, Yankee Doodle experiences sincere empathy for the “[p]oor homesick stranger,” crying, “It is no wonder he don’t like ‘Flun-kees!’ YAN-KEE
DOODLE himself don’t like Flun-kees” (WHM 9: 434).
Yankee Doodle’s sympathy for the Chinese mandarin originates in his
disgust with his New York brethren. When visiting the Chinese junk with“his curious friends,” he sees “the near approach of something Celestial”(WHM 9: 432). Playing with the word “Celestial,” an old name for the
Chinese empire, the narrator weaves a satire of his own society in whichpeople, as “mortal sinners,” “take so much pains to keep away from things
heavenly” (WHM 9: 432). Yankee Doodle turns a cynical look not only on
his countrymen but also his countrywomen. Superficially taking pity on
the “the weary, toil-worn, home-sick stranger[s],” these women are driven
by snobbish curiosity and thrust their heads and hands into the Chinesecrew’s closets. In addition, Yankee Doodle’s critical gaze pierces into
Western countries’ imperial expansion in the Asia-Pacific region. Report 2
blames England for its hypocrisy of advocating for the cause of Christianity
while exerting military control over China; report 6 warns about France’s
trade in the Society Islands, in which the Indigenous people’s lives andcultures have been destroyed (WHM 9: 431, 436).52 In this sense, Melville’s
narrator’s sympathetic feeling for the Chinese mandarin is intimately
connected to his antipathy toward his own brethren and society.
Sensational reports about the Chinese junk were found not only in
Melville’s essay. After the strike against Captain Kellett, twenty-six Chineseleft the Keying and went back home on the Candace on October 4, 1847.
An article in Dwight’s American Magazine described their departure in an
emotional tone: “[T]he swarthy figures of these bare-headed Mongolians”
stood in line on the rail and waved their hands, and they were “in tears atparting with their kind friends.”53 This was “answered by the ladies waving
their handkerchiefs, and the response of the gentlemen.”54 When they
stopped, the Chinese crew “struck up their farewell song,” and “their harsh,cracked voices” continued until they were “so far separated that the sounddied on the air.”55
Yet, I wish to pay more attention to the fact that the meeting with the
Chinese mandarin encouraged Melville’s narrator to transcend racial
boundaries. Indeed, Yankee Doodle’s outburst, cited above, shows that hemakes ungrammatical expressions and renames himself using the pseudo-

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

161

Chinese word, “YAN-KEE.” The interracial friendship between Yankee
Doodle and Ke-sing is most touchingly illustrated in the cartoon of report
13 (Fig. 3). There are three figures: Ke-sing, Yankee Doodle, and one of
Yankee Doodle’s “curious” friends who holds a copy of Yankee Doodle.
A tree, like a wall or a border, separates Yankee Doodle and Ke-sing fromthe curious magazine reader. On the right side of the tree, Yankee Doodle
and Ke-sing are united in a farewell embrace. On the left side, the friend
observes their emotional parting. The cartoon demonstrates the result of
Yankee Doodle’s empathy: going beyond the wall/border that separates
the observer from the observed, Yankee Doodle has abandoned his own
observer position and ironically become part of an exhibition, at which his“curious” reader-friend stares.
Melville’s text, however, puts a rupture between the cartoon and thetext to avoid such an ironical subversion. Whereas the cartoon portrays
the emotional farewell, the following text, entitled “Will You Go, or Won’t
You?,” describes the narrator’s rejection of the Asian other. Two weeks
after their “formal farewell,” Yankee Doodle knows that the Chinese junk“still sticks close to Castle Garden” and “has not yet even reached theoffing” (WHM 9: 442). He gets mad and says, “YANKEE DOODLE won’t
stand this kind of nonsense much longer,” threatening the “slow-coachFig. 3. “Yankee Doodle Parting with the Mandarin of the Chinese Junk.” Yankee Doodle,
September 18, 1847, 240.

162

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

Junkers [the Chinese crew]” that he will take “the most extreme measures”(WHM 9: 442). If they won’t leave, as Yankee Doodle incorporates his
antipathy into his humor, they will be forced to “cut off [their] pig-tails,
and put [them] all on a full allowance of weak tea,” which is “pretty sure
to be the death of [them]” (WHM 9: 442). The change of Yankee Doodle’s
appellation is of significance. Writing his name in capital letters as “YANKEEDOODLE,” not “YAN-KEE,” demonstrates that he chooses to stay in his
own society and adhere to his white identity. In resonance with the racial
discourse of the time, Melville’s “On the Chinese Junk” examines how
white curiosity turns China and its people into exotic freaks. At the end,
the narrator rejects abandoning his position as an observer. Yet, Melville’s
comic essay, taking up the Barnumian art of freak shows, discloses thevulnerability of the naturalized border between the white spectator and theoriental curiosities.
III.

“THE PIAZZA” ON THE PACIFIC OCEAN

On March 31, 1854, Japan’s feudal government signed the Treaty of
Kanagawa with the United States under pressure from Commodore Matthew
C. Perry. In command of four “black ships,” Perry came to Uraga anddelivered President Millard Fillmore’s letter that demanded Japan’s opening.
The treaty marked the end of Japan’s closed-door policy with the opening of
its doors to the US and other Western countries. Perry’s expedition had two
aims: to acquire naval bases and coal stations and to establish a commercial
route between California and China. It was necessary for American whalers
to have access to Japan as a transit port for supplying food, water, andcoal, and as a shelter where survivors from sunken whaling ships could beprotected “till [the US] can send vessels and bring them away.”56
The foreign affairs concerning Perry’s expedition were related to thedomestic US situation. Since the California Goldrush had begun in 1848,
the US turned its expansionist gaze toward the Asia-Pacific region as a
new frontier.57 As Fillmore wrote, “Our great State of California produces
about sixty millions of dollars in gold every year,” while “Japan is also
a rich and fertile country, and produces many very valuable articles.”58
Although the Edo shogunate had already imposed strict export restrictions
on precious materials, Fillmore was “desirous” to establish a commercial
connection with Japan.59 The president’s emphasis on trade was madeto avoid the domestic problem of slavery. His administration passed theCompromise of 1850, which, declaring California a free state, enacted the

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

163

notorious Fugitive Slave Law. They became worried about how to deal
with the problem of slavery if they moved into the Asia Pacific region. To
avoid this sensitive issue, Fillmore delineated the aim of Perry’s expedition
as not being to colonize Japan but to open trade with it. Indeed, he stated,“The Constitution and laws of the United States forbid all interference withthe religious or political concerns of other nations”; thus, he ordered Perry“to abstain from every act which could possibly disturb the tranquility” ofJapan.60
US newspapers and magazines circulated various views of Japan to argue
the need for Perry’s expedition. On the one hand, they portrayed Japan asa savage country by reporting the cases of the Lagoda and Lawrence, inwhich American sailors were severely mistreated, resulting in the deaths ofsome of them.61 An article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine asserted that
Perry’s expedition should be undertaken to ask Japan for “better treatmentof shipwrecked Americans, who have been heretofore barbarously treatedby Japanese.”62 On the other hand, Japan was not completely regarded assavage and barbarous. In fact, another report cited Edo foreign diplomaticadviser William Adams’s remark that the people in Japan were “governedin great civility” and that “many Jesuits and Franciscan friars” were in
Japan, who “[had] converted many to be Christians.”63 Despite its having acruel closed-door policy, Japan was seen as a half-civilized racial other that
someday would come to be an ally of the US.
The structures of Japanese junks symbolize such ambivalent ideas. As
Ikuno Saiki points out, they were used as “a symbol of the rigid diplomatic
policy of Japan” to criticize the nation’s strict closure.64 On seeing Japanesejunks at Matsumae, Perry offered an anthropological observation: theinconvenience of their “frail and open” stern represented “the suspicious
policy” of the Japanese government, which “[forbade] any of its vessels
to visit foreign countries.”65 The same idea is also found in an elevenpage essay, “Japan,” published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. The
author considered that the awkward structure of Japanese junks reflected
the government’s policy that “prevent[ed] . . . the possibility of long
voyages.”66 This essay dug into the history of Japan’s closed-door policy.
While criticizing its barbarous attitude toward the shipwrecked sailors, it
envisioned a curious future. Claiming geological and climatic “likenessbetween the Japanese and British Empires,” the author imagined that “thesanctifying processes of pure Christianity” would make Japan the second
home of America:

164

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

From England the heaven-born pilgrims crossed the Atlantic to thefourth quarter of the globe, and found in this, our land, a home. And
now, unwearied, she is travelling after the pioneers of civilization, andvoyaging in the wake of ships; sanctifying commercial intercourseand claiming commerce as her partner. She has taken refuge under theflag of these United States to pass over the Pacific to the East again,
persevering in her circuit round the world, until she shall reach herbirth-place in Asia.67
The author figuratively confirmed in Perry’s expedition the sacred historyof the westward progress of American pilgrims, who had departed fromthe Old World and would be arriving on the coast of Japan. Japan was
imagined as the “birth-place,” or “home,” of Americans rather than as amere unexplored land filled with uncivilized savages. In this domestic
rhetoric, we can see what Gretchen Murphy examines as a hemisphericideology. Based on the Monroe Doctrine that divided the globe into Westernand Eastern Hemispheres, America’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region
was explained as a national errand to promote democratic Christianity andadvanced technology through commercial trade. The US rhetoric of theWestern Hemisphere as its home promoted nationalism and imperialism at
the same time. While blaming the Old World for aristocratic imperialism,
the US considered its expansion in the Asia-Pacific region a sacred mission
to “tam[e] monsters with trade,” not to “destroy” them.68
Melville’s story “The Piazza” draws the curious white gaze on Japanesejunks in a more complicated manner. This was the title work of hiscollection of short stories, The Piazza Tales (1856). The narrator recollects
his scary experience occurring “not long after 1848” (WHM 9: 3). He buys
an old farmhouse in the countryside of Massachusetts and builds a piazza(or porch) to enjoy the beautiful scenery. One day, on the mountain opposite
from his house, he finds a spot shining in the daylight. He leaves his home,since he firmly believes what he sees is a “fairy-land” and wants to meet“the queen of fairies” (WHM 9: 6). After a long journey, he finally meets
an isolated woman, Marianna, who lives in a shabby house. Shocked by
the true figure of the fairy queen, he returns home and swears not to leave
his piazza again. On first reading, this work can be examined as a domestic
fiction not as a sea story, such as Typee or Moby-Dick. Yet, its details
demonstrate that Melville’s domestic fiction deliberately reflected the US
expansionist desire toward the Asia-Pacific region.69
For instance, the narrator of this story is an ex-sailor, whose “light hat,

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

165

of yellow sinnet, [and] white duck trowsers” are “relics of [his] tropic
sea-going” (WHM 9: 8). His curious gaze turns his destination into theislands of the Pacific Ocean: Marianna’s bemossed house reminds him of
the “copperless hulls of Japanese junks,” and she is compared to a “Tahiti
girl” (WHM 9: 8). These depictions cannot help but suggest the imperialist
relationship between the conqueror and the conquered: “[Marianna] shyly
started, like some Tahiti girl, secreted for a sacrifice, first catching sight,
through palms, of Captain Cook” (WHM 9: 8–9). Here, it is important
to note that Melville’s adaptation of Spenser’s Fairy Queen echoes thediscourse of Manifest Destiny. The narrator literarily departs “westward”
from his home (WHM 9: 6), and his unyielding travel to see the fairy queen
is implicitly driven by the thirst for gold. When first discovering Marianna’shouse, over which a rainbow arches, the protagonist remembers the saying“If one can but get to the rainbow’s end, his fortune is made in a bag ofgold” (WHM 9: 5). That this story is set around 1848, when the California
Goldrush began, suggests that the narrator’s travel to Marianna’s home
traces the history of US expansion into the Asia-Pacific region.
The figurations of a threshold in Moby-Dick and “The Piazza”
demonstrate that these works discuss the opening of Japan. Moby-Dickpredicts the end of Japan’s closed-door policy with the articulation of athreshold: “If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable,
it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she ison the threshold” (MD: 99). The American whaler in Moby-Dick, written
before the opening of Japan, still rests on the threshold to Japan and cannot
yet enter into its interior.70 On the contrary, in “The Piazza,” written after
Japan’s opening, the threshold to Marianna’s house is exposed, and its
door is opened to the ex-sailor narrator: “Pausing at the threshold, or
rather where threshold once had been, I saw, through the open door-way,
a lonely girl, sewing at a lonely window” (WHM 9: 8). Just as the curious
white visitors leered at the interior of the Chinese junk in New York, thenarrator’s eye penetrates into Marianna’s house, which is compared to“Japanese junks.” The queerly opened house without a threshold lets his
vision infinitely extend into the scenery: “No fence was seen, no inclosure.
Near by—ferns, ferns, ferns; further—woods, woods, woods; beyond—mountains, mountains, mountains; then—sky, sky, sky” (WHM 9: 8). His
expanding view seems to see/possess everything.
Melville’s text obstructs such an imperial vision, however, by revealing
the reality of what the narrator longs for. At the end, he knows that his
destination is less a fairyland of the fairy queen than a haunted domain

166

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

of a ghostly woman: Marianna’s house is located in a “[f]orbidding andforbidden” place, where even animals fear to tread (WHM 9: 7). Her
house is “rotting” because of the strong sunshine, and flies gather as they
do on dead bodies (WHM 9: 10). Marianna’s only relative, her brother, iscompletely “fagged out” after working and sleeps on the bed or “the grave”(WHM 9: 9). And she herself is a “pale-cheeked” inhuman character whosits and sews alone all day long and “know[s] nothing, hear[s] nothing”(WHM 9: 8, 11). The Gothicization of Marianna and her house indicatesthat the narrator’s dream of seeing the queen of fairyland will never be
realized. In this way, “The Piazza” can be read as a fable of the American
empire that suggests that US expansion into the Asia-Pacific region,
motivated by a desire for gold, will be in vain and produce nothing.
What needs to be stressed here, however, is that Marianna is not merely
the ultimate other of the Asia-Pacific region, who completely rejects US
imperial advances. Knowing that Marianna suffers from chronic insomnia,
the narrator recommends a treatment he has learned by hearsay: “I haveheard that, for this wakeful weariness, to say one’s prayers, and then lay
one’s head upon a fresh hop pillow—” (WHM 9: 12). Marianna interrupts
him, showing “a small garden patch” near her house where she grows two“nipped and puny” hopvines. She explains that she has already tried both“prayer and pillow” but to no effect (WHM 9: 12). Although she lives inan extremely isolated place, Marianna seems to have some connections
to the outside world. This discordant openness of her life may echo thecontemporary view of Japan, which, having basically rejected any exchangewith foreign countries, had come to partially accept Western religion andtechnology through trade.
Gothicized Marianna uncannily represents the narrator’s desire.
Analyzing the male characters’ “fear of faces” in Melville’s writings,
Elizabeth Renker points out that the pale-faced females uncover these
men’s desires as they become captivated by their own hunger.71 In herlonely life, “pale-cheeked” Marianna finds solace in seeing a beautiful spot
lit by the setting sun, which is the narrator’s house, and she earnestly wants
to visit it: “Oh, if I could but once get to yonder house, and but look upon
whoever the happy being is that lives there” (WHM 9: 12). At that moment,
as he turns his gaze to Marianna/her house, the narrator realizes that she isalso staring at him/his home. By repeating the narrator’s wish and deed,
Marianna demonstrates that the reductive dichotomy between spectator (thenarrator) and spectacle (Marianna) is just an illusion.
As in “On the Chinese Junk,” Melville’s narrator tries to keep his

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

167

prestigious observer position. After going back home, he swears to “stickto the piazza” and never to leave there (WHM 9: 12). In order to forget
Marianna, he keeps a physical and psychological distance from her:[The piazza] is my box-royal; and this amphitheatre, my theatre of
San Carlo. Yes, the scenery is magical—the illusion so complete. And
Madam Meadow Lark, my prima donna, plays her grand engagement
here; and, drinking in her sunrise note, which, Memnon-like, seems
struck from the golden window, how far from me the [Marianna’s]
weary face behind it. (WHM 9: 12)
The theatrical depiction of the piazza as his “box-royal” and the view fromit as an “amphitheater” impresses on his readers the considerable distance
between the narrator’s home and Marianna’s. Just as Yankee Doodle
decides to stay in his own society by rejecting the interracial friendship with
Ke-sing, the narrator here tries to stay in his home and continue to enjoy thebeautiful scenery.
However, the narrator’s curiosity disturbs the realization of his wish.
He is haunted by Marianna’s pale face after getting connected with her byvisiting her strangely opened house: “[E]very night, when the curtain falls,
truth comes in with darkness. No light shows from the mountain. To and
fro I walk the piazza deck, haunted by Marianna’s face, and many as real astory” (WHM 9: 12). Knowing that he has become the target of her curious
gaze, he cannot forget Marianna’s face. While seeking to purge himself ofMarianna and her story, he cannot get rid of his obsessive imagination that
Marianna’s ghostly face always sees him. In the figurative amphitheater, thenarrator finally finds out that he himself ironically has become a curiosity
exhibited to Marianna’s curious gaze, which vainly mirrors his own desire.
CONCLUSION
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Asia-Pacific region served as “acoherent space of the American fantasy and design” onto which the US
projected its commercial and imperial desire.72 When the US advanced
into the new frontier of the Asia-Pacific region, the domestic culture of
exhibition helped to reorganize it as lands with monstrous freaks. On the
one hand, Melville’s writings on Chinese and Japanese junks seem to havereproduced the contemporary racial discourse that confirmed the imperialist
relationship between the colonizer (the United States) and the colonized

168

SHOGO TANOKUCHI(China and Japan). On the other hand, his texts displace such a reductive
dichotomy through the ambivalence of stereotyping the racial others as
curious freaks. With their own curiosity, Melville’s white characters are
ironically required to abandon their hierarchical position as observers.
Realizing that their romantic wishes come to nothing, they become
exhibited curiosities themselves. In this sense, Melville portrays the AsiaPacific region as a critical space of “the American fantasy and design” thatwants to see and possess the oriental others living in far-flung and unknown
Asia as freaky curiosities.
NOTES
1
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (hereafter abbreviated as MD), ed. Hershel
Parker and Harrison Hayford, 2nd ed. (NY: Norton, 2002).
2
OED Online, s.v. “Junk, n.3,” https://www-oed-com.ez.wul.waseda.ac.jp/view/Entry/10
2091?rskey=4wB6hw&result=3#eid.
3
In Ishmael’s prejudice, Elizabeth Schultz sees his “derogatory and demonic racist
representation of Asians.” Schultz, “‘The Subordinated Phantoms’: Melville’s Conﬂicted
Response to Asia in Moby-Dick,” in “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Paciﬁc, ed. Jill
Barnum, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Sten (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007),
Adobe Digital Editions, 188.
4
See, e.g., Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Paciﬁc: From South Paciﬁc to
Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Takayuki Tatsumi,“Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpaciﬁc Crossovers,” PMLA
119, no. 1 (2004): 92–102; Yunte Huang, Transpaciﬁc Imaginations: History, Literature,
Counterpoetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Paul Giles, The
Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
5
For Rob Wilson, the tragic end of Moby-Dick, in which Ahab and the Pequod are
defeated by the white whale and drowned near Japan, warns against US commercial
imperialism (Reimagining the American Paciﬁc, 81–85). Yunte Huang examines thecharacters of Moby-Dick as “collectors who hover in the abyss of conﬂicting economic
interests,” considering that these collectors deny the capitalist logic of trade on the Paciﬁc
Ocean (Transpaciﬁc Imaginations, 7).
6
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 64.
7
Warren Rosenberg, “Poem as Palm: Polynesia and Melville’s Turn to Poetry,” in
Barnum, “Whole Oceans Away,” 218.
8
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 95.
9Ibid., 100, 101.
10
Ibid., 116.
11
John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping ofAmerican Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 116.
Also see Gary Kulik, “Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to thePresent,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leonand Roy Rosenzweig (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3–37. Analyzing theearly displays of the Smithsonian Museum, where historical exhibits were arranged fromthe primitive and exotic (non-Western) to the civilized (Western), Kulik argues that “themuseum had become a temple to secular progress, an aﬃrmation of the happy conﬂuence of

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

169

moral and material wellbeing” (“Designing the Past,” 9).
12
Rosemarie Garland Thompson, “From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak
Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson (NY: New York University Press, 1996), 5.
13
For Barnum’s success, see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973); Robert Cottrell, Icons of American Popular Culture:
From P. T. Barnum to Jennifer Lopez (London: Routledge, 2009), 11–22.
14
P. T. Barnum to Moses Kimball, September 4, 1843, Disability History Museum, https://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=1636.
15
Ibid.
16
Harris, Humbug, 78.
17
Thompson, “From Wonder to Error,” 2.
18
Ibid., 1.
19
Ibid., 2.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Eric Fretz, “P. T. Barnum’s Theatrical Selfhood and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of
Exhibition,” in Thompson, Freakery, 101–2.
23
Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in US Popular Culture,
1850–1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 59. For more on exhibiting
racial others in Barnum’s museum, see James W. Cook, “Of Men, Missing Links, andNondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum’s ‘What Is It?’ Exhibition,” in Thompson,
Freakery, 111–54; Benjamin Reiss, “P. T. Barnum, Joice Heth, and Antebellum Spectacles ofRace,” American Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1999): 78–107; Tchen, New York before Chinatown,
117–23.
24
P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum; Written by Himself (NY: Redﬁeld, 1855), 157,https://archive.org/details/lifeofptbarnum00barnuoft/page/n5/mode/2up.
25
Ibid., 159.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9.
29
Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years’ Recollections (Buﬀalo, NY: Warren,
Johnson, and Company, 1872), 90, https://archive.org/details/strugglestriumph00barnrich/mode/2up.
30
Ibid., 90.
31
Fretz, “P. T. Barnum’s Theatrical Selfhood,” 104.
32
John Evelev, adapting Harris’s notion of the “operational aesthetic,” examinesin Typee the Barnumian “balancing act between authenticity and duplicity.” Evelev,
Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 31–32. Richard Chase considers that“literaryscientiﬁc extravaganza[s]” in Moby-Dick have aﬃnities to Barnum’s showmanship.
Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (NY: Macmillan Company, 1949), 75–82. In The
Conﬁdence-Man appear the Barnumian freaks such as the Siamese twins (chap. 22) as wellas the Barnum-like character, Calvin Edson (chap. 16, 23). Reading The Conﬁdence-Man,
Neil Harris suggests that both Barnum and Melville form the idea of humbug as a social
healer who relieves people’s tension from “the money-getting and competition of Americanlife” (Humbug, 217).
33
Herman Melville, The Writings of Herman Melville (hereafter abbreviated as WHM), ed.
Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle, 15 vols. (Evanston, IL:

170

SHOGO TANOKUCHI

Northwestern University Press, 1987).
34
Quoted by Arthur Bonner in Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?: The Chinese in New
York, 1800–1950 (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 2.
35
For the Keying’s voyage and acceptance, see Stephen Davies, East Sails West: The
Voyage of the Keying, 1846–1855 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014), Adobe
Digital Editions; Tchen, New York before Chinatown, 63–71.
36
John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of China: Excursions to China in US Culture, 1776–
1876 (NY: Columbia University Press, 2008), chap. 5, www.gutenberg-e.org/haj01/. Barnum
himself was said to have made a copy of the Keying and exhibited it along with the Chinesecrew. See Haddad, chap. 5; Davies, East Sails West, 124.
37
Haddad, Romance of China, chap. 5.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid. The visitors could also see the embodiment of Chinese patriarchy in Moy’s“monstrous small” feet (Tchen, New York before Chinatown, 104).
41
Haddad, Romance of China, chap. 5. Stephen Davies analyzes the strange usageof Chinese-like ﬂags in “the established Western manner,” considering that the Keying“represented a form of Western triumphalism” (East Sails West, 37).
42
Charles Dickens, “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” Household Words 8 (1851),
281–89, https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=nYhPAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=
ja#v=onepage&q=junk&f=false.
43
Ibid., 284. For more about Dickens’s view on the Chinese junk, see Elizabeth Hope
Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century
Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 111–25. According to Chang,
Dickens’s apparently patriotic view stems from his authorial anxiety that he cannot properly
understand and narrate the Asian junk.
44
Tchen, New York before Chinatown, 20.
45“The Tombs” is a symbolic place in Melville’s writings where the protagonists of Pierre(1852) and “Bartleby” (1853) come to their tragic deaths.
46“Row on Board the Chinese Junk,” New York Herald, August 31, 1847, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1847-08-31/ed-1/seq-2/.
47
For more on the riot on the Keying, see Davies, East Sails West, 125–35; and Tchen,
New York before Chinatown, 68–69.
48
Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (NY: Simon andSchuster, 1978), 24.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., 36.
51
OED Online, s.v. “Flunky, n.,” https://www-oed-com.ez.wul.waseda.ac.jp/view/Entry/72
129?redirectedFrom=Flunky#eid. In his famous essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850),
Melville expresses his growing frustration with the US literary market of the time, which
indulged in “literary ﬂunkeyism towards England” (WHM 9: 248).
52
The negative inﬂuence of European civilization is a dominant theme in Melville’s Typee.
Throughout that novel, Melville demonstrates how Western missionaries, merchants, andcolonists have had a terrible inﬂuence on the natives of the South Paciﬁc islands.
53
Dwight’s American Magazine, November 13, 1847, 727, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/
pt?id=hvd.32044092634054&view=1up&seq=5.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Millard Fillmore, “Millard Fillmore, President of the United States of America, to His
Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Japan,” in Narrative of the Expedition of an American

FREAKY ASIAN JUNKS

171

Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, ed. Francis L. Hawks (Washington, DC: Beverley
Tucker, 1856), 257, https://archive.org/details/narrativeofexped0156perr/mode/2up. See
Tetsuo Kawasumi, Kurofune ibun [Curious stories of the black ships] (Tokyo: Yurindo, 2004) on Japan’s opening and the American whaling industry.
57
John Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Paciﬁc in American
Culture (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2004), 25–57.
58
Fillmore, “Millard Fillmore,” in Hawks, Narrative, 256.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid. For the relationship between Perry’s expedition and the Compromise of 1850,
see Paul Finkelman, Millard Fillmore (NY: Henry Holt, 2011), 92; and Gretchen Murphy,
Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of US Empire (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2005), 67–83.
61
For more on cases such as the Lagoda and Lawrence, see Peter Booth Wiley, Yankees inthe Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (NY: Viking, 1990); andWilliam McOmie, The Opening of Japan, 1853–55: A Comparative Study of the American,
British, Dutch and Russian Naval Expeditions to Compel the Tokugawa Shogunate toConclude Treaties and Open Ports to Their Ships (Kent, UK: Global Oriental, 2006).
62
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (May 1852), 835.
63
Adams quoted in “Dutch and English Intercourse with Japan,” Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine (January 1854), 198.
64
Ikuno Saiki, “‘Strike through the Unreasoning Masks’: Moby-Dick and Japan,” in
Barnum, “Whole Oceans Away,” 178.
65
Hawks, Narrative, 449.
66
“Japan,” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (March 1853), 247. Melville published his
short stories both in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine.
67
Ibid., 243, 251.
68
Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings, 70.
69
For domestic ﬁction as a literary instrument embodying the national and imperial
ideology, see Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998):
581–606. On reading works by antebellum female writers, Kaplan insists that the domestic
novel, although set in “the private sphere of female interiority,” reenacts “the narratives ofnation and empire” (601).
70
Several scholars have read Moby-Dick in the context of Japan’s opening. See Arimichi
Makino, “Nihonjin Ishumeru” [A Japanese Ishmael], Eureka (April 2002): 126–35; Saiki,“Unreasoning Masks,” 175–81; Christopher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misﬁts,
Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (NY: Random House, 2003), 3–43.
71
Elizabeth Renker, Strike through the Mask (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996), 41.
72
Wilson, Reimagining the American Paciﬁc, 83.