Japanese Atmospheres and the Pleasures of Belonging: Winnifred Eaton and Sadakichi Hartmann

Abstract

Studies of mixed-race “Eurasian” authors often overemphasize allegories of white-Asian romance and trans-imperial geopolitics. Here, I consider how Eurasian artworks that resist such allegorization sensitize us to an important facet of Eurasian life at the turn of the twentieth century: an evident desire to create and dwell in Asian atmospheres where belonging might be experienced as aesthetic pleasure. Although Winnifred Eaton’s “The Wife of Shimadzu” (1902) and Sadakichi Hartmann’s A Trip to Japan in Sixteen Minutes (1902) do not articulate forms of political resistance commonly valorized by Asian American studies, their implicit desires and strategies of execution help us understand how racial atmospheres, and the aesthetic pleasures to which they may give rise, enabled marginalized Eurasian and other diasporic subjects to survive and thrive. Because their public participation in ethnic (Japanese) culture generally occurred in the context of their publicized mixed race, Eurasians could publicly experiment with a pleasure that may be regarded, prototypically, as feeling Asian. Put another way, in “The Wife of Shimadzu” and A Trip to Japan, each author centers a nourishing relation between the Eurasian person as a sensual, feeling subject and a curated, racial atmosphere (a distinct, if transient social environment in which racial meaning is made or transformed) in which the foremost pleasure is that of belonging. By attending to these elements, I contend, we do not weaken the power of ideology critique but supplement it and move toward a more circumspect view.