Nanbanesque behaviour

A nanban-themed scene in which Western figures — Portuguese or Dutch traders, or perhaps the long-nosed Iberian missionaries of the late sixteenth century — perform some social ritual that Kawakami found foreign and faintly comic. The title's coinage, treating Western manners as a behavioral category, is characteristic of his mature voice: he turned the encyclopedic curiosity of Edo namban screens into an affectionate, slightly satirical anthropology. Compositionally, prints in this vein arrange their figures in shallow, frieze-like space with no recession, the costumes (high-crowned hats, hose, balloon trousers, pipes, parasols) reduced to graphic silhouettes that the viewer reads as type before person. The carving favors clean contour over textural detail, and the printing relies on flat fields of opaque color rather than the layered transparent washes used in landscape mokuhanga. The print belongs to the long sequence of nanban subjects that defined Kawakami's contribution to [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) and circulated widely in the small-edition print culture of the 1920s and 1930s.