Nambanesque Behavior

"Nambanesque Behavior," from 1955, mounted as a hanging scroll, extends Kawakami's investigation of nanban (Southern Barbarian) culture — the term used in Japan for the Portuguese and Spanish traders and missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — by presenting behavioral rather than narrative subjects. "Nambanesque" suggests the fusion of Japanese and Western manners that characterized the hybrid culture of the trading ports, neither purely Japanese nor purely foreign but something in between. The hanging scroll format gives the work a formal presentation appropriate to its meditation on cultural mixing.