“A Blind Beggar" by Mortimer Menpes, R. I., from “Japan, A Record in Colour” by Dorothy Menpes

A Blind Beggar

Mortimer Menpes

1901

Watercolour

Source: Japan, A Record in Colour, facing p. 22

This is a particular kind of beggar, a street performer with his shamisen. See commentary below.

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Notice that the "beggar" is performing in front of an entrance with what looks very much like a gate. Gerald Groemer explains:

Arts performed while strolling down avenues and thoroughfares tended to be called nagashi, literally "to let flow." Genres exhibited while standing before doorstcps were frequently identified by the prefix kado ("gate"): kado-jamisen for "gate shamisen playing".... From the mid-eighteenth century the more general term kadozuke ("attached to the gate") became a common epithet for identifying "beggarly" performances or artistic activities taking place at domestic entryways. In the 1850s Kitagawa Morisada. a razor-sharp observer of Edo ways, defined the term succinctly as "standing at doorways, playing the shamisen and begging for coins": Scholars today often dub the arts in question kadozuke-gei, loosely translatable as “arts of the doorways." [2]

So Menpes was creating quite a valuable record of a specific kind of traditional street performance. Equally interesting is the fact that the performer is evidently singing to his own accompaniment. Blind performers were the very ones to have developed their own distinctive style of singing to the shamisen. Geisha took this up for themselves, but this is how it had originated (see Arisawa 39). — Jacqueline Banerjee

Bibliography

Arisawa, Shino. "Akiko Fujii: Telling the Musical Life Story of a Hereditary Jiuta Singer of Japan." Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity. Ed. Ruth Hellier. Champaign, Illinois: Arisawa University of Illinois Press, 2013. 38-53.

Groemer, Gerald. Street Performers and Society in Urban Japan, 1600-1900: The Beggar's Gift. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016.

Menpes, Dorothy. Japan: A Record in Colour. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1901. Internet Archive version of a copy in the University of California Libraries. Web. 20 June 2019.

Created 21 June 2019