It Would Be Fair to Say That Monet Was No Fan of Japanese Art

Gallery 208, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston. In this room hangs Claude Monet's 1876 painting La Japonaise. Contrary to its title, there is no Japanese woman in it: the painting depicts Camille Monet, the painter's wife, wearing a sumptuous kimono. She's twisted toward the viewer/portraitist in a classic feminine pose, cribbed from the Japanese ukiyo-e prints then popular in France at that moment, property up a Japanese-style folding fan in blue, white and red (the colours of the French tricolour flag) in front of a backdrop featuring many more Japanese fans. The gallery guide informs u.s. that the 'naturally dark-haired' Camille is besides wearing a blonde wig, 'to emphasize her Western identity'. In effect, the painting reflects the peak of Japonisme in nineteenth-century France, so excessively that some critics claim it was meant as a parody of the French obsession with Nihon.Footnote ⁱ Turned in two directions, Camille faces back toward the future viewer, or the former creative person, poised at the apex of a craze, grinning with self-possession at both her husband, the artist who will later disavow his piece of work as une saleté ('a piece of filth') and at generations of gallery visitors. By summertime 2015, Camille's painted image was smiling down at an unruly oversupply – some of whom were precisely copying her pose and affect in a replica of her red kimono, while others were vigorously denouncing the painting, the re-enactors and the museum that housed them all.Footnote ^two

La Japonaise'south latest controversy began on 24 June 2015, the starting time night of the MFA's summer plan, Kimono Wednesdays. Visitors on open-late, pay-what-you-can Wednesdays were invited to try on replicas of the kimono Camille wears in La Japonaise and mind to a curt gallery talk entitled 'Claude Monet: Flirting with the Exotic'.Footnote ³ In addition to patrons trying on the heavily embroidered and padded kimono and posing for pictures, 3 protesters stationed themselves in the gallery, holding hand-lettered signs made of plainly printer paper with messages about orientalism, exotification and racism. That showtime Kimono Wednesday coincided with the retirement festivities of the museum manager, Malcolm Rogers, who, when asked by a Boston Earth reporter nigh the protesters, declared, 'a little controversy never did any harm'.Footnote ^four

Over the next two weeks, however, the protesters named themselves 'Stand against Yellowface' in a Tumblr business relationship and Facebook page (changed a couple of weeks later to 'Decolonize Our Museums', which they oftentimes abbreviated to 'DOM'), publicized a 'list of charges and demands' and chosen hashtags, and began garnering pregnant media attention, especially in the realms of Asian American activism, art criticism and Boston-area and Japanese-centric news. Having initially refused Stand up confronting Yellowface's need that they stop allowing visitors to try on the kimono, the MFA capitulated, although they continued displaying the kimono for visitors to bear on and examine for the remainder of the program's scheduled six weeks. Past week three, every bit the numbers of protesters crept up (only three the first calendar week, then five, and then a dozen and later upwards to 20 or and then), counterprotesters too began to appear: mostly older, more often than not Japanese and Japanese American, and many wearing kimono (encounter Fig. i).Footnote ^five Two camps emerged: DOM protesters told reporters that the MFA was 'perpetuating Orientalism. They don't requite any context. They're similar, endeavor this on, and that'due south information technology. That's non the manner to exercise information technology'.Footnote ⁶ The MFA insisted, 'We don't think this is racist', in a memo patently intended simply for staff.Footnote ⁷ Counterprotesters concurred with the museum, presenting signs with letters such as, 'I welcome museum exhibits that share Japanese civilisation with the community', head to head with DOM signs bearing letters such as, 'THIS IS RACIST. THIS IS APPROPRIATION. THIS IS ORIENTALISM'. Jiro Usui, the deputy delegate general of Japan, in Boston told the Boston Earth, 'We actually exercise non quite understand what their point of protest is. We tried to heed to those people who are protesting, but we think together with the MFA we should encourage that Japanese civilization be appreciated in a positive way'.Footnote ⁸

Fig. one (Color online) Counterprotesters (left to right: Ashley Lehane, Ara Mahar, Timothy Nagaoka, Ikuko Burns) in front of La Japonaise on 15 July 2015. Photograph by Keiko Kawabe.

The plot thickened yet again with the revelation that the MFA'south two replica kimono had actually been donated to the museum by NHK, the Japanese national broadcasting company, afterwards they had been made and used for an identical dress-up programme in Japan during La Japonaise'due south tour of art museums there during 2014–fifteen every bit role of an exhibition chosen 'Looking Eastward: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan'. NHK'southward kimono, one larger and one more child-size, had been painstakingly constructed by the costume shop of the Takarazuka all-women musical revue company in Kyoto, the traditional eye of kimono design and industry.Footnote ⁹ While the painting was on display at the Nagoya Art Museum, fans and even a blonde wig were provided for guests to try on along with the kimono. Special gift toys and stationery of cartoon bear mascot Rilakkuma as La Japonaise were released. Somehow, however, in its transoceanic return to Boston, La Japonaise picked upward wild new stakes and the souvenir of kabuki kimono fabricated by the women's revue company became the star of an entirely new drama.

I was riveted past the kimono protests from the moment I heard about them after the showtime or 2nd effect. Like many of the counterprotesters, I accept spent a lot of time wearing kimono in Boston as a student of Japanese tea (and equally a vesture enthusiast). Although I am not of Japanese descent, I lived in Japan for three years, in two different stints; from 2012–13 I spent ane year in a tea-training program in Kyoto where I wore kimono equally a sort of school uniform every weekday and many weekends. And yet, like many of the protesters, I identify as Asian American, and moreover I am accustomed to existence on the side of the protest for cultural sensitivity and against the institution. Finally, as a operation scholar and theorist with research specialities in both Japan and clothing, I idea that operation studies ought to have something to add together to the argue around the kimono protests. After all, no one had protested the display of La Japonaise in the museum; information technology seemed to be the activeness of physically trying on the kimono that protesters identified as fundamentally different, as orientalist, racist appropriation. The introduction of replica kimono and the attempt-on activity appeared to reactivate the orientalist heritage that had lain fallow in the museum all along. I wondered whether there was significance to the act – the performance – of putting oneself in the orientalist frame? Practice trying-on and posing and moving-picture show-taking – the bodily run across with the kimono, in brusk – constitute a unlike kind of doing than the embodied deed of looking? The protesters in Gallery 208 certainly seemed to think so and so did counterprotesters who hailed the upshot as a way to appreciate and share Japanese culture (not necessarily European art history) with the public.

Although cross-cultural representation and 'cultural exchange' are hot issues in contemporary discourse, both pop and academic US discussions seem to repeatedly stall in a binary, but and alliteratively summed up as 'appropriation' and 'appreciation'. Headlines regarding movie casting, Halloween costumes, fashion shows and (in May 2018 equally I edited this article) a white Utah high-school student's qipao-/cheongsam-style vintage prom clothes each kick up their own wake of defences and condemnations, but conclusions rarely seem to sally when the dust settles. Nigh of the general coverage of the kimono protests controversy fell into just such a familiar plot. The museum presented its Kimono Wednesdays programme as a fun, 'flirty' appreciation of a famous slice of art and (presumably) Japanese culture; counterprotesters and many news outlets in Nippon agreed. Decolonize Our Museums, however, paraphrases the MFA stance and replies to information technology in its FAQ catechism:

e. This is appreciation, non appropriation.

The manner this programming was framed and curated makes it appropriation, not appreciation.Footnote ^x

Equally if there were only two mutually exclusive sides to this kimono.

In this commodity, I utilize the kimono as a jumping-off bespeak to call back through some issues of contemporary cross-cultural performance, trying to clear the current stakes of 'cultural cribbing' – in part through a brief history of kimono and its international, transcultural influences over time – and to think through the ramifications of current conceptions of appropriation, cultural capital letter and their differing valences within and beyond the United states. At stake in my attempt to parse the currents and cantankerous-currents of debate in the kimono protests are the loaded terms 'orientalism', 'exotification' and 'racism', all filtered through my ain indicate of view, which favours approaches sensitive to discourses of 'performance', 'performativity' and 'theatricality'. The kimono protests, while never all that big, and never all that controversial, however institute an of import scene wherein we can examine the collision of multiple forms of politically charged performance: cultural appropriation, racial identity, transnational 'exchange' and anti-theatricality. Further, I argue that information technology is precisely on the basis of the 'non-that-serious' that performance scholars need to intervene: our 'objects' of written report (performance, theatre, representation) tend to teeter ambivalently between attributions of deep significance (political, psychological, social) and apparent triviality (mere entertainment, imaginary, clothes-upwards, capitalism). It is peradventure precisely at the level of the seemingly frivolous that we tin begin to hammer out more nuanced overtures to intercultural reconciliation and agreement.

In a July 2015 post about the kimono protests on Oxford Academy's Practical Ethics weblog, UK-based ethicist Kei Hiruta observed that

the wrongness of Orientalism is considered so self-evident that those commenting on 'Kimono Wednesdays' have largely focused on whether the event is Orientalist, sidestepping harder questions equally to specifically what is wrong if the effect is Orientalist and (assuming, for the moment, that information technology is indeed Orientalist) whether the wrongness of Orientalism should override other considerations.Footnote ^eleven

Hiruta's caveat obliquely references the ways in which contemporary culture treats certain concepts every bit settled: orientalism, every bit a species of racism (just like appropriation) is 'bad' – we have, of class, known that ever since 1978 when the eponymous book by Edward Said came out. Past starting back earlier the settledness of orientalism's 'self-evident' badness, Hiruta's invitation entails re-evaluating whatever simplistic assumptions we may be making nigh the immanence of culture's meanings and messages, especially equally information technology traverses national boundaries, generations, institutions and individual bodies. Similarly, in a 2014 article in The Atlantic, manner scholar Minh-Ha T. Pham demonstrates how orthodox discussions of appropriation tin obscure the agency, inventiveness and acquisitive deportment of the originators of the cultural objects then 'appropriated' past Western (white) cultural arbitrators. Using a contemporary example of the plaid plastic carrier bag, globally synonymous with internal and external refugees, immigrants and poor people, remade every bit loftier fashion satchels, Pham notes that the appropriation/appreciation binary predetermines the terms of every debate by foreclosing the specifics. The anti-appropriation camp reify a binary carve up between passive victims and Western thieves and thus 'preserve the hierarchical relations between the fashion manufacture and the cultures being appropriated'.Footnote ¹²

Pham proposes one way to get past the stultifying binary of appropriation/appreciation in fashion criticism is to 'engage in an "inappropriate" discourse, one that reframes the debate to include all the things that are not carried over when white Western creators swipe from elsewhere'. In my reading of Pham, an inappropriate soapbox need not forestall noting an ethical wrongness in the 'appropriative' activity in question, but rather, in refusing to reduce individual cases to the construct of the thief–victim dyad, restores the context, detail, history and complex considerations which tend to be foreclosed in binary correct/wrong discussions and which, I contend, are most important in forging long-term solutions to the bug of cultural exchange and hybridization.

To add to Pham's proposal, I suggest we also consider inappropriation – actions, behaviours, and performances as themselves contributing to 'inappropriate discourse'. The kimono protests in Boston in 2015 furnish a particularly rich and complicated instance of inappropriation. The common sense of 'orientalism is bad' collided spectacularly with the mutual sense of 'sharing culture is skillful', amply demonstrating the importance of Hiruta's and Pham's reminders that seemingly obvious upstanding dicta can obscure more than they illuminate. Where Hiruta uses the keyword 'orientalism' to anchor his word, and Pham uses 'appropriation', I volition be attempting to work back and forth betwixt both those terms. In defence of what may seem like an irresponsible elision, I desire to recall the DOM protestation sign that pithily summed upwardly the imbrication of these terms as if they were interchangeable: 'THIS IS RACIST. THIS IS APPROPRIATION. THIS IS ORIENTALISM'. Our inappropriate task, then, will be to articulate these tangled and elided terms and claims by restoring the particular and information stripped away by protesters and museum alike. In this article, I want to take up Hiruta'south and Pham's invitations past starting with the thing itself: the kimono.

Some 'thing to wear'

What is Japanese about the kimono? Perhaps its very simplicity – rectangular sleeves and overlapping front panels – helps the kimono to function every bit an unmistakable symbol of Japaneseness. Surely the transliterated name from Japanese into English pronunciation ('kuh-MO-no' or even 'kimona') maintains some of that exoticism too, even when the specific details of the garment so denoted depart wildly from standard Japanese constructions. I call back we tin can safely say that kimono – the word and the garment – always connotes some degree of Japaneseness, exist information technology the physical country or the fantasy orientalist 'Japan of Pure Invention' (as Oscar Wilde put it). We might, and then, consider the kimono a 'scriptive thing', a term coined by Robin Bernstein to depict a thing which, 'like a play script, broadly structures a performance while simultaneously allowing for resistance and unleashing original, alive variations that may not be individually predictable'.Footnote ¹³ The MFA's ii kimono, for case, clearly denoted some sort of Japanese essence so that both proponents and opponents identified every embodied encounter with it as some sort of performance of Japaneseness (either equally 'cultural exchange' or mockery or orientalist fantasy). Camille Monet's experience with Monet's kimono was Japanese enough to warrant the naming of the painting of her and information technology 'La Japonaise' – equally if donning information technology performatively turned the French woman Japanese. This, information technology is worth noting in passing, was not an isolated slippage – many European paintings of women in kimono refer to Japanese women, when they clearly present renderings of models with phenotypically European features wearing imported Asian habiliment.Footnote ¹⁴ When it comes to artistic representation, it is difficult to articulate where to locate the transgression between European and Asian: in a joke about 'dressing up' and pretending, or in the creative person'southward intention despite lacking skill in portrayal or access to an actual Asian model, or some other inchoate place between material thing, homo body and artistic object. Whether one imagines the transformative power of the kimono as firmly limited to the theatrical realm of costume and fantasy or not, the kimono remains an overdetermined object, symbolic and concrete medium of the pleasures and pitfalls of cantankerous-cultural commutation in our contemporary post-colonial, globalized paradigm.

'Kimono', though, for all its ancient, archetypical connotations, is a fairly contempo invention. The word 'kimono' ways literally 'a thing to wear' (着物) and information technology came into mutual parlance in Japan during the same flow that it entered foreign languages such as English language: in the second half of the nineteenth century, after two and a one-half centuries of stringently policed political isolation in Nippon was forcibly ended by Matthew Perry and the United States Navy in 1853.Footnote ^xv Prior to the new influx of foreigners and the post-1868 official Japanese embrace of strange influence over all aspects of Japanese society, there had been no need for a take hold of-all give-and-take to describe Japanese typical wearing apparel. The emperor inverse his clothes from traditional majestic court clothes to a Western-mode military machine uniform in 1872, in conjunction with an official annunciation instructing others to practice the same, and the empress permanently inverse to European dress in 1886. Only in this new milieu of foreign import and international exchange would Japanese native dress be binarily understood as forming a unity distinct from strange-import clothing styles. The words wafuku (和服) and yōfuku (洋服) for 'Japanese dress' and 'foreign dress' were invented.Footnote ^xvi Equally more and more members of the population adopted more than and more articles of Western dress (military uniforms were some of the primeval, and so ceremonious service uniforms, men'southward apparel, school uniforms and, much more slowly, women'southward everyday dress and uniforms), wafuku rapidly took on new and different meanings. The wide variety of wafuku forms that had reflected course and caste distinctions, uniforms for labour and specialized clothing for sure activities, began to exist subsumed into a more than generalized, atypical kimono style (most iconic of the samurai) that was representative not of all those granular distinctions amongst different people, but rather of a generalized Japaneseness.Footnote ¹⁷ This national sense of identity had not existed with much distinction until at that place was a present and insistent not-Japanese to catalyse it, and an influx of new things, practices and people to be designated equally yo (洋 foreign, ocean) to the Japanese wa (和 Japanese, harmony).

In other work, I have examined more extensively the circumstances by which the change to yōfuku occurred, but for our purposes, it suffices to note that, by the late twentieth century, kimono had get a highly rarified, formalism dress.Footnote ¹⁸ Even (or especially) as the kimono has fallen out of everyday use and become a highly specialized, generally formal or archaic garment, its mystique as a quintessential keepsake of Japaneseness seems to have grown. Stringent hierarchies of formality and ceremoniousness and unabridged schools defended to learning how to dress oneself have sprung upward, 'preserving' the traditional kimono in the mummifying manner of salve anthropology – helping to kill its object nether the guise of documenting information technology.Footnote ^nineteen Kimono in Japan is now largely worn only on specific holidays and ceremonial occasions similar weddings, funerals and coming-of-age 24-hour interval or by people with specific jobs: geisha and other traditional entertainers, tea anniversary practitioners and some traditional innkeepers. Today, the vast majority of Japanese people hire dressers or get to rental studios if they need or desire to wear kimono, both because it takes expertise to wrap and necktie the kimono and also because the standards of 'proper' clothing accept become more and more stringent as it has retreated from everyday apply.Footnote ²⁰

Despite their modern status as the quintessence of Japaneseness, kimono are fundamentally international, beyond the fact that the give-and-take coalesced around the germ of foreign influence. Like innumerable other aspects of Japanese culture, the prototype for the range of garments now collectively chosen kimono came from Chinese influences, although they accept grown over the centuries into unique styles.Footnote ²¹ In the sixteenth century, the first straight contact between Japan and European mariners, primarily Dutch merchants and Portuguese missionaries, brought new influences in design motifs and colours to Japanese fashion also as some fashionable new accessories, similar rosaries, as documented in early depictions of Izumo no Okuni, the woman to whom the invention of kabuki is attributed.Footnote ²²

When Japan re-embraced the rest of the world in the mid-nineteenth century, it took time to change apparel permanently to yōfuku, since tailoring Western-style clothes was a specialized skill that took fourth dimension to larn and favoured yōfuku fabrics (especially wool) were rare in Japan. Nineteenth-century Western women'due south dress was especially expensive and complicated to brand and clothing – exactly the problem most people have at present with kimono.Footnote ²³ Further, a gendered bifurcation between 'public' and 'private' duties (in that men were tasked with presenting a modern confront to the rest of the earth and women were deemed responsible for the private, domestic work of ryosai kenbo ('good wives and wise mothers')) also affected the kimono's fortunes: wafuku was associated with individual life, while yōfuku played an important role in Japan'due south bid for international political equality through appearances. Meanwhile, other aspects of vesture inverse more than apace: aniline (synthetic) dyes (invented in Britain in the 1850s equally a by-production of attempts to synthesize quinine) rapidly made their fashion into Japanese product of fabric also every bit ink for woodblock prints and the broad surfaces of the kimono and juban (under-kimono) proved a ready canvas for additional appointment with the outside world. Just equally visual artists chop-chop invented a pop new genre of woodblock print: the Yokohama-due east and kaika-due east (pictures of foreigners doing foreign things and pictures of new 'enlightenment' things like locomotives, clothes, architecture then on), textile designers and manufacturers adopted the same visual influences into stylish new kimono that incorporated images of new items and influences rather than directly reproducing them.

Mayhap my favourite instance of these cocky-consciously international kimono was created in honor of President U. Due south. Grant'southward 1879 visit to Japan. This visit, the first time an American (onetime) president visited the country, was hugely celebrated in Japan with processions, events and a full social schedule. At a special functioning for President and Mrs Grant, a group of Tokyo geisha danced in specially designed stars and stripes costumes (see Fig. 2).Footnote ²⁴ Clara Whitney, an American missionary'due south daughter who was in attendance, described in her diary

a street scene in Tokyo, all illuminated by lanterns with flags … a line of girls, dancing every bit they came, advanced simultaneously from the door of either vestibule, waving their fair hands and keeping time with sandaled anxiety. What made the claret rush with a thrill through the hearts of the Americans? What in the appearance of these girls made thousands of sweet memories and patriotic thoughts arise in our minds? Ah, the old flag, the glorious Stars and Stripes! … Each girl was dressed in a robe fabricated of the dearest erstwhile Stars and Stripes, while upon their heads shone a circlet of silver stars. Information technology fabricated the prettiest costume imaginable. The stripes constituted the over-robe itself while one sleeve slipped off from one shoulder revealed a sleeve of stars below, their girdles were dark blue, sandals, carmine and white, and presently they took out fans having on one side the American and upon the other the national flag.Footnote ²⁵

Fig. ii (Colour online) Stars-and-stripes geisha from The Life of President Grant in Japanese (Gurando-shi den wabunshō, 1879) past Utagawa (Baidō) Kokunimasa. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mary Griggs Shush Collection, Gift of the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, 2015.

We could look at the stars-and-stripes kimono and other mod and international motifs as a contrasting strategy to adopting yōfuku, one which cannily preserved a sense of selfhood while gesturing to the new dominant paradigm of 'modernization' and Westernization. Of course, shifting motifs was faster and easier than changing the entire infrastructure of dress manufacture (a process that was not completed until roughly the 1950s), just this specific kimono adaptation can likewise exist seen as a strategy of 'domestication' of foreign influences. Most importantly, in surveying the period since the 1850s, we should note that Japanese sartorial strategies, like the stars-and-stripes kimono no less than the origin of the kimono, do not break down into a bang-up binary between 'indigenous' kimono and foreign dress, simply rather are always constituted in imbrication with each other inside and beyond the boundaries of the Japanese archipelago.

In fact, during the early on twentieth century, imperial Japan weaponized the recently cemented Japanese essence of kimono in their Asian colonies. In a precise inversion of the Meiji makeover bid to gain Western-style imperial power by ways of 'dressing the part', by the 1930s, occupiers, particularly in Taiwan and Korea, were encouraging local women to prefer kimono as a ways to inculcate a sense of Asian racial unity that simultaneously demonstrated Japanese cultural supremacy. In her piece of work on the utilize of kimono in colonial contexts, Rie Mori posits that it was precisely the essentialist associations that Japonist Europeans had established betwixt Japanese women and kimono that were in turn seized upon by Japanese occupiers in Asian colonies to further their goals of 'greater E Asian co-prosperity' nether Japanese leadership.Footnote ²⁶

Nippon'due south sartorial practice on both sides of the royal power dynamic is particularly instructive as nosotros turn back to the kimono of the MFA kimono protests: in a distinct departure from the typical Said construction of orientalism's active Western appropriator and passive, feminine oriental appropriated object, we could also conceive of kimono propagation as a Japanese strategy of 'soft power' which may indeed be traced all the way back to Japan's agile participation in the belatedly nineteenth century's world fairs and expos – including the ane that facilitated Claude Monet's purchase of a ruby-red kimono in 1876. Japan'southward active support of export activities does not, however, touch on whether Europeans and North Americans were simultaneously revelling in orientalist and exoticizing attitudes under the banner of 'Japonisme'. Equally a simple Google search for 'Japonisme' or a plough through the late nineteenth-century wing of a European fine art museum shows, kimono proved to be a particularly popular and evocative export item and remains a fraught symbol of the promise and perils of intercultural commutation.

Key to the kimono's status as a particularly overdetermined orientalist thing is the fact that you put it on. The kimono, equally an detail of vesture, comes to have meaning via the intertwined valences of body, garment and actions taken, none of which are effaced in the combination – which is to say, the meaning of kimono is constituted through performance. For example, the perceived appearance (such as gender and race) of the torso wearing the kimono (and how the kimono itself looks and seems) and what those clothed bodies do matter hugely to how the body and the kimono come to mean. It is a patent tenet of orientalism that such collective rules of the interpretation of bodies and culture cut both means. Where a white body in a kimono may read as stylish, louche and bohemian (or alternatively – and increasingly – crassly colonial and oppressive), the Asian body in the kimono may be simply as limited to a sense of naturalized exoticism, romantic atavism and fetishization.Footnote ²⁷

Both attitudes – disproportionately gendered feminine – are on display in La Japonaise. Mary Mathews Gedo catalogues a range of responses to the painting in 1876: while many enjoyed it, several critics declared Camille's attitude, and especially the placement of the grapheme (holding an unsheathed sword) depicted on the kimono, to be obscene. Ane critic described La Japonaise as showing 'a Chinese [sic] in a red robe who has two heads; ane of a demi-mondaine on the shoulders, some other of a monster, placed – we do not dare to say where'.Footnote ²⁸ However, La Japonaise seems scarcely erotic considering how lilliputian female person flesh is on brandish in contrast to other Japonist paintings, which exploited the conflation of Japanese exotic dress with exoticized flesh, such as Tissot'south 1864 Japanese Girl Bathing and/or the imported kimono's clan with déshabille among European women.Footnote ²⁹ The critics' propensity to label even a portrait of Monet's very covered-up married woman a 'Chinese demi-mondaine' due to her being enveloped in a red kimono accents the strength of the kimono'south scriptive power to attribute exoticized sexuality to its wearer.

Further, Camille'due south kimono (equally well as many of the other kimono depicted in nineteenth-century Japonist paintings) was not an 'ordinary' kimono, but uchikake. Today uchikake are generally but worn by brides at weddings and kabuki actors onstage. The motifs on Camille'due south kimono indicate it was a kabuki costume, something that long-time Japonophile Monet himself knew, including the fact that all kabuki actors were men.Footnote ^thirty This means that MFA visitors were 'learning Japanese culture' past pretending to be a French woman pretending to be a Japanese adult female by wearing a replica of a theatrical costume meant to be worn by an onnagata – a male player of women's roles – who had himself been pretending to be a Japanese woman, likely a courtesan character. That is, at that place are no Japanese women physically nowadays at all, in a controversy centered on a painting named La Japonaise.

Does it matter that both the kimono in the painting and its replicas were theatre costumes all along? That museum visitors had been invited to 'channel their inner Camille Monet' not 'inner Japanese adult female'? That the painting itself may exist a parody? What are we to make of the performative power and history that the kimono seems to take been ascribed by both the protesters in 2015 and the Euro-American Japonist painters who ascribed Japanese identity to so many of the subjects in their paintings? What, then, does putting on a kimono do? In the remainder of this article, I will revisit the indicate–counterpoint of the swirl of argument that surrounded the kimono in Gallery 208 in 2015 to forge a path across the binary of appreciation–appropriation. In general, nosotros will see that protesters tended to adopt a fundamentally antitheatrical ethical stance while opponents (especially Japanese interlocutors who had varying amounts of exposure to the details of what was happening on the footing in Boston) tended to identify a different sort of cultural power in the performative proliferation of the kimono, one for which nosotros have already seen historical precedence. In threading our way through these opposing camps, I will endeavour to lay out a basis programme for addressing these thorny problems of representation through the definition of what I call a theatrical ethic of inappropriation.

Protesters

Simply every bit Monet had named his painting of his French married woman La Japonaise, many critics of Kimono Wednesdays, both online and in person, identified the act of putting on a kimono as an act of performatively turning Japanese – either in mockery, as a costume or clothes-upwards, or (mayhap?) seriously. For instance, a comment beneath the original MFA publicity photo for Kimono Wednesdays on Facebook (featuring a young, obviously white woman, copying the pose in La Japonaise behind her) declared, 'This is honestly one of the near vilely racist things I've ever seen. White folks wanting to play dress up and feel Japanese? Delight, don't'.Footnote ³¹ Although we have already established that indeed the MFA's invitation was much closer to inviting 'folks' to dress upwards as a French adult female dressing upwards to merely perchance feel Japanese, this comment exemplifies the typical disapproving reaction.

More than complicated was the mental attitude encapsulated by a sign from the second protest: 'The MFA is all about cultural experiences. Try on the kimono [in stereotypical 'oriental' font] Larn what it's similar to be a racist imperialist !!! TODAY !!!' Offset of all, I desire to affirm that one does non have to try on a kimono to learn what it is like to be a racist imperialist; the sign suggests that there is a key divergence between trying on the kimono and looking at the painting it is copied from. No ane, think, was protesting the painting hanging in Gallery 208 until there was the selection to try on a kimono in front of it. The sign implicitly suggests, then, that you learn racist imperialism when yous practise it in performance, rather than by looking at information technology, or living and breathing in a society founded and foundered on racist imperialism. Indeed, nigh defenders of the program did non feel a sense of racist imperialism at all when they tried on the kimono, which, if y'all tin can learn anything past not feeling it, is probably exactly how well-nigh racist imperialists feel well-nigh their racism and imperialism.

Or perhaps there is a departure betwixt 'putting on', which is what I wrote, and 'trying on', which is what the sign actually claimed would teach you what information technology is like to be a racist imperialist. How many ways are in that location to put on a kimono? And what factors make up one's mind the status of an action? Here the protesters seemed to be repeating as tragedy what the Monet painting had enacted every bit parody, revealing a slippage between performativity and theatricality: does trying on the kimono performatively make yous a racist imperialist? Or only brand you like one? And strangely, here it is the playful theatricality of 'dress-up' in kimono that performatively turns the museum guest into a racist imperialist, non (presumably) whatever a serious putting on of clothes entails. While, of course, presuming that one was not e'er already a racist imperialist before doing the donning. For instance, consonant with the Facebook commenter who institute Kimono Wednesdays 'one of the almost vilely racist things [she'd] ever seen', 1 of the hashtags called past the DOM protesters was #whitesupremacykills. 'White supremacy kills' is not a controversial claim in disquisitional race studies. However, here is how it played out on Twitter: up until 24 June 2015, #whitesupremacykills was beingness used in conjunction with the Charleston shooting (one week earlier, 17 June 2015), in which, yep, a twenty-year-onetime white supremacist named Dylann Roof carried out a mass shooting, murdering nine black people inside a church building in Due south Carolina. Suddenly, the feed changed to pictures of people in a fancy art museum with a gorgeous ruddy silk kimono.

The juxtaposition jars, but clearly, by this bespeak for protesters, the kimono in the gallery had taken on sins far greater than Claude Monet'due south ambivalent relationship with Japonisme: 'I have been assaulted, raped, harassed, and stalked, denied my humanity, and you don't want to think about me because I'm just another JAPanese woman', declared 1 sign.Footnote ³² Indeed, an injured minority subjectivity began to adhere to the kimono itself when DOM co-founder, Pampi, tweeted, '.@MFABoston didn't rly cancel. Kimono all the same on display to be felt it [sic] upwards nether creepy Orientalist gaze n touch'. In another tweet, Pampi makes her perceived elision clearer: 'touching kimono due west/o adequate curation condones nonconsensual touch and worse on feminine asian and othered ppl'.Footnote ³³

Plenty of critics argued that claims similar these reveal an inability to distinguish between 'serious' and 'piddling' concerns, that DOM comprise a variety of those college 'snowflakes' unable to deal with the quotidian vagaries of modernistic life.Footnote ³⁴ Even so, we could also clear this situation equally an antitheatricalist problem. As is oftentimes worth recalling, antitheatricalists do not underestimate the ability of theatre, merely rather they tend to accredit smashing performative import to 'theatrical' acts; Plato's declaration in The Republic that i must not imitate the inferior things for fearfulness of condign like them probably remains the premier case of this attitude. For the kimono protesters, trying on the kimono could not be simply for fun – over and over the disapproving identified putting on kimono every bit an attempt at somehow 'turning Japanese' – with the result, plainly, of really becoming, or becoming like, a 'racist orientalist'. The mercurial oscillation of operation'southward mattering or not mattering (we might proper name this 'theatricality'), the possibility that people try on kimono with different intentions and come abroad with different experiences, even the possibility that non-white, non-American museum patrons might desire to endeavour the kimono were all discounted in DOM's antitheatricalist stance.

DOM clashed with the majority in their insistence on the deep importance of this grade of play confronting the majority stance of low-cal fun and pleasantly entertaining cultural appreciation (or indeed, even if ane thought the action inappropriate, those who discounted it as unimportant or trivially incorrect would also be beyond the orbit of DOM concerns). The link between orientalizing and exoticized images of Asian and Asianized women (like La Japonaise) and the persistent fetishization of Asian women in the US is undeniable, and yet it remains a struggle to determine how exactly to evaluate the inchoate effects of imagery as textile amercement to individual psyches or as effecting prejudices against certain groups. DOM'southward tactics attested to the enmeshed nature of want and oppression, violence and amusement, but sometimes at the expense of equating, or fifty-fifty replacing, racially motivated mass murder with museum dress-up kimono. The theatre costume store replica of a nineteenth-century theatre costume had itself, it seems, been hyper-exoticized by the protesters who imbued information technology not simply with an ontological Japaneseness which it seemingly unfailingly transferred to wearers, but as well with a sense of its ain vulnerable (indeed traumatized) subjectivity.

Counterprotesters

Meanwhile, the counterprotester Timothy Nagaoka asked,

Isn't it stereotyping on the protesters' role to say that kimono represents Nippon and to put then much weight into but wearing a kimono? For a Japanese person, kimono is simply clothing, and there's actually zilch sacred to it. And I feel it's the protesters who placed the kimono up on a pedestal.Footnote ³⁵

Amber Ying, a founder and principal spokesperson for DOM, described the crux of their protest as 'who speaks for whom' amidst institutions and communities – just this is also precisely the point upon which many counterprotesters and opponents centred their responses. Both sides' shared agreement on the essential 'Japaneseness' of the kimono and the distillation of the try-on activity downward to some form of 'turning Japanese' helped to ensure that the ethnic origins of protesters seemed salient to many observing the protests unfold. Ying and her co-founder Pampi are Chinese American and Indian American, respectively, and very few protesters claimed to be Japanese or Japanese American.Footnote ³⁶ While it seems that there was at least one protester of Japanese descent present at at least i protestation, Japanese expatriates and Japanese Americans primarily appeared on the side of the counterprotests. Several Japanese news outlets picked upward the story, with the most outlandish even suggesting that strange provocateurs (meaning Chinese spies) were attempting to derail Kimono Wednesdays out of anti-Japanese prejudice.Footnote ³⁷

Japanese and Japanese American counterprotesters' claims almost sharing civilization and the positive appreciation of Japaneseness did non necessarily discount the power of representation. Rather, they located a dissimilar power of Japanese desirability in the proliferation of images of Japaneseness. Indeed, even far more than questionable imitations of Japan are generally approved past Japanese observers, as a brief survey of recent kimono-appropriation controversies confirms. I Japanese YouTube vlogger documents young people on the street in Tokyo being shown Katy Perry's eye-shattering neon-orientalist qipao-kimono mashup outfit, scenography and back-up dancers at the 2013 American Music Awards prove.Footnote ³⁸ They are nonplussed past explanations that the performance evoked outrage and universally concur that they appreciate foreign interest in Japanese culture. In just the time since the kimono protests, numerous additional examples of so-called 'yellowface' and 'whitewashing' have cropped upward in international media, demonstrating the same split between Asian American critiques and Japanese beatitude. A short list would include a March 2017 US Vogue magazine photo spread starring white American model Karlie Kloss in a black geisha-reminiscent wig and kimono-like fashions shot on location in Japan, a Utah kid's 'geisha'-themed birthday political party from 2012 that made the rounds once again in August 2017, and the 2017 remake of Ghost in the Beat, an anime and manga story whose protagonist, Motoko Kusanagi, was played by Scarlett Johansson in the Hollywood film. 'I am Japanese, in Japan at this very moment. The but people who think culture shouldn't be shared are racists similar you', reads one annotate in the back-and-forth argument on the Tumblr entry about the child's geisha birthday political party. Over and over over again on Internet discussions of cribbing, a version of this comment (with two elective parts: (1) I am [salient ethnicity], (ii) Information technology is racist NOT to perform cross-culturally) is presented as the 'end' of the argument.Footnote ³⁹ While the foregoing comment demonstrates how Japanese identity functions equally a trump card to end argue, the mental attitude functions oddly by opening up performance every bit freely bachelor merely foreclosing discussion at the level of authority: the Japanese take alleged, everybody tin can wear kimono, withal they want.

Japanese approval of kimono's global dissemination is non necessarily altruistic: equally we have seen, Japan already has over a century of experience exporting kimono for political and economic purposes. Since the eclipse of kimono equally daily wear past the mid-twentieth century, an unabridged bureaucracy of kimono business and civilization enterprises predicated on 'saving' the 'dying tradition' of kimono wearing and manufacture take sprung up in Nihon, from kimono rental and 'transformation' into geisha and maiko dress-up packages to high-stop kimono designer Hiromi Asai's 2016 New York Mode Week kimono style testify, featuring the standard parade of dour multicultural models, but all in kimono. Nippon Times articles on the kimono protests consistently linked Boston with concerns that protests would adversely affect attempts to stabilize Japan's kimono industry. In a larger sense, however, fiscal profitability and the perception of cultural desirability (no matter how egregiously inaccurate) regularly and historically have trumped most concerns about the 'authenticity' or exclusivity of culturally marked products. While information technology is surely impossible to pinpoint a single reason why such a contrasting attitude prevails in Japan, but one contributing factor is likely the belief that Japaneseness is a unique and indelible essence, a prevalent social attitude and hotly contested field of study both identified with the term Nihonjinron, typically translated every bit the 'theory of Japanese uniqueness'. In a certain sense, so, the more than outlandish the representation of Japaneseness, the less likely information technology is to upset a sense of inborn Japanese essence, while connoting a sense of 'cool Nihon' cultural desirability. Thus, in contradistinction to the DOM recourse to antitheatricalism, the counterprotest and allied narratives located a ability in theatrical proliferation, simultaneously articulable every bit a nationalist sense of Japanese soft power and a broader gesture toward a global civilisation of multicultural appreciation.

A theatrical ethic of inappropriation

Most of the furor wound downwards with the finish of the Kimono Wednesday programme at the stop of July 2015, although at least ii panels were held to discuss the controversy and its larger ramifications, one hosted past fine art blog Hyperallergic in New York and i at the MFA in January 2016. And so, in Apr 2016, the Netflix sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt belatedly doubled downwards on the kimono protests and the testify's own previous racial controversy in the 3rd episode of season two, entitled 'Kimmy Goes to a Play'.Footnote ^forty The episode imported the performative concerns of the kimono protests directly into the theatre: in the episode, struggling thespian-cum-Times-Square-costumed-performer Titus Andromedon mounts a i-human being prove entitled Kimono You lot Didn't in which he recounts one of his erstwhile lives as a Japanese geisha named Murasaki.

Titus is shocked and confused when, before they've seen the show, Asian American activists (and one 'transracial' activist) name him ane of the top five Hitlers of all fourth dimension in fury that a black human being would assume to perform a Japanese woman character. Real Hitler, he reports despairingly, isn't even on the list. After an angry confrontation, the protesters are induced to take seats in the theatre, where Titus wins them over with the sincerity and beauty of his operation and the protesters are left insufficient of their offence. The viewer sees a two-minute montage of Titus's prove, featuring Tituss Burgess in white makeup and a purple kimono singing in a plaintive soprano falsetto interspersed with bits of monologue about Murasaki'south hard life. Kimmy Schmidt itself does not definitively decide whether Titus'southward reincarnation is true or imitation (though viewers are treated to a montage of Titus's previous incarnations every bit various genders, ethnicities and species), merely the emotional effect of Titus'due south race and gender cross-dressed performance is to win over his initially hostile audience, primarily through the emotion conveyed through his beautiful singing in Japanese. The leader of the protesters hugs Titus later on the evidence and tells him he hasn't heard Murasaki's song since he was a niggling boy.

Some critics viewed the episode as a doubling downward by the testify's creators on earlier crassness about race and certainly the episode could be interpreted as more severely mocking the protesters' ire, particularly their Internet-enabled trend to condemn in accelerate, than Titus for the delusion of playing Japanese. What I want to focus on is the potentiality that Titus'south show presents, one that is suggested by the performance's happy outcome: the patent wrongness of the (re)advent of Murasaki in Titus'southward black, queer, southern, sizable male body is presented equally having nevertheless got something right about cross-cultural understanding.Footnote ⁴¹ Focusing on whose body is 'correct' in kimono obscures the fundamentally international origins and development of the kimono, the naturalized assumptions made of Asian bodies in kimono, and the complicated not-visual routes by which 'civilization' and 'identity' travel. Just as orientalist representations of Japaneseness, like Camille Monet's red uchikake, have bled across the boundaries of nationality to touch the Asian American experiences of the protesters (and counterprotesters, and bystanders), so the kimono in the museum cannot be comfortably assigned to a single authoritative 'owner': neither the MFA'due south predominantly white docents, nor Boston-area protesters, nor the Japanese and Japanese Americans' claims to authority can preclude the legitimacy of the other parties' concerns.

In the terminate, I exercise not believe information technology is important to decide in retrospect whether the MFA should or should not have produced and promoted Kimono Wednesdays; the result is much more than valuable for demonstrating the impossibility of making that choice and the impossibility of attributing ownership to culture and its symbols. Focusing on attributing ownership of cultural belongings advantages Japanese interlocutors while comparatively acknowledging the very real ways in which orientalist image making has affected the Asian American experience of the non-Japanese protesters. All the same, acquiescing to DOM demands to control the narrative of the Kimono Wednesdays program had the effect of stifling the volition of the majority and subsuming the multiplicity of Asian transcultural experiences under a hyper-specific American rubric.

Ane of the most scrupulous reporters on Kimono Wednesdays, the 'Japanese American in Boston' blogger Keiko Kawabe, pithily pointed out a major flaw to DOM's 'Stop Appropriation' entrada: 'Many people, including Japanese Americans and Japanese felt that the mainly not-Japanese American protesters had appropriated a Japanese cultural event for their own agenda'.Footnote ⁴² The obliterating effects of binary arguments about appropriation could exist seen fifty-fifty more starkly in the way in which concerns over the 'vilely racist' kimono dress-up overwhelmed the vilely racist Charleston shooting with the hashtag #whitesupremacykills. Instead of demonstrating the complicated imbrication of orientalist fantasy and racially motivated mass murder, i appears equivalent to, or even subsumes, the other.

Where arguments around appropriation have tended to make claims about ownership (as in the construction 'taking from a culture that is not your own'), and accurateness or 'authenticity', the contextual power dynamics of the groups involved have been conflated with a theatrical question of accuracy in representation or functioning. That is, what dynamics appear when we restore the context to cross-cultural operation, asking what grouping defines the meaning of the functioning? How many groups tin lay claim to a stake in the representation and how can we craft performances that comprise every bit much of that information as possible? And, importantly, when can we use our opportunities for thought and fence non to insist on simplifying and binarizing the situation, merely on complicating and expanding it?

In proposing a theatrical ethic of inappropriation, I am arguing that 'accurate representations' are not synonymous with 'justice' – that demanding a 'correct' representation is no proxy for off-white treatment or redress for oppression. For example, although Titus Andromedon's portrayal of a geisha is clearly all wrong visually, even skirting dangerously close to parody, we are offered the possibility that an honest attempt at empathetic surrogation may succeed at transferring something meaningful across bodies and subjectivities (character–performer–audience). In real-life cross-cultural performances similar Kimono Wednesdays, the moral of the story is oft more ambiguous than Titus Andromedon's television set scripted triumph; indeed, the very theatricality of the xx-showtime-century costume-shop re-create of the nineteenth-century kabuki costume further confused the clarity of what a sartorial performance could be said to accept done or communicated at Kimono Wednesdays. Trying on the replica kimono and posing like Camille Monet might institute a recurrence of the troubling dynamics of nineteenth-century orientalist exoticizing; information technology might remind us that the legacy of these habits of imagination and desire are still with us. Just, every bit scholars of Richard Schechner, Judith Butler, Joseph Roach and many others, we remember that every repetition likewise constitutes a difference – that the central to breaking a bike may also prevarication in 'the possibility of a different sort of repeating'.Footnote ⁴³

The possibility that we might understand something, even partial, flawed, or silly, across the boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, nation and so on, is a possibility that we cannot afford to give up. Neither, though, does this mean that representations should try to agree themselves immune from critique. The moral and ethical valences of representations are, of course, contingent on the context of their deployment. Being precise about the relationship between Kimono Wednesdays, white supremacy and colonial legacies may, and then, paradoxically, require acknowledging that the kimono represents exoticized orientalism and the gimmicky soft-power cultural exchange of 'absurd Nippon' and some legitimate and necessary, if messy, cross-cultural marvel and desire. Importantly, such valences are probably not fifty-fifty articulable. The kimono thus functions multifariously, activating people's senses of difference and familiarity, desire, marvel, history and aesthetics. Our recognition that desire and representation have been deployed oppressively cannot forestall our attempts to stand for, to sympathize improve, to facilitate negotiation of the teeming multiplicities of feelings, desires and denials that come with the incommunicable situation of decolonizing cultural exchange, of fostering reparative discourse and intercultural interaction. To, if yous volition forgive a Beckett paraphrase, offered sincerely, neglect meliorate in our attempts to understand each other.

Theatre takes as its fundamental axiom that one may substitute for another. That a chair may be a mountain, that an empty space may be a horse. (A French woman might play Japanese; the present-twenty-four hour period museum-goer might re-enact a Japonist painting.) Ane thing may exist interchangeable (for the time beingness, for the defined moment) with some other, and despite a functioning'due south brevity, nosotros know that these effects can be long-lasting. (Whiteface brand-up and chopsticks in a bun all the same signify some Hollywoodized notion of 'geisha'.) Functioning is gluey even equally it is momentary and fleeting. The apparent transitoriness of operation may embolden some performers and observers to view their performances in a vacuum, equally if they are not haunted by all the other performances where the magic of standing in was used in oppressive ways, as a mode of tearing control of bodies or of curtailing sure people'southward horizons of possibility. As theatre specialists, we should exist particularly attuned to parsing out the upstanding ramifications that follow from taking seriously the arts of substitution. To address the long sticky history of how representation – impersonation, surrogation, operation – has been used to oppress, to insist on recognition of that fact from those who feel no such weight when they don (for example) a kimono, constitutes a right and an injunction to ethical representation that is the responsibility of everyone, not just a few college-age protesters. We demand to be articulate about decoupling essentialist expectations of performers from our evaluation of complex engagements across cultures (amongst so many other boundaries). I believe it means remembering that theatre insisted, long ago, that fiction tin can pb toward justice as unerringly as fact tin.

References

ii Lambourne, Lionel , Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Nihon and the West (London: Phaidon, 2005), p. 111Google Scholar.

four Malcolm Gay, 'MFA Recasts Kimono Days after Complaints of Stereotyping', Boston Earth, 7 July 2015. northward.p.

5 Japanese nouns exercise not take plural forms. One kimono is a kimono; two are two kimono.

eight Stephanie McFeeters, 'Counter-protesters Bring together Kimono Fray at MFA', Boston World, 19 July 2015. north.p.

12 Minh-Ha T. Pham, 'Style's Cultural-Appropriation Argue: Pointless', The Atlantic, fifteen May 2014. northward.p.

xiii Bernstein, Robin , 'Dances with Things: Material Civilization and the Operation of Race', Social Text, 27, four (2009), pp. 67–94, here p. 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 For instance, James Tissot's La Japonaise au bain (1864), Alfred Wordsworth Thompson's La Japonaise, Léon François Comerre'southward La Japonaise (northward.d.), Émile Villa'due south La Japonaise (1878?) and James Whistler'southward The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863–4).

15 Dalby, Liza Crihfield , Kimono: Fashioning Civilisation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), p. 65Google Scholar.

18 Michelle Liu Carriger, Theatricality of the Closet (PhD dissertation, Brown University, 2013), pp. 129–67.

19 For more on salvage anthropology see, for case, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara , Destination Civilisation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

20 At that place would be much more than to say about contemporary Japanese campaigns to 'save' or 'revive' kimono for the nowadays. At that place is a subset of Nihon's robust mag market dedicated to kimono fashions and how-to periodicals, from which sprang a sub-subset of vintage kimono styling, often attributed to a single title: Kimono Hime ('Kimono Princess') which, since 2002, has provided an alternative aesthetic of vintage, stylish kimono primarily aimed at young women. Additional titles and ane-off publications provide guidance and encouragement for immature women to find occasions to wear kimono. While a kimono-outing club called Kimono de Jack (which boasts individually organized chapters around the world) and other groups exist to promote quotidian kimono clothing, in general this is a tendency that lives most vibrantly in the pages of magazines. One exception to this is the burgeoning kimono rental studios, specially in Kyoto and other tourist destinations, which cater to Japanese and foreign tourists who want to get dressed upward to stroll around Gion or other traditional locales.

21 It is a widely accepted (if not uncriticized) tenet of Japanese studies that 'domestication' of foreign influences is a key dynamic of Japanese culture. For a typical example see Tobin, Joseph J. , Re-fabricated in Nihon: Everyday Life and Consumer Taste in a Changing Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. For an important critique of the essentialist underpinnings of these ideas (widely shared by both Japanese and non-Japanese scholars) see Iwabuchi, Koichi , Recentering Globalization: Popular Civilization and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Printing, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See, for example, the seventeenth-century screen painting of Okuni held by the Tokugawa Art Museum. Or Milhaupt, Terry Satsuki , Kimono: A Modern History (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), p. 38Google Scholar.

23 The sakoku period of Japanese isolation is frequently mischaracterized as total seclusion from the rest of the world, while in fact Japan maintained heavily controlled, tightly limited trade relations with China and the Netherlands throughout that menstruum, which naturally also involved some cultural exchange and scholarship. The change from sakoku to Matthew Perry's 'opening' of the country and the Meiji government's policy of internationalization is a change in scale and degree, not a consummate near-face. For claims nearly the complexity of Western womenswear see, for example, Meech-Pekarik, Julia , The World of the Meiji Print (New York: Weatherhill, 1986), pp. 130–1Google Scholar.

24 Interestingly, when I posted this image on social media, one of my Facebook friends, a former State Section officer in Japan (amid other countries), wondered pointedly how the Americans in attendance reacted to this presentation. Clara Whitney, for one, loved it, but my friend seemed to retrieve information technology could be offensive to recast the The states flag equally a geisha costume – precisely, and conveniently, inversely sensitive to what the kimono protesters were concerned about at the MFA.

25 Quoted in Meech-Pekarik, The Earth of the Meiji Print, p. 110.

26 Mori, Rie , 'Kimono and Colony: From Testimonies and Literatures', Voices from Japan, 25 (March 2011), pp. 17–twenty, here p. 18Google Scholar.

27 In addition to Edward Said's canonical work Orientalism, see, for example, Chow, Rey , The Protestant Indigenous and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 107Google Scholar.

28 Gedo, Monet and His Muse, p. 174.

29 It is further worth noting how many Japonist paintings feature seemingly not-Japanese women wearing kimono, and how many of those paintings' titles nonetheless claim, like La Japonaise, 'Japanese girl', 'Japanese adult female' and and so on in the title, as if there were some performative holding of the kimono itself to make its wearer Japanese for creative purposes.

30 Gedo, Monet and His Muse, p. 174.

32 McFeeters, 'Counter-protesters Join Kimono Fray', capitalization in original.

33 Capitalization and spelling in original.

34 For example, Cathy Young, 'The Totalitarian Doctrine of "Social Justice Warriors"', The Observer, 2 February 2016. north.p.

37 O'Dwyer, 'Of Kimono and Cultural Appropriation'.

39 Representative reactions, starting time with references to the Utah geisha altogether: Casey Baseel, 'Japanese Tumblr User Drops Hammer on Fence of If Caucasian Girl's Japan-themed Political party was Racist', at https://soranews24.com/2017/08/08/japanese-tumblr-user-drops-hammer-on-debate-of-if-caucasian-girls-nihon-themed-party-was-racist, accessed 10 July 2018. Gavin J. Blair, 'Japanese Fans React to "Ghost in the Beat out"', at www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/japanese-fans-react-ghost-crush-992255, accessed 10 July 2018. Isabelle Khoo, 'Mom Called Racist for Throwing Daughter a Japanese-Themed Birthday', at world wide web.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/08/02/japanese-birthday-party_a_23061529/, accessed 10 July 2018. Casey Baseel, 'Japanese Twitter Seems to Accept No Bug with Karlie Kloss' "Geisha" Photograph Shoot', at https://soranews24.com/2017/02/17/japanese-twitter-seems-to-have-no-problems-with-karlie-kloss-geisha-photo-shoot, accessed x July 2018.

40 The first flavour of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt attracted its own variety of DOM-like criticism of the grapheme Jacqueline, a blonde-haired, blue-contact-wearing socialite who turns out to be a Native American raised on a S Dakota reservation who has been hiding her non-white heritage.

41 My reasoning hither is indebted to Tavia Nyong'o. In The Amalgamation Flit (Academy of Minnesota Printing, 2009), p. 136Google Scholar, he writes, 'I am preoccupied not with the virtues of getting information technology correct but with the ethical chance that may lie within getting it wrong. What does information technology mean to mistake a memory, to retrieve past mistake, or fifty-fifty to remember a fault?'

43 Butler, Judith , 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution', Theatre Journal, 40, 4 (Dec 1988), pp. 519–31, here p. 520CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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