Journey to the West

Around the 18th century the first European written sources mentioning mermaids appear and recount the acquisition and subsequent journey back to Europe. From the early 17th to the late 19th century, Japan’s international trading was extremely limited, officially accepting only Chinese and Dutch merchants as trade partners. Our mermaid was acquired by a Dutch man, Jan Cock Blomhoff (Fig. 1), who resided on the trading post of Deshima as a warehouse master between 1809 and 1813, and as its director between 1817 and 1823. It is possible that Dutch traders, including Blomhoff, would have either been able to see the mermaids when visiting temples on their trips from the island of Deshima to the capital city of Edo or during misemono sideshows taking place on Deshima. During one such occasion Blomhoff acquired the mermaid, of which he had portraits painted of by the artist Kawahara Keiga (Fig. 2).

It is unsure whether those who were bringing them back were aware of their manufactured nature or not. But in many cases, once they arrived in the West their origins were made even more vague, and the mermaids were exhibited at freakshow-style exhibitions, organized with the intent to awe, entertain, and mislead the audiences. We can take as an example the notorious “Fiji Mermaid”, which was owned by the American showman and businessman Phineas Taylor Barnum (Fig. 3). The mermaid, originally from Japan, was described as having been fished out of the waters of the Fiji Islands, and was exhibited in the Barnum's American Museum in New York in 1842, as well as taken along in temporary exhibitions.

And still to this day mermaids such the Fiji Mermaid or the ones from the collection of the Museum Volkenkunde are exhibited, and inevitably catch the viewer’s attention with their mysterious aura.Chaiklin, Martha, “Simian Amphibians: The Mermaid Trade in Early Modern Japan”, in Large and Broad: The Dutch Impact on Early Modern Asia: Essays in Honor of Leonard Blussé, edited by Nagazumi Yōko, 241-273. Tokyo: The Toyo Bunko, 2010; and Viscardi, Paolo, Hollinshead Anita , Macfarlane Ross , and James Moffatt. “Mermaids Uncovered”, Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 27 (2014): 98–116.