"America," from the series Five Nations

This 1860 woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)), ink and color on paper, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.241), is a vertical ōban single sheet from Yoshimori's series Five Nations (Gokakoku), which presented Japanese viewers with stylized but carefully observed portraits of representative figures from the five treaty nations — American, English, French, Dutch, and Russian — whose nationals had recently established themselves in the Yokohama foreign settlement. The image measures 37.1 by 25.1 cm and depicts an American figure in the bright costumes and accessories that had become the visual shorthand for American visitors in the early treaty port. The Five Nations format was one of the most successful formulas of early [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e): it allowed publishers to commission a complete set of ethnographic portraits as a unified series, and the resulting ōban sheets gave Japanese audiences a portable encyclopedia of the new foreign residents. Yoshimori's contributions to the genre, alongside those of his fellow Kuniyoshi pupils Yoshikazu and Yoshitora, are among the most widely reproduced documents of the Bakumatsu visual encounter with the West. The print is signed Yoshimori ga and bears the censor's seals and publisher's marks of 1860. It entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 2005 through the Bequest of William S. Lieberman.