Foreigners in Miyozaki-chō

This woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper, dated the 11th month of 1860 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.240), is a single ōban Yokohama-e by Yoshimori depicting foreign men and women in the streets of Miyozaki-chō, the newly designated pleasure quarter of the Yokohama treaty port. The image measures 36.8 by 24.8 cm and shows the characteristic mixed architecture of the new quarter, with its Western-style frame buildings and Japanese vernacular structures, populated by foreign figures going about everyday activities. Miyozaki, established in 1859 under the same regulatory framework that governed the Yoshiwara in Edo, rapidly became one of the strangest cultural creations of the early treaty port — a Japanese pleasure quarter built explicitly to accommodate foreign residents — and Yoshimori's print belongs to the dense visual reportage that Edo publishers commissioned in late 1860 to satisfy the public appetite for images of the new foreign presence. The print is signed Yoshimori ga and bears the censor's seal of the 11th month of 1860. Lieberman, whose Yoshimori group at the Met is among the most important in the United States.