Foreign Words: Dutch

This print features an American woman and a French man who model Western fashions. The woman wears a beribboned bonnet, fitted jacket, and billowing skirt; the man wears a top hat and dress coat above belted trousers. The man’s telescope and the schooner pictured offshore illustrate Western technology.

Some Yokohama prints appear to have had a didactic function as they included lists of simple foreign words. In this case the white panel shows such basic words as I, you, happy, sell, buy, white, red, and black. These vocabulary words are written in the upper part of the panel in Japanese. The bottom part is a Dutch translation that is spelled out phonetically in a Japanese script. When this print was created, Dutch was the common language of the treaty ports.