"Dwarf Trees" from Emily S. Patton's
Japanese Topsyturvydom


        Emily S. Patton (? - ?) and her daughter were originally from England but had lived in Australia prior to taking up residency in Japan in 1889.  She lived at The Bluff in Yokohama while working in Tokyo as an instructor at the School of Music in Ueno.  By 1900, she had become the proprietor of the Yokohama School of Music and Academy of Dancing, located at her home address in The Bluff.   She started writing Japanese Topsyturvydom in 1895.  The book ridicules Western misconceptions about Japan.  Patton encourages readers to free themselves of their "narrow-minded prejudice" and not impose Western points of view on "the habits, manners, and customs of these people."  Her book was aimed at an adult audience, and it was probably appropriate that she chose smaller type than usually used in order to include more text.  Clues to her personal life appear in a book she wrote in 1905 entitled Japanese Types Sketched with a Brush and Pen, which was produced by Kelly and Walsh, the leading bookseller dealing in Western books in Yokohama.  Kelly and Walsh was an important Hasegawa customer.


      Japanese Topsyturvydom (1896):

Dwarf Trees
(pg. 6)


       In arboriculture also is "Japanese Topsyturvy-dom" again in evidence, for instead of cultivating a young tree for its shapeliness, advantage is taken of any accidental eccentricity of root or branch, every early symptom of blemish, and these are forced and fostered until first a deformity and ultimately a monstrosity of tree-form is evolved.

Dwarf Trees

      The writer once asked a Japanese "Do you ever leave a tree as Nature made it?" and the smiling reply was -- "Not often, if we can do otherwise!"  Hence the origin of the innumerable little wizened pine-trees, many scores of years old, as the moss and grey lichen on their trunks clearly testify, which are seen at every shop and cottage door in pots no larger than a tumbler.  And if such a one has its gnarled branches entirely denuded of leaves save for one struggling little shoot of greenery, and displays such a generally moribund condition that we should pluck it out, and throw it away, then it is cherished with affectionate care, and displayed with unmistakeable pride, so entirely at variance with our own, is Japanese taste in this particular!  (pp. 26-27) 1

NOTES

1      Patton, Emily S.   Japanese Topsyturvydom (Tokyo: Hasegawa Publishing Co.; July 1896).  A b&w photocopy of the book was generously given to RJB through InterLibrary Loan from the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.;

Sharf, Frederic A.  Takejiro Hasegawa: Meiji Japan's Preeminent Publisher of Wood-Block-Illustrated Crepe-Paper Books (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum; 1994), pp. 17-18, 52-53, 71.  

Luis Frois, S.J. wrote Tratado em que se contem muito sustinta-e abreviadamente algumas contradiçoes e diferenças de costumes... in 1585, a collection of some 600 sentences or observations which highlight the contrasts between European and Japanese customs.  Although many of them are admittedly superficial, some of the observations succictly describe various aspects of sixteenth-century Japanese life.  Per Cooper, Michael, S.J. (ed.) They Came to Japan, An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543-1640 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1965), pp. 48, 420.  It might be interesting to do a comparison of his list with those of Patton and others.


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