Take that Washington Irving ... 童絵解万国噺: a wonderfully bizarre 19th century Japanese fanfic history of America Japanese historian Nick Kapur unearthed "Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi" (童絵解万国噺), a wonderfully bizarre illustrated Japanese history of the USA from 1861, filled with fanciful depictions of allegedly great moments in US history, like "George Washington defending his wife 'Carol' from a British official named 'Asura' (same characters as the Buddhist deity)." They just get weirder and better from there: "Washington's 'second-in-command' John Adams battling an enormous snake"; "George Washington straight-up punching a tiger"; a snake eating John Adams's mother and seeking help to avenge himself upon the snake from "a magical mountain fairy"; and so on. If you like this kind of stuff, you should check out Franz Kafka's first novel, Amerika, which was published posthumously and against Kafka's wishes. Kafka knew nothing about the USA, so he just kinda made stuff up (think of "English as She is Spoke"), like millionaires being carried through the streets of New York on sedan chairs (I learned about this from EL Doctorow's -- no relation -- essay collection The Creationists). A thread of images from a Japanese illustrated history of America from 1861. [Nick Kapur]
I saw this recently on Twitter. I had no idea this existed. I'm a total history nerd, and this is just fantastic!
That's what I was wondering....where is the tiger getting punched image? And, why do all of our founding fathers look.....slightly Asian?
They probably were all slightly Asian/Mongolian. Since no cameras were around back then their image was refashioned to match the Anglo Judeo Christian interpretation of things. Similar to Jesus.
