The anonymous woodblock print on the cover of this issue of HJAS features three icons of Japan’s embrace of Western-style modernity after the Meiji Restoration of 1868: the steam locomotive, the telegraph, and the rickshaw. We have put two copies of the image on the cover as a visual homage to the reduplicative onomatopoeia that early Meiji writers employed to capture the soundscape of Tokyo. Shusshuppopo しゅっ しゅっぽっぽ chugs the train.
By the time of the Restoration, both the locomotive and the telegraph were familiar technologies in the industrialized West. In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway in England operated the first steam locomotives, and in 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message over an experimental line from Washington, DC , to Baltimore. Transcontinental telegraph and railroad lines were completed in the United States in 1861 and 1869, respectively. The nascent Meiji regime embraced these technologies: the
One could not hail a rickshaw on the streets of Stockton-on-Tees in 1868, yet the lightweight, two-wheeled vehicles telegraphed modernity to Japanese viewers of the print as clearly as the locomotive did. 1 The first jinrikisha 人力車—”human-powered vehicle”—appeared in Tokyo in 1869. It was the handiwork of a trio of entrepreneurs, Suzuki Tokujirō 鈴木徳次郎, Takayama Kōsuke 高山幸助, and Izumi Yōsuke 和泉要助. The men appear to have conceived of the vehicle as a mash-up of a Japanese hand-drawn cart and a Western horse