Royal Academy, London
Like Hogarth on sake, the artist’s quirky works wittily satirise the human carnival of foreigners Japan opened itself to in the mid-19th century

It’s no secret that the first European modernists were obsessed with Japan. In Manet’s Portrait of Zola, the novelist has a print of a wrestler by Utagawa Kuniaki II and a painted Japanese screen in his study. The Japanese artists most imitated by the likes of Van Gogh and Whistler were woodblock printmakers such as Hiroshige and Hokusai who had flourished in the early 1800s. It’s a curious mirror image to see how, while they looked east, their contemporary Kawanabe Kyōsai was looking west. His paintings on scrolls and woodblock prints, made from the 1850s to his death in 1889, are full of witty portraits of Europeans and a not always happy marriage of Japanese and western styles.

The Japan into which Kyōsai was born had kept its borders closed for centuries. His lifetime saw the first visit by an American fleet, the end of the Tokugawa shogunate that had restricted foreign contact, the legalisation of Christianity and the coming of railways and the telegraph. He’s constantly making satirical swipes at these changes. In one picture Jesus is portrayed on the cross, holding a fan. In another Mr Punch, from Punch magazine, features as a demon. More demons attend a strict western-style school in a satire on educational reforms.