Perspective box

Japanese: 極楽箱 (gokuraku bako)

Perspective boxes were one of a number of optical curiosities or devices introduced into Japan in the 17th to 18th centuries. A variety of lenses and/or mirrors are used along with images painted on the inside of the box, or small objects placed within the box, to create for viewers who peer inside the box a semblance of an experience of a complex, three-dimensional, scene.

One notable example of such perspective boxes or "peep boxes" was one gifted by the Dutch East India Company to the Tokugawa shogunate in 1647. Shogunate officials viewed the box at the Nagasaki-ya residence for the Dutch in Edo, and dubbed it a gokuraku bako, or "paradise box," referencing a traditional Chinese story of a wizard who entered into a gourd to live in the world inside there (a kyôchû no ten, lit. "heaven inside a gourd"). The box was later presented to the shogun at Edo castle by Willem Versteeghen, chief trader of the VOC in Japan.

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References

Timon Screech, "Rethinking the Visual Revolution in Edo," in Nozoite bikkuri Edo kaiga: The Scientific Eye and Visual Wonders in Edo のぞいてびっくり江戸絵画, Tokyo: Suntory Museum of Art (2014), 16.