Kushibiki Yumindo-Cedar Herald Index

, also given as Yumeto, Yumito, and Yumeno, was a Japanese impresario responsible for organizing many international exhibitions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Japanese Exhibition King

Kushibiki Yumindo was born in the town of Gonohe, Aomori, either in 1859, as most Japanese sources claim, or 1865, as he stated on several occasions while in the United States. Little is known of his early life. A brief Japanese biography from the Aomori Prefectural Library states that he went to Tokyo with the intention of entering Keio Gijuku but was unsuccessful. According to a 1916 profile in California's Magazine, he "came first to America in 1884." The beginnings of his entrepreneurial career are similarly undocumented. According to the 1916 profile, "At the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 he presented his first conception of an exploitation of Japan on the Midway, which proved highly successful, both as an instructive and popular exhibition and as a financial venture." Kushibiki's name does not, in fact, appear among the main organizers of that exposition, but within a few years he would become known as the "Japanese Exposition King."

Kushibiki Yumindo

Kushibiki's success owed much to his collaboration with another Japanese organizer at the Columbian Expo, Arai Saburō (1867-1951). In subsequent years, "Kushibiki and Arai organized Japanese villages and tea gardens at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition (1895), Atlantic City (1896-1900), the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition (1901), the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition at Charleston (1902), Coney Island’s Luna Park (opened May 1903), the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis (1904), the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition in Seattle (1909) and the Panama–California Exposition at San Diego’s Balboa Park (1915)," along with the San Francisco Panama–Pacific International Exposition (1915) and Japan–British Exhibition (1910).

Kushibiki Yumindo

Chicago, Atlanta, Nashville, Omaha

Aside from the names and dates of expositions in which they participated, there are few descriptions of what sorts of work Kushibiki and Arai actually did at the expositions they organized, but it can be surmised that they operated as independent entrepreneurial managers or contractors in a style somewhat reminiscent of Professor Risley and his so-called Imperial Japanese Troupe, or Tannaker Buhicrosan's Japanese Village at Knightsbridge, London. Kushibiki worked well with both American and Japanese associates, with excellent collaboration skills and little need for recognition. It was five years before they received any attention in the American press, but five years after that, Kushibiki was declared "undisputedly the best Japanese showman in America."

Kushibiki Yumindo

For the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition, September to December 1895, Japanese commissioner M. Fujisawa requested and received a place off the Midway for a "high class" attraction. Japan was winning the Sino-Japanese War and hoped for international recognition. But the stratagem failed. "The Japanese Village, though located in another part of the park, may be considered a part of the anthropological display of the Midway group," wrote a local historian.

Although the Japanese exhibits at the 1897 Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition at Nashville were omitted from its official guidebook, they were at least spared the indignity of the racist depiction of the Chinese Village with its "queer creatures that are almost savages" and theater of "crude acting and dancing."

Nor could Kushibiki attract much attention on the Midway at the Omaha Exposition in 1898, where "the German Village, the Streets of Cairo, the Temple of Palmistry, the Japanese Tea-Garden, and a hundred others, offer their various tempting delights."