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Paper short abstract

Scholars of Shiba Kōkan have framed his work as Edo-period “Westernization” treating prints as passive reflections. Revisiting his 1780s megane-e, I read them as documents of making: substitutions, misreadings, and failures that expose negotiation between foreign imitation and local modes of making.

Paper long abstract

Scholars of Shiba Kōkan (1747–1818) have long focused on his iconographic sources and the transmission of European visual models into Japan, framing his work as a symptom of Edo-period “Westernization.” This approach often treats his prints as passive reflections of imported techniques rather than as active experiments in material translation. Revisiting Kōkan’s 1780s megane-e, etchings designed for optical viewers, I situate them instead as documents of making. Drawing on close analysis of Kōkan’s View of Mimeguri Shrine and Ryōgoku Bridge, as well as his cited Dutch sources such as Egbert Buys’s Nieuw en volkomen woordenboek van konsten en weetenschappen and Noël Chomel’s Dictionnaire Économique, I reconstruct the technical and chemical improvisations through which Kōkan reverse-engineered etching in a Japanese context. His substitutions of materials, his misreadings, and even the visible failures of the mordant become legible as records of process. I argue that these flawed and distorted images are not failed copies of European models but negotiations that expose the friction between foreign imitation and locally available modes of making in Edo visual culture. Reading Kōkan’s prints as experiments in material and chemical mediation allows us to move beyond the teleology of realism and instead understand them as sites where craft knowledge, such as oil pressing, lacquer art, and optique making, converged with the publisher’s penchant for novelty to produce a new class of image.