Russians Strolling

This February 1861 woodblock print (nishiki-e) in ōban format, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number JP3322), depicts a group of Russians walking together in the newly opened treaty port of Yokohama. The print belongs to the Yokohama-e (横浜絵) tradition, the brief but intense vogue of 1860 and 1861 for prints depicting the foreign traders, sailors, diplomats, and their families who had arrived in Yokohama after the opening of Japan in 1859. Utagawa Yoshifuji was one of the leading Yokohama-e designers of the period, working alongside his teacher Kuniyoshi's other pupils to satisfy Edo audiences' enormous appetite for prints documenting the appearance, costume, customs, and technology of the Western newcomers. Russia, whose interests in Japan dated back to the late eighteenth century and whose envoy Yevfimy Putyatin had negotiated the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855, was one of the five nations granted treaty-port access in the Ansei Treaties of 1858. Russians at Yokohama were therefore a distinctive and identifiable foreign community in the early Meiji decades. The print measures approximately 14 by 9.5 inches and is part of the Metropolitan Museum's substantial Yokohama-e holdings, a documentary record of one of the most consequential cultural encounters in modern Japanese history. The sheet is held in the Met's Asian Art collection.