Printed 1928. Artist and printmaker Lilian May Miller constructed her personal image as consciously as she did her artwork. When she was in Japan, she wore Western clothing, often favoring Amelia Earhart–esque ties and mannish blazers. On a 1929 lecture tour in America, on the other hand, at a time when Japanese women were casting off kimonos, she wore traditional Japanese dress. She cropped her hair short, went by Jack among family and friends, and described herself as unable to work up “even the ghost of” a romantic interest in men. To journalists, she explained that, as a child, she’d only spoken Japanese—almost certainly untrue, given that her parents were American. Contradiction and confusion all seemed to be part of the game. ...Miller went on to spend much of her adult life in Japan and Korea, with occasional stints on the West Coast or in Hawaii. In the United States she made a name for herself with her woodblock prints, cut with painstaking accuracy in a hyper-traditional Japanese style. ...Her work is similarly culturally complex. Unlike the number of other American artists who worked in a Japanese style, such as Helen Hyde, Elizabeth Keith, and Bertha Lum, Miller had grown up immersed in Japanese culture and spoke the language fluently. She saw herself, therefore, as a bridge, separate from those who experienced Japanophilia in adulthood. But there were tensions. In letters, Miller writes disparagingly of the country’s industrialization and growth, and said she saw her work as helping to keep a dying Japanese tradition alive. ...After Pearl Harbor she begged for those prints to be destroyed. “It’s been widely interpreted that she felt betrayed by Japan and therefore wanted to destroy her connection,” says Gulliver. But there was another factor—in December 1942, doctors found a large, malignant tumor in her abdomen. Barely a month later, she was dead. Though it’s purely speculative, says Gulliver, “it may have been the case that she didn’t want her work to survive her.” [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lilian-miller-woodblock-artist-japan]