The Western musical theater acquired a taste for Japanese themes with Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Mikado, in 1885. The naughty old man Koko, prince in disguise Nanki-Poo, and the Three Little Maids from School, as well as the "very humane" Emperor of Japan, became part of popular culture in America and England, easily recognized in advertising or amateur recitals. As American and British friendship with, and knowledge of, Japan grew, songs and musical vignettes on Japanese themes-some comic, some plaintive-stayed popular.

In the meantime the French author Pierre Loti rose to fame in 1888 with another immensely popular work about Japan, his novel Madame Chrysanthème. It is the story of a sailor who "marries" and abandons a Japanese girl, Kiku-san, and of their brief life together in Nagasaki. Loti's moody, cynical but romantic style shed a new light on Japan, and may also have established a basic metaphor for Westerners talking about Japan: the people are like dolls or marionettes, their houses and utensils are dolls' houses, dolls furniture, etc. Whereas Gilbert and Sullivan found in second-hand impressions about Japan as a subject for laughter, Loti  had been to Japan and said that indeed the country seemed "made to amuse" with its not-quite-human scale and manners.

Ten years later John Luther Long published his novella Madame Butterfly, about an American who, like Loti, takes a Japanese wife on a whim and refuses to take her seriously. Suddenly stories about young Japanese women pining away for love came thick and fast in American magazines and on publishers' lists. Occasionally, as in Onoto Watanna's The Heart of Hyacinth, children playing with dolls were mentioned. Such stories came to the stage with David Belasco's spectacular play Madame Butterfly, A Japanese Nightingale by Onoto Watanna, and Sidney Jones's 1896 musical comedy The Geisha, and Talbot and Monckton's 1911 operetta La Mousmé.

Madame Chrysanthemum, Pierre Loti illustrations,  1888, France,  by Rossi or Rossi & Myrbach The first is an ichimatsu (illustrating Loti's assertion that he has married into a family of marionettes), the second (signed Rossi) a 2-sworded samurai doll (a tailpiece for the entire book), the third a puppet whose shadow is that of a wolf (this is the only one of the 3 that actually illustrates a description in the book, of a performance during a festival at night).

A postcard based on a painting by Mademoiselle Jeanne Beitz, of a little girl who may have just received a Japanese doll as a gift, or who may be holdingthe doll at a doll tea-party. The title of the painting is "Mademoiselle Chrysanthème."

The Heart of Hyacinth, by Onoto Watanna (American, 1903) illus. by Kiyokichi Sano (signed EM-MHS) From p. 70:  "Hyacinth, playing with a regiment of Japanese doll soldiers on the floor... leaped to her feet... [and] stood, holding tightly in her hand her doll" as her long-absent foster brother arrives. "Her hand unclinched, the doll dropped to the floor."  Hyacinth is in the story a Western child, raised from birth as a Japanese. The two dolls illustrated appear to be boy ichimatsu..

Two Italian operas that featured Japanese themes also featured Japanese dolls onstage. The earlier one, from 1898, is Mascagni's Iris, a story whose characters are all Japanese, about the seduction of an innocent young girl by a cruel but handsome and wealthy man. The libretto, by Luigi Illico, provides many little dramas within the play: Iris describes a frightening dream, watches a puppet show, is brainwashed into thinking her would-be lover is the Sun God (apparently Mascagni did not know that the Sun is a goddess in Japanese myth). Nothing is quite what it seems. Finally poor Iris leaps to her death rather than endure dishonor. In the first scene, though, her innocence and piety are demonstrated by her playing with her doll. In her dream, her doll was seized by a terrible monster (see the illustration, by Giuseppe Maria Mataloni). Now that she is awake, she has the doll pray to the sun god in thanks for the beautiful day. The soprano Emma Carelli, shown with a doll in the photograph, seems to be acting out this scene for us.

G. M. Mataloni's design for Iris, published by Riccordi, circa 1901. One of a series. For the text of the aria illustrated, click here.	Emma Carelli (1877-1928) was one of the most  famous interpreters of the role of Iris,  which she played until 1914..

The second Italian opera was, of course, Madama Butterfly, which premiered in 1904. The opera gave Long's characters a depth and beauty that they did not have in his novella (in which Pinkerton is ruthlessly cynical and Cho-Cho-San speaks a hideous pidgin English). A doll often appeared on stage in the final scene, in the arms of Cio-Cio's baby, Trouble (named thus because Pinkerton encouraged Butterfly to irony). I have two postcards that evoke this scene. In one, Trouble is a toddler, with his American flag and his doll- he must not have spent too long on stage, or he would have caused real "trouble." In the other photo, an older boy holds a doll; Lea Baten, who owns another photograph of "Little Julien" as well as other images from the set, identified this for me as a Belgian production of the opera. New in 2004! a page on Madame Butterfly.

"Little Julien in Madame Butterfly,"  in a Belgian production.	Trouble in the last scene of Madama Butterfly (a Dutch or Belgian image).

It is a somewhat ironic footnote that the Japanese have taken a great interest in Madama Butterfly, with all-Japanese productions since 1930, and in the 1950s a Bunraku play and several versions in the Takarazuka all-woman theater. In the Japanese versions, the cultural mistakes made by Puccini are corrected, and Cho-Cho-San is a morally stronger character. An article online by Arthur Groos gives more details, and  a review by Lane Earns of Jan van Rij, Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San gives other details about the Japanese reception of the story. It follows that, after the war, Japanese doll makers began to produce sakura versions of Madama Butterfly, labelled with her name and/or wearing kimono and hairpins decorated with butterflies, which were popular with Americans who knew the story. Even now, people may identify any "geisha doll" as Madame Butterfly.

Japanese dolls became popular in ballets, too, around the turn of the century (remember that a doll that comes alive is a favorite idea for a ballet, as with Nutcracker, Coppélia, and Petrouchka). A ballet originally written in 1888 by the German Joseph Bayer, The Fairy Doll, about a toyshop, was reworked for t to include a Japanese doll (as well as Chinese, French, etc.) for which Leon Bakst designed a costume in 1902.   The photo here is from a Bolshoi Ballet production of The Fairy Doll in the early 1900s. The ballerina, dressed like a child in a nightgown, is dancing in front of a row of dolls-including a Japanese doll. Perhaps this is even "scene one" of the production for which the Bakst designs were made.

Bakst (Baxt), Japanese doll,  one of a series of costume designs for a 1902 Russian  production of The Fairy Doll.