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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 16 (2005)

Onoto Watanna’s Japanese Collaborators
and Commentators

Yuko MATSUKAWA*

In the last twenty years, scholars with an investment in Asian American
writers from the turn of the century have paid increasing attention to theliterary works of Edith and Winnifred Eaton, children of an English
father and a Chinese mother, who adopted the pen names of Sui Sin Far
and Onoto Watanna respectively, and wrote ﬁction and non-ﬁction in
English about Asian characters. The older, Edith Eaton (1865–1914), has
had a warmer reception into Asian American literary canons: by choosing to write essays and short stories about the plight of the Chinese in
America, she helped transform the American literary landscape of thelate nineteenth and early twentieth century, that present scholarship now
shows to be vitally multicultural.1
Embracing Winnifred Eaton (1875–1954) is a more complicated task.
Unlike her sister Edith’s writing persona and subject matter, Winnifred’s
writerly identity and novels are not as easily categorized under more conventional Asian American rubrics. Winnifred Eaton chose to write undera Japanese (or Japanese-sounding) pseudonym and proceeded to produce
over a dozen best-selling novels, most of which were set in Japan, orfeatured Japanese characters. Winnifred not only continued to use thispseudonym but reinforced it with a fabricated biography. According toearly newspaper and magazine proﬁles and reviews featuring Onoto
Copyright © 2005 Yuko Matsukawa. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Associate Professor, Seijo University

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Watanna as well as her sister Edith’s New York Times obituary (whose
authorship is attributed to her,)2 she was the daughter of an Englishman
and a Japanese noblewoman from Nagasaki. The publicity photographsthat accompany these proﬁles usually depicted her in outﬁts that are orapproximate Japanese dress, accentuating her unusual background andmarking her as exotically Other.
Because of this unconventional authorial persona, only in the last decade has Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna been resurrected as an Asian
American (or Asian Canadian) writer. More often, scholars choose tofocus on Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, whose life and writings followed moreconventional narratives of Asian American literature. It would take ashift in the climate of literary studies and a recognition of the heterogeneity of Asian American experiences and literary expression for scholars to start to pay attention to the subversive strategies of Onoto Watanna.
The past few years have proven bountiful in Onoto Watanna studies.
Four of her novels were reprinted by different university presses: Me: A
Book of Remembrance (1997), Miss Numé of Japan (1999), The Heartof Hyacinth (2000) and A Japanese Nightingale (2002). Some of her
shorter works, both ﬁction and non-ﬁction were collected in a volume
entitled “A Half Caste” and Other Writings (2003).3 A lively and informative full-length biography written by her granddaughter Diana
Birchall entitled Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton was published in 2001.4 Longer scholarly pieces, including two excellent 2002
studies have also informed how we reconstruct and interpret Onoto
Watanna: Dominika Ferens’ Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown
Missions and Japanese Romances which argues successfully for reading the sisters’ work through an ethnographic lens in order to understandtheir contexts, methodologies and audiences,5 and Jean Lee Cole’s The
Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redeﬁning Ethnicity and Authenticity brings to her analysis of Onoto Watanna historical and cultural
themes to map for us productive ways to understand Eaton’s life andwork in context.6
Ferens explains that when Eaton decided to adopt this persona andperform orientalism through Onoto Watanna, “a thirty-year-old tradition
already existed into which she could step” and by “becoming Onoto
Watanna, Winnifred enacted mainstream orientalist fantasies, exploiting the discourse that feminized and aestheticized Japan. Her gender
became a major selling point in the publishing marketplace.”7 As Oscar
Wilde reminds his readers, “the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There2-Yuko Matsukawa(p31) 4/21 05.7.12 6:42 PM ページ 33

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is no such country, there are no such people. [. . .] the Japanese people
are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.”8That many Westerners saw Japan as pure invention gave Onoto Watanna
the creative space in which to write her novels; by seeming to enact orientalist fantasies, she also created covert double narratives that resisted
and rewrote the very stereotypes that tried to deﬁne her and what she
wrote.
In reality, Japan was neither pure nor solely an invention. In the decades after Japan ended its long isolation, much information about thecountry, its customs and its people became available to the public. A cursory look at Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature and its supplements
which indexes articles, editorials and reviews from American periodicals from 1802 to 1906, shows that the number of articles about Japan
increased steadily over the nineteenth century. The third supplement (forthe years 1892–1896) lists over 170 entries about Japan and things
Japanese. By the time we get to the twentieth century, the ﬁfth supplement (for the years 1902–1906) includes over 500 entries.9 We may assume Eaton took advantage of this proliferation of information in order
to construct her Onoto Watanna and inform her stories, especially now
that we know from Birchall’s biography that Eaton never traveled to or
lived in Japan or had any biological ties to the country.
Writing narratives set in a country of which she had no ﬁrst-handknowledge must have been hard enough for Eaton; constructing andmaintaining the exotic persona of the half-Japanese Onoto Watanna wasprobably daunting as well. Indeed, a closer look at Eaton’s self-representation reveals the effort that went into this transformation. It is too
facile to assume that this elaborate performance was divorced from direct
assistance, comment or criticism by Japanese artists living in the UnitedStates at the turn of the century. In this essay, I wish to explore Eaton’s
personal and professional connections to Japanese in the United States
who served as collaborators and commentators of her work as I examine outward markers of her Japaneseness, such as her name and a facsimile of her autograph as well as her publicity photographs.
I.

THE COMMENTATORS

Onoto Watanna had attracted the attention and interest of at least two
Japanese writers during her lifetime and many Japanese scholars posthumously. In fact, articles written by two Japanese scholars, Katsuhiko2-Yuko Matsukawa(p31) 4/21 05.7.12 6:42 PM ページ 34

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Takeda and Yoshiro Ando, predate by over a decade what most Asian
American literature scholars consider the ﬁrst inﬂuential scholarly essays on Watanna by S. E. Solberg and Amy Ling.10 Takeda published“Onoto Watanna; A Forgotten Writer” in the English-language journal
Orient/West Magazine in 1964.11 Understandably, having read the available published proﬁles of her, he is under the impression that Onoto
Watanna was born in Nagasaki and lived there as a child. Interestingly
enough, he introduces her as a Canadian writer and does not allude to
her biracial background; he attributes her ease with writing about Japanto her childhood experiences. After a brief biography, he introduces readers to what he considers Watanna’s best novel, A Japanese Nightingale.
In his evaluation of the novel, Takeda waxes enthusiastic: “The origin
of Onoto Watanna’s romantic dimension is traceable, in spirit, to the
French romantic school. Some readers will complain about the novel’s
excessive sentimentality but this should not prevent us from estimating
it highly on its esthetic merits.”12 He also suggests that the reason why
Watanna’s works have been neglected is because she “lived in a period
which marked the decline of romanticism and the rise of realism.”13 Heends his essay by noting that “[a]s an early introducer of Japan, Onoto
Watanna belongs in the same ranks with Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti,
even if she is inferior to them in the ﬁeld of imaginative literature.”14
Ando’s two-page article entitled “Onoto Watanna to iu Sakka” [“AWriter called Onoto Watanna”] written in Japanese in 197015 augments
and corrects Takeda’s essay in terms of biographical details which hegleaned from a correspondence with Winnifred Eaton’s daughter, Doris
Rooney, who met with Ando and Takeda during her travels in Japan andSoutheast Asia earlier that year. His essay, in addition to providing amore detailed overview of Eaton’s life (for instance, Ando explains that
Winnifred’s mother Grace was Chinese but educated in England) andcareer, also presents Rooney’s explanation of her mother’s pen name andhow it came into being, a point I will discuss in detail later in this essay.
Ando’s essay ends with the following thought: “[. . .] even though, as[Kafu] Nagai says, she may not be a ﬁrst-rate writer, I do think that theseworks, ﬁlled with a beautiful style of writing, entertaining plots and dramatic effects, ought to be read more, especially in Japan.”16
Both Takeda and Ando delight in Onoto Watanna not only because
she wrote of Japan but also because they, like later scholars, were elated
to rediscover a writer who had been popular during her lifetime but thenfell into oblivion. Their assessments of Onoto Watanna’s prose, unlike
current readings of her made through the lens of ethnic studies, focus on

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her style and possible connections to other traditions such as romanticism and Japanese literature. As both Takeda and Ando note in theiressays, Onoto Watanna was known at least to one Japanese writer of her
generation, Kafu Nagai (1879–1959). Nagai, who later established himself as one of the most important Japanese writers of the ﬁrst half of thetwentieth century, traveled through the United States and France as ayoung man. It was during his stay in Seattle that he read a Watanna novel
and was charmed. On February 26, 1904, he wrote in his diary:17
Read a novel recently published in America entitled The Heart of Hyacinth.
Written by accomplished authoress Onoto Watanna, it is a sweet love story
set in Japan’s Matsushima and portrays an English orphan girl. It is not particularly a masterpiece but the chaste prose and artistic sentiment is worthsavoring. The greater part of my curiosity centered on the Japanese setting
and the depiction of Japanese manners so I ﬁnished reading the 200-odd pages
with pleasure in a single day.18

Takeda suggests that Nagai, who “had a taste for the exotic which is oneof the elements of romanticism” and “belonged to the school of art-forart’s-sake [which is] a literary school [. . .] he founded in Japan” wasinﬂuenced by Watanna and claims that some pieces in Nagai’s American
Stories “make this fact unmistakable.”19
Another name of a Japanese writer that comes to mind is Yone Noguchi(1875–1947), the Japanese poet who was known for his numerous collections of poetry in English. Noguchi dropped out of Keio University
and traveled to California where he eventually started writing and publishing poems in English, winning acclaim both in the United States andGreat Britain. After Noguchi left California, he made his way to New
York where he continued to write poems, essays and novels. On his way
there, he spent some time in Chicago where he met and became friends
with Onoto Watanna.
In Yone Noguchi: Collected English Letters,20 Watanna is mentioned
several times, twice by Frank Putnam, a friend with whom Noguchi
stayed during part of his visit to Chicago, once by himself and anothertime by a woman named Ann Water. Putnam, a journalist and sometime
poet, published a slim volume of poems in 1898 dedicated to Winnifred
Eaton with an introduction by Onoto Watanna,21 so we may surmise that
he was in on her masquerade though in his letters to Noguchi, he refers
to her as Onoto. In a June 19, 1900 letter to Charles W. Stoddard,
Noguchi gives her address as the one where letters to him should be sent
because it is2-Yuko Matsukawa(p31) 4/21 05.7.12 6:42 PM ページ 36

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where my dearest friend lives and I visit nearly every evening. She is a half
caste woman with the name Onoto Watanna; her mother was Japanese, father
being an English [sic]; she herself being very bright writes now and then very
clever short stories for magazines. Did you ever hear her name? Onoto
Watanna, you never heard before? She published one book from Rand
McNally & Co., last year, I believe. She is awfully clever, but she has nosound mind and sweet philosophy. She is woman after all!22

It is clear here that he at least in this context subscribes to the public version of Eaton’s persona; though he later becomes disenchanted with her,
here his artless enthusiasm for his new friend is full of youthful eagerness and he seems impressed by her being a published writer. Her success as a writer of Asian descent in the United States must have been
heartening to Noguchi. One wonders if he knew or suspected that she
was not of Japanese descent. One also wonders what they did during
those evening visits. Was Noguchi telling her about Japan? Was Onoto
Watanna able to gather information about Japan from him?
II.

INVENTING A NAME

Though it is a marker of her supposed Japanese heritage, the pseudonym “Onoto Watanna” has puzzled scholars for years. Is it Japanese or
simply Japanese sounding? Does it mean anything? Does it have to?
According to Ando, her ﬁrst name, “Onoto,” is found in a Lafcadio Hearn
story and is Japanese. But while “Onoto” is a Japanese name, “Watanna,”though written in Japanese,
merely sounds Japaneseand is an invented name.
As Ando relates, Doris
Rooney explained that
“Watanna” was abbreviated from “Watanabe,” acommon Japanese surname.23 This sounds plausible, since “Watanabe”
is more likely to be mispronounced than not(since English speakers
Fig. 1. A facsimile of Onoto Watanna’s autographmay consider the last “e”
from the frontispiece to The Wooing of Wistaria(New York: Harper, 1902).
silent though it is not);2-Yuko Matsukawa(p31) 4/21 05.7.12 6:42 PM ページ 37

ONOTO WATANNA

37“Watanna” is less likely to be mangled. A facsimile of her autographappears in the frontispiece of her novel, The Wooing of Wistaria (1902).24
The signature is written in Japanese, the two characters reading“Watanna” using kanji or Chinese characters coming ﬁrst followed by
the three reading “Onoto” in hiragana phonetic characters (ﬁgure 1). The
ﬁrst kanji used in her autograph to write her last name reﬂects that etymology: the character for “Wata” (“to cross”) here is the same that thosewith the last name “Watanabe” would use. It is the combination with thesecond character, “Na” meaning “name,” that makes her last name signiﬁcant. As I noted in a previous essay, this cross-naming “foreshadows
Winnifred Eaton’s career as a tricksterlike ﬁgure who assumes multiple
identities in order to straddle different spheres and disrupt the sense ofreality and complacency in those worlds.” As a trickster, she crosses
boundaries to challenge public assumptions about race, gender and literary production.25 Her pen name, therefore, playfully implies she is atrickster and discloses the presence of a bilingual collaborator.
The penmanship of the last name is such that we can see that the pen
makes the requisite strokes in more or less the right order. However, theextra lines and awkward balance which are, even within the more generous boundaries of cursive writing, indicators that though perhaps the
person who wrote this had samples in clear Japanese handwriting tocopy, s/he was doing just that: copying without comprehending. The calligraphers I consulted separately agreed on this point since the distortions in the writing seem as if they are the result of the hesitant startingand stopping of copying rather idiosyncratic messy handwriting.
This is conﬁrmed in how the ﬁrst name is written. The hiragana characters correspond to those used for names in the late nineteenth century(here, the “to” is a cursive version of a kanji character which differs fromthe one in current use). However, there are glaring errors: the ﬁrst “O”
character is strangely twisted around, giving it a look akin to the reversed“r” in the name of that ubiquitous American toy store. The “no” is ﬁne
but the “to” is missing a cursive curve. All in all, it is the mangled “O”
that is the give-away and strongly suggests that these characters were
written by, if not Eaton herself, someone who was not literate inJapanese.26
It would be a serendipitous discovery if one could prove that it was
Noguchi who had christened Winnifred Eaton as Onoto Watanna andalso bestowed upon her the clever cross-naming Chinese characters forher name as well as examples of how to write her name in Japanese, not2-Yuko Matsukawa(p31) 4/21 05.7.12 6:42 PM ページ 38

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only because it would link these two writers more ﬁrmly but also because
it would give a local habitation and a name to one of the invisible
Japanese collaborators who helped to maintain her persona, for surely
she could not done all of this on her own. Unfortunately, her use of thepseudonym predates their ﬁrst meeting, and so we must conclude he was
not responsible for naming her. However, Noguchi was already a friendby the time her novel The Wooing of Wistaria (1902) was published witha frontispiece featuring a facsimile of what purports to be her autographso it may be possible that he was the one to put characters to the soundsof her name. If so, perhaps he was the one who taught her to write her
pen name in Japanese during their evenings together, though whether or
not it was his handwriting she copied is impossible to determine.27 In any
case, the presence of this autograph indicates that Eaton did take her halfJapanese persona seriously enough to want to make Onoto Watanna atangible reality through the writing of her name.
III.

THE COLLABORATORS

Eaton was not known for her literacy in Japanese so if this is indeed
Onoto Watanna’s handwriting, who showed her how to write inJapanese? Other than Noguchi, some professional connections immediately come to mind: Kiyokichi Sano, Genjiro Kataoka (also known as
Genjiro Yeto) and Gazo Foudji, three illustrators for her books who wereJapanese. I have yet to ﬁnd references to Kiyokichi Sano who illustrated
The Heart of Hyacinth (1903) and Daughters of Nijo (1904) but Gazo
Foudji who illustrated The Love of Azalea (1904) and Genjiro Kataoka
who not only illustrated Tama (1910) but also A Japanese Nightingale(1901) under the name Genjiro Yeto, were known both in Japan andabroad as practitioners of western-style painting.
Gazo Foudji, or Fuji Gazo (also known as Masazo) as he is sometimes
listed,28 was born in what is now Oita prefecture, Japan in 1853. He enrolled in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce’s Fine Arts School(Kobu Bijutsu Gakko) in Tokyo in 1876 where he studied painting under
Antonio Fontanesi and Acchile San Giovanni, two Italian painters who
were responsible for putting together the ﬁrst western-style painting curriculum in Japan. In 1880, he was awarded a government scholarship to
study abroad in Paris. His mentor there was Raphael Collin. Foudji isperhaps best known not for his own work (though he did win awards
both in Japan and France for his paintings) but for convincing a young

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Seiki Kuroda, who later became one of the leading Japanese artists ofthe turn of the century, to quit his law studies and become a painter.
Foudji later worked for the porcelain factories at Sevres, married a
Frenchwoman and moved to the United States to continue composing
designs for porcelain companies. Most reference sources list this muchand add that he died in Yonkers, New York in 1916. That he worked as
an illustrator is clear from Onoto Watanna’s books. He also designed thecover for the June 1904 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal so that it
looked like a traditional Japanese ukiyoe woodblock print of a young
woman standing in a garden. That a leading women’s magazine whichinﬂuenced the taste of its readership would choose such cover art suggests how pervasive and popular Japonisme was at the time in the UnitedStates.
Genjiro Kataoka29 was born in the porcelain-manufacturing town of
Arita, Saga prefecture, Japan in 1867. Records show that he was adopted
by the Ezoe family but for some reason, he chose to be known by thesurname “Yeto” in the United States. Since he went back to using“Kataoka” after the adoption was dissolved, one book he illustrated for
Onoto Watanna uses the surname “Yeto” and the other, “Kataoka.” Yetoobtained a government scholarship to study abroad in the United Statesin 1889. Living at the Bush-Holley House in Greenwich, Connecticut
and associating with artists such as Childe Hassam who frequented thispart of Connecticut, Yeto studied with the American Impressionist
painter, J. H. Twachtman who was also under contract with Scribners as
an illustrator from 1888 to 1893; perhaps it was through Twachtman’sconnections that Kataoka later worked as an illustrator. In 1895, heenrolled in the Art Students League in New York City. He had his ﬁrst
solo art exhibition in New York in 1901. A member of the New York
Watercolor Club, he also exhibited at the Salmagundi Club in New York
where he was a prize winner in 1905. He married in 1904 and returned
to Japan for good in 1911 to work at the Telecommunications Museumin Tokyo. He does not seem to have been very visible as an artist during
the last part of his life. He died in 1924 of tuberculosis.
Unlike Foudji, who apparently had a career designing porcelain, YetoKataoka, though also a watercolor artist, seems to have been primarily
an illustrator, drawing not only for Watanna’s books but also for thoseof Noguchi, Lafcadio Hearn and others that had “oriental” themes. He
was also in charge of designing the costumes for David Belasco’s The
Darling of the Gods (1902) after serving as an advisor for costumes and2-Yuko Matsukawa(p31) 4/21 05.7.12 6:42 PM ページ 40

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props for Madame Butterﬂy (1902), both Broadway hits with Japanesesettings and characters. However, both artists seem well-versed in theAmerican idiom of turn-of-the-century book illustration so their work is
not extraordinarily different in composition and subject matter fromthose done by Watanna’s non-Asian artists, such as L. W. Zeigler, who
was responsible for the illustrations in A Japanese Blossom (1906). In
fact, these two Japanese artists, because they were trained in France andthe United States respectively, could not have been blind to the western
fascination for things oriental. However, a closer look reveals that theirillustrations differ from those of their non-Asian counterparts because
they integrate techniques characteristic of Japanese illustrations andwoodblock prints of the late nineteenth century; given that the rise of
Japonisme depended on the careful study and imitation of such woodblock prints, no wonder their artwork deftly catered to the orientalist
desires of the American public without disrupting conventional ideas ofbook illustration.
That Sano, Foudji and Kataoka-Yeto were Japanese and had Japanesenames was an asset for both the publishers and Eaton herself: theirnames, coupled with hers, reinforced not only Eaton’s ﬁctive persona
but also helped to exoticize the contents of her books. Conversely, fromthe point of view of the Japanese illustrators, having their work publishedby major American publishing houses was probably a plus. That throughher works, she provided work opportunities for Japanese artists suggests
her redeﬁning the parameters of publishing practices while making sure
she also proﬁted.
IV.

INVENTING A LOOK

From early on in her writing career, Onoto Watanna received a greatamount of attention though there was much confusion about her nameas well as her ethnic and racial background. An early mention of her inCurrent Literature from 1897 tells us of a Japanese woman writer named
Kitishima Kata Hasche, “a clever Japanese girl who is living in Chicago
at present and winning fame by writing for the magazines and newspapers of Chicago and the East under the pen name of Otano [sic] Watanna[. . .] the two names meaning the same thing but belonging to different
Japanese dialects.”30 Later, when her ﬁrst novel, Miss Numé of Japan, ispublished, her biracial identity is more ﬁrmly established. In 1899, thejournal Book News notes:

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Among those who have recently appeared none has sprung more rapidly into
notice as a successful short-story writer than Onoto Watanna, the young halfJapanese, half-English girl, who makes her home in Chicago. [. . .] In appearance, Miss Watanna is decidedly Japanesque with the black hair and eyes ofher countrywomen, but in stature she is taller than they. In her simplicity ofspeech and belief that all mankind is as honest as herself, she resembles thefascinating characters of her own stories.31

Though this passage and other passages in book reviews and proﬁlesmake mention of the fact that she is half Japanese and half English, Onoto
Watanna is more often than not described as if she were simply Japanese.
On a practical level, this ignores mixed race identity, something Eaton
insists upon highlighting, both in the persona of Onoto Watanna and as
a running theme in many of her works. Nevertheless, Eaton perseveres
and in fact, her choice to make Onoto Watanna a half-Japanese and halfEnglish writer was a bold political move that reveals canny insight into
how Americans understood foreigners.
As Robert G. Lee argues in his book Orientals: Asian Americans inPopular Culture, there is a political difference between the terms foreign and alien, though they are often used interchangeably: “ ‘Foreign’refers to that which is outside or distant, while ‘alien’ describes things
that are immediate and present yet have a foreign nature or allegiance.
[. . .] foreigners, whose presence is deﬁned as temporary, are seen as
innocuous and even desirable.” However, Lee explains, “[a]liens, outsiders who are inside, disrupt the internal structure of a cultural formation as it deﬁnes itself vis-á-vis the Other; their presence constitutes aboundary crisis.”32 Onoto Watanna’s half-Japanese, half-English background makes her doubly “foreign”; this combined with her ethnic crossdressing triggers references to Japanese countrywomen, compounding
her foreignness in print. That she is in reality an “alien” and at the sametime a trickster, is masked effectively in a double narrative of racial representation.
The photograph that accompanies this review shows the author wearing a loose kimono and holding an enormous fan behind her head (ﬁgure2). The staged artiﬁcial pose and props as well as her youth and uncertain expression highlight the incongruity between this portrait of an
author and those more conventional and staid portraits of other authors,
who mostly were white. However, this staged pose starts to make sense
if we read this photograph as one that mimics or is informed by photographs such as those of actors performing in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The

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Fig. 2. Portrait of Onoto Watanna fromBook News 17 (1899): 451.
Fig. 3. Geraldine Ulmar as Yum-Yum.
Portrait no. 2 of a set of seven cabinet
portraits of D’Oyley Carte’s English“Mikado” Company.
(From the author’s collection.)

Mikado that were widely available at the turn of the century. For instance,
this photograph of Geraldine Ulmar as Yum-Yum (ﬁgure 3) is part of aset of seven cabinet portraits of D’Oyley Carte’s English “Mikado” company that consumers could obtain if they sent in to the manufacturer
ﬁfteen wrappers of Dobbins’ Electric Soap. What is interesting here isthat the image of a white woman then stands in for the Japanese one andthat Caucasian features in Japanese dress represent the Japanese woman,especially since there were few competing images of Japanese womencirculating within popular culture to compensate or correct this. The
following advertisements, called trade cards, copied the Mikado
photograph and gave birth to other similar trade cards that disseminatedand naturalized the idea that the loose kimono, the oversized fan and
Caucasian features were the hallmarks of Japanese womanhood (ﬁgures
4 and 5).

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Fig. 4. Trade card for Chin Lee & Co., Fig. 5. Trade card for Gilt Edge Shoe
San Francisco. (From the author’s colGloss, Whittemore Bros. & Co., Boston.
lection.)(From the author’s collection.)

In such a cultural environment, no wonder Eaton’s cross-dressing was
accepted more or less seamlessly. Birchall notes that even the Eaton family was not exempt from the craze for The Mikado and dressing in costumes reminiscent of the light opera. She notes that Eaton’s older sisters
were
mad about Gilbert and Sullivan, and a passion for Japanese styles hit
Montreal hard, culminating with an elaborate production of The Mikado in
1886. [. . .] A family photograph shows three of the Eaton sisters—Sara,
Rose, and May—waving fans and wearing kimonos about this time. The mostenthusiastically Japanese of them all, Winnifred, is not among them, but perhaps she took the picture.33

Eaton was a quick study. With the exception of the ﬁrst Mikado-inﬂuenced photo, the other photos show a clear progression from that ﬁrst
image of Onoto Watanna as a Mikado chorus girl to wanting to present
a credible image of a Japanese woman who is not a geisha. In ﬁgure 6,
from a 1901 “Notes of a Bookman” column of Harper’s Weekly, allshowiness from the 1899 photograph is erased and we see a poised andreﬁned young woman wearing a kimono and looking into the camera.34

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There is none of the silliness and caricature that accompanies Mikadoinﬂuenced poses. We can only guess that this transformation is the resultof advice from those who were acquainted with Japanese women andtheir dress but in any case, here Eaton and her publicists have mastered
how to manipulate the photographic image to create a credible subject
that does not need to stoop to obvious forms of yellowface to achieve
their goal. The third photograph, the frontispiece to The Wooing of
Wistaria (1902) continues in this vein and adds an air of studiousness:this is Onoto Watanna, the authoress, holding a book and wearing an outﬁt that is evocative of the hakama overskirts women scholars wore in
Japan over a century ago (ﬁgure 7).

Fig. 6. Portrait of Onoto Watanna from Fig. 7. Portrait of Onoto Watanna fromthe frontispiece to The Wooing of“Notes of a Bookman” Harper’s Weekly
Wistaria (New York: Harper, 1902).
45 (Dec. 21, 1901): 1300.

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Compared to the middle- and upper-class white women in the earlytwentieth century whose performance of Asian-ness was, according toMari Yoshihara, “very much congruent with their identity as American
women,”35 Onoto Watanna’s cross-dressing had different concerns atstake. For Yoshihara’s performing white women, the thrill is in the progression from looking at things that are Asian, owning things that are
Asian and then becoming Asian, if only for however long the costume
event was to last.36 This kind of performing Asian-ness denotes privilege
and leisure as it reinforces whiteness; it also assures the performer that
she may return to that normative whiteness whenever she wants. For
Eaton, performing as Onoto Watanna was inextricably tied to the economics of earning a living. This performance was not necessarily leisurely nor was it only for a speciﬁc duration of time. And whiteness was
not necessarily promised to her at the end of the day.
This is not to say that Onoto Watanna always dressed in kimonos forher publicity shots. In fact, Onoto Watanna practices another kind ofcross-dressing in the December 1903 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which
published three photographs of her in western-style clothes.37 In thesephotographs, Onoto Watanna presents us with another kind of performance: she is now transformed into a Gibson Girl, albeit one who is more
ethnic looking that the ones we usually see. In ﬁgure 8, Onoto Watanna
wears an elaborate lace blouse and has her hair piled atop her head likethe women Charles Dana Gibson often drew. In this pose, we see avibrancy in her expression that we do not see elsewhere. The advent of
the Gibson Girl coincided with the emergence of the New Woman, who
not only had the choice to be freed from the economic shackles of domesticity by being gainfully employed but also had more control over how
she led her life. The second photograph of her reading in her library suggests the material comfort and psychological repose her successes inwriting have given her (ﬁgure 9). And in the photograph with her andher car, we see enjoying the fruits of her literary labor in the form of thelatest that automotive technology has to offer (ﬁgure 10). This is not to
say that these last three photographs capture the “real” Onoto Watanna;
I would argue that this is Onoto Watanna as a trickster again, challenging our preconceptions of gender and race. She is and can be all of theseincarnations at once because these portraits chronicle the processes ofinvention and adjustment that make Onoto Watanna possible.

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Fig. 8. “The latest Portrait of Onoto
Watanna, Author of ‘A Japanese Nightingale’ and ‘The Heart of Hyacinth.’ ” Fig. 9. “Onoto Watanna in her Library.”“Onoto Watanna” Harper’s Weekly 47“Onoto Watanna” Harper’s Weekly 47(Dec. 5, 1903): 1959.
(Dec. 5, 1903): 1960.

Fig. 10. “Onoto Watanna starting from her Home at Fordham
Heights, New York, for a Spin in her Automobile.” “Onoto
Watanna” Harper’s Weekly 47 (Dec. 5, 1903): 1960.

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COLLABORATOR DISILLUSIONED

Despite his eager friendship and professed closeness to her early on,
Yone Noguchi gradually grew critical of Onoto Watanna and her writing. Though in his letters, Noguchi and his friends refer to Eaton as Onoto
Watanna, one wonders about his complicity in maintaining her ﬁctional
identity. As a rising literary star, with friends in literary circles in theWest and later in Japan, he as a Japanese writer easily could serve as anauthenticator of her persona, whether he was taken in by her or not. Since
he published his two novels under the pseudonym, “Miss Morning
Glory” (a name, by the way, that reminds us of Eaton’s sister’s pen name,Sui Sin Far, another ﬂowery pseudonym) and by doing so crossed thegender line, he may have delighted in Eaton’s ruse and cooperated inperpetuating her literary self.
However, there are moments in his novels that suggest that he wascritical of not necessarily Eaton’s masquerade but rather of the fact that
she and others traded realistic representation for orientalist imaginingsof how and what Japanese women were. In The American Letters of aJapanese Parlor-Maid (1905), the protagonist, Miss Morning Glory, ayoung Japanese woman from a well-to-do family takes advantage of her
longish sojourn in New York during her travels with her uncle to go on
an adventure: to work as a maid in an American household. Her lettersto her friend Pine Leaf comprise the bulk of this epistolary novel and in
one of them, she writes about how her employers would prefer her to be
more “oriental”:“Morning Glory, your speech is too perfect for Japanese. How I wish you
could speak broken English like an actress in a Japanese play,” Madam exclaimed.
How disgusted I was, you can imagine!
[. . .]I am sorry I really can’t succeed in making me a puppet like a Jap heroine in
Meriken story who titters “Ahé, hé, hé!” endlessly.38

Edward Marx cites a similar passage in The American Diary of aJapanese Girl (1902) where Morning Glory goes to a photographer who
encourages her to pose like one of the characters from Sidney Jones’
1896 light opera, The Geisha. Morning Glory is disgusted by the disorderly look that passes for Japanese and declines posing with a fan because it was out of season. Unlike Watanna’s Japanese heroines who

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mumble and lisp their way through their speeches, Noguchi’s Morning
Glory is educated, upper-class and speaks relatively idiomatically correct and clear English; she, and by extension, Noguchi, refuses to givein to the prevailing stereotypes of “Japanese” women. As Marx states,“the novel is witty and full of interesting cross-cultural observations, and
it is in many respects an improvement over the pseudo-Japanism ofMadame Butterﬂy, which is itself critiqued in the novel.”39
Noguchi’s critique of Watanna became more pronounced once he wasback in Japan. After returning to Tokyo in 1904, Noguchi establishedhimself as an essayist, writer and literary critic in Japanese journals andbecame a professor of English literature at his alma mater, Keio University in 1905. At the same time, he continued to write for English language journals and newspapers. One such publication was Taiyo [TheSun], a Japanese journal, which, as most Japanese journals still do, opensfrom what English-language journals would consider the back, withreverse pagination. Appended to the end of Taiyo was The Sun Trade
Journal, an English-language journal, whose cover and pagination corresponded to western journal conventions. Noguchi wrote for both Taiyo
and The Sun Trade Journal, conﬁdent in his writing abilities in both languages.
In 1906, Noguchi wrote a glowing appreciation in Japanese of Mary
Fenollosa and her poetry entitled “Nihon wo Utaeru Beikoku no Onnashijin [An American Female Poet who Sings of Japan]” for Taiyo. He
praises her “emotional poetic personality [. . .] that allows her to look atnature in Japan as if she were looking at a lover”40 and attributes her
afﬁnity to things Japanese not only to her sensibility but also to her eight
years living in Japan.41 Through his readings of her poems, Noguchi
makes it clear that she is a talented poet, not the least because she introduces to foreign audiences interpretations of Japan of which Noguchi
approves. He ends the essay by saying “I think Japan should be grateful
not only to have had Mr. Fenollosa among us but also Mrs. Fenollosa
too. [. . .] Her artistic life signiﬁes grace and compassion [. . .] I can saythat without a doubt, Mrs. Fenellosa is the truest and most exquisite poetto come to Japan from the United States and Great Britain.”42
The year after he showered Mary Fenollosa and her poetry with praise,
Noguchi castigated Onoto Watanna and her works in a two-part article
entitled “Onoto Watanna and her Japanese Work” for The Sun Trade
Journal.43 Part one starts out with Noguchi expressing his extreme distaste for plays such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and Sidney

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Jones’s The Geisha (which Noguchi seems to think is part of the Gilbert
and Sullivan oeuvre) and before launching into a review of the stage version of Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale, takes a dig at John
Luther Long and Onoto Watanna. Noguchi writes:
Later, when I began to read the Japanese stories written by American writers (?) [sic] I felt the same indignation [I did as when I saw The Mikado]! I
refer to the works of John Luther Long and Onoto Watanna. The saddest partabout Miss Watanna is that she is still posing as a Japanese, a half caste at
the least.44

Noguchi spends the rest of the ﬁrst part of this article in enumerating all
the inaccuracies in the staging of Japanese life in the play, A JapaneseNightingale: bad pronunciation of Japanese words, stilted dancing, seasonal errors (wisteria and lotus both in bloom at the same time; seasonally incorrect clothing), religious mistakes, gaudy props and so on. In
the second half of the article, Noguchi does essentially the same critiqueon Watanna’s novel, A Japanese Blossom which makes him ask, “I wonder why she must write a Japanese story as she does. A Japanese Blossom
is happily not much of a story.”45 After again pointing out things thatwent against Japanese convention, Noguchi ends this article by declaring “The book is one of the saddest literary creations which ever attempted to pass as a Japanese story.”46
Comparing these two reviews, we see that for Noguchi, accuracy inconveying a realistic portrait of Japan is paramount: Mary Fenollosa,with her eight years of living in Japan trumps Onoto Watanna, whoseknowledge of Japan is all second hand. Noguchi’s sensibilities and national pride are insulted by representations of Japan that are more ﬁctional than anything else. Noguchi is not alone is insisting on historicaland cultural accuracy. In a 1904 review entitled “Novels, Japanese andJapanned” an anonymous reviewer for The Independent reviews two
novels: Nami-Ko by Kenjiro Tokutomi and Daughters of Nijo by Onoto
Watanna.47 The former garners this praise: “As a help to the understanding of Japanese character and difﬁculties there is no book that takes
the place that Tokutomi’s novel in its English translation is likely to ﬁll”
whereas the reason the latter is reviewed is explained as follows: “If it
were not that to a great many persons Mrs. Babcock’s work seems a true
picture of Japanese life, it would be hardly worth while to review it seriously, so many and so glaring are its errors. There is nothing Japanese
about it save a few words usually misspelled and wrongly used.”48 Again,

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the standard is whether or not the depictions are historically and culturally accurate or not. Unfortunately Onoto Watanna is severely criticizedfor the same reasons from both sides of the Paciﬁc.
By ﬁxating on realistic accuracy, Noguchi fails to distinguish between
two very different subject positions and the conditions that deﬁne eachof them: one, that of a privileged well-educated white woman who wasa researcher, a writer and also the wife of an art collector and scholar
who gained access to many Japanese art collections and artifacts during
a period when Japan was more interested in catching up with the Westthan preserving its art heritage; the other, that of a biracial woman froman impoverished background who took to writing in her teens to eke out
a living and gradually carve out a very successful career as a popularnovelist and later a screenwriter while dealing with tumultuous marriages (she was married twice) and raising four children.
Furthermore, despite his partiality to Onoto Watanna early on, by thistime Noguchi is unable to get past the historical and cultural accuracy tostart to consider how Onoto Watanna’s seemingly innocuous narratives
provide her with frameworks to discuss issues of race, class and gender.
Not only does he not seem to have any interest in Asian American identity and literary production, especially by his former friend, he no longer
appears to appreciate the difﬁculties of what he calls a “half caste”
woman would have in the United States. This is particularly ironic considering his own son, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, as a biracial childwould face many of the same problems Eaton faced both in Japan andin the United States throughout his life. Indeed, again ironically, his
inability to engage with Onoto Watanna’s work and self-invention reveals more about Noguchi and his relationship to the establishment aswell as the literary standards of the time and illustrates what obstacles
Eaton faced as a writer.
In her biography of Eaton, Birchall notes how “Winnifred’s ‘Japanese
deception’ was wearing thin” by 1904 and though many journalists andbook reviewers continued to take Onoto Watanna at face value, “the New
York literary establishment seemed aware that Winnifred was not
Japanese.”49 Birchall points out that at this point of her career, Eaton“may have suspected that she could not continue her imposture indeﬁnitely and that exposure could be embarrassing. [. . .] [T]here was nothing to do but play the Japanese author.”50 It would take another two
decades before Eaton would be able to shed Onoto Watanna and reinvent herself as Winnifred Eaton Reeve, screenwriter and story editor for2-Yuko Matsukawa(p31) 4/21 05.7.12 6:42 PM ページ 51

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Universal, Twentieth Century-Fox and MGM. In the meantime, Eaton
sustained the persona of Onoto Watanna through her writings, both ﬁction and non-ﬁction, and in interviews. To this end, her Japanese collaborators, those named as well as those whose presence can only be
assumed, wittingly or unwittingly helped her deﬁne, reﬁne and/or
authenticate her self-representation as a woman of Japanese descent.
Their participation in the construction of Eaton’s persona reveals how
those considered Other were, in fact, engaged in the production ofAmerican orientalism, thus disrupting popular notions about orientalist
fantasies being more or less the product of occidental imaginations. And
unsurprisingly, after all, it is Winnifred Eaton as trickster who makes
this porosity visible.
NOTES
1
Sui Sin Far’s only published book is Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Chicago: McClurg,1912). Two editions of her works are currently available: a reprint of Mrs. Spring
Fragrance edited by Catherine E. Falvey (Albany: NCUP, 1994) and Amy Ling andAnnette White-Parks eds., Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings (Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1995). Annette White-Parks has written a full-length biographical study ofher: Sui Sin Far/ Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Urbana: U of Illinois P,
1995).
2“Edith Eaton Dead: Author of Chinese Stories under the Name of Sui Sin Far” NewYork Times, April 9, 1914.
3
The bibliographical information for Onoto Watanna’s works in print are as follows:
Linda Trinh Moser and Elizabeth Rooney eds., “A Half Caste” and Other Writings(Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003); The Heart of Hyacinth (New York: Harper, 1903); Rpt.
Samina Najmi introd. (Seattle: U of Washington P, 2000); A Japanese Nightingale (NewYork: Harper, 1901); Rpt. in Jean Lee Cole and Maureen Honey eds., “Madame Butterﬂy” by John Luther Long and “A Japanese Nightingale” by Onoto Watanna (Winnifred
Eaton): Two Orientalist Texts (New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 2002); Me: A Book of
Remembrance (New York: Century, 1915); Rpt. Linda Trinh Moser afterword (Jackson:
U P of Mississippi, 1997); Miss Numé of Japan (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1899); Rpt.
Eve Oishi introd. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1999).
4
Diana Birchall, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton (Urbana: U of Illinois
P, 2001).
5
Dominika Ferens, Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and JapaneseRomances (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002).
6
Jean Lee Cole, The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redeﬁning Ethnicity andAuthenticity (New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 2002).
7
Ferens, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, 118–119.
8
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Vyvyan Holland introd. The Complete Worksof Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper, 1989), 988.
9
Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature and Supplements. Rpt. Gloucester, MA: Peter
Smith, 1963. See especially the ﬁfth supplement. 333–339.
10
See S. E. Solberg, “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese American Fictionist”

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MELUS 8 (1981): 27–39 and Amy Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese
Ancestry (New York: Pergamon, 1990) as well as Ling’s “Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic
Chameleon and Popular Success” MELUS 11.3 (Fall 1984): 5–15.
11
Katsuhiko Takeda, “Onoto Watanna; A Forgotten Writer” Orient/West Magazine
9.1 (Jan.-Feb. 1964): 77–81.
12
Ibid., 80.
13Ibid., 80.
14Ibid., 81.
15
Yoshiro Ando. “Onoto Watanna to iu Sakka” [“A Writer called Onoto Watanna”]
Eigo Seinen [The Rising Generation] 1116.10 (October 1970): 596–7.
16
Ibid., 597 (translation mine).
17
This entry is from Saiyu Nisshi Sho [Extracts from a Diary of Western Travels] published in installments in the journal Bunmei from May to October of 1917. These installments were subsequently published together repeatedly in volumes of Nagai’s collected
works and/or diaries. Kafu Nagai’s American Stories, a collection of vignettes based on
his experiences (also chronicled in his diaries) during his travels in the United States atthe beginning of the twentieth century is now available in an excellent translation by
Mitsuko Iriye (Columbia U P, 2000).
18
From Saiyu Nisshi Sho [Extracts from a Diary of Western Travels], ﬁrst publishedin 1918 and included in Danchotei Nichijo [Danchotei’s Diaries]. Vol. 1. (Tokyo:
Iwanami, 1980), 7 (translation mine).
19
Takeda, “Onoto Watanna,” 81.
20
Ikuko Atsumi, ed., Yone Noguchi: Collected English Letters (Tokyo: Yone Noguchi
Society, 1975).
21Frank Arthur Putnam, Frank Putnam’s Love Lyrics (Chicago: Blakely P, 1898).
22
Atsumi, Yone Noguchi, 44.
23
Ando, “Onoto Watanna,” 596.
24
Onoto Watanna, The Wooing of Wistaria (New York: Harper, 1902).
25
Yuko Matsukawa, “Cross-Dressing and Cross-Naming: Decoding Onoto Watanna.”
Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: a Multicultural Perspective
Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks, eds. (Hanover: U P of New England,1994), 106–125.
26
Sokaku Takagi and Yujin Nakagawa, both award-winning calligraphers, graciously
took the time to provide the assessments that made this part of my analysis possible.
Both mentioned that the tempo of the writing seemed hesitant and not that of someone
who was literate in Japanese; they both noted also that it would be impossible to know
who wrote the sample Eaton copied from looking at this signature alone. When I raised
the possibility of someone other than Eaton penning this autograph, Takagi pointed outthat if Eaton went to all the effort to cross-dress, she would probably take great pleasure
in being able to write her name. I agree.
27
Noguchi’s penmanship in Japanese differs depending on what writing instrument
he uses. His hand is usually characterized by a roundness which is not present in the
Onoto Watanna autograph so most probably, it was not he who actually wrote that autograph. Samples of Noguchi’s handwriting in Japanese may be found in Gendai Nihon
Shijin Zenshu [Contemporary Japanese Poets] Vol. 3. (Tokyo: Sogensha, 1955) andMasao Hosaka and Masami Aoki, Kindai Shijin Kajin Jikihitsu Genkoshu [A Collectionof Modern Poets’ Manuscript Pages in Their Own Handwriting] (Tokyo: Tokyodo,
2002).
28
Biographical information on Gazo Foudji is available from several sources. One that
I found useful was Shincho Nihon Jinmei Jiten (Tokyo: Shincho, 1991).

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53

There are fewer sources for Genjiro Kataoka than there are for Foudji. He is listed
in Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who Was Who in American Art (Sound View, 1985), 328,
but his last name is misspelled as “Katoaka.” I am indebted to Miyako Hada for mostof this information which she shared at her presentation to the Japonisme Society, July
31, 2004. Her book which includes a discussion of Yeto, Japonizumu Shosetu no Sekai[The World of Japonisme Novels] is forthcoming from Sairyusha in 2005.
30“Onoto Watanna, the Japanese Woman Writer” Current Literature 24 (October
1897): 306.
31
“Onoto Watanna.” Book News 17 (1899): 451.
32
Robert G. Lee. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple U P, 1999), 3.
33
Birchall, Onoto Watanna, 18.
34“Notes of a Bookman” Harper’s Weekly 45 (Dec. 21, 1901): 1300.
35
Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism(Oxford: Oxford U P, 2003), 98.
36
Ibid., 98.
37“Onoto Watanna” Harper’s Weekly 47 (Dec. 5, 1903): 1959–60.
38
Yone Noguchi, The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid (Tokyo: Fuzanbo,1905), 117.
39
Marx, Edward. “A Different Mode of Speech”: Yone Noguchi In Meiji America.”
Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History. Josephine Lee, Imogene
L. Lim and Yuko Matsukawa eds. (Philadelphia: Temple U P, 2002), 302–303.
40
Yone Noguchi,“Nihon wo Utaeru Beikoku no Onna-shijin [An American Female
Poet who Sings of Japan].” Taiyo 12.2 (1906): 115 (translation mine).
41
Ibid., 116.
42
Ibid., 119 (translation mine).
43
Yone Noguchi, “Onoto Watanna and her Japanese Work” The Sun Trade Journal
13.8 (1907): 18–21; 13.10 (1907): 19–21.
44
Yone Noguchi, “Onoto Watanna” 13.8 (1907): 19.
45
Yone Noguchi, “Onoto Watanna” 13.10 (1907):19.
46
Ibid., 21.
47“Novels, Japanese and Japanned.” The Independent. 55 (June 23, 1904): 1445–46.
48
Ibid., 1445.
49
Birchall, Onoto Watanna, 92.
50
Ibid., 92.