Foreigners Enjoying Themselves in the Gankirō

This triptych of woodblock prints, ink and color on paper, dated circa 1861 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number JP3264), is one of Yoshikazu's most celebrated Yokohama-e compositions and a vivid documentary record of the Gankirō, the licensed foreign pleasure quarter built at Yokohama in 1859 to accommodate the new foreign residents under the same regulatory framework that governed the Japanese pleasure quarters of Edo and Kyoto. The image measures 36.8 by 76.2 cm and depicts foreign men of multiple treaty nations being entertained by Japanese courtesans in the elaborate rooms of the Gankirō, with banquet trays, sake cups, musical instruments, and the dense decorative trappings of a high-end Japanese teahouse. The Gankirō was one of the strangest cultural creations of the early treaty port and rapidly became a fixture in Yokohama-e as artists explored the surreal spectacle of foreigners participating in the conventions of Japanese pleasure-quarter culture. Yoshikazu's triptych is among the earliest and most fully realized examples of the type, and it has been widely reproduced in modern scholarship as a key visual document of Bakumatsu cross-cultural encounter. The print is signed Issen Yoshikazu ga and entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 1959 as a gift from the choreographer and balletomane Lincoln Kirstein, whose collection of nineteenth-century Japanese prints is one of the foundations of the Met's Yokohama-e holdings.