30 - Christian Polak, ed., with Hugh Cortazzi. Georges Bigot and Japan 1882–1899: Satirist, Illustrator and Artist Extraordinaire

Summary

For their size, it is remarkable how the small foreign communities of the East Asian treaty ports produced so many newspapers. Titles such as the North China Herald or the Japan Mail are well known to scholars even if they are not always highly regarded as accurate sources of information. What is less well-known are the more light-hearted publications. Distant reflections of the London Punch or similar ‘comic papers’, they were usually short-lived and did not attract the subventions that kept many more conventional newspapers going. There are few library holdings and even those that do exist are now almost unusable, such was the poor quality of the paper used.

Two cartoonists are associated with Yokohama. Charles Wirgman from Britain was the first. He arrived in 1861 as a correspondent for the Illustrated London News for which he continued to work until the late 1870s. He was not a trained artist but was competent. A number of authors used his work as illustrations, including Sir Rutherford Alcock, Britain's first minister to Japan. And from 1862, he began to produce the Japan Punch. This was a pale imitation of the London original but it was clearly popular with the Yokohama community. Wirgman too was popular even with those who were mocked in his cartoons. The Japan Punch appeared spasmodically while Wirgman worked for the Illustrated London News. Then it became his main, if limited, source of income and appeared more regularly until he left Japan in April 1887. Although he soon returned, Punch was never restarted. Wirgman died in Yokohama in 1891.

Georges Bigot was a younger man, born in 1860. He trained at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, which he left at 16. He worked as an illustrator before arriving in Japan in 1882. There he worked as a teacher and a painter. He and Wirgman perhaps naturally came to know each other; there were not many resident artists in Yokohama. Wirgman included a cartoon of Bigot in the July 1882 issue of Punch, which carried a favourable review of an album of the new arrival's etchings in December the following year. And when Wirgman left Japan, Bigot's new publication, Tobae, carried on the tradition of comic journalism for a couple of years longer. There was even a formal handover in that the last issue of Punch showed Tobae taking over.