How did the Japanese depict your country in 1904 as caricature?🌏🇯🇵
This is a Japanese political propaganda map from 1904, created at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Its title is “ A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia.”
Visually, the map turns countries into exaggerated human figures or symbols.
Its purpose was to serve as anti-Russian propaganda, celebrate Japanese military actions, and warn Eurasian lands about Russian expansion.
I'm from the USA, and the question isn't how Japan depicted us in 1904, but how they depicted us fifty years earlier- specifically, in a book called "Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi", which means, uh, something in Japanese. Only a year after Perry forced Japan to open its markets back up, and allow contact with the outside world, the Japanese people were, naturally, very curious about literally everyone else- except this one guy, who somehow knew all about us, and wrote this book, which features (among other things) John Adams teaming up with an eagle to kill the giant snake that ate his mother, George Washington saving his wife from the Buddhist deity Asura, then sending her brother (Ben Franklin) to defeat a group of bandits with a cannon he held in his bare hands, and eventually punching a tiger to death after saving nearby villages from a two-headed demon. Curiously, Washington's wife is referred to as "Carol", presumably because the author had somehow seen Batman Vs. Superman and knew that even the two combined couldn't match the power of George Washington.
It's strange to think how someone who'd probably never even seen a white person (the pictures in the book have everyone looking Japanese, which is perfectly reasonable in that time and place) and certainly never talked to an American could grasp the country so thoroughly.
