ABSTRACT
In spite of having limited direct contact with Japan, Spain was not immune to the fashion for things-Japanese that infected all of the arts, from painting and decoration to literature and music, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As elsewhere in Europe and North America, the consumption of Japan through objects and books gave free reign to Orientalist fantasies about a land of Lilliputian paper houses, kimono-clad geishas, and sword-carrying samurai, while holding at bay the supposed danger of real encounters with Japanese people. Operettas and zarzuelas after the fashion of William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s phenomenally popular The Mikado (1885), and Owen Hall and Sidney Jones’s The Geisha (1896) offered an enhanced experience by bringing to life the two-dimensional figures that decorated screens and vases, and inviting audiences to face-to-face encounters with these figments of the imagination. Actors donned in silk garments and face paint “played Japanese” by inhabiting the world of objects avidly consumed by the public, and so acted not merely as referents to an imagined and distant Japan but also to the “real one” on display in department stores and bourgeois homes.
