A FRENCH OBSERVER OF MEIJI JAPAN

Georges Ferdinand Bigot (1860–1927) was one of the most remarkable foreigners to have lived in Japan. With his independence of mind and the sharp eye with which he viewed his contemporaries, French, British and Japanese alike, his works provide an incomparable picture of Japan in the Meiji era which began some 150 years ago.

Painter and watercolourist, copperplate engraver, illustrator, caricaturist, war correspondent, photographer, editor and humorist, Bigot was in all his different qualities a fascinating character. Almost unknown in France where he was born he has been immortalised in Japanese school textbooks, which reprint unaltered his caricatures of Japanese society at the end of the nineteenth century.

Thanks to the help of Madame Odile Émery, a former French resident in Tokyo, his vast archive was discovered in Paris on 21 September 1981 in the keeping of Raphael Loison, the great grandson of Georges Bigot who was in charge of a workshop producing artistic engravings in the Rue de Mouffetard in the centre of Paris (1).

The Loison family had kept numerous documents relating to their ancestor including personal papers, letters sent to his mother, travel documents, sketches, drawings, watercolours, copperplates, photographs and various canvases. All these documents, which the artist had put away in filing cabinets before his death, had not been moved from his little house and studio in Bièvres, a small village south of Paris (2).

This extraordinary discovery filled many of the gaps in the story of Bigot's life in Japan and elsewhere. It also provided the material for an exhibition in Yokohama six months later of these hitherto unknown and unpublished papers. More than 250 items for exhibition had to be transported as hand baggage from Paris to Yokohama. These items were displayed at the museum of the Archives of History at Yokohama between April and July 1982 in an exhibition entitled ‘Georges Bigot: in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of his arrival in Japan’ (3, 4). This was also the inaugural exhibition of the museum. Some of these items were re-exhibited at the Sogo Museum in Yokohama in 1987 (5) and then at the town hall of the sixth arrondissement in Paris in the same year and at the Shoto Art Museum of Shibuya in Tokyo also in the same year (6).