page_title: Kushibiki Yumindo
section_title: Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, Omaha
hierarchical_section_title: Kushibiki Yumindo / Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, Omaha
caption_attribution_description: English: Official Views Of The World's Columbian Exposition: The Japanese Tea Garden
context_page_description: Kushibiki Yumindo, also given as Yumeto, Yumito, and Yumeno, was a Japanese impresario responsible for organizing many international exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
context_section_description: Aside from the names and dates of expositions in which they participated, there are few descriptions of what sorts of work Kushibiki and Arai actually did at the expositions they organized, but it can be surmised that they operated as independent entrepreneurial managers or contractors in a style somewhat reminiscent of Professor Risley and his so-called Imperial Japanese Troupe, or Tannaker Buhicrosan's Japanese Village at Knightsbridge, London. Kushibiki worked well with both American and Japanese associates, with excellent collaboration skills and little need for recognition. It was five years before they received any attention in the American press, but five years after that, Kushibiki was declared "undisputedly the best Japanese showman in America."
  For the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, September to December 1895, Japanese commissioner M. Fujisawa requested and received a place off the Midway for a "high class" attraction. Japan was winning the Sino-Japanese War and hoped for international recognition. But the stratagem failed. "The Japanese Village, though located in another part of the park, may be considered a part of the anthropological display of the Midway group," wrote a local historian.
  Although the Japanese exhibits at the 1897 Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition at Nashville were omitted from its official guidebook, they were at least spared the indignity of the racist depiction of the Chinese Village with its "queer creatures that are almost savages" and theater of "crude acting and dancing."
  Nor could Kushibiki attract much attention on the Midway at the Omaha Exposition in 1898, where "the German Village, the Streets of Cairo, the Temple of Palmistry, the Japanese Tea-Garden, and a hundred others, offer their various tempting delights."
caption: Chicago (1893)
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