About this ProjectThe John Hay Library at Brown University holds a fascinating Japanese scroll that beautifully illustrates Commodore Matthew Perry's landing in Japan, the first official contact between Americans and Japanese. This work of an anonymous Japanese artist depicts events that took place in 1854 and was painted sometime between then and 1906 when the Chinese scholar, Wang Zhiben, titled the scroll and wrote a commentary on the last panel. Mirroring the scroll, the Hay also holds a set of lithographs by William Heine, the official artist of the Perry expedition. These lithographs depict an American view of the same events shown in the scroll and were published on Heine's return to the United States in 1855. This web site grows out of the work of Brown students, faculty, and library staff who examined the scroll and the Heine lithographs. The recent popularity of Pokemon, anime and Tokyo Disneyland remind us that the cultural interaction between Japan and the United States remains important to both countries and we wanted to investigate how it began, a century and a half ago. On this site, you can examine the anonymous scroll, the Heine lithographs, and student writings about these images. The Brown students used the published accounts of the Americans who went with Perry to Japan, to supplement what they learned from the images, and excerpts from these accounts are also available here. More about the process of putting together the web site and the classes of which it has been a part can be found by following the links below.
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