| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Longfellow's Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan. By Christine M. E. Guth. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. xxii, 234 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-295-98401-5. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-295-98456-2.)

Charles Longfellow, the son of Henry Wads-worth Longfellow, was something of an eccentric as well as a world traveler. In 1871 he stepped off a boat in Yokohama at the age of twenty-seven, intending, like the better-known Lafcadio Hearn two decades later, to spend only a few days there. Instead he stayed eighteen months, living in Japan during the first years of the Meiji era. By the time Charley returned to the United States in 1873 he had acquired an extensive collection of Japanese curios, which were forwarded to the Longfellow home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Longfellow enjoyed going "native" in Japan, which included a fondness for Japanese housing and dress as well as the pleasures of the flesh readily available in the treaty ports. Charley's harem of ten Japanese "beauties" seems to have aroused bittersweet comments from his prudish fellow American, William Elliot Griffis (p. 47). At the same time, his exhibitionist tendencies appear to have attracted him to another feature of Japanese society, namely, tattooing, a rite that was closely associated with Japanese laboring and criminal classes. Among the souvenirs he brought back from Japan were two extensive body tattoos, on his chest and back. It is these that provide Christine M. E. Guth with her title.

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