Using interdisciplinary research and critical analysis, this book examines experiences through (or with) kimonos in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Bringing new perspectives to challenge the existing model of ‘Japonisme in fashion’ and introducing overlooked contacts between kimonos and people, this book explores not only fine arts and department stores but also a variety of theatres and cheap postcards. Putting a particular focus on the responses and reactions elicited by kimonos in visual, textual and material forms, this book initiates an entirely new discussion on the British adoption of Japanese kimonos beyond the monolithic view of the relationship between the East and West.
Arisa Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor at University of Tsukuba, Japan.
The 1894 Hong Kong plague, part of the third plague pandemic, was a major outbreak of the bubonic plague in Hong Kong. 80,000 died in Guangzhou! To fight the plague soldiers and saailors were mobilised as well as inspection and disinfection teams, known as the “Whitewash Brigades”, and the establishment of temporary hospitals. despiute these efforts over 20,000 died.
So it seems that those involved with fighting the plague were awarded medals by ‘the Hong Kong Community’. It’s quite a dramatic medal in terms of the front. This shows the efforts obviously but also perhaps foreigners helping a Chinese. The Chinese in Hong Kong suffered dispopropotionately – Kennedy Town and Taipingshan particularly – and there was some distrust of western medicine and British soldiers so perhaps the medal’s image is meant to address this? There’s a lot more on all that here.
The Staffordshire Regiment clearing plague districts, 1894
Phyllis Konya (nee Juby) was an arts journalist, reviewer and theatre historian who married Sandor (AS) Konya in Cape Town in 1928. The pair moved to China and Phyllis began working for The China Mail as a journalist, and publishing some books (illustrated by her husband) based on the couple’s travels in China, including Chinese Fairy Tales (Newspaper Enterprise, 1934) and some of the chapbooks bound by string below published in the mid-1930s by The Newspaper Enterprise Ltd., Hong Kong.
These two woodblock prints by Tsukiota Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) – Moon at Yamki Mansim-Kagekado and Samurai Warrior, – both are from a set entitled One hundred Aspects of the Moon 1885-1892 – are of especial interest as the rear includes a plate on the rear that reads: Man Fong, 13 Lyndhurst Terrace, Hong Kong. Annoyingly I don’t have a shot of the plate (the one below is one I found on the web and probably approximate) but it does indicate interest in Japanese woodblocks in old Hong Kong…
In her new multimedia project Restless Archive, Simone Gigliotti curates a digital history of the historical migrations and transnational routes of Jewish refugees and postwar displaced persons. She has amassed what she terms a “restless archive” of photographic, cinematographic and visual material that was created and re-used between 1933 and 1949, with several newsreels relating to Shanghai as a port city and transit hub for Jewish refugees. She has also worked with GIS and mapping technology to recreate the voyage routes these refugees took from Europe to Asia. Her presentation will integrate videos, posters, and testimonies from the 1930s and 1940s.
Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced (Indiana University Press, 2023) is available to read for free here.
