In doing the research for this book, the story of Professor Risley became as interesting to me as that of his Imperial Japanese Troupe. Risley was born in New Jersey around 1814 and died in a lunatic asylum in 1874. In an era of many larger-than-life figures, he was without doubt one of its more colorful characters. An acrobat who became an impresario, he was certainly one of the most widely traveled, for he went back and forth among multiple continents at a time when the average person was probably born, lived, and died within a fifty-mile radius. As an individual in the mid-nineteenth century who lived in the demimonde of the theatre and circus and left few records of his own, Risley’s movements are remarkably well-documented. Yet he remains a mysterious figure who fades in and out of the mist of history, sometimes coming into clear focus and then sometimes vanishing completely from view. While doing research on him, I constantly found myself consumed by burning questions. How did he decide to go to Japan? In 1866, how did he come up with the idea of forming a troupe of Japanese acrobats and jugglers and taking them overseas? How did he succeed, when so many others did not? What, in his background, made him such a pioneer in the globalization of popular culture?
This book will not answer every question about Risley and his Troupe, but I hope it will contribute to a greater awareness of them and will stimulate curiosity about the spread of popular culture and the performing arts around the world. If I can shed light on a little-known but fascinating story, and show how individuals—who may not have high social status or official connections—can transcend vast cultural differences and do extraordinary things, I will be happy.
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Wherever possible I have relied on primary source information, rather than what others have written, and kept speculation to a minimum. Even thirty years ago, a project like this would have been next to impossible, because there was either not enough information available or it was too fragmented and difficult to access. Since then, however, several big changes have occurred.
In 1975, the diary of Takano Hirohachi—the overseer or manager of the Imperial Japanese Troupe—was rediscovered by some of his descendants in Iinomachi, his village in Japan. In the poorly documented world of semi-literate nineteenth-century popular entertainers, this diary is an extraordinary document. It is first and foremost a day-to-day, detailed record of the troupe’s movements in the United States and Europe, showing where they went and what they did. But it also represents the written impression of one of the first Japanese commoners—other than a few poor shipwrecked castaways—to see the West, after Japan’s nearly two hundred and fifty years of official seclusion from the outside world.
The discovery of the diary subsequently set in place a movement among Japanese writers and scholars to confirm the movements of the troupe, and to correlate them with global events. And without their formidable efforts my book would have been impossible. The original diary, in hard-to-read and fading, free flowing mid-nineteenth-century Japanese calligraphy—rendered by a social outsider who spoke a northeastern dialect and probably taught himself how to read and write—is exceedingly difficult to read today.
Luckily, in 1977 the Iinomachi historical society painstakingly transcribed Hirohachi’s handwritten diary and published it as a small, limited-edition book. This generated much media interest. In 1983 the well-known writer Yasuoka Shōtarō began serializing a story titled Daiseikimatsu saakasu (“The grand fin-de-siècle circus”) in the prestigious Asahi Journal magazine, and five years later it was compiled into what became a popular book. It was one of the first attempts to put the diary into a historical context, and it greatly helped raise awareness of Hirohachi’s story. In 1999, another book based on the diary appeared, titled Umi wo watatta bakumatsu no kyokugeidan (“The bakumatsu acrobatic troupe that crossed the seas”), by popular historian Miyanaga Takashi. In this case, Miyanaga undertook the physically daunting task of traveling to most of the sites mentioned in the diary and attempting to confirm them. During this period there was also considerable research done by other scholars, writing articles in journals and magazines. Of the academic researchers in Japan, no one has done as much work on the story of the Imperials as Mihara Aya, a specialist in nineteenth-century Japanese performing arts history, especially that of the multiple Japanese troupes that then toured the United States and Europe. Working with the local historians of Iinomachi, she painstakingly went back over the original diary, checked for errors, correlated it with her knowledge of the nineteenth-century entertainment world, and added new annotations. In 2005 her work was included in a multi-volume history of the Iinomachi area, and it is this transcription of the diary that has been most useful for me. Mihara’s other work on early Japanese troupes—in academic papers and articles and especially in a 2009 book that summarizes much of her research, titled Nihonjin tōjō: Seiyo gekijō de enjirareta Edo no misemono (“Enter Japanese: A Night in Japan at the Opera House”)—has also proved invaluable in unlocking many of the secrets of the Imperials and of Risley’s association with them.
The second thing that has made this book possible is new technology. The story of Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe is particularly complicated. It encompasses many languages and geographic regions, and it requires correlating a vast number of disparate shards of information. The travel expenses and the time required for a project like this would normally have been prohibitive. Research would have involved traveling to four continents, spending weeks if not months in libraries around the world, and poring over dusty original documents and viewing scratchy, blurred microfilm and fiche. I still spent considerable time in libraries in America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, but I was greatly aided by the development of online databases of scanned nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines that have recently become available to researchers. Each country has begun to implement these historical databases in different ways. Japan, alas, lags far behind the rest of the advanced world. The American databases are disparate, diverse, specialized, sometimes hard to use, and largely commercial. The French system is beautiful and broad and free and sometimes quirky. In an attempt to preserve their national heritage, many smaller countries now also often offer remote access to their historical files, and do so with remarkable clarity and quality. The newspaper files of New Zealand, for example, are so immaculate and easy to search that reading them remotely from nearly seven thousand miles away often feels like taking the paper pages in hand.
When considering a character like Professor Risley and his Imperial Japanese Troupe, this technological revolution is enormously useful. It helps cut through decades of accumulated misinformation and myths. It allows me to rely mainly on primary sources, instead of what other people have written, and to quote extensively from Risley’s contemporaries, in their wonderfully colorful nineteenth-century voices. And it creates an almost voyeuristic thrill. Because Risley survived by generating publicity and running advertisements in newspapers, it becomes suddenly possible to track his movements at an extraordinarily granular level, on multiple continents and through the fourth dimension of time. In a sense, online databases are rather like the new satellite, sonar, and undersea robotic technologies that have made the world’s oceans increasingly transparent, allowing discovery of more and more valuable treasures and old wrecks hitherto hidden beneath the sea. By searching through vast seas of newspapers and magazines on multiple continents, through multiple languages, the movements and actions of people over a century ago become visible in ways they never imagined, to degrees they might even have found embarrassing. In the nineteenth century, after a failure or scandal, simply changing towns was often enough to allow one to start anew; not so any more. We can now view the past movements of people almost as if we are omniscient gods, looking down on humans from outer space.
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Many people have aided me in the production of this book, and they deserve more thanks than I can adequately provide in this preface.
For agreeing to read part or all of my manuscript and provide valuable comments, many thanks to Ricard Bru i Turull, Jonathan Clements, Fiammetta Hsu, John Kovach, Aya Mihara, Leonard Rifas, and Mark St. Leon. Aya Mihara performed the especially arduous task of meticulously checking detailed references in such