Foreigner Walking with a Pygmy Family 1863

Utagawa Yoshitsuya created this woodblock print, "Foreigner Walking with a Pygmy Family," at a time when Japan was newly opening up to the West. The image captures an encounter, filtered through a Japanese lens, with Westerners and people then called pygmies, likely from Africa. Yoshitsuya situates these figures within a hierarchy of difference. The Westerner is drawn with exaggerated height and features, a marker of his foreignness, while the figures of the "pygmy family" are rendered as caricatures, their small stature emphasized. The artist's inscription details their heights, reinforcing an emphasis on physical difference. The image thus reflects Japan’s complex negotiation of its place in a world increasingly defined by colonial encounters. The print, while seemingly documenting an ethnographic curiosity, also reveals the anxieties and fascinations that accompanied Japan's engagement with global power dynamics. It's a reminder of how cultural exchange is always inflected with the politics of identity, and how the gaze—who is looking at whom—shapes our understanding of the world.