Happy Father’s Day, dads! In this 1861 Japanese woodblock print by Utagawa Yoshifuji (1828–1887), the father is depicted smoking a cigar, a form of tobacco that was probably introduced to Japan by American residents of Yokohama. Tobacco had been smoked in elongated pipes since its inception by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. The Japanese word for Americans, Amerikajin, has been divided awkwardly into syllables so that the letters correspond as closely as possible to Japanese phonetic script (and to make them fit into the vertical frame).
See more fathers in our collections.
