Japanese jugglers, acrobats and top spinners in Victorian London - by Lesley Downer

Japanese acrobats at the Paris Expo 1867

When Phileas Fogg arrives in Japan, the first thing he does is to go to an ‘acrobatic performance’. There he sees the ‘butterfly trick’, where the performers make origami butterflies fly across the stage just by waving their fans. Another performer juggles lighted candles while one sends tops spinning along ‘pipe stems, sabres, wires and even hairs’ as if they have a life of their own. He watches ‘astonishing performances of acrobats and gymnasts turning on ladders, poles, balls, barrels, etc., all executed with wonderful precision.’ And he finally tracks down his lost servant, young Passepartout, underneath an entire human pyramid.

All of this makes perfect sense. In 1872, when Jules Verne was writing his Around the World in Eighty Days, westerners’ image of Japan was as a land of acrobats. Before the arrival of Japonisme the first Japanese to tickle westerners’ fancy were top-spinners, jugglers, acrobats and other performers and when westerners thought of Japanese they thought of acrobats.

'The Japanese at St Martin's Hall'

This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of circus - in April 5th 1768, when Philip Astley opened his Amphitheatre in Surrey Road, London. To celebrate I’ve been looking into the jugglers, acrobats and other performers who were the first Japanese to arrive in Victorian Britain.

For 250 years Japan had been closed to the west and Japanese had been prohibited from leaving the country under pain of death. It was only in 1866 that the prohibition was lifted and the first ‘passports’ - actually ‘letters of request’ - were issued. The idea was to enable diplomats, government officials, merchants and students to travel abroad to help develop Japan and its economy. But entertainers were also eager to apply.

'Matsui Gensui Troop of Top Spinners' 1865

Among the very first was a legendary top-spinner called Matsui Gensui. He was 43 years old and had been wowing crowds with his amazing feats for decades in Edo (now Tokyo)’s East End, around the famous Asakusa Sensoji Temple. In the traditional way the illustrious name of Matsui Gensui was handed down through the generations. He was the thirteenth to bear it. 

On December 2 1866 the Gensui troupe - seven men, two women, two boys and a girl - set sail on the British steamer Nepaul. They landed in Southampton on February 2nd 1867. On February 11th they made their debut to a packed house at St Martin’s Hall, just behind the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

The arrival of the Japanese acrobats led to one of the first Japanese crazes of the nineteenth century. Audiences filled theatres to capacity and newspapers reported extensively on their performances and daily activities.

Hayatake Torakichi performs
the ladder trick

The Times reported that ‘a company of acrobats, conjurors and jugglers have established themselves at St. Martin’s-hall where, richly habited in their native costume, they go through a set of feats. ... The children are whirled around in huge humming tops. The others walk on the slack rope and do the famous butterfly trick.’ 

The Era reported on May 5 1867 that the tight rope walker, ‘Kosakichi, in common with the rest of the Japanese does not seem to know the meaning of the word nervousness. ... He carries an umbrella in one hand and a fan in the other and grasps the rope between the first and second toe, after the manner of monkeys in general. Kosakichi rests for a time and, sitting on the rope, smiles amiably at the public while he fans himself. He recovers his position without touching the rope, and never for a moment dispenses with the umbrella.’ Then, to the shock of the audience, the cord snapped, sending Kosakichi to the ground, where he landed gracefully and dexterously on his feet. 

The troupe also performed the ladder trick, in which a man lying on his back balanced a vertical ladder on his feet. The Brighton Gazette described it: ‘A child with the greatest ease ascends to the top of the upright ladder, where he stands upon his head and again upon his feet, and with an intrepid air and serene aspect clasps his hands, amidst the greatest applause; he then continues his journey along the horizontal ladder where again his flexible manoeuvres and gyrations, at a very lofty elevation, are as surprising as they are wonderful.’

Hayatake Torakichi spinning tops

The troupe went on to tour England and performed for the royal family at Windsor Castle. Then, on May 27 1867, they left from Liverpool for the Paris Exhibition. Here they took on the new and grand title of ‘The Tycoon’s Japanese Troupe’. They must have known they’d be crossing paths - and swords - with some old friends and rivals ­- the so called ‘Japan Imperial Artistes’ Company’, fresh from the newly United States.

In 1864, when westerners were allowed in to Japan but Japanese were not yet allowed to leave, the shogun’s government gave permission for the self-styled ‘Professor’ Richard Risley and his American circus troupe to perform in Yokohama. He arrived with ten artists and eight horses. Their performances were a sensation. Many Japanese balancing artistes, jugglers, contortionists, top spinners, and conjurers came to watch and to show off their own expertise.

Amazed at what he saw, Risley had the idea of taking Japanese-style acrobatics abroad. He assembled several groups of Japanese entertainers including Hamaikari Sadakichi’s troupe, who performed tricks with their feet, Sumidagawa Namigoro’s troupe of jugglers and conjurers and Matsui Kijujiro’s top-spinning specialists. Three days after Matsui and his troupe left for London, on 5 December 1866, they set sail for San Francisco. Under the name ‘The Japan Imperial Artistes’ Company’, they performed there for several months in early 1867, then went on to New York where they performed until July, when they left for Paris.

The tumbling tubs trick - Japanese Imperial Troupe in Paris

The most celebrated member of the company was a little boy called Hamaikari Nagakichi, the only child athlete to appear abroad. The first time he performed in San Francisco, he fell from the slack wire. The audience rose to their feet, gasping in horror. The boy picked himself up and shouted, ‘Little All Right,’ which became his nickname thereafter. He was hugely popular.

The greatest acrobat of all was Hayatake Torakichi, celebrated as the last superstar ringmaster of the Edo period. He was based in Osaka but thrilled crowds across the country. Torakichi’s specialty was an act called kyokuzashi, in which he balanced long bamboo poles on his shoulders or feet while other members of the troupe performed juggling tricks or quick-change acts on top. He too was lured to San Francisco and performed there in 1867.

Frog acrobats by
Kawanabe Kyosai

Jostling for public acclaim, all these different troupe members unexpectedly found themselves in each other’s company. In New York it transpired that Hamaikari Sadakichi, the popular young leader of one of the three troupes in The Japan Imperial Artistes’ Company, had had a secret love affair with a lady shamisen player named Tou, who was part of the Sumidagawa group, another of the three. She found herself pregnant and eventually had her baby in London. The Times reported that this was the first Japanese ever to be born abroad. 

Thus it was that Japan’s first representatives on the world stage were its acrobats and stage performers.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Mikado and the Japanese Village in Victorian Knightsbridge - by Lesley Downer

‘We are gentlemen of Japan:
On many a vase and jar -
On many a screen and fan,
We figure in lively paint:
Our attitudes queer and quaint -
You’re wrong if you think it ain’t, oh!’

A hundred and thirty three years ago today, on March 14th 1885, The Mikado premiered at the Savoy Theatre in London. It was hugely successful and ran for a record 672 performances. As W.S. Gilbert wrote, he was inspired by a Japanese executioner’s sword hanging on the wall of his library. Setting the opera in distant and exotic Japan allowed him to satirise British politics and institutions by disguising them as Japanese. He was certainly not overly bothered with authenticity. As he wrote, ‘I believe the chief secret of practical success is to keep well within the understanding of the least intelligent section of the audience.’

Nevertheless he did take steps to give his opera a few Japanese elements. The Mikado really was the word used by the Japanese for their emperor and the Miya sama chorus, which Gilbert and Sullivan unashamedly filched, words and all, was the marching song of the Mikado’s troops as they advanced on Edo (soon to become Tokyo) in 1868, written by Yajiro Shinagawa, a samurai, and put to music by his geisha lover.

Gilbert also sent for a young woman from the Japanese Village which had just opened in Knightsbridge to give the Three Little Maids lessons in dance, deportment and use of the fan. He describes her as ‘a very charming young lady’ who came every day to put her charges through their steps and adds, ‘It was impossible not to be struck by the natural grace and gentle courtesy of their indefatigable little instructress, who, although she must have been very much amused by the earlier efforts of her pupils, never permitted them to see that the spectacle of three English ladies attempting for the first time a Japanese dance in Japanese dress had its ridiculous side.’ She must have taught in the Japanese way, by imitation, as she didn’t speak any English other than ‘Sixpence, please’, being a tea server, and the English actresses only knew ‘Sayonara’.

Kate Forster, Geraldine Ulmar and
Geraldine St Maur as
the Three Little Maids 1885 

It’s rather extraordinary to think that there was a Japanese Village with 100 residents in the middle of Victorian Knightsbridge. Japan had opened to the west only 27 years earlier, in 1858, when the first American consul, Townsend Harris, signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. The prohibition forbidding Japanese to leave the country under threat of execution was lifted shortly afterwards.

People soon began to take advantage of the new freedom to go abroad. The first were official delegations and diplomats, plus students and circus artists. The first Japanese performing artists arrived in England in 1867. Led by a man called Matsui Gensui, the troupe consisted of twelve Japanese jugglers - seven men, two women, two boys and a girl. ‘The children are whirled around in huge humming tops,’ reported The Times. ‘The others walk on the slack rope and do the famous butterfly trick’ (which involved making paper butterflies appear to flutter at the end of a fan). Other acrobats and jugglers quickly followed.

Meanwhile, with the end of the old order, daimyo warlords and samurai found themselves broke and took to selling their swords and other heirlooms, to be snatched up at bargain prices by western collectors. Japanese artefacts flooded the west - screens, fans, kimonos, lacquerware, blue and white porcelain, vases, curved swords, netsuke and bonsai. Japonisme became the flavour of the day and fashionable ladies disported themselves in kimono, as in James Tissot’s distinctly un-Japanese-looking 1864 La Japonaise au Bain and Monet’s 1876 La Japonaise, later to cause a scandal at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

La Japonaise, Claude Monet 

The Japanese Village opened in January 1885 in Humphrey’s Hall, a large splendid building used for exhibitions, a kind of Victorian Earls Court. It was in Knightsbridge Green, near Albert Gate, a couple of blocks from Hyde Park, around the corner from Charles Digby Harrod’s recently established Harrods’ Stores Limited and a couple of streets behind Harvey Nichols, founded some fifty years earlier in 1831 by Benjamin Harvey and James Nichols.

Humphrey’s Hall was ‘very handsome’, open, light and ‘exceedingly well ventilated,’ with a single span arched roof, a raised skylight, white marble floors and a gallery at either end.

The Village was intended to enable visitors to imagine they really were in Japan. Running down the centre was a broad street of one or two storey Japanese houses built by Japanese workmen of bamboo, wood and paper, with sliding trellis shutters and translucent paper screens, with red lanterns hanging from shingled or thatched roofs. Behind this main road were five more streets of smaller shops where there were displays of pottery, wood and ivory carving, toys, fans, cabinets, inlaid metalwork, lacquerwork, textiles and embroidery, though nothing was for sale. Painted backdrops showed distant hills and snow-capped Mount Fuji. Here Japanese in traditional dress strolled up and down and engaged in all the activities of everyday life.

Photograph of the Japanese Village
by W.S.Gilbert

Everything was done to bring the Village to life. Visitors could watch artisans at work, then take tea, served on lacquered trays by kimono clad attendants, in two teahouses equipped with chairs in deference to stiff western joints. There was a Shinto shrine and at the far end a Buddhist temple where two priests officiated, though they steered clear of any rites that might offend their hosts’ Victorian sensibilities. There was also a Japanese garden.

In a second hall, the newer part of the building, there were displays of kendo, sumo wrestling and martial arts. There were rickshaws to ride in and ‘Japanese Musical and other Entertainments’ throughout the day. Posters promised Wire Walking, Pole Balancing, Top Spinning, The Great Ladder Feat, ‘The Gayshas or Dancing Girls’, Wrestling, Sword Exercise and much else.

All this was greeted with considerable consternation in Japan. The government there wanted to present themselves as an advanced civilisation on a par with the west, that should be treated on equal terms - whereas the Japanese Village was patronised largely because westerners thought of the denizens in their quaint costumes as medieval. The hundred performers had had a hard time getting passports because they were thought to be low class travelling players, not the sort of people the Japanese government wished to represent their country in the west. The government feared the Japanese Village would bring shame on Japan. As Ito Hirobumi, who became Japan’s first prime minister that same year, 1885, put it, ‘How can they take us seriously if we dress as novelty dolls?’

The Mikado, Casternet Club Montreal, 1886

In fact the hundred were made up of all sorts of people - samurai down on their luck, metalworkers, rickshaw pullers, artisans and dancers. The mastermind behind the project, a man who went by the splendid name of Tannaker Buhicrosan, emphasised that they would not take any geisha (contrary to what was promised on the posters); they would not do anything that would tarnish the image of Japan. Nevertheless a lot of applicants were refused passports and a couple travelled illegally without passports. Some got passports allowing them to go only as far as Hong Kong and had to leave Yokohama rather quickly before they were found out. A couple got passports to Paris then crossed the Channel to London.

The Village was a huge success. Cost of entry was one shilling (sixpence for children) and it was open 11 to 10 daily. Two hundred and fifty thousand visitors passed through the gates in the first few months. But then on May 2 1885 came disaster. The Village caught fire and burnt down, destroying the hall, damaging nearby Albert Gate Mansions and killing a Japanese woodcarver. It was immediately rebuilt bigger and better. While it was being rebuilt the troupe went to Berlin. By the end of the year there was a new Japanese Village with several streets of shops where goods were offered for sale. There were also two temples, ‘various free standing idols’, a pagoda and a pool spanned by a rustic bridge. The Sun Music Hall next door had been acquired by J.C.Humphreys just before the fire and now offered ‘astounding entertainments’ by Japanese artistes.

In all over a million people visited. The Japanese Village finally closed in June 1887. As for The Mikado, that continues to delight audiences to this day and has bestowed immortality on the 1868 marching song of the Mikado’s troops.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

The poster of the Japanese Native Village is private collection. All other pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.