Hatching Hostilities

Well this is not really a post that speaks to the spirit of Easter, but it does involve eggs…..I think I’ve written about all of the usual Easter topics over the years, including rabbits, the White House Easter Egg Roll, and Swedish Easter witches, but never war, until today. The minute I saw some egg-themed postcards from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), I knew I had to write about them, and this seems like an (oddly) appropriate time. Even though it was a relatively short war, this cross-cultural conflict was nevertheless a major turning-point in Russian history, Japanese history, and world history, and it anticipated the truly global nature and coverage that would characterize World War I in the next decade. A good part of this coverage was pictorial: photographs, editorial images, and postcards–the latter was new media at the turn of the last century, and producers and artists in the west and the east embraced them as a multi-national form of war reportage. Cards produced for domestic audiences tend to be more propagandistic and jingoistic, obviously (you can see a sampling at MIT’s “Asia Rising” online exhibit), but those oriented towards an international market tend to be more symbolic, allegorical, and (above-all) humorous. Because of the universal symbolism of the egg and its all-too-apparent nature, these egg-themed cards, all from the vast Leonard A. Lauder Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are not too difficult to understand: an “Easter Egg of the War” is about to hatch hostilities in Manchuria, a Russian soldier cracks opens a “boiled egg” filled with his enemy, and the theater of war is played out in two postcards from the “Easter Eggs of the Mikado” series.

A.F. Delamarre, “The Easter Egg of War”, 1904-1905; Fernet, “Boiled Egg”, 1904-1905; and unidentified artist, “The Easter Eggs of the Mikado” series, 1904-1905, all from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The meaning behind these next four postcards is even easier to grasp: an egg fight, in which eggs are broken, and scrambled (leaving behind a big mess!):

Unidentified (Japanese?) artist, The Egg Battle series: face to face, start the fire, fire at will, body to body, after the battle, 1904-1905, Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.