Sakata Haruo
- Japanese: 坂田 春雄 (Sakata Haruo)
Sakata Haruo was an administrative official (jimukan) in the Ministry of the Interior (Naimushô) of the Meiji government who played a notable role in Japan's official participation in a number of expositions in Australia.
Along with Hashimoto Masato, Sakata led a group of ten Japanese officials, brokers, and others in attending the 1875 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. The account they produced of their travels in Queensland, Tasmania, and South Australia, entitled Fu Gôshû Meruborun-fu hakurankai kikô (赴豪洲￨即厘供府博覧会紀行, roughly "An Account of the Australian Melbourne Exhibition"), is believed to be the first report on Australia ever written in Japanese.[1]
The following year, he accompanied British designer Christopher Dresser on a tour of Japan that Dresser undertook as a representative of the South Kensington Museum (today, the Victoria & Albert Museum).[2]
Sakata later served as an official in the planning of Japanese participation in the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, under the title of goyōkake junsōnin 御用掛准奏任. He produced a formal report on this exhibition as well.[3]
References
- ↑ Jennifer Harris, "'Odd and Bizarre': The Export of Japanese Aesthetics to Nineteenth-Century Australia," in Harris and Tets Kimura (eds.), Exporting Japanese Aesthetics, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press (2020), 46.
- ↑ Harris, 48.
- ↑ Sakata Haruo 坂田春雄 (ed.), Meiji jūni nen ōshū shidoni fu bankoku hakurankai hōkokusho 明治十二年濠洲悉徳尼府万国博覧会報告書 (Meiji Year 12, Australia Sydney International Exposition Report), publisher unknown, 1879. National Diet Library, Japan. Microfiche. NDL call no. 23-208.[1]. pp80-81.
