San’yō angya 山陽行脚

FSC-GR-780.921

Commentary by Erin Schoneveld

Posted August 11, 2016

Similar to the Shikoku angya (FSC-GR-780.924), San’yō angya (Wanderings in the San’yō region) is an illustrated travelogue of the American anthropologist Frederick Starr (1858–1933) during his trip along the San’yō pilgrimage route from Hiroshima to Shimonoseki in early 1917.

Starr is recognized for his study of various aspects of Japanese culture—most notably, the ethnographic study and collection of senjafuda 千社札 (its shortened form is ofuda お札), a type of woodblock-printed paper votive strip that visitors affixed to Shinto shrine gates. [1] He visited Japan fifteen times between 1904 and his death in 1933 (see also Shikoku angya). His first major cross-country trek occurred in November 1915, when he took three weeks to journey along the Tōkaidō, the east-west road running from Tokyo to Kyoto. [2]

The publicity of Starr’s Tōkaidō pilgrimage resulted in a commission from the newspaper Ōsaka asahi shinbun in 1917 for a series of accounts of his travels around the central and southern regions of Honshu, Japan’s main island. This also included an ascent of Mount Fuji. [3] Starr’s San’yō angya is based on these serialized features in the Ōsaka asahi shinbun.

This 803-page travelogue contains a combination of old and new reprographic technologies with eleven color woodblock prints and twenty-seven black-and-white woodblock-printed illustrations. There are also five black-and-white photographs. (The identity of the photographer is not disclosed.)

The artists involved in this publication also worked on the 1916 Bun’endō album of landscape prints, Hanshin meisho zue (FSC-GR-780.920); they were Akamatsu Rinsaku 赤松麟作 (1878–1953), Noda Kyūho 野田九浦 (1879–1971), Hata Tsuneharu 幡恒春 (1883–?), Mizushima Nihofu 水島爾保布 (Nihou, 1884–1958), and Nagai Hyōsai 永井瓢斎 (1882–1945). They were also affiliated with the newspaper Ōsaka asahi shinbun, and each contributed one color print to this book. The compositions capture the people and places Starr encountered during his trip. Nagai Hyōsai’s contribution, for example, is an endearing portrait of Starr at the water’s edge and dressed in the traditional Japanese attire of a black haori (jacket), striped hakama (loose, pleated trousers), and geta. The haori is decorated with what appears to be a star motif, presumably an emblematic family crest associated with the author. Starr also sports a Western-style fedora hat; in his left hand he carries a blue bag and in his right a walking stick (pp. 120–21).

The text of Starr’s travelogue describes his personal impressions and experiences of many aspects of Japanese life, including family, religion, history, culture, and food. Starr was certainly not the first foreigner to record his observations of Japan, yet his “taste for publicity” and extensive writings on Japanese pilgrimages contributed to his reputation in both Japan and abroad. [4]

The Pulverer copy exhibits some paper discoloration; the wear to the lines of key block on a number of the prints suggests that it is not a first impression.

Selected readings

Helen Merritt, Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: The Early Years (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990).

Helen Merritt and Nanako Yamada, Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900–1975 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992).

David C. Moreton, “An Account of the Shikoku Pilgrimage by Frederick Starr,” The Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 4, vol. 9 (2005), 106–11.

Henry D. Smith II, “Folk Toys and Votive Placards: Frederick Starr and the Ethnography of Collector Networks in Taisho Japan,” in Popular Imagery as Cultural Heritage: Aesthetic and Art Historical Studies of Visual Culture in Modern Japan: Final Report, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research no. 20320020 (PI: Kaneda Chiaki) (March 2012), 1–51.

Oliver Statler, Japanese Pilgrimage (New York: William Morrow, 1983).

Copies in other collections

Columbia University Libraries, New York
National Diet Library (NDL), Tokyo

[1] Smith 2012, 1.

[2] Ibid., 10.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 2.

San'yō angya