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Abigail Markwyn | Economic Partner and Exotic Other: China and Japan at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.4 | The History Cooperative
39.4  
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Winter, 2008
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Economic Partner and Exotic Other:
China and Japan at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition

Abigail Markwyn



China's and Japan's role in San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition demonstrates that although both nations sought to use the fair to construct themselves as progressive, modern nations, they faced entrenched anti-Asian racism in California, which contributed to the production of contradictory representations of the Chinese and Japanese at the fair.


      After fourteen-year-old Doris Barr visited Japan's display in the Liberal Arts building at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), she expressed her disappointment with the part of the exhibit that featured Japan's acquisition of western objects such as tennis rackets, bats, and clocks. She found the portion of the exhibit that featured "old" Japan with streets lined with cherry blossoms and women wearing kimonos far more "picturesque" than the image of "new" Japan, in which men wore western-style suits.1 But Japanese officials intended to use the fair to demonstrate their nation's emergence as a world power and its moves toward western definitions of "progress," so Japan's exhibits featured examples of industrial and technical innovations as well as examples of traditional culture. Barr's response to this juxtaposition of "modern" Japan alongside "old" picturesque Japan is just one of many moments during the nine-month-long exposition when the agendas of fair exhibitors and fair visitors came into conflict. 1
      Many of the exhibits and much of the artwork and rhetoric of the PPIE, like those of other pre-World War I American worlds' fairs, emphasized the accomplishments and progress of white Americans and Europeans at the expense of the world's "nonwhite" and non-Western peoples. Such displays, scholars argue, were designed to prepare Americans for life as citizens of an imperial United States, and solidified a racial hierarchy based on social Darwinism and white racial dominance.2 Statues celebrating the European conquest and settlement of the Americas dominated the grounds of the exposition. The Race Betterment Booth drew visitors by the thousands in the Palace of Education and promoted the "science" of eugenics. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the fair "embodie[d] completely the ultimate achievement of the race," reflecting popular assumptions about the accuracy of this portrayal of the achievements of white Americans.3 . . .
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