Nanbanesque behaviour

Nanban — literally 'southern barbarian' — was the Edo-period term for Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch visitors, and the visual vocabulary their presence generated (long-nosed Europeans, ruffled collars, galleons, religious imagery) became one of Kawakami's signature subjects. The numbered title indicates this print belongs to an extended series in which he treated nanban iconography as a sustained creative exercise. The image likely depicts costumed Europeans in exaggerated period dress, drawn with the flat patterning and graphic contour line characteristic of his work. Kawakami's interest was not historical reconstruction but aesthetic affinity: the anonymous Edo woodcarvers' simplified, emblematic depictions of foreigners suited his own preference for flat color and decorative pattern over volumetric realism. This connection to nanban folk imagery, produced largely by unnamed artisans rather than the established [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) schools, placed Kawakami outside the central [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) lineage that ran through Koshiro Onchi's lyrical abstraction toward modernist refinement.