Taylor presents this book as the close of a trilogy begun in Journey to Central Africa and continued in Lands of the Saracen, and as the record of travels — India, China, Japan, the Loo-Choo and Bonin Islands, and the long homeward voyage around the Cape of Good Hope — “all accomplished in the space of a year.” Its forty-four chapters are first-person narrative, with dates worked into the prose rather than set as diary headings; footnotes added later — one announcing a projected railroad extension in 1855, another the water let into the Ganges Canal in 1854 — show how much later it was written up. The retrospect is not unbroken. The desert crossing from Cairo to Suez and a tour of the fort at Agra slip into the present tense; one chapter transcribes seven dated entries from a journal kept at Shanghai, because he knows “no better way of giving a picture of the uncertainty of all news in China”; another gathers several excursions into a single walk taken in the reader’s company. The preface, signed at New York in August 1855, is candid about the book’s limits. India and China are “as complete as the length of my stay in those countries allowed me to make them,” but the account of Loo-Choo and Japan “is less full and detailed than I could have wished,” because the Secretary of the Navy required him to give up his journals and his request to copy portions back was “peremptorily denied.”

The narrative opens at Gibraltar in November 1852 and reaches Bombay a month later, by canal boat and Nile steamer across Egypt, a convoy of vans over the desert from Cairo to Suez, and the Red Sea to Aden. What follows is, as much as anything, a book about getting from one place to the next. Taylor allows himself two months for Delhi, the Himalayas and Calcutta, leaves Bombay on 3 January, and covers 375 miles by banghy-cart to Indore and 380 more by mail-cart to Agra; six chapters go to the conveyances themselves. The axle snaps twenty miles beyond Dhoolia and throws him into the road, and he waits two hours in the jungle with a pipe while a bullock-cart is found. Robbers are plentiful between Indore and Agra, where the mail-cart has just been plundered and one lately upset in a gully, breaking its driver’s thigh. Palanquin bearers work their tricks on him; coolies lay hold of the garree at the difficult places, make a show of pushing, and demand backsheesh; a runaway horse is brought up against the abutment of a bridge; one night he wakes to find the carriage tilted on a hillside with three natives hanging to the upper wheels. Between the stages lie dawk bungalows, hospitable officers, and fellow travelers last seen at Suez.

A week at Bombay yields Elephanta’s cave-temples, Parsee households, a nautch at Parell and a chapter on the Hindoo faith. Three chapters go to Agra: the Fort and Akbar’s palace, prison education at the jail, deserted Futtehpore-Sikree and the Taj Mahal. Then Delhi and the shrunken court of Akbar II; a palanquin journey north to the unfinished Ganges Canal and to Hurdwar, half-deserted except at its great annual fair; a climb to the hill village of Landowr for the Himalayan snows; a day at Lucknow, where the king is fleeced by his own court and the revenues “are collected yearly with cannon”; the Hindoo festival at Allahabad, where pilgrims are shorn at the Place of Hair and bathe where the Ganges and Jumna meet; Benares; and a garree-dawk run to Calcutta on 21 February. His verdict on British rule is a qualified defense: the wrongs “call for severe reprehension,” but “the country has prospered under English Government,” the Company’s is “a well-regulated despotism,” and he will think it fortunate when “the power of England stretches, in unbroken integrity, from Cashmere to Cape Comorin.” The exception is furious. He cannot notice the contemptuous English treatment of Indians “without feeling disgusted and indignant,” records a racial epithet applied to the whole race by “those high in office” and in general use among the lower orders of the English, and asks how Exeter Hall can tolerate it while condemning “the social inequality of the negro and the white races in America.”

China opens with the passage from Calcutta by way of Penang, “the most beautiful island in the world,” and Singapore, where his first sight of a large Chinese community fills him with “an unconquerable aversion.” He is bound for Canton when at Macao the United States Commissioner, Humphrey Marshall, attaches him to the legation, and he sails north instead in the steam-frigate Susquehanna, carrying shipwrecked Japanese sailors. Marshall’s attempt to steam up the Yang-tse-Kiang to Nanking puts the ship on the Blonde Shoal; she works clear, but neither chart nor pilots can be depended on and the expedition is given up. Taylor stays at Shanghai from late March to the middle of May, in “almost daily expectation” of the rebel vanguard: rumor and atrocity report, a state visit from the Taou-tai, a military review that “was like a Chinese travesty of Don Quixote.” One chapter walks the Chinese city — burying-grounds and paper money for the dead, a baby tower, a pawnbroker’s, the Tea Garden and its gamblers, a prison where men are caged with knees drawn to their chins, kite-flying at sunset. His verdicts are harsh and often repeated: no original taste, a “mental inertia” that “seems to be almost hopeless of improvement,” a court whose “duration or overthrow is a matter of complete indifference,” and the deliberate opinion that they are “morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth,” whose “touch is pollution,” and who “should not be allowed to settle on our soil.”

Perry’s squadron reaches Shanghai in May 1853. Navy orders barred anyone aboard not subject to the service, so Taylor enlists as an acting master’s-mate — a rank “purposely left vacant, in order that it might be filled by artists and naturalists,” at twenty-five dollars a month — and sails in the flagship on 17 May with the corps of artists. At Napa in Loo-Choo he is one of four officers who walk the interior six days and more than a hundred miles, a journey spies shadow throughout — “we were surrounded with a secret power” — and one he can give only in outline, permission to copy that part of his journal having been refused. On the march to Shui, about 215 strong, the Regent tries to divert the procession to his own house, and the castle gate is found closed until a messenger is sent at full speed to open it; his banquet runs to twelve courses, eight of them soups. At the Bonins, eight or nine hundred miles away, the settlers make the strangest company in the book: Savory of Massachusetts, there since 1831, selling sweet potatoes to whalers and distilling rum; an Englishman of twenty years who means to die on the island; the Portuguese Bravo, whose daughter a whaling crew carried off; a ragged British flag hoisted by a Kanaka the day after the squadron arrived. Taylor commands one of two parties across Peel Island, and calls it “certainly the hardest day’s work of my life.”

The squadron sails from Napa on 2 July and makes Cape Idzu on the 8th; two steamers, “the first that ever entered Japanese waters,” running at nine knots, must, Taylor thinks, have astonished the natives. Off Cape Sagami the decks are cleared and the guns shotted; at Uraga two-sworded officials are refused the gangway, the Vice-Governor’s proposal that the ships go to Nangasaki is rejected as an insult to the President, and after four days of conferences — the first parley carried on principally in Dutch — the Emperor appoints “one of the Chief Counsellors of the Empire” to receive the letter ashore. Through a glass Taylor counts five batteries and finds their strength “greatly exaggerated”; the Japanese throw up a false battery of black canvas a hundred yards long with “no appearance of guns,” and the quarter-masters report gravely, “Another dungaree fort thrown up, sir!” The surveying boats, closer in, find the forts mount fourteen guns in all, none larger than nine-pounders. On 14 July the letter is delivered at Gori-hama, under canvas emblazoned with the Imperial arms: upwards of 320 persons landed against five thousand Japanese troops, “as they themselves informed us,” two sailor boys bearing the letters in sumptuous boxes, two princes silent as statues in the house of reception. The Mississippi then carries Perry to within a supposed eight miles of the capital, the squadron leaves on 17 July, and an appended note reports the 1854 treaty and the opening of Simoda, Hakodadi and Napa-Kiang.

Back at Napa in late July, Perry presses demands on the new Regent: a coal depot, an open market, an end to espionage, a collection of island manufactures. Taylor disputes Basil Hall’s Loo-Chooans, ignorant of money, arms and war; Napoleon, told this at St. Helena, exclaimed “Point d’armes! point de guerres!—impossible!”; “He was right,” Taylor writes, citing Klaproth’s chronicle of their wars and the ruined castles of two of the three old kingdoms, the third still the Viceroy’s. A chapter on naval life turns to policy — promotion by seniority, flogging abolished without an effective substitute — “one of those mistaken acts of philanthropy which are founded on abstract ideas of humanity rather than a practical knowledge of human nature.” Hong Kong and Macao bring the princely households and “iron laws of etiquette” of the foreign communities, the grotto of Camoëns, and his resignation in September; Canton brings an opium experiment, the eight-mile wall, Parker’s hospital, and the verdict that China is “the very best country in the world—to leave.” He sails in the clipper Sea Serpent, gives a whole chapter to one day at St. Helena, and lands at New York on 20 December 1853, after an absence of two years and four months, hoping the reader ends with the same faith in “those innate virtues of human nature which no degradation can obscure.” The book carries two engravings: a Taj Mahal vignette on the engraved title page and, as frontispiece, his sketch of the Loo-Choo valley of Un-na.

A compilation rather than a travel narrative, this two-volume work anthologizes European and American accounts of Japan under the hand of an American historian who never went there. It is Richard Hildreth’s Japan as it Was and Is re-set with the subtitle “A Handbook of Old Japan,” edited with supplementary notes by Ernest W. Clement and carrying a foreword by Wm. Elliot Griffis, which the title page bills as an introduction. Hildreth’s own “Advertisement” to the original edition, signed at Boston on June 1st, 1855, is reprinted in the first volume and states the method plainly: “Instead of attempting, as others have done, to cast into a systematic shape observations of very different dates, I have preferred to follow the historic method, and to let the reader see Japan with the successive eyes of all those who have visited it, and who have committed their observations and reflections to paper and print.” Clement, writing from Tōkyō in July 1906, notes that the book had appeared in three editions — 1855, 1856, and 1861 — and concedes that its title “was proper in 1855 and 1856, but it is rather unsuitable in its entirety fifty years later.”

That method produces a book largely made of other men’s sentences. Something between a quarter and a third of the first volume, and something over two-fifths of the second, sit inside quotation marks, and the proportion climbs steeply wherever a single witness takes the floor: four chapters of Volume I and four of Volume II run from about three-quarters quoted to all but wholly quoted, the last chapter of Volume I most nearly so. Volume II in fact opens inside a quotation, with no speaker named on the page — “TO accommodate travellers, there is, in all the chief villages and hamlets, a post-house, belonging to the lord of the place” — the voice being Engelbert Kämpfer’s, carried over from the volume before. Hildreth narrates in the third person and reaches for an editorial “we” (“It is not our purpose to trace minutely the progress and fluctuating fortunes of the Jesuit missionaries”), keeping the first-person singular largely to his footnotes. Where an “I” does appear, it usually belongs to a Dutch-factory physician of 1690, a Swedish naturalist of 1775, a Russian naval captain of 1811, or an American consul of 1857.

Volume I opens on the name of the country, “pronounced in the country itself Nippon or Nihon,” and on Marco Polo’s Zipangu and the Mongol invasion, set beside the Chinese and Japanese annalists’ versions of the same event. From chapter II the book settles into the Christian century, which fills pages 11 to 268: Galvano’s account of the discovery of 1542, in which a storm carries three Portuguese to an island “which they do name Japan,” and Fernam Mendez Pinto’s rival claim, which a footnote refuses to date earlier than 1545 — the landfall at Tanegashima, where Diego Zeimoto’s hand-gun so astonished the prince that he “caused other guns to be made like it” — and Pinto’s later visits; Xavier preaching at Kagoshima, Hirado, Yamaguchi and Miyako; the baptized king of Bungo and the embassy of 1582 to the Pope, with the king’s letter, a discourse on obedience, and one papal brief printed at length as a sample of the rest; Nobunaga, Taikō-Sama and the expulsion edict of 1587; the expedition against Corea; the twenty-six crucified at Nagasaki in 1597. Then come the northern Europeans — Will Adams, wrecked on the eastern coast of Shimo, reporting that “I think no land in the world better governed by civil policy”; Captain John Saris and Richard Cocks at Hirado — with Don Rodrigo de Vivero, the shipwrecked late governor of Manila, on Yedo. The persecution follows, the fall of Shimabara, and the exclusion edict of 1638 quoted from Kämpfer: “No Japanese ship or boat whatever, nor any native of Japan, shall presume to go out of the country.” A last chapter on the policy of the Dutch sets down Francis Caron’s answers to the Company’s questions on the income of the emperor and the nobles, the military force and justice.

A chapter on commerce carries the account down to 1690 — the Portuguese, Dutch and Chinese trade, the prohibition on exporting silver, the Chinese shut up in a factory of their own, the traffic with Lew Chew [Riukiu] — and the last hundred and twenty pages of the first volume are given over to Kämpfer, introduced as “the first scientific and systematic observer who visited Japan” and, by the Advertisement’s account, quoted in “very liberal extracts,” with “a little” of “the superabundance of his words” retrenched. Chapters XXVII through XXXI describe Deshima and its inhabitants; the machinery of the Dutch trade, from the unlading of ships through duties and profits to smuggling and the execution of smugglers; Nagasaki itself — harbor, streets, courtesan quarters, temples, the three governors, the street government, the figure-treading, and the Suwa festival; and the preparations for the two journeys to court — presents, attendants, road-books, norimono and kago. The last chapter takes to the road: highways, rivers, ferries and vessels, the proclamation places, the roadside temples, and the amulets pasted to house doors. Kämpfer’s summary of his situation carries the section: “Thus we live all the year round little better than prisoners, confined within the compass of a small island, under the perpetual and narrow inspection of our keepers.” The volume ends at page 401 with Kämpfer still speaking, all its apparatus reserved for the second.

Kämpfer runs on for another hundred and eight pages there, taking the Dutch train out of Nagasaki through Kokura and Shimonoseki to Ōsaka and Miyako, whose houses, streets, bridges and temples are set down by the census, and on to the audiences at Yedo of 1691 and 1692, where the Dutch were ordered “to dance, to jump, to play the drunkard, to speak broken Japanese, to read Dutch, to paint, to sing,” so that “with innumerable such other apish tricks, we must suffer ourselves to contribute to the emperor’s and the court’s diversion.” The witnesses then change hands. A short chapter in Hildreth’s own analytical voice traces the debasement of the koban and the drain of the precious metals; Charles Peter Thunberg follows for 1775–76 with botanizing, acupuncture and moxa, and a verdict on the factory where “an European that remains here is, in a manner, dead and buried in an obscure corner of the globe”; Isaac Titsingh supplies annals of the Dairi and long accounts of marriage and funeral ceremonial; Hendrick Doeff, the Phaeton affair and the years when no ship came from Batavia; Golownin and Rikord, the captivity of 1811–13 at Hakodate and Matsumae.

Doeff’s chapter and Golownin’s open a run of a hundred and fifty pages on the foreign approaches of the nineteenth century — the Russians from the north, Siebold and the affair of the map, the Morrison turned away in 1837, Commodore Biddle rebuffed in the Bay of Yedo, the Preble sent to Nagasaki to bring away the deserters held ashore. The Perry chapter is the longest in either volume at fifty-one pages, printing Fillmore’s letter, the Kanagawa treaty and the Additional Regulations in full, with descriptions of Shimoda and Hakodate and letters to the newspapers from officers of the squadron. The final chapter carries Townsend Harris from Shimoda to his audience at Yedo in 1857 — “the people were ordered to cast down their eyes as I passed, as I was too high even to be looked at; but this order was only partially obeyed, for the dear daughters of Eve would have a peep” — and on through the treaties of 1858 to the embassy that sailed for Washington in 1860. There the account stops, on the sentence: “A few cargoes of Japanese products have been shipped, but the trade is still in its infancy, and the extent to which it can be carried remains very problematical.”

Clement works chiefly in the margins. His added notes are signed “Edr.,” a smaller set drawn from Mr. K. Murakawa’s Japanese reprint is signed “K. M.,” and modern equivalents are supplied in brackets while the old forms stand in the text — Miyako [Kyoto], Taikō-Sama, Shimo, Corea, Yedo. He harmonizes the spelling of Japanese words with a macron-bearing modern romanization, prefaces Volume I with a page of “Japanese Pronunciation,” and warns that two usages were too deeply woven in to correct: “Nippon” for the main island, and “Emperor” for the Shōgun, the true sovereign appearing throughout as the Dairi. The second volume holds the back matter: an Appendix of Notes A through I, among them a bibliography of turn-of-the-century writing on Japan and a set of “Omitted Documents,” and an index keyed to both volumes. Each title page promises “One Hundred Illustrations and Maps,” a count of pictures rather than plates: the first volume carries thirty-three plates and two folding maps, the second forty-two and no maps, many of them holding two or three pictures under one caption. Most are halftones of modern photographs, which Clement defends, so far as manners and customs go, on the ground that “there has been comparatively little change in those particulars” — leaving a narrative that ends in 1860 illustrated with a tea garden, a wedding, a Tōkyō street crossed by trolley wires, and a plate captioned “The Old and the New: Junks; The New Battleship Mikasa”: junks under sail above, the battleship smoking below.

A voyage narrative of the Perry expedition written from a berth well below the level of command. J. W. Spalding sailed as clerk to the commander of the U.S. steam-frigate Mississippi, the expedition’s first flag ship, leaving Norfolk on the 24th of November 1852; his preface credits the appointment to “that fine officer and estimable gentleman, Commander Sydney Smith Lee,” describes the voyage as “a cruise of nearly two and a half years,” and disclaims any larger ambition — the pages “do not profess to be a history of Japan, of which there are already a number extant, but only embody observations of what came under notice,” set down by a writer who “kept no journal” and depended on “scattered memoranda, jottings down to friends, and to memory.” The narrative chapters are told in the first person throughout (“I found myself, as commander’s clerk, on board of her”; “I started for Longwood and the now vacant tomb of Napoleon”; “I had landed, according to previous appointment, to take a botanical tramp into the country”), though set-piece description slips habitually into a generalizing second person — “You no sooner put your foot on the stone stairs than your winding way of ascent is beset by innumerable lazzaroni” — and official papers are reprinted entire. Fifteen chapters and an appendix run from page 9 to page 377.

The first ninety-odd pages are the outward passage, one port at a time. Madeira brings washerwomen, wine-houses, a gallop to the Petite Coral and a Portuguese hospital and prison; St. Helena brings a nine-mile walk to Napoleon’s empty grave, the shilling charged at the gate, the register scrawled by Englishmen, Frenchmen and “Jonathan,” and Longwood turned over to a thrashing-machine and horse-stalls. Then Cape Town in its red sandstorms, the drive to Constantia and a look at the captive Kaffir chief Seyolo in the prison at Wynberg; Mauritius, with Port Louis, the sugar country, and the reputed tombs of Paul and Virginia at Pamplemouses; Ceylon and Point de Galle, with a mosque, a Koran school and a pigeon express; Singapore, its joss-house, convict prison and a call on the rajah of Johore. China follows — Macao, Hong Kong, Whampoa, and Shanghae, where Spalding prints the card of the spring races and reports the Hermes’ encounter with Thae-ping-wang’s rebels. A whole chapter then goes to Great Loo-Choo: a compiled history of the islands, the guarded reception at Napa, the missionary Dr. Bettelheim, hooted and beaten in the streets and preaching to auditors whom the police scattered at a signal, the armed march up to the palace at Sheudi, and a feast of nearly a dozen soups and the visiting party’s first taste of saki.

Japan itself occupies about half the book, in three visits. The first is prefaced by a compressed chapter on the country as it was known through books — Koempfer, Thunberg, Siebold, Golownin, the Jesuit letters — with Japanese cosmogony, the succession of mikados and ziogoons, Kublai-khan’s letter and the wreck of his armada, and short extracts from two English writers predicting bloodshed. The visit itself, eight days in July 1853, is given “as jotted down at the time,” in dated entries for the first week: the shells fired from the hill above Uraga, the cordon of guard-boats broken up under threat, the chaplain giving out “Old Hundred” at the dressed capstan in sight of heathen temples, the Mississippi steaming up behind her sounding boats past the point beyond which no “barbarian” ship had been permitted to go and the clay bluff named “Mississippi bluff” to mark how much nearer the ziogoon’s palace she had come than any foreign ship before, and on the 14th the landing at Gorihama before some thousands of Japanese troops, where the prince of Idzoo received President Fillmore’s letter — printed here in full with Perry’s own — and the squadron marched back to its boats. A burial at sea, a cyclone, a bazar extracted from the Loo-Chooans at Napa and the run back to Hong Kong close the chapter.

A China chapter intervenes — Blenheim Reach in the heat, consular courts, the Feast of the Lanterns, a jaunt around the walls of Canton with the missionary S. W. Bonney past the execution ground, and a sustained attack on the opium traffic and the English flag that covers it — before the squadron returns in February 1854. The second visit runs longest: dinners and swords aboard ship, a visiting Japanese official who will not touch a Book of Common Prayer once he sees the cross engraved on it, a Christian burial ashore at Yokohama (given in the chaplain’s words), the locomotive and telegraph put in operation on shore to the great interest of the Japanese, wrestlers in a straw ring, and the treaty of Kanagawa signed on the 31st of March and reprinted article by article. Spalding explains hari kari when the interpreters plead that a run up to Yedo will cost them their lives, then follows the ships to Simoda — temples, spies shaken off in the brambles, bath-houses, purchases funneled through the gayoshio — where two young scholars of Yedo, Isagi Kóóda and Kwansuchi Manji, slip him a letter begging passage abroad and are found days later in a cage; their letter is translated in full, and with it the statement one of them wrote on a board and passed through the bars of his cage. Hakodadi follows, its people in flight until the treaty is shown them, with the two orders of the blind, a climb up Hakodadi Yama that ends in a contest of scale between the circles a lookout draws on the ground for “Nipong” and “America,” and a letter from the Japanese functionaries explaining why the women had hidden. Then Simoda again for the additional regulations, the currency dispute, notes on lacquer, porcelain and tea, and the rules of the Japanese chess-game “Sho-ho-ye”; on the way back a compact is signed with Loo-Choo, and Spalding turns on the commodore twice over — for menacing the forts while a Loo-Chooan tribunal sentenced the men who had stoned an American seaman, “the United States bullying Loo-Choo!”, and for landing cutlasses and ball-cartridges to sign the compact “among a people whose forts are disarmed.”

The last chapter is brisk and mostly sour. Letters at Hong Kong, fresh rebel fighting near Canton, and Perry’s departure in the mail-steamer on the 11th of September 1854, preceded by an address from the American merchants that Spalding dismisses as “this bijou of toadyism” and answers with a page of dates showing how little protection they actually had. The Mississippi then makes her third visit to Simoda in the autumn — Captain Lee’s exchange of courtesies with the lieutenant-governor of what was now an imperial city, an engineer of the ship who refuses silver dollars for his revolver until a Japanese officer pays in the forbidden its-evoos and disappears over the side, the new Japanese ship Ho-o-maro built on the model of the Southampton, New England cotton cloths distributed to men who had no use for them — and Spalding concludes that the great trade prophesied with that country, “should we ever get a commercial treaty, is a mere myth and exists in the brain of visionaries alone.” Supplemental notes report the exchange of ratifications, the earthquake that piled Simoda in ruins and wrecked the Russian frigate Diana, and the English and French squadrons negotiating their treaty at Nangasaki; the homeward run through Honolulu, California, Valparaiso and the straits of Magellan is set aside as it “would make our narrative of undue length.” An appendix supplies sailing directions for Napa and Oonting by Lieutenant S. Bent, for Simoda, Yedo and Hakodadi by Lieutenant Wm. L. Maury, and for Lloyd harbor in the Bonins from the reports of two acting masters, the pursers’ report on the currency question, and a table of Japanese distances with the native measurement of the height of Foogee Yama. Eight tinted lithographs by Sarony & Co. of New York are distributed through the volume, among them a frontispiece of Japanese figures and views captioned “Cape of Good Hope,” “Ceylon,” “Loo Choo,” “Near Yedo” and “Foogee Yama.”

Mac Farlane writes wholly at second hand, and his book does not pretend otherwise: it is a compilation, made in England out of other men’s books, and the dedication says so — “you have, in the kindest and readiest manner, rendered very valuable assistance while I have been engaged in the compilation.” The preface objects to the common saying “that we know next to nothing of Japan and the Japanese,” and answers it by describing what lies on the writer’s desk “chiefly through acts of kindness presently to be acknowledged”: what “might almost be called a Japanese library, or a library about Japan,” in Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, German, and English. Much of it was lent by an old friend, the late James Drummond, who drew his attention to the subject twenty years since and who, “passing for a Dutchman, . . . resided several years in Japan”; the Royal Asiatic Society and the Library of the East India House are thanked separately at the close. He has, he writes, “purposely avoided minutiae,” wanting “a broad, general view,” and has spoken “doubtingly” wherever a thing “startles belief or . . . is not confirmed and supported by several authorities.” The result is arranged by subject in eleven numbered Books and an appendix, and a great deal of it is not his own prose: Kämpfer above all, and after him Thunberg and Sir John Francis Davis, are quoted for pages at a stretch, while Golownin, Doeff, Meylan, Fischer, Titsingh, Siebold and Thomas Rundall are drawn on and cited throughout. The connecting voice is a compiler’s editorial “we” that slips now and then into “I.”

Book I, at a hundred and eight pages the longest thing in the volume, is a history of European intercourse. It opens in 1542 with a Portuguese ship blown off her course to Macao and anchoring at Bungo, follows Francisco Xavier to Japan and the Portuguese trade to Firando and Nagasaki, sends the Japanese Christians’ embassy to Rome, and comes to the edicts, the twenty-six crucifixions of 1597, the massacre near Nagasaki in 1622, and the total expulsion of the Portuguese before the close of 1639. They accused the Dutch of causing it, “and it is not easy to see how the charge can be either denied or doubted.” Worse follows at Simabara, where the converts held an old fortified place that the Dutch director Kockebecker, at the emperor’s request, battered with 426 cannon-balls; having “cleared the Dutch from unfounded aspersions” earlier, Mac Farlane does not excuse them here. From there it is Desima, “more like a prison than a factory,” in Kämpfer’s long quotation, and Fischer on the far pleasanter journey to Jeddo of 1822. The English strand belongs to the pilot William Adams, whose two letters home are quoted almost entire — the passage of the Straits of Magelhaens, the audience at Osacca, the eighty-ton ship he built for the emperor, the wife and children he never saw again — followed by Captain Saris and the Clove, the privileges of 1613, and the closing of the factory in 1623. The later approaches come in order: Laxman and Resanoff for Russia, Golownin’s captivity in the wooden cages at Chakodade and Matsmai, the frigate Phaeton at Nagasaki in 1808 and the official suicides that followed her departure, Raffles’s attempt to take over the Dutch factory, Captain Gordon’s little brig in the Bay of Jeddo, Belcher in the Samarang, the unarmed American Morrison fired on off Kagosima, and last of all the sloop Mariner, Commander Matheson, off Oragawa in May 1849, “this our last visit of all,” whose report is given in full.

The expedition named on the title page is anticipated, not narrated; American dealings with Japan stop at 1849. What the book has to report is Commodore Biddle’s Columbus, of ninety guns, and the frigate Vincennes, which lay ten days at the entrance of the Bay of Jeddo in 1846 and were sent away with the written answer, “No trade can be allowed with any foreign nation, except Holland”; and the Preble, sent in 1849 for some men from the whaler Lagoda. The substance of the President’s letter is printed — “our steamers can reach the shores of your happy land in less than twenty days” — with long extracts from Lawson’s Merchant’s Magazine and a congressional report on a San Francisco–Macao steam line. Mac Farlane’s own judgment is that “little or nothing can be done by negotiation,” and that “should our very enterprising and energetic brethren begin with a too free use of Bowie-knives and Colt’s revolvers, the history of their mission will all be written in characters of blood.” The commander is named just once, in a Book VI footnote citing the Times of May 12th, 1852 for the instructions to Commander Aulick; otherwise the enterprise is impersonally “the American expedition,” whose declared main object, Book VI reports, is Japanese coal — “a gift of Providence,” in the words of Webster’s letter of instruction.

The survey proper starts with Book II, a geographical sketch that opens on Marco Polo’s Zipangu with its roof “covered with a plating of gold” and then lays out the three islands of Proper Japan — Kioosioo or Kewsew, Sitkokf, and Niphon — with Yesso, part of the Kuriles and the south of Tarakay as dependencies, the shallow and whirlpool-ridden coasts, the single great peak of the Fudsi Jamma, and the towns: Nagasaki in its narrow valley, commercial Osacca with its canals and freestone steps, Miaco with its Dairi and its printing houses, and Jeddo, “according to the Japanese” nearly thirty miles in circuit and forever burning down. Book III opens on a Japanese who will tell you “with great pride, that they are lineally descended from the gods,” assigns them instead to the Mongol stock, follows Kämpfer’s conjectured migration from the Caspian along the Amoor to Corea, and runs a summary history from Syn Mu, “about the year before Christ 660,” through the twice-wrecked armadas of Kublai Khan to the soldier of fortune Taiko Sama, nicknamed “The Ape,” who divided the empire into its spiritual and lay halves. Books IV and V take religion and rule together: the Sintoo cosmogony and the Sun Goddess, the rules of purity and defilement, the pilgrimage to Isye and the purchased ofarria, the mountain hermits and the two societies of the blind, Buddhism and the Confucian “way of philosophers,” and the emperor Nobunanga’s answer to the bonzes that “where thirty-five religions can be tolerated, we can easily bear with thirty-six.” Then the two coexisting sovereigns, the council of state that may depose the lay emperor and must sometimes rip itself open, the vassal princes compelled into alternate residence at Jeddo with their families held as hostages, the eight hereditary classes and the leather-workers counted in none of them, and a surveillance so complete that “it may well be called ‘a government of spies.’”

The shorter Books inventory the country. Book VI takes up gold, silver, copper and pearls, and the coal of Sikusen; Book VII the firs and cypresses, “the most common trees in their woods and forests,” the camphor and varnish trees, the tea plant, the terraced hillsides, the trick of growing a fir, a bamboo and a blossoming plum in a box three inches long, and the rice that is brewed into sackee; Book VIII the sparse quadrupeds, the sacred cranes, the ownerless street dogs and the whale fishery; Book IX the lacquer, the steel and the paper, with Thunberg’s account of boiling mulberry bark given in full and an American seaman’s description of a junk’s single mast, open stern and unwieldy rudder. Book X turns to amusement and manners — theaters of three tiers of boxes, where Fischer’s ladies change dress two or three times during the performance, the Feast of Lanterns and the Matsuri at Nagasaki, the etiquette of the tea-party, the bath taken every morning and every evening — and holds that the condition of women is “incomparably better and higher in Japan than in any other Oriental country,” while naming incontinence and the appetite for revenge as the national vices. Book XI ends the survey with a philologist friend’s notes on Japanese grammar, the two syllabaries, printing from wood blocks since 1206, poems in Titsingh’s versions, the stage on which three long pieces are played an act at a time in rotation, medicine, acupuncture, the corpse-limbering Dosia powder, astronomy and painting. A thirty-five-page appendix goes back over the same ground with further extracts — Mendes Pinto, the Japanese annalists’ notice of the strangers of 1543, Captain Gordon’s journal, Heylyn’s Japan of 1639, Klaproth on the volcanoes, Doeff on the great Jeddo fire, Thunberg on how the Dutch were searched at Nagasaki — then a short list of Japanese books the author has handled, a translated preface to the Tale of the Six Folding Screens, and, on the last two pages, a note on the grammars and dictionaries available to anyone “commencing the study of the Japanese language.” Every one of the eleven Books opens with a cut: four — Firando, the Fudsi-Jamma, the Kirisima Jamma, a Japanese fishing family — are wood engravings printed with the letterpress above the heading, and the other seven are full-page plates on unnumbered facing leaves, among them the Divinities before Book III and a vassal prince on horseback before Book V. Other cuts sit in the letterpress, the crater of the Fudsi Jamma at the foot of a page, ornamental candlesticks and a lady painting in mid-text; twenty-seven in all are named in the list of illustrations, and a frontispiece of a Japanese lady, framed in shelved vases, bowls and hanging lanterns, stands before the title.

Commodore M. C. Perry’s official report on the American naval expedition to the China Seas and Japan, issued as a heavily illustrated volume by D. Appleton and Company in 1856, is unusually forthcoming about how it was made. A Prefatory Note explains that Perry, whose facts came from his officers’ journals as well as his own, “thought it better to confide the compilation to a disinterested third party,” and placed in the compiler’s hands “the manuscript journal of the Commodore, in three large folios,” his official correspondence, the journals of his secretary and other officers, the diaries of the fleet captain and flag-lieutenants, the reports of gentlemen detailed for special duties, and the public documents of the Expedition. Francis L. Hawks calls the work “that of a compiler merely,” says the language is often “a verbatim copy” from Perry’s journal, and acknowledges a “competent literary gentleman” — named in a footnote as Robert Tomes, Esq., M.D. — who sketched some descriptions of scenery and parts of the narrative of the two Japan visits, so that the whole was written “in less than a twelve-month.” Every word was read to Perry in manuscript and every proof sheet by him, and a short signed paragraph follows in his own first person: “I present it as my official report, and am alone responsible for the statement of facts it contains.” The book that results is a composite: a third-person narrative that calls Perry “the Commodore” throughout, carries an editorial “we,” and interleaves officers’ journals, dispatches and dialogue printed verbatim.

Nearly a seventh of the volume passes before the voyage begins. An unnumbered Introduction running to page 94 is a free-standing essay on all Europeans knew of “this self-isolated Kingdom.” Eight numbered sections survey geography, religion and natural productions, and a government of double sovereignty under Mikado and Ziogoon, with paired officials and five-family groups making what the book, quoting others, calls a “government of spies.” The longest by far, a nation-by-nation history of earlier attempts on Japan, carries the thesis that exclusion was not native to Japan but taught it by Europeans. The Portuguese were welcomed — Xavier is quoted calling the Japanese “the delight of my heart” — and their ruin laid at their own door, to quarrelling friars and “the pride, avarice, and extortions of the Portuguese laity”; the Dutch shared the guilt of Simabara, “no better than cold blooded murder,” and were confined to Dezima, “more like a prison than a factory” in Kaempfer’s phrase. Eight English trading privileges of 1613, printed entire, “conclusively show,” it says, “that the original policy of Japan was not at all one of exclusion.” Seventeen unheaded pages of polemic close it: no power in the other hemisphere needs Japan as Russia does, though the book declines to endorse the suspicion that she meant to absorb it; Holland bought her monopoly by servility; Von Siebold’s Bonn pamphlet is “the product of mortified and irritated vanity.” Loo-Choo and Ziogoon are the Introduction’s spellings; the narrative drops both. Its last claim is one of credit: “England and the United States alone succeeded; and England readily admits that, in point of time, ours was the first.”

“The Middle Kingdom” is a name the first chapter suggests Americans might now apply to themselves, their territory “spreading from ocean to ocean”; against that acquisition, and against the search for coal, the mission is set. Perry’s proposal, the vessels promised him, the “vexatious delay” in their equipment and his refusal of all civilian scientists — Von Siebold among them, being believed banished from Japan — fill out the chapter; the Mississippi sailed alone from Norfolk on 24 November 1852. Hawks says he kept the outward passage as brief as duty permitted, yet it still fills seventy-odd printed pages: Funchal, and the ox-drawn wine-sledge in which the Commodore made his official visits; Jamestown, Longwood fallen into decay, and Napoleon’s empty tomb; Cape Town, the vineyards of Constantia, and Perry quoted saying that Americans have “no right to rail at other nations” for wrongs done to native peoples; Mauritius, where the story behind Paul and Virginia is traced to a wreck of 1744 and the tombs shown to be monuments an eccentric Frenchman raised in his garden to draw company, turned since his death into a paid show; Point de Galle, with a digression on the consular service and its unfit appointees; Singapore and its tigers; Hong Kong; Canton, an anticlimax of “filth and noise” after the picture-books of childhood; Macao and the cave of Camoens; and Shanghai, where the Plymouth was left to guard American property during the Chinese rebellion.

No way station but a second theater, Lew Chew is returned to five times, across seven chapters and more than a hundred pages — more than the Introduction fills. The squadron anchored at Napha on 26 May 1853, where the missionary Dr. Bettelheim came aboard “almost beside himself with joy”; gifts were peremptorily refused, officers shadowed by spies, and an official negotiating about a house on shore broke into English: he had read of Washington, “very good man, very good,” but “American no can have house on shore.” A whole chapter is surrendered to the report of the inland exploring party under Chaplain Jones, narrated in the first person by Bayard Taylor — six days, a hundred and eight miles, a flag unfurled on Banner Rock. Perry forced his way up to the palace at Shui on 6 June behind two bands and some two hundred men, “Hail Columbia” playing as he walked in through a gate the regent had had shut against him, and sat afterward through twelve courses, eight of them soup. Between visits the ships ran to the Bonins, where thirty-one settlers lived at Port Lloyd under Nathaniel Savory; the book argues that the Japanese and not Beechey discovered the group and records the title obtained to land for a coal depot; the settlers’ own constitution, brought back by a later visit of the Plymouth, is printed further on. On the third visit Perry threatened to land two hundred men and hold Shui; the authorities gave way two mornings later, a coal shed rose, and a bazaar opened.

On 8 July 1853 the squadron entered the bay of Yedo, cleared for action, and anchored off Uraga, casting off and dispersing the guard-boats. Beacon fires burned on every hilltop that night and a great bell tolled till morning; the flag-ship’s nine o’clock gun put some of the fires out. At daylight the survey boats went out, and the governor, objecting that Japanese law forbade sounding the bay, was told that “the American laws command them.” Days of maneuver follow, printed largely as dialogue, until the landing at Gori-Hama on 14 July: fifteen boats, nearly three hundred officers, sailors, marines and bandsmen, two armed black men marching on either side of the Commodore as his personal guard, and two princes who sat in “statuesque formality” and never spoke. The letters were laid on the lid of a scarlet lacquered box and an imperial receipt handed over, printed first as a literal rendering of a Dutch text the book calls badly translated, then as what “would probably be the correct translation from the Japanese,” both acknowledging the letter was received “in opposition to the Japanese law.” Rather than leave as ordered, Perry moved the squadron ten miles higher up the bay, then took the Mississippi ten miles further still, twenty miles above Uraga, in sight of a town the book takes for Sinagawa; presents were exchanged on terms of reciprocity, and he sailed on 17 July. The chapter prints Fillmore’s letter entire, with the Commodore’s letter of credence and two more of his letters to the Emperor — one instance of a habit running through the narrative, which reproduces official papers by the score, in the text and in footnotes crawling along the page-bottoms.

Between the two visits comes a winter on the China coast: a refit at Macao and Hong Kong, fever through the squadron, Chinese food, servants, guilds, beggars and boat-girls, a correspondence with Sir J. G. Bonham about the Bonins, and news of French and Russian movements that decided Perry on a mid-winter return. He anchored again on 13 February 1854 and spent a fortnight refusing to negotiate at Uraga, until the Japanese proposed Yoku-hama, where nine ships moored abreast covered five miles of shore. Five commissioners are described one by one; the Emperor’s answer to the President is printed; a marine is buried ashore, a Buddhist priest sitting silent at his altar through the Episcopal service and beginning his own rites over the filled grave; and the presents are landed on 13 March — a telegraph strung nearly a mile, and a locomotive so small that a dignitary rode on the roof of the car “with his loose robes flying in the wind.” Twenty-five wrestlers carrying rice sacks, a dinner aboard the Powhatan ending in blackface minstrelsy and a tipsy embrace, and days of argument over ports and consuls — Perry said he expected five ports in time but would take three now, and refused Nagasaki outright; the Japanese offered Simoda and conceded Hakodadi on 23 March, and at a conference five days later said flatly, “We do not want any women to come and remain at Simoda” — precede the treaty, signed at Kanagawa on Friday, 31 March 1854, printed entire and then weighed in a long essay taking up several of its articles in turn.

What follows the treaty is less narrative than description. Chapter XXII surveys the harbor of Simoda, describes its nine Buddhist temples and their graveyards, and tells of two Japanese scholars who came aboard by night to beg passage to America, were put back ashore, and were found afterward caged in the town prison, their fate never ascertained. At Hakodadi, where the authorities had not yet heard of the treaty, comes the longest chapter in the book — thirty-three pages that leave the expedition behind for the town’s houses, its burial grounds, where a prayer-wheel is set in a post among the tombs, its commerce and junks, the skill of its carpenters and blacksmiths, lacquer and drawing, the Ainos or hairy Kuriles, and games of chess and cards. The Southampton surveyed Volcano Bay and Endermo harbor, where two volcanoes erupted; boundaries for the Americans and the value of the two currencies were settled at Simoda, and additional regulations signed there on 17 June 1854. In the last chapter a sailor is found dead at Napha after forcing his way into a house and assaulting a woman; a court of six judges convened on Perry’s demand, its policemen punching the accused in the ribs to make him speak, convicts six; the Commodore declines to receive the ringleader when the regent brings him bound to the Mississippi, and all six are banished. A compact with Lew Chew was signed on 11 July; the Macedonian went to Formosa, where Chaplain Jones found coal in abundance at Kelung, and on to Manila; and the Plymouth, with two British ships, shelled and burned the imperial camps outside Shanghai before Perry hauled down his flag at Brooklyn on 24 April 1855.

After the last chapter come a Supplementary Chapter, carrying matters to the earthquake and wave at Simoda and the exchange of ratifications on 21 February 1855, and an Appendix of twelve pages holding five hydrographic pieces of no single kind: sailing directions for Simoda and for Napha that address the navigator directly, directions for Hakodadi that turn aside into an account of what the visit found, a survey of Yedo Bay reported in the first person plural — “Our survey embraced the western shore only… We had no opportunity of examining the eastern side” — and an impersonal essay on the Kuro-Siwo. Chapter XXII has already broken off to tell the navigator how to enter Hakodadi. A twenty-page index closes the volume. There is no table of contents and no list of illustrations; long small-type arguments at each chapter head do that work. Some eighty full-page plates are bound in, nine of them under tissue guards, printed separately from the letterpress and most of them signed by a New York engraver, and among them a folding map bound at the end of the Introduction and a folding chart of the harbor of Napha; the drawings are by the expedition’s artists W. Heine and E. Brown, Jr., some from daguerreotypes taken ashore. An errata slip admits that seven plates went to press wrongly lettered, and that one illustration referred to was never published.

A Royal Engineers officer’s narrative of one summer’s cruise in the northwestern Pacific, written from the vantage of a passenger, not a squadron officer. Whittingham, then giving up the command of the Royal Engineers at Hong Kong, embarked on April 7, 1855, aboard H.M.S. Sibylle “as a visitor” at Commodore the Hon. C. Elliot’s invitation, sailing north with the steam corvette Hornet and the brig Bittern. His Preface, which speaks of him in the third person as “the writer,” calls the book “rough notes … originally pencilled at intervals of a few days” and announces an attempt “to bring out the different phases of an ill-directed expedition with candour.” Ten chapters and two appendices follow, each prefixed by its own analytic summary. The telling is mostly plural — the ship’s and the shore party’s “we” — while the squadron’s operations are often given impersonally (“the steamer boldly advanced … she had bumped on the hard sands”), and the singular carries opinion and feeling: “I felt ashamed,” “glad I was to land that evening at Southampton.” Of some three hundred pages, close to half concern Japan. Chapter I runs from Hong Kong along the shores of Formosa — a brilliant aerolite falling between the ships on the way — past the terraced island of Tsu-sima (“sima means island in the Japanese language”) and into the Straits of Sangar, where the ships anchor at Hakodadi on April 29.

Hakodadi fills the book’s longest chapter. Whittingham describes a bay four miles across beneath a snow-covered extinct volcano and gulls so tame that he takes them as corroborating “the assertion that the Japanese kill no animals” — a law he can never square with the wholesale destruction of salmon and herring, and one that meets the squadron’s demand for fresh meat with “gently hinted horror at such cannibalism.” The harbor master comes off with port regulations in Dutch and Japanese framed under the American treaty; numbers of the Illustrated London News relieve an awkward silence. The governor receives the Commodore in a Buddhist temple whose courtyard is lined with twenty arquebusiers, slow matches coiled, and twenty halberdiers with weapons twenty feet long — the steel of both sheathed in leather, since naked weapons may not be shown to friends — and whose galleries are lined with officials, while a kneeling secretary takes down every Japanese word. Shopkeepers’ wares fill a temple fitted up as a bazaar — lacquer of “exquisite tone,” porcelain “thin as a wafer”; he records the muddle of copper cash against dollars, a currency debased by adulteration, and the failure of every effort to buy a sword. On one walk he sheds the police escort by climbing a hill they will not follow him up; on another, landed up a river, he strolls among farms and hamlets where a headman gallops after them on a bare-backed pony to press saki on them.

Four chapters carry the squadron away from Japan and into the war. Matsmai passes at sunset under its three-storied pagoda; La Perouse’s journal is the guide along shores where, so far as those aboard know, no other European ship has been. On Sagalien, landing parties find deserted log hamlets, and Ainos who keep a black bear caged and fed on dried fish, ringed with votive pines, and give the visitors to understand that harm to it would make them ill. At De Castries Bay six Russian vessels lie at anchor, four moored with springs on their cables, broadsides bearing on the channels; shots are exchanged and fall short; the brig is sent for reinforcements, and five days later the ships return to an empty anchorage, ovens ashore still hot and the black bread quite warm — while the reinforcements reach the Baie de la Jonquière only on June 25, never looking into De Castries Bay. Whittingham returns again and again to the squadron’s ignorance of the enemy’s force and to opportunities let slip. Then follow the Japanese salmon fishery in Aniwa Bay, six hundred fish in a day; the Russian armed trader Okhotsk, deserted and fired by her own crew, fourteen of her people taken; and deserted Aian, where the Archbishop of Eastern Siberia proposes the toast of “Speedy Peace,” two days’ digging for buried guns yields nothing and the gardens give up hundreds of walrus teeth, and the Barracouta brings in half the crew of the Russian frigate Diana.

Back at Hakodadi at the end of August, the port is changed by summer traffic. The Commodore wades a river with a fly rod to the villagers’ astonishment, French scurvy patients lie quartered in a temple, and the governor comes aboard the frigate to fire a gun and a carbine and sketch whatever he wants explained, while he and his suite puzzle over European ladies’ dresses and dancing; and late in the chapter Whittingham turns to Yezzo, a later acquisition of the Japanese whose interior is still held by Ainos, “the Hairy Race.” Sailing on September 8, the frigate runs down the coast of Nipon past the smoking cone of Oosima to Simoda, which he calls badly chosen, more like “a haunt for pirates, than a commercial port opened to the trade of the western world.” He sets out the fate of the Diana — the earthquake, the lost rudder, the sinking — and Admiral Puniatin’s building of a small schooner with his own carpenters and Japanese mechanics, the copper delivered in massive pieces to be hammered into plates by hand. Fitsujama then rises from seventy miles off, “the noblest spectacle I have ever seen,” and after it Van Diemen’s Strait, Kiusu, and Amakusa under the knoll of Simibara, where the extermination of the Christian population “was effected by the aid of Dutch arms and artillery.”

Nagasaki proves the reverse of Hakodadi: cordons of guard boats, confinement to the ship or a bare islet, a governor who until the frigate’s arrival was always “too ill to be seen,” and a day-long interview in which officials hold that under the treaty “refreshments are water, wood, and vegetables.” He ends the Japanese portion on trade in cottons and woolens, on copper mines he is told are failing for want of engines to drain them, on caution in sending missionaries, and on leaving “these shores, so interesting and so little known,” with “no slight affection for an amiable race, suffering from degrading tyranny and debasing superstitions.” The last chapter is the homeward run: Shanghai, where he sets the busy settlement against the Chinese city he walked a year before under the rebels, and urges the New Testament in Chinese and Tartar over the rhapsodies current among “the brethren”; then Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Ceylon and, two days out, a passenger lost overboard, Aden, Suez, Alexandria and M. de Lesseps’ canal scheme, and Gibraltar to Southampton. Two appendices argue in the same first person: one finds it “inconceivable” that four frigates, a steamer, and a brig failed at Petropaulski; the other wants charts believed to be with the Dutch Admiralty, light-draft steamers with long guns, and colliers for the next campaign. A large folding chart of the author’s track, drawn and engraved by Edward Weller of Duke Street, Bloomsbury, precedes the title page, and twenty-eight pages of Longman advertisements — the longer catalogue among them dated September 1855 — are bound at the back.

My Last Cruise; or, Where We Went and What We Saw is a lieutenant’s narrative of the North Pacific Surveying and Exploring Expedition, which sailed from Norfolk on June 21, 1853, and dispersed at San Francisco in October 1855. Habersham names the squadron on his first page — the sloop-of-war Vincennes as flagship, the screw-steamer John Hancock, the brig-of-war Porpoise, the schooner J. Fenimore Cooper, and the store-ship John P. Kennedy, under Commander Cadwallader Ringgold — and identifies himself as one of the Kennedy’s officers. He serves successively in the Kennedy, in the little Cooper, and finally in the John Hancock, from whose decks, he announces at page 116, “the remainder of this book will be chiefly made up.” Twenty-four chapters and a Conclusion run from page 13 to page 507. The preface sets the terms: the government sent the expedition out to test the charts in use, to prepare others for uncharted coasts, to follow unknown currents, to lift the veil between civilization and the customs of isolated tribes and nations, and to collect scientific data, and these pages “are simply intended to show where it was that we went, and what it was that we saw.” Twenty-nine engraved subjects sit on inserted leaves printed on one side — an engraved pictorial title and a frontispiece, both signed by S. H. Gimber, and twenty-seven plates spread through the text across the whole cruise — captioned more often with the author’s own narrative phrases (“IT WAS TIME TO THINK OF LIGHTENING HER.”; “BACKWARD—SLOWLY BACKWARD.”) than with topographic titles. The book prints no list of them, no map of any kind, no index and no appendix.

The register is mixed, and the mixture is deliberate. Habersham claims his contents are “strictly matter-of-fact” though “slightly coloured by the excitement of feeling,” and the table of contents advertises comedy in advance — “We waylay a Siberian bear and narrowly escape ‘catching a Tartar’” — which the chapters largely deliver, in running jokes about the purser’s worthless fowling piece “old bust-proof,” the unseaworthy John Hancock (“the old John”), and the draughtsman Hartman’s English. Against this run pages of hydrographic detail, latitudes and soundings, and passages of open grief: the volume is dedicated to the officers lost in the Porpoise, and the chapter reporting her disappearance turns to elegy. The telling is first-person and leans constantly on quoted extracts — “I take from my journal,” “let my journal speak” — with Habersham climbing hills carrying a sextant, hanging by a bunch of grass above a rock fissure, running for a boat ahead of the tide. But the shipmates’ “we” outnumbers the singular “I” by roughly two to one across the book, and the two forms alternate inside single paragraphs; episodes he missed he relays at second hand, from the doctor’s account or the mess’s gossip.

The first fifty pages never reach Asia. The Kennedy waters at Porto Praya in the Cape de Verde Islands — where Habersham records, with undisguised revulsion, the marriage of a woman he calls white to an African — then rides out gales to Simon’s Town, where the squadron proves to have been sent to sea in need of extensive repairs. Three chapters go to the Cape of Good Hope: a jolting mail-coach ride to Cape Town behind a Mormon driver named Peter, Kaffirs and Bushmen as described by a resident English captain, and the “Cape Malay.” Java is sighted on Christmas Eve; from Batavia, where he hears of the running muck and of Java’s tiger bounties, the vessels move to Gaspar Straits, and the survey proper begins on January 10, 1854, with a gun fired for base by sound. Four months of it, Habersham on temporary duty in the little Cooper throughout, produce corrected charts, the wreck of the Memnon exposed as an insurance fraud, a run to Singapore where seven of the schooner’s twenty men lie fever-stricken in a hospital ashore, and desertions at both ends — two men making off with a boat from White Rock, three more slipping away from Singapore on recovery. When the survey is done, a three-day search of Banca for two lost seamen, one of the party bitten by a snake on the way, ends with them unhurt in the mixed Malay and Chinese village of Rangou. The squadron then makes for Hong-Kong.

The China coast fills the next fifty-odd pages. At Hong-Kong the Kennedy is condemned as rotten, Commodore Perry orders the ailing Ringgold home, and Commander John Rodgers takes over an expedition Habersham describes as reorganized into confusion. He sketches Victoria, Macao and Camoens’s cave, Whampoa, and Canton, where he pulls past three headless bodies in the river and describes the execution-yard and the retaliatory arithmetic that fills it. The John Hancock and the Cooper are then pressed into diplomacy, carrying the American commissioner Robert McLean and Sir John Bowering toward the mouth of the Pi-ho in an attempt to “reach Pekin by water” that ends in weeks of stalled talk and a survey of the bar instead; on the way the ships visit Fou-chow-foo, its granite bridge and trained fishing cormorants, and bury Lieutenant Hunter in the foreigners’ graveyard. Formosa gets two short visits — coal at Keilung, obtained through two escaped convicts, and repeated failed landings among the armed “red men” of the harborless east coast — and Loo-choo about seventeen pages, in which Habersham surveys the Anakirima group, meets an English and a French missionary at Nappa, and watches the market-place empty at his approach.

Japan takes roughly a hundred and twenty of the book’s four hundred and ninety-five pages of text, second only to the Okotsk Sea. The squadron reaches Si-mo-da, where one officer and a few men remain of the shipwrecked crew of the Russian frigate Diana, quartered in a temple, and a party of American traders is trying to open a ship-chandlery on the strength of Perry’s treaty. Five chapters of grievance and observation follow: government spy-houses and the counting of every American ashore; the officially organized bazaar, its lacquer and porcelain, and the lithographs that Yeddo ordered withdrawn from sale and the officers carried off the stalls, paying the merchants next day; the treaty clause fixing the dollar at one itzabu, which Habersham calculates as a two-hundred-per-cent duty; the interpreter Tatz-nosky and his Webster’s dictionary; the mixed public baths, reported at length as evidence of “impurity of taste,” though he adds that he never saw among the Japanese any lack of practical morality, the women perfectly correct in their intercourse with strangers. He and his messmates take to kicking the two-sworded officials who follow them, and record the practice with satisfaction. The surveying then runs from Hey-da on Nipon to Tomari on Jesso, over a thousand miles of coast against Japanese objection, while Lieutenant Brooke takes the Vincennes’s launch — rigged as a sloop and renamed the Vincennes, Jr. — nearly five hundred miles up the same shore in twenty-one days. Habersham closes with an extended account of the Ainu, or “hairy Kuriles,” correcting from his own observation the travellers Pritchard compiles, while calling Golownin’s book the best extant on Japan, Perry’s not excepted. He calls the Japanese politically “the most dishonest and untrustworthy people in the world,” and the Ainu their wronged and abler subjects.

Clear of Japan on July 15, 1855, the ship crosses to Kamtschatka, and the next hundred and seventy-eight pages — more than Japan receives — belong to the Okotsk Sea. Two chapters go to Kamtschatka and its people, a hunt for a coal-mine a whaler had reported somewhere on that coast, and a half-buried village. Northward the ship reaches her highest latitude in the Gulf of Penjinsk, then crosses to Siberia, where a helpless drift toward a roaring sea-cave nearly ends her, and works down the coast through the trading settlements of Ola, Armen and Taousk, where milk, salmon and turnips go for molasses and tobacco, a wounded bear escapes up a hillside, and a week of Russian hospitality at Ayan brings the fur company’s agent “old Frybark” and a whale the mess names “old Grayback,” harpooned in the harbor by a New Bedford boat and escaping with the iron torn out. After the Tschantar Islands, where the doctor’s promised capture of an inhabitant turns out to be a squirrel taken alive and kept as a pet, and a failed attempt to enter the Amoor, a hurricane drives the scurvy-ridden ship to San Francisco on October 19. The Conclusion opens on Habersham’s summing-up — “we sounded around the world” — and the volume ends with the John Hancock turned over to the navy-yard and refitted for Puget Sound regardless, a note that the naturalist Stimpson brought home nearly five thousand previously unknown varieties of animal life, thanks to Edward Kern, Geo. G. White and Hartman for their pencils, and an appeal that Congress call on Commander Rodgers to write the expedition’s official account.

Robert Tomes’s The Americans in Japan is a single-volume condensation of the United States government’s account of Commodore Perry’s expedition, issued by D. Appleton & Co. in 1857 and described on its title page as “an abridgment of the Government Narrative of the U. S. Expedition to Japan, under Commodore Perry.” Tomes is named on that title page, but the volume opens straight from the contents into the narrative, with no preface in which he says what he kept or dropped, and he never speaks of himself in the first person. All sixteen chapters and 382 pages run in the third person — Perry is “the Commodore” throughout, the landing parties are “the Americans” — interrupted only by an editorial “we” that speaks for the United States (“our own country,” “as with us,” “our own boasted progress”) and by quoted matter: a remark or two of Perry’s, officers’ reports, and Japanese documents in translation. The purpose is stated on the second page, where the credit for proposing the expedition and the honor of its success are both assigned to Perry, “which it is the purpose of this book to narrate.”

Nearly two fifths of the book passes before the squadron sights Japan. The steamer Mississippi sails alone from Norfolk, and three chapters carry her to Madeira, where the fashionable carriage is a wine-sledge drawn by oxen; to St. Helena, with its visit to Longwood and a lieutenant neatly fleeced over a borrowed horse; to the Cape of Good Hope, its dust storms and Constantia vineyards and its war with the Caffres, where Perry is quoted on the Hottentot tribes mostly exterminated by European cruelty, their remnant surviving as Bushmen — Americans, he says, “have no right to rail at other nations for the wrongs they have inflicted upon the aborigines”; then to Mauritius and the monuments raised to the fictitious Paul and Virginia, to Ceylon with its elephant bounties and Buddhist pilgrims, to Singapore with its man-eating tigers and the hospitable Chinese merchant Whampoa, and at last to Hong Kong, Canton, Macao, and Shanghai, where the Commodore calls on the Taou-tai. A later chapter returns to China for the winter of 1853, giving some fifteen pages to Macao’s fevers, Canton wages, the guilds of licensed beggars, men employed as dressmakers, and the bound feet of Chinese women.

Lew Chew and the Bonins take up some eighty pages. At Napha the Commodore refuses the authorities’ gifts, keeps himself invisible until the Regent comes aboard, takes a house on shore at the temple of Tumai over every objection, and marches more than two hundred men up the coral causeway to the palace at Sheudi, where a hastily improvised reception is followed by a twelve-course feast of soups and thimblefuls of sakee; an exploring party meanwhile walks nearly a hundred and eight miles of the island dogged by the portly Pe-ching and his spies, coming upon a ruined fortress and standing stones taken for phallic emblems. A run east in the Susquehanna, with the Saratoga in tow, brings the Commodore to Port Lloyd in the Bonins, where thirty-one settlers live under the Yankee patriarch Nathaniel Savory, from whom he buys a piece of land fronting the bay for a future coal depot. A later chapter drops the narrative for a survey of Great Lew Chew — coal, terraced rice, sugar mills, dress, marriage and summary divorce, universal espionage, Buddhism, tomb vaults — and prints a comparative vocabulary to argue that Lew Chewans and Japanese are one people.

Japan itself fills about half the text. The squadron rounds the promontory of Idzu under Mount Fuzi into the bay of Yedo in July 1853, and days of argument follow with the governor of Uraga, Yezaimon, who insists the ships go to Nagasaki while armed American boats survey the bay and the shore batteries hang out canvas to look formidable. The President’s letter is carried ashore at Gori-hama by nearly four hundred marines and sailors and laid on a red lacquered box before two silent princes, Toda of Idzu and Ido of Iwami, and Tomes makes much of the imperial paper admitting that it was received “in opposition to the Japanese laws.” The squadron returns in February 1854, holds its anchorage against ten days of pressure to fall back on Uraga, and meets the commissioners under Hayashi at Yokuhama, where the treaty is signed on the 31st of March. Presents follow — a working telegraph and a miniature locomotive on one side, rich brocades, lacquered ware and one or two hundred sacks of rice on the other, the rice shouldered by twenty-five wrestlers as a preliminary to their bouts; from “the brutal performance of the wrestlers” the Americans turn “with pride” to the telegraph and the railroad, “those triumphs of civilization.” Then come banquets, a minstrel show got up by the sailors, and some eighteen pages of watching the Japanese at Yokuhama: the ubiquitous spies, tea parties, blackened teeth, women respected, the Commodore’s walk ashore and his call on an official’s family, and the burial of a marine.

The later chapters describe the two ports the treaty opened. Simoda is gone over street by street — its sewers, lodging houses, mixed public baths, nine Buddhist monasteries and the Sintoo shrine of the god-like Hachiman — and it is there that two Yedo scholars slip a letter to an officer begging passage abroad, are refused, and are found days afterward in a cage, the resigned statement they wrote on a board copied down. Hakodadi supplies fire-tubs on the gables, ward aldermen, junk-building and timid navigation, a prayer wheel on a grave post, and pages on Japanese metalwork, silks, printing, and literacy. After a last round of disputes at Simoda over spars, exorbitant prices, and worthless coal, Perry accepts a stone for the Washington monument, three dogs for the President and two for himself, declines to surrender the shipwrecked sailor the crew call Sam Patch, signs a compact at Napha, and hauls down his flag at the Brooklyn navy yard. A closing chapter gathers the detached ships — the Southampton surveying Volcano Bay among the Ainos, the Macedonian at Kelung in Formosa, castaways from Sil-li-ba-boo landed at Manilla — and ends with Commander Adams bringing the ratified treaty back to a Simoda that an earthquake and its waves had reduced to sixteen buildings. An appendix of thirty-odd pages prints Fillmore’s letter and the Japanese answer, the treaty and its regulations, the Lew Chew compact, correspondence over the Bonins, a report on Japanese currency, and the rules of the chess game Sho-ho-ye. A frontispiece of Japanese coopers faces the title page, and wood engravings are cut into the letterpress throughout — the ox-drawn sledge at Funchal, a Japanese boat, portraits of the treaty commissioners, and the Yedo and Simoda dogs presented to the Commodore.

Issued anonymously by the Religious Tract Society, Japan Opened is a cheap English abridgment of the official American record of Commodore Perry’s expedition of 1852–4. The title page names no author, only a source — “compiled chiefly from the narrative of the American expedition to Japan” — and the preface sets out the method: the government narrative, “prepared under the eye of Commodore Perry” and “far too voluminous and costly ever to be generally accessible to the English public,” has been reduced to “those portions of it which strictly relate to Japan,” with a historical sketch prefixed “to render the work more complete.” The compiler never names himself and never writes in his own first person; he narrates in the third person and surfaces only as an editorial “we” — “we shall not refer,” “we have gone into the details of this transaction,” “but to resume the narrative.” First-person passages are always quoted and attributed to someone else: Bayard Taylor on a march into the interior of Loo Choo, William Adams as “honest old Purchas” preserved him, Kaempfer on Dezima, the chaplain Mr. Jones on the prospects of Christianity. Eight chapters fill 296 pages, each after the first opening with a long summary of its contents.

The first chapter, some forty-five pages, sketches Japan’s earlier dealings with the West from writers other than the expedition — Kaempfer, Purchas, Macfarlane, Fraissinet, Golownin, Siebold. It begins with Marco Polo’s report of a palace roofed in gold and a digression on the geography of the archipelago, then follows Mendez Pinto to Bungo, Francis Xavier to Japan, and the Dominican, Augustinian and Franciscan friars who came after the Jesuits “like swarms of locusts”; the bishop who refused to leave his sedan in 1596, Moro’s intercepted letters, the edict of 1637 banishing “the whole race of the Portuguese,” and the converts who died for their religion. Sections follow on the Dutch, the English, the Russians and the Americans in turn: Adams pilot of the sole surviving ship of his fleet and risen high at court, the Dutch guns that battered the Christian insurgents at Simabara — “an indelible stigma” — and Dezima, fan-shaped and artificial, six hundred feet long, which Kaempfer found “more like a prison than a factory”; Saris and the Clove, Cockes at Firando, the crew of the Return in 1673 interrogated about Santa Maria and the cross in their flag, the Phaeton of 1808 after which the governor of Nagasaki disembowelled himself, Raffles’s attempt to seize the Dutch factory; Laxman, Resanoff and Golownin for Russia; the Morrison fired on in 1837, Biddle in 1846, Glynn in the Preble demanding sixteen imprisoned seamen in 1849. A tabular chronological view of all these attempts closes the chapter.

Chapters two through five carry the expedition itself. Perry leaves in the Mississippi in November 1852 by Madeira, the Cape, Ceylon and Singapore, gathers his ships at Hong Kong and Shanghai, and anchors at Napha in Loo Choo in May 1853, where the missionary Dr. Bettelheim comes aboard and an exploring party of twelve walks a hundred and eight miles across the island. The commodore forces his way into the palace at Sheudi in a sedan chair built for the occasion by the ship’s carpenter, examines the Bonin Islands, and reaches the bay of Jeddo in July, where guard-boats are cast off, the bay is surveyed under arms, and on the fourteenth the president’s letter is landed at Gori-Hama in rosewood and gold boxes and laid on a scarlet lacquered chest. Fillmore’s letter is printed entire, and the imperial receipt in two translations, the second correcting the first. Perry returns in February 1854 to find the Macedonian aground, argues for ten days over whether to meet at Uraga or nearer the capital, and finally lands at the hastily built treaty-house at Yoku-hama. There the five commissioners sit with Hayashi at their head; a telegraph whose wires run nearly a mile and a lilliputian railway whose car is too small to carry a child of six are set up, and a dignified mandarin rides the little car by clinging to its roof; wrestlers carry rice sacks of a hundred and twenty-five pounds and give a performance the compiler calls “too disgusting to be narrated here”; a marine is buried while a Buddhist priest performs his own rite alongside the chaplain; a banquet on the flag-ship ends in what the book calls “boisterous and bacchanalian conviviality,” and the treaty is signed at the end of March.

The later chapters turn descriptive before finishing the story. Simoda is set out street by street — its gutters and sewers, its thousand houses and seven thousand people, its nine Buddhist temples with their epitaphs and boxes marked “for feeding hungry demons” — and Hakodadi is likened to Gibraltar, with water tubs in straw jackets on every roof against fire, shops of cheap cottons and lacquer, praying wheels beside the graves, and three specimens of Japanese art examined at length: Prince Hayashi’s two-volume book on the points of a horse, a color-printed frieze of wrestlers, and a child’s primer bought for a few copper cash. Between these come the two scholars from Jeddo who slip a letter into an officer’s coat, come alongside by boat at two in the morning and lose the boat as they climb the ladder, are refused, and are later found in a cage, where they write on a board handed to them what the book calls an example of philosophical resignation — “Weeping, we seem as fools; laughing, as rogues.” The final chapter settles boundaries and pilots at Simoda, complains of coal at £5 10s. a ton, records a compact with Loo Choo and the death of a drunken American seaman at Napha, and sends Perry home overland in January 1855. It then follows Commander Adams back with the ratification to a Simoda destroyed by the wave of the December 1854 earthquake, where the Russian frigate Diana spun forty-three times in thirty minutes; adds Stirling’s British treaty, a quarrel at Nagasaki in 1856 and the edict that followed it, and ends with a young Japanese named Seutharo studying at Madison University.

Running through all of this is the Society’s religious argument, stated in the preface and returning every fifteen or twenty pages — thickest in the historical chapter, in the Simoda and Hakodadi descriptions, and in the closing pages, and nearly absent from the chapters of pure narrative. The opening of Japan, the preface holds, has for the Christian “a singular and almost sublime importance,” marking an epoch “pregnant with more momentous issues… than any other period since the apostolic age.” Buddhism is “that giant superstition,” the prayer wheel “the very climax of a superstitious ceremonial”; the Roman Catholic missions are blamed both for the persecutions and for the hatred of Christianity that survives them, the Dutch at Dezima are condemned for the compliance Kaempfer records, avoiding “all the outer signs of Christianity in the presence of the natives,” and dissolute sailors are set down as false representatives of the faith. Descriptions of Loo Choo, of Japanese homes and of family shrines break off repeatedly into prayer that the gospel may reach these islands. A frontispiece of the delivery of the president’s letter faces the title page on a preliminary leaf, and nine full-page wood engravings are printed among the text, all but two turned sideways on the leaf: the town of Dezima, a royal barge and boats, a Japanese farmyard, a Buddhist priest in full dress, a Japanese temple and the interior of another, a Japanese woman and child, a kitchen in a dwelling-house, and spinning and weaving. One small cut, the praying-wheel post, is set into the type on the Hakodadi pages. The text ends with the printers’ imprint, Reed and Pardon of Paternoster Row.

Andrew Steinmetz, whom the title page calls “of the Middle Temple, barrister-at-law,” assembled Japan and Her People in the months after the British treaty was signed at Jeddo in 1858, and the “Advertisement” that opens it is frank about how it was made. He claims to have “read or consulted all that has been written on the subject,” and prints a list of chief works beginning with the Epistolæ Japanicæ of 1570 and running through Kampfer, Thunberg, Golownin, Titsingh and Siebold to the narrative of the American expedition. Four compilations had already quarried that literature for him — the Chinese Repository of 1832–1845, the volume drawn from it, Manners and Customs of the Japanese, Jancigny’s Japon, and the Quarterly Review — “so that nothing remained for me but to choose from which of these warehouses I should take my materials. I have made free with them all.” MacFarlane’s out-of-print Japan, Geographical and Historical, whose copyright belonged to Steinmetz’s own publishers, was “placed at my disposal,” though he found he had to alter, re-arrange and enlarge it, and MacFarlane is “nowhere quoted” excepting “for his individual facts or opinions.” Steinmetz calls the result a compilation; his object was to select facts and incidents, “striving to make every page (as indeed indicated by its ‘heading’) a subject of interest to all,” and the running heads are indeed topical. The title page promises “numerous illustrations”; the list names thirty-four within the book, some cut into the letterpress and some full-page plates on their own leaves, from the imperial palace at Jeddo facing the title to Nagasaki and Desima near the end, with a final entry for an image of Quanwon on the cover. The list’s own erratum is accurate: the Japanese garden was printed on page 31, amid a passage about fog.

The Introduction makes the case for the moment, quoting the Quarterly Review of 1834 predicting Japan would never be opened and The Times of November 1858 on the “moral force” that opened it — Perry, the American consul at Simoda, news of the treaty of Tien-sin, and Lord Elgin finding on arrival that the ministry he had expected to treat with had been turned out days before. Steinmetz’s own gloss is blunter — “Has a nation any right thus to isolate herself under any circumstances whatever? Political ambition says No” — and he turns at the end to “contemplate the hand of Providence in this entrance of the Western wedge into the granitic block of Oriental stagnation.” In the pages between, he argues that Japan is a country of redundant population: forty millions, three thousand one hundred and eighty-two to the square league where France has twelve hundred and thirty-nine, villages touching one another for leagues, a country “sinking under a human plethora.” Before the decree of 1639 — which made returning home a capital offense and restored the old build of ship by law, “to insure the chance of shipwreck” — Japanese emigration had reached sixteen countries, and he presses for those restrictions to go. Australia and New Zealand would take the surplus; California “would welcome a race with which they need not be ashamed to mix and renovate their blood”; and the well-off “would be received throughout Europe with open arms … to vie with our fops.” In the essential characteristics of the superior human races, he holds, the Japanese are at least the equals of “our interminably mixed European and Trans-Atlantic populations,” and he stacks up Bayard Taylor, Xavier, William Adams and Father Froes to say so.

The archipelago and its produce fill chapter I. Jeddo covers more ground than London; Nagasaki has the fan-shaped islet of Desima, “the crib to which the Dutch have been rigorously confined for two hundred years”; Osacca stands on the Yedogawa; Meaco holds 52,000 priests and the empire’s principal printing. Fousi Yamma is said to have risen in a single night, and the eruption of Wountsendake in 1792 destroyed Simabara, blew the spur of Miokenyamma into the air, and raised waterspouts where the boiling water met the sea; fifty-three thousand persons perished. Cedars more than eighteen feet in girth, a camphor tree Siebold visited a hundred and thirty-five years after Charlevoix, the varnish tree whose lacquer Europe calls japan, nine hundred names for the sorts of one flowering shrub, terraced husbandry, and a forest law requiring a young tree for every one felled — “thus shaming some nations of Europe” — fill the middle of the chapter. On an eyewitness’s authority Steinmetz reports a box three inches long and one inch wide, offered for sale to the Dutch governor of Nagasaki, in which a fir, a bamboo and a plum in blossom were all growing, the price asked being 1,200 florins. The sacred street dogs get their guardians and hospitals and a page of his own theorizing; the whale is followed down to the strings made from its tendons for musical instruments; minerals follow — the Isle of Gold kept off Japanese maps, a Dutch memorandum of 1744 reckoning the export of gold and silver at ten million florins a year early in the seventeenth century, and the coal that Webster’s letter of instruction to the American commodore called “a gift of Providence” — and four pages of scenery — Kirisima Yamma, Simoneseke, Pirando — close the chapter.

Chapter II quotes Marco Polo’s Zipangu — gold-plated roof, pink pearls in the mouths of the dead — noting that he never went there and that his account sent Columbus west to mistake Hispaniola for Cipango. The double sovereignty is told twice: as the story of the Cubo, a “Mayor of the Palace” who murdered his colleague and left the Dairi, in Purchas’s phrase, “a bare title and a Herald’s Kingdom”; and in a modern one reaching Yoritomo and the widow who left her convent to rule as the Ama Siogoun, reportedly the only female one. Government is “an absolute despotism, yet far from being altogether arbitrary”: eight hereditary classes over an unnumbered outcast class of tanners, paired officials whose families stay at Jeddo, no written code, only edicts placarded in every town. Death is the punishment for all offenses, a quoted authority reports, since only death “affects alike prince and peasant” — yet the laws are “greatly modified in practice,” the power to inflict it “permissive, not compulsory.” Chapter III takes its palaces from the castaway Don Roderigo de Vivero y Velasco, whose account of Jeddo is dated 1608: he passes a thousand musketeers to reach the prince, and finds the Meaco Buddha’s thumb too thick for a large man to embrace. Kampfer supplies the Dai-Bods; Japanese guide-books reckon Quanwon’s images at thirty-three thousand three hundred and thirty-three, and another temple holds the world’s largest known bell. Towns are unwalled; the Spaniard’s Jeddo gives every street to one trade, which Steinmetz commends; houses are low, wooden against earthquakes, papered, floored with mats of one legal size — “glass windows are unknown” — and rank shows in a norimon’s pole. The bath-houses, open to the street, draw a digression pronouncing the Japanese “not modest,” then recalling “our own Holywell-street.”

The longest chapter is the fourth, an overland and coastal journey from Nagasaki to Jeddo that Steinmetz builds as a composite, announcing that “we must do our best, borrowing the eyes and ears of old Dr. Kampfer, Dr. Thunberg, Captain Golownin, Heer Izaak Titsingh, Siebold.” A single traveling “we” sails from Batavia, takes off the crew of a wrecked junk that must then be scuttled lest it drift home and convict them, watches the bibles and money sealed into a chest and the rudder carried ashore, and endures Desima, whose stone bridge “is indeed a ‘Bridge of Sighs’ to the traveller.” The quadrennial embassy to court is printed as an order of march, from the baggage-master down to the rear police officers: seven weeks and more than a thousand miles, seven days across Kewsew, a week by water, twenty-two days over Niphon. The road supplies the book’s densest reporting — pilgrims to Isye so poor that many are found dead along it, the begging Bikuni, mountain priests rattling iron-ringed staffs, blind musicians and the general who plucked out his eyes, inns with their alcove displays and sweating-baths, tea-house women bought as children and afterwards taken back into society, the Oyegawa forded by licensed guides who answer with their lives, and Fousi Yamma, climbed in three days and descended in three hours on a straw sledge. At Jeddo the first visitors are five physicians and two astronomers, one of whom knows the Copernican system and the satellites of Uranus; a fire consumes thirty-seven princely palaces; and the audience is given twice over, as the modern prostration whose “whole ceremony does not occupy a minute,” and as Kampfer’s older ordeal of being commanded “to dance, to jump, to play the drunkard, to speak broken Japanese.”

Chapter V lays out the Sintoo cosmogony, the impurity that leaves a man unclean seven days for blood and thirty for four-footed flesh, and the pilgrimage to Isye, where Kampfer’s poorer pilgrims have their names and birthplaces written on broad reed hats, so that if “sudden death, or any other accident” befalls them “it might be known who they are.” Of Buddhism’s spread he ventures only that “it should seem that, at least in the maritime parts of the empire, there are twenty Buddhist to one Sintoo temple.” He notes Nobunanga’s reply that “where thirty-five religions can be tolerated, we can easily bear with thirty-six,” and doubts the treaty’s promise of worship will reach Japanese converts. Chapter VI covers festivals — the Feast of Lanterns, the Matsuri at Nagasaki — theaters where the ladies, says Fisscher, change dress “two or three times during the representation,” the education of girls with boys, the bride who wears her own shroud, a wrestler carrying a rice-sack by his teeth before the Commodore and the Commissioners, and funerals with tub-shaped coffins and screens to keep cats off the corpse. Chapter VII treats language and the arts: the eighteen pronouns for “I,” “the very mirror of the man of Japan”; the Vienna printing-office that cast four hundred and eighty-one Japanese types for the ordinary syllabarium and two hundred and twenty-seven more for the Chinese characters one novel added; wood-blocks cut with text and picture together; 150,000 volumes in the libraries of Jeddo and Meaco on Balbi’s figure; the two students of Jeddo who begged passage on an American ship to see “the five great continents” and wrote from their cage after being caught; and the powder said to make corpses flexible, which an examiner tried on dead bodies that remained as stiff as ever.

Part II argues first that the Japanese are an original race and not Chinese colonists, then runs a rapid history: Kublai Khan’s envoys beheaded and his armadas destroyed by storms, at which Steinmetz breaks in with “God grant that every armada against Japan, as against England, may meet with the same disaster!”; and Taiko Sama, the six-fingered wood-carrier nicknamed “The Ape,” who rose to rule and invaded Corea. The second chapter opens in 1542 with a Portuguese ship bound for Macao “driven from her course, and dashed by a storm on one of the islands of Japan,” which only afterwards came “safely to anchor in the harbour of Bungo,” and runs on through Xavier’s landing in 1549, the friars who quarreled with the Jesuits, and the persecutions — crucifixions, boiling springs, the Torment of the Fosse — to the expulsion of the Portuguese and the siege of Simabara. Steinmetz holds that governmental suspicion, not missionary conduct, was the true cause, and is unsparing toward the Dutch, who helped besiege Simabara and remain, he says, “a despised set of traffickers”; he quotes an American writer that Simabara’s walls “were unquestionably battered by the Dutch cannon,” a course Kockebecker preferred to interrupting the Dutch trade. The third chapter records everyone else — Adams the Kentish pilot, Golownin tied down to a plank “like a sheep or dead pig,” Pellew’s Phaeton off Nagasaki, Biddle told that no trade is allowed “except Holland,” the Commodore landing in 1854 into “nothing but a plain frame building,” and Elgin pushing past the forbidden anchorage to Jeddo. The 1858 treaty clauses close the narrative, with a Times leader owning to “the pressure of a force which was not altogether moral”; three pages on grammars and dictionaries and three of vocabulary from “Agreeable” to “Year” follow.

A voyage narrative assembled from a naval officer’s running notes, Personal Narrative of a Voyage to Japan, Kamtschatka, Siberia, Tartary, and Various Parts of Coast of China follows the paddle-wheel steam-sloop Barracouta, six guns, through three seasons on the East India and China station. In a preface signed from H.M.S. Hogue in July 1859, Tronson explains that he sailed in her “in the years 1854, ’55, and ’56,” noted down “whatever appeared to me to possess novelty or interest,” and “arranged my notes in a Narrative form.” The title page names him only as J. M. Tronson, R.N., and he elsewhere writes of “our surgeon” as another man, but medical work runs all through the book: he goes into the boats against a pirate stronghold “with my side-arms and surgical instruments,” is called to a starving captured pirate on the troop-deck, and doctors Ghiliack villagers on the Tartary coast. Twenty-eight chapters follow the ship’s movements across four hundred and fourteen pages, in a first-person voice that slides between “I” and “we.” The printed list names fifteen illustrations. Four are tinted lithographs after W. K. Bush — the frontispiece “Japanese Garden” and views of Castries Bay, Port Seymour and Port May — and four are sheets of coast profiles drawn by F. H. May and lithographed by Kell Brothers, showing the approach to Castries Bay, Jonquiere Bay in Seghalien, two views of Guerin Gulf, and Port Louis in Tartary with Cape Vashon in Corea. The rest are folding charts, among them a track chart of the northern cruise by S. W. R. Freeman, R.N., and a chart of Nagasaki “from a survey, by Ph. Fr. von Siebold,” with two wood engravings set into the text, the Isle of Langlé on page 146 and a Japanese coin on page 345.

The book opens in Japan. On 7 September 1854 Sir James Stirling’s squadron sails from the Yang-tez-o-Kiang, sights Kiusiu, and anchors in the Bay of Pappenberg, where an official boat holds up a white wand carrying a list of questions written in Dutch. Tronson describes the tiered batteries, the guard-boats with their lanterns, the boatmen’s chant of “Ah sin yah,” the two swords and copper ink-bottles of the officials, and the immense pile of chickweed sent off as vegetables, to which Jack gives “a ‘fair wind’ over the ship’s side.” The squadron is confined for weeks to one islet, Nazumasima, nicknamed “Little Britain,” where officers and men are allowed to land for athletic sports and he counts thirteen species of fern; the only visits to the city are the Admiral’s state processions to the Governor, ending on 15 October with the signing of the Convention. Three chapters then break off for a retrospect of foreign dealings with Japan — Marco Polo’s Zipanga, whose people Polo calumniates as cannibals, a charge Tronson answers by saying that their bitterest enemy could not do them more grievous injustice; Pinto at Bungo; St. Francis Xavier; the persecutions and Simabara; Will Adams and the English factory at Firando; Pellew in the Phaeton; then Perry and Poutatine. The 1613 privileges granted by the Emperor, a Dutch draft treaty with the King of Holland’s commentary, and the Anglo-Japanese Convention, which the document itself dates 14 October 1854, are printed out at length.

From Nagasaki the Barracouta drops to Hong Kong and into hard service. Tronson sets down Victoria and Happy Valley’s three cemeteries, then two expeditions against the pirates: at Tyhoo Bay in the island of Lantao the boats board and burn seventeen junks and the landing party fires every house in the village, and on 12 November the armed boats go in against Kuhlan on the island of Tylo, where fifty junks lie behind an embankment of twenty guns and the marines drive the pirates out of a battery beside a temple. Through the winter of 1854–55 the ship lies in the Canton river while rebels destroy the Imperial squadron off Blenheim Fort, and two mandarins’ heads appear in cages on poles within musket-shot of the anchorage. In March 1855 she sails north and joins the allied squadron at Petropolovski, deserted but for starving dogs. The batteries are razed, which he thinks right, and the government buildings burned, which he does not: “there are no laurels to be gathered by burning a deserted town.” A survey of Kamtschatka follows, with its jourts and balagans and Benyowski’s conspiracy of 1771. The Russian government brig Okhotsk, bound for the Amoor with stores, runs ashore near Cape Golovatchoff; her people set her on fire and take to their boats, which are chased over the sandspits, two of them taken and the foremost getting clear. The Bremen brig Greta is stopped with 276 shipwrecked men of the frigate Diana, whose loss in the Simoda earthquake is quoted at length. The Diana’s men are berthed in the fore and after troop-decks and her officers given cabins; Tronson gives up his own to the linguist Gosgovitch, talks in halting French with Lieutenant Pouschkin, and hears Lieutenant Schelling praise the Czar’s fatherly kindness.

Clearing the Straits of La Perouse, Tronson sets out Seghalien — six hundred miles long, coal cropping out at Jonquiere Bay, the northern two-thirds Russian and peopled by Ghiliacks, the southern third held by the Japanese, who he says have driven the Ainos out of Yezo and treat them so badly that they would gladly change rulers. Then come the China chapters. Refitting at Shanghai, he finds a settlement of English, French, American, German, Portuguese, Parsee and Jewish merchants whose respectable classes “resemble one large family,” a racecourse whose low road runs around an old burial ground where coffins lie exposed, and a river full of Yankee and Aberdeen clippers. He walks the walled city, still ruined from the rebellion, through shops of porcelain, silk, tea, furs and drugs, takes tea for thirty-four cash, and leaves by the North Gate past men locked in the cangue and skulls in cages overhead. In the country he sets down the exposed coffins of the north and the terraced tombs of the south, and a family keening in white fillets over a body, which he compares to wakes in the west of Ireland. Other chapters describe opium tested in brass pans aboard a receiving ship at Woosung and smoked in back-street dens, a bath-house where a workman washes for four cash, and Dr. Lockhart’s missionary hospital, which counted 12,237 patients in 1855.

It is at Shanghai in 1855 that Tronson writes of his own countrymen, “I frequently think we are too overbearing in our conduct towards the Chinese,” and that British aims there are pursued “by a system of bullying: I regret I cannot use a milder term.” A pirate cruise in January 1856 takes the ship to Chusan, where he climbs to the citadel of Tinghai past painted hell-torments a bonze displays with relish, and visits the graves of the 55th regiment, and past Potoo, with its two thousand priests and its temple islets that pay no tribute; then to Chinhai, whose hill fort stands open and whose temple gods have lost an eye or a nose. At Hong Kong he tours samshoo shops, gambling houses and thieves’ lodgings, and reports daylight watch-snatching by robbers whom a police force of “worthless characters from ships” cannot catch. In April the ship enters the River Min, anchors off Pagoda Island, and he describes Fuchan, its tea trade and Mantchu quarter. In May the boats work the almost unknown coast of Tartary, finding a deserted Russian settlement and the burnt wreck of the frigate Pallas. Tronson records the Ghiliacks of Barracouta Bay closely — birch-bark moccasins, coffins in the forks of trees, a vocabulary of their words — counts five cases of disease among their thirty people and four more among the twenty-five of an inlet he names Destitution Bay, and sets them down because “many people imagine that savage races, living in a state of nature, are exempt from those ills which beset the more favoured and civilised portions of the human race.” In one hut he attempts to tear down a wooden idol, “to try the effect such a proceeding would have on their minds.”

Hakodadi is the ship’s base through 1856, and the fullest Japanese chapters gather there, before and between the Tartary cruises. Tronson visits its bath-house — five copper cash, men, women and children bathing together, “nothing abashed by the presence of strangers” — and reflects that “we, with our artificial habits and customs, are astonished at the primeval simplicity of the Japanese.” He walks out over marsh and moor past a new earthwork fort, teaches English to a peasant who puts aside his spade for it, and examines Yezo coal whose source the Japanese will not disclose “lest we should help ourselves.” At a tea party in a summer-house the elder of two sisters takes up a guitar and sings, one plays while the other dances, and he leaves with a Japanese coin taken from a young officer of the party in exchange for a new English silver one. He details the pilchard fishery, the Sintoo and Buddhist temples, the burial ground where French, English and Russians lie side by side, an old physician whose only instruments are needles and moxas, and the bazaar where every sale is reported nightly to the authorities. In the Corea he gives out Testaments from the Bishop of Victoria, slips his police escort by pretending to gather shells, and has his wrist twisted by a soldier. At Nagasaki in September a chained line of junks still bars the inner harbor; Sir Michael Seymour gives the Governor an hour and then has the Barracouta steam through, sinking one junk with its soldiers and armament, though the men reach shore “nothing the worse for a slight wetting.” Tronson spends about ten days ashore from the 8th, and the book ends at anchor before Victoria at Hong Kong, the signalman making up a homeward-bound pendant.

Two Journeys to Japan, 1856-7 is a traveler’s narrative in two volumes, told in the first person by a civilian passenger aboard American warships calling at the ports opened under Perry’s treaty. Cornwallis fixes his vantage on the first page of the narrative — “I was on board that sloop” — and keeps it (“And so ended my first day in Japan”; “I am discursive, but I trust pardonably so”). The first visit, in July and August 1856, is made in a sloop of war and takes in Simoda, Ha-da, Hakodadi, and the coast of Jesso; the second, from August 1857, is made in a steam frigate and takes in Lew-Kew and Nagasaki. Neither stay is long, and the book fills the gaps with compiled matter: of the two volumes’ six hundred-odd pages, roughly a quarter of the Japanese portion consists of topical and historical chapters in which the same “I” turns compiler and addresses “the reader” directly, running in one unbroken block from late in volume I across the volume break and splitting the Nagasaki narrative in two. A “Prefatory and Geographical Note” opens volume I with the empire’s position, extent, and disputed population, and three verse addresses to Japan, each signed “Author,” head the two journeys and the historical chapters.

The narrative opens with the sloop rounding Cape Izu into the bay of Simoda, where the party finds American traders from the Sandwich Islands and the shipwrecked crew of a Russian frigate quartered in a temple at Kaga-zaki. Cornwallis fastens at once on the surveillance — officials with pocket-books and ink-bottles who count every visitor ashore and afloat — and then on the town’s nine Buddhist temples and its one Sintoo temple, its gutters, ward gates, and fire-engines. A morning walk inland produces the book’s most violent episode: an American sailing-master kicks a two-sworded official, who thereupon disembowels himself. Cornwallis reproves his companion and explains the “Harikari” at length. Later chapters cover the bazaar built and stocked for the ship’s company, the orders from Jeddo stopping the sale of colored prints, the two hundred per cent currency profit Perry’s treaty hands the Japanese on every silver dollar, and the mixed public baths, which he puts forward as evidence of Japanese innocence. The sloop then works south to Ha-da, where Fusiyama shows itself above the harbor, and north again to Hakodadi, with its marine cave, a coasting survey toward Matsmai, an audience with the governor conducted in whispers through two interpreters, and a wrestling match in the prince’s grounds.

Sailing up the coast of Jesso, Cornwallis botanizes, shoots a wolf that ends as a stuffed exhibit in a Washington museum, brings down a deer with his revolver, watches two boatmen try to eat cakes of toilet soap, and describes the bearded Kuriles at Tomari before the ship stands away for Kamtschatka. “Journey the Second” begins on the river Min near Fow-chow on the twelfth of August 1857 and reaches the Lew-Kew island at Napa-kiang by way of Shanghae. There he walks up to Sheui, is turned out of the Regent’s courtyard by fifty soldiers, and is then fed a dinner of six successive fish soups; a second day’s tramp across the island’s ravines ends with turtles’ eggs cooked on a beach and a punishing climb back. At Nagasaki the party is escorted through curtained streets to the governor’s palace, smokes and drinks tea through kneeling interpreters before four dignitaries seated on a crimson dais, and eats a long Japanese breakfast. Wandering off alone, Cornwallis sketches a funeral procession, is befriended by a two-sworded gentleman he calls Noskotoska, visits his house and his wife Tazolee, is shown a three-year-old Illustrated London News, and watches a thousand lighted paper boats set adrift on the bay. The acquaintance is renewed at length in volume II, where long stretches of the Nagasaki chapters are carried by reported conversation — with Noskotoska, with a Dutchman of the factory, and with the frigate’s American surgeon.

Near the end of volume I the book turns expository. Cornwallis runs through Japanese history from Zin-mu-ten-woo and the line of the Mikados to the rise of the Ziogoons, the wreck of Kublai Khan’s four thousand sail, and the Portuguese landfall of 1542, then describes the feudal ranks, revenue reckoned in kokus of rice, the religion of Sintoo and its rival Buddhism, diet, agriculture, writing, and the etiquette of self-destruction. Chapters on Xavier follow the Jesuit missions to their height, the embassy of two boy envoys sent by the converted kings of Bungo and Arima to Gregory XIII and Sixtus V, the Corean war, and the crucifixions on the Mount of Martyrs at Nagasaki. Volume II carries the story forward: William Adams, the Dutch factory at Firato, a shipwrecked Spanish governor’s overland journey to the courts at Jeddo and Miako, the edicts of 1614 and 1638, the slaughter at Ximabara, and the confinement of the Dutch to Dezaim. Two further chapters catalogue foreign approaches — La Perouse’s survey, the Argonaut, two rebuffed Russian embassies, the Phaeton’s raid, Raffles’s letter that dismayed the Dutch director, Golownin’s capture, the Morrison fired on at Kangosima, the Preble — with the Nagasaki governor’s English-language warnings to shipping copied out verbatim in a footnote.

Returning to Nagasaki, Cornwallis lays the city out street by street: eighty-seven streets in two divisions, thirty-seven bridges, three governors serving in rotation whose families are kept at Jeddo as hostages, the Torika and Doosiu of a governor’s household, the ottona balloted for in every street, the tanners who serve as executioners and live apart, the six unequal hours of day and of night, and the yearly visitation in which a crucifix and an image of the Virgin are laid on each floor to be trodden on. He crosses to Dezaim, spends a day botanizing in Latin names on the hills above the town, and passes a long day with Noskotoska that takes in a shared warm bath — interrupted by the ladies of the house, who undress and get in — a library of native romances alongside Webster’s dictionary and a Cincinnati cookery book, and a minute account of Japanese marriage down to the twelve embroidered robes worn month by month. A Dutchman of the factory supplies the longest set piece, a narrated embassy overland to Jeddo by way of Osaka and Miako, its ninety-foot wooden Buddha on its brass lotus and its thousand many-armed idols, ending with the captain of the Dutch crawling on all fours to the throne of the emperor at Jeddo.

Cornwallis’s opinions run through both volumes and grow louder toward the end. He holds the Japanese to be the most virtuous and the most polite people on earth, and among the most cleanly, calls their rule the most despotic on the face of the earth while insisting the people are happy under it, refuses to attempt any conversion, and measures Nagasaki against the night-refuge in Field Lane and the casual wards of Islington and Lambeth to England’s disadvantage. After a last ride, a theater full of conjurors, and Tazolee’s playing, he leaves Nagasaki, and the book closes with “The After Journey. A Single Glimpse,” some ninety pages on the Pacific island of Nookoora: swimming girls boarding the frigate, King Rowanna and his tattooed queen, a near-fatal descent of ravines by hanging roots, a feast on the Tooloola ground, the making of tappa cloth and breadfruit paste, a warrior’s effigy paddling a canoe in his mausoleum, and a closing denunciation of missionaries as pioneers for usurpers. The apparatus is slight — the prefatory note, a two-item errata, and a “Directions to the Binder” listing eight plates, six in volume I and two in volume II, after the author’s own drawings, with the publisher’s advertisements filling the last leaves of volume II.

Laurence Oliphant sailed east in 1857 with the special mission sent to settle Britain’s quarrel with China, and these two volumes are that mission’s unofficial history. His title page calls him “Private Secretary to Lord Elgin”; a footnote early in the first volume adds that in July 1858, when Mr Bruce went home in charge of the Treaty of Tientsin, Oliphant succeeded him as Acting Secretary to the mission. Both volumes print on the back of the half-title six lines of verse credited to Hwashana, one of the two Imperial Commissioners who signed at Tientsin. The preface, dated from the Athenæum Club on 15 December 1859 and printed in the first volume only, describes the book as “a history of the proceedings of the Special Mission to China and Japan, which extended over a period of two years,” “thrown into the shape of a personal narrative.” It also warns that his Japan may prove “somewhat at variance” with later reports: “A fortnight sufficed to enable us to conclude a Treaty with it upon a most liberal basis. We had just passed a year in China, and all comparisons made with that Empire were in favour of Japan.” The shape is lopsided. The first volume never reaches Japan; the second opens in Japan in its first sentence, holds it for twelve chapters, then turns back to China for its last nine. The work is also more documentary than “narrative” suggests: roughly a quarter of the first volume is quoted state paper.

Volume I opens before the mission exists, with a documented retrospect of the Arrow affair at Canton in the autumn of 1856. Oliphant crosses the Desert on 9 May 1857 “in the first train which had ever carried passengers to the central station,” hears of the Indian Mutiny at Galle, and reaches Singapore, where three weeks of waiting yield a sympathetic essay on the settlement’s Chinese and an unsuccessful tiger hunt on the Malay mainland. There Elgin turns aside to Calcutta the first troops sent out to him for the China war, and gives up the frigate Shannon as well so that Captain Peel may raise a naval brigade for Upper Bengal; the difficulties in China, Oliphant writes, were “immeasurably enhanced by the sacrifice.” Hong-Kong follows, then a month at Calcutta at the worst of the Mutiny, then Hong-Kong again. A twenty-four-page excursion to Manila, made privately in H.M.S. Furious with Captain Sherard Osborn, has the mission nowhere in it; late in the chapter it pauses to demolish another traveler’s book about the islands, and it ends on the sugar and hemp trade, the export duty, and a swipe at Spanish political economy. After the opening retrospect, four chapters and seventy-eight pages — one page in six of the volume — pass before the ultimatum to Yeh at chapter VI opens the war.

From December 1857 the volume turns to war: the bombardment and storming of Canton, at which Oliphant and the other civilians call themselves “amateurs”; the capture of Yeh; and sightseeing in the occupied city. But its middle is travel. He forces an entry into Soo-chow by water-gate — “For the first time in its history, barbarians had made an official entry into Soo-chow” — and likens its canal traffic to Fleet Street, ferry-boats plying like omnibuses, cargo-boats lumbering along like brewers’ drays, light tanka-boats cutting in and out like hansoms. Fourteen pages go to the Snowy Valley behind Ningpo, the “Thousand-fathom Precipice” and the return down the Tsze-ke on a raft of ten bamboos. Missionaries occupy him repeatedly and unkindly: a Lazarist on Chusan whose industrial farm is cultivated by the boys of his school, many of them waifs and strays he has picked out of byways and hedges, though generally, Oliphant notes, the pupils are children of converts, the Roman Catholic system being “rather to breed converts than to make them”; the Jesuit college at Siccaway and the cathedral of Tonk-a-doo; and Pootoo’s shaven priesthood chanting “Ometo Fuh” all day. Then the Gulf of Pechelee, five weeks of “total inaction at anchor in one spot,” and the Taku forts taken on 20 May 1858, the gunboats having been “quietly edged so close to the forts” that only Chinese forbearance kept them from firing first.

Gunboats carry the plenipotentiaries up the Peiho to Tientsin, where the mission spends five weeks quartered in the “Temple of Supreme Felicity,” negotiating with the Imperial Commissioners Kweiliang and Hwashana. The volume’s second-longest chapter goes to the city rather than the treaty. After Captain Dew is pelted and loses his hat, a party scales a crumbling angle of the wall, six respectable householders are demanded, and the captain of the Tartar Guard and a few shopkeepers marched off between two files of marines while Mr Lay makes passers-by repeat “It is very wrong to insult an Englishman.” Eleven pages of a notice compiled by Mr Wade follow, on the Yellow River, which has forced a new channel into the Gulf of Pechelee and left the Grand Canal “useless for any of the greater purposes of trade,” so the grain tribute Pekin lives on goes by sea. Then a page of the book’s harshest writing, on diseased street beggars and the scavengers who carry off the dying, closing on the irony that Tientsin means “heavenly spot.” Oliphant does not disguise the method: “It had been necessary to have recourse to violence, and to force an entry into the country, to obtain satisfaction for insults.” Keying is ruined at length here, confronted with his own captured memorial on the management of barbarians and ordered by autograph decree that “he put an end to himself.” The treaty is signed on the evening of 26 June 1858, three large paper lanterns lighting the tables.

The Furious passes the Asses’ Ears on 2 August 1858, raises the highlands of Japan next morning and anchors at Nagasaki, and the first chapter spends twenty-two pages on that one day ashore: the island of Pappenberg, the Tarpeian rock down whose sides Christians were hurled; “Dungaree forts” of painted canvas; and Decima, whose two centuries of Dutch confinement Oliphant recounts through Kaempfer and Thunberg and with open scorn for the Dutch. A chapter of twenty-eight pages then leaves the journey altogether for a compiled history of Xavier’s mission, William Adams, the English factory at Firando, and the edicts that sealed the country. No shopkeeper may take a foreign coin, so every visitor climbs to an upstairs room in the Russian bazaar, where grave two-sworded officials hand out “the little oblong pieces of card which bear the Government stamp.” The Vice-Governor comes aboard to ask that the yacht meant for the Emperor be surrendered at Nagasaki; Elgin refuses, the yacht being his excuse for reaching the capital. After a gale, a first sight of Fusi-yama, and a call at Simoda — where the American consul Mr Harris lends his secretary Mr Hewsken as interpreter, and where eight unbroken pages go to a Buddhist temple, the household kamis, the goddess Ten-sio-dai-zin and the value of Sintooism against Buddhism — the squadron declines to stop at Kanagawa and steams straight up to Yedo.

Elgin lands in state on 17 August, and rooms are requisitioned at a Buddhist temple for eighteen, servants and some officers of the squadron included. “There exists not a single disagreeable association to cloud our reminiscences of that delightful country,” Oliphant writes; negotiation takes up little of the twelve Japanese chapters, and description and borrowed history hold the rest — lacquer shops, street dogs no one may kill, the tea-gardens at Hojee, the Quanon temple fair, a juggler’s trick with paper butterflies, and a ride of about four miles up the main street on which children take him for a Chinese and call “Chinamen, Chinamen! have you anything to sell?” The schools impress him: “a more widely-diffused system of national education exists in Japan than in our own country.” The treaty is signed on 26 August in Dutch, Japanese and English, each in triplicate, so that “no fewer than eighty-four signatures had to be appended,” and is then “ratified in a loving cup.” There is no audience with the Tycoon, a state prisoner in his citadel — “It was a cruel satire upon this unhappy potentate to present him with a yacht; one might as well request the Pope’s acceptance of a wife” — who had died secretly, “nayboen,” about the time the mission arrived. The party hears of it about two months afterward, weighs the Dutch, French and American accounts and settles on natural causes, though “We never exactly learned the date of his death.”

The yacht changes hands on Prince Albert’s birthday, and a Japanese fort fires twenty-one guns — the first salute in Japan’s annals to a foreign flag. Japan ends past the middle of the volume, 265 pages of 481, with a trade essay in which “A Japanese has no more idea of individual freedom than a child of three years old,” and a typhoon on the way to Shanghai. Nine chapters and two hundred and sixteen pages return the mission to China. At the tariff conferences Mr Reed, the American minister, presses Elgin on opium; Elgin answers that “legalisation is the only available remedy,” and the drug enters the tariff at thirty taels a chest, shut out of the new inland-transit privileges. Then the expedition up the Yang-tse-Kiang, which fills seven chapters, for which he announces “I shall extract from my journal the daily record of events” and the narrative becomes a dated diary: an action with the rebel batteries at Nankin, Chinkiang, where “we might have imagined ourselves in Pompeii,” a visit to the rebel chief at Woohoo, thirty-seven pages at Han-kow, likened to Nijni Novgorod and worked over for cotton prices, insect-wax and tea, and Christmas in a gunboat. Coming down, Mr Wade interviews the rebel chief Le inside Nankin; Oliphant’s verdict on the Tai-ping is that “we found the rebels making war like Jews, living like the worst description of professing Christians, and believing like — Chinamen!” Canton, an aborted voyage to Hainan and Malta close the journey.

Each volume ends in appendices: fifty-six articles of the Treaty of Tientsin, and Dr Saunders’s thermometrical register, whose position column quietly logs “At Yeddo, Japan” for fifteen days of August 1858; then the Treaty of Yedo in twenty-four articles, trade returns, a Han-kow shop list and a note on prostitution. Both title pages promise “illustrations from original drawings & photographs”: seventy-five listed items, twenty-seven in the first volume, forty-eight in the second. Twenty colored lithographs and five folding maps are tipped in, fifty wood engravings printed among the type; the only four credited to photographs are portraits of Chinese officials, though a Canton pagoda woodcut is taken from one. Plates are lettered with the name of Mr Bedwell, R.N., who the preface says accompanied the mission to Japan in the yacht Emperor, and with Hanhart’s. Twenty of the second volume’s items are marked “From a Native Drawing,” and four of its color plates are facsimiles of Japanese prints — a lady at her toilet, Fusi-yama, a winter snow scene, a street in the aristocratic quarter of Yedo — reproduced whole with their cartouches, two in a gold-flecked border. A government order forbade selling books to the strangers, but “by soft speeches and perseverance, we managed to pick up a good many picture-books.” The last sentence is doubt, not triumph: whether “the Treaty of Tientsin becomes at last a reality or a fiction, must depend upon the skill of our diplomacy no less than on the force of our arms.”

William F. Gragg sailed as surgeon’s steward aboard the side-wheel steamer Mississippi, and his book is a plain running account of that ship’s whole commission. It opens at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where the Mississippi was put into commission under Captain William C. Nicholson on the fourteenth of July, 1857; Gragg lists every officer who reported for duty by name and rank and tallies the ship’s company by rating, down to the fifteen boys and twenty-five coal heavers — three hundred and seven souls. The narrative then runs on without chapters or divisions for seventy-two pages, alternating a ship’s-log run of dated entries with undated set-piece descriptions of the ports, and now and then widening into sustained narrative. He writes throughout as one of the ship’s company: the vessel and her people are “we,” while his own rambles ashore are told in the first person singular, or occasionally assigned to “the writer.” He names himself twice, both times in lists of the parties that landed. A prefatory note presents the work “to my late shipmates and the public” and explains that he has confined himself to matters connected with the cruise. The book is dedicated to Dr. Philip S. Wales of the United States Navy.

The outward passage runs from New York in August 1857 to Funchal in Madeira, St. Helena, Capetown, Port Louis in Mauritius, Batavia by way of the Straits of Sunda, and Singapore, reaching Hong Kong in January 1858, ninety-nine and a half sailing days out. Gragg stops along the way: the washerwomen who swarm aboard at Funchal; three hulks of condemned American slavers lying stripped in the roadstead of St. Helena; Napoleon’s decayed vault and, fifteen minutes’ walk beyond it, the dilapidated house where he lived and died, each costing a fee Gragg resents paying to the English; and the Indian laborers at Port Louis whom he says the English Government brings from India and sells “into slavery for five years, at the rate of four dollars per month.” The Mississippi carries the American minister William B. Reed north to the Peiho, a party from the ship takes a junk up under the guns of five forts to force a letter for the emperor upon the mandarins, and Reed is afterwards received in a tent on the beach. On the twentieth of May, 1858, Gragg watches the English and French bombard and storm the forts, and gives several pages to the battle, the mines the Chinese fired as they fell back, and the suicide of a mandarin who had visited the ship and was said to be an excellent man and a scholar. As much of the China narrative goes to port life and port description as to the war.

Japan fills nearly half the book, in three visits. The Mississippi reaches Nangasaki in June 1858 with forty-seven of her people down with diarrhœa; the Fourth falls on a wet Sunday, and the national salute — the first, he says, fired in that harbor in honor of American independence — comes on the fifth. Governors are entertained aboard, three thousand Japanese visit her, and the Japanese, whom he calls very ingenious, build a glass model of her that is almost exact. At Simoda the ship anchors off Consul-General Harris’s residence, a Buddha temple given up for his use, and brings him his first mail in six months; Gragg finds him gray but hale, and credits him with the treaty opening Kanagowa. A marine is buried ashore there, hundreds of Japanese following the procession to see a Christian burial. At Hakodadi he notes the dogs that scent out strangers, the annual school celebration, two whalemen caged after trial before the consul, and women sweeping their family gravestones and laying fresh flowers, carrying him back to the tomb of two of his own little ones. Harris runs through the later pages: taken aboard at Simoda with his baggage, carried to Kanagarva and on to China, where the commodore brings him his commission as Minister; landed at Jeddo on the seventh of July, 1859, in boats sent by the emperor’s order and borne in procession to the temple appropriated to him, one of twenty-four Americans whom Gragg lists by name.

Shipmates and their fates fill the pages: courts-martial sentencing men to bread and water, sweat-boxes and disrating; desertions at Capetown, Hong Kong and Nangasaki; and a running contempt for Polish-born Sergeant Block — brawler, humbug, and at last a man who cuts his own throat — prompting his complaint that foreigners, not Americans, man the marine guard. Hong Kong is “a most miserable, filthy hole, and fit only for dirty John Chinaman to live in”; Woosung and Shanghae are miserable holes too, though some residents are worth millions; yet the Chinese at the Peiho, though beaten, “fought to the last like heroes.” “Probably no nation can boast of so much politeness as the Japanese,” he writes, while calling them heathens and idolaters, reading the mixed bathing at Simoda, Hakodadi and Jeddo as a want of morals, and setting down that those in power are very oppressive and the country’s severe laws keep the masses in a condition worse than that of the slaves of his own country. Homeward by way of Singapore, Penang, Mauritius, Capetown and the West Indies, partly under canvas alone, the ship buries three more shipmates at sea — “such is life on board of a ship-of-war,” he remarks. She reaches Boston on the twenty-seventh of January under one engine and canvas, and the book closes with the accounts — miles run, salutes fired, coal and provisions consumed, and the only seven times all hands were called to bury a shipmate — and a farewell to them.

Japan and the Japanese is a ten-cent pamphlet of fifty-six pages, published in New York in 1860 by Frederic A. Brady under the standing line “Information for the Million.” Its title page advances no eyewitness claim beyond a pseudonym: the book is “written and compiled from the record of the American expedition, and the best sources,” “by an Oriental Traveller.” Nothing stands between the title leaf and the text, which opens on page 3 under a drop-head title and runs as unbroken prose, without chapters, to page 56. The contents list printed on the wrapper supplies the structure the pages withhold: the early history and Portuguese discovery of Japan, the Jesuit missions and the slaughter of Christians, the decree of isolation, the arrival of the Dutch and English, Perry’s expedition and the American, English, Russian and French treaties, then topics running from climate and geology through government, laws, revenue, religion, education and trade. No eyewitness ever emerges from behind the pseudonym; the voice is a compiler’s editorial “we” pitched to American readers — “the government of this country,” “our countrymen,” “our city authorities,” “our Oriental guests.” Named authorities are few: Marco Polo, the English pilot William Adams, whom the book quotes at length three times, Captain John Sares, Dr. Siebold, and a Russian officer who spent two years a prisoner at Hakodadi.

The book begins with chronology and a note of skepticism: the Japanese trace themselves to a first spiritual monarch, Sinmu, or Sinmu Tenu, enthroned 660 years B.C. and reported to have lived 167 years. Landmarks follow — saki first made in 693, gold in 749, the birth in 1147 of Yozitorno, the first secular emperor, whose usurpation left his sovereign only spiritual power, and Kublai Khan’s armada of 4,000 ships in 1284, nearly destroyed by a storm “like the Spanish against England.” A Chinese junk manned by Portuguese is blown ashore in 1542; Francis Xavier lands in 1549; and the persecutions are tallied — no more than “six or seven and twenty” under Taico Sama in 1587, 20,570 in 1590, crucified European priests in 1597, and thirty-seven thousand in a single day of the year after the persecution was renewed in 1637. The isolating decree is quoted whole, then the beheading of all but twelve of a Macao mission of seventy-three in 1640 and the rite of trampling on the cross. The compiler argues the killing was political, not religious, quoting an emperor’s retort to a Spanish envoy about imagined missionaries of Sinto in the Philippines. The Dutch inform on their commercial rivals, help shell Simabarra, and are shut up on Dezima; the Clove reaches Firando in 1613 on Adams’s prompting; and Perry, sailing from Norfolk in the Mississippi, delivers the President’s letter in the Bay of Yeddo in July 1853 and returns in 1854 for the treaty that opens Simoda and Hakodadi.

Description takes over at page 16. Japan is fixed between latitudes 31° and 48°; Nipon, Kiu-siu, Sitkokf and Yesso are measured; Fuzi is put at not less than 12,000 feet; earthquakes are counted down to the Yeddo (Tokyo) shock of 1855 that leveled 100,000 dwellings. Gold, sulphur, cedars eighteen feet through, and the Japanese horses Adams found “far exceeding the Spanish jennet in pride and stomach,” fill out the natural history. The people are put nearer Europeans than Asiatics, the married women blackening their teeth with a corrosive composition, the tea-parties “kept up as briskly in Japan as in the United States.” Population is reckoned from Indian analogies at forty millions, checked by infanticide and licensed prostitution; society falls into eight hereditary classes above a Pariah class of leather-dressers; government is a double sovereignty at Miako and Yeddo, run by a grand council of thirteen and secured by hostages, spies and five-family groups. The judgments are flat: a naturally frank people has become “in public life cunning, treacherous and mean” and “in the art of war mere children,” and nowhere is human life less valued, suicide meritorious, performed by crossed incisions. Rent takes four or six parts in ten of every crop, for an annual revenue reckoned at about $60,000,000; lacquer is “unequalled for beauty and durability by that of any other nation,” porcelain said to excel the Chinese and swords to equal “the finest Damascus blades,” while the art is ignorant of perspective and the physicians who thronged Dr. Siebold are forbidden the dead subject.

Religion takes the longest run of any topic. Sinsyu, the gods’ worship, is set out from the sun-goddess Ten-sio-dai-zin through a calendar reckoned at 3,132 divinities, with the five great duties, the purity rules and their graded impurities, and the temple of Isye, “which is to the Sintoos what Mecca is to the Mohammedans”; Buddha, “introduced to Japan A.D. 69,” follows, and after him Confucius. The compiler breaks off to warn that the religions of Asia have been misrepresented in the West by travelers “either too ignorant, or too bigoted,” and to suggest that the 492 inferior divinities are “merely separate attributes of God.” Against the harsher judgments stand highways swept better than American city streets, universal reading and writing, and an emperor who, told there were thirty-five sects in Japan, answers that he can “easily bear with thirty-six.” Dezima, the whale fishery and a projected $10,000,000 import trade close the survey, and the book ends on the embassy then in America: it expects no very beneficial result from the mission, doubts the narrative of its adventures will do more to enlighten Japan on its return than Marco Polo’s or Sir John Mandeville’s did for Europe, and imagines that journal surpassing everything of the kind since Lemuel Gulliver’s. No plates or maps break the text; the inside wrapper advertises Brady’s Home Truths for Young Wives and The Pastry Cook’s and Confectioner’s Assistant, thirteen cents each.

Laurence Oliphant sailed for China and Japan as private secretary to the Earl of Elgin — the office by which the title page identifies him — and this book is his account of the two years that followed. His preface sets out the design: a history of the proceedings of a special mission, “thrown into the shape of a personal narrative, in the hope that it would convey, in a more amusing and readable form, the record of our experiences in those empires.” It runs to forty-one chapters and seven appendices, every chapter fronted by a long dashed line of catchwords. Oliphant writes as an “I” inside a “we,” addressing his reader as a companion — “If the reader is only as tired of Canton and its neighborhood as we were, I shall have the less scruple in requesting him to accompany me to the north” — and, three hundred and fifty pages later, “I shall extract from my journal the daily record of events.” Against that personal thread sits a weight of quoted matter: captured Chinese state papers, imperial decrees, dispatches cited to the Blue-Book, tariffs, statistical tables, a rebel manifesto in 172 numbered verses. That weight lies at the two ends of the book and scarcely at all in the middle. About one page in five of the China chapters is set-off document — the grain-tribute report with its Board of Revenue tables and Keying’s captured memorial are the heaviest blocks in the first half, the rebel manifesto in the last — while the Japan chapters lean instead on earlier writers, Kaempfer above all, and the thirty-five pages of appendix are almost nothing else. Japan fills pages 301 to 476 of a volume whose text ends at 645.

The book opens before the author reached China at all. Chapter I is a retrospect assembled largely out of quoted dispatches and consular correspondence: the boarding of the lorcha Arrow at Canton in October 1856, the taking of the river forts, the bombardment of Commissioner Yeh’s yamun, Yeh’s bounty on English heads, the burning of the foreign factories that December, and the British withdrawal to Macao Fort. The narrative proper starts with the overland journey out, the party “rushing across the desert” on 9 May 1857 “in the first train which had ever carried passengers to the central station,” the first news of the Indian Mutiny at Galle, three weeks at Singapore among its Chinese secret societies, and a torchlit tiger-hunt in the Johore plantations that catches nothing. Elgin diverts the China expeditionary force to India and goes to Calcutta himself for August, where Oliphant records the city’s outward calm in the worst month of the rising. Back at Hong Kong — “Like a beautiful woman with a bad temper, Hong Kong claimed our admiration while it repelled our advances” — the mission waits for marines while Oliphant takes himself to Manila for the cheroot manufactory and a crater lake. Then the ultimatum to Yeh, the twenty-seven-hour bombardment and escalade of Canton on 28–29 December 1857, the capture of Yeh in a back passage on 5 January, and the reinstatement of Governor Pihkwei as a supervised puppet. The occupation then fills two chapters: an allied police of Chinese and Europeans replacing patrols behind which a rabble had shoplifted; Pihkwei’s proclamations forbidding the street cry of “fan-kwei”; and Elgin’s discovery of the public prisons, whose emaciated inmates are moved into Pihkwei’s own yamun over the old mandarin’s indignant protest.

Two chapters of unofficial travel come next. Oliphant sails north in February 1858, bluffs his way through the water-gate of Soo-chow with seventeen canal boats, dines with the Shanghai Taoutai, goes up by night-boat and mountain chair to the Temple of the Snowy Crevice above Ningpo, and lands on Pootoo, entering five or six of the sixty temples, shrines and monasteries Mr. Williams reckoned there. In April the allied ships anchor off the Peiho bar, and there the book turns sour: five weeks pass without gun-boats, the grain fleet sails by untouched, and Oliphant argues that the delay gave Elgin’s proceedings “a vacillating character” and cost the mission Pekin. The Taku forts are taken on 20 May; the squadron then burns the millet stacks up the Peiho to Tientsin. There Elgin walks out of the first interview inside a quarter of an hour, and Keying is broken by having his own captured memorial of 1850 read aloud in his presence and is ordered by autograph decree “that he put an end to himself.” Twenty pages then leave diplomacy for the material case: Tientsin decaying since the Yellow River broke down the banks of the Grand Canal, the river now gone from its ancient bed, Mr. Wade’s compilation on the grain-tribute with its Board of Revenue tables, the capital’s rice shifted from the canal to junks by sea, and Oliphant’s own commercial eye, for which “the problem is not whether they want clothes, but whether they have money enough to buy them.” The Treaty of Tientsin is signed on 26 June 1858 by the light of three paper lanterns. A footnote explains the volume’s own title-page epigraph as “a rhythmical version of the last half stanza” of a poem by Hwashana, the second imperial commissioner.

Japan begins on the afternoon of 2 August 1858 with the Asses’ Ears, high pointed rocks out of sight of the Japanese coast; early the next morning the highlands of Japan come up, the nearest land the island of Iwosima, and with them the run into Nagasaki past the rock of Pappenberg and a landing under the Dutch flag on Decima. Oliphant sets down the factory’s two centuries of spies, sealed Bible-boxes and body-searches, then walks the town: houses open to view, upward of eighty streets crossing at right angles, thirty or forty bridges over the stream that cuts the town, a population put at about sixty thousand. Chapter XXII drops the narrative entirely for seventeen pages of history, from Xavier’s mission and the conversion of Sumitanda through Taiko-Sama’s edict of expulsion, William Adams, the English factory at Firando, the expulsion of the Portuguese, Simabarra, and the founding of Decima in 1636. The mission then sails for Simoda, where Townsend Harris, his American treaty just concluded, is found in his temple hermitage, the Stars and Stripes flying over premises “originally occupied by some recent incarnation of Buddh” and the shrine of that divinity converted into a four-poster; the bazar, the graveyard and a six-page essay on Sintoo and its kamis occupy the stop. Oliphant is candid about his own enthusiasm — “I find it difficult, in attempting to convey our first impressions of Japan, to avoid presenting a too highly-colored picture to the mind of the reader… There exists not a single disagreeable association to cloud our reminiscences of that delightful country.” On 12 August Elgin refuses to halt at Kanagawa and steams “up the bay, where no Western ship had ever before ventured.”

Yedo takes over a hundred pages, more than any other place in the book. Boarding officials press for a return down the bay; Elgin sends his letter ashore, and on 17 August lands in state, thirteen boats in tow, the Retribution’s band playing “Rule, Britannia,” and rides two miles between packed crowds to a Buddhist temple fitted up as a residence, with the emissaries of a Japanese governor lodged in the ante-chamber. What follows is mostly not diplomacy. Oliphant measures the mats, describes the plasterers and fire-ladders, the ward gates and fire-proof stores, the Princes’ quarter as “Belgravia in September,” the citadel moat, the Nipon Bas from which distances are reckoned, the Quanon temple and its fair, the bath-houses, the lacker and silk shops, the picture-books he bought against a government ban, the masterless street dogs, the two little peep-holes expressly constructed in a paper screen, through which the young ladies next door watched an English gentleman at his toilet, and rides out to the tea-gardens at Hojee and to a temple beyond the Logos River. Set-piece chapters explain the double monarchy with the Mikado a puppet and the Tycoon a state prisoner, the council of state, the spy system, the “happy dispatch,” the social scale, taxation and the criminal code. His verdict is warm and qualified at once: “we were the greatest gainers”; national education better diffused than in England; officials incorruptible; yet the whole fabric rests on “the absolute extinction of individual freedom,” and the people are “notoriously vindictive, superstitious, haughty.”

The mission’s business in Japan is done in a few pages. Elgin had come to make a treaty and to deliver a yacht sent by Queen Victoria to the Tycoon, and used the second as his reason for insisting on the capital. Full powers were exchanged over ham and champagne with six Japanese commissioners; the work went forward informally through Dutch, with Mr. Hewsken and the interpreter Moriyama between the parties. The Treaty of Yedo was signed on 26 August 1858, requiring “no fewer than eighty-four signatures,” and that afternoon the yacht was handed over and the shore battery fired twenty-one guns — “For the first time in the annals of Japan a salute was to be fired in honor of a foreign flag.” Only two months later did the mission learn that the Tycoon had died about the time of its arrival. Nine days ashore in Yedo lie behind a closing chapter of assessment: why the treaty was really conceded (fear, and the fate of India), what character future Englishmen are likely to give the Japanese, Dutch subservience, the tariff schedule, and Hiogo, Ohosaka and Kioto described from report rather than sight. The preface sums the comparison the whole section runs on: “We had just passed a year in China, and all comparisons made with that empire were in favor of Japan.”

Back at Shanghai, Oliphant sits on the sub-commission that settles the tariff and admits opium at thirty taels a chest, barred from the new transit privileges. On 8 November 1858 the squadron starts up the Yang-tse-Kiang, in seven chapters of dated journal: worthless charts, the Furious impaled on a rock, Chinkiang emptied of its half-million, the rebel batteries at Nankin firing on a flag of truce and silenced for it next morning, and encounters with the Tai-ping — the commandant How at Woohoo, whose first question is “What have you got to sell?”; the exchange of shots at Ngan-king; and, on the return voyage down the river, the manifesto purporting to come from the rebel Celestial emperor, received at Woohoo on a long roll of yellow silk and printed entire, then the Nankin interview. Oliphant concludes that “We found the rebels making war like Jews, living like the worst description of professing Christians, and believing like — Chinamen!” Han-kow, reached on 6 December nearly six hundred miles from the sea, is catalogued shop by shop; two ships are left to winter in the interior, and Christmas is kept twelve to a gun-boat cabin. Then, “On the 4th of March we watched with inexpressible delight the rugged coast of China sink behind the horizon,” and the book closes at Malta doubting whether the Treaty of Tientsin will prove “a reality or a fiction.” Seven appendices follow: both treaties entire, the correspondence on a resident minister at Pekin, Shanghai–Japan trade returns, a Han-kow price list, a note on licensed prostitution in Yedo, and a year’s thermometrical register. The sixty-odd wood engravings divide as the book does: every subject credited “from a Native Drawing,” the frontispiece included, is Japanese, and the four “from a Photograph” are Chinese officials.

A British consul’s account of two Japanese treaty ports in the first years after they opened, published in London by Richard Bentley in 1861 as A Residence at Nagasaki and Hakodate in 1859–1860. With an Account of Japan Generally, by C. Pemberton Hodgson, “late H.B.M. Consul at those ports,” and adding on the title page “with a series of letters on Japan, by his wife.” Five wood engravings are printed within the text — a governor’s cortège, a tea-garden maid-servant, a girl walking and a girl sitting, an officer — and two full pages of gold, silver and copper coins are keyed to a numbered description. Hodgson dedicates the book to Sir William Hooker and writes retrospectively, in the first person, as a former consul: “I have endeavoured, in the following pages, to present to the reader a faithful picture of what I myself saw, and what I learnt, of Japan during my residence at Hakodate, as Consul of Her Britannic Majesty.” He was three months at Nagasaki from June 1859 and “somewhat more than a year” at Hakodate, leaving Japan in October 1860. A long introduction argues that Japan was contented in isolation and has been given nothing by the treaty powers. Fifteen chapters follow across about 325 pages: roughly the first 130 are narrative — Nagasaki, four inland excursions, the voyage north, and his wife’s letters — while the remaining two hundred are topical chapters on government, priests, doctors, houses, money, and natural history.

The opening chapters set out his working life at Nagasaki: three-hour conferences with deputations of exactly three officers, the third of whom is the “Ometske,” or government spy, who enters every word in a “Day Book” forwarded to Yedo; the interpreting chain that runs from Japanese through Dutch into English; and the currency deadlock, in which paper “taels,” a “nichou” coined expressly for foreigners, and a Treasury that would change only a few dollars a day brought trade to a stop. Hodgson describes Nagasaki lacquer and egg-shell porcelain, the Prince of Fizen’s monopolies, exports of silk, tea, camphor, isinglass and beche de mer, coal beds in which no shaft has been sunk, and batteries said to mount close upon three hundred guns above the narrow channel past Papenberg. Chapter III consists of four letters addressed to Rutherford Alcock at Yedo, written from the Hakodate consulate in July and August 1860 on four excursions into Yezo: the Emperor’s doctor’s botanical garden, the first European ascent of a volcano, which he credits to the ladies of his party, a lake whose islands they baptized “Victoria,” “Eugénie” and “Marie,” the lead mines, Aino villages with bears’ heads staked at the entrance, and an iron foundry come upon just past a stretch of black sand they judged to contain iron.

From Nagasaki the family sails north in September 1859 aboard H.M.S. “Highflyer,” through Van Diemen’s straits to Kanagowa and Yedo, reaching the legation on the morning the French treaty is ratified, lodging in Alcock’s own rooms beside a temple garden, and calling on Mr. Harris, the United States Minister, and on Mr. Huesken, whose later murder Hodgson records. He sets down the road from Kanagowa to Yedo, the passport and mounted Yakonin escort it requires, and a tally of assassinations — Alcock’s linguist “Dan,” “Nathal,” flag-guard to Monsieur de Bellecourt, two Dutch captains, the Regent or Goteiro cut down by Prince Mito’s retainers — before the ship reaches Hakodate on 5 October and he hoists the flag on the fifteenth. Chapter V, some thirty pages, hands the book to Mrs. Hodgson, in two letters to her mother, both dated from Nagasaki in June 1859, the second running on as a diary into August. She reports the Governor’s welcoming present of a live pig, white radishes, eschalots and four hundred eggs; a walk through the town in which thousands follow her and a man trots alongside sketching her flounces; the snakes, centipedes and cat-sized bats of the temple consulate; the triennial festival of the dead with its lanterns and straw boats; and a diet of omelettes and preserved meats.

The topical half opens on religion. Hodgson describes the Mikado at Miako with his Dairi and his twelve painted, black-teethed attendants, the daily round of bells, psalmody and sermons in the “Tera” he lodged in, funerals in which the party circles the porch to confuse the evil spirit, the one Sintoo “Mia” at Hakodate, and the “Sootoists” who follow Confucius; he reads the aureoles, tapers and tabernacles of the temples as relics of the expelled Portuguese, believes secret Christians survive in Yezo, and thinks Roman Catholicism, if it were permitted, would be accepted throughout Japan. Chapters on the Tycoon, the Gorrogio and the Daimios include his arithmetic of how many men each rank of noble might bring into the field. Later come the three Governors of Hakodate; the dinner he gives them, and an exchange of visits with the Lieutenant-Governor’s wife which he claims made him more intimate than any other European with Japanese ladies of rank, his own wife and child being with him; two capital punishments he reports without watching — a carpenter beheaded for stealing a few coins from an Englishman, an incendiary paraded through the streets and asphyxiated at a stake; the doctors, with acupuncture, moxas and sulphur baths; the Otono of each of the ten wards; a long chapter nominally on houses that also takes in the government brothels at Yukohama, concubinage, harikiri, horse-races and tea-gardens; and a short chapter on money.

Two chapters close the book. One weighs Hakodate’s political importance, tracing Russian advances from Nicolaiesk and Castries Bay along Sagahlien and the Kuriles and concluding that the port must be kept open and Japanese; the other surveys the natural history of Yezo — gold at Matsmai and Nambu, the lead mines sixteen miles from Hakodate, copper, iron sand, sulphur and coal, then basalt, agates and pumice, then oaks fit for building men-of-war, pines, camphor and lacquer trees, bear steaks and venison, quail and snipe, and a Hakodate garden of cherry, peach and plum in blossom for a month. Hodgson’s sympathies are declared plainly: he maintains that Japan “has gained nothing, politically, socially, or morally, from the Treaties,” lays the blame for stalled trade and murdered foreigners chiefly on the foreign community, complains that Rome sends missionaries of gentle blood while the British send men who are often not even Englishmen, and speaks of the Aino as “the despised aborigines of Japan.” The volume ends with a “Catalogue of Japan Plants, systematically arranged,” communicated by Sir William Hooker and compiled by Mr. Black of the Kew herbarium — about 1,600 species, Hodgson’s own gatherings starred, with mosses, algae and fungi appended — and then the publisher’s advertisements.

Henry Arthur Tilley’s Japan, the Amoor, and the Pacific is a voyage narrative of a circumnavigation made, as its title page explains, “in the Imperial Russian corvette ‘Rynda,’ in 1858—1860.” Tilley opens by explaining that in September 1858 an offer was suddenly made to him to go round the world, that he had two days to prepare for a voyage of two years, and that he traveled to Brest to join Commodore Popoff’s little squadron, bound for the Amoor River with liberty to touch at any ports the commander pleased. He sails as a civilian guest rather than an officer, and his want of a uniform puzzles the Japanese officials who come aboard; his preface claims a residence in Japan of more than three months, “every day of which he was moving among the people,” and asserts that he was the first Englishman ever to land at the Russian settlements at the mouth of the Amoor. He also warns that the whole work was written “when in a state of constant locomotion,” and signs the preface from Alexandretta, Syria, in January 1861. Twenty-one chapters follow the ship’s track outward by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to Japan and Siberia, then homeward eastward across the Pacific and round Cape Horn.

The first four chapters carry the squadron south and east. Tilley lands at Santa Cruz in Teneriffe, calls at Porto Grande in the Cape Verdes, and reaches Rio de Janeiro, where he praises the Misericordia hospital and reports that yellow fever was locally nicknamed the Polka Fever. Six weeks at the Cape produce an ascent of Table Mountain, a visit to the Constantia vineyards, complaints about the southeast winds and the dust, and an inland trip through the Paarl and Stellenbosch, where the coming railway has the Boers in a state of excitement. Batavia follows, with its native torch-carrying curfew and the Dutch opium revenue; then Banca’s tin, Singapore, and Manilla, where he describes the Tagals’ houses and dress, the cigar manufactories of Binondo, the government tobacco monopoly, and a cock-pit at Santa Cruz where he watches fifteen couples fight in half an hour. A quarrel over unreturned salutes at Hong Kong and a brief stop at Shanghai close the outward leg.

Japan fills the middle of the book, Chapters V through X, the longest single block in the narrative, and it is to Hakodadi that Tilley returns to take his leave of the country in Chapter XIII. The squadron raises Cape Goto in June 1859 and anchors at Nangasaki amid hundreds of torch-lit fishing craft; a sub-governor comes aboard with an interpreter and a book of questions, and Tilley finds the officers of the disabled Russian frigate Ascolde lodged in a Buddhist temple with the priests confined to a central sanctuary. He argues at length that the Russians are popular because they learn the language and respect local scruples, and reproaches his own countrymen and the Americans for walking into matted rooms in dirty boots and shouting at the people. Nangasaki supplies him with the town’s porcelain, its temples and tea-houses, mornings spent photographing Japanese of both sexes in full costume, dancing and singing girls among them, a rice-transplanting custom in which men chase the women with grass roots, and the paper currency and wild speculations that preceded the opening of trade on the first of July.

Chapter VI steps back into a topical sketch of the empire: Marco Polo’s Zipango, Xavier’s mission, Taikosama and the crucifixion of twenty Spanish priests, the massacre at Simabara, the servility of the Dutch at Desima, and then Perry, Putiatin, and Lord Elgin. Tilley describes the Mikado at Miako and the Tykoon at Yedo, calls the government “about the most absolute despotism that exists,” anatomizes the spy system and the eight castes, and works through dress, marriage, punishment and suicide, Sintooism and Buddhism, education, printing, lacquer, sword blades, paper, houses, and miniature gardens. On commerce he is deflating: the only real benefit of the treaties, he concludes, is the opening of ports where ships and especially whalers can refit. The narrative then moves north to Hakodadi, where the governor breakfasts on board and wants his portrait taken privately, and Tilley rides twenty-five miles inland to a lead mine worked with hammer and chisel by torchlight, and watches a miner run after him in terror to return a coin. A currency change in August throws the shopkeepers into panic and lands Tilley in a street brawl of his own making.

From there the squadron carries Count Mouravief-Amursky to the Bay of Yedo. Tilley describes Kanagawa and the newly built trade village of Yokahama, the obstruction of trade by officials, his lodging in a temple, and rides through Yedo past the palaces of the feudal princes and the barred wards with their jingling wardens. A cyclone is logged barometer reading by barometer reading; days later a Russian lieutenant and a sailor are cut down at Yokahama, and Tilley — who saw the bodies and attended the funeral — gives the wounds, the inquiry, the governor’s prevarications, and his own conclusion that some person high in power was behind it. Chapters XI to XIII carry him past Matsmai into the Gulf of Tartary, aground on a sandbank near Cape Lazaref, and through Ghelak fishing settlements to Nicholaivsk, where he notes the wretched climate, the caged and half-worshipped bears, dog-sledging, and the Siberian dance called the Vosmerka, and argues that Russian colonization of the Amoor will be slow.

The homeward half is a Pacific and Atlantic tour. St. Francisco draws out chapters on its polyglot population, its newspapers in six languages, its duels, and its volunteer fire companies, which Tilley should like to see established in every village in Great Britain; he goes up to Sacramento and out to Placerville, once Hang-town, to see trough-washing, hydraulic mining, and quartz mills, and describes with anger some two hundred warriors of the Pitt river tribe marched down through deep snow from the Sierra Nevada and encamped on their way to be shipped up the coast, tribes driven like sheep to “reservations” hundreds of miles from their homes. At Honolulu he misses the hula got up for the officers at the instigation of the king’s father, is presented to Kamehameha the Fourth and shown the feather cloak of Kamehameha the Great, and rides round Oahu by the pali of Nuuanu, sleeping in native huts and writing bluntly about the traffic in daughters he was repeatedly offered. Tahiti under the French protectorate gets its laws, revenue, and Queen Pomare, a six-day circuit of the island, and the departure of all but two of the English missionaries; then come the wreck of the Seine, the Chilian post at Punta Arena, Patagonians on the shore, and Monte Video and Buenos Ayres, where the saladeras kill five hundred mares in six hours for their hides. The book ends without ceremony, anchoring in Plymouth Harbour ten weeks out from Monte Video. It carries a list of errata and eight plates, every one of them a Japanese subject.

Ten Weeks in Japan is a first-person record of a short visit made in the spring of 1860 by George Smith, D.D., whom the title page identifies as Bishop of Victoria (Hongkong). He crossed from China rather than from Europe — “On April 7th, 1860, I embarked at Shanghae in the steamer ‘Yangtze’ … on the voyage from China to Japan” — and he came as a bishop looking for missionary openings: he officiated among his own countrymen at each port he touched, and, as president of the Hongkong committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, brought a hundred copies of St. Luke in Japanese to test “the practicability of distributing the Holy Scriptures in Japanese among the native population.” The personal form holds across the thirty chapters, though a scattering of passages speak instead of “the Author,” chiefly in the preface and in the chapter on Loochoo. The preface disclaims any “profound or elaborate treatise,” calling the book “a simple record of facts which the Author witnessed during his brief visit to the country, and on which he has grounded some general observations respecting the moral, social and political condition of the Japanese race.” Of the 441 pages of text that precede the index, the Nagasaki stay — a little over five of the ten weeks — takes rather more than half (chapters II–XVI, pp. 9–239) and the Kanagawa and Yeddo weeks rather less; something like a third of the whole leaves the day-by-day narrative for topical exposition on religion, government, language, schools, funerals, festivals and trade, interleaved with the travel rather than gathered apart from it.

Smith came in sight of Kewsew on April 9 and, passing the island of Papenberg, anchored off Nagasaki, where for more than five weeks he lodged in a Budhist temple on the hill above the city with his host the Rev. C. M. Williams, an American Episcopal missionary. The Nagasaki chapters move outward from that room: the trades of the streets, the carved granite family mausoleums on the hillside, an eight-day Budhist “octave” at which a preacher of high local repute harangued nearly a thousand people “seated on the floor in a half kneeling, half sitting posture,” and a Sinto temple where an elderly gentleman rang an old cracked bell and clapped his hands before a bright metal disk a foot across and a dusky red one representing the sun suspended overhead, the titles of the great “Sun-goddess” emblazoned on the sides. He pays a ceremonial call with the British Consul on the governor of Nagasaki and watches native reporters take down every word for transmission to Yeddo, seven hundred miles away. On five successive Sundays he reads the Liturgy of the Church of England in the “Temple of Great Virtue” to congregations of twenty to forty, out of a foreign community of about sixty. He visits the confined Chinese guild, the old Dutch factory at Desima, Colonel von Siebold, Dr. Pompe van Meerdervoort’s medical school, and the government engine-factory with its diving-bell, stopping on the way back at the steam yacht presented two years earlier “in the name of Queen Victoria” to the Tycoon and renamed the “Yeddo,” whose aft-cabin he found in a wretched state of dirt. He rides out to Tokitz, and over the hills above his temple, from whose summit he descries the volcano Unsen-yama across a wide bay.

The district of Simabara lies at that volcano’s foot, and the sight of it opens a chapter on the extinction of Roman Catholic Christianity: the last native Christians entrenched in the fort, where “Thirty-seven thousand Christians surrendered in the fort and were all put to the sword in one day”; the inscription set over the mass grave — “So long as the sun shall warm the earth, let no Christian be so bold as to come to Japan”; and the flat verdict that “not a single native Roman Catholic survives throughout the kingdom of Japan.” Other chapters leave the narrative in the same way. One sets out Sintoism and Budhism and their mutual assimilation; another gathers marriage customs, the New-year holidays and the five national festivals; another describes a company of actors from Yeddo playing the tragedy of the prince of Ako, then treats the Harakiri, or “Happy Despatch,” as a national institution. A further chapter reports funeral rites from the physician Urishino Te-ju before Smith describes a burial he watched near his lodging; two more expound the written language — drawn from Rutherford Alcock’s manuscript grammar and from the Rev. S. W. Brown, between whose views on how far a Chinese book is intelligible to a Japanese reader he has occasionally to decide — and the schools and medical training of Yeddo. He names his Japanese informants freely — Doctor Kasatu, who bought native books and maps for him; Rinshan, the monk who was his landlord — but says he has “generally abstained from mentioning individual names in these pages,” unwilling to drag into print the consular, diplomatic, mercantile and clerical gentlemen who supplied him with his means of observation, and pauses to justify the exceptions he makes.

Where the preface promised to designate “evils by their real name,” the naming runs in every direction. He calls the Japanese “one of the most licentious races in the world,” dwells on promiscuous public bathing, licensed brothels and concubinage, sets Thunberg’s catalogue of Japanese virtues against what he saw — “never in any portion of the East have I witnessed so large a proportion of cases of drunkenness as in Japan” — and repeats the Dutch factory surgeon’s belief that after nine at night “nearly one-half of the adult population to be met with in Nagasaki are more or less inebriated.” He presses the other side as hard. Japanese law “affords a fair security for protecting the life, property and liberty of its subjects,” and Japan “enjoys the pre-eminence of possessing one of the most effective governments for the repression of crime throughout the pagan world” — resting, he grants, on dualism, espionage and sanguinary punishment. His native visitors at Nagasaki leave him the impression of “a friendly race of people, accessible, frank, manly, energetic and polite,” if “not very truthful”; and around that port, he writes, “in no part of the East do foreigners and natives appear (as a general rule) to live together on better and more harmonious terms.” His first chapter argues that Japan “seems adapted to assume that relative place among surrounding nations in the East which Great Britain has long filled in the countries of the West,” his last Nagasaki chapter that “A noble career lies before these children of the ‘Rising Day.’” He is as blunt about Europeans: the dissoluteness of the settlements, smuggling, the bribing of custom-house officers, and the “East Indian pride of conquest” he wants his countrymen to unlearn.

He boarded on the evening of May 15 and was under steam at daybreak, coasting Kewsew, Sikok and Niphon to Kanagawa, where on May 19 he lodged with the Rev. S. W. Brown. At the new settlement of Yokuhama he notes Mount Fusi seventy miles off and reports the two matters agitating the port: the recent street murder of two Dutch merchant captains, and a currency scramble in itzebus and kobangs that had drawn a public rebuke from the British envoy. On May 25 he traveled the seventeen miles to Yeddo along the Tokaido in a norimon, halting at a refectory-house where the waiting-girls held a peeled boiled egg to his lips. Eight days at the British Legation followed, in a temple compound conceded to Rutherford Alcock: an earthquake at four in the morning, rides past the bridge where the Goteiro had been assassinated, the “Belle vue” and “Grande vue” over a city he reckons at two millions, and an aged juggler whose paper butterflies flew about the drawing-room. His political chapters trace power from the Mikado at Miako — who “retains the empty title of sovereign,” “relegated to dwell in idle pomp” — down to the Tycoon, his Council of Five or “imperial senators,” and the 264 first-class vassal chieftains styled Daimios. Japan, with no middle class, he argues, resembles England “in the times of our Plantagenet princes”: a Tycoon imitating “our Edward IV” might foster a middle class against the great barons, and even a civil war like “the English wars of the Roses” might “inaugurate an era of constitutional monarchy in Japan.” At Yeddo he hears of the hundred families at Ao-yama, descendants of apostates kept on “five rations of rice for each family” as hereditary “religious detectives and inquisitors.”

A separate chapter goes back to Loochoo, where Smith spent a week in 1850, reprinting the regent’s dispatch asking that no more foreigners be left there. The longest chapter in the book covers the fortnight back at Kanagawa after June 2: at Yokuhama he conducts “the first public religious service celebrated at that port,” thirty-three Europeans and Americans attending; in the Budhist monastery where he lodged at Kanagawa he baptizes “the first child of pure European parentage born in Japan”; he learns that three natives in missionary employment were arrested in his absence. The chapter closes with a letter he wrote at Yeddo on May 30, 1860 to the Bible Society, reporting that “all the Protestant missionaries now in Japan concur in the view that it is highly impolitic and inexpedient … to attempt any distribution of a Japanese version of the Holy Scriptures.” Declining a thousand-mile round voyage under sail to Hakodadi, he gives that port a brief notice and an 1859 meteorological table, sails from the Bay of Yeddo on June 17, and reaches San Francisco in thirty-eight days, amid the excitement over the Japanese ambassadors lately passed through “en route to Washington.” The last chapter prints his public letter to Judge McAllister protesting that Californian law barred the state’s 45,000 Chinese immigrants from giving evidence in its courts — a bar that would have covered the ambassadors themselves — and Lieutenant John M. Brooke’s letter arguing that disabled junks may have drifted from Japan to America. The conclusion asks for “a spirit of earnest prayer on behalf of this interesting portion of mankind.” The volume carries eight wood-cuts, five taken by G. Pearson from Negretti and Zambra’s photographic “Views in Japan,” a folding map engraved by Edwd. Weller, an erratum leaf and an index.

A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan is a voyage narrative in twelve chapters and 297 pages, recording a pleasure cruise of some months made in 1862 by Anna D’Almeida with her husband, an infant daughter, and a Chinese servant. The journey begins on 2 March aboard the opium clipper Thunder out of Singapore. In her preface D’Almeida disclaims any scientific ambition and any comment on political affairs — “no one need expect to find in these pages the results of scientific research, or tedious disquisitions on the ethnology and early history of the country” — and promises only to “represent Japan and its people as they exist at the present moment,” drawing on the “various places which, during a cruise of some months in Japanese waters, I had the pleasure of visiting.” The dedication, signed “Anna,” is to her husband, “thy loving and faithful wife.” Throughout, she writes in the first-person plural for her traveling party (“we left Singapore,” “our captain,” “we entered”), dropping into a personal “I” for her own reflections and occasionally addressing the reader as “kind reader” or “gentle readers.” The frontispiece is Vincent Brooks’s lithograph of the bay and part of the town of Nagasaki, from a sketch taken on the spot by her husband W. B. D’Almeida and finished by Benjamin Barker of Bath; the title-page vignette is “A Japanese ‘Tea-House’ Girl.”

The first three chapters are set in the Philippines. After a “wretched three days’ voyage” from Hong Kong on a filthy Spanish steamer, D’Almeida lands at Manila, stays first at Madame du Bosse’s hotel and then with the family of “Signor C.,” and drives on the Calçada in the evening promenade among four military bands. She describes the walled Manila within Fort St. Iago and the Estras Muros outside, the statue of Isabel II and that of Magellan, the origin she is told for the name Luzon, from “Looson,” the rice pestle-and-mortar, the great cigar manufactory in Binondo employing ten thousand women beating tobacco leaves with lemon-sized stones, a sugar manufactory belonging to the widow of a Chinese mandarin who had turned Christian, the Academy for Native Artists, and the double-circle cemetery with its lime-strewn Golgotha. She retails the ghost stories told her about the cemetery, quotes a poem by the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, and reprints her husband’s notes from the Presidio, where prisoners chained in pairs wear an “F” or a “chongo” (monkey) badge according to their offense. An excursion inland takes them by casco to Binan, Los Baños, and the Lake of Makilign, and on to the volcano of Taal, where she sleeps in the hut of Gonzales, “El Capitano del Pueblo,” whose sleeping room holds “an immense figure of St. Peter” clasping a couple of gilt keys; she translates a long Spanish account of the eruptions of 1707, 1715, 1731, 1749 and 1754.

Chapters IV through VII cross to the China coast. Back at Hong Kong she walks in the Happy Valley, then sails through the “Cut-throat Gate” to Macao, where she inspects the seven forts, the ruins of the Jesuit church and college, built in 1602 and accidentally burned in 1834, and Camoens’ garden, where a stone pillar carries the wooden bust of “the bard.” She recounts the 1849 murder of Governor Amarals by Chinamen enraged at his cutting roads through their burial grounds, and the arrest and forcible rescue of a young English missionary who refused to remove his hat before the Host. She sails on the P&O Pekin up the Yangtsi, “Child of the Ocean,” to Shanghai, where she pieces together the settlement: the coolies’ falsetto calls of he-ko and hi-ho, the “pigeon English” of “Missy Losy” and “red-haired barbarian,” the exposed coffins and skull-topped jars of bones in the countryside, the Taipings’ attack on the North Gate on the night of 1 May 1862, a captured mandarin beheaded the following day, the “chin-chilling” of ground with pork and saffron-dyed chicken before a house was built, an opium-smoking shop with its treacle-like paste and bamboo pipes, and two versions of the Chinese marriage ceremony, the bride locked in her sedan chair and either accepted or sent back when the bridegroom opens the door. A further chapter compresses her notes on the cangue, tea, kow-tow, the Tae-pings’ cruelty at Kahding, and the “baby towers” of infanticide.

A becalmed ten-day sail from Shanghai brings them within sight of the Gotto Islands on 23 May 1862; a foggy night holds the vessel stationary till daylight, and they arrive about noon the next day, in a harbor she calls perhaps the most beautiful she has ever seen, surpassing, she is inclined to think, Singapore. Passing Pappenberg she is told its dismal tale — the converts made through Xavier and later missionaries carried to the summit and thrown down on the rocks. Officials come aboard, take cake and wine, and leave an officer to remain on board while the vessel is anchored; she describes the hara kari from a “native drawing,” noting that it leaves the delinquent’s family unblemished. Staying with a consul in a house partly of camellia wood, she tours a tea-firing shed where women touch her hair and cry “ipioca, ipioca!” (“good, good!”), and silk, lacquer, and porcelain shops. A picnic to Nazumi-sima, or Rat Island, brings them to a countryman’s grave whose white cross has been pulled up and laid between two trees, its painted inscription reading “W. Cullingford, A.B., H.M.S. ‘Spartan,’ Oct. 3rd, 1855.” A chapter on Japanese women follows: hair greased and pasted, undisturbed a day or two on a wooden pillow; eyebrows shaved and teeth blackened when a woman becomes a wife; daughters parted with at seven or eight to “tea houses,” secluded until fourteen or fifteen, then compelled to “an immoral course of life,” and free at twenty-five to marry, generally well.

She calls on a Yacoonin who fell in love with his wife at a tea house and bought her, and is led by a man promising to show her a dog into a building where men and women bathed together. Two cases, she says, go far toward proving that the Japanese are strict with those who behave ill to Europeans: a farrier who revengefully put chili seeds into the eyes of a horse he failed to cure was condemned to be decapitated — a sentence she calls unnecessarily rigorous — and a thief caught breaking into a Nagasaki house was decapitated a day or two later. They ride to Tookits, beyond the limit permitted to European excursions, followed back by a bi-sworded officer and two coolies who turn at the boundary to report their espionage to the head Yacoonin, an agent of the Prince of Satsuma. The St. Louis carries them through the Inland Sea to Yokohama — aground on a rock the pilot knew nothing of — and past Fusiyama: fusi, matchless, and yama, mountain. At Kama-kura, capital of the whole empire six hundred years before, they pass grooms with cleverly tattooed backs; an old man coaxes them onto a marked spot in each of three rock-cut caves; they learn only afterward that three men were buried alive beneath for refusing to worship after the manner of the Japanese — martyrs she wonders were Christians. After a long search they find the Diebutzu and seat themselves on its thumbs.

Yedo they fail to reach: Colonel Neal, the British Minister, is seriously unwell; the American has no room. In the Straits of Simonosaki the current seizes the bows; only the captain’s coolness keeps them off the rocks. At Nagasaki a merchant’s wife begs “as a favour” to keep their little girl a few days, and at a theater a wrongly accused husband is pardoned as his hara kari is prepared. They leave Shanghai for the last time on 18 July in the Lyeemoon, meet a violent storm, and put back into Amoy just in time to escape the worst of the typhoon; Macao, revisited two days later, is a picture of ruin and disorder. At Canton she is shown a joss-house said to contain five hundred images, among them the “Ying-ki-li-god,” a gilt image of an English sailor shipwrecked, imprisoned, and so admired for his ingenious contrivances that the Governor released him and made him a mandarin. At Hong Kong they see a Chinese exhibition of clay figures for the feast of lanterns, made to roll their eyes and raise a limb by wires running to a wheel boxed in behind, worked by white mice crossing it. The book ends: “And now, gentle readers, ‘my work is done.’ Trusting that it has at least succeeded in whiling away a portion of your time, if it has proved a means neither of instruction nor of information, I will lay my pen aside, and, making my exit from your mind, say Adieu!”

Sir Rutherford Alcock’s The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of a Three Years’ Residence in Japan, published in two volumes in 1863, is the account given by Her Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in Japan of the first years of resident Western diplomacy at Yeddo. In place of a preface, volume I carries a dedicatory letter to Sir John F. Davis, signed at London on January 21st, 1863, in which Alcock disclaims formal dedications and stilted prefaces and names two objects: to give the results of a careful study of the people among whom his lot had been cast, and to throw light on the conditions of all Western diplomacy in its struggles with Eastern character and Eastern policy. Having long forsworn regular journalizing, he kept fragmentary notes of men and things, and preserves those first impressions with corrections and amplifications only — hence a chronological narrative rather than a systematic and scientific treatise. He offers the book as a contrast to Mr. Oliphant’s account of Lord Elgin’s mission and to Commodore Perry’s expedition: the special embassies were received with smiles, while their resident successors had the poisoned chalice held to their lips. The same letter explains the pictures. In the illustrations alone, he writes, he has freely borrowed — his own sketch-book, the portfolios of friends and sometimes their photographic labors, some drawings from the pencil of Mr. Wergman, and numerous facsimiles of Japanese wood-cuts, all appearing as wood engravings printed within the letterpress.

Japan is not sighted for some thirty pages. Volume I opens at Canton in the spring of 1859, with the appointment received and European furniture packed, and moves through a China under allied occupation: the corpse of Viceroy Yeh carried up the river, Hongkong’s prosperity explained by free port and security, Macao’s missed chance, and Shanghae with its devastation and land-jobbing, closing in an argument for armed intervention to protect the treaty ports. The passage to Nagasaki then occasions a survey of what Europe had written about Japan — Marco Paolo, Mendez Pinto, Purchas, Kaempfer, Thunberg, Siebold — and Alcock’s account of the Portuguese arrival, Xavier, the embassy of Christian princes to Rome, the edicts of expulsion, Simabara and Decima, with his thesis that papal claims to temporal supremacy, and the drain of bullion, brought the Christian century down. He reaches Nagasaki on 4 June 1859: the bay likened to a Norwegian fjord, blackened teeth and nudity, a matsuri, the steam factory worked under Dutch officers where Japanese hands had built a tubular-boiler engine from plans before any of them had seen a steamer, and a governor’s reception conducted through a relay of Dutch. A warship anchors off the Yeddo batteries on 26 June; he lands privately, inspects temples, takes Tozengee for his legation, and fights for extra rooms amid the chaos of unpacking.

The capital gets a set-piece chapter offered as stereoscopic slides — the ride in from Sinagawa, the view from Atango-yama, jugglers, fire-proof houses of mud, the moats and the Daimio quarter, and the two-sworded men he calls often drunk and always insolent. Three quarrels open the diplomacy: Kanagawa or Yokohama as the settlement site, which he calls Decima-like; a currency trick in coins marked half an itziboo but weighing one and a half; the right of road. Ratifications are exchanged on 11 July 1859; the warship sails, and a hermit life sets in. Chapters on the Japanese language and on Japanese sayings and doings frame a political core: how the American treaties were made and how the country is governed — a Mikado at Miaco, a Tycoon at Yeddo, a council of five, several hundred Daimios held by hostages and duplicated offices, and a standing law, never repealed, making foreigners outlaws in the land. Around these run a voyage north to Hakodadi, a gold mania at Yokohama, and a country walk to a district prison and bazaar. Then the killings: a Russian officer and two of his men, the French consul’s servant, his own linguist stabbed at the legation gate in January 1860, two Dutch captains in February, and on 24 March 1860 the Regent cut down in a sleet-storm outside the Tycoon’s palace — told with its oil-paper cloaks and decoy and the field-pieces run into the legation courtyards, and followed by the popular story of the forty-seven Lonins.

At the first anniversary Alcock inserts a journal entry written on a wild night — exile, boredom, a defense of Japanese conservatism by analogy with the Corn Laws — and draws up a balance-sheet of the year’s tea and silk against its murders. In August 1860 he is received by the Tycoon, a stout, heavy-faced youth, after a procession of some miles and ranks of kneeling officers, the audience prefaced by an argument that ceremonial in the East is politics. The volume’s longest continuous stretch then follows, a journey undertaken to assert the treaty right of travel. Leaving Kanagawa on 4 September 1860 with a cortege of at least a hundred, he goes by Totsooka, Foodisawa and Odawara, over the Hakoni pass, where a hot-spring hamlet draws his most quotable formulations — Japan as a country of paradoxes where familiar things are curiously reversed, and the bath as the people’s parliament, the only one they are permitted — and to its lake, then by Missima and Yosiwara to the foot of Fusiyama, which he climbs from Mooriyama past a chain of huts to the crater among pilgrims in white. Three weeks at the sulphur springs of Atami slow it to village economy: a bamboo aqueduct, paper made from bark, a failed speculation in rags, the moxa and its pun on new taxes, and the burial of his terrier Toby. A genre-picture of the high road — pack-horses, cangos, a blind gentleman, a female ostler — ends the volume on “Saionara!”

Volume II carries no preface and resumes at Yeddo in the autumn of 1860. An Italian servant of the French Minister is cut at the legation gate and fires his revolver at his assailant while the yaconins on duty do nothing, and two anecdotes from Titsingh follow, illustrating the code of honor of the armed classes. Fire breaks out at Tozengee; a British subject returning from shooting wounds a police officer at Kanagawa, and out of that case grows a long digression on consular jurisdiction, the suit afterward brought against Alcock at Hongkong, and a proposal for visiting judges. An American paper gifts him a wife and two children and the English press repeats it, and the year closes with a Christmas dinner for twenty-three. January 1861 brings the crisis of the residence: a New Year warning of a conspiracy of Lonins, the murder of Mr. Heuskin of the American legation as he rides home at night, his public funeral, the reported suicide of Hori Oribeno-no-Kami, and the decision of the British, French, Dutch and Prussian representatives to strike their flags and withdraw to Yokohama — told largely through despatches already laid before Parliament. A short chapter follows the negotiations for return, Alcock’s counter-threat to visit the unopened ports, three conferences late in February, and his re-entry into Yeddo on 2 March 1861 under a salute of twenty-one guns to each flag.

More than eighty pages then go to the overland journey from Nagasaki to Yeddo. Alcock leaves Decima on 1 June 1861 with a Dutch colleague, a gentleman of his legation, a consul and an artist, and crosses Kiusiu in nine days: hot sulphur baths at Urisino, a coal mine of the Prince of Fizen, and Kokura, whence a junk carries the party across the strait. At Simonoseki he sets down a merchant’s commercial report; four days of towing junks bring him through the Suonada. Landing at Hiogo, which he surveys as a future treaty port, he is met by a governor whose errand is to keep the party away from Miaco, and consents; two days at Osaca yield canals, shops and copper works and a long set-piece on the theater, whose melodrama, he remarks, rehearsed a scene he was soon to act himself. From 19 June the Tocaido stages carry him round Miaco — the shuttered town of Nieno, a river ford, castles, couriers, the first view of Fusiyama — to Kanagawa on the thirty-second day, with the realization on the road that the Mikado had never ratified the treaties. Riding up to Yeddo, he is attacked in the night of 5 July at Tozengee; the assailants hold the house some ten minutes without finding his rooms, Oliphant is maimed and Morrison cut, and the conspirators’ bond is translated in full. Oliphant goes home invalided, carrying the Tycoon’s autograph letter to the Queen urging delay in opening more ports.

Roughly forty percent of volume II is topical treatise with no narrative in it. A review of foreign relations asks why Japan signed treaties it did not mean to execute, traces the answer back to the expulsion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, weighs Russia’s advance, and sets out three alternatives — withdraw, acquiesce, or coerce. A chapter on government describes the hierarchy of Seogun, Gorogio and subordinate officers, compares Japanese feudalism with Saxon England, and passes into essays on what Alcock takes for national mendacity and commercial fraud, on concubinage and the sale of daughters, and on Sinto, Confucianism and Buddhism. The longest chapter asks what civilization is, offers Andorre as the Japan of Europe, sets good roads against the absence of post, press, railway and permanent architecture, and gives some twenty pages to lacquer, bronze, metal medallions with two folk-tales retold from them, and above all the cheap picture-books, from which about twenty cuts are reproduced; his summing-up ranks their material civilization high and their intellectual and moral pretensions very low. A companion chapter turns to pilgrimage and indulgences, the temple of Asaxa as a fairground, top-spinners, wrestlers, matsuris and cemeteries. A final treatise names three enemies — political economy, religious intolerance and feudalism — and argues that to preach Christianity in Japan is of necessity to preach revolution.

The closing chapters return to narrative and to figures: the Japanese mission to Europe gets aboard H.M.S. “Odin” in January 1862 in a scene played for comedy, the year’s trade given port by port, and the attack of 14 February 1862 on Ando Tsusimano Kami, second Minister of Foreign Affairs, by eight men — the first such attack in which a firearm was used. Alcock sails on 23 March 1862 and reaches England by Shanghae, Hongkong, Singapore, Aden and Malta, reports the Japanese envoys’ demands and the postponement conditionally conceded, and gives seventeen pages to the currency, allowing that Article X was in its essence erroneous and vicious and that the evil originated in foreign interference. News overtakes him of a second attack on the legation and of an attack on British riders on the high road, and the text ends on the departure of the Daimios from the capital, which he reads as revolution — by compromise, or else as preparation for an appeal to arms in which foreigners would be attacked first. Seven appendices follow, from the trade of China and the minutes of a meeting of British residents at Yokohama to a list of Daimios and their revenues, Mr. Veitch’s notes on the flora, and a reprinted argument that Tycoon is neither a Japanese word nor a title its bearer may claim; a long index ends the work, whose printed lists also call for a map of Japan and a map of Osaca.

Edward Barrington de Fonblanque’s Niphon and Pe-che-li; or, Two Years in Japan and Northern China is a personal narrative of two years spent in the Far East on military business, told in the first person from beginning to end — “It is of my experiences during the intervening period, passed in Japan and in the North of China, that I am about to speak” — and built out of continuous recollection into which are set dated extracts from the author’s journal, one private letter, his own newspaper account of an ascent of Fusi-jama, and, in the China half, a run of Chinese state papers. He anchored at Hong Kong on 15 December 1859, one of the officers shipped east after the British repulse at the Peiho, and was sent on by General Straubenzee to Japan to report on that country’s capacity to supply the expeditionary army in China and, if he could, to procure several thousand horses for military transport. The book falls into two titled parts of unequal weight: “Niphon” runs from page 1 to page 179 of 282 pages of text, and “Pe-che-li” fills the remaining hundred-odd pages. De Fonblanque opens by disclaiming all authority — he has “worked up no statistics, studied no institutions, borrowed no ideas,” his little book “has therefore no pretension to be instructive,” and readers who want instruction had better shut it at once — offering instead a record of impressions steering between “the dry realism of blue-books” and “the rosy tints of Captain Sherard Osborn’s charming romance.”

He crossed from Hong Kong in the American steam-ship Powhattan as the guest of Commodore Tatnall, who was going to Japan to carry the Japanese embassy to the United States, caught his first sight of the snowy peak of Fusi-jama on 10 January 1860, and anchored the next day in the bay of Kanagawa. The Japanese half then follows the eighteen miles of road to Yedo — tea and “Ohios” at the Kavasaki ferry, the drunken two-sworded followers of the Daimios in the long suburb of Sinagawa — to Tosenjee, the temple allotted to Mr. Alcock as British Minister. De Fonblanque describes the eight-mile main street of Yedo with its barriers and guard-houses, the triple moat and mortarless granite walls of the Tycoon’s palace, and the audience of 13 January at the Foreign Minister’s reception hall, where a procession of norrimons and Yaconins, an interpreter knocking his forehead on the ground between sentences, and three hours of “puerile objections” ended in a promise of a thousand horses from Niphon and as many from each of the other two islands — later cut back to a thousand in all. Much of what follows is the working record of that business: purchase permitted only from government-appointed dealers in the presence of Yaconins, the referrals to Yedo required to put up a stable, the pack-saddles later condemned by a committee of British officers, the dealer who lacquered false marks on his horses’ teeth, and the transport Forest Eagle, which sailed with more than two hundred horses and came back disabled with seventy. Around it he sets the new treaty port — the Custom-house and reclaimed swamp of Yokuhama, the government-run Gankeroo, the public bath-houses, a consular court held in a dining room over a shot watch-dog — and long appreciations of old lacquer, bronzes, egg-shell porcelain and ivory pipe-buttons.

Killing punctuates the Japanese chapters. The Legation steward Dan is stabbed in the back under the British flag at Yedo; two Dutch ship-captains are cut down in the main street of Yokuhama, and De Fonblanque is taken in to see the bodies; the American minister’s secretary and interpreter, whom he had met at breakfast, is assassinated months later; and the Gotairo, uncle and regent to the boy Tycoon, is hacked out of his chair in the open square before his own gate, after which the officer at the barrier who failed to arrest the assassin is invited to perform the Hari Kari. Between these come amusements and observations spread across the year: New Year at Kanagawa and the July fêtes, a déjeuner at the Ojee tea-gardens with Alcock and Mr. Townshend Harris, the fair and waxworks and monkey-theater of Osakusa, the conjuror Itsojee and his paper butterflies, a Japanese fire-brigade at work. His opinions are stated flatly and repeatedly: the country people are friendly, prosperous, free of beggars and drunkards, the officials no more obstructive and a good deal more courteous than their British counterparts, though their account-keeping is more complicated than the War Office’s and in circumlocution they beat Pall Mall and Whitehall together, the women respected within the household — and the nation as a whole “depraved, sensual, and obscene in every sense,” a charge he presses through pages on bathing, toys and shop goods. He is equally blunt that the British resort to Japan neither to civilize nor to convert nor to add to the happiness of the people, but for no object in the world “but to trade with profit to ourselves.” In September 1860 he joins Alcock’s party of eight, with Mr. Veitch the botanist, over the Hakoni mountains and up Fusi-jama, hoisting the flag on the crater rim, firing a salute from revolvers and drinking the Queen’s health in champagne iced in the mountain snow; the peak is put at rather more than 14,000 feet. Recalled to China on the fall of the Taku forts, he sails in October by the Sowonada Sea past Osahaka and Hiogo to Nagasaki and the Pappenberg, argues that Japan could be raided but never invaded, warns against schemes to dethrone the Mikado and the Tycoon, and bids the country farewell in a page of half-disbelieving reverie.

“Pe-che-li” begins with the shock of the plunge from the green shores of Japan to the mud-colored forts at the mouth of the Peiho, and settles at Tien-tsin, where the author passes the winter of 1860–61 with the small force left under Brigadier-General Staveley after the army came down from Pekin. The book becomes a garrison chronicle: a temple converted into a theater with a verse prologue, sledging on the frozen Peiho, races and cricket, curio-hunting among the Summer Palace loot in the shops, a subscription alms distribution that killed nine people in the scramble, Dr. Lamprey’s hospital for the Chinese poor, and the mutual, contented incomprehension of the English and French camps on opposite banks of the river. The sacking of Yuen-ming-Yuen draws several pages — the loot surrendered up to the prize-agents, and ironic passages on the French, “who never plunder,” and on General Montauban’s own telling of it. In March he rides to Pekin through burnt villages, visits the Russian cemetery and its monument to the officers, a private, an attaché, a civilian and the eight Sikh soldiers seized under a flag of truce and dead of their treatment, pushes fifty miles north to the Great Wall at Chataou — “a monument of the cruel folly of one man” — and brings back a brick, then returns by the ruins of Yuen-ming-Yuen. Longer set pieces follow: a burlesque of the Chinese competitive examination, with the winning candidate’s history of the late war in which the barbarians are annihilated; the death of the Emperor Hien Fung, his self-praising last decree, and the coup d’état that carried Prince Kung to the regency and Su-shun to the block; and ministers’ remonstrances against the imperial flight to Ye-hol, quoted from dispatches found at the Summer Palace. His verdicts on China are unhedged — British diplomatists, he writes, have more to gain by a manly and independent attitude than by truckling in dealing with “the most false and corrupt Government in the world” — while his pity for the taxed, tortured, long-suffering peasantry is as plain as his contempt for the mandarins. The narrative ends with the auction of a thousand army horses and the author borne past the muddy banks of Tien-tsin in a French gun-boat, forgiving all his enemies and hoping never to meet a worse place. Two appendices follow, both on Japan: Mr. John Veitch’s memorandum on the vegetation of the Fusi-jama districts, and the stage-by-stage march route from Sinagawa to the summit, 123 English miles in all. Ten plates are bound in — a lithographed frontispiece of the British Consulate at Kanagawa; a color facsimile of a Japanese print of a woman with a food-tray — the “illustrations, copied from native paintings” by which the author means to show how far the Japanese ideal of beauty stands from the actual type; the Temple of Quanon, “from a Japanese engraving on copper”; a folding tinted “Outline of a Map of Japan, Showing the Route through the Sowonada Sea, Reduced from an Original Japanese Map”; the gods of Fusi-jama on a folding sheet; three tinted views of the Sowonada Sea; a folding facsimile of a Japanese play-bill; and a plate of the stables of Fane’s Horse — while woodcuts printed in the text add pack-horses, the pilot, and the party setting out for Fusi-jama with the encampment, the storming and the descent. Lieutenant Perreau of the 47th B.N.I., temporarily attached to the author in Japan, is thanked for the greater part of the sketches.

Robert Fortune’s Yedo and Peking: A Narrative of a Journey to the Capitals of Japan and China, with Notices of the Natural Productions, Agriculture, Horticulture, and Trade of Those Countries, and Other Things Met With by the Way, published by John Murray in 1863, is a plant collector’s travel narrative. Its title page names him an Honorary Member of the Agri-Hort. Society of India. The preface, signed “The Author” and dated London, February 1863, explains that “with the view of making collections of these and other objects of natural history and works of art” he took his departure “for the ‘far East’ in the summer of 1860, and reached Japan in the month of October of that year,” and that “When I had finished my work in Japan, the Chinese war had been brought to a successful termination,” which let him visit “the new ports of Chefoo and Tien-tsin … and also the capital city of Peking itself.” Twenty-three chapters run to page 388, followed by a seven-page Index and Murray’s thirty-page January 1863 list of works. Twenty-one plates and vignettes accompany the text — “most of the illustrations,” the preface says, “were kindly sketched for me by Dr. Dickson of China” — and a folding “Map of Japan and North China” is bound between the Index and the list. Japan takes up the first 304 pages and China the last eighty-four, so despite the title’s paired billing the Japanese portion fills roughly four-fifths of the book.

Fortune reaches Japan aboard the barque Marmora at daylight on 12 October 1860 and stops first at Nagasaki, where he walks over “dear old Desima, where the Dutch have traded and dreamed so long,” stumbles on “a large rough piece of rock, on which were carved the words ‘Kaempfer’ and ‘Thunberg,’” measures an azalea “no less than 40 feet in circumference,” and calls on “the veteran naturalist, Dr. Von Siebold” at his house up a rice valley. Sailing for the Bay of Yedo he sights Fusi-yama, whose height he takes from “Mr. Alcock’s party in 1860” at “14,177 feet,” and anchors abreast of Yokuhama on the morning of 30 October. The new settlement is shut in by a canal and guardhouses, an arrangement he thinks “intended more for our protection than for anything else.” He takes quarters across the bay in a Kanagawa temple lent by Mr. Jose Loureira, engages a former pedlar, Tomi, as guide, and works the Tokaido, the town’s main street: Daimios’ processions before which “all the people on both sides of the way drop down instantly on their knees,” pack-horses in grass shoes with a family housed amongst the packages, mendicant priests “jingling some rings on the top of a tall staff,” blind shampooers. Up the valleys behind the town he finds at the temple of Bokengee the “umbrella pine” (Sciadopitys verticillata), whose specimens near Kanagawa and Yedo often reached a hundred feet against Siebold’s “twelve to fifteen,” and at To-rin-gee a grove of Thujopsis dolabrata.

On 13 November, with mounted yakoneens, he rides to Yedo and is lodged at Mr. Alcock’s Legation in the suburb of Sinagawa. From Atango-yama, the “Hill of the god Atango,” he looks across at “the palace of the Tycoon and the ‘official quarter’ of the city, encircled with massive stone walls and deep moats,” with the feudal princes’ barn-like town residences outside. A few months earlier “the Gotiro, or Regent of the Empire, had been waylaid and murdered in open day,” and a writer in the Edinburgh Review supplies five pages on the killing, down to two badly wounded assailants who stopped in flight and “deliberately performed the Harikari.” Across the Yedo river, in “the Southwark or Borough of the capital,” he finds the temple of Eco-ying, “erected to the memory of 180,000 human beings who lost their lives in one night” in an earthquake — the danger, he argues, that gives Japanese houses their heavy roofs. He looks into a public bath whose occupants were “of both sexes, old and young, apparently of three or four generations, and all were perfectly naked.” When a stove-pipe fires the dining-room roof he admires the fire-brigade — hundreds of men in the rooms and on the roofs, and “not an article of any kind was stolen” — but not the engine, whose stream was “little larger than that thrown by a hand-syringe.” Other nations, he concludes, should send fire-engines, not “implements of destruction, which may one day be turned against the givers.”

Yedo’s nursery districts teach him the art of dwarfing and show him that the Japanese “have in cultivation, in a variegated state, almost all the ornamental plants of the country”: Dang-o-zaka in its wooded valley, Ogee, “the Richmond of Yedo,” and Su-mae-yah, where “one straight road, more than a mile in length, is lined with them.” The collection runs to Thujopsis dolabrata, “two or three new species of Skimmia,” Osmanthus aquifolius, and the male Aucuba japonica he had come to Japan to procure, found at last in Dr. Hall’s garden at Yokuhama. The plants waited in that garden “until Ward’s cases were ready for their reception”; a Dutch carpenter took on the glazing “but unfortunately broke his diamond”; the steam-ship England carried them no further than Shanghae, “there being as yet no means of sending them direct from Japan”; and the homeward passage fell to Captain Taylor of the Tung-yu, some of whose plants were shown at South Kensington three days after reaching England. The England was let through the Inland Sea with Japanese pilots because she had aboard the Tycoon’s return presents for “Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain.” She came up to the mouth of the bay of Hiogo and Osaca — Hiogo “likely to prove the most important place in Japan” — and turned away: “we did not proceed further up the bay.” Osaca he never saw; at that point in the voyage he quotes Kaempfer, Thunberg and Alcock’s despatch to Earl Russell.

Fortune wintered in China, reaching Shanghae on 2 January; then “in the spring of 1861 I returned to Japan, my object being to inspect the natural productions of the country during the spring and summer months, as I had already done in the autumn and winter.” For this second visit he brings over Tunga, his old Chinese servant, and the two collect insects and land-shells by enlisting the country children, until “as we were seen approaching in the distance, the fact was telegraphed from village to village … by the clear, ringing voices of the children.” A long letter from Dr. Adams in the Zoologist recounts the capture of the beetle Damaster blaptoides; the prize of the season is a new primrose, “beyond all question the most beautiful species of the genus to which it belongs,” which he crowns “the Queen of the Primroses” — Primula japonica. Invited to Yedo by Mr. Townsend Harris, the United States Minister, he is twice ordered out of the city by the officer left in charge of the British Legation, prints the whole correspondence, and remarks that he had come “without first bowing the knee to him who was dressed in a little brief authority.” Mr. Harris then rides with him to the grave of “poor Mr. Heuskin,” the American Legation’s murdered interpreter. Back at Kanagawa he watches moxa cones burnt in four holes made in the skin between a woman’s shoulders while she sits “laughing and joking as if she enjoyed it.”

On 4 July, with Dr. Dickson and two Yokuhama merchants, he rides to Kanasawa and Kamakura, “the ancient capital,” and enters, by a door in its side, the bronze image “not less than thirty feet in diameter at the base, and fully forty feet in height,” which he finds “lighted by windows placed at the back.” Three chapters set the narrative aside: Alcock’s despatch on the midnight attack on the British Legation of July 1861, with Mr. Oliphant and Mr. Morrison wounded and a captured document refusing “to stand by and see the sacred empire violated by the barbarians”; and, “while these pages have been going through the press,” the Japan Herald on the killing of Mr. Richardson “on the 14th of September last.” Fortune calls the Tycoon’s Government “powerless to enforce those treaty rights” and fears that “war and all its horrors may, at no distant day, be the penalty.” Dr. Hepburn’s Kanagawa tables of temperature, rain, snow and earthquakes open a chapter on agriculture; a trade chapter holds Japan “probably overrated … as a mart for our manufactures,” certain of “large quantities of silk and tea,” and looks to the new port of Hiogo, near the great tea districts. Leaving in the Fiery Cross on 29 July 1861, he lodges the plants in Mr. Webb’s garden at Shanghae, sails for Chefoo in “Her Majesty’s despatch boat ‘Attalante,’” goes on to the Taku forts in a chartered French mail steamer, and reaches Tien-tsin by gun-boat up the Pei-ho.

At Tien-tsin he sees salt heaped “in the form of hay-stacks” about thirty feet high over “a space of ground fully a mile in length.” Dr. Lamprey of the 67th Regiment, whose photographs furnish two plates, ran “an hospital for the poor of Tien-tsin … supported by the British Army of Occupation,” and supplies an account of a dust-storm the Chinese classed “a red one.” Carrying a passport whose “English portion” he prints, name and destination blank, he goes three days by springless cart over a road “full of deep holes at every step,” and at noon of the third day rattles “through the gate of the Chinese city” of Peking, to be received at Leang-kung-foo, where Dr. Lockhart of the Medical Missionary Society was founding a hospital. From the Observatory he sees the Chinese city south of the Tartar one, and the Imperial city inside it; he walks to Loo-le-chang, “the ‘Paternoster Row’ of Peking,” and past the Russian cemetery beyond the An-ting gate where Bowlby of the Times lies. At Pale-twang he meets the White-barked Pine (Pinus Bungeana), its branches “rising perpendicularly, as straight as a larch, to the height of 80 or 100 feet,” and on the Pata-tshoo hills “a new oak-tree (Quercus sinensis),” whose acorns went to Mr. Standish at Bagshot. He ends: “On the 2nd of January, 1862, the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s ship ‘Ceylon,’ Captain Evans, steamed into the dock at Southampton, and thus ends the narrative of my visit to Zipangu and Cathay.”

Compiled at Hongkong and published in 1867 by Trübner and Co. in London and A. Shortrede and Co. in Hongkong, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan is a guidebook rather than a narrative — its title page calls it a “Guide Book & Vade Mecum for Travellers, Merchants, and Residents in General” and advertises twenty-nine maps and plans, which the list at the front sets out along with a key sheet to the Peking map. Three men are credited: Wm. Fred. Mayers of H.M.’s Consular Service, N. B. Dennys, late of the same service, and Chas. King, Lieut. R.M.A.; the volume is “compiled and edited by N. B. Dennys.” The preface, dated Hongkong, March 1867, states one object only, “producing a book of general use for intending visitors to, and residents in, the two countries of which it treats,” and presents the work as the first attempt to gather in accessible form the particulars scattered over the many books already published on the two countries. It asks indulgence for typographical faults, the type having been “set in great part by Chinese compositors, while the maps have all been engraved by natives.” A prefatory note adds that in the Japan sections “Tycoon” was sometimes printed where “Shogoon” was intended.

The articles run port by port, and the manner is chiefly an impersonal third person with an editorial “we” surfacing at intervals — “For other buildings we must refer our readers to the accompanying map” — and the reader addressed as “the visitor” or “the traveller”; the first person belongs to the many authorities quoted at length. The hands differ: Canton and Peking are dense with dynastic history and Chinese characters, Nagasaki and Yokohama are picturesque and built around walks, and Yedo is handed over to a quoted and measured topography. Hongkong opens the book and is the longest article in it, running from geology, harbor, and tides through public buildings, schools, the naval yard, docks, clubs, newspapers, and libraries to house rent, servants’ wages, market prices, climate, and the colonial surgeon’s reports on fever and smallpox, then finishing with a year-by-year chronicle of the colony from 1841 to 1865, visibly compiled out of the local papers. Canton follows: the river journey past the Bogue forts and Whampoa, the Shamien site, street names and house construction, temples and mosques, the execution ground, the curio shops of Honam, and an ascent of the West River. Macao is given as a Portuguese settlement, with Camoens’ Grotto, the forts, and statistics of the coolie traffic.

Beyond those three centers the articles shorten. Swatow brings sugar boiling and the Hak-ka clans; Amoy the island of Kulangsu and the supposed tomb of the pirate-chief Koxsinga; Foochow its tea districts, timber export, and fishing cormorants. A Formosan group — Takow, Taiwanfoo with Fort Zelandia and the Nerbudda massacre, Tamsui, and Kelung — covers camphor, petroleum, coal, sulphur, and the aboriginal inhabitants of the mountains. Ningpo and Shanghae are treated at length, the latter printing the land and municipal regulations entire and recounting the rebel attacks of 1860 to 1862, the Ward force, and Lt.-Col. Gordon’s successes, with excursions to Soochow and the Tai-Hu lake. Then come the river ports — Chinkiang, Nanking, Kiu-kiang, Hankow — and the north: Chefoo, Taku, Tientsing, and Peking, where the traveller is told how to surrender his passport, what to pay for rooms in a temple, and what to see in the Tartar and Chinese cities, the Prohibited city, the legations, the observatory, and the Ming tombs. An itinerary from Peking to Kalgan and the Great Wall is compiled from notes made by the editor during a tour into Mongolia in 1863, and Newchwang closes the Chinese half. Many of the Chinese articles carry a common apparatus besides: import and export returns, usually for 1864 and 1865 by article and value; shipping and tonnage figures; notes on currency and exchange; and, in half a dozen of them, a roll of the missionary societies at work in the port.

Japan fills the last seventy pages of the text, a little over a tenth of it, and eight of the sheets listed at the front belong to it. Introductory Remarks sketch the four chief islands — Yesso, Niphon, Kiusiu, and Sikok — the volcanic character of the group, the daily earthquakes, and the want of navigable rivers; explain that despite European talk of a double sovereignty “there is still but one Emperor,” the Mikado at Kioto, with administrative power in the hands of the Shogoon; and trace the seclusion that followed Taiko Sama’s massacre of the Christians at Simabarra and Nagasaki down through Perry’s landing in the Bay of Yedo to Sir Harry Parkes’s wringing from the Council of the Mikado a final assent to treaties concluded seven years earlier with the Tycoon only. Nagasaki then receives the fullest of the Japanese articles: the fan-shaped grant of Desima to the Dutch, the approach past the batteries and the island of Pappenberg, the cango and the biting, unshod ponies, the currency of boos, tempos, and the gold cobang, and a street-by-street walk from the English settlement through shops selling lacquer, egg-shell china, and straw work-boxes into the official quarter and up to the temples on the hillside. Costume, public bathing, the Acunora factory worked by Japanese artisans under Dutch engineers, climate, trade, and natural history close it.

Yokohama is presented as a made place — the Kanagawa site abandoned for its shoals and for Japanese objection to a settlement on the Tocaido, the bund and three streets, Curio Street and the “Benton dore,” the new riding road, the fluctuating exchange — and carries a long excursion to Kamakura, its Hachiman temple and the bronze Daibootsz, quoted from a naval medical officer writing in the Chinese and Japanese Repository, with a note that Major Baldwin and Lieut. Bird were murdered nearby in 1864. Yedo is reached along the Tocaido under Yakonin guard, and most of its description is given over to a quoted topographical account by Mr. Lindau, dividing the capital into the Siro, the Soto Siro, and the outer town, walling off the Yosiwara, and recapitulating the population in six elements that together come to rather over a million and a half. To this are added the British Legation at Tozengee, twice attacked and still bearing sword cuts, the view from Atango Yama, the temple of Asaza, the fox-feeding at Ogee, and the sulphur springs of Atami. Hakodadi follows, with its pentagonal redoubt, its consulates, its cool climate, and the ride to lake Onoma; Hiogo, still closed, gets two pages and Alcock’s remark that Osaka is “the Venice of Japan.” The text ends by calling itself imperfect and the first effort to embody such particulars in one volume.

An index of nearly fifty pages, arranged not alphabetically across the whole but port by port, Hongkong first and Hiogo last, follows the text. After it comes an appendix of steam-navigation matter: extracts from the handbooks of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company and the Messageries Imperiales, with fleet lists, fares, and baggage rules; rates for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and Alfred Holt’s line; a polymetrical table of distances; nautical distances from Shanghae up the Yang-tse-kiang to Chinkiang, Nanking, Kiukiang, and Hankow; and a table of statute miles from Canton, Macao, and Hongkong to ports as far off as Honolulu and San Francisco. The appendix closes with a Catalogue of Books on China and Japan, over four hundred and forty English-language titles arranged under their authors’ names where known, otherwise under the publishers’ names or the leading words of the titles, and annotated chiefly from the Chinese Repository, which the preface calls the first such list published. The maps themselves run from a folding Map of China facing the title page through plans of Victoria, Canton, Ningpo, and Shanghae and the Japanese sheets — a chart of the islands, Nagasaki Harbour, Japanese coins, Nagasaki, Yokohama and Kanagawa, Yokohama, Yedo, and Hakodadi — to a folding chart of ocean steam routes in the appendix, several of them large sheets tipped in on leaves of their own.

Greater Britain is a record of travel through the English-speaking and English-governed world, and Dilke sets out the plan in a preface to the first edition: “In 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands.” He arranges the result in four Parts — America, Polynesia, Australia, Asia — and calls the whole “Sketches of Saxondom,” since “If two small islands are by courtesy styled ‘Great,’ America, Australia, India, must form a ‘Greater Britain.’” The book as it stands holds a second journey: two chapters at the end of the Asian Part, on English influence in Japan and in China, were written in 1875 and record a later voyage, and a preface to the enlarged edition says the earlier text was otherwise left untouched apart from “striking out some statements which had obviously ceased to be true, and by adding a few notes.” The writing is first-person throughout — “FROM the bows of the steamer Saratoga… I caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe”; “AT early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbour of Wellington, is famed” — and it alternates between narrative and free-standing argumentative essay, with a further share given to statistical survey. One chapter is cast as a letter; elsewhere a conversation with a planter is set out with speech-prefixes, and Maori chants are printed as verse.

Part I opens in Chesapeake Bay in June 1866 and crosses Hampton Roads among the wrecks of the Cumberland and the Merrimac, then moves through Norfolk bar-rooms where ex-Confederates say “we’re just as secesh as we ever was,” the Petersburg works nicknamed “Fort Hell and Fort Damnation,” the mine crater, and Washington, where Grant says of the Monitors, “You can batter away at those things for a month, and do no good.” New York follows, with Castle Garden; then the Harvard Commencement and Alumni Celebration of 1866, where Dr. Wendell Holmes proposes a toast and the classes answer by year — two old men for 1797, a sole survivor for 1800; then Quebec, the Saguenay, and Ottawa, “Hole in the Woods.” Cholera drives him from Cincinnati; at Ann Arbor he finds a university without honors or competition; at St. Louis he joins Hepworth Dixon and takes the mail ambulance west, six nights across the Smoky Hill route to Denver, in a chapter cast as a letter — “MY DEAR ——, Here we are, scalps and all.” Six days more bring Salt Lake City, four interviews with Brigham Young (“I am a prophet — one of many”), the Mormon newspapers, and Porter Rockwell at a roadside ranch. Nevada, Placerville, and San Francisco follow, with the Vigilance Committees of 1851 and 1856 and a night in Chinatown with two detectives, before he coasts past Acapulco to Panama. Essays on the freedmen, the South, the Red Indians, Utah, and Fenianism are interleaved throughout.

Sixteen days out of Panama the Rakaia raises Pitcairn, whose islanders come aboard asking “How do you do, captain? How’s Victoria?” New Zealand fills the rest of Part II: Wellington, Nelson and the French Pass, the bar at Hokitika and sunrise over the Alps, gentlemen-diggers on the West Coast fields, the crossing of Arthur’s Pass. An essay on Polynesian migration precedes its set-piece, the great Manawatu land purchase at Parewanui Pah, conducted by Dr. Featherston — the women’s chant, the spear-quarrel between Hunia te Hakeke and Karanama, the flag hauled down, the deed signed, and the war-dance after it, narrated with an explicit Iliad parallel and with Hunia’s speeches recorded as “specimens of Maori oratory.” Essays on the collapse of Maori Church-of-Englandism and on natural selection among peoples close the Part, followed by a comparative survey of Pacific coal. Part III begins on Christmas Day in a squall off Wellington and enters Port Jackson at dawn on New Year’s Day, 103° in the shade at the Sydney races. It works through the Hunter coal-field, Queensland’s imported island labor, which he fears may bring “not merely semi-slavery, but peonage,” Melbourne as “the London, Sydney the Paris, of Australia,” the Bendigo diggings and the Ballarat anti-Chinese riots, squatters, payment of members, colonial wines, Tasmania, the Intercolonial Exhibition, Adelaide’s wheat sacks lying uncovered in the roads, and convicts in chains at King George’s Sound — “A gaol the size of India.”

Part IV carries a note announcing that Dilke will ignore the government’s new system for spelling native names and confine himself to “spellings known to and used by the English in England.” It begins in maritime Ceylon — Point de Galle, Columbo, the new railway inland and the coach up to Kandy, the temple that holds the tooth of Buddha, the Peredenia garden, the coffee trade — then touches Madras, whose surf boats are built without nails, and runs up the Hoogly past the palace of the dethroned King of Oude to Calcutta and on to Benares, with its monkey temple, Jai Singh’s observatory, and burning ghauts: “Benares is the type of India.” Mirzapore, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Delhi follow, then the dawk journey to Kalka and up to Simla, where one chapter anatomizes the Government Gazette and another ends on a Himalayan sunrise over Kamet. Cholera among the Hurdwar pilgrims meets him at Umritsur; Lahore is “a city of pomegranates, oleanders, hollyhocks, and roses.” Chapters on the Indian army, on Russia and Afghanistan, on native states and irrigation, and on Scinde carry him down the Indus in 116° heat to Kurrachee and Bombay, to the three-faced bust at Elephanta and the Mohurrum procession at Poonah. Free-standing essays on caste, English learning, and India itself weigh as heavily here as the itinerary. Homeward chapters take up dependencies and Egypt, and the summing-up, “The English,” ends the first journey steaming from Alexandria by Crete and Brindisi and Milan toward home.

The Japan chapter, twenty-five printed pages of a six-hundred-and-eight-page text, near its end, opens with three questions: who made the Japanese revolution, whether its popularity will hold, and “will English ideas continue for an indefinite period to gain ground in the country of the Rising Sun?” Dilke answers that “that which was nominally a revolution of the Daimios, was in fact a revolution of their councillors” — retainers he calls “those able, pushing democrats,” who with their masters hated the Tycoons — and that the Mikado had no share in it; a Japanese gentleman says of the Emperor, “He never says ‘No,’ only ‘Yes.’” He names Okubo and Okuma, and dwells on Shimadzu Saburo, “the foremost man among the Scotchmen of Japan,” who spoke for war on Corea and resigned with eight Satsuma generals in a night. Other passages take up the proposed sale of the Dai-Butz at Kamakura, the proposed reduction of the Daimios’ pensions, the post office, extraterritoriality, the navy under English instructors, the press-gagging law, the mirror at Asaksa and a clockwork Buddhist hell, the castle of Akashi, and the comic English of two Kiyoto guide-books (“burnt to the ground by thunderlight”). Having seen seven of the eight largest towns, he ends not on politics but on rapture: Japan is “the traveller’s paradise,” villagers call “Ohio” with “the bow of equal to equal,” and the land is “the last refuge of the Joyous Life.”

A doctrine of race runs through the whole. “The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth,” Dilke writes at the end of the American Part, and the summing-up concludes “that the dearer are, on the whole, likely to destroy the cheaper peoples, and that Saxondom will rise triumphant from the doubtful struggle.” Irish immigration alarms him — “All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues English.” He argues at the same time for immediate negro suffrage, since “Government through the negroes is the only way to avoid government through an army,” holding that the vices charged against slaves belonged to slavery, not to race. In Tasmania he records that “three old women and a lad who dwell on Gun-carriage Rock” are all who remain of its aboriginal people, and that “Battues of the natives were conducted by the military in Tasmania not more than twenty years ago.” He warns that “the English, unless held in check, exhibit a singularly strong disposition towards cruelty” wherever the enemy is weak, and objects that “we… inflict the blessings of Free Trade upon the reluctant Chinese and Japanese at the cannon’s mouth.” On the colonies he presses for Canadian independence — “we are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the Americans of the North or West” — and finds “something ludicrous in the idea of taxing St. Giles’s for the support of Melbourne,” yet holds that “as regards the Australias” separation “would hardly be advisable.”

The last chapter turns to the China coast, where Dilke declares a prejudice in favor of the Chinese, defends the co-operative policy of Bruce, Vlangaly, and Burlingame, and opposes forcing railways and mining upon an over-populated empire. Hong Kong follows — the abolished mint, the opium-farmers’ club, Canton — and then Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, where he calls for the annexation of the Malay Peninsula. A journey to Java is interpolated in its midst, “a dream of Mangosteens and thunderstorms,” and the volume closes on a comparison of British with Dutch rule: annexation of the peninsula “would not produce that abject degradation of the people before their rulers which is too evident in tropical countries occupied by the Dutch.” Three full-page plates sit within the pagination, at pages 127, 149, and 347: Porter Rockwell; a view on the American River where gold was first found; and a facsimile of Governor Davey’s 1816 pictorial proclamation to the Tasmanian Aborigines, in four registers — settlers and Aborigines side by side; a chief and a governor shaking hands between a file of Aborigines and a file of soldiers; a black man spearing a white man beside a black man hanged from a tree; and a white man shooting a black man beside a white man hanged from a tree. A full analytical index at page 609 covers the added chapters too, and short footnotes, some of them dated, run through the older text.

Walter Dickson’s Japan, Being a Sketch of the History, Government and Officers of the Empire, published by William Blackwood and Sons in 1869, is not a travel narrative but a resident’s handbook to the machinery of the Japanese state. Dickson writes of himself in the third person: “The aim of the author in the following pages has been to give some idea of the framework of the constitution of Japan. Having resided for some little time in the country, he was enabled to get what seemed to him a clearer glimpse of the working of the different parts of the machinery of State than was to be gained from any of the able works published on the subject” — though his time was “too short, and his knowledge of the language too limited,” to produce more than “a sketch which may serve a temporary purpose.” The preface acknowledges “a Japanese gentleman in Yokuhama, whose name, for obvious reasons, it is prudent not to mention,” whose knowledge filled the blanks in short notices of history contained in elementary Japanese books and who went through the red-books of the empire on the pedigrees of illustrious families and the minutiæ of government offices; for the Jesuit period “the letters of the fathers have been almost the only authorities relied upon,” and for later events “contemporary publications have been used.” Dickson regrets that notes taken from an informant “who could speak but little English” were often written down in “what is known in China as ‘pigeon English,’” and that their cramped nature has not been entirely removed. Eleven chapters run to page 478, followed by an appendix and an index; almost exactly half the text is topical description of institutions, and the other half is narrative history.

The first two chapters, sixty-five and thirty-one pages, lay out the court at Miako. Chapter I opens at a distance, on steam, the telegraph, quinine, and the discovery of gold as agents of a coming change in which “every existing institution is to get such a shaking that only the things that cannot be shaken will stand” — and Japan, retaining her feudal system intact, will feel it most. Dickson then works inward: the old names of the islands, the mythology of Ten sho dai jin, Zinmu setting out from Miazaki in Fiuga, Fusiyama rising “out of a low country with a beautifully curved sweep to a conical apex” and visible from thirteen provinces. He describes the palace Kinri go sho with its Shi shin den, where the Emperor receives homage almost in the open air, seated not on a chair but on three mats; the three sacred emblems, an eight-cubit mirror, a grass-shaving sword, and a ball or seal; the Emperor’s green silk robes, his shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth, the white under-dress never worn twice; his allowance of 100,000 kobangs from the Shiogoon; the twelve concubines the law permits him, and the frequency of abdication. Then come the four royal families — Fusimi, Arisungawa, Katsura, Kunnin — the fourteen richly endowed abbacies and twenty-four nunneries into which their surplus sons and daughters are absorbed, the six ranks of four grades each borrowed from China, the division of all Japan into those who may wear two swords and those who may not, and a tabulated list of the 137 Koongays with their revenues in koku, the poorest of whom eke out an existence teaching the football game “mari,” the dwarfing of trees, flower-arranging, poetry, and cookery. Chapter II sets out the eight boards of government under the Dai jo gwang, office by office and title by title, largely from the Shoku gen sho of 1340; Dickson concedes that “the study of such a subject is rather dry and uninteresting,” but holds that no one can follow Japanese history or read the old Jesuits without it.

Narrative history takes over with Chapter III, fifty-eight pages long, and holds the book through the eighty-six further pages of Chapters IV to VI. Dickson traces the empire from Yamato Daki no Mikoto and the Empress Jingu kogu’s invasion of Corea through the introduction of Chinese letters by Wonin, the arrival of a Buddha image from Hakkusai in 552, the priest Kobo and the invention of the kana, the ruin of Ten mang, the long war of the Gen and the He, Kio mori’s tyranny, Yoritomo’s flight and rise, the establishment of a second court at Kamakura, the destruction of the Hojio, the Mongol fleets scattered off Tsussima in 1281, the wars of the Northern and Southern Emperors, the Ashikanga Shiogoons, and the eleven years of the Onin, until Miako was so reduced by war and fire that whoever attempted to live there “ran the risk of being burnt, killed, or starved.” Muskets reach Tanegasima in 1539, and from that point the Jesuit letters carry the story: Xavier preaching unheard in the streets of Miako, Nobu nanga burning the five hundred temples of Hiyaysan and setting up a statue of himself at Azutchi to be worshipped, then dying at Honnoji under the darts of Akitchi mitzu hide. Chapters IV and V follow Hideyoshi — the street boy nicknamed Sarumatz who became Kwanbakku and then Taikosama — through the fortification of Osaka, the edict of 1587 expelling the padres, the invasion of Corea, the extermination of his nephew Hidetsoongu’s household, the earthquake of 1596, and the crucifixion at Nagasaki in 1597 of five Franciscans, three Jesuits and their Japanese converts — twenty-five in all; then Iyeyas, William Adams landing in Boongo in 1600 and rising to be a small Hattamoto with a street in Yedo still called Anjin, the rout at Sekingaharra, the burning of Osaka castle in 1615, and Iyeyas’s death at Soonpu in 1616 and burial at Nikko. Dickson quotes the Histoire de l’Église du Japon page after page as his chief authority, and argues throughout against the missionaries it records: they came, he says, from a country of the Inquisition and “set the example of intolerance,” giving non-Christians in Takaski and Amacusa the choice of conversion or leaving the country, breaking temples and abusing the bonzes to their faces, so that the persecution which followed was retaliation in kind — “the doctrine of the Papal supremacy is an ‘exterritoriality clause’ of itself,” creating an imperium in imperio as embarrassing to Japan as to Reformation England.

With Chapter VII the book returns to institutions for a hundred and forty-two pages. Dickson gives a section-by-section rendering of the “Bookay hiak kadjo,” the hundred rules left by Iyeyas as his testament, warning that it is “a mere sketch, or such defective information as a Japanese who understood little English could convey to the author, who understood little Japanese.” The rules run from self-control and charity to widows and orphans, through the division of the empire’s 28,900,000 koku, the classing of lords as Fudai, Tozamma and Kammong, the four employments of Samurai, farmer, artisan and merchant, marriage at sixteen and adoption of heirs, the number of concubines allowed at each rank, the requirement that a man register at the Kets dan sho before avenging a father or a master, and the injunction that a gentleman’s long sword is to be as his soul. Chapter VIII settles the Shiogoon’s position and titles — Tai jiu, Se i dai Shiogoon, Genji no choja — and notes that “there is, however, no such title as Tycoon in the language of Japan.” Chapters IX and X then catalogue the Yedo government: the San kay and San kio, the Gotairo or regent, the Go ro chiu that meets daily at ten, the Waka toshi yori, the temple governors, the Owo metsuki with its road laws and its examination of every subject’s religion, the thief-catching office whose men keep inns and sit in temples, the mint, the physicians (nineteen, five of them practicing after the European system), the barriers at Hakonay and elsewhere where every young traveler is examined as to sex so that Daimios’ wives cannot leave Yedo, and finally a ruled “List of Daimios in 1862” giving each lord’s rank-class, province, castle town and income in koku, with anecdotes attached — the boy installed at Owarri after the Regent disgraced his predecessor, the lord of Sanuki murdered in bed by a concubine from Mito, the Bizen ancestor “reputed to have got all his territory by his sword.”

The last ninety-six pages, a fifth of the book, carry the story from 1616 to the moment of writing. Dickson passes through the Simabara rising, when Christians driven to the hills by the yayboomi — the monthly treading on an engraved copper plate — held the castle two months and were massacred to the number of 31,000; the beheading of the Portuguese envoys from Macao in 1640; the confinement of the Dutch to Desima in 1639; Coxinga’s capture of Fort Zelandia and the letter smuggled out fifty years later by its Dutch survivors, “we are now shut up as in a prison, and every day we weep.” He records the eruption of Fusiyama in 1707 that laid two feet of dust on Yedo, the Simabara earthquake of 1793 in which fifty-three thousand perished, the forty-seven retainers of Assano who killed Kira and then killed themselves and lie at Sengakuji, the riots at Osaka in 1837, the theaters and the boy wrestlers. Then Perry, Stirling and Townsend Harris, and the crisis that follows: the Mikado’s letter of 1858 refusing his approval — “For the honour of the name of the first Mikado it is impossible to agree to it” — the Regent Ee Kamong no kami degrading Owarri, Mito, Satsuma, Tosa and Etsizen, and his assassination in the snow at the Sakurada gate in March 1860, reconstructed at length from official letters and the depositions of the gate guards, with the verse stitched on an assassin’s abandoned coat: “My corpse may dry up with the flowers of the cherry, but how can the spirit of Japan relax?” Richardson’s murder, the bombardments of Kagosima and Simonoseki, Choshiu’s memorial urging union of Shiogoon and Mikado and the study of foreign arts and sciences, the abdication of Yoshi hisa, and the surrender of the fiefs in 1869 close the account. Dickson closes on two notes. The first is hopeful: with one responsible ruling power in Japan at last, “it may be hoped that in no long time she may be strong enough to defend her own position,” and to “resent any insult and repel any aggression.” The second is a complaint. Japan, like China, Turkey, Persia and Siam, has been rendered “sick” by an exterritoriality clause under which foreign troops are “most illegally stationed on the beautiful shores of Japan,” and “she can only pray for some European convulsion to enable her to cast off the intolerable yoke and insult under which she at present groans.”

After the last chapter comes a four-page appendix, a note on the geography and topography of Japan, meant to help the reader through the double naming of places: the three islands of Nipon, Kiushiu and Sikok, the Go kinai or five home provinces and the seven “do” or roads, and a table of all sixty-eight provinces paired with their Chinese-derived alternatives — Yamashiro or Zioshiu, Nagato or Choshiu, Satsuma or Satsshiu — together with the Kwanto or eight provinces east of the Hakonay barrier and the old district names, including Mitchi no Oku, “the obscure, unpenetrated road,” for the unexplored north. A seven-page index follows. Two cuts are printed with the text rather than tipped in as plates: a full page at page 34 carries the Emperor’s two crests, the sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum “kiku” used for government business and the “kiri” reserved for matters personal to the Emperor and his family, and a second cut at page 286 shows the Shiogoon’s awui, three mallow leaves joined at the points within a circle. Ahead of them the book carries a frontispiece drawn by a native artist, which the opening chapter describes at length: in its upper half the late Shiogoon kneels and prostrates himself, head to the floor, before the Emperor in the great hall Shi shin den at Miako, the Emperor’s upper person hidden behind a screen of thin bamboo slips and his throne three mats laid one on another, with Stotsbashi and the great Daimio Owarri prostrate behind him and military officials of the imperial court standing or kneeling in the open court below; in the lower half the Shiogoon travels in procession to the capital amid the general prostration, upon the public road, of his countrymen and fellow-subjects.

Two officers of the 9th Regiment began Our Life in Japan together aboard the ship carrying them home from Yokohama, and the unsigned Introduction stages the book’s own conception as a scene on deck: two “chums” at their afternoon smoke, sick of backgammon and rope quoits and of the corpulent old warrior whose Bangalore story they have heard before, one of whom proposes, “Let’s jot down our life in Japan, by way of amusing ourselves for the rest of the voyage!” A postscript adds that the authors, afterward “torn asunder by the cruel exigencies of the service,” were unable to compare or arrange their work properly. R. Mounteney Jephson and Edward Pennell Elmhirst are named on the title page and scarcely anywhere else; the dedication goes to Colonel T. E. Knox, C.B., of their own regiment, and the front matter prints a two-page Dramatis Personæ, a cast list laid out as a play’s, which supplies the mess nicknames the book uses throughout — Aaron, “Huntsman to the celebrated Yokohama Hunt”; Belleville, “the beautiful, the beau”; the Fenian; the Aide; Captain Puffles; Mr. Pop; Dr. Quock Wock; the Liver Cutter; Micawber; Jorrocks; the Child; and Abdul, to whom the reader is “indebted for more than one of the accompanying illustrations,” before the roll trails off into a row of etceteras. The book calls itself a “veracious chronicle,” and names real people freely outside the circle it masks — Colonel Summers, Signor Beato, Sir Harry Parkes.

The first chapter states the object — “more amusement than instruction” — and promises “scarcely anything but a chronicle of the doings of these Englishmen for the space of two years: how they rode, shot, ate, drank, and generally made merry.” The regiment, known as the Holy Boys, reached Japan on 9 May 1866 after a sickly year at Hong-Kong, anchored in Yokohama harbor at seven in the morning with Fusi-yama monopolizing most of the attention and O-yama, more sacred still, named beside it, landed at noon, and marched to an English camp on a hill overlooking the town. Quarters are “a frail erection, something between the old-fashioned dog-kennel and an overgrown bandbox,” ten feet square and rat-holed; a hundred yards away lie the kennels of a pack of harriers, beagles and dwarf fox-hounds handed on from the 20th Regiment, the Minden Boys, whom the 9th had relieved. The book calls the bettoes, or native grooms, “a separate caste of their own,” “Capital grooms if they choose” but “the greatest thieves in the universe.” Foreigners may move only “within the limits of a segment of a circle, whose radius is thirty miles.” An early chapter keeps a promise made in the first, to take “a timid dip” into Japanese politics: eight pages on Mikado and Tycoon, on the moat of the Osaka castle, and on Sir Harry Parkes’s audience there, relayed at second hand from a brother officer, barely a year before a revolution swept it all away.

Thursday is a garrison holiday, and one long early chapter follows a seventeen-mile ride to Daiboots, made with revolvers in belts “in obedience to a strict order that this weapon was to be invariably carried on all long trips into the country,” passing the spot where Major Baldwin and Lieutenant Bird of the 20th Regiment had been killed. Children run out crying “Tojin! Tojin!”; there is a halt at a roadside tea-house among the moosmies and the saki; at Kamakura come the arched bridges, two sacred ponies slung in a stable for the god of war, and a four-foot stone in whose shaping, the authors write, “Nature seems to have been actuated by most improper feelings,” where women pray for a son, and each whose prayer is answered plants a bamboo beside it with her name on a rag. Daiboots itself is “a huge bronze figure, forty-three feet high, of a Buddhist god … sitting cross-legged and with clasped hands,” its walls scrawled by “J. Smith, Jean Le Brun, Karl Schmidt, and Phinehas Bunkum, of San Francisco.” An earlier chapter turns aside for ten unbroken pages: a three-mile ride to the prison at Kanagawa to see a man beheaded, the condemned calling out for “the foreigners to come and see how a Nippon could die,” a catalog of tortures and of deaths by crucifixion, impalement and maddened cattle, the head set on a gallows for six days, and the twenty-one cuts that killed the rebel chief Mowung at Canton.

Sport and comic set piece fill more of the book than everything else in it together, and the descriptive matter is spread unevenly, thicker in the first half than the second. The Yokohama Hunt runs its drag — “an old shot-bag filled with red herring and aniseed” — across paddy valleys and terraced drops named “Solon’s Success” and “the Selling Drop”; ponies bought blindfold off the parade ground are schooled over a home-made course; a mess sweepstakes becomes “The Hack Handicap,” whose entry lists are printed out in full, with ponies called Muffin Worry, Maneater and the Pig. “Drag Hunt by Moonlight,” footnoted “Reprinted from Baily’s Magazine,” narrates a night run in the manner of the sporting press and ends with a comic ballad credited to Abdul. Two chapters headed “Great Sporting Event” build a one-mile match between the stout, aitch-dropping Captain Puffles and his rival romancer Mr. Pop, complete with spurs put on the wrong way, a secretly swapped pony, and a chapter that stops mid-sentence at “‘Because,’ said Puffles” and hands the reader “(To be continued in our next.)” Later chapters wake the reader before dawn to walk round the race-course, explain the “Selling Lotteries” that “supply the place of the Ring all over the East,” and report a steeple-chase in which the last bank stops three horses — two refusing, one sinking backwards off the top — while Bobby’s fitter pony climbs it and canters in alone.

A whole chapter is given to a single mess night, held to celebrate the opening day with the beagles and doubling as the anniversary of Ferozeshah, which figures on the regimental color, and of the Captain’s eighteenth year in the corps. The winter game market supplies venison, wild boar, teal and snipe, “besides an occasional bear.” Dr. Quock, baited past bearing, crushes his tormentors with “God bleth my thoul! you look very well on parade!” Colonel Summers of the American Legation sings “Hurrah! hurrah! we’ll sound the jubilee! … As we went marching through Georgia,” and the authors stop to say what that chorus did for men who served in that cruel war. One of the party weeps his way into the toast “Here’sh health killed and wounded at Fosheshah!”; a hunting song written on the voyage out to China is called for; and Captain Puffles bursts back from his rounds demanding of the president, “Am I drunk? Say, am I drunk?” — he has run a ghost through with his sword, and Abdul’s verses on it go round the mess next evening. The same chapter recalls Puffles waking beside a sleeping visitor and howling that “there was a dead man in his bed,” and then, without a joke, the season at Hong-Kong that cost the regiment “nearly three hundred of their total strength,” part by death and the rest invalided, and the graveyard named, “with a terrible — almost sacrilegious — humour,” the Happy Valley.

Late in the volume the authors admit they have written a horsey book, with “so little that can interest the non-horsey portion of the public.” They kick the half-finished chapter into a corner, announce that the personal pronoun “I” has appeared for the first time, and keep it for two pages to explain that “R.M.J. and E.P.E. agreed to write conjointly; I … to treat of sporting matters, He … of matters Japanese proper and miscellaneous” — a division that broke down at sea. What follows, “Japanese Jottings,” is sustained description: the “chimono” and the “obi,” houses built roof-first and largely of paper, the cut delivered in the act of drawing, daimio processions, harakiri. Elsewhere the book records Curio Street, the theaters of Yedo and Osaka, the kite-flying at Isibarra, a Yokohama fire watched in the second person, a bamboo amphitheater where foreigners are “charged six times the entrance for a Nippon,” a public bath-house of which the authors “assert, without any reservation, that there is nothing whatever immoral about it,” the Einos who came down to Hakodate in ’67, and Prince Satsuma’s Kagosima dinner, its forty courses reprinted and dated. Opinion comes unhedged. “Instead of the Japanese being the uncivilised barbarians that Englishmen are apt to imagine them, no people in the world are more polished in their manner”; yet when the Child throws a wrestler it is “the metal forged by good beef and beer” telling “against the soft untempered stuff induced by rice and saki.”

“All at Sea” abandons its intended subject to complain of writing in a crowded saloon among ladies, one-fingered pianists and a midshipman off to shoot the sun, where even the manuscript is “solicited for cutting” — the shipboard substitute for tossing a coin — and shipmates ask, “I say, old fella, what’s it all about? Is there anything in it about me?” The last chapter turns on the parade of the 24th May, 1867, “the forty-eighth anniversary of Her Majesty’s birthday,” on a Settlement ground called “the Swamp”: full-dress tunics in the heat, Captain Puffles unable to fasten his two lower buttons, a feu de joie that sets ponies bolting, and officers of the “Girojio, or Grand Council of Japan” looking on. At the tiffin the Aide, seated between two French officers, carries a whole conversation on the word oui until he attempts a story and begins, “Eh moi, monsieur, quand j’étais fille—.” Then a shout from the deck breaks the page — “‘Land on the port bow!’ … This was what caused us to break off so suddenly” — and the authors hurry to a farewell, hoping the reader will say, “I, too, would throughly have been one of them had Fate thrown me there!” Twenty-one uncaptioned plates stand behind them, wood-engravings after photographs by Signor Beato, Lord Walter Kerr and Frederick Button of the Navy, after drawings by A. F. B. Wright of the 9th, and after two Japanese paintings on silk, these last colored by hand.

Raphael Pumpelly’s Across America and Asia is a traveler’s narrative — “a simple narration of a journey which encircled the earth in the Northern temperate zone,” as its preface calls it — written after its author had finished the technical volume Geological Researches in China, Mongolia, and Japan for the Smithsonian Institution. His vantage throughout is that of a working mining engineer whom governments kept hiring: he took charge of the Santa Rita silver mines in Arizona, was engaged by the Japanese Government to explore its lands on the island of Yesso, and later examined coal fields west of Peking under commission from the Chinese Board of Foreign Affairs. Twenty-eight chapters follow the route rather than any argument, carrying him from the westernmost end of the railroad in Missouri, in the autumn of 1860, to Arizona and Sonora; by clipper across the Pacific to Japan; on to China and up the Yangtz’; and home overland through Mongolia, Siberia, and Russia. The book is dedicated to Anson Burlingame, and one chapter, on Japanese art, is contributed by John La Farge.

The opening chapters are Arizona, and they are the most violent part of the book. Pumpelly begins with sixteen days and nights in an overland coach carrying nine passengers, arriving at Tucson so delirious from sleeplessness that he remembers nothing of the last stage but Indian camp-fires at Apache pass. At the Santa Rita hacienda he takes charge of the mine, hears how a lieutenant sent out from Fort Buchanan seized six Apache chiefs under a flag of truce and so provoked a war of extermination, and one moonlit night finds his superintendent, H. C. Grosvenor, shot from ambush and lanced in the road beside a plundered ore wagon. What follows is a chronicle of ambushes and burials — weeks of smelting silver under armed guard with the workmen sleeping on their arms, an excursion into the Papagoria that ends with the party starving and half-deranged on the desert, the massacre at the Canoa inn, the murder of John Poston and two German employes at the Heintzelman mine by their own peons. Pumpelly escapes through Sonora and the Colorado desert with Colonel Poston and a hired frontiersman, Williams, whom they gradually recognize as a survivor of a band of cut-throats and whom Poston dismisses at pistol point. His conclusions are stated flatly: that Arizona had no law but public opinion, and that no treachery or cruelty charged against the Indians was left unemployed by the whites.

Japan occupies chapters five through fourteen, roughly a third of the book’s pages, though China takes up a somewhat larger share. Sailing from San Francisco on the clipper “Carrington” in November 1861, with Lady Franklin among the passengers, Pumpelly endures a ninety-day passage of head winds and a leaking water tank, broken by two days at Honolulu, where he sets down the islands’ history and revenue and the collapse of their population under foreign vices and foreign disease. The first glimpse of Asia is the snow-clad cone of Fuziyama; the ship beats into the Uraga channel and anchors at Yokohama. He describes the new port as an island built by a cunning Government so that it could tell the anti-foreign party that no aliens had been given a dwelling-place on Nipon, then rides out to Kamakura to see the Daibutz, expecting a grotesque idol and finding instead “a successful rendering of a profound religious abstraction.” A festival at the temple of Daishi near Kawasaki brings incense, fortune-telling sticks whose printed answer defeats him and his teacher for hours, and a dinner of soup, fish, rice, seaweed, eggs, mushrooms, and beche de mer with warm saki that cures him of any prejudice against Oriental cooking. Weeks pass while the authorities decide whether mining engineers rank as mechanics or as officials; the future Governor of Yesso calls to ask whether the color of the sea or the taste of the fish had told them anything of Japan’s wealth in metals. Riding out to the Oyama and the silk district of Hachiogi, Pumpelly finds every inn on the mountain street suddenly bereaved or under repair until politeness wins a room, sleeps on a wooden neck-pillow that gives him dreams of being beheaded, and sits through an earthquake at supper.

Two further chapters set down what he learned of the country: a political sketch of the Mikado, the Taikoon, the six hundred daimios, and the hattamoto bureaucracy with its doubled offices, metzki auditors, and secret spies; an account of the treaty troubles in which he blames Western arrogance, arguing that Richardson was cut down for doing what law and custom punish with death in a Japanese subject, and that the bombardment of Kagosima destroyed a city, thousands of lives, and the machine shops that were “the nucleus of foreign civilization in Japan”; and a chapter of excursions to Inosima and a single crowded day in Yeddo, where he saw only the daimio quarter and the western suburbs and met a party of drunken retainers slashing at each other in the street. He is candid about what struck him — the neatness of Japanese houses, the daily parboiling in the household tub and the mixed public baths, the cemeteries, festivals, wrestlers, and theatres, and drunkenness, which he calls the ruling vice. His official work fills two journeys in Yesso out of Hakodade with a staff of five Japanese officers and village wardens kneeling in the road ahead of him, and it is reported as a working geologist reports — strata, sections, and schedules of daily mining expenses down to the cent: the lead mines of Ichinowatari, the crater of Komangadake climbed through beds of pumice, the sulphur solfataras of Esan and Iwaounobori, the gold washings of Kunnui where men hoe gravel onto mats in a rivulet, an Aino settlement with bear skulls raised on poles, and the Yurup lead mines, where he fires the first blasting charge he believes was ever used in Japanese mining and the miners quit the works in a body and return delighted. A separate chapter surveys Sintuism, ancestor worship, Confucianism, and the spread of Buddism. The engagement is ended by the Government in February 1863, the Taikoon having been charged with throwing the country’s resources open to foreign spies; his pupils weep and press ancestral swords on him, and he sails to Nagasaki, whose terraced hillside of stone-floored family tombs he describes as a city of the dead. La Farge’s essay closes the Japanese section with an appreciation of lacquers, bronzes, color printing, and Hoksai’s sketch-books, and of a decorative principle of “apparent chance arrangement: a balancing of equal gravities, not of equal surfaces.”

China takes up the next eleven chapters and the largest share of the book. Landing at Shanghai, Pumpelly confesses that his first impressions were extremely unfavorable, then describes an excursion on which the captain refused to stop his steamer and cut down a loaded scow, drowning its crew, as an illustration of what long misrule had made of relations between the two races. Steaming up the Yangtz’, his boat is rammed in the night and burned to the water’s edge, her captain lost overboard. Passing the walls of Nanking in the ninth or tenth year of its siege prompts a long account of the Taiping rebellion, of the sale of offices that had rotted the administration, of the Yellow river bursting its neglected embankments, and of Ward’s “Ever Victorious Braves,” Burgevine, and Gordon. With the Rev. Josiah Cox he hires a junk for the upper river and Hunan, is fought off the bank by soldiers opposite Changsha while the skipper’s wife hacks the mooring cable with a knife, and pushes through the Ichang gorge and up the rapids before turning back. A separate chapter argues that Chinese emigration is coming to America in millions, praises the race for industry, sobriety, family honor, and universal education, and urges the repeal of all special legislation against Mongolians, while insisting on a term of residence and an English-language test before the vote. At Peking he lodges for months with the Burlingames, walks the city wall, visits the marble altar and azure roofs of the Temple of Heaven, haunts the lapidary and curiosity streets, and — commissioned to find steam coal for a purchased flotilla — inspects the Chai-tang, Mun-ta-kau, and Fang-shan fields, crawling six thousand feet into one mine on his hands and knees. A severe attack of small-pox ends the winter’s work.

In April he sets out with a physician of the Russian legation on a six weeks’ ride along the Great Wall, past the road to the Ming tombs, whose avenue of colossal marble animals he had seen on an earlier excursion, through the Nan-kau pass, and up the escarpment onto the plateau of central Asia, which he treats as one of the sharpest boundary lines drawn by nature — the boundless steppes of Tartary to the north, the broken and barren mountains of China to the south. He traces the beds of a vanished chain of lakes, is stoned out of one town and besieged as a physician in another, and at the Roman mission of Si-wan meets Abbé Huc’s lama cameleer. A reprinted essay on Western policy in China reviews the wars of 1840 and 1860 and the co-operative policy framed by Burlingame and Sir Frederick Bruce, and a chapter on the journey from Peking to Nagasaki takes up an erratic missionary and the state of Christian missions in China. The homeward journey begins from Peking in November with a caravan of twenty-six camels and four felt-covered carts, seventeen hours of travel out of twenty-four and one meal a day, cauldron soups of frozen vegetables, fresh mutton or horse, and tinned salmon, bottles of coffee hugged all night against freezing, and cold that froze his beard into a foot of icicles before Urga, where he sees the Grand Lama’s gilded palace and prayer cylinders geared to wind-mills. One step through the stockade at Maimaichin puts him among Russian houses at Kiachta. Siberia fills the last two chapters: a Cossack village dance, a crossing of Lake Baikal over dark ice with a restaurant set up in the middle, the frozen mist that jewels every twig at sunrise, three weeks of balls and cards at Irkutsk, and an account of the exile system and the wives and fiancées who signed away their own freedom to follow condemned Poles. Traveling on alone by post sleigh in extreme cold, he shares his kibitka for weeks with a young Warsaw noblewoman who had escorted her convicted brother across Asia, the two of them at first possessing only the Russian word for horse in common; he is threatened with arrest at Omsk for having lost his passport, studies the gold washings at Ekaterinburg and the sheet-iron process at Nijni Tagilsk, and crosses the Urals past the boundary monument where a group of exiles had gathered.

The closing pages step back from the road to speculate about the future of the temperate zone — the Anglo-Saxon expansion across the Americas, the Sclavonic expansion from the Baltic to the Pacific, the unworked coal and iron of China, and the Chinese as the one race able to colonize the tropics — ending with the thought that the compass, printing, gunpowder, and the use of coal, all born on the western shore of the Pacific, have traveled westward around the globe for six centuries and want only to be engrafted again on the stock that produced them. Behind the narrative stands its apparatus. A plate of the Daibutz of Kamakura, engraved from a photograph, serves as frontispiece; twenty-five wood-cuts and lithographic plates illustrate the saguara and the Arizona desert, Fuziyama and Inosima, Komangadake from Washinoki, the Japanese methods of washing gold and winning sulphur, facsimile Japanese wood-cuts and color printing for La Farge’s chapter, the Temple of Heaven, the Corean embassador and his attendants, the marble arch in the Nan-kau pass, and the Great Wall. Four maps accompany the text: a Mercator chart of the author’s route, a map of Arizona with parts of Sonora and California, a map of southern Yesso, and a map of the Tang Ho district. Five appendices follow — a consular report on the rebellion at Ningpo, the Rev. W. Muirhead on the religious bearing of the Taiping movement, a consular report on the agricultural productions of Chihli with a price list of grains, analyses of Chinese and Japanese coals made for Pumpelly by J. A. Macdonald, and a twenty-year tabular statement of the private gold-washings of Trans-Baikalia — and an index closes the volume.

James B. Lawrence sailed from Boston in March 1865 as one of the fifteen men of the Marine Guard detailed to the U.S.S. Wachusett, and China and Japan, and a Voyage Thither is his account of the forty-one months that followed. It is a voyage narrative built out of forty-four numbered letters, each headed with a port and a date and, until the last, a ship, and each opening “My Dear R.” — the friend who, Lawrence says in the first letter, had asked him to write at length about whatever he might “see, hear, or think.” His preface defends the form as “less didactic and stiff than any other,” grants that it “necessarily occasions a considerable use of the first person,” and admits that wherever another writer had expressed something better, he has used that material “without further acknowledgments,” blending it with his own “into a kind of mosaic, in which he admits that his part is little more than the cement.” Salutation and dateline hold from the first letter to the last, and even the long compiled digressions on Chinese history or Japanese government are addressed to R. A bust portrait of the author in uniform, above the facsimile signature “Yours Truly, James B. Lawrence,” serves as frontispiece.

The outward passage occupies the first thirteen letters. The Wachusett coals at Fort de France in Martinique, where Lawrence first sets foot on foreign soil, and looks in at St. Pierre; runs down to Porto Grande and Porto Praya in the Cape Verdes, where news arrives of President Lincoln’s death and where an approaching English corvette produces a false alarm of war; is caught by a pampero while steering for Montevidio and puts into St. Catharine; then lies at Rio Janeiro for repairs, with imperial ceremonies, the murder of a messmate, and excursions to Botafogo and the Botanic Gardens. Simon’s Bay and Cape Town bring Table Mountain and the Constancia vineyard, Java Head and Anjer Point bring Batavia, and Manilla brings cigar manufactories, earthquakes, and a garroting. Threaded through these letters is the criticism the preface promises of “some great evils which exist in an important national institution.” Lawrence likens the salt beef to sole leather and the desiccated potatoes to sawdust, calls the bread musty and “fairly alive with weevil,” and blames contractors and the Navy Department; he objects to the monthly reading of the articles of war “in all their thundering terrors”; and he notes that the daily routine he sets out “refers exclusively to the enlisted men.” The complaint returns at intervals for the rest of the book.

China takes up the bulk of the volume, from Letter XIV to Letter XL. Lawrence works through Hong Kong, Macao with its fast boats and Tanka girls and its memories of Camoens, and Canton, where he walks Curiosity street and visits the execution ground. Hong Kong and Shanghai recur most often, titling seven and six of the letters, with Chefoo titling two more. Newchwang produces the book’s most violent episode: a midnight landing party of about a hundred men scales the walls of the stronghold of the pirate chief Hu, “The Long Knife Man,” and takes twenty-six prisoners; Captain Townsend and the consuls then sit as judges beside the Tau Tai until the thumb-screw and the whipping-machine drive Townsend to give the prisoners up to the Tau Tai, who has them tried and executed. Other episodes include the heat at Chinkiang on the first Yangtse expedition, which kills Mate Kelly and, two days later, Captain Townsend by fever; a Hong Kong opium shop, and two or three whiffs of Old Sam’s pipe aboard ship; the winter voyage to Corea to ask the king about the burning of the General Sherman, which brings an unsatisfactory reply and puts the Wachusett’s name on a bay; the run up to Hankow and back past Nankin; Foochow; and a summer cruise through the Chusan islands that ends with a week among the Buddhist temples of Pootoo. Compiled sections set out the Confucian, Taou and Buddhist systems, Christianity in China, and the written language.

Japan fills two separate blocks amounting to roughly a tenth of the book. Letter XXIII, “A Look at Japan” (pages 215–235), covers a visit in 1866: the arrival at Yokohama; an account of Japanese dress, salutation, honesty, and public bath-houses, and of what Lawrence calls their “dual character,” official and social; the tea-drying establishment and the lacquer shops of Curiosity street; a three-mile march through Yeddo as escort to General Van Valkenburg, the American minister, ending at his Anglo-Japanese residence; a gale that drives the ship into the bay of Oosima; the passage of the Inland Sea with the battery loaded, which he calls the most delightful trip he ever had; and a horseback ramble over Nagasaki, where the horses wear straw sandals. He judges the Japanese “by far the most intelligent, and farthest advanced in the civilized arts and sciences of any people of the East.” Letters XXXVIII and XXXIX (pages 375–395) return aboard the flagship Hartford in the winter of 1867–68 for the opening of Hiogo and Osaca: the Mikado, the Tycoon, and the daimios; the penal code; the dwarfed oaks and pines of Simonosaki; the salutes of January 1, 1868; the drowning of Rear Admiral H. H. Bell and eleven others on the Osaca bar; the roadside tablets naming the punishments for professing Christianity; and a ride to Osaca that ends with the pair penniless, a shipmate playing a two-cent flute in a public square while Lawrence passes the hat for their fare back.

Five letters carry the homeward run. From Nagasaki the Hartford returns to Hong Kong and goes up to Whampoa for a last look at Chinese printing; back at Hong Kong, Lawrence is asked to a tea merchant’s tea-party; then the ship sails for Singapore, Anjer Point, Simon’s Town and Cape Town, and St. Helena, where he climbs Ladder Hill, rides out past the Briars and Willow Cottage to Napoleon’s tomb in the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and signs the visitors’ book. The last letter, dated New York, August 15, 1868, describes the anchorage off the Battery after forty-one months, the board of inspection, and the hauling down of the colors as the ship is put out of commission at the Brooklyn Navy Yard: “There is now no more a ‘Hartford’s Crew.’” An appendix gives rosters of the officers of both vessels, marked for those who died, were transferred, sent home, or drowned, and a “Comprehensive Summary” tabulating every port with dates of arrival and departure, days in port, days at sea, and distance sailed — 81 ports and 63,888 knots in all. Eight plates fall inside the China and Japan letters: Macao, a street barber, Shanghai, Chinese smoking opium, Whampoa Reach, Pagoda Anchorage at Foochow, Hong Kong, and the Tycoon’s palace at Osaca.

Alice M. Frere, who appears on the title page as Mrs. Godfrey Clerk, published this account of a voyage round the world with Hatchards in 1870, in one volume of 633 pages. There is no preface; the opening chapter, headed “Introductory,” does that work. It begins with the remark that provoked the book — “‘A ’spose whun ye gut hom’, like all foolish people, y’ intend t’ write a buke?’ was the half-questioning remark made to me in Pekin by a young man fresh from the wilds of Scotland” — and explains that the material was letters “regularly and lengthily sent home for the amusement of two ‘old aunts.’” The letters survived, but “in the form of diaries,” which she judged tedious and “slip-shod”; she rewrote them, wishing “to convey to the mind of the reader the impression left upon that of the writer,” and defends her minuteness of description on the ground that travel books too often name things no reader can recognize. The party was three: “my father, myself, and an Indo-Portuguese servant, ‘Lucien.’” They quit Bombay on April 15, 1865, her father leaving a country in whose government he had held responsible posts for five-and-thirty years, with a “cherished scheme of visiting Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, and California, on our way home.” She narrates in the first person; her father appears throughout as “my father,” the surname surfacing on a hotel-keeper’s note of introduction, and most private persons are reduced to initials or a blank.

Four days’ steaming brings them to Point de Galle, and from there the long run to King George’s Sound — “3330 miles, without touching, or even sighting, land” — delivers a first, harsh sight of Australia in convict gangs on the road and a “corroboree” got up for the passengers. Melbourne follows, with nearly two months at Toorak as guests of the governor, Sir Charles Darling; she watches gold melted at the Oriental Bank and gives several pages to the grotesqueries of the Queen’s Birthday levée and ball. At Ballarat she is lowered four hundred feet down the United, Great, Extended, Band-of-Hope mine in a wagon of mud and comes up with two or three pages on miners who “have no notion of the real value of anything.” Then Sydney and Botany Bay — which she had been threatened with in the nursery — Camden Park, and the Blue Mountains, where the party is snowed up two days at Blackheath in a hut with a hole in the roof, sitting in the chimney corner under umbrellas. Brisbane and a month in Queensland bring the Darling Downs sheep stations and an explanation of “colonial experience,” the system by which a young man pays about £100 a year to a squatter to learn the work, followed by her report of a former Guards captain waiting at an up-country hotel and of two English baronets who “were driving vehicles for hire about the streets.”

From Sydney they cross to Auckland, staying with Bishop Selwyn and visiting the Melanesian Mission, whose building costs were “in great part defrayed from the proceeds of one of Miss Yonge’s novels.” The coasting voyage south takes in Taranaki, where fourteen wrecks lie on the shore of what “by a beautiful euphuism” is called a harbor; Nelson; the Maori burial island in Tory Straits; Wellington; and Lyttelton, from which they turn back within a few miles of Christchurch to catch a steamer that then sails two hours late, so that a chapter whose title includes Christchurch never reaches it. Dunedin she calls the finest town in New Zealand. Tasmania draws her strongest colonial preference — “Were I obliged to live in the colonies, I should wish my lot to be cast in Tasmania” — and Adelaide brings the rail to Gawler Kapunda, a quarter-mile walk with “the thermometer at 113° in the shade,” a copper mine she cannot go down because the machinery is out of gear, and her rejoinder to emigration literature: fires and floods “will sometimes, in a few hours, sweep away the fruits of years of unremitting labour.” Ceylon was to have been three weeks on the way to Java and became three months — Kandy, the Peridenia gardens, a squalid week at Newera Ellia, Adam’s Peak, the Temple of the Tooth, and an elephant kraal that came off the day after they sailed and was reported to her a failure, five elephants taken instead of thirty.

China takes up more of the book than any other country, close to two hundred pages. Penang passes in a night and Singapore in a morning; then Hong Kong, reached on March 31, whose barrenness and single road oppress her, and Canton, which alone runs some forty pages. Guided by the consul, she works through streets she calls the narrowest and filthiest she has seen in any city, temples, a gambling house, two opium saloons, the examination hall with its cells for seven thousand candidates, the walled “City of the Dead,” and workshops for lacquer, jade, silk, kingfisher-feather ornament and concentric ivory balls; she is taken into the women’s quarters of a rich Chinese house and dressed up in one of their holiday robes. Macao, the sulfur springs of Formosa, and Shanghai follow, then canal boats to the Tein-tung temples near Ningpo and a steamer 783 miles up the Yang-tse-Kiang to Hankow past ruined Nanking. Northward come Chefoo, the Manchurian port of Ing-tse, Tientsing, and Peking, entered on June 15. There she announces a change of method — “for this expedition I will follow my journal as nearly as possible, and write it journal-wise” — and gives three weeks in dated entries: the Ming tombs, the Nan-kou pass, Khalgan, the Mongolian plateau with its felt yorts, and the Great Wall at Ku-pi-kou.

Japan fills chapters XVII and XVIII, its own pages running 386 to 491, and comes fifth of the six regions named on the title page. Sailing from Shanghai in the Aviso, “at daylight, on the 12th August, 1866, we found ourselves within sight of Japan.” The country draws the book’s warmest judgment — “Of all countries in the world that I have seen, there is none I should so much like to revisit” — while Nagasaki gets a long account of the Feast of Lanterns, three nights of lit graves ending with straw spirit-boats launched at midnight. She visits the foundry across the harbor, where Japanese workmen assemble imported English machinery, and a Japanese gentleman whose manner she thinks nearer perfection than any she has seen, except now and then in an old English gentleman and once in an old American. The two-sworded men make her uneasy; so do countrymen who treat the Japanese “as inferiors, and as a conquered people.” The passage up the Inland Sea is made during the war between the Tycoon and Prince Chiusiu: at the Straits of Simonasaki a battery fires three shells over the steamer’s stern, and she prints the governor’s letter of explanation and a private apology signed “Ito,” observing that the Union Jack had been flying straight out. Fusiyama is sighted on September 4 and Yokohama reached that evening, where “Curio Street” absorbs her and she regrets that curiosities “seem to have deteriorated since the admission of foreigners into the island.”

At Yedo, where Sir Harry and Lady Parkes lodge them at the British Legation, she describes the yaconin guard that makes one “feel rather like a prisoner,” the ya-shi-kis of the Daimios, the moat round the Tycoon’s palace — where a fall from her horse leaves her lame — the Regent’s murder in March 1860, the temples at Asaksa, the mint her father was shown when lameness kept her from the party, and the temple of the forty-seven Roonins. A ride into the silk districts beginning October 3 takes in Hatchoji, silk wound off the cocoons in a farm-house on the road to Miangashi, two hours spent outside a temple gate at the foot of Oyama that the priests will not open, Enoshima, and the great bronze Dibutz near Kamakura: “for beauty and expression I have seen nothing (not even the Sphinx itself) that can compare with this glorious bronze image.” The American barque Swallow then takes them twenty-nine days across the Pacific to San Francisco, reached on November 16, 1866.

The last hundred and thirty-odd pages are American, and open: “Any one who has been in America knows that one description of a town, or of a monster hotel, answers, with few exceptions, for all others in the country.” San Francisco — “twenty years ago San Francisco was not in existence” — yields the Occidental Hotel, where 1,200 beds could be made up, she was told, and the Yo Semite expedition, undertaken on the advice of Americans met in Japan, fills most of that chapter; against “the meaningless ones given by American cockneys” she sets the Indian names, Pi-wy-ack, “Cataract of Diamonds,” for the Vernal Fall and Po-ho-no for the Bridal Veil. The Constitution carries them to Panama, the isthmus railway to Aspinwall at a computed “life to a sleeper,” and New York is reached on January 10. Then Niagara in winter, Chicago’s stock-yards and grain elevators, and the Mississippi — less fine, she says, than the Yang-tse-Kiang — down through Vicksburg to New Orleans, then Mammoth Cave, Washington, Philadelphia and Boston, where Longfellow receives them at Washington’s Cambridge head-quarters. The Southern pages carry her defense of slavery, opened as a question each must answer for himself and closed in her own voice: “Never again will the Negroes be so cared for, comfortable, and happy, as in the days of slavery.” Seven plates, all Chinese and Japanese subjects, and unlisted wood engravings illustrate a book with no index or advertisements; it ends “And here ends my journal” and a homecoming.

Arthur Adams’s Travels of a Naturalist in Japan and Manchuria (1870) is the narrative of a Royal Navy surveying cruise, written by the ship’s doctor and covering considerably more ground than its title promises. The title page names its author Arthur Adams, F.L.S., “Staff-Surgeon, R.N.,” and the book opens far from Asia: “Early in the year we left England in H.M. ship ‘Actæon,’ bound for Rio Janeiro, our object being to survey the little islands at the entrance of the glorious harbour.” Adams states his position outright — “While on board the ship of which I was surgeon” — and writes throughout in the first person, singular when he is ashore alone with net and collecting bottle, plural when the ship or a shore party is the subject; here and there an episode slips into the third person and calls him what the sailors and the Japanese called him, “the doctor,” or “Esha.” He addresses his audience directly and often (“start not, gentle reader!”; “some of my lady readers may wish to know”). Travel and collecting run together on nearly every page, and he makes no apology for the balance: “I must again confess I have a liking for beetles.”

The first forty-one pages never leave the Atlantic world. Adams watches flying-fish and Portuguese men-of-war on the passage out, describes the harbor of Rio Janeiro and the city of San Sebastian — “a huge mass of shabby buildings,” its inhabitants “an indolent race” whom he sorts by ancestry in a paragraph of blunt racial taxonomy — then ranges over the islets of the bay after crabs, tiger-beetles and ferns, losing a golden Cassida that his companions had been induced to accept as Poe’s “Gold Bug.” Six weeks’ sail brings the ship to the Cape of Good Hope and a multi-day beetle hunt around Simon’s Town and the flat rocks of Millar’s Point, where the carcasses of stranded whales are hauled up and stripped. Asia begins on page 42, in the Straits of Sunda, with a Javanese market, a tiger’s fresh pawprint beside a jungle stream, and a village on Mew Island abandoned to the tigers. From there some seventy pages belong to China: the Pratas Shoal, where the bones of shipwrecked men lie bleaching among the bones of the turtles they had fed on, and a small joss-house farther along his walk holds the offerings of grateful mariners to the Chinese goddess of the sea, the rock-basins above Hong Kong, drum-fishes humming through the planks off Macao, the granite quarries of the Chu-Kiang, spring villages on the Yang-tsze-Kiang, a shower of beetles falling on the fleet in the Gulf of Pecheli, and a walk on the Great Wall where it ends in the sea.

Korea occupies pages 125 to 166. The Actæon anchors in Victoria Harbour with beacon fires flaring along the hills, and receives a chief in a violet robe and a broad hat of black-stained bamboo network. For what he cannot observe himself Adams leans repeatedly on Hamel’s seventeenth-century Travels of shipwrecked Dutchmen, and he reports the Koreans as hard drinkers, pilferers of ward-room spoons and, above all, rude, contrasting their handling of him unfavorably with “the graceful salutations of the polished Japanese.” Ashore he meditates among their tombs, hauls the seine for bream, kills a venomous snake, is routed by an old woman with a stick, and takes the beetle named in his honor, Dicranocephalus Adamsi. The Manchurian chapters, pages 167 to 221, describe the emptiest country in the book: a coast newly sold by China to Russia, scarcely a human being met between Victoria Harbour and Vladimir Bay, half-wild cattle, salmon by the netful, Manchu hunters with straw bound round their legs against snakes. Here too falls the volume’s frankest passage, on his cabinet of skulls — seal, bear and deer crania, but also human skulls gathered by the Pearl River, an infant’s skeleton, and the bound foot of a woman killed by a British shell at the bombardment of Canton.

Japan and its northern approaches fill the last third of the book, pages 222 to 334. Chapter XVI works through Risiri’s snow-capped volcanic cone, the deserted salmon-curing sheds of Rifunsiri, the seal colony of Todomosiri, and dredging in Aniwa Bay in Saghalien, where Adams and the captain slide open the door of an Aino hut, hand round sweet biscuits and pictures from the Illustrated London News, and record the dress, tattooed lips and heavy ear-rings of the “hairy Kuriles,” whom he judges timid and good-natured behind a ferocious exterior and whose language, on M. de Rosney’s authority, he separates firmly from Japanese. At Hakodadi, reached on 15 July, he finds wide quiet streets, a tub of water and a broom on every roof against fire, a gilded Buddha lit by a shaft of sun, and a theatre where a stolen child is murdered onstage with blood from a concealed pig’s bladder and the Hara-Kiri is played for laughs. Elderly gentlemen shooting arrows in a suburban garden call him in for tea and saki; children bring him wild flowers; he buys a wicker basket for an “itzebu” and fills it with skulls and shells. Farther south he takes gigantic oysters at Tsu-Sima, and on Tabu-Sima, a little island off the shores of Niphon, walks alone along the strand and captures the coveted beetle Damaster; on Sado he joins a shooting party and leaves the shooting to his messmate Lieutenant Warren, who brings down Diard’s pheasant; and he watches the squid fleet of the Oki Islands working by the glare of burning birch-bark.

Nagasaki and the Inland Sea carry the book to its close. Adams sketches the harbor with Desima and Pappenberg, the governor’s barge moving “like a galley of old Rome,” and a long parade of street life — a tipsy samourai, coolies under bamboo poles, a mendicant priest with jangling rings, strolling acrobats — then the flower-decked cemeteries, which he prefers to Kensal Green, the temples with their “hideous idols,” and a dog-fancier’s shop selling poodles, nuthatches and giant salamanders, two of which he buys for the captain. Passing into the Seto-Uchi he lands at Tomo during a festival, is shown dancing girls by a priest, quotes Captain Saris of 1613 on the women of Japan, describes the Niphon belle’s hair, robes and cosmetics, condemns the blackening of teeth as a jealous husband’s device, and thinks a lady on horseback compares poorly with an English girl on an Arab mare. At Yokohama he ransacks the curiosity shops for carved ivory “buttons,” and concludes that the Japanese are “a very paradoxical race.” Later come the Naruto whirlpool, quack doctors and pet bears at Simidsu, a village whale hunt, and shell-sand sifted for organisms carried down by the Kuro-Sino. The final chapter turns to Japanese books — a bird book he likens to Gould’s Birds of Australia, and an illustrated Wonders of Nature and Art in Japan showing a burning mountain, a Sado gold mine and the earthquake wave that overwhelmed Simoda — before the homeward run ends at Ascension with an octopus hauled up inside an old tea-kettle. Beyond the contents leaves, the apparatus is purely pictorial: an engraved frontispiece captioned “MANCHU WOMAN,” and a title-page vignette, “THE MUSINA. (Native of Japan.),” to which a footnote in the text refers.

“Round the World.” collects the travel letters Wm. Perry Fogg sent home to the Cleveland Leader during a westward circuit of the globe; they begin at Cleveland in October 1870 and break off in Egypt the following April. Thirty-one letters fill pages 7 to 237, numbered One through Thirty-Three — the sequence skips Twenty-Nine and Thirty-Two — each opening with a run-in string of catchwords advertising its contents, most carrying a place-and-date line, and all but one closing with the initials “W. P. F.” The voice is a sustained first person from the first paragraph, which sets out under the motto “Westward the Star of Empire takes its way” and continues, “as the lights of our Forest City grow dim in the distance, I try in vain to realize that, leaving all that is so dear to me behind, I am really started on my way ‘Round the World’”; it holds through every letter, sliding into “we” whenever he is traveling in company and back to “I” when he is alone. Fogg writes as a sightseeing American with introductions and money, not as a resident, official, or missionary; his method is to describe what he saw in the order he saw it, with digressions on currency, trade statistics, and local government.

The first five letters, twenty-eight pages, cover North America and the Pacific. Fogg takes the Kansas Pacific route rather than the Omaha road, watches buffalo and antelope from a Pullman car, learns that the “rabbit stew” at the eating station was prairie dog, and stops at Greeley and Denver before crossing to Salt Lake City. Two letters are given to the Mormons: the Tabernacle, an evening at Brigham Young’s theater spent studying the prophet’s wives and daughters through an opera glass, a bishop who declines to show him the inside of his house, and an hour’s interview with Young himself, after which Fogg concludes that “when he dies the bubble will burst.” Then the Central Pacific, San Francisco, and twenty-five days on the Pacific Mail steamship America, where he watches seven hundred returning Chinese passengers eat with chop-sticks, looks into the canvas opium-smoking room and refuses the offered pipe, denounces the British opium trade as “England’s shame,” loses a day at the 180th meridian, and rides out a typhoon that smashes the skylights and kills a sailor.

Japan occupies letters Six through Twelve, pages 35 to 80 — forty-six pages, about a fifth of the book, and the longest treatment of any country except India. Fogg lands at Yokohama on the 25th of November and stays a few weeks. He describes the harbor and the foreign Bund, a former American consul who sold the consulate ground to the English and pocketed the money, the tattooed bettos who run beside the horses, married women with plucked eyebrows and blackened teeth, a pair of moosmies in lacquered pattens, and a two-sworded Yaconin. A long stretch of Letter Seven turns to the curio shops, whose dealers “have as many prices for their goods as they have customers,” and sets out the currency — with a warning that the new pasteboard money has driven coin out of circulation and invites an over-issue and a crash — the tea trade with America, and a political sketch of the Mikado, the Tycoon, the recent civil war, and the ram Stonewall, ending with the complaint that Sir Harry Parks is now omnipotent and “we Americans … must take a back seat.” A forty-mile round trip carries him to Kamakura and the bronze Daibutz, where his betto breaks the gilt hand off an image inside the statue and Fogg “quietly slipped the ‘relic’” into his pocket; he talks through an interpreter with the Mikado’s uncle after writing his Ohio militia title on his card; goes up the Tocaido to Yeddo past the spot where Mr. Richardson was killed; climbs Mount Atango, views the Mikado’s castle, and pulls off his boots at the temples of Shiva, where the bell, book, and incense strike him as a Roman Catholic service with the cross left out. Socially, he judges, the people have gained by the revolution: except in remote country districts the cry of “shita-nino” is no longer heard, and the people “have cast off the manners of slaves.” Letter Twelve runs him down the coast to Hiogo and the “Moon Temple,” describes Osaca as the Venice of Japan and its paper handkerchiefs and pillow cases, passes the Inland Sea and the strait of Simonasaki, and ends at Nagasaki — the islet where native Christians were slaughtered, the junk anchored alongside, the decaying Dutch warehouses at Decima, and the porcelain shops, which prompt a verdict that in porcelain, bronze, lacquer, the temper of sword steel and fabrics of silk and paper the Japanese “rival any nation of the civilized world,” while “painting, sculpture and music have few votaries.” Steaming out of the bay he writes that “Japan is a country with a future,” wonders whether the change now spreading through their manners, customs and life will make them “more virtuous, happy and contented,” and takes his leave with “Sionara, Japan.” Eight of the volume’s plates fall in these letters, among them mounted photographs captioned in script — “Japanese Village,” “Betto or Groom,” “Bronze Statue of Buddha” — and an uncaptioned wood engraving of a temple and arched bridge.

China takes the next forty pages. At Shanghai Fogg follows his trunk and satchels, slung on bamboo poles by six victorious coolies, to the Astor House, watches the squeaking wheelbarrows, explains the system of “squeeze” by which taxes are collected, admires the competitive literary examinations at the expense of American spoils politics, and tells the story of the Taiping rebellion and of General Ward, the American sailor whose effigy the Chinese have placed among their gods. He visits a Chinese theater and finds the acting far inferior to a play he saw at the Yeddo theater, watches a wedding procession, reports Secretary Seward’s progress through Peking and Prince Kung’s reluctance to receive him, gives a page of “Pigeon English,” and is entertained by a wealthy merchant whose luxury sits behind a wall a few feet from open sewers. Hong Kong he calls the greatest smuggling depot in the world and “the most snobbish place in the east,” reserving his sharpest words for Americans there who cultivate side whiskers and sneer at republican institutions. Three days in Canton, guided by Arr-Kum, take in the Temple of Honam and its sacred hogs, the cat and dog meat lane, the Temple of the 500 Genii, the execution ground where seventy-five thousand rebels died in a year, and the fourteen thousand cells of the examination halls. Two further letters, fifteen pages, cover Singapore — the fan palms of the Asiatic Society gardens, the Malay creese and “running a muck,” the millionaire Whampoah — and Penang, where an Englishman and an American wager on who can eat more dorian and the American wins by stuffing cotton in his nostrils.

India is the largest block in the book: eight letters and sixty-five pages, from Calcutta to Bombay. Fogg engages a servant whose name he hears as “New Varmint,” attends the morning races, notes the exclusion of Eurasians from the grand stand, locates the Black Hole between the Post Office and Court House, and sets out on a journey of nearly three thousand miles through India by the new railways. At Benares a Brahmin guide, Shiva Dotta, takes him to the Monkey Temple and along the ghauts past bathers, burning bodies, and corpses in the river; at the Golden Pagoda a priest throws marigolds round his neck and holds out his hand for backsheesh, and in the shops he finds idols made in Birmingham. Then Allahabad, and the mutiny sites — the memorial well at Cawnpore, the Residency ruins and Havelock’s grave at Lucknow — where Fogg records the reprisals with open revulsion, asking “by what name can we call the horrible cruelties by which these deeds were avenged?” and drawing out of a railway guard, “by judicious questioning,” an account of blowing prisoners from cannon related “with perfect sang froid.” Agra gives him the Fort, the Pearl Mosque, Akbar’s tomb, and the Taj by daylight and again by blue lights; Delhi gives conjurors who grow a mango tree from the seed, a hotelkeeper he calls Barrabbas, the shawl store of Manick Chund, and the Koontub Minar with its iron pillar. A dak journey through the Mohun Pass carries him to Mussoorie and Landour for the view of the Snowy Range, with a sleet storm on the mountain path and a servant who burns his master’s boots. Returning south he sees the Marble Rocks and the Thug prison at Jubbalpore, argues the Russian question with an English civil servant, and ends at Bombay among the Parsees, a yacht race, Wenham Lake ice, and the caves of Elephanta.

The last four letters, thirty-seven pages, run from Bombay to the Nile. Fogg sails on the Italian steamer Arabia with English officers going home on furlough, goes ashore at Aden with a jovial Greek padre whose charity to beggars nearly traps them, and beats up the Red Sea against a head wind with Sinai in sight. A full letter is devoted to the Suez Canal as a working proposition — the exploded objections about levels, quicksand, and sand drift, a meeting with M. de Lesseps at Suez, the rates of toll, and the mammoth dredging machines. At Cairo he hires a donkey named General Grant, buys a fez to halve his prices in the bazaars, climbs to the Citadel and the Mamelukes’ Leap, visits the mosque of Mohamet Ali and finds it tawdry beside the Pearl Mosques of Agra and Delhi, and times the dancing dervishes at a maximum of seventy turns a minute. The final letter crosses to Memphis and Sakharra through repeated sand storms, lunches among the painted “old masters” in a chamber of the temple beside the galleries where sarcophagi of black porphyry, now empty, once held the sacred bulls, and climbs Cheops in time for sunrise, coming down past the Sphinx, whose abstracted expression reminds him of the Buddhist idols of Japan and India; the book closes on a two-line verse about kings whose names have perished. Two closely printed pages of errata follow the table of contents, and twenty-nine inserted plates are distributed through the volume — some mounted photographs, some wood engravings, most bound sideways, seven uncaptioned — beginning with an unidentified photographic portrait that precedes the title page.

Round the World in 1870 is a journal-based narrative of a thirteen-month circuit of the globe, published in London by Henry S. King & Co. in 1872 and subtitled an account of a brief tour made through India, China, Japan, California, and South America. Its author identifies himself on the title page only as A. D. Carlisle, B.A., Trin. Coll. Cam. The preface explains that the book is taken, “in some parts word for word,” from a journal kept while traveling, and that it means to be no more than “an easy, truthful, and, it is hoped, an interesting account of the men and manners, of the various objects of interest, natural and artificial, seen in the different countries visited.” Carlisle concedes at once that thirteen months — five of them “consumed in steamers” — must leave his narrative superficial, and says he has deliberately refrained from entering into discussions of moot points of fact and “vexatæ quæstiones” of theory. His stated hope is to encourage anyone with £1,500 to spare and two years’ leisure to make the same journey. He sailed from Southampton Dock in the P. and O. steamer ‘Pera’ on Christmas Day 1869 and came home to Liverpool; the narrative fills thirty-two chapters, is carried throughout in the first person plural, and is accompanied by five maps — the world on Mercator’s projection, part of Japan from a native map, California, the Yo-semité Valley, and the provinces of the Rio de la Plata.

One long opening chapter carries the reader out by the overland route, ticking off dates and ports: Gibraltar at the end of December, Valetta on 3 January, the mud of Alexandria, an overnight ‘special’ to Suez that has “earned this title principally by being specially slow,” and an approving look at the newly opened Suez Canal, which he expects to make Englishmen “rather ashamed that we did not give it a more timely and disinterested assistance.” Then the Red Sea in the ‘Mongolia,’ Aden with its nearly empty ancient tanks, Point de Galle and the drive up Wak-Wallah for the view to Adam’s Peak, the surf-boats at Madras, and the Hooghly up to Calcutta on 2 February. Seven chapters of India follow, the book’s largest national block. Calcutta is defended as a healthy place for an Englishman in the cold season; indigo plantations in Tirhoot are reached by palkee and twenty-eight bearers, with an account of how indigo is made and how little labor costs. Benares draws open contempt for Hindu worship — at the monkey temple he wonders “if humanity can come to a lower point of degradation than that of holding sacred its animal caricature.” Cawnpore and Lucknow are visited as battlefields of 1857, the Memorial Well inscription copied out entire. Agra brings the book’s most unqualified praise, for the Taj Mehal; then Delhi and the Khootab Minar, a dak gharry into the Doon, and ponies or one’s own legs up the last seven miles to Mussoorie.

China occupies four chapters and, by his own count, six weeks among the “Celestials.” Carlisle leaves Calcutta in March aboard one of Jardine, Matheson and Co.’s opium steamers, stops at Penang and Singapore, and reaches Hongkong in April, where a letter to a leading British merchant brings the party into his hill-side house and “that free-hearted and lavish hospitality for which Englishmen in China are famous even above their hospitable countrymen in India.” He records “Pigeon English,” quoted verbatim, a thirty-one-course dinner “à la Chinoise” of which the party “at least tasted each one of the alarming series,” and Macao living on gambling houses and on a coolie traffic shipping ten or twelve thousand men a year, over half to Peruvian sugar plantations. Canton yields pawnbrokers’ warehouses, sun-dried rats in the Honam market, the Examination Hall with its 8,600 cells, and an opium-shop where he doubts whether opium harms China more than alcohol harms England. Three weeks in the north take in the Taiping devastation of the Kiang-su plain and, in the longest of the four chapters, 700 miles up the Yang-tse-Keang, a river he expects to become “a great highway of nations” once the “antediluvian tories who rule at Pekin” are modified. At Nankin, fields and ruined cottages stand inside walls twenty-four miles round, the Porcelain Pagoda has been blown up by a Taiping commander and its ruins built into a Scotsman’s house, and a semicircular avenue of outsize stone men and beasts stands by a Ming tomb-mound.

Carlisle’s verdict on China is “rottenness and decay in every limb and member of this gigantic empire,” relieved only by the common people. Arriving from Shanghae on a May morning in 1870, he gives Japan five chapters and some seventy pages — a block matched in the book only by India — and sets their keynote at once, measuring everything in Nagasaki against the China just left: broad, well-laid roads, wooden houses “not unlike Swiss cottages,” an air of “quiet business and well-to-do contentment,” a language “almost as liquid and as full of vowels as Italian.” A single day there yields the shops itemized one by one, Decima called “a mere prison-house” whose windows at least had a good view, a Sinto temple and its ‘tori-i’ explained from scratch, tea-houses and ‘saki,’ a midday puppet theater, Papenberg from which Japanese Christians were thrown in the persecution of 250 years before, and a warm passage on how Japanese burial grounds are sited. The ‘Golden Age’ carries him through the Inland Sea, whose famous scenery he declines to rank, to Kobé, the hot springs and basket-work of Arima, and Osaca — the Venice of Japan, its castle burnt since the Shogun fled it in 1868, a mint going up under an English engineer, its singing-girls, wrestlers and ‘wood-works’ — with Kioto shut to foreigners thirty miles up the river. From Yokohama, eleven years earlier a fishing village, he rides out to Kanasawa, Kamakura, the Dai-butz measured to the inch, and Inosima.

Two further Japanese chapters follow. Three days in Yedo are done from horseback and hotel, with a frank disclaimer about a capital in which he has spent “only half a week” and whose language he does not know: the Tocaido with its cangos, norimons, Yakonins and running couriers; the execution-ground outside Yokohama, which he matches against Temple Bar and English forgery law of forty years before; Yedo’s area drawn onto a map of London; the Shoguns’ tombs at Shiba, “this Westminster Abbey of Yedo”; the Forty-seven Ronins’ burial ground, told at length, with footnotes sending readers to Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan and Humbert’s Le Japon Illustré; the Kwan-non temple at Asaksa and its fairground; and the Emperor’s gardens at Hamagoten. The last Japanese chapter takes a mounted quartett inland into the Hakoni country, the treaty limit got round by a doctor’s certificate recommending the sulphur springs; one pony falls in Curio Street at the start and twice more in “the five days of actual riding to which he is subjected during the trip.” Against the English belief that travel in Japan is about as dangerous as travel in Central Africa, Carlisle sets his own uneventful trip, a silk village, an avenue of cryptomerias, blind shampooers, fruitless fly-fishing in a lake said to hold a dragon, and Fusi-Yama, which he thinks may well claim to be “the matchless mountain of the world.” He ends by blaming Europeans, not Japanese, for the state of tea-houses near the ports.

Twenty-two days at sea in the ‘China,’ one of the largest ships of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, carry the party on to America: forty-five saloon passengers of nine nationalities, 580 Chinese in the steerage bound for the gold-washing and clothes-washing of California, China ‘boys’ waiting on the saloon and, in the book’s own parenthesis, “carved for (to our discomfort) by a negro!” They raise the Farallones on 13 July 1870, and a man on the wharf calls out that France and Prussia are going to war. Four chapters of California follow. San Francisco is a city thirty years old with 160,000 people, many houses of iron frame-works filled in with plaster, pavements often of planks, nearly one shop in four in Montgomery Street a money-changer and assayer’s, no copper coinage and a ‘bit’ worth fivepence, two dollars a dozen for laundry — and a corn-merchant who finds that morning’s Liverpool market report waiting on his desk, and newspapers printing what the Times of to-day says. Then the wheat and heat of the San Joaquin, worked-out diggings, the Grizzly Giant measured at sixty-six feet round, the silence of the sequoia groves, the Yo-semité with its cliffs and falls measured and their lost Indian names regretted, the Pacific Railroad over the Sierra with fifty miles of snow-sheds, Donner Lake, Tahoe’s bottom visible through 150 feet of water, the Geyser Springs, the New Almaden quicksilver mine, and, twice, an anti-Chinese agitation he blames mainly on Irish emigrants and does not share.

Panama is reached in sixteen days, by way of Acapulco, once the galleons’ port for Manilla, and proves mold and mildew, weeds on the church steps, the prison perhaps its liveliest building. Down the west coast, Callao and Lima — disliked, its hotels “musty, dusty, and fusty” — the rainless coast whose want of rain lets guano accumulate on islands offshore, the coolies shipped in a way that “seems hardly less open to the charge of inhuman cruelty than was the African slave-trade,” and Arica, still five-sixths rubbish-heaps two years after the earthquake of 1868, three vessels high and dry. Chili brings Valparaiso and Santiago, the Chilian Paris, and a comparatively stable government he puts down partly to Chilians’ “less mixture of Indian blood” than their neighbors. The Strait of Magellan on 18 October — sleet, glaciers, Punta Arenas — is set against the Inland Sea. Then Monte Video’s state of siege, ludicrous but not harmless; the Buenos Ayres saladeros, and the fever that broke out six weeks after he left, 700 dead in a day in a city built over “a honey-comb of cesspools”; locusts, gauchos, and sheep-farming in the “camp,” summed up as “Don’t”; 247 miles of railway with barely a cutting or an embankment, to a hot white week in Cordova; Rio, whose bay, of all he saw, only Nagasaki’s rivals for beauty; and, past St. Vincent, Teneriffe and Lisbon, two Biscay gales before landing in a Liverpool fog and “a ready welcome from waiting friends.”

New Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun is a compiled chronicle rather than a traveler’s account. Thirty chapters run from 1853 to 1873, one to four chapters to a year, with a single chapter covering 1856–57 and another, undated, dropped in at the 1858 seam to explain the Japanese system of government. Beneath the chapters the volume is divided into consecutively numbered sections, § 1 through § 550, each with its own italic heading, and every chapter opens with a synopsis paragraph listing its sections by number and title. There is no preface, so the book’s account of itself sits in the second and third sections of Chapter I: a comprehensive history of Japan “has yet to be written in a European language,” and meanwhile “The Author lays no claim to the high functions of a historian,” offering instead “a clear and succinct narrative of the most important occurrences in its recent annals, culled from the best authorities.” Those authorities are named as the book goes — Dr. Hawks’s narrative of Perry’s expedition behind the opening chapters, L. Oliphant’s narrative of Lord Elgin’s mission behind the fifth, Alcock’s The Capital of the Tycoon behind the seventh through ninth, and thereafter treaty texts, naval and consular dispatches, and the treaty-port, London and Japanese papers. From 1861 most years bring returns of trade, currency and settlement growth at the open ports. Four chapters carry a footnote saying their subject matter had appeared in The Leisure Hour for 1872.

The first six chapters carry the story from seclusion to the treaties. Chapter I describes Japan as it stood twenty years earlier — the exclusion of upwards of two centuries, the Dutch factory on the fan-shaped islet of De-sima with its spiked wall, water-gates and searches, the freer Chinese quarter beside it — and invites the reader to imagine Britain shut up the same way, every harbor closed but Cork. Perry’s squadron anchors off Uraga on July 8, 1853, and President Fillmore’s letter is delivered. Chapter II follows Perry’s return in 1854 to the twelve articles of the treaty of Kanagawa, executed on March 31, opening Simoda at once and Hakodadi a year later; the American presents get a full scene, the working model locomotive running on its circular track with a car so small it could hardly carry a child of six, a dignified functionary whirling around clinging to the car’s roof, and the telegraph wires run out from the treaty-house. Chapter III brings Admiral Poutiatine, the sea overwhelming Simoda after an earthquake, the wreck of the ‘Diana’ and the Russian treaty; Chapter IV the Dutch envoy’s failed attempt to enlarge his old Nagasaki privileges; Chapter V Lord Elgin and Baron Gros, and the treaties opening Kanagawa, Nagasaki, Hakodadi, Hiogo, Osaka and Nee-e-gata. Chapter VI likens the annals of Japan to those of medieval England, explains the ranks of Mikado, Siogoon and daimio, and blames Koempfer’s account for the belief that Japan had a spiritual and a temporal emperor.

Chapters VII through XIV cover the opened ports and the years of attack. Mr. Alcock arrives in 1859 and the British legation is installed at Sinagawa; he and Harris conclude that a second De-sima is intended for the foreigners, and the merchants settle at Yokohama rather than Kanagawa against their ministers’ wishes, because quarters can be had nowhere else, while the rate at which the silver itziboo is exchanged becomes a standing grievance. The killings are recorded one by one: three Russians cut down at Kanagawa; the British legation’s native linguist killed at its entrance; the Gotairo, or Siogoon-Regent, assassinated by men of the Mito clan; Mr. Hewskin, the American secretary of legation, killed in January 1861; the midnight attempt to massacre the inmates of the British legation at Yedo; Mr. Richardson cut down on the To-kai-do in 1862 by the train of Shimadzoo Saburo; the new legation buildings blown up; Major Baldwin and Lieutenant Bird killed at Kamakura. So are the reprisals: 440,000 Mexican dollars counted out by official shroffs at seven in the morning of June 24, 1863; Admiral Kuper’s squadron bombarding Kagosima that August through a typhoon, two of his officers killed at his side by one round shot; and in September 1864 the allied squadrons silencing the batteries at Simanosaki and carrying off sixty-two pieces of ordnance. Mossman treats the Kagosima action as Lord Palmerston’s Romanus sum in practice, while recording that many British officers and merchants thought the burning of unresisting prizes went too far.

The middle chapters follow the contest between the two feudal factions. The Siogoon’s cortège leaves Yedo for Kioto in 1865 and is watched from a knoll beside the tokaido by nearly the whole foreign community, in a ‘Japan Herald’ account printed at length because, Mossman says, no cortège of the kind will be seen again. Sir Harry Parkes arrives that summer with a long instruction from Earl Russell quoted across three sections; in November the allied envoys take their ships to Osaka Bay and obtain the Mikado’s consent to the treaties. In 1866 Chosiu of Nagato, whose Simanosaki batteries foreign squadrons had twice bombarded, beats the Siogoon’s army in the field with European drill and rifles while Satsuma quietly assists him; Parkes visits Kagosima as Satsuma’s guest three years after the bombardment and is saluted, banqueted and taken hunting; the Siogoon Iyemochi dies at Osaka castle at twenty-one and Stots-Bashi, Yoshi Hisa, is elected in his place; a November fire burns fifty acres of Yokohama. The new Siogoon is installed at Kioto in January 1867, the Mikado Osa-h’to dies of small-pox on February 3 and is succeeded by his son Mut-sh’to, the envoys are received at Osaka in state, and by November the Siogoon has resigned. Hiogo and Osaka open on the first day of 1868, the Mikado’s person is seized, the battle of Fushimi is lost, and the chapters close with the massacre of French seamen at Sakai and the storming of the Siogoons’ cemetery at Ooyeno.

The last eight chapters are the ones the title promises. Parkes is received by the Mikado at Osaka on April 26, 1868 — a youth seated on a chair with the Sosai kneeling behind to prompt him, his eyebrows shaved and repainted an inch higher, the daimios placed so that they cannot see his face — and in November the Mikado enters Yedo in state and renames it To-kiyo. Hakodadi is retaken in 1869 and the civil war ends; the great daimios surrender their feudal rights, which Mossman calls a bloodless act in the revolution; an assembly of 276 members, one to a clan, is convened. The rules of the new legislature are printed in 1870: fixed sitting days, motions and opinions handed in in writing, no oral discussion, seventeen committees. Then the han become ken and the daimios governors, the army is clad in European uniforms, 378 foreigners are counted in the public service, and the Imperial Mint at Osaka opens on April 4, 1871, with machinery from Hong Kong, followed by pages on the old cobangs and itziboos and the new yen and sen. The Iwakura embassy gets a chapter to itself — fifty names, five young girls sent to be educated in America, President Grant, Liverpool, a four-month tour of England and Scotland, the Queen at Windsor. The eighteen-mile railway from Yokohama to Yedo opens on June 12, 1872; in 1873 the European calendar arrives, the top-knot is sheared, and the boards proscribing Christianity are taken down.

The narrative never breaks into the first person singular. It speaks in an editorial “we,” calls itself “these brief annals,” and names Mossman just once, in a quoted press report of the embassy at Brighton hearing him read a paper on the city of Yedo before the British Association. Its standpoint is declared at the start: the transformation is credited to the Treaty Powers’ representatives, and “it is with pride that we find the British representatives among the foremost in this work,” the Americans credited with beginning it. He is hard on the Dutch and their old semi-prison factory, on French and American envoys who took commercial contracts, and on the Iwakura ambassadors, whose conduct he calls irreproachable but of whom he asks what was learned about their country and answers, “little or nothing!” The closing section is one accumulating retrospect of 1873 against 1853 — six treaty ports where there had been one Dutch factory, twelve Treaty Powers with legations, a railway where the Yedo highway “was a way of death to the foreigner,” the telegraph reaching Europe in fifty hours — ending on the cry “Forward! Onward! New Japan; the Land of the Rising Sun!” A folding map of Japan engraved by W. & A. K. Johnston is bound in at the end, as a front leaf directs the binder; there is nothing else — no plates, no appendix, no index.

A slim Yokohama volume that reprints one man’s contributions to a treaty-port newspaper. The title page carries no author’s name, no publisher and no printer, only the title and “YOKOHAMA, SEPTEMBER, 1874”; the only preliminary matter is a note to the editor dated 17th August 1874 and signed C. J. Pfoundes, asking him to “re-print all my contributions to your paper, without exception, from the beginning.” The sixteen letters that follow are dated, one exception apart, between April 1873 and September 1874, and are signed not by Pfoundes but with a rotating set of pen names — CENSOR, A. B. C., AMATEUR, E. NON FUMARI, MERCATOR, ARGUS, NEMESIS, A PROSELYTE, DAMOCLE’S SWORD, SCRUTATOR and REFORMER — which the book nowhere explains. Nearly all are written in the first person by a foreigner of long residence, addressing the editor and, through him, the foreign community of the treaty ports: “Many of us can remember the time when there was not a single foreigner in the country outside of treaty limits …” One is barely a letter at all, a few lines asking that smoking be confined to smoking-carriages.

A single question runs through most of them: why respect for foreigners in Japan is declining, and who is to blame. The first letter takes up the proverb “Familiarity breeds contempt,” and it and the one that follows lay much of the fault on the foreign residents themselves — “mostly waifs who have been washed ashore here,” who keep in their houses a class of Japanese women ticketed and taxed for the ticket, bully and cringe by turns, lend their names to Japanese for doubtful ventures, start “bogus” claims, and rush goods through the Customs at a fraction of their value. The writer is at least as hard on the Japanese. The half-educated natives foisted on foreign employés as interpreters and assistants are “the curse of this country”; the foreign employé is pumped for what he knows and then, “after squeezing the lemon, they throw it away”; “Unstable as water, they shall not excel,” runs one verdict. He writes of “the moral and physical inferiority of the natives” and states flatly that “gratitude to a foreigner is absolutely unknown.” One passage weighs the country both ways at once, granting a taste for flowers, scenery and art more general than in Europe and a smaller share of the population unable to read and write, alongside bribery from lowest to highest, gross sensuality, and “the most extreme superficiality and desultoriness, with an astuteness we cannot fathom.” One letter, prompted by the relaxation of the ban on foreign travel in the interior, argues the case historically: “the history of foreigners in this country shows that they have been almost invariably the first aggressors,” a case traced from the Spanish buccaneers and the Portuguese in Hirado through Desima, British men-of-war at Nagasaki, Golowin, and the treaty of Perry, after which “our forcible entrance into the country is far from forgotten.”

Elsewhere the letters move by topic: a plea for agreed European equivalents for Japanese official titles, introduced by an anecdote of a Dutchman whose interpreter, soundly rated by the Boungio of Yedo for letting him stay mounted, told him instead that he had been complimented on his horsemanship; an attack on the licensed Yokohama brokers, the Hiki-toriya and Uri Komi-ya, with a revived proposal for a general Exchange behind the Saibansho in which natives and foreigners might meet unrestrained; two letters from ARGUS, the first on the new government’s centralization, forced taxes and provincial risings, comparing its young officials to the British in India and calling Japan “the Ireland of the Pacific,” the second on the bad faith of foreigners toward one another and the place-hunters who undercut long-serving employés; a complaint that missionaries are the best-off members of the foreign community; and two on shipping, one defending Japanese owners against foreign criticism, the other describing worn-out China-trade steamers passed on “with a new name and a fresh daub of paint” and a steamer advertised to sail for Osaka that put to sea with a former coal trimmer in charge.

An appendix of eleven pages, separately numbered, closes the book. It opens with a letter of 25th April 1868 that Pfoundes signed in his own name to the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce at Yokohama. Calling at the government offices to arrange that people he had bought from within the treaty limits might bring their wares to him directly, he was told that no Japanese could sell to a foreigner unless he was himself a licensed Yokohama trader resident in the port, and the higher officials at the Sai Bansho confirmed it; a group of Japanese hoping to have their business conducted by a foreign house had meanwhile found the Japanese government prohibiting anything like co-partnership between natives and foreigners; and the guard gates, those on the creek especially, kept up on the specious plea of securing residents’ lives and property, he reports having repeatedly seen used to bully inoffensive people. The letter proposes, among other things, petitioning the Consuls, a fixed method of taxation in place of the present irregular squeezes, doing away with the gates, and electing a residents’ committee. A note then explains that what follows is “re-printed by permission of the Editor, for comparison with the dates, &c., of the above. The writer does not know the author,” and remarks that six years have brought no improvement. Two letters signed MERCHANT end the volume, on the Yokohama guilds that can taboo a foreign firm, the commission forced on outside sellers, and the Machi-gai-sho, whose one-half per cent ad valorem levy he reckons at $170,000 a year on the 1872 returns; the treaties, he holds, were dictated to a people looked upon as children, and “we must again introduce a little of the gun-boat policy.”

Issued in 1874 by Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, Meeting the Sun: A Journey All Round the World is a working newspaper artist’s account of an eastward circuit made between August 1872 and June 1873, its title page promising “Egypt, China, Japan, and California” and “an account of the marriage ceremonies of the Emperor of China.” William Simpson opens by explaining how the trip came about: after six or seven years of going wherever “history was being made” for the Illustrated London News — the Abyssinian War, Jerusalem, the opening of the Suez Canal, the Franco-German War, the Commune in Paris — he was asked whether he would like to see the Emperor of China married, with Japan “also hinted at” and a return by the New World. A request from the Daily News for letters reached him just before he sailed, making him “a kind of double-barrelled correspondent, or, to take an idea from Japan, a sort of two-sworded Daimio.” The book is those letters and pictures worked up afterward, and he says as much, likening books of travel to “stuffed birds.” His preface explains the change of title from “All Round the World,” describes a binding of Imperial yellow and nuptial red stamped with dragon, phoenix, Yin-yang and Pah-kwah, and thanks the proprietors of the Illustrated London News, “for which I had produced the original sketches during my journey,” for permitting their woodcuts to be repeated by the heliotype process.

A little over a quarter of the volume goes on the outward run, much of it looking backward to earlier journeys rather than forward. Simpson leaves London by night train on 5 August 1872, is held up at St. Michel where a storm has choked the railway with debris, recalls being driven into the Mont Cenis Tunnel workings, and boards the P. and O. “Poonah” lying off the Doge’s palace at Venice. The Adriatic chapters argue that the Suez Canal is remaking Europe’s ports — “the arterial blood of the Suez Canal is tickling every place into life” — and stop over St. Mark’s, the columns at the end of the Appian Way, and a sixth-century crypt shown him at Brindisi by Archdeacon Tarantini. Egypt is mostly retrospect: going over the unfinished canal in 1869 with Lesseps as guide, and the English prediction that the desert would fill it in, “one of the most perfect myths on record.” The Red Sea gets the longest chapter of the voyage — August heat, passengers sleeping on deck, and a descent into the stoke-hole of the “Ellora,” “this Gehenna of Gehennas,” whose stokers faint at their work and are revived with buckets of water. Aden is a “cinder heap”; then Adam’s Peak and the Tooth of Buddha in Ceylon, the mosque, joss-house and Hindoo temple side by side at Penang, the diving boys at Singapore, chopsticks and the boat population at Hong Kong, and a pilot’s tales of piracy in the China Seas.

China is by far the book’s largest subject, taking up something close to half of it. Reaching Shanghai on 22 September 1872, Simpson goes north almost at once, and spends five days on the Peiho in a house-boat, meeting at Tung-Chow a blind Buddhist priest who reads his face with his fingers while he sketches. Peking he introduces without ceremony: “Imagine about sixteen square miles of tumble-down bricks, dirty earthen tiles, dusty or muddy thoroughfares, open stagnant sewers, and unlimited filth of every kind lying about,” a capital that is “only in reality an extended village,” though its plan — reproduced as a full-page plan with a lettered key — reminds him of the New Jerusalem, walls facing the points of the compass and the “Prohibited City” set apart at the center as if it were the sanctum sanctorum of a temple. He is sharp about the siting of the foreign Legations in the quarter reserved for tribute-bearers. The marriage chapter recounts the choosing of the bride by the two Empresses Regent from Manchoo girls of the Eight Banners, the astrologers who fixed the hour, Ah-Lu-Té’s commanding manner, and the yellow-sanded way barricaded so that nobody could watch. Having refused to promise he would not intrude, Simpson saw the midnight procession of 15–16 October from a Peking opium shop, through finger-holes poked in its paper window. His verdict: “Chronologically it belongs to the present; philosophically it belongs to the past.”

Another Peking chapter studies the Temple of Heaven, entered by climbing walls, rushing a door and applying “the magic influence of pieces of silver, called ‘Dollars’”; Simpson gives his own sketch-plan of the temple, sets the altar’s nines beside the numbers that fix the Emperor’s second, third and fourth-class wives, and reads its square enclosing a circle as the common Chinese grave-mound repeated in marble. That reading serves a general conclusion he grants is contested, that all temples are founded upon tomb worship, though years of travel have left him no doubt of it; the state worship he calls, in commercial phrase, the firm of “Shang-ti and Hwang-ti, supreme rulers.” Reportage follows: the young Emperor Tung-chih’s assumption of power, which Simpson places within a racial scheme he takes as settled and returns to across the China chapters — the most ancient form of Turanian civilization meeting the highest the Aryan race has reached, and Western civilization, “be it for good or ill,” bound to carry the day. Then the Audience Question, whether Western ministers must perform the Ko-tow, traced through Lord Macartney and Lord Amherst to “Time swallows up all things, and it will swallow up the Ko-tow” — with a postscript added since the chapter was written, that the ministers have been received without the Kotow, though the Peking Gazette said they had supplicated. He walks the ground of the Tientsing massacre of June 1870 with a gentleman who was in the town when it happened.

An excursion of four or five days takes in the Ming Tombs, the inscribed arch of 1345 at Keu-yung-Kwan, and the Great Wall, which draws a wry passage on famous sights: one counts the courses and towers, gathers a flower to send home, and hears somebody grumble that the mustard has been forgotten. The longest chapter in the book is the one on Chinese literature and education, and its exhibits carry an argument. Shop signs prove that most who pass can read them; ten thousand cells hold the candidates of the Peking examination hall, where dead bodies are sometimes found; the Peking Gazette is described at length, and “Excelsior” is Englished into Pigeon English as “Topside-galow!” From these Simpson concludes that China has an education penetrating, at least to a certain extent, through the whole mass, wonders how far that has preserved its civilization from the decay that took every other Power in the East, and tells England’s educational reformers to come and study — while writing in the same chapter that a literary man’s mind has its growth arrested at the early date of Confucius. A chapter on Chinese civilization matches Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera against village hand-weaving already in existence, before a steamer run up the Yang-tse-kiang to Han-kow and a return to Shanghai by the Grand Canal, through country the Taeping rebellion had emptied and left stocked like a game preserve.

Japan fills one chapter, about a fourteenth of the text; a month there, Simpson warns, was “far too short a time for anything like serious study.” It opens on contrast: “China is stationary, fixed, and immovable; Japan, on the contrary, is turning a somersault.” At Nagasaki he notes Pappenberg, where Christians were martyred, Desima, where the Dutch were “only tolerated as prisoners,” and streets “quite as clean as those of London.” He watches men take to collars, watch-chains, boots and the wide-awake hat, regrets that women may follow, and counts sewing machines and a photographic shop. In the Inland Sea, or Seto Uchi, he calls at Kobi; the Micado has just appeared in public to open the Yokohama railway to Yeddo. A survivor guides him along the Tocaido to where Richardson was cut down in 1862, while a train screams past. He rides that line to Shinagawa, his ticket handed out at a pigeon-hole and nipped at a barrier, behind an engine plated “Sharpe, Stewart, and Co., Atlas Works, Manchester.” Shinto having been made the only State faith, Buddhism is disestablished and speculators buy its bronze bells to be coined into English pennies — hence the priest of the Dai-Bootz at Kama-kura, reached on a fortnight’s walking tour with two coolies and a sketch-book, who finds beer more profitable than religion. Ino-shima, snow at Hakoni, Fuji-yama, “the one not two mountain,” pilgrims on Oyama, Will Adams’s grave near Yokoska, and a last dinner of shark and saki close it.

Simpson sails from Yokohama on 24 February 1873 in the Pacific Mail steamer “Alaska,” carrying 1250 Chinese emigrants, works out that the Pacific must give China to America rather than Russia, landing at San Francisco on 21 March. The city is built and paved in wood; he defends its Chinese against Californian hostility — “John has not a friend in California.” News that Captain Jack shot General Canby at the peace conference, Dr. Thomas killed beside him, sends him north by rail and thirty-three hours of stage-coach to Yreka and the Lava-beds. He likens the stronghold to a rabbit warren and to Sebastopol’s rifle-pits, repeats the extermination talk on the road north, tells of the Ben Wright massacre of 1852, when whites gave the same signal at the same kind of parley, and blames the Indian commissioners. He writes too that the crime put the Modocs “beyond the pale of mercy, and extermination like vermin was decreed against them,” yet that of forty who fought six hundred “like perfect devils,” but for it “few heroes could have been compared to them.” He mourns by name officers of a scouting party seen off that morning. The Yosemité and Mariposa big trees follow, ten minutes with Brigham Young, and the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky. Saying he has “almost nothing to tell,” he sketches the rest: Harper’s Ferry, Washington, where he gave General Sherman information about the Modoc country, New York, Niagara, and his sailing on 14 June in the White Star “Oceanic.”

Twenty-one short sketches of an old village in the suburbs of Yedo, collected and published at Yokohama in 1874 over the initials “T. A. P.,” the only name the title page gives. A short preface explains that the pieces appeared first in the Japan Weekly Mail and “have been in a measure revised and, indeed, in some instances rewritten,” and thanks “one or other of three friendly artists, to whose kindly help the pictures owe whatever claim they may be found to have to public favour”; the three are not named. Their work is the book’s most conspicuous feature: twenty-four full-page plates are listed, from a “Japanese Garden” frontispiece to “The Graveyard,” each printed on its own leaf with a blank reverse, drawn in a Japanese idiom and nearly all signed in characters worked into the design, and captioned in letterpress in words that do not always match the list — the two entries given as “Old Street” appear as “Village Street” and “A Sketch from the Outskirts.” The subject is “a retired and quiet suburb of the ancient city of Yedo,” an “old-fashioned straggling village” in which “the evidences of Western civilization have not displayed themselves as yet.” Most of the book is present-tense description spoken in a resident’s “we” — “Our village may be said to occupy the neutral ground between the termination of the great city and the commencement of the open country beyond” — with long stretches of quoted talk, a single lapse into “I,” and two sketches built around a tale told aloud by a character. The narrator is a foreigner all the same: a Japanese razor is an instrument of torture “at least to European faces,” and the blind boy’s playmates scatter the moment he asks “whether a foreigner is not present.”

Affection and condescension run together throughout. The neighbors are “simple-minded folks” who “still walk in the footsteps of their fathers,” and also “a more contented lot of old dullards than the villagers it would be difficult to discover out of dreamland” — the narrator speaking in the village’s own voice against innovation in one place and jeering at its “slavish obedience to established custom” in another. The opening piece walks the main street past leaning timber houses long “out of perpendicular,” a black-lacquered fireproof storehouse, an apothecary’s sign presided over by “a pair of mighty gilded eyes,” and a tea shop crowded with laughing girls at the sorting; it pauses over the gardens glimpsed through open doors, where ferns are set between moss-grown stones and a stream caught on a projecting stone falls as a mimic waterfall among golden carp, and it stops for the funeral of “a person of consequence” carried shoulder-high in virgin white while the whole neighborhood turns out to speculate on the deceased. “The Saké Shop” describes the mayor’s establishment at the forking of the street, its banto rattling a soroban behind a rail, and its tapster, shrewd from the right side and vacant from the left, who complains at length of pressing drink on the unwilling and is answered by the stone-mason in favor of “the circling wine cup.” The stone-mason then gets his own pages, with two red-rimmed stone griffins outside his door, his battered fighting cocks and his cage of canaries, and his devotion to the Kanameishi, a stone said to cure kakke that cannot be dug up. “The Barber” is the fullest of the early sketches: the little barber jokes over his customers’ heads, assures a sleepy horse-boy that the frogs keeping him awake are earthworms, and is celebrated for having outlasted a “travelled barber” who set up a flame-colored pole in a flower pot, advertised hair-cutting on his paper windows, and decamped in the night pronouncing the place the dullest he had ever visited. Outside stand the Mojiyaki, who runs hot sugar into a string of tortoises on a stick, and the Ameya, who pinches barley gluten into gourds and rats to order. A brief piece follows on the blind boy who flies his kite by ear and touch, and on the pains his playmates take to give him a fair chance at tops and counters.

The two told tales come next. In “The Barber’s Tale” the barber, unsteady on his clogs and trailing a fragrance that “bears a singular and remarkable resemblance to the odour of saké,” pays a New Year call at the saké shop and recounts the fable of a Japanese dog who takes lessons in deportment from a foreign one and then bays at the Okurasho: “as I see none but thieves, I’ve followed your advice.” The tapster returns the favor next day, while the barber shaves him, with the story of a daimio who lay in wait for a thief in his wood-store, found the man scrupulous enough to take only what would cook his supper, rewarded him, and concluded that the one to be despised is he who steals from office, “a Man in Kamishimo.” Around them stand the neighborhood’s trades and observances. The Kamikudsuhiroi, the picker-up of paper-scraps, is set down as an Eta and “a hereditary outcast of the class of tanners” who poisons dogs for their skins, though the same sketch admires a manly Eta clog-mender and asks why mending clogs should be reckoned more degrading than making them. At the Ujigami no Matsuri the Mikoshi is whirled about like a football and halted before the nagaya until coins are shaken loose. For a woman dead in childbirth the Nagare Kanjo is stretched on four stakes and passers-by ladle water over the inscribed linen until it parts, the rich being furnished cloth already scraped thin in the middle. The sparrow catcher takes forty birds in a morning with a limed bamboo rod, for eating. The doctor, a partisan of the Chinese school who refers every ailment to an ascending or descending principle, keeps black-lacquered boards lettered in gold advertising “Thousand years’ life pills” and a “Mixture of a hundred ingredients,” wraps his potions in handbills for Clove, Rhinoceros and Musk Pills, and at the bedside works through eyelids, nostrils, tongue and pulse — always the left in the case of a man — with a portentous “h’m” after each act before arriving at a guarded diagnosis. The longest sketch, “The Fortune-Teller,” places the Blind Priest and his fifty zeichiku rods in a row of houses deserted since the young paper-man was found dead with his right hand severed and a woman’s cries rose all night from the well; he stops a housewife fumbling for her quarter bu with “You’ve had a quarrel with your husband and are meditating flight,” and the sketch ends in his doorway with the old man’s bright little maid, her cats, and her talk of the dead.

Tomikitchi the story-teller works the vacant space at the end of the street, breaking off his tale of Ishikawa at the knife-edge to demand “three tempos, Good Sirs” before he will go on. “By the River” watches children on a bridge cheer a corpse along as it drifts past the village and asks whether life is held so cheap; Kichibei the masked cakeman will fling a saraband for a single tempo, crying “Karintoya!”; and Inos’ke, who plays his flute with his nose, is the one innovator the neighborhood has produced — his sketch turning on the villagers rather than for them, since “to a community so dunderheaded as ours, a nose to the end of time would simply be a nose.” A recipe follows for driving off ants by pasting in their path a paper demanding sixteen cash a head. “The Bells” mourns the great bell of Shiba, cast under the third Shogun Iyemitsuko and presented to the temple of Zojoji, with a footnote dating the temple’s destruction by fire to New Year’s eve 1874 and reporting that some blamed the overturning of a lamp and others a Buddhist priest maddened by an edict under which the relic was to be transferred next day to the Sintoo sect; older bell lore follows, including the bell of Miidera that could only sob “Miidera ye iko.” Then the ancient gate, deserted now, where the wooden passes of retainers were once hung for the momban, where pole-arms and quarter-staves still stand ready for the disarming of brawlers, and where twice sixty Buddhist tablets are counted. The book closes in the graveyard of the Imai family — whose present head is the saké merchant and mayor — among the figures of Jizo Sama that mark children’s graves, the posthumous Kaimiô titles conferred by the priest in place of the names the dead were known by in life, the toba renewed every seventh day to the forty-ninth, the six cash laid in the coffin to pay the toll on the road to Hades, and the belief that a butterfly out of season is a spirit come back to hover round its own.

Issued anonymously in 1875 over the initials L. D. S., Letters from China & Japan gathers forty-three letters written home during a residence in China and a closing tour of Japan. The preface explains their origin plainly: the writer had not meant to publish, and only “on returning to this country” did she realize “how little is known by the world at large of daily life in the far East,” so the letters appear “divested of all personal matter not absolutely necessary for carrying on the narrative.” The engraved title page gives no name either, only “BY L. D. S.” beneath a scene in which a shaggy black terrier lies on an open book against an opened fan, a robed Chinese figure and a Japanese figure standing on either side of a temple and a rising sun. Nearly every letter is headed with a month and a day; one is headed “May 187-” alone, one carries no date whatever, and where a year appears it is printed “187-.” People are reduced to initials too — her husband is “H.,” and those around her are “Mon. G.,” “Madame D.,” “Canon B.” She warns in advance that “still more cursory is the glimpse given of Japan and its remarkably progressive inhabitants,” and the proportions bear her out: the outward voyage and the Chinese years fill about four-fifths of the volume, Japan only the last fifth.

The first six letters carry her out by way of Marseilles — a rough crossing to Boulogne, the P. and O. steamer, a day ashore at Alexandria, an overnight train across the desert to Suez, divers at Aden who paddle out in canoes and then go down headlong after the passengers’ sixpences, then Point-de-Galle, Penang and Singapore. She sails under the escort of a couple she calls the E.’s, who part from her before Hong-Kong; there, two days after landing, she marries H., head of the Chinese government’s naval training department and addressed on a Chinese official’s card as “Naval Professor.” The wedding brings with it “Scuttle,” H.’s black terrier, thereafter a fixture of the household and the creature on the title page. Life at the Imperial Arsenal at Foo-Chow, where they stay close to two and a half years, fills the book’s longest stretch. Bugles sound from five in the morning; cadets drill at gunnery in an “imaginary ship” on shore; coolies carry every load slung from a bamboo; the establishment runs under French direction, with about seventy Europeans, French and English, instructing the Chinese; and a training ship is launched after two pigs and two goats have been offered to the goddess of the river.

Gaiety is the surprise of the residence, and she reports it home as news: a ball at which twelve ladies were the greatest number ever assembled at Foo-Chow, the men outnumbering them about four to one; a Christmas week of Sir Roger de Coverley, a hunt breakfast, the whole party of sixty photographed, and about twenty riders taking every pony in the town up the hills; a harmonium that makes its weekly journey to church swung on a bamboo between two coolies who, she rather thinks, “believe it to be our Joss.” Beside this she sets down servants’ wages and the price of beef and mutton, the duties of the “Boy” and the Comprador, the pidgin English she keeps house in, the Dragon-boat festival, fishing with cormorants, and — in a passage H. writes out and she encloses — his account of the Imperial Commissioner’s annual dinner at the Yamûn. Harsher matter enters as well: the Tien-tsin massacre; a theft in her own house after which the servants are bambooed and the Boy held at the Yamûn is bambooed daily and, she is told, once suspended by his thumbs for four hours; a sustained complaint that the ships listed in the Times as protecting British residents are hulks and worn-out gunboats; and three anxious months, after H. sails north in the new training ship “Kien-Wei,” in which rumor reports her seen “bottom upwards” and a sailor’s wife creeps under the half door to ask whether the ship has gone down.

Late in the residence the long-promised excursion comes off: a week in a house-boat up both branches of the river Min, past orange groves lost in the rain and a sulphur spring prescribed for rheumatism, then tracked up the rapids in a native boat and on by foot and chair to the monastery of Yûng-foo, supplied with water that trickles down a bamboo rope from a spring on the mountain top. Villagers turn out to inspect the party and call them “Fanqui,” which she glosses as “foreign devil”; when a young man throws mud at her, she remarks that English villagers might behave no better toward a Chinese woman walking through their street. The homeward steamer supplies the other Chinese ports. At Shanghai she notes the European streets, wheelbarrows “licensed to carry two passengers,” and cotton farms; at Ningpo she climbs a pagoda said to be a thousand years old, hears “Fung-Sui” invoked to explain bridges that cross nothing, and listens to an account of mandarins who buy their rank and then “squeeze” those beneath them. Japan arrives in the middle of a letter written aboard the S.S. Costa Rica: Nagasaki by moonlight, admired from the deck without landing, then Simonosaki and the Inland Sea, then Hiogo, or Kobe, whose streets and houses strike her as far cleaner than any in China, and where the “Gin-rik-sha” is described rather than ridden. Yokohama, which holds most of the Japanese letters, comes next; Mr Cook’s excursionists are living in the same hotel.

The Mikado has opened the railway to Yedo (Tokyo) and begun showing his “hitherto sacred person”; their hotel’s landlady remembers the town ordered indoors three years earlier when he was to pass. Twice the writer takes the new line — to the Tycoons’ tombs at Shiba, in Ginrikshas drawn by two men, and to Asakusa with its dwarfed trees and chrysanthemum figures. Whole streets of daimio barracks stand empty; H. remembers when almost every man carried two swords; poorer Yaconins have “turned their swords into shoe brushes.” A longer expedition reaches Yukoska, whose French-run arsenal works “on much the same principle as that at Foo-Chow”; eighteen miles out lies the bronze Dai-butsz, home by the Tokaido through Kamakura. Twice she watches the Mikado, once on the station platform, where his courage fails as he reaches her group of women — “quite young, not above one-and-twenty, tall, but not handsome.” Rule by edict fills the last letter: Buddhism “lately abolished,” Christian families seized at Nagasaki “even in this very year” and few ever heard of since, and an edict she welcomes placing women “more on a footing with their Lords and Masters,” though she finds them uneducated and overpainted and reports the Japanese, on hearsay, “even a more intensely conceited nation than the Chinese.” Osaka’s Imperial Mint and the Dutch island of Desima come last, before “farewell to the East”; a closing note asks readers to find Miss Laurence a helper for her Ningpo girls’ school, above the printers’ imprint.

The title page of this book names a publisher, Trübner & Co. of Ludgate Hill, and a year, 1875, but no author. Nothing else in the volume supplies one: it runs from half-title to printer’s imprint to title page to eleven pages of contents to text, with no preface, no dedication, no signature or initials, and it carries no illustrations, no map, no index and no advertisements. The 605 pages of text are divided into twenty-two chapters, each opening with a dense paragraph of analytical head-words, and in those head-words the writer is designated in the third person — “Author misses Mr Grant,” “Author has to take to a camel,” “Author dislikes the ‘quiet’ of guide-books.” Everywhere else, a stray footnote apart, he is “I,” shifting to “we” whenever he has company. What the text shows of him is an elderly traveler for whom England is home, whose white beard gets him mobbed in the towns of northern China, who had been at Penang twenty-five years earlier aboard the Fire Queen, “the first steamer that traversed these seas,” at Honolulu and Macao in 1844, and at sea in the Ayacucho in 1825. He carries an aneroid barometer and a thermometer and quotes both on almost every page; footnotes dated 1874 show the manuscript was gone over before printing.

The journeys are not one journey. A divisional title at the head of the first page of text announces the FIRST TOUR — “Palestine—India—China—Japan—Mongolia—Siberia—St Petersburg” — and governs chapters I through VIII, from “20th October 1868.—Left London, crossed Mont Cenis by Fell’s railway” to a thunderstorm at St Petersburg in August 1869. A second divisional title, on a leaf of its own before chapter IX, announces “The United States—San Francisco—Sandwich Islands—New Zealand—Australia—Tasmania”; that tour opens “I landed at Halifax June 1st, 1870” and ends chapter XIII with one sentence: “From Jaffa I pushed on to Port Said and Alexandria, and thence on to Marseilles and home.” The next leaf, likewise blank on the verso, carries the third divisional title, listing Palestine, Aleppo, Diarbekir, the Tigris, Babylon, Kurrachee, the Indus, Cashmere, India, Ceylon, China, Japan, Australia and Tasmania, and the third tour begins “Left London on 21st January 1872 for Paris.” The intervals at home are not narrated at all. The long country list on the title page is therefore a heap and not a route: Palestine is visited on all three tours, and Ceylon, China, India, Japan and Australasia on two each. Japan fills pages 67 to 86 of the first tour and 509 to 547 of the third, some sixty pages in all.

The first tour lands at Jaffa in November 1868. He goes up to Jerusalem, descends into Warren’s excavations at Robinson’s arch, camps at Jericho with the Bedouin chief Goblan, fords the Jordan and bathes in the Dead Sea; several pages attack the European alms that support the city’s eleven thousand Jews and argue that the money would do more in schools. He inspects the unfinished Suez Canal, doubts that M. Lesseps can open it by October, and at Aden calls on “a correspondent of the New York Herald, Mr Stanley,” waiting to intercept Livingstone. India fills January and early February 1869 — Elephanta, the rail to Nagpore, the bathing festival at Allahabad, the Cawnpore Well, the Lucknow Residency, the Kootub Minar at 238 feet and 379 steps, the Taj, the burning-ghats at Benares, and at Beehea a wage table down to girls who break brickbats for one anna a day — then Rangoon’s rice-mills, the Shway Dagon, Penang, Malacca, Singapore, Saigon, Hong-Kong and a crowded day in Canton with Archdeacon Grey. After Japan the tour resumes at Shanghai and goes on to Cheefoo, Tientsin and Pekin, then over the Nankow Pass to Kalgan and across the Gobi to Urga and Kiachta, then west by Lake Baikal, Irkutsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, the Volga, the Nigne-Novgorod fair and Moscow to St Petersburg; the Siberian chapters keep returning to the exile system, the lines of carts carrying exiles, men, women and children, and the name given to those who have served their term, “colonists.”

Japan fills most of chapter IV, pages 67 to 86: he anchors at Nagasaki at midnight on 22–23 March 1869 and sails from Yokohama on 16 April. At Nagasaki he walks round “the Decima, a little artificial island, the old Dutch settlement,” and inspects Messrs Glover’s tea establishment, six hundred charcoal pans with a woman at each, sprinkling powdered Prussian blue to make green tea “principally for the American market.” Hiogo he notes as “the last opened of the treaty ports.” The day ashore at Osaka on 27 March fills five pages: villagers who have “as yet seen but very few” foreigners; a hotel kept by a Japanese, with Brussels carpets, a piano and European bedsteads; the castle, which “a few months ago, in the late revolution” the Tycoon evacuated without defending, its buildings burnt afterwards and the only cannon he sees two brass twenty-four pounders; and a Buddhist preacher in a pulpit before two hundred seated hearers, which reminds him of Italy. At Yeddo he sees the burnt enclosure of Aidsa, Asaxa, Sheba, the Tycoon’s duck-covered moats, the graves of the forty-seven Lonins, whose victim the book takes to be the Mikado, and the Ashewarra. “On the whole, I confess myself disappointed with Yeddo,” he writes, and of its streets, “The only wheeled vehicles in them are those driven by foreigners, hired for sight-seeing.” Kamakura and the Daiboots close the sightseeing, with Mr G. pitching his photographic apparatus and pilgrims who come “to pray and pay.”

The second tour disposes of a month in British North America and the States in a single clause and picks up at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, where he spends ten hours underground on the Long Route. Chicago follows — “which thirty-seven years ago contained only 400 inhabitants … now reckons 300,000” — then the Pullman cars west, Salt Lake City, where Elder Pratt defends plural marriage from Scripture and Brigham Young receives him “very courteously,” and the silver workings of the White Pine district. In California he sees Yosemite, for which he prints several pages of quoted description, its source unnamed, instead of writing his own, the Calaveras big trees with a table of annual rings, the geysers, the New Almaden quicksilver mine and the San Francisco mint. From Honolulu he sails to Hilo and rides to the summit crater of Mauna Loa, making it 14,100 feet by aneroid, sets out the kingdom’s revenue and expenditure to the dollar, and, after fifty years of missionary monopoly, judges the missionaries’ “treatment of the natives” to have been “a dead failure so far as results are concerned.” New Zealand brings the Thames gold reefs, Hokitika’s 171 public-houses and the coach over Porter’s Pass; from December 1870 to April 1871 he moves between Melbourne, Tasmania and Sydney, with the bone-boiling stench of “the stinking Yarra,” the Ballarat and Clunes quartz mines, and a two-hundred-mile ride from Circular Head to Launceston. He comes home by Ceylon and Suez, leaving Jaffa on 18 July 1871.

The third tour is the longest and least shapely. From Jerusalem he crosses the Jordan to Goblan’s tents again, then coasts to Alexandretta and rides by caravan through Aleppo and Orfa to Diarbekir. There he contracts for a kellik — a raft of 150 inflated goat-skins under a platform twenty-five feet by fourteen — and floats down the Tigris to Mosul, where the first of the Nineveh mounds seems to have been “completely ransacked,” and on to Bagdad, with an excursion to Birs Nimroud. Steamers carry him to Bussorah, Bushire, Muscat and Kurrachee; a tug hauls him 575 miles up the Indus in eighteen days at temperatures reaching 116°, and those pages hold his angriest writing, on Englishmen who speak of Indians “as niggers or brutes” and expect gratitude. Chapter XVIII is a whole Kashmir season at Sreenuggur and Gulmurg and ends with the deed transferring Kashmir to Golab Sing printed entire; chapter XIX comes back through Simlah, Delhi, Agra and Bombay. Hong-Kong, Canton and a Government barracoon at Macao, where he watches eighty-five coolies bound for Havannah penned within a rail, fall on either side of the Japanese chapters. The last chapter circles Ceylon by steamer, argues for Trincomalee against Colombo, and revisits Tasmania and Victoria. In the Red Sea a passenger drops dead; he is buried at eight in the morning and a concert fills the same gangway at eight at night. The book stops mid-itinerary, without a summing-up, “so on homewards by Brindisi, Venice, and Vienna.”

The second Japanese visit, pages 509 to 547, runs from 5 December 1872 to 27 January 1873. An interior excursion takes him to Adawarra, Meanosheta, Hakoni and Atami, where a jet of steam and hot water every six hours runs the thermometer to 212° and Sir R. Alcock’s dog Toby’s monument lies on a rubbish heap. On the Tocaido he counts “many hundreds of ginrickshas travelling to and from Yokohama, each drawn by one man,” and “besides the ginrickshas, not a single wheeled vehicle” — “until now, that the ginricksha has been invented, wheeled vehicles were unknown in Japan.” Around New Year, at Yokohama and Yeddo: the Mikado’s levee with every official in European costume, the new calendar, patterns of coats and hats pasted up on a board, pillar-boxes, an eighteen-mile railway taking 8000 dollars a week, two hundred girls firing tea with Prussian blue, eleven headless criminals on the dissecting tables of the Yeddo hospital, and the residences of six hundred Daimios, save those the Government has taken over, “now howling wildernesses,” a feudal system “so quickly, and, I believe, so completely, destroyed.” At Osaka he goes over Major Kinder’s mint and the castle — “When I visited this castle three years ago, during the war, there was nothing on the inside of it but the charred remains of the former buildings. Now it contains extensive barracks and several regiments of infantry.” Disappointed of permission for Kioto, he asks himself “Do I like these Japanese?” and decides he does.

A serving officer’s account of a single naval commission, The Eastern Seas follows H.M.S. “Dwarf,” a small gun vessel, from her commissioning at Hongkong on July 18th, 1871 to the day her ship’s company was relieved there on November 30th, 1874. Bax writes in the first person everywhere but the compiled history of Chapter II, alternating an “I” for his own visits, official calls and inland journeys with a “we” for the ship and her people, and he states his aim plainly in the Preface: “I have endeavoured to describe her commission of three years and eight months in those seas and the places visited.” He wants especially to make known the Russian ports on the coast of Tartary and eastern Siberia, and to describe the Japanese expedition to Formosa and its cause; for historical matter he says he consulted Père Gaubil, Dixon on Japan, the Chinese Repository, Captain Basil Hall’s voyages, and Beechey’s voyage of H.M.S. “Blossom.” Ten chapters run in the order of the cruise.

The first four chapters cover the passage out, China, Formosa and a call at the Loo-Choos, and Chapter II leaves the ship entirely for a compiled history of the island — the Dutch at Fort Zealand, the siege by Koxinga, the minister Hambrocock’s return to certain death — drawn from Burney and other earlier writers. Bax opens with the passage out from England in the troopship “Tamar” in April 1871 — St. Vincent, Ascension, St. Helena, the Cape, Natal, Mauritius, Singapore — then a typhoon at Hongkong, and station work out of Amoy and Swatow and afterward from Foo-Chow, to whose division the “Dwarf” is transferred as senior officer: raising foundered coal lighters, hauling a stranded schooner off a Formosan beach, and lying nineteen days by the wrecked steamer “Douglas” while the ship’s own men dived without dresses for boxes of treasure and a twenty-pounder shot turned back boats coming to plunder. He walks inland from Takow to the Peppo-hoan mission village of Baksa with a Presbyterian missionary and his family, and later goes with a missionary of the Canadian Presbyterian Church to Sin-kang, some sixty miles S.S.W. of Tam-sui, and over the frontier to a camp of Peppo-hoans buying a valley from an interior tribe, sleeping among people he calls savages and reporting an orgie held over a Chinese head taken the night before. At Twa-tu-tia he waits with the vice-consul until the two ringleaders of a riot are brought before them at nine at night by soldiers carrying spears and torches, and his companion takes a candle and reads the inscription on each man’s cangue. A call at the Loo-Choo islands brings a walk before daylight to the capital, Scheudi, a present of a pig and fowls from the king answered with blankets, serge, pictures and books, shopkeepers who retreat by a back door rather than sell anything, and officials who keep repeating that their island is poor and has neither gold, silver, copper nor coal, as though they feared annexation.

Japan enters in Chapter V and holds a little more than a quarter of the book outright, with Japanese affairs the subject of much of the Formosan material besides. Driven from the Van Diemen’s Straits by easterly gales, the “Dwarf” shelters in the Inland Sea in June 1873 and coals at Kobe before joining the Commander-in-Chief at Yokohama. Bax describes the Bluff with its Royal Marine camp, the eighteen-mile railway to Yeddo, the temples and tombs of the Tycoons with their stone and bronze lanterns, and a Japanese theater whose historical piece he finds monotonous enough to leave early. He notes trade passing from the large city of Osaca to Kobe, the government mint under English management, the deserted castle of Akashi with its samurai town outside the walls, and the landing of William Adams in 1599; he remarks that the Japanese change everything, even their religion, without settling on a replacement, and that the party of progress seems to care for none. Passing Simonoseki and Hirado, the squadron reaches Nagasaki, where he recounts the throwing of Christians from the cliff at Pappenborg in 1636 and estimates, on a priest’s word, some twenty thousand Roman Catholics in southern Japan.

Chapter VI carries the “Dwarf” north with the flagship “Iron Duke” from Nagasaki in July 1873, by Tsu-sima and the Corean coast to Possiette Bay, Vladivostok, Wrangel and Nakhodka, Olga Bay, St. Vladimir Bay and Barracouta harbor, with soundings, seine hauls of salmon, log barracks, and a running assessment of what the Russians are building. Because the flagship draws too much water, the Commander-in-Chief shifts to the “Dwarf” for the run over the bar and eighty miles up the Amur to Nikolaevsk, where salmon fall from six to fifty for the dollar and Bax posts one letter home through Siberia, one across America and one by the Peninsular and Oriental to compare the routes. Back at Pallas Bay the squadron’s blue-jackets dig a trench behind the settlement with axes, picks and shovels all through the 9th, by night as well as by day, and are still hard at it on the 10th, against a forest fire that nothing but a change of wind keeps from taking the houses. The homeward leg is Japanese again: a gale drives the ship into a sheltered bay on the west coast of Yesso that is not marked in her chart, and the next day’s blow is spent surveying it. The village there is Maro-Yama, and the greater part of those who come off to see the ship are Inos, a race he records as treated with great contempt by the Japanese; when a pair of double-glasses and some soap go missing after the visitors leave, he supposes the Inos responsible, “as they have no character to lose.” Then come Hakodate, the American-run government farm and inland colony, and the harbor of Nambu on Niphon.

Chapter VII is a spell of leave inland from Yokohama in October 1873, built around the ascent of Fusi-yama, made by Bax with the captain of the flagship and the admiral’s secretary, an interpreter called Gong, a cook, and nine coolies hired at Shi-bash-ere for wood and baggage. They start from the tea house at Mi-a-nosta, where the Mikado’s own rooms fall vacant for them, walk by Go-tem-bah, climb through forest into ashes and scoria in sleet and gale, and pass a smoke-filled night in stone rest house No. 7 at about 10,200 feet before reaching a summit he makes about 12,600 feet by mountain barometer, looking into the crater and paying respects at the little joss-house. The descent is a slide through snow. Afterward come the lake and cedar avenue at Hacone, the ruined castle of Odawarra, gin-rick-shas to Fugi-sawa, and the bronze Dieboots at Kama-kura, where he sets down the killing of Mr. Richardson on the Tokaido by the Prince of Satsuma’s followers and the bombardment that answered it.

The last three chapters move between Japan, China and Formosa. Bax winters at Kobe as senior officer in the Inland Sea, visits the open burial pit for criminals at Hiogo, is shown the governor’s plan to make the port safe by running a pier out from each end of the bay, and walks the curiosity shops at Miwara, where armor sold off from the castle lies in quantity enough “to arm a regiment” and at a very cheap rate. At Shanghai a field day and sham fight is arranged between the settlement’s volunteers and a naval brigade of about two hundred men landed from the “Cadmus” and “Dwarf,” and one evening he attends a missionary prayer meeting at which nearly a hundred seamen and marines of the “Cadmus,” “Dwarf” and the United States corvette “Lackawanna” are present; he argues at length for the seamen’s homes started at Yokohama and Nagasaki — the Yokohama one on temperance principles, the Nagasaki one fitted with a reading room, a bowling alley and about eight bedrooms after the settlement met and voted that no beer should be sold in it, and blown down in a typhoon just as it began to pay its own expenses — for the temperance hall with its reading room and library at Shanghai, and for the room a Church of England missionary at Amoy lent the men to read and meet in; he reports that commanding officers at Shanghai, Hankow and Tientsin have found their ships’ companies visibly changed where residents and clergy give the men somewhere to go, and puts much of the invaliding on the China station down to diseases a sober life would have avoided. The rebellion at Saga brings the “Dwarf” to Nagasaki in February 1874; a fruitless search follows among the Goto, Meac-sima and Kosiki islands for the missing boat of a foundered schooner, and the kite-flying festival at Nagasaki on April 25th. Chapter IX follows the Japanese expedition that sailed from Nagasaki on May 3rd with 1,200 troops, growing to some 2,500 soldiers and 1,000 coolies at Liang-kiou, sent to revenge the murder by the savages of some of the crew of a Loo-Choo junk wrecked two or three years before on the southeast coast of Formosa, the rest having made their escape to Takow; Bax calls on General Saigo, reprints a Chinese proclamation of June 21st, 1874 in translation, and reports the twelve Pellew islanders who reached Kelung in three canoes after sixty-four days and some 1,300 miles at sea. Chapter X returns to the wreckage left at Nagasaki by the typhoon of August 20th, ascends the Yang-tze to Ching-kiang and Nanking’s arsenal and ruined porcelain pagoda, and records, on the ship’s return to Shanghai on November 2nd, that the quarrel between Japan and China is settled at last, China agreeing to pay Japan 100,000 taels for the families of the murdered Loo-chooans and a further 400,000 for the roads and improvements the Japanese had made in the south of Formosa. The ship calls at Ningpo, where the coffins of the dead are left among the ruins to rot and the military command is held by an Englishman bearing the rank and title of Colonel, formerly an officer in Gordon’s “Ever Victorious Army,” the remains of which force are stationed there and have dwindled to barely three hundred men; then Amoy, and Hongkong, where the commission ends. The volume carries a frontispiece of “Fusi-yama Mountain, from Hacone” and a printed list of twelve further illustrations, among them the capture of Amoy by the mandarin forces in 1853, a Peppo-hoan woman and child at Baksa, Vladivostok, a Japanese mountain coolie and a Japanese junk. A large folding engraved map of the island of Formosa, which that list does not name, is bound in facing the first page of the Formosan history.

The Rambles of a Globe Trotter in Australasia, Japan, China, Java, India, and Cashmere is the travel journal of E. K. Laird, issued in two volumes by Chapman & Hall in 1875. The preface explains its origin: Laird wrote his letters and journals “generally after a hard day’s work of sight-seeing,” with “not the slightest idea of their ever appearing in print,” and consented to publish only after repeated inquiries about his “two years’ wanderings in many lands.” They stand “as they were penned at the time,” a few revised paragraphs excepted, and all he claims for them is that “they were taken on the spot.” That private form survives intact. Chapters consist of an “EXTRACT FROM LETTER,” headed with a place and a date whose year is always blanked as “187—,” followed by a “JOURNAL” of dated daily entries written to family at home; personal names are cut to an initial and a dash, “Mr. B——,” “Sir C. W——.” The book is dedicated to his mother, “as a token of affection and appreciation of the invariable interest she has evinced in my many wanderings by sea and land.” Each volume opens with an “INDEX” that is really a table of contents, every chapter followed by a run of catchwords with their pages, and with a list of eighteen plates in each volume — uncaptioned views printed sideways across the leaf, thirty-six in all — against the map and forty illustrations that both title pages announce.

The vantage is that of a young man traveling on introductions: he moves from consulate to legation to club, and lodges in port after port with the agents of J. M. & Co. He is slight — “I only weigh eight stone six” — dogged by boils and weak eyes, and complains that he is “never taken for less than thirty”; his family’s shipbuilding follows him about, the premier of Victoria telling him that he had often heard his father speak of the Lairds of Birkenhead, the Maharajah of Johore sending for him at Singapore because he had gone over the Birkenhead iron works when in England. At Kioto he supplies his own label: “if I were asked what my occupation was, I could only say, a ‘Globe Trotter’ in search of ‘the Elixir of Life,’ ‘Moabite Stone,’ or any other visionary article.” The first volume opens with the outward passage in the s.s. “Great Britain,” Liverpool to Melbourne in fifty-three days, with amateur theatricals whose prologues are printed entire. A month in Victoria follows — Melbourne, Geelong, sheep stations in the Western District, the Ballarat gold mines — then Tasmania, Sydney and the Blue Mountains, a passage back down the coast from Sydney to see the Melbourne Cup, and seven weeks in New Zealand: the coach over the Otira Gorge to Christ Church, the Maori village of Ohinemetu, and the hot springs and white terraces of Rotomahana. The steamer “Nevada” takes him on to Honolulu and San Francisco.

Japan fills pages 176 to 238 of the first volume — a month ashore, from March 29 to April 25, roughly a fifth of that volume and under a tenth of the two together. He crosses from San Francisco in the steamer “Japan” and reaches Yokohama with Fusiyama standing over the bay. He lands from a sampan, stares at the coolies’ calves, and fills pages on dress — chignons skewered with gold, clogs, a gait that is “a shuffle rather than a walk” — while complaining that upper-class Japanese, by “aping the manners and costume of the more civilized nations,” have “spoiled the charm of novelty for a traveller.” On March 31 he rides with a betto to Kanasawa and Kama-Kura, “old seat of the Shoguns,” and on to the Daibutz, the hollow bronze Buddha he measures at forty-five feet and climbs inside, then to Katase, Inosima, and a night in a tea house. Ginrickishas carry him from town to town and he never quite accepts them: “I do not yet like the idea of being dragged by men.” Yedo he does in a day by rail — the temple of Asaksa and its fair, a theatre he quits after fifteen minutes, the Shogun tombs at Shiba, the view from Atango-Yama — and what strikes him most is “the neatness and cleanliness of the Japanese,” though “as soon as he has a hat on he turns from a man into a monkey.”

His first considered letter is cool: the Japanese are “not very clever,” their character “shallow,” and they are “going ahead and altering their laws and customs too fast to be permanent.” Five days beyond the Treaty Limits take him by ginrickisha to Oudawara and by morimon up to Meonooshta, “the Baden-Baden of Japan,” with its hot springs, the sulphur baths at Ashyniou, and the cedar avenue at Hakoni. On April 12 he sails for Kobé and crosses to Osaca, “the Venice of Japan,” then goes thirty-four miles by ginrickisha to Kioto, “which is only open for foreigners during sixty days,” lodging in an old temple and spending a day at the Exhibition in the palace of Oosho; back at Osaca he calls the mint “the finest Mint in the world” and admires the castle for stones “decidedly larger than those of the Pyramids.” He threads the Inland Sea (“a fairy-like scene; and yet … I was disappointed. Can it be that I am growing blasé!”), is on deck at half-past four to pass the Straits of Simonosekio, and ends at Nagasaki and the island of Papenberg. Then he recants — “In one of my last letters I was inclined to run down Japan” — withdraws any suggestion that the Japanese are uncivilized, sets the Daibutz beside the Sphinx, and turns to the “Rising Sun,” hoping “no cloud may overshadow it until it has reached the full meridian of its glory.”

The remaining eighty-odd pages of volume I are China: Shanghai, the Peiho up to Tientsin, a springless cart to Pekin and the British Embassy, the Great Wall (“I have seen — aye, done the Great Wall”), the Ming Tombs, the ruined Summer Palace, Foo Chow, Formosa, Hong Kong, Canton, Macao, and Saigon, breaking off at Singapore. Volume II resumes there and holds no Japanese or Chinese travel at all; Japan returns only as a measure of other places — Javanese terraces recall it “in neatness,” Cashmere blossom is matched only “perhaps, in Japan.” Six weeks in Java open the volume: Batavia and its mosquitoes, a week as the guest of the Governor-General at Buitenzorg, an up-country ride to Sindanglaya, Bandong, and the crater of Tankanan Praha, a drenched ascent of Mount Pangarango, then Sourabaya, a sugar plantation, the Bromo crater on festival day, Boro Boudor, and the fête of the Emperor of Solo, where wives shuffle a hundred yards on their knees before a betel-chewing prince. Dutch rule is his running argument here, first “the best in the world,” later “simply one of oppression and trying to keep the people as much in ignorance as possible.” Ten days in the Straits Settlements follow — a twenty-five-foot boa constrictor, breakfast with the Maharajah of Johore, the durian — then a month in Ceylon: Kandy and Buddha’s Tooth, Newera Ellya, Mount Pedro, and a coffee plantation at Mattakelly.

India takes about five months, and with the Burmah chapter inside it fills a little under half of volume II. He lands through the surf at Madras, walks up to Ootacamund in the Neilgherries, sails to Calcutta, and goes north-west to Agra for the Taj Mahal — “probably the finest of all monumental edifices in the world” — and the Viceroy’s durbar there, with Delhi and the Kootub Minar, the memorial well at Cawnpore, the Residency at Lucknow and a second durbar with sixty elephants in the procession, and the dirt and antiquity of Benares following. From Darjeeling he watches Kinchinjunga and camps at 10,000 feet on Tonglo; the famine runs under these chapters as a constant background. A Burmese interlude takes in the Great Dragon Pagoda at Rangoon and elephants stacking teak at Moulmein, the Burmese being “a most good-natured race”; of the natives of India he writes that “they seem naturally a nation of beggars and thieves.” Cashmere, entered by the Murree route and left by the Punch, is the volume’s disappointment — “mud, mud, nothing but mud,” the fish said to abound in the Jhelam “a myth,” the celebrated beauties short of their reputation, and “considerably more ‘mere’ about it than ‘cash.’” He sails from Bombay as the monsoon breaks and reaches Birkenhead on July 17. An appendix tables the sea passages and land distances — eighty miles by railroad in Japan, 265 “in ginrickishas” — and totals the journey: 58,271 miles, 723 days away, 245 of them at sea.

“English Influence in Japan” is an article of twenty pages, presented in a footnote at its head as “An additional chapter for ‘Great Britain’” — the journal’s slip for the author’s Greater Britain. Charles Wentworth Dilke writes as a recent traveler — he was in the country in 1875 — and draws on conversation with a Japanese gentleman and an unnamed high authority, on foreign ministers and European residents, on native newspapers, and on official documents such as the annual report of the Japanese Postmaster-General. He opens by posing three questions: who made the Japanese revolution and still defends its principles, whether its popularity will last, and how long the present settled order will endure and whether English ideas will continue for an indefinite period to gain ground “in the country of the Rising Sun.” The revolution, he argues, was made neither by one man nor by a small group, and least of all by the Emperor, formerly known as the Mikado, whose part has been to approve everything done in his name — “He never says ‘No,’ only ‘Yes,’” as his Japanese informant put it to him. What looked like a revolution of the Daimios was in fact a revolution of their councilors, ambitious and poorly paid men who hated the Tycoons and who still govern; Okubo, the present prime minister, was one of them. Iwakura he dismisses as a courtier, an instrument of “those able, pushing democrats,” and Shimadzu Saburo, uncle of the young prince of Satsuma, as a Tory so violent that he is ridiculed — a man who spent 1874 writing Bemmo, an attack on Christianity, who came to the council of state with his head gummed in the old fashion and three coolies in attendance, and who argued for war with Corea chiefly to employ the discharged Samurai.

Dilke says plainly that an Englishman must feel some sympathy with the Japanese Conservatives, and he catalogues recent acts he calls shameless and vandalistic. Some of the most important monumental bronzes in the world have been sold for old metal — nominally, in many cases, the act of the priests, though he holds that the government could at once have stopped the practice; a proposal to sell the sixty-foot Dai-Butz was blocked by the foreign ministers; the guardian figures at the gates of the temple at Kamakura, where the great Buddha stands, were rebuilt only by subscription among the European residents at Yokohama; the Loo Choo gates and the Tycoons’ tombs at Tokio, formerly Yeddo, are thought to be at risk. In 1875, while he was in the country, Buddhist priests were hanged for burning their own temple after it had been “purified” into a Shintoo one.

Money and administration occupy the middle of the article. The Daimios were left a tenth of their old incomes — Satsuma dropping from £800,000 a year to £80,000 — while their retainers got nothing but some posts, and those not clever or instructed enough to become officers now earn a living dragging miniature hansoms; pensions of £2,800,000 weigh on a revenue of £9,000,000 and odd, and Okuma, the finance minister, is under public pressure to cut them, which Dilke thinks will probably happen and may well be submitted to willingly. Against this he sets services he admires: three thousand five hundred post offices opened in four years, thirty-three lighthouses that are models to any country in the world, an army drilled by the French and a navy and marines drilled by the English, and a personal cleverness in the Japanese people such that the foreign minister and the late Prince of Satsuma built steam engines from books alone. He relays Japanese grievances against England and endorses them — Britain’s refusal to enter a postal convention, its separate post office at Yokohama, and above all the “monstrous claim” of sporting rights, where Englishmen shooting over the country have at times killed poultry and slightly wounded inhabitants — and suggests that extra-territoriality itself might safely be surrendered, opening the mines to foreign capital. He then sets out the strength of the Japanese forces, judges that had war with China broken out two years earlier the Japanese would have taken Pekin, though Pekin might have proved a Moscow, and asks whether the European Powers could not be induced to support the status quo in the Pacific and recommend the island Powers of that ocean to put down their armies. Defining his title, he finds English diplomatic power the greatest but not overwhelming: the French hold the law and the army while the English have the navy and the mint, and foreign employees are dwindling, yet trade is in English hands, Yokohama and Hiogo are English towns, and both England and America push the Japanese toward English as an official language.

Observation crowds in among the arguments of the later pages. Dilke jokes about the evils that English influence brings with it — Birmingham metal work, cut-glass decanters, gingham umbrellas, hideous boots and felt hats, an ex-Daimio in a ready-made coat driving a gig — and insists that Japanese art is not yet killed, praising wall pictures of egrets and of gulls in a temple priest’s house on the Tokaido, new screens, enamel work, and a Nautical Almanac whose tables of logarithms are made beautiful by engraving. Religious indifference is a recurring theme: the crowded temple of Asaksa ringed by peep-shows, a clockwork Buddhist hell that the spectators treat as a joke, and a trade journal reporting brisk bronze exports because “old idols and temple bells are being very largely sold.” He tells of a tea-house caricature of a Daimio’s procession made up of insects, before whom a cockroach knocks its head on the ground, and of a dinner party at Hakodadi at which a Japanese guest teased an American and a Southerner for having fought each other in Texas ten years before, only to be told that six years earlier he and his fellow guest Enomoto had been fighting each other on that very spot — “Ah, yes,” came the reply, “but in Japan it’s different.” He quotes the native newspapers at length on both sides of the Corean question, and faults the new men for a severe press-gagging law and for inducing Sir Harry Parkes to make the publication of Japanese newspapers by British subjects in the treaty ports an offense punishable by imprisonment, mentioning Wirgman’s Yokohama Punch cartoon of the home minister toasting editors on a gridiron. A trip from Hiogo to the feudal castle of Akashi yields loop-holed walls, a park run wild, and a deserted shrine whose fine mats lie unstolen, and also his answer to his own second question: the national flag flew from every house for the Mikado’s birthday, but in the smaller villages, where there are no police, not a flag was up. The article ends in rhapsody rather than analysis, by way of the village book-shops and the comic English of the guide-books: the traveler’s safety on the roads, the villagers’ “Ohio,” the bow of equal to equal, and the claim that Japan is the last refuge of the Joyous Life, its rural districts forming with Wonderland and Through-the-Looking-Glass-Country “the three kingdoms of merry dreams.”

A round-the-world travel journal published in 1877 by Robert Nicholas Fowler, M.A., F.R.G.S., F.S.A., Fellow of University College, London. Its preface, dated from Gastard, Chippenham, in November 1876, concedes that “so many travellers round the world have published their journals, that an apology is required for adding to the list,” and pleads as excuse that the author has taken the opportunity to allude to “a number of questions of public interest in which, both in and out of Parliament, I have for many years taken a deep interest.” That promise shapes the book. A first-person narrative of one continuous journey made between September 1875 and March 1876 keeps stopping for essays on opium, colonial policy, and Indian finance, written by a man who calls himself “a Churchman and a Tory” and who sat on a Commons committee on East Indian finance. Eight chapters carry him from London to Japan, through Japan, down the Chinese coast, across the Straits Settlements and Ceylon, and then through four chapters on India. Japan fills the second chapter, roughly thirty-eight of the 289 pages of narrative; the four Indian chapters together take up more than half. Fowler reckons the whole at 34,000 miles. The volume is unillustrated, and a four-page index of names and subjects follows the text, ahead of the printer’s colophon and a bound-in Sampson Low trade list of April 1876.

The narrative opens with Fowler leaving London on Wednesday, 1 September 1875 and sailing from Liverpool next day in the Inman steamer “City of Chester.” Eight days and eighteen hours out of Queenstown bring him to New York, which he admires as a city of palaces while grumbling at hotels that charge by the day whether or not a guest takes his meals. Allowed only eighteen days in America, he spends them reaching the Pacific states by way of Niagara, Detroit, Chicago, the Mississippi, and Omaha, “the spot where civilization terminates.” At Salt Lake City he sits up talking with his Mormon landlord, who defends polygamy. Indians begging at a railway station provoke the book’s first sustained protest: the notion that feebler races must be extinguished by advancing civilization is, he writes, “a hollow and worthless excuse for the cupidity and rapacity of mankind.” After the Sierra Nevada snow-sheds, the Mariposa big trees, and the Yosemite Valley — on the road to which he runs short of money and is given credit by a forest innkeeper — he sails from San Francisco on 1 October in the Pacific Mail paddle-steamer “Alaska,” some eight hundred Chinese in her steerage, for a passage of thirty days.

Japan begins on 1 November, the “Alaska” anchored off Yokohama. Fowler notices the jinrikisha first — “I do not like turning men into cattle” — then goes that afternoon by rail to Yeddo to ask the British Minister, Sir Harry Parkes, whether Pekin can still be reached; told it cannot, he stays. He sketches the revolution — Mikado, Tycoon, Daimios, the disarming of the two-sworded samurai — visits the Tycoons’ tombs at Sheva, and with a government passport, two jinrikisha men, and no interpreter works the Hakone country: Kamakura and its great statue of Budda, the Tokaido, Odawara, the lake at Hakone, the hot baths of Myanoshita. Steaming west he reaches Kobe, Osaka, and Kioto, where a temple he calls Sanji Sanguento holds a thousand ranked figures, “a remarkable and melancholy exhibition of idolatry,” where admission to the Mikado’s palace at Gosha is at first refused, and spends “a solitary Sabbath in the midst of this vast heathen city.” The inland sea to Simonosaki draws his warmest writing; at Nagasaki he is shown Decima and the rock of Papenburg. Remarks on cleanliness, paper currency, prostitution, and the persecution of native Christians run alongside. Then the chapter argues: a nation that has taken “ten centuries at a bound” is opening 53,000 schools and building a navy on a land-tax supplying four-fifths of revenue, while deposed Daimios and disbanded samurai leave “floating elements of discontent” a soldier of fortune might turn into civil war. “The future looks to me a dark one.”

The third chapter follows the coast southward from the Yellow Sea. At Shanghai, “an instance of what European energy can effect,” Fowler contrasts the elected council of the English concession with French consular rule, walks the narrow streets of the walled Chinese city, has the tael and the comprador’s “chit” explained to him, and is taken by a Bible Society agent into two opium shops, one claiming a thousand visitors daily. Coasting steamers carry him to Foochow and the monastery of Kushan, to Amoy and Swatow, and to Victoria, Hongkong — “one of the most beautiful cities I have ever beheld” — where he walks up the Peak and inspects an opium-boiling works licensed for 120,000 dollars a year. At Canton he sees the Examination Hall with its 8,650 cells and meets a dozen residents at a missionary’s house to discuss opium. The chapter then turns to policy: to merchants demanding “a spirited, in other words a warlike, policy” toward Pekin, he answers that another war would drive Britain, as in India, “to enlarge our dominions, whether we wished it or not, and finally we should be obliged to govern China as we govern India”; forbearance is the only alternative. He closes on three questions he says he took up in Parliament — the opium trade, the Hongkong gambling-houses, and the Macao coolie traffic, the last documented from the burning of the “Dolores Ugarte” on her way to Peru and a Chinese government commission’s report on the coolies of Cuba.

A fourth chapter takes him by P. and O. to Singapore, to Penang with an essay on the Perak war, and to Ceylon, where he keeps Christmas at Kandy, climbs Pedro, and at Colombo dines with Sir Comara Swamy, a Tamil barrister who “complained that the dark races were looked down upon by the white” — to which Fowler replies that a knighthood placed him above all untitled English gentlemen. Landing through the surf at Madras in January 1876, Fowler is taken into Government House by the Duke of Buckingham, inspects Fort St. George, and works south to the Rock at Trichinopoly, the seven-walled temple of Srirungam, Tanjore, Madura with its hall of “one thousand columns (the real number being 999),” and the hill station of Ootacamund. Calcutta brings Belvedere, the Legislative Council, the vanished site of the Black Hole, and talk with Krislodas Pal of the Hindoo Patriot. The seventh chapter runs from the bathing ghauts of Benares to the Lucknow Residency, Delhi and the Kootub Minar, Mussouri, the Ganges Canal, Lahore, the Golden Temple at Umritsur, and last of all Agra, saved till the end on advice picked up at Amoy, the Taj being “far the finest sight in India.” It closes at the Well of Cawnpore. The eighth chapter reaches Bombay through Poona, where a fellow diner mentions having been to Mecca: “Then you must be Captain Burton.” He was. He is home by Aden, Suez, and Brindisi to the City of London on 18 March.

More than a third of the Indian half is argument rather than travel, and its spine is that India is being made to pay for England. The Madras chapter ends on the native army — the question he heard “most anxiously discussed,” regiments no longer fully officered, native gentlemen to be given the Queen’s commission if only “the snobbism of low-class Englishmen” can be kept from making their position unpleasant, and a closing complaint of “far too great a tendency to saddle India with charges which ought to belong to England.” Some forty pages from Calcutta take up the East India Company, the land revenue, the salt-tax, the Home Charges, and above all the government opium monopoly; forcing “this poisonous and deleterious drug upon the Chinese” he had called in the Commons, in the Indian budget of 1869, “the greatest blot on the name of the British nation.” The chapter ends not on opium but on schooling in Bengal and the zenana missions. A second essay, on the native states, runs from Dalhousie’s annexation of Sattara through the deposed Nawab of Tonk, “tried and condemned by a secret tribunal worthy of the worst days of the Venetian Council of Ten,” to Baroda. Granting the misgovernment “of the most atrocious description” and the deposed Guicowar “the most vicious of Eastern potentates,” he objects that Lord Northbrook deposed Mulhar Rao after an acquittal and before the granted period of reform had expired: “this mockery of justice is new in India.”

A topical survey of women’s lives in the six countries of its title, Japan named first, written by a Methodist minister who circled the world in 1873–4 with Bishop W. L. Harris and the Rev. W. A. Spencer of Chicago, the Rev. J. W. Waugh accompanying the party through Japan and China. Houghton’s preface describes visiting nearly all the English and American mission stations and making frequent inland journeys with residents who knew the languages; it states his aim to awaken deeper interest in “the debased millions of Asia,” and disclaims troubling the reader in every instance with references to authorities while insisting he has made no statement without ample warrant. The book is not divided by country. Twenty-five topical chapters — religion, birth, infanticide, education, foot-binding, betrothal, marriage, polygamy, houses, household life, seclusion, dress, chastity, labor, widows, suttee, funerals, and five closing chapters on mission work — mostly work through Japan, then China, then India, then a section headed “Among the Mohammedans” under which Egypt, Syria and Turkey appear; a few print country sub-headings, most simply run from one country to the next, and several are given wholly to one. The connective prose is Houghton’s own first-person reporting, but he interleaves long block quotations, mostly from named missionary women, and from the works he names: Doolittle’s Social Life of the Chinese, Griffis’s Mikado’s Empire, Humbert’s Japan and the Japanese, Butler’s Land of the Veda, Jessup’s Women of the Arabs.

The first chapter lays down what Houghton takes for the foundation of all that follows — that in all false religious systems woman has had a well defined but ignoble place — moving from a Chinese literatus’s argument that man stands as far above woman as heaven above the earth, through the Code of Manu and the Shasters, to chapters of the Koran in George Sale’s translation. Chapters on birth and infanticide follow, opening with an Arab mission-school girl, in a story told at Beyroot, who called a small thing “as little as was the joy of my father on the day I was born,” and running through testimony from Amoy, Swatow and Foochow to a Bustee magistrate’s 1868 returns, seven of ten villages holding a hundred and four boys, one girl. The education chapter reports that nearly the whole adult population of Japan can read, write and calculate, yet that in its higher government schools in 1873 he looked in vain among the pupils for a sprinkling of girls, the empress since founding a girls’ normal school at Yeddo under American teachers; and prints a long Chinese conduct-book, The Girls’ Classic. A chapter wholly on foot-binding works from two unbindings at Kiu-kiang and Shanghai — one won through a mission preceptress, the other bought — intelligent natives assuring him it was not half so pernicious as American ladies’ compressing of their waists, and ends with the “Christian shoe” devised so unbound converts would not be taken for improper characters.

Three consecutive chapters treat marriage in Japan, in China and in India; the Chinese one prints, inside a Foochow missionary’s letter, the bill of fare of a Feast of Betrothal — a girl of six pledged to a boy of eight, seventeen courses and sixteen standing dishes. Houghton attended the wedding of a Yokohama betto he calls Taro, whose sixteen-year-old bride was contracted through a mediator without being consulted and was left alone with him at ten at night, the two never having exchanged a word. He calls the Japanese wife a companion rather than a slave, yet without legal rights and with her evidence inadmissible in court; a chapter on polygamy and divorce reports that easy divorce, granted for numerous and trivial reasons, makes what he calls successional polygamy common, one legal wife at a time, with adultery punished by death in the wife and excused in the husband. India furnishes the extreme case: a Kulin Brahmin, who takes no bride-price but is paid by each bride’s father and leaves each wife in her own father’s house, whom Houghton met in Benares “said to have fifty wives, some of whom he had never seen but once, and none of whom he supported” — on whose death all of them, some mere girls, become widows at once.

Japan is the country Houghton most sets apart, yet holds only about seventy of the four hundred and eighty pages of text — less than China, far less than India. Its longest run is the chapter on Oriental houses: dwellings of plank and mud open to the street, the mat as national unit of measurement, carpet, chair, table and bed, the wooden neck-pillow, the fire-proof go-down, gardens hedged with bamboo, shrubs trained into junks and temples, and tea-houses — one over Hakoni Lake, Fuji-Yama above, which reminded him of Lake George; two nights at Hata, where seventy-five pilgrims bedded in rows while his party of ten foreign gentlemen took the rear suite, a blind doctor shampooed several of the party, and the struggle with the fleas was long and bloody. The same chapter turns to the Indian quadrangle: the Baboo keeps a library and magazines in the outer court, his wives the inner, in “mere sheds built against the wall, one story high, made of clay.” Household life brings wife-whipping, “sanctioned by the classics of China, the Shasters of the Hindoos, and the Koran of the Moslems,” and a church trial at Moradabad where converts of his own mission defended a wife-beater, one preacher holding that women must be kept in subjection “by judiciously whipping them” — recalling for him home debates over woman’s rights in the Church. He closes judging Eastern women, so far as he saw, tolerably happy, not inclined to murmur, “having no knowledge of a better.”

The rest of the Japanese material comes under dress, seclusion and chastity. Houghton states flatly that seclusion is not practiced in Japan and cites a government order, given in substance, urging ambassadors to take abroad their wives, daughters and sisters, that they might learn the correct system of instructing children; of secluded zenana women elsewhere he passes on a pupil’s word that a moss-covered wall was the only prospect she had had for years. The dress chapter adds pages on the kirimon, or outer garment, the obi tied behind in an enormous bow, and the shaved eyebrows and blackened teeth of married women, a fashion he reports is being gradually discontinued. The first of two chapters on chastity is largely Japanese: the public bath divided down the center by a low rail, which he argues is no evidence against Japanese virtue, and the Yoshiwara, the moated and walled licensed quarter. In a hall above a Yeddo silk-shop, every guest handed tobacco and a tiny pipe, he and Dr. Waugh heard a celebrated reader recite an historical tale for an hour to her samisen. The second pairs those readers with India’s nautch-girls, “the licensed courtesans,” who read and write, quote the Shasters, and appear at every wedding and festival; the Brahmins, he reports, take beautiful low-caste girls, marry them “to a deity,” and train them to offer themselves “to the frequenters of the shrine for hire, the funds thus secured going into the sacred treasury” — his phrase is “consecrated harlots.”

The darker second half is mostly India and China. A chapter on hard and degrading labor shows women hauling stone on the Cairo causeway and Jaffa road, at Syrian olive presses, drawing water at Nazareth; watching women yoked to the plow he turns to Europe: in Italy, France and Southern Germany he had seen “a woman and a dog, harnessed, side by side, drawing a small wagon,” a man riding in it, smoking his pipe. The Bombay Widow Marriage Association, formed 1866, died out by late 1876; suttee, prohibited since 1857, is still documented from Indian newspapers through 1875 and in the burning of three wives of Jung Bahadoor of Nepaul in 1877; and Chinese meritorious suicide, usually by public hanging, is classed as suttee — at a Shanghai house he was led past a feast to a room where a young widow’s body lay among richly dressed women, learning of it afterward. The funeral chapter keeps Japan’s earthen-jar burial, a fragment of umbilical cord between the folded hands, but its weight is Chinese and Indian: coffins kept in the house a year or more, one used “for a dinner table”; and the dying Hindoo woman carried to the Ganges, whose son, if she is long dying, will “hasten the closing scene by filling her mouth and nostrils with the mud of the river,” while a dead girl’s face is blackened with burning straw, the body cast into the stream — no pyre, “deemed quite sufficient for a female child.”

The last five chapters turn from description to advocacy for the American Woman’s Foreign Missionary Societies, which Houghton presents as “God’s remedy for her degradation and misery,” resting on one fact: only women can reach these women. His own party of gentlemen “was not permitted to enter any of these day-schools for girls, either in China or in India,” and the native Bible-readers reach “hundreds of poor wives and mothers who would not listen to a gentleman, or even to a foreign lady.” He prints the societies’ 1876 returns — six of them, collected for him by Miss Dora B. Robinson — and describes the Bareilly orphanage, where many of its hundred and fifty-three pupils bore their American sponsors’ names, so that Hindoostanee names gave way to Jane Smith and Sarah Brown. In the medical chapter he prints a woman physician’s account of a Nawab’s wife left to die because taking medicine from a Christian would break caste. The final chapter is not his: bylined by Clara A. Swain, M. D., first American woman physician to India, it tells in her own voice of her arrival at Bareilly in January 1870, the medical class of fourteen orphanage girls and three married women she taught, thirteen of whom were certified in April 1873, and the Nawab of Rampore’s gift of forty acres. Sixty-one illustrations, most from photographs: a frontispiece of Chinese Bible-readers and sixty set within the text. A four-page index closes the volume.

Twenty-nine letters written on the voyage out and from Japan between June 1871 and August 1875, collected into a missionary book for children. Mrs. Mary Pruyn was one of the ladies of the household that kept the American Mission Home in Yokohama, a boarding home and school for Japanese girls, and by her own account she sailed when “more than half a century of years had passed over my head.” The letters fill just over two hundred printed pages and run in date order but for one that falls out of sequence, from the outward voyage to her departure four years later. All are in the first person, and all but two speak straight to child readers; those two are addressed to the teachers as well as the scholars of Albany schools. Most go to her grandchildren in Albany — Mary, Bertie, and Kittie — and are signed “Grandma,” “Grandmother,” or “Grandmamma”; six, about a fifth of the pages, go instead to American children interested in the Home, most of whom have sent gifts to it or are being asked to support it — three of them to Albany Sabbath and industrial schools or to “the Sunday School Children in America” — and are signed with her name or her initials. Her preface says the letters were “written hurriedly,” with “no attempt at order,” and were gathered up with the consent of “the little folks to whom they were written, — the most of them my grandchildren,” for “the children of our Sabbath schools and Christian families.” Religious matter is not a frame around a travel narrative but runs through it: nearly every letter turns at some point to prayer, conversion, or an appeal for pennies.

The first letter is written twelve hundred miles at sea aboard the good ship Japan, and describes the swing the captain has rigged on the upper deck and the Chinese waiters with their long braids and boat-like shoes. From Yokohama Pruyn writes of a Sabbath on which the stores stay open and the fishing boats go out, of a typhoon during which a visiting child is found praying on her knees, and of an old temple at Kanagawa where worshippers chew paper pellets from the priests and throw them at the red guardian images to see whether they stick; inside she finds more gods than she can count, and many of the altars very much like those in the Catholic churches in Albany, and writes that there is “a great deal in the worship of these idolaters that is so nearly like the Romish church, that one could almost believe they were the same.” She reports the Japanese New Year with bamboo trees set before the houses, straw fringe along the eaves, whistling kites shaped like beasts and demons, dolls so lifelike she has mistaken them for babies, and a pyramid of rice topped with straw, bitter oranges, a crab, and dried fish-skin, each element of which she explains. Among these come a letter to the First Reformed Sabbath school in Albany asking for money for a larger building and more teachers, and the story of Nona, a lame child with a foreign father and a Japanese mother who learns to sing hymns. A later letter tells how a family altar was set up for the servants: a young convert named Shonoski, lodged with his wife in a room off the school-house, reads the Bible and prays with the household in Japanese every morning — the first house in the country, she says, where this has been attempted, and done in the knowledge that the government does not allow it and that those detected can be taken by the officers and put in prison.

A long excursion across the bay carries her, seasick and at the end spilled into two feet of water by the men carrying her ashore, then inland by norimono past flooded rice-fields and pear trees trained into green tunnels, to the moated estate of Sakuma. A later letter finishes the story: hosts who make up beds out of large wooden doors laid on blocks and spread with their new red woolen blankets, a party that decides the mats on the floor are easier than the doors, a visit to Mount Karnozan twelve miles off, where a thunderstorm forces a night on the mountain, and an evening meeting on Christian teaching held before some thirty household idols. From the back windows of the house on the bluff she watches through opera-glasses the ceremonies in the Chinese burying-ground below the lot, with roast pigs, burning papers, and the food afterward given to the servants and the poor. Other letters describe babies strapped to the backs of larger children, so that a child coming toward her seems to have two heads; the dreadful sores she sees on almost all the children, which she explains by saying that “the people are very wicked, and have some very bad practices,” so that God “punishes them by letting them be weak and sickly,” and “the poor little children have to suffer for it”; the sending away of the small boys in 1872 so that the Home can take girls only; earthquakes that slide the tiled roofs off houses; a visit to Shidzooka, where she is the first foreign lady ever in the city and a crowd follows her jin-ri-ki-sha to the temple gate; a musical party of koto and samisen at which a young wife’s blackened teeth repel her; a Christmas tree strung with pop-corn grown from General Capron’s seed; and the first Sunday school in Japan, opened at half past three and closed with the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. A summer up at Hakone brings the desolate ground called O’Jin-Oku, or the “Great Hell,” meetings for the women held every day and evening in the rooms of the house they have taken, and a crowd outside her door around a god’s carriage set down in the street — the man who keeps the house has invited the bearers to rest, she supposes, and offered them saki, and they stop to drink and dance and shout, in what she calls “the most dreadful exhibition of heathen idolatry I have ever seen.”

The later letters mix description with the Home’s own history. Writing to Sunday-school children in America, Pruyn takes them through the school-room where the native church also meets, the dining-room where thirty-six girls and children now eat with knives and forks, and the sleeping-rooms, and tells of O’Sono, whose father died of fever in the Formosa campaign and who is promised the best and largest girls’ school in Satsuma by General Saigo as soon as she is trained to teach. She retells “The Fabulous History of Japan,” with the egg-shaped chaos, the spear that drips mud into an island, and Izanagi-no-Mikoto and Izanami-no-Mikoto, calling it foolish and its believers to be pitied rather than blamed. A mountain trip in an oversized kago she has had built ends with her coolies setting her down in the rain to beg for a present until torches come back for her. The coachman’s baby, named Kittie after her granddaughter, dies, and is buried from the school-house before more than a hundred people; a summer at Katasi brings boating around Inoshima and the bronze Diabutz at Kamakura. The last letter, dated August 29, 1875, announces that ill health obliges her to leave, asks the children to keep working for Japan, and closes with verses by Miss M. G. Brainard. Four engravings after photographs accompany the letters: a frontispiece of the school-house of the American Mission Home at Yokohama, full-page views of a Japanese woman playing with a doll and of a ride in a jin-ri-ki-sha, and, set into the page of the letter that introduces it, a group of Japanese young ladies.

Charles H. Eden’s Japan: Historical and Descriptive is a compact popular survey of the country, issued in a uniform series that also carried his India, Historical and Descriptive. Its title page describes the work as revised and enlarged from the French Les Voyages Célèbres, and the book is throughout a compilation rather than a traveler’s own record: the descriptive chapters are built from long extracts credited above all to Humbert, Lindau and the Comte de Beauvoir, with two from Bousquet and one apiece from Sir Rutherford Alcock and Baron de Hübner, and further citations of Siebold, Meylan, Titsingh, and The Statesman’s Year-Book. The preface states the purpose plainly: to hold “within a short compass what could otherwise only be discovered by an extensive perusal of large and expensive works,” with popular tales and legends interwoven to make the account more attractive. Twenty-one chapters follow — an opening survey of national peculiarities, a historical narrative of Japan’s dealings with the West, and then a long topical description of religion, society, city life, amusements, domestic custom, manufactures, and trade.

The first chapter gathers what Eden calls the curious anomalies of the country: books that begin where English books end, ladies who blacken their teeth, sexes mingling in the public baths, old men flying kites while children look on, and a state with two sovereigns — the Mikado, “the shadow,” shut in a palace prison, and the Tycoon, “the substance,” scarcely less confined. Yedo appears as a city of orchards and green lanes without architectural beauty, so combustible that the whole of it is reckoned to burn and be rebuilt once in five years; the great earthquake of 1783 is quoted at length, and the shock of 1854 that wrecked Simoda and spun a Russian frigate “round and round like a top.” The theater, the Daimios and their swash-buckling retainers, and the Hara Kiru stand as survivals of a feudal age, set against the new Anglo-mania — Japanese “swells” riding bicycles through Yokohama in full English costume and gamins whistling “John Brown’s Body.”

Chapters two through four trace contact with the West: Marco Polo’s Zipangu and Kublai’s disastrous fleet, the storm-driven landing of Mendez Pinto, Portuguese trade and Jesuit ascendancy, the edict of 1597, the massacre of native Christians near Nagasaki in 1622 with its catalog of tortures, the banishment of “the whole race of the Portuguese,” the Dutch penned into the fan-shaped island of Desima, the English factory at Firando under William Adams, and the failed overtures of Russia and France. Commodore Perry’s squadron anchors off Uraga in July 1853, President Fillmore’s letter is given in extract, and there follow the landing at Gori-Hama, the treaty of March 1854 opening Simoda and Hakodadi, Lord Elgin’s mission and his gift of a steam yacht, and the Japanese embassy that toured London, Paris, the Hague, and Berlin uttering only the occasional “Wonderful!” The murders of foreigners and legation staff at Yokohama and Yedo, the firing of part of Kagosima, the French landing at Simonasaki, and a general assembly of Daimios voting sixty-five to forty-seven that the hour to declare war on foreigners had not yet come close the historical section.

Turning descriptive, Eden gives the empire as a group of nearly four thousand islands with some thirty-two millions of people, canvasses theories of the origin of the race, and retells a native tradition of the Chinese tyrant Sikono, whose physician escaped him by sailing east with three hundred youths and three hundred maidens in search of an elixir of immortality. Religion occupies four chapters: the Kami creed with its cosmogony of atoms, the arrival of Buddhism from Corea in 552, the wars of the armed monasteries, the mission of Francis Xavier in Kiusiu in 1549, and a persecution whose victims are numbered above twenty thousand. A survey of doctrine follows — the Sintoo rules of pollution and purification, the stages of Buddhist contemplation, and the seven household gods of good fortune, each described with its emblems, among them the fisherman Yebis, the rat-attended god of wealth, Hotei “the Diogenes of Japan,” and Benten with her fifteen sons. Eden describes the Kami temple at Kamakoura, the great bronze idol in its silent grove, and the temple of the thirty-three thousand three hundred and thirty-three divinities with its god of toothache, and quotes Humbert’s eyewitness account of the Sannoo festival at Yedo, with its long-nosed Tengon, pasteboard white elephant, and gigantic lobster. The usurpation of Tycosama, the founding of the Shio-goon line at Yedo, and the recent revolution that put the Tycoon to flight and restored the Mikado — who, Eden notes, was formerly invisible even to his own subjects and is now frequently seen driving or on horseback — are compressed into a few pages. A chapter on the grades of society lists nobility, literary class, and commons, with the mendicant Kotsedjikis, the hide-curing outcasts, and the descendants of the old Christians excluded altogether, and closes with specimens of popular literature — hero-tales, the Confucian story of “The Fatal Star,” “The Old Woman and the Sparrow,” and “The Stone-Cutter.”

The heart of the book is a long tour of Yedo and of Japanese daily life. Eden lays out the city’s quarters and makes the Niphon-Bass, the bridge from which all distances in the empire are measured, the point of vantage for its most picturesque view. Mounted Yakonins in japanned hats, tattooed running grooms, the fish market and the whale and shark merchants, the disreputable suburb of Sinagava with its masterless Lonins, and the story of the forty-seven Lonins all pass in sequence, followed by the Tocado highroad with its norimons, kangos, and newly invented jinrikishas, and its rivers forded on the shoulders of a hereditary corporation of bearers. The bath-houses are described at length from Beauvoir and Lindau, defended against the charge of immodesty on the ground that modesty is a social institution, and half-seriously proposed as the people’s parliament. A chapter on the tea-houses distinguishes the respectable Tscha-jas from the Joro-jas and gives an unsparing account of the girls sold into them as children and the debts by which they are held for life. Then come the fair at Yomasta with its mountebanks and nose-balancers, the wrestling of the giant Soumos, and the Sibaia in the Yedo suburb of Osaka, where plays run from dawn to night, women’s parts are taken by men, scenes revolve on a turn-table, and a black-cowled Shadow attends each actor with a candle on a stick. A chapter of popular superstition follows — the demon cat that haunts the house of the Prince of Hizen, a supernatural rat-hunt, and foxes who repay a kindness — and further chapters treat costume, acupuncture and moxa cauterization, earthquake-conscious houses, miniature gardens, marriage and concubinage, funerals by burial and by burning, and a round of festivals culminating in a New Year that falls in February, before a closing section on the Ainos of Yezo.

Three final chapters turn to letters, industry, and trade. Eden sets out the forty-eight syllabic signs and the four series of characters and their bewildering intermixture, surveys printing from wood-blocks, poetry, and astronomy, and works through a calendar of intercalary months and a reckoning of hours in which midday and midnight are both nine o’clock. There follow subscription libraries at fivepence a month, public lecturers traced by the numbered sandals at the door, a handful of proverbs, and accounts of fan-painting, bronze-founding at Kioto, and the many-coated process of japanning — capped by Beauvoir’s comic account of beating a shopkeeper down from two hundred boos to twelve. Manufactures cover porcelain, paper-making from boiled bark, and sericulture, with extracts from the treatise Yo-Sau-Fi-Rok and the legend of the filial weaver; then agriculture on half-acre plots, rice transplanting, the culture and repeated firing of tea, giant camphors beside firs dwarfed in five-inch boxes, the scarcity of livestock, keel-less native shipping, and the new railway from Yokohama to Yedo. The last chapter describes the open ports in turn — Nagasaki in decline, Yokohama risen on English commerce, Hakodadi, Hiogo or Kobi, Osaka, and Niegata with its dangerous entrance — prints a table of Anglo-Japanese trade, and predicts that within a generation Japan will rise to a prosperity unequaled among the kingdoms of the East. The volume carries numerous cuts and a map, opening with a barber’s shop as frontispiece and closing with an index keyed to both text and cuts.

A first-person narrative of four years spent in Japan as a hired teacher of science, published for young readers by a religious publishing house. The unsigned Preface sets out the vantage: the author “resided four years in the country (1871-1875), in the service of the Japanese government; two years were spent at the city of the exiled Tycoon, and two at the modern capital of the Mikado,” and the book is “a simple narrative of his experiences and adventures, presented from a Christian standpoint,” “intended primarily for the young” but also fit for “children of a larger growth.” Its twelve chapters follow that employment in order — arrival at Yokohama, the overland journey to Shidz-u-o-ka, two years there, the transfer to Tokio, two years at the Imperial College, a long journey to Kioto, a chapter on missions, and departure. Clark narrates almost all of it himself, opening “AT early dawn on Wednesday, October 25th, I looked out of my state-room window from the steamer Great Republic” and closing at sea off China; the exception is four printed pages at the end of Chapter IV, where a missionary friend takes over the book in his own first person to describe Clark’s house and manner of living. Set pieces slide into an instructive second person — of houses and bedding, of the road, of a temple, of the schoolroom where “all the scholars bow down in an instant before you,” of the tea-pans — and at Tokio castle and among the lantern-lit tables on the Kioto river flats into a guided-tour “let us stand” and a running present tense.

The opening chapter turns quickly on a dispute over terms. Engaged to take charge of a scientific school at Shidz-u-o-ka and teach chemistry and physics, “liberally paid by the Japanese Government,” Clark finds that the Dai-jo-kan, or Council of State, has slyly inserted into the thirteen articles a clause forbidding him to teach Christianity and binding him to silence on all religious subjects for three years; friends urge him to sign or lose “$300 a month, and all your good chances besides,” he refuses, word comes after three days that the clause is to be stricken out, and he reports the officials more friendly than ever and respectful of the “pluck” displayed. The journey inland fills Chapter II: the Tokaido with its double rows of pines, two-sworded Samourai and bell-carrying pilgrims, a detour to “Dai-Butz,” the great bronze idol of Japan, into whose lap he climbs to sing the long-metre doxology before the astonished priest, the crossing of the Hakone pass in a kan-go carried on coolies’ shoulders, a night at the Hakone hotel with a wooden pillow-block and rats, and a formal reception by the Gon-dai-san-je, governors of Su-run-ga, conducted through French into Japanese. The first year is spent living in a Buddhist temple, where he keeps a Sabbath Bible-class alongside a school of nearly a thousand students and fifty Japanese assistants, and where earthquakes, temple drums and a murder by the gate-keeper break the monotony; here too is his interpreter Shimojo, who expounded the most abstruse scientific subjects with a clearness Clark found delightful and died in his twenty-fourth year, under a stone in a Japanese cemetery in Tokio whose inscription his friend Nakamura wrote in Chinese and closed with a statement of the Christian faith. Chapter IV describes the foreign-style house the government decided to build on the corner of the ruined castle moat, put up by Katz and Okubo as a gift from San-mie-san, a young prince in their charge, with carpenters who for a long time could not be prevailed upon to build the chimneys at all, until at last they broke holes through the floors and roof and put them in with the stone-cutters’ help; a Christmas-eve stereopticon show and a dinner for forty; a costumed tournament of “Reds” and “Whites”; and the old anti-Christian edict tablet hanging in the parlor. Chapter V collects excursions and comical experiences: a soaking walk to the “White Rope” waterfall and a farm-house bath-tub used in turn by a dozen people; the ex-Tycoon, who lives near by and who, sent a chromo of a hunting scene and invited to tea, answers in an elegant perfumed note written with his own hand that he would like to come but that political difficulties are in the way, for he is an exile, and returns a china aquarium bowl carried by four men, so large that Clark sits in it and has his photograph taken — until Sam Patch, the cook, puts several gallons of hot water in it to make a bath and it bursts; a boar hunt with nearly two hundred armed men; a duck hunt in which someone fires at him and a boy is killed; the choosing of a well site in an oil district; and laboratory demonstrations in which a Leyden jar and a Ruhmkorff coil are turned on dignified officials and Samourai.

Fuji-Yama gets a chapter of its own: a first attempt from the north with the missionary Ballagh, lost after dark on trackless lava plains and driven back by two days of storm in a straw shanty, and a second from the south in September — a day of twenty-one hours from a two-o’clock start, up past shrines and shuttered pilgrim huts to the broken lip of the crater in a wind that blows him over, his two companions — a guide and a Japanese student — frightened out of going to the top by a half-dozen pilgrims huddled in a stone hut waiting for the storm to lift, coaxed a mile farther up, and then deserting him while he is at the crater and carrying his instruments down the mountain, so that the barometer is read only far down the slope, at a little above 20.50 inches, “about 11,000 feet,” and the mountain reckoned, with the descent estimated back in, at “a little more than 11,560 feet.” The same chapter follows the tea of Su-run-ga from the picking to the boiling, the rolling of the leaves by hand over charcoal pans, the sifting by girls at low tables, and the re-firing at Yokohama whose odors opened the book. Removal to Tokio comes when the government centralizes education and calls away his friends and best students; Clark argues to the Educational Department that “no education was truly national which disregarded the interests of the interior,” and records that the Department admitted the truthfulness of the argument and went on calling them away. His director at the Kaisei Gakko turns out to be Hatakeyama, known to him for several years in America, who had parted from him at the Albany depot with “You go westward while I go eastward, and we will meet around the world in Japan!” — a man whose native city Kag-o-shi-ma had been bombarded by English war-ships, who became a Christian at New Brunswick and answered his government, when called to account, that he had gone abroad to study the true source of western civilization and had found it in Christianity, and who was given charge of the other students sent to America rather than punished for it. Clark starts three Bible-classes, one of them at the house of Nakamura — an officer from the province he was bound for, the most noted scholar of Chinese literature in Japan and yet “as simple as a child,” who had called at the Mission Home in Yokohama while Clark was out and afterward wrote up in his own broken English how the children there entertained him with singing from cards and “the biblical pictures, very fine,” who had petitioned the imperial government to build a Christian church in Tokio, who declined a place on the embassy to America on the ground that he had “once lived in a Christian country — England — without learning Christianity,” and who came to sign his letters “Your most humble servant, and to be your future and forever friend in the spiritual world.” Clark paddles a one-man canoe he calls “The Rob Roy of Tokio” through the moats and canals, walks the Tori among shops and children’s kite-fights, takes his first ride on the new eighteen-mile railway with a little boy who had lived in his house and who runs out at the first stop to look under the wheels for what is pushing the car, notes the farmers who cut the telegraph wire and then watch it for hours to see the messages go by, and fights a fire in the roof of the college with three Babcock extinguishers while Japanese firemen break in the roof above him. Chapter IX recounts how he used the stereopticon to get inside the palace, showing a hundred views of Europe and America to the Mikado and empress with two marine bands playing, then raising a magnesium lamp to light the departing court so as to see them; he calls the Mikado “a sensible man and a good emperor, but as ‘a god’ he is fast becoming a failure,” and closes with the four old classes of society and a mock battle of fourteen thousand troops staged after the Formosa settlement with China.

The Kioto journey occupies several weeks: a violently rough passage to Kobe aboard the Pacific Mail steamer Oregonian, the imperial mint and sulphuric-acid works at Ozaka and the enormous stones of its castle, a moonlit night on a Japanese gondola poled and towed upriver by eight men, a week among the temples of Kioto including Kiyo-Midzu with its high stages and its cold waterfall where worshippers stand counting beads, an evening among the lantern-lit tables on the river flats, then Lake Biwa, Hikoni, three hundred and fifty miles by jinrikisha, Nagoya with its golden roof-fishes, and a junk across Su-run-ga Bay. Chapter XI is the one chapter given wholly to missions: the edict-boards declaring “The evil sect called Christian is strictly prohibited,” the persecutions of two centuries before, the removal of the edict and the board Clark ships home as a relic, the first Protestant church in Japan, organized by Ballagh in March 1872, its edifice standing in Yokohama on part of the ground where Perry made his treaty in 1854, the American Mission Home and its three ladies, Dr. Hepburn’s dictionary, and an answer to the objection that the Japanese are well enough as they are — he grants that as a people “they certainly excel us in politeness, gentleness, obedience to parents and superiors,” that their sense of honor is “at least equal to that of the average American,” and replies that even their lives on earth “would be better, their hopes brighter,” and that “above all, Christianity brings salvation,” meaning “deliverance from eternal death.” Elsewhere the religious matter is interspersed rather than argued continuously, though Ballagh’s four-page letter and the page Clark gives to Hatakeyama’s conversion are exceptions; the language of “heathenism,” “pagan” and “idols” is habitual in the first three chapters, thins almost to nothing across the long travel chapters, and returns not in the missionary chapter, which uses it only in passing, but in the burial scene of the last — “heathen rites,” “the heathen altar.” Blunt secular judgments stand alongside it, among them that the United States “had no right to force Japan to pay $700,000” into its Treasury in what the book calls the “Japanese indemnity,” brought on when the Shimonoseki forts fired on foreign ships. The last chapter buries Sam Patch — a sailor-boy blown to sea in a typhoon, picked up by an American vessel and carried to San Francisco, taken toward Japan on Perry’s flag-ship the Mississippi and, afraid of losing his head if he landed, permitted instead to sail around Cape Horn to New York — with what Clark calls “a Christian form of burial”: the ordinary square Japanese coffin, a Testament Clark had given him the year before and his wife had placed in his hand, a plot secured and a grave dug that morning, two and a half miles up the Tori on a temple-shaped cart drawn by two old men, and, since new regulations forbade burial within the city and Sam could not be laid beside Shimojo as Clark had intended, a grave taken on Nakamura’s offer beside the tomb of Nakamura’s ancestors beyond Christian Slope, so called from a Jesuit imprisoned there more than two centuries before who converted his jailer. Ballagh being out of town, a Rev. Mr. Thompson officiates, “using the Japanese language”; a Buddhist rite Clark finds already under way at the altar he decides, after a first impulse to stop it, to let continue; and over the grave he raises a stone cross inscribed SAM PATCH. Then come the farewells, an ovation from more than a hundred students at the Tokio depot, the news that Hatakeyama died of consumption on the Pacific a few days before the steamer reached his native land and was buried, though a member of the Christian church, “in a Shinto cemetery in Tokio, with the most imposing pagan honors,” and the steamer Behar through the inland sea to Shimonoseki and Nagasaki, where the book ends as Clark sails for Shanghai “face to face with all the dread uncertainties of a long and lonely journey around the world.”

Thirty-two plates accompany the text and no illustration is printed within it: every one is a full-page wood engraving on its own inserted leaf with a blank back, and twenty-seven of the thirty-two are laid sideways, so the book has to be turned to look at them. The first is the frontispiece, the new house on the castle moat; the second an upright outline map of the Empire of Japan with an inset of Tokio and vicinity and a pronunciation key, whose original the Preface credits to “his friend and fellow-traveller, Mr. W. E. Griffis.” The Preface also says the illustrations are taken from original photographs, and the text points out the camera standing on a table in the plate of the Tokio house as “the one employed in taking some of the pictures of this book.” The last plate but one is not a picture but a facsimile of Matthew vi:9–13 in Japanese, which Clark says was prepared in New York by the American Bible Society and is “the fairest specimen of printing in Japanese” he has seen produced outside Dai-Nippon.

An illustrated book made for English children, published by Griffith and Farran in 1879, its title page appending to M. Chaplin Ayrton’s name a run of Paris and Edinburgh qualifications and its introduction signed from the École de Médecine, Paris. The dedication, “TO ŌJŌSAMA,” names its dedicatee only by an honorific and then stages a scene: an old Japanese nurse, “showing her black-stained teeth,” quotes “great Nipon’s proverb” about sending the child you love on a journey and asks where her charge is bound, and the child — “the little ladyship whose features, though, neither whose dress nor talk, show her to be a European” — answers, “To my honoured grandmother of my noble country.” The introduction starts from the Japanese fans, dolls and lacquered pen-trays already in English homes and shops and from “the jargon of fashion for ‘Japanese Art,’” an expression Ayrton rejects on the ground that “the whole glory of art in Japan, is, that it is not Art, but Nature simply rendered, by a people with a fancy and love of fun quite Irish in character.” The stated object is that young folks who find “books of travels thither too long and dull for their reading” may “catch a glimpse of the spirit that pervades life in the ‘Land of the rising Sun’”; a portion of the book, the introduction adds, is derived from translations of Japanese tales given to the author by Mr. Basil H. Chamberlain, and the rest was “written at idle moments during graver studies.”

The first forty-seven pages describe more than they narrate, and they change voice as they go. “Seven Scenes of Child-Life in Japan” works through the seven full-page plates — which the title page says were “drawn and engraved by Japanese artists” — while speaking directly to a child reader: “These little boys all live a long way from England in islands called ‘Japan.’ … you must fancy from these pictures what little Jap boys are like.” The pictures are made to explain wooden clogs held on by a thong between the toes, socks with a compartment for the big toe, coins with square holes strung on a straw, the wide sleeve used as a pocket, humming bamboo tops, the big dogs of the streets of Yedo, the tame ones carrying a wooden label with the owner’s name where an English dog would wear a collar, bamboo stilts called “Sangiash” after the herons of the rice-fields, and the masked house-to-house performance called “Kangura.” “The Scrap-Book” then turns first-personal and English — a childhood third share in a scrap-book owned with two elder brothers, then a later one of the writer’s own making that was “tumbled into a box that was sent to Japan” and filled there with Japanese prints — and its print-shop scene, in which “the august Grandmother” carries her Ojo-sama pick-a-back to buy a penny picture-book, frames the story of O’Shu, who strips and lies on the river ice to melt it with his own warmth after his step-mother wishes aloud for fresh fish, until heaven, touched by his filial piety, melts the ice and two carp swim into his hands. “O’Shogwats (New Year)” follows two children, Yoshsan and his sister O’Kiku, through the pine-and-bamboo gate arch and its gohei paper zigzags, the pounding of rice-cake, their father’s departure at dawn in “full European evening-dress” for the Emperor’s levee, the Takara-bune print of the seven Gods of Wealth tied to their pillows for lucky dreams, and ball-songs and counting-rhymes, some romanized, some Englished; in “The Chrysanthemum Show” Yoshsan and his grandmother climb to the great temple at Shiba, where chrysanthemums are trained into the warrior Kato Kirjomasa and into “a barbarian lady, and even her child,” which Ayrton calls “an unconscious caricature of Europeans.”

Eight retold tales occupy pages 49 to 92, the part of the book closest to plain folk narrative; filial piety is the explicit moral of three of them. Two children asleep in a junk are carried off by tide and wind to an uninhabited island, where they plant out the seedling rice they were ferrying and are found years later, able to offer their aged parents “Imo-se-jima,—the brother and sister island.” “Fishsave” takes his name from the fish that carries him across the sea from China to the beach of Naniwa and to the ambassador father who had never written. A girl of Echigo, given her dying mother’s mirror, worships her own reflection in it, never having heard of a mirror; a peasant girl near Aska goes on picking parsley for her mother while Prince Shotoku Taishi’s procession passes, and is taken away to become the “Parsley Queen”; the wrestler Tsuneyori lets a river snake coil round his legs until it bursts, then has men haul on a rope until sixty of them match the creature’s pull. A monk is met on his deathbed by a fire-carriage and “the red, the black, the grey three-toed devil drivers” over a borrowed bushel of temple rice he never returned; the two daughters of the rōnin Okada put on white gowns so that their father, out shooting storks by night, will kill them and be converted from taking life; and in “Uranai” a traveling diviner locates in a hollow pillar the thousand pounds that a dead adept had foretold his daughter would recover from a lodger.

The last quarter returns to description. “Games” sets Japanese play beside English nursery play — blindman’s buff is Mekakushi, “eye-hiding”; knuckle-bones is played with five little stuffed bags instead of sheep bones, which the children cannot get because the Japanese do not use sheep; the snow-man is Daruma, “Buddha’s squat follower,” “whose legs rotted off through his stillness over his lengthy prayers” — and adds games with no English counterpart, among them Hoi kango, in which two children carry a bamboo pole on their shoulders while a third clings to it in imitation of a palanquin, and mock battles in which Tokio boys, hearing of the modern tactics of “the late insurrection” in Satsuma, arm themselves with bamboo breech-loaders. Judging that “the games and sports of Japanese children have … been so well described by Professor Griffis,” Ayrton gives some twenty-three pages of Griffis’s account as an appendix, and it ranges over street shows and toy stalls, card games such as the Iroha Garuta of proverbs and the Hiyaku Nin Isshiu Garuta of a hundred poems, kite duels fought with glass-coated string, the Hina Matsuri and the paper carp flown for boys on the fifth day of the fifth month, and a flag-and-earthenware battle game since “forbidden by the Government as being too severe and cruel.” Two lists in the front matter name seven full-page pictures and twenty-three smaller ones; the seven plates carry no signature or credit, though many of the smaller blocks carry a small drawn monogram, and none of the Japanese artists the title page invokes is named anywhere in the volume. A note in the front matter explains the device on the cover: a red and gold paper string called Midzuhiki, and a paper bag with a piece of seaweed inside, called Noshi, “are the Japanese symbols that the book is a present.”

Wiley’s volume is a Methodist bishop’s record of an official visitation, laid over memories of an earlier residence. Its preface, which speaks of the author in the third person, explains that he was appointed in 1850 as missionary physician to the mission at Foochow, reached the field in 1851 and remained until 1854, and that in 1877 the bishops of his Church appointed him to visit all their missions in China and Japan — a visitation of nearly a year that took in the Chinese coast from Peking to Canton, five hundred miles up the Yang-tsze-kiang, and every open port of Japan from Hakodate to Nagasaki. The book is written, he says, “mainly from a missionary point of view,” but promises also “much information on topics of general interest,” on manners, customs, institutions, religions and foreign relations. Its thirty-three chapters run first as a dated travel narrative in the first person — “On the 24th of July 1877, accompanied by my wife and little daughter, I started on a tour of official visitation” — and then, from chapter XXIX on, as topical essays on Christianity, on the religions of the two empires, and on their women. A note on pronunciation precedes the text, fixing the vowel values behind spellings such as To-ki-o, Yo-ko-ha-ma, Ha-ko-da-te and Yang-tsze-kiang.

The narrative opens in San Francisco, where Wiley spends two days at the Chinese mission of the Rev. Otis Gibson, which shelters about twenty-five women from the companies that had imported them and stands “between two lines of enemies,” the Chinese companies on one side and white hatred of the Chinese on the other, with Gibson’s house assailed by the mob and Gibson himself burned in effigy. He sails on 12 September in the Pacific Mail steamship City of Peking with six hundred and thirty Chinese in the steerage, observes at sea that the steamers are taking nearly as many Chinese home as they bring over and that “if politicians and excited and unreasonable men would let ‘the Chinese question’ alone, like a great many other questions, it would soon regulate itself,” watches albatrosses and stormy petrels for three weeks, and reaches Yokohama on 3 October, where a first ride in the jinrikisha, “the Pullman car of Japan,” costs ten cents an hour. Reserving Japan for the homeward leg, he coasts by the Tokio Maru to Kobe and Ozaka, through the Inland Sea past Shimonoseki, and on to Nagasaki, then crosses to Shanghai. Chapters II through VI carry him up the coast past Chi-foo to Taku and up the shallow Peiho to Tientsin, where rice lies piled on the docks with no way to move it to the famine districts, and then a hundred and twenty miles further in five chartered house-boats, “tracked” most of the way by “human horses,” four men on a long rope. At Peking he holds the annual meeting of the North China mission, prints its statistics and appointments, and devotes three chapters to the city: its four walled enclosures and decayed grandeur, the disused Observatory with its bronze instruments, the Tungwen College under Dr. W. A. P. Martin (whose course of study he quotes entire), the Lama temple with its seventy-two-foot Buddha, and the Temple of Heaven, whose open altar he measures out on its principle of nine and its multiples. Chapter VII brings him back to Shanghai.

Shanghai is described at length as “really a triple city, native, foreign, and mixed,” with a complaint that American consular quarters shame the country beside the British and French; from there he steams five hundred miles up the Yang-tsze-kiang past Nanking, whose destroyed Porcelain Tower he describes in the past tense, to the Central China mission at Kiukiang. The longest single stretch of the book, chapters XI to XX, belongs to Foochow, the station of his own youth, whose city and suburbs of nearly a million he walks street by street. He enters the river Min again after twenty-five years, finds an arsenal and gunboats where Portuguese lorchas once carried missionaries up the coast, and gives a chapter of historical sketch naming the pioneers from Stephen Johnson in 1846 onward, including the two Swedes attacked by pirates on the river in 1850. That then-and-now gap is the book’s measuring device, and he sets it out at the opening of the Conference: “Twenty-seven years ago, I had come to this city among the earlier missionaries… Then there was not a Church nor a native Christian; now there are in this city three large churches of our own mission, besides several of other missions.” He rides by chair over the mountains to Kucheng, records a love-feast there testimony by testimony, and prints in full the translated life-story of Lau Yong Ming, an exhorter who hands him three of his old idols. In December 1877 he organizes the Foochow Annual Conference — the first in China — and prints its full roster of districts, circuits and preachers, its statistics, and the pay scale of three dollars a month for a native preacher, closing it on Christmas Day with a thought of the Christmas Conference of 1784. A chapter on a wedding in a wealthy merchant’s house — his fifth younger brother’s — prints the invitation and then hands the account over to Mrs. Wiley, who attended while he was at Kucheng; others take in the temple of Matsoo Po by lamplight, a quoted eyewitness account of the pre-dawn sacrifice to Confucius, and the mountain monastery at Kushan; a chapter on Confucius calls him “the providential man of China” and concludes that “the mighty work to be done in China is to bury the dead Confucius and to raise up the living Christ.” The China narrative ends at Amoy, Swatow, Hongkong and Canton, “the Paris of China,” where he tours the Buddhist temple of the five hundred gods and the Temple of Horrors with its ten cells of clay figures and attacks the Roman Catholic claims to land under the French treaty as “making false claims and inflicting great wrongs on the Chinese.”

Japan occupies close to a third of the volume: a continuous run from page 328 to page 435, two later chapters and the Japanese part of the last one, besides the nine pages of his first landfall in chapter I. Sailing from Hongkong on 1 February 1878, Wiley enters the Gulf of Yedo past Simoda and Uraga, retells Perry’s two visits and the treaty of Kanagawa of 1854, and notes the American names left along the bay — Susquehanna Bay, Cape Saratoga, Mississippi Bay, Treaty Point. Rather than summon his missionaries to one place he goes to them, and the first journey is northward: five hundred and seventeen miles by a Mitsu Bishi steamer to Hakodate, where he finds three feet of snow, sees a new chapel dedicated in a service wholly in Japanese but for the dedicatory prayer, and ordains Y. Honda deacon — the first ordained Japanese preacher of his Church — printing Honda’s account of his own conversion exactly as Honda wrote it in English. He describes Yezo as the island to which the Ainos have been driven, sets out the government’s plans for its settlement, and reports on the agricultural college at Sapporo under William S. Clark and on the old daimio school at Hirosaki, which snow kept him from reaching. Returning south by the Tokio Maru, he takes Kobe and Hiogo, Ozaka “the Japanese Venice” with its castle walls of enormous granite blocks, the Inland Sea, and Shimonoseki, where he calls the bombardment of 1864 “one of the most disgraceful affairs” and reports that Congress has since declared the indemnity unjust, though he believes the money has not been returned. At Nagasaki he walks the terraced hills, tells the story of the Jesuit mission and of Papenberg and Shimabara, and notes the Roman Catholic settlement of about five hundred families above the head of the bay, whose members walk the weary four miles to the church he visits in the city. “But old Japan is dead,” he writes there, with the government boiler and machine shops across the bay, a granite dock-yard just finished, and the telegraph lines concentrated at the port; the beating of the hammers, the noise of the machinery, the steam vessels and gunboats in the harbor and the bells on the Christian churches are “all giving the death knell to the past.”

Three chapters then settle on Yokohama and Tokio. Yokohama, a fishing village at the time of the treaties and now seventy-five thousand people with twelve hundred foreigners, is anatomized into the Bluff, the Settlement and the native town; Wiley sets down the export and import figures for 1877 down to cuttle-fish, and the returns of the seven-year-old postal system with its forty-seven million pieces of mail and its savings banks, and he devotes several pages to the hostility between the foreign mercantile community and the missionaries, quoting at length Griffis, late of the Imperial University of Tokio and author of The Mikado’s Empire, on the traders’ “dense ignorance.” Twelve miles from Yokohama, at Kamakura, stands the bronze Daibutz, inside whose nose, he notes, a full-grown man could sit. Tokio he approaches by the narrow-gauge railway, disapproving of the money lavished on its iron bridge, and he explains for his readers that the shogunate was a usurpation of six hundred years and that the mikado, Mitsuhito, is the first in seven centuries to hold real power. “Sights in Tokio” walks the shoguns’ burial grounds at Shiba and Uyeno, the hill of Atago Yama, the Asakusa temple of Kuanon with its sacred pigeons and its rubbed image of Binzuru, and the temples of Hachiman and of the five hundred sages; but Wiley keeps returning to what he calls the new Japan — the university with its American, English and German professors, the engineering and military colleges, the empress’s normal school and kindergarten, and the museum in Uyeno park with its open illustrated Bible and Scriptural mottoes on the walls.

The last five chapters leave the itinerary behind. “Christianity in China” runs from the Nestorians through the Jesuits banished by Kang Hi to Robert Morrison at Canton in 1807 and S. W. Williams of The Middle Kingdom, and closes with statistical tables of Protestant and of Methodist work. “Christianity in Japan,” credited to a paper by John H. Gubbins read before the Asiatic Society of Japan, follows Xavier from Kagoshima in 1549 through the shifting policies of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu to the proscription of 1613 and the massacre at Shimabara, and then to the Protestant re-entry after 1859. “Religions of Japan,” drawn from C. Pfoundes, a resident of Tokio and contributor to the Japan Mail, sets out the Shinto cosmogony of Isanagi and Isanami, the kami and the tori-i and the go-hei, funeral rites in close detail, and the chief Buddhist sects — the Shinshiu called the Protestants of Japanese Buddhism, the Nichiren the Ranters. “Religions of China” works through Shang-ti and the imperial sacrifices, remarking that in the national religion “there is no idolatry, as far as idolatry includes the sensible representation of an object of worship,” its annual offerings being performed in the open air away from all the temples, then through Confucianism as politico-moral philosophy rather than religion, Laou-tsze and the Taou Teh King, and a long comparison of Buddhist practice with Roman Catholic ceremonial. The closing chapter gives seventeen pages to the women of China — the wife who in not a few instances is “the mere servant of her husband’s parents,” and the wife of the higher circles who is never seated while her mother-in-law stands; the girl whose “unfeeling and poverty-stricken parents have sold her to a monster”; foot-binding, concubinage, suicide and infanticide — and then turns to Japan, with a disclaimer: “I do not feel as well qualified to speak of the women of Japan as of those of China, having had much less opportunity of observing or studying them.” What he does say is that the general principles of subjection are about the same as in China, but that “marriage, the home, and the family are certainly much more significant in Japan,” the family circle freer of fathers- and mothers-in-law; that the young women spoil their features with white paint and a custom that turns “multitudes of really pretty girls” into married women who blacken their teeth and pluck out their eyebrows; and that girls read newspapers in the railway car between Ozaka and Kobe. The book ends by naming the daughters of Japan the most promising field in the world for missionary effort. Sixty illustrations are named in the printed list, which is not complete — engravings such as “Japanese Interior” at page 375 and “At Home” at page 387 sit unlisted in the text — and three of the sixty are maps: “Eastern China,” which underlines the principal missionary stations, “Fokien,” which keys the stations of three societies, and “Empire of Japan” with an inset of Tokio and vicinity. The volume ends with the last chapter, without index or appendix.

The Sunrise Kingdom is a Presbyterian missionary’s account of the years Julia D. Carrothers spent in Japan, arriving at Yokohama in 1869 and sailing for home on February 28, 1877. She dedicates the book to the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church “by one of their missionaries,” and a preface signed with her initials describes it as a retracing of “seven years of missionary life”; a separate introduction in another hand, signed M. H. P., calls the pages “a picture of seven years of missionary-life in Japan.” The volume is divided into four Books — of thirteen, eight, ten and five chapters — and the running heads carry a year, from 1869 to 1877, though not in strict order. Its form is mixed. Much of it is first person, moving between a missionary “we” (“the sun was just rising over the islands of Japan when we saw them for the first time”) and a singular “I” (“I have never myself noticed any difference in their treatment”); but five of the first Book’s thirteen chapters are third-person past-tense narrative about a Japanese merchant family and, at the end, about a party of pilgrims. In the later Books dated entries open some stretches, of which she says that “much of the preceding consists of extracts from journals kept during the last winter.”

The first Book, roughly a third of the volume, is scene-painting and travel. It opens on the Pacific crossing aboard the Great Republic, among passengers who said that missionary work was “contrary to the treaty” and that missionaries “had no right to go, as such, to Japan at all,” and on the junks, sampans and bronzed boatmen of Yokohama harbor. Early chapters work outward: the ranks of Japanese society from the Mikado down through kugis, daimios, samurai, priests, doctors, merchants, barbers, coolies and beggars; Buddhism and Sintooism, and the earlier persecution of Christians; summer among the rice-paddies; a winter in Tokio, with A-sa-ku-sa and Shi-ba, the To-ri and Niphon Bashi where the edicts against Christianity were posted, and the Foreign Concession at Ts’kiji. The narrative then settles on one merchant family, the Ka-ji-mas, through ordinary days: the little girl O I-ne san waking on her futon, a breakfast of rice, fish and radish, her mother walking her to school while a servant follows with the paper and the ink-box, an outing to Mu-ko-ji-ma to “see flowers.” Here Carrothers gives the position of women — a girl “is all her lifetime a mere subject” — and, among the picture-books and adult literature of a later chapter, the conduct-book On-na-Dai Ga-ku, with its injunctions to women “to be quiet and not talk too much.”

What Japanese children read and where their families travel fills out the Book: a chapter on the New Year, the Dolls’ Feast and the toy-shops; another retelling the tales children read — “The Ape and the Crab,” “Mo-mo-ta-ro,” “The Tail-Cut Swallow”; and then the Ka-ji-mas take the road down the To-kai-do to O-da-wa-ra, on foot and by ka-go, and up to Ha-ko-ne’s lake and sulphur springs. There the parties divide, and the book follows the white-robed pilgrims — “Let us follow them” — up Fu-ji’s cinder cone to worship at the crater. One chapter stands apart: at Ro-ku-ban, the new mission-house on lot No. 6 of the Concession, the first Bible class “ever attempted in the Tokio mission” breaks up after someone informs the ya-cu-nins at the custom-house. The second Book takes that thread up. In 1872 a door opens; girls come to Ro-ku-ban to learn English — Hama, Mishi and Kiyo first, then Tama, Rio, To-yo and O I-ne san — and the school grows to twenty-five. Carrothers records the fire that destroyed Ro-ku-ban with its dictionaries and manuscripts, Mark and John printed in Japanese, the new jin-ri-ki-sha, the Tokio–Yokohama railway, the calendar shifted to the Western year with “our Sabbath” replacing the Ichi rokus, a first pupil baptized and another refused by her father because baptism was “contrary to the law of the land,” and her own question whether it is “wise or best to disturb this people in their present state of content.”

The third Book carries the school into a church: candidates examined and baptized, meetings in private houses, a first hymn-book of eighteen hymns with “Jesus loves me” the favorite, a plain wooden building bought in a Japanese’s name near Ts’kiji, and in November a church regularly organized with elders and deacons ordained. The struggle over baptism deepens. O Chiye san’s father explains that in his department the officials must send the names of any who are baptized to the government, and his daughter’s name might cost him his office; O Shige san comes out “without her father’s permission, which had been angrily refused”; O Chiye san is forbidden the mission-house and comes running in when her father is out. Around this run an excursion to E-no-Shi-ma and the Dai Butsu; a fifteen-day jin-ri-ki-sha journey down the To-kai-do to Kiyoto, where she sees the temples and a theatre she pronounces “immeasurably superior to that in our Christian country,” and where it appears to her that the Japanese “would not be loth to slaughter one of us, their white brethren, the hated foreigners”; a changed Tokyof stores in European style, with no two-sworded men and beggary abolished; weekly meetings at Gen-ske-cho for poor women and for the blind men called a-mas; a chapter on babies, bags of amulets and the betrothal of small children; and a fellow-missionary’s prayer, which she says all can echo, to “cleanse this people from the great national sin of hypocrisy.”

A quarter of the book is given to the fourth, which turns from narrative to instruction addressed largely to supporters at home. Its opening chapter surveys the American women’s foreign missionary organizations — the Women’s Union Missionary Society, the Women’s Board of Missions, her own Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church and its Occidental Branch, and the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal and Reformed boards — then explains how auxiliaries, mission-bands and Presbyterial societies work, how a contribution reaches the field, and why she prefers scholarships to the sponsorship of a named child, since it is not always easy “to find something interesting to write concerning these apathetic little Asiatics.” The same chapter answers “sneering remarks” about missionary houses and servants. A further chapter sets out what a missionary needs: the spoken language before all else (“There is no way to learn how to speak a language but to speak it”), a cheerful disposition, some music and medicine, and no peculiarities to be humored. Her estimates of the people are flat — Japanese women have “shallow, undeveloped minds, with blunted ideas of truth and virtue, but they are capable of a high degree of culture”; Japanese literature “drains the mind without enriching it”; the Japanese women who are to take up the work try her by “their shallow and frivolous natures” and by their indolence. Evangelization, she argues, must finally rest on Japanese workers, foreign missionaries being “too few in number and too weak in the flesh.”

A long penultimate chapter takes a survey view of the empire in 1877: its islands and estimated population, the agricultural department’s experiments in Yeso, a railroad “finished at each end,” the telegraph, normal schools with graded Readers, prison reform, the new yen and sen, the old Yoshiwarra system “virtually abolished,” men in half-foreign dress with bath-towels worn as comforters. It then visits the seven open ports as mission centers, and Kiyoto besides, which she notes is not an “open” city though missionaries are allowed to live there: Yokohama, where she names Dr. Hepburn’s dictionary and medical work, takes one glance at the cemetery where the missionary dead lie, and says the hardest thing the mission has to contend with is “the ungodly conduct of our own countrymen”; then Tokio, Ko-be, Osaca, Kiyoto, Niigata, Hakodadi with its Ainos, and Nagasaki, with the rock of Shimabara from which the Christians were thrown in the old days of persecution. The short closing chapter, “Sai-o-na-ra,” records last baptisms, a parting gift of crape from O I-ne san’s mother, the girls coming down from Tokyoo Yokohama to sing their hymn at her bedside, and Fu-ji receding on the morning of February 28, 1877. Seventeen plates, from a frontispiece of a wayside tea-house to a Japanese kitchen keyed by number, are bound through the volume, nearly all captioned with the page they illustrate.

A compact one-volume survey of Japan as it stood at the end of the 1870s, arranged in ten topical chapters that run from geography to natural history in a little over 240 pages. The opening page states the plan: “It is the purport of this unpretending volume, to give a concise account of the past and present condition of the nation from the most authentic sources.” Those sources are named at the back, in a “List of Books on Japan Consulted by the Author” of eleven titles — Kaempfer in Scheuchzer’s translation, Siebold’s Fauna Japonica, Hawks on the Perry expedition, Oliphant’s The Earl of Elgin’s Mission to Japan, Hodgson’s A Residence at Nagasaki and Hokodate, Fortune’s Visits to Japan and China, Humbert’s Japan and the Japanese, Alcock’s City of the Tycoon, Summers’s Chinese and Japanese Repository, Hepburn’s dictionary, and Mossman’s own earlier New Japan. The method matches the list. Mossman quotes Siebold, Kaempfer, Alcock, Fortune and Summers by name, and supplements them with consular reports, imperial edicts, ministerial returns, the Government Gazette and the Tokio press. The voyage of the first chapter is conducted at arm’s length, through “the traveller” and “the voyager,” and the book never says that its author made it. Its voice is an authorial “we,” by turns editorial, British — “Japan being eminently a maritime country, like our own” — and proprietary: a native map of the islands and a list of the feudal barons are “before us,” a carved shell is “in our possession,” and “in our herbarium we have some rare and beautiful specimens of ferns, mosses.” The first-person singular appears only inside quoted matter, and the author is named once, in the third person, as “the author of this volume,” down on the list of the British Association at Brighton in 1872 to read a paper on “the City of Yedo,” with the chiefs of the Japanese embassy listening in the hall.

Chapter I sets out the physical country and then walks it. It counts 3,850 islands, traces the volcanic chain from Fizen and Satsuma up to Fusiyama at 13,977 feet, recalls the eruption of 1799 and the greater one five years later, whose ashes fell inches deep on Yedo seventy miles off, and describes Lake Biwah and its fish-traps. It then follows the steamer route east: Nagasaki with its 62 temples, 760 tea-houses and 60,000 people, the islet of Takoboko called Papenberg and the vanished Dutch factory on De-sima; the Strait of Simonosaki and the five inland seas that British hydrographers named the Inland Sea; Hiogo, opened in 1868 and locally called Kobe; Osaka, “the Paris of Japan,” with Taiko-sama’s castle and the Imperial Mint whose plant had failed at Hong-Kong; Kioto, emptied of its court since 1868, its Gosho tenantless; Yokohama, a fishing village grown to 20,000 natives; and Tokio, “the London of Japan,” with 185,951 houses and 823,240 people. Chapter II turns to origins, canvassing Kaempfer, Siebold, Klaproth and Golovnin, quoting Siebold on the Aino migration and then working for four pages through a paper on the Ainos of Yezo by James Enslie, British consul at Hakodadi, mostly in paraphrase and closing on his verdict on “the servile and wretched condition in which the Ainos are kept.” The chapter ends with the old ladder of classes, a passage on Japanese politeness, a description of houses, and a census of 32,866,161.

The next three chapters are the most narrative in the volume. Chapter III declines to recount 125 reigns — that “would require a series of volumes like the present” — and confines itself to “the salient events in Old and New Japan”: Zinmoo the Divine Warrior, the drift into feudalism, Yoritomo’s usurpation, the office of Dai Shio-goong that foreigners corrupted into Tycoon, and a flat correction of the old error of two emperors, spiritual and temporal (“No such distinction, however, existed in Japan”). It prints the Mikado’s September 1871 edict abolishing the feudal governments in full, takes from a list of the feudal barons “now before us” the highest of their rice revenues, Mayedda’s 1,027,700 kokus, and the lowest, a bare 10,000, sets out Okuma Shigenobu’s budget for the year ending 30 June 1876 item by item, and follows the Iwakura embassy from Yokohama through San Francisco and Washington to London. Chapter IV moves from Daimio heraldry and the swagger of the Samourai to the killings the old order bred — the assassination of the Regent inside the precincts of the Shiogoon’s castle, Chosiu’s assault on Kioto in 1864 that burned nearly half the city — and then to the imperial army formed out of the Shiogoon’s soldiery and the risings it was first turned against: Mayebara’s rebellion of 1876 with the suicides that followed its defeat, and the Satsuma war of 1877, the powder magazine at Kagosima, Saigo Takamori’s defection and his standard as “President of the New Government,” and the storming of Shiroyama quoted from the Nichi Nichi Shimbun. It ends on the army itself, drilled on the Prussian model: an uncle of the Mikado, Prince Kita Shirakova, a captain in the Prussian Dragoons, appointed commander-in-chief; the German needle-gun of the first issue giving way to Sniders and Martini-Henrys; words of command given in German and lectures on tactics drawing as many as five hundred officers of a garrison; infantry service lengthened from three years to five; artillery on the Prussian seven-pounder model, with mountain batteries that come to pieces for carriage on horseback. Chapter V does the same at sea: the firing on the Pembroke, the Kien-Chang and the Medusa, the allied bombardment of Simonosaki by eighteen men-of-war, the shelling of Kagosima in a typhoon after the killing of the merchant Richardson, and then the new service — twenty-three Englishmen from the Royal Navy, a lieutenant at their head, teaching some 500 students at the Tokio naval college, the Yokoska dockyard built under M. Verny, and a ship-by-ship inventory in which the Foosoo-kan from Samuda Brothers is “the monarch of the fleet.”

Chapters VI and VII compile rather than narrate. The education half tracks the Daimios’ first foreign teachers, the eighteen speculative private schools in Tokyof which two survived a year, the fees at the Osaka Gacco and the English school, the Mikado’s January 1872 message to the assembled ex-Daimios quoted at length for its passage on the education of women, the Mombusho’s seven circuits, and Taranaka’s returns of 1,799 private and 3,630 government schools with 480,000 pupils, one in sixty-eight of the population. The religion half explains Sintoo through the mirror and the gohei and the married Kami Nusi, sets down a Sintoo festival at the Suwa temple near Nagasaki with its cars whirled about the temple ground, quotes two long passages from a government treatise on “the country of the gods” that Mossman calls presumptuous, names nine missions at Tokio, retells the persecution that ended at Pappenberg, and describes the colossal Buddhas of Kioto and Kamakura. Chapter VII takes Professor Summers for its “text,” distinguishes the katagana and hirakana styles and gives the syllabary in roman letters, prints the iroha verse with a literal translation, works through particles, honorific pronouns and numerals, then samples the literature: a moral tale of A.D. 930 given in full, the eighty-four-volume Illustrated History of Taikosama, proverbs matched against English ones, imperial poems in verse translation, the koto and the biwa, the song “The Flown Bird” complete, and the rise of the native press to the Press Law and the imprisoned editor of the Manichi Shimbun.

The last three chapters are inventories of things made, grown and observed. Chapter VIII holds that Japanese art excels its Chinese teachers in birds, fish and flowers while failing at perspective, and then details lacquer from the urusi no ki, porcelain from Fizen and Imari and the cream-colored Satsuma ware, immense iron bells without tongues, sounded by striking them outside with heavy blocks of timber, ivory carving — one specimen “in our possession,” a cockle-shell two inches long, holds under a magnifying glass a carved sea-port town with the peak of Fusiyama beyond — the silk shops of Tokio, the culture and drying of tea, and paper made from the Kaji tree. Chapter IX covers the rice calendar and the koku as a measure of value, saki brewed at Itami — “the Japanese Burton” — a translated Japanese pamphlet on copper mining, the Osaka mint and the devices on the new yen and sen, external trade of about seven millions sterling, the Mitsu Bishi fleet, and the first railways, telegraphs and post. Chapter X takes up the nengo and the sixty-year cycle, the variable double hours, medicine judged by European doctors to border on quackery, the Kuro Siwo or Black Stream, the climate figures, and Hooker, Kaempfer and Fortune on the plants, which take its longest run of pages; and later the sea, where about four hundred species are known to frequent the coasts, rivers and lakes, salmon in ten varieties are the most valued, twelve thousand koku of salted and cured salmon came in a single year from the Isikari alone, and the Japanese are called “essentially an ichthyophagous people,” with Siebold quoted on the shoals the early Dutch navigators saw and on the gigantic sea-crab and the long-legged crab. Its closing remarks find the Japanese improving on their instructors yet exhibiting “more of the imitative faculty than inventive genius,” and end on the prospect that “the future of Japan and the Japanese promises to be prosperous.” The volume opens with an uncaptioned wood engraving, printed sideways, of a helmeted swordsman in armor and a leaping opponent with a fan, and a folding “Physical Map of Japan,” printed in colors and signed by Edward Weller; seven further plates carry nine engravings, eight of them captioned with the page they belong to — “Fusikama: The Highest Mountain in Japan,” “Ehmidge Castle, Kioto,” “Dignitary of the Old Court of Kioto,” “Street in Yokohama,” “Ladies in Walking Attire,” “Buddhist Temple at Kawasaki,” “Cock-Fighting at the Court of Kioto,” “Old Night Watch on the Rounds” — with engravers’ names cut into several of the blocks. Only one illustration is set among the letterpress, a facsimile of a Japanese almanac at page 216. There is no list of illustrations and no preface; a four-page index and the list of books consulted close the volume.

A two-volume account of Japan by a British naval architect and Member of Parliament, published by John Murray in 1880, joining a compiled history of the country to the narrative of a three-month visit. Sir Edward J. Reed, K.C.B., F.R.S., M.P., vice-president of the Institution of Naval Architects, had designed warships for the Japanese emperor; he arrived on January 10, 1879, at the invitation of Admiral Kawamura, the minister of marine, and some of his colleagues, and traveled with his son as a guest of the government. The preface disclaims any original intention of writing even “a magazine account” of the visit and apologizes for “the crude familiarities and inequalities of style” of pages composed between eight and midnight after rising before six and traveling all day in “jinriki-shas (hand-carriages) over jolting roads.” It also explains the book’s odd proportions: names such as Nintoku, Kobodaishi, Yoritomo, Nobunaga, or the Taiko, places such as Nara, Uji, Kamakura, or Nikko, and battles such as Dan-no-ura and Sekigahara would convey nothing to an English reader, so a history had to come first. Volume one is accordingly given over to history, religion, and contemporary politics, travel entering only in passing — the visit to Kamakura and Yoritomo’s grave, the audience with the emperor; volume two is the visit itself, three topical chapters dropped into the middle of it, and the apparatus for the set.

The first volume opens with the islands as an engineer sees them — area, harbors, rivers, Lake Biwa, the Kuro-shiwo current — and with an abridged chronology of earthquakes from A.D. 599 onward, including the shock of 855 that shook the head off the colossal Daibutsu at Nara. Three chapters then take up religion. Reed retells the god-period from the Kojiki and Nihonki — Izanagi and Izanami stirring the sea with a spear, Amaterasu withdrawing into the cave, Uzume’s dance, the mirror, sword, and magatama — and observes how much of it survives in the gohei and in the straw ropes stretched across shrines and torii. His Shinto chapter prints Satow’s translation of the harvest norito entire, then defends the religion by its fruits, admiring altars that “did not stream with blood” and a worship consisting of rinsing the hands, a coin, a clap, a bow, and a few short words. The Buddhism chapter, the volume’s longest, runs from Shakyamuni through Shotoku-Taishi, Kobo Daishi, and the thirteen sects; it prints an account of Shin-shu written in English at Reed’s request by a priest of the Nishi Honganji, calls the Shin-shu believers the Protestants of Japan and passes on Griffis’s verdict that the followers of Nichiren are “the Ranters of Buddhism,” and ends with a comic report of a public debate on “Infinite Vision” held at Shinagawa in 1878.

History proper begins with the descent of the crown and runs to the present reign: Jingu-Kogo, Nintoku telling his empress that the people are the true substance of an empire, the reigning empresses, the boy-emperors held by whoever controlled the sacred person of the mikado. Reed is not neutral about any of it. He reveres Kusunoki Masashige, quoting the parting at Sakurai and the sixteen charges at Minatogawa, and Nitta Yosisada, whose sword cast into the sea near Enoshima he glosses by confessing that he viewed the spot “with no small interest,” whereas of Yoritomo he says he must record “acts which humanity can never forgive, and history ought never to extenuate.” Nobunaga burns the thirteen valleys of Hiyei-san with their five hundred and more temples, shrines, and priestly dwellings; Hideyoshi rises from groom to Taiko and writes a boasting letter to Korea; Iyeyasu, whose army reaches Momokubarino at daybreak in a fog that hides objects a few yards ahead, wins Sekigahara and founds a dynasty whose two centuries of peace Reed reckons a great blessing to the country. The persecution of the Christians is given at length from Gubbins, with Reed’s insistence that tortures of that kind were unknown in Japan before the Jesuits arrived. The closing chapters carry the story from Perry at Uraga in 1853 through the fall of the Shogun, the fighting at Fushimi and Toba, the emperor’s oath, and the renaming of Yedo as Tokio.

Opinion is the volume’s other engine. Its introduction is a sustained brief for treaty revision: judging by what the Japanese themselves say, “England is the greatest sinner”; the ordinary Japanese peasant “far excels the artisan of the Black Country, the tenant of the Irish shanty, or the Russian moujik”; consular jurisdiction is “at best but a makeshift”; Japan, it argues, “is fully entitled to very great modifications in her treaty arrangements.” The narrative chapters put the case harder still, holding that the treaties were extorted by armed force and yielded at the cannon’s mouth. Reed is sarcastic about the British bombardment of Kagoshima after the Richardson killing and the indemnities exacted afterward, inventing a warship he christens H.M.S. Havoc to carry them off, and about the Shimonoseki indemnity — “In the old days it used to be, ‘Your money or your life.’ … in these days it is, ‘Your money and your life.’” The preface meanwhile charges Griffis’s The Mikado’s Empire with “insufficient acknowledgment of the sources,” a book Reed then quotes more than any other. Later chapters survey foreign relations from the Mongol invasion to Saghalin; the reforms of the last ten years, with much on the conscript army, the police, the post, and above all education and the empress’s endowment of a female normal school; the Satsuma rebellion, avowedly abstracted from Mounsey; and Reed’s own audience with the emperor, who thanks him because “the three men-of-war, which by my particular desire were constructed under your special care, have duly arrived, and are very successful.”

Volume two opens at sea, with Fuji sighted from far off as the steamer comes up from Hong Kong past the Loo-choo Islands. Landing at Yokohama, Reed finds in the roadstead the Japanese ironclad frigate Foo-so, which he had himself designed for the emperor, and is met by Admiral Kawamura and Mr. Enouye Kawori. A month in the eastern capital follows: a dinner at which a pie is opened and small birds fly out with written welcomes tied to their legs; the Tokugawa tomb-temples at Shiba; the fair-like Kwannon temple at Asakusa with its Nio, its rubbing-idol Binzuru, and its worshippers flicking paper pellets at the images; technical excursions on lacquer and on bronze casting; the government paper mills at Ogi; and an official statistical account of the Tokio Fu. Three topical chapters then interrupt the journey. The first treats language and literature, from the unwritten early speech to the thirty-one-syllable stanza, Tsurayuki’s Tosa Nikki in Aston’s translation, the part women took in classical prose, Captain Brinkley’s memorandum arguing that Japan must cast off Chinese characters, and — reproduced entire — Hyde Clarke’s theory that Japanese belongs to an ancient “Turano-African empire,” a thesis Reed also airs in the introduction and backs with the comparative vocabulary printed at the end of the set. The second traces drawing and painting from Kose no Kanaoka to Hokusai, with Professor Anderson’s verdict that Japanese perspective is false and chiaroscuro absent. The third is a bare list of some two hundred proverbs.

The traveling resumes on February 5 aboard the lighthouse department’s steamer Meiji Maru, with lights inspected along the way and a fall from an upper bunk that leaves Reed with a bruised rib for weeks. The Inland Sea brings Miyajima, its torii standing in the water and its sacred deer now few and forlorn; Shimonoseki brings the bombardments of 1863–64, on which a footnote says he has “purposely touched but lightly in this work” while stating flatly that the demand was “entirely unjustifiable, and the money taken ought to be returned,” and beside him stands a Choshiu officer of the present navy who had fought the “Christians.” At Nagasaki the party lunches two hundred feet underground in the Takashima coal mines, and Pappenberg returns to the page — the rock down whose sides “the Japanese Christians were hurled into the sea by thousands,” and which Reed is glad the resident missionaries cannot see from their windows. Osaka supplies the imperial reception house at the mint, a prehistoric dug-out boat in the museum that the naval architect measures with care, the castle monoliths, a new great-gun factory, and a banquet said to be the first the merchants of the city ever gave a foreign visitor. Late in February about twelve jinriki-shas, three men to most of them, run the party to Nara for the Dai-butsu, the treasures laid out for a coming exhibition, and the palace door on which Kusunoki Masashige scratched his farewell, of which Reed obtained a rubbing. At Kioto he lodges in a temple, tours the mikado’s palace, dines at the residences of the Eastern and Western Shin-shu archbishops, and describes the girls’ normal and industrial schools at length and with delight.

Leaving Kioto ill on March 4, the party crosses to Ise by the Tokaido, halting at Ishiyama-dera, where Murasaki-shikibu wrote part of the Genji-monogatari. Rain on the Sudsuga pass, and the jinriki-sha men in straw hats and sheets of oil-paper, draw the book’s plainest statement of unease: “I am never quite happy here, among these poor jinriki-sha men, dragging their fellow-men about in carriages in all weathers, under all circumstances, often with attenuated muscles and wasting lungs and breaking heartstrings.” At the Geku nothing can be seen past three gates and a plain white curtain, and Reed finds there the deepest impression religious externals can make, “combined simplicity and antiquity,” set against the thousand hands and triple heads of gods elsewhere. A rheumatic collapse at Yokkaichi costs three days; then come Atsuta and its sacred sword, with a digression on sword etiquette; Nagoya, whose castle tower carries golden fish a thief once tried to reach by kite; Shidzuoka, where Iyeyasu retired to his books and the dethroned Tycoon now lives in privacy; the Hakone pass, crossed on foot after the kagos proved unendurable; and a last Tokaido run behind men averaging nearly seven miles an hour, ending back in the capital. Appendices then print the 1858 Yedo treaty and the tariff convention of 1866, lists of emperors and year-periods, a comparative vocabulary of Japanese, West African, and other languages, notes on celebrated swords and their makers, and an index to both volumes. A folding color map of Japan faces the first page of volume one. Most of the illustrations are wood engravings by Josiah Whymper, chiefly after photographs and in several cases after pencil sketches by the author’s son, E. Tenn Reed; of the sixteen full-page plates, eight were cut in Japan by native engravers from the works of Hokusai, and the two volumes open on the temple of Miyajima and on Fuji.

A travel book for young readers cast as a story. Three Americans — Doctor Bronson, his nephew Fred, and Fred’s cousin Frank Bassett, who is eighteen — leave home in June 1878, cross the continent and the Pacific, and spend the volume looking at Japan and China. The preface, addressed “To my Young Friends,” sets the terms exactly: “The characters in ‘The Boy Travellers’ are fictitious; but the scenes that passed before their eyes, the people they met, and the incidents and accidents that befell them are real,” and the routes, the cities, the excursions, the observations — “in fact, nearly all that goes to make up this volume” — “were the actual experiences of the author at a very recent date.” Knox names his borrowings too: the publishers allowed him engravings “that have already appeared in their publications relative to China and Japan,” and he made selections from the volumes of Sir Rutherford Alcock and the Rev. Justus Doolittle and from Professor Griffis’s The Mikado’s Empire; for the whaling episode he is indebted to Mr. Davis’s Nimrod of the Sea “not only for illustrations, but for incidents of the chase of the monsters of the deep.” More than three hundred engravings follow, every one printed with the type, behind a single color frontispiece the list names as “A Japanese Swimming-scene. Reproduced from a Painting by a Japanese Artist.” Knox adds that he knows of no book on China and Japan “specially addressed to the young” yet published.

Thirty-one chapters carry the story across 405 pages, from page 17 to page 421: four on the outward journey, eighteen in Japan, nine in China, so that Japan takes about three-fifths of the book, China about a quarter, and the voyage out the remainder. Three forms are in play. A third-person narrator frames everything (“Our three travellers were seated in a Pullman car on the Erie Railway”) and now and then turns to the reader directly (“‘What is the jin-riki-sha?’ the reader naturally asks”); long stretches of dialogue let Doctor Bronson deliver set-piece exposition on history, religion, currency and storms, prompted by the boys’ questions; and roughly a quarter of the pages are handed over verbatim to Frank’s and Fred’s own letters and notebooks, written in the first person — a share that runs unevenly through the Japan chapters and is heaviest in the China ones, the book ending inside a letter signed “Frank and Fred.” In Kioto the two write half a letter each, and when they read it out to Doctor Bronson he cannot say which half is whose.

The opening chapters take the party west by the Erie Railway past the valley of the Neversink and the Starucca Viaduct, to a day at Niagara and the Cave of the Winds, and across the plains, where the train slows to pass through a herd of buffaloes. At San Francisco they go out to the Cliff House and see the sea-lions by dozens and hundreds within easy rifle-shot of their breakfast-table, then board the steamer Oceanic for a run of five thousand miles without a stopping-place on the whole route. Two figures the preface defends as necessary to the narrative attach themselves to the story: Miss Effie, who comes to the railway station to see Frank off and thereafter exists in letters, and a nondescript fellow passenger entered on the list as “Mr. A. of America,” whom the others nickname “The Mystery.” Captain Spofford, an old New Bedford whaleman, fills a whole chapter with the sperm-whale fishery — the loss of the Essex, Captain Hunting beaten by a single bull — after which The Mystery caps it with the adventure of one Captain Sammis of the Ananias, who was swallowed whole and found “Jonah, B.C. 1007” printed in “injey ink” on the wall of the whale’s stomach.

Fusiyama is sighted on the twentieth day, and the ship anchors off Yokohama among swarming sampans. The Japan chapters proceed by excursion and by topic: a first walk among the silk-shops and street musicians; the seventeen-mile railway to Tokio, with its three classes of carriage and its rice fields, irrigating wheels, storks, and watchmen keeping the birds off with rattling boards, whistles and clappers; the Nihon Bashi, from which all the roads are measured, and the great kosatsu beside it, which carried until 1868 the edict that “the evil sect called Christians is strictly prohibited”; the yashikis of the abolished Daimios; the fire-lookout ladders; the temple of Asakusa with its praying-machine, its archery booths and its thirty-six wax-work tableaux of the miracles wrought by Ku-wanon, and its worshippers who chew their written prayers into pellets and throw them at the image. A New York correspondent’s letter supplies a description of the First National Fair held at Tokio in 1877. From Yokohama the party rides out along the Tokaido to the great bronze Dai-Boots at Kamakura — sixty feet from the ground to the top of the head, the figure alone forty-three — on an excursion that also carries the book’s hardest passage: the killing of Richardson on the Tokaido in 1862, the indemnity exacted, and the bombardment of Kagoshima, after which the narrator remarks that it would not be surprising if the Japanese entertained curious notions of the Christian religion when such acts are committed by the nations professing it — “The blessings of civilization have been wafted to them in large proportion from the muzzles of cannon; and the light of Western diplomacy has been, all too frequently, from the torch of the incendiary.” At Enoshima the party sleeps on quilts in a Japanese inn, Fred bitten by fleas through the night, and is led down to the sacred sea-cave by a guide with torches.

The ascent of Fusiyama takes two chapters: cangos from Odiwara, the almost scalding hot springs in the mountain pass and the cold lake at Hakone, the last inhabited spot at the monastery of Muriyama, packs carried by porters called yamabooshees with two priests for guides, a night in a hut of refuge among fleas and wind, sunrise over the Pacific, and the crater at the summit, given as fourteen thousand feet. Around these come the topical chapters — the four old classes and the abolished two-sworded Samurai, a beheading Doctor Bronson attended, hari-kari and Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan; a wrestling match and a theater where the fairy play of Bumbuku Chagama, the bubbling teapot, is performed and the legend behind it printed entire; the cloisonné process explained cell by cell for Mary at home, together with lacquer, the carved ivories the book calls “nitschkis,” faked old Satsuma and the uses of bamboo, which the Doctor says are almost without number; and a whole chapter on Japanese women, written by Frank to Miss Effie, on blackened teeth, clogs, the obi, geishas, divorce and kite-flying. Frank also writes up a tea warehouse and its firing-room, where some two hundred charcoal pans heat a shed he does not believe he could exist in for a day; many of the workers are women, some with children strapped to their backs and the rest of the babies parked in a side room, at ten or fifteen cents a day; and into every pound and a half of tea goes a teaspoonful of a coloring the house keeps secret — indigo and gypsum, the clerk tells them, to make the tea sell better in the American market. Then by steamer to Hiogo (Kobe) and by junk to Osaka with its castle wall and imperial mint, to Nara’s deer park and Buddha and to Kioto with its three thousand temples, its bell and its hall of 33,333 idols, and out through the Inland Sea past Pappenberg, from whose steep rock “many thousands of men and women were hurled, solely for the offence of being Christians,” to Nagasaki, Deshima and a typhoon.

China begins on the Woosung River. The Chinese quarter of Shanghai, a tea-house on a stagnant pond and an opium den set the pattern for what follows: a steamer six hundred miles up the Yang-tse-kiang past Silver Island and Chin-kiang to Han-kow, with Doctor Bronson’s account of the Tae-ping rebellion and of the American commanders Ward and Burgevine; a cloud of locusts that obscures the sun and envelops the steamer for more than an hour; brick tea pressed for the Russian market. Then Tien-tsin and the Taku forts, ninety miles on the backs of Chinese ponies to the “City of Magnificent Distances,” the Temple of Heaven and the great bell, the Board of Punishments with its cangue, finger-squeezing and hot-water snake described at length, and the Nan-kow Pass to the Great Wall. Southward come pidgin English, with “Excelsior” rendered as “Top-side Galah,” and The Mystery’s account of the coolie trade and a mutiny put down at sea — a subject he knows from the inside, as the last chapters reveal, having dealt in opium, coolies and arms for the rebels in Japan. Then Hong-kong, and three days in Canton among the pawnbrokers’ towers, the leper hospital, the eleven thousand cells of the Hall of Examinations, and the fan and ivory shops. Every day of their stay in Japan, the narrator reports, confirmed the travelers “more and more in the belief that there are no more polite people in the world than the Japanese,” while the China chapters dwell on dirt, smells, cheating and cruelty; but the book turns on the West in both halves, matching the cannon passage with Frank’s remark, written up after his first walk through a Chinese city, that it is no wonder the Chinese are confused about the character of Christianity “when a Christian nation makes war upon them to compel them to admit a poison which that Christian nation produces, and which kills hundreds of thousands of Chinese every year.” It ends with the boys at Hong-kong waiting for letters that will decide whether they go home by San Francisco or continue westward around the world, and with their own summing-up: “We believe that the people of the East have the same claims to respect that ours have, and that it is only a narrow mind that sneers at the ways of others because they are not like its own. We know that there are many things in which we are superior to the Orientals, but we also know that we have our weak points, and might be profitably instructed by those whom some of us affect to despise.” A final cut, “Good-bye!”, closes page 421.

Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo is a two-volume narrative of the foreign settlement and of the city of Yedo from the signing of the treaties in 1858 to the close of 1879, written by a newspaper man who spent the greater part of that period in Japan. Its preface disclaims more than it claims: “To the dignity of history this book makes no pretension. It is a simple narrative of the most prominent events that have taken place in the beautiful ‘Land of the Rising Sun,’ in which foreigners have been more or less interested.” Black adopted the narrative form, he explains, “first as allowing a lighter and more readable style than that of history; and then, as permitting personal reminiscences to be introduced.” The title page sets out his standing: formerly editor of the Japan Herald and the Japan Gazette, editor of the Far East illustrated monthly, and proprietor and editor of the Nisshin Shinjishi. His vantage is uneven, and he says so. For the earliest years he is a compiler; he reached Japan only after the Richardson affair had been settled with Satsuma, arriving, in his own words, “on a visit, without an idea of becoming a permanent resident.” The first volume’s title page is dated 1880 and the second 1881, both under the imprint of Trübner & Co. in London and Kelly & Co. in Yokohama, and both printed in Yokohama, the first at the author’s own printing office.

A preliminary chapter, written after most of the book was finished, sketches the imperial line from Jinmu Tenno, the rise of the Sei-i Tai Shogun under Yoritomo at Kamakura, the succession through Ota Nobunaga, Taico Sama and Iyeyas’, the closing of the country in 1637, and the ranks of kugé, daimio, hatamoto and samurai, quoting Iyeyas’ “Legacy” in Lowder’s translation. The narrative proper begins with Perry, with Lord Elgin’s mission told largely through long extracts from Oliphant, and with the commercial treaties of 1858; then comes the quarrel over whether the settlement should stand at Kanagawa on the Tokaido or at Yokohama, which the merchants settled by taking up the houses, godowns and allotments the government had already prepared at Yokohama. A chapter on the currency question reprints several pages of Alcock on the opening day, when the bright new coins tendered in exchange proved to be half-boos. The killings follow: three Russians cut down in the streets, Alcock’s interpreter Dankitchi, two Dutch captains, the assassination of the Regent Ii Kamon-no-Kami, and the murder of Heusken, after which every minister but Harris withdrew from Yedo — and then two attacks on the British legation.

The middle of the first volume belongs to the crises. A twenty-one-page chapter turns on the murder of Mr. Richardson on the Tokaido in September 1862, printing Mrs. Borrodaile’s statement, the depositions of Mr. Clarke and Mr. Marshall, the inquest jury’s verdict, and — thirteen years later in date — the Satsuma version from Mr. House’s pamphlet, which Black sets out at length and disputes on a single point, wishing “that all may judge for themselves.” The new British legation at Go-ten-yama is burned; Colonel Neale’s note of 6 April 1863 demands a formal apology and £100,000, with £25,000 and the execution of the murderers required separately of the Prince of Satsuma; the government’s £110,000 is paid at daybreak in 440,000 Mexican dollars dragged by coolies from the treasury to the legation, Satsuma settling its own account only in December and the murderers never being produced. Ogasawara’s dispatch announcing that the ports are to be closed draws Neale’s reply that it is “a declaration of war by Japan itself against the whole of the treaty powers.” Choshiu’s batteries fire on shipping in the straits of Shimonoseki; Admiral Kuper’s squadron fights Satsuma at Kagoshima in a typhoon; the allied squadrons reduce the Shimonoseki forts in September 1864 for a three-million-dollar indemnity; and in November 1865 Sir Harry Parkes and his colleagues take a fleet to Hiogo and obtain the Mikado’s ratification of the treaties. The volume closes on 30 June 1866.

Much of the work is other men’s words set in type. Black’s preface meets the charge in advance — “some portions of my narrative might justly be called a compilation; but, if so, it is from my own writings” — and then sets out what he owes to others. He thanks Mr. Dohmen, acting British consul at Yokohama, for blue-books and documents, the proprietors of the Japan Herald and Japan Mail for their files, and those of the Japan Gazette for both files and type. Named authorities include Oliphant, Alcock’s Three Years at the Capital of the Tycoon, Satow’s translation of the Kinse Shiriaku, Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan and a blue-book translation of his, Griffis’s The Mikado’s Empire, and House’s pamphlets on Kagoshima, Shimonoseki and Formosa. Whole chapters are handed over to other hands: an “interpolatory chapter” reprinting House on Shimadzu Saburo, an account of Kamakura written for Black in 1865 by Mr. Heco, and thirteen pages of the second volume given to a personal narrative by a former page of the Tycoon. Elsewhere the pages fill with dispatches, ultimatums, imperial decrees, proclamations, depositions, translated Japanese memorials and manifestoes, treaty articles, statistical returns, and — in a chapter headed simply “Exclusively Municipal” — the minutes of the settlement’s council.

Volume II resumes at the beginning of July 1866, and its first twenty-five chapters, more than half its four hundred and ninety-nine pages, carry the story only as far as the middle of 1869. This is the revolution: the death of the Tycoon Iyemochi, which Black published on 8 September from sources open to him “as a member of the fourth estate,” while the government’s announcement a fortnight later still called the Tycoon only “extremely ill”; Hitotsubashi’s reluctant accession; the death of Komei Tenno; the Osaka audiences of 1867, told through Mr. Von Polesbroeck; the resignation of the Shogun, announced in the Gazette on 20 November; the opening of Hiogo and Osaka on New Year’s Day 1868; the coup at Kioto, the burning of the Satsuma yashiki at Mita, the battle of Fushimi and Keiki’s flight to Yedo; the Bizen affray that put Kobe under siege; the massacre of the Dupleix’s boat crew at Sakai; the attack on Parkes’s cortège on his way to the imperial audience; the surrender of Yedo and Keiki’s retirement to Mito and then Sumpu; the northern war, Uyeno, Aidzu and Yenomoto’s fleet at Hakodate; the renaming of Yedo as Tokio; and the memorial by which the western daimios gave back their territories.

Braided through the politics is a close chronicle of the settlement. The great Yokohama fire of 26 November 1866 fills a chapter, reprinted from the account Black penned “whilst the embers were still smouldering,” unsparing about the soldiers and sailors who looted under cover of helping. He records the first banks, the volunteer corps and the fire brigade, the public hospital and the home for the poor, the English church, the first Masonic lodge, the chamber of commerce, the race-course on the reclaimed swamp and the Yokohama Race Club, the elected municipal council of 1865 with its police committee and its superintendent at eighty dollars a month, and the surrender of the settlement’s government back into Japanese hands in 1867 for want of funds. His standing grievance is local: “in the matter of local government” Yokohama “has been the most unfortunate of all foreign settlements in these seas,” its streets dark at night while the native town beside it is lit with gas. Later chapters follow the lighthouses, the telegraph, the mint at Osaka, the Yokoska dockyard, and the railway opened by the Mikado in October 1872, along with the Iwakura embassy and the Maria Luz case.

Black states his own opinions plainly, and says where they lie: “My own personal sympathies are so strongly with Japan and the Japanese, that I would have been glad if I could have avoided some of the more sombre tints…” He holds that Keiki originated the friendly intercourse between Japanese and foreigners, and that had he been permitted to work in his own way Japan would have made as rapid progress as she has made, “without all the horrors of revolution.” A chapter tells how he founded the Nisshin Shinjishi in 1872 with Mr. Da Roza, and notes elsewhere that he had over sixty samurai employed on it for four years; of the press law that followed, barring foreigners from editing or owning a Japanese newspaper, he writes only, “Thereby hangs a grievance, which I do not consider this book is the proper place to ventilate,” and declines to say what became of his paper. The last chapters cover Formosa from House, the Saga rebellion, the Corea treaty of 1876, the prohibition of swords and the capitalization of the shizoku pensions. Then, mid-sentence on the alleged plot against Saigo, a bracketed note reports that the manuscript ceases, that Black died suddenly on 11 June 1880, and that his estate’s administrator published the book unfinished, adding a chronological narrative of 1877 — the Satsuma rebellion, drawn to its close through Mr. Mounsey’s account — while presenting Young Japan as Black’s sole work. A twenty-two-page index ends the second volume.

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is a two-volume account of travel in Japan in 1878, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1881 and dedicated to the memory of Lady Parkes, “whose kindness and friendship are among my most treasured remembrances of Japan.” Its preface sets out both the occasion and the form. Bird had been “recommended to leave home, in April 1878, in order to recruit my health,” and chose Japan less for its climate than for “those sources of novel and sustained interest” that suit “a solitary health-seeker”; the climate disappointed her, “but though I found the country a study rather than a rapture, its interest exceeded my largest expectations.” She insists that “this is not a ‘Book on Japan,’ but a narrative of travels in Japan,” and rests her claim to novelty on route and access: “From Nikkô northwards my route was altogether off the beaten track, and had never been traversed in its entirety by any European”; she was “the first European lady who had been seen in several districts” along it; and she offers “a fuller account of the aborigines of Yezo, obtained by actual acquaintance with them, than has hitherto been given.” The volumes “consist mainly of letters written on the spot for my sister and a circle of personal friends” — a form that sacrifices “artistic arrangement and literary treatment” and “necessitates a certain amount of egotism,” but that “places the reader in the position of the traveller.”

The letters carry no numbers; each is headed by a title and a run-on string of topics, and most carry a place-and-date line, though about a fifth carry none at all and a few give a place without a date. Volume I opens with an introductory chapter that readers who already know Japan are invited to skip — a catalogue of English ignorance about the country, quoted as overheard questions, followed by elementary facts “merely given for the purpose of making the succeeding Letters intelligible.” The narrative then begins with a steamer entering the Gulf of Yedo in May 1878 and ends on 12 August, when she lands at Hakodate. Its first seventy pages of letters never leave Yokohama and Yedo: the kuruma, the railway to Shinbashi, H.B.M.’s Legation, the foreign concession at Tsukiji, a reformed theater, the Asakusa Kwan-non temple. Here she engages Ito, an eighteen-year-old with no references, at twelve dollars a month — “I suspected and disliked the boy. However, he understood my English and I his” — and he becomes the book’s second figure. Her fullest judgment of him comes later, at Kubota: “He is not a good boy. He has no moral sense, according to our notions; he dislikes foreigners; his manner is often very disagreeable; and yet I doubt whether I could have obtained a more valuable servant and interpreter.” From Yedo she rides by kuruma to Kasukabé and Nikkô, the one “beaten track” the preface refuses to dismiss.

Nikkô takes about forty-four pages — the shrines, Kanaya’s house at Irimichi, the village school, shopping, evening employments. On 24 June she starts north: “Ito’s informants were right. Comfort was left behind at Nikkô!” The road runs by Fujihara, Ikari and Kurumatogé to Tsugawa, then down river by packet-boat to Niigata, where a week at the Church Mission House yields six sections, several of them essays with no journey in them at all — on missions, on Buddhism, on the treaty port and its shops, on the adulteration of imported goods, and ten pages on Japanese food. Beyond Niigata she goes by Kaminoyama and Kanayama to Kubota, then by Odaté to Ikarigaseki, where days of rain strand her and the great bridge parts in the middle with “an awful groan like a living thing”; then Kuroishi, Aomori, and a gale-blown crossing to Yezo. The northern road is where the book keeps its harshest material — dirt and disease, extreme filthiness, a malarious district, kak’ke — which the preface defends in advance as “strictly representative,” offered “in the interests of truth.” Tables give her stages and distances, about 247 miles from Tôkiyô by way of Nikkô to Niigata and about 368 from Niigata to Aomori, against the preface’s “land journeys of more than 1,400 miles.” Yet about 116 of the volume’s 407 pages are spent at Yokohama, at the Legation in Yedo, or at Niigata.

Volume II opens not with a letter but with a survey of Yezo: its climate and area, coal, the Colonisation Department and its finances, the fisheries, and Hakodate. Near the end of it she promises that “the Letters which follow contain all that I could learn about them from actual observation,” and adds as “a few additional facts” a census supplied by the Kaitakushi at Sir Harry Parkes’s request, which puts the Ainos at 12,281 — a figure she later doubts, thinking it may be “under the mark by some thousands.” Bird spends August and September on the island, first at Hakodate, then riding by Mori to Mororan, behind whose hill lies “the first Aino village along this coast,” and on by Horobets, Shiraoi and Sarufuto and up a forest track “only twelve inches broad” to Biratori, where she lodges three days in the house of Benri the chief. The letters describe the evening meal, libations of sake to the fire and to peeled wands, the chief’s mother splitting bark while “still sitting like a Fate,” and her questioning of Shinondi and the other Japanese-speaking young men for hours at a stretch: “The process was slow, as both question and answer had to pass through three languages. There was a very manifest desire to tell the truth.” Before they told her anything they “begged and prayed that I would not inform the Japanese Government that they had told me of their customs, or harm might come to them!”

“Savage Life,” still datelined from Biratori, and the undated “Costume and Customs” and “Religion of Ainos” — thirty-seven pages together — set the material out by subject rather than by day: physique, and the measured height of thirty adult men; women’s tattooing, called “a part of our religion” and grieved over since its recent prohibition; clothing, bark cloth and the loom; house construction, with a floor plan; household gods and a shelf of Japanese curios; food, arrow poison and arrow traps; nature worship; bear worship and the annual festival; the future state; marriage, chieftainship and burial. She took down about three hundred Aino words, “spelt phonetically,” and went over them again with the chief and afterward with the coast Ainos at Usu. The six Aino letters run to sixty-five pages, a fifth of the volume’s letters, and thirteen of its twenty-one listed illustrations are Aino subjects. Her judgments are openly divided. The opening survey calls the “hairy Ainos” “stupid, gentle, good-natured, and submissive”; a later passage, having set down that they have no history, claim descent from a dog, and are “sunk in the grossest ignorance,” goes on: “they are uncivilisable and altogether irreclaimable savages, yet they are attractive, and in some ways fascinating, and I hope I shall never forget the music of their low, sweet voices … and the wonderful sweetness of their smile.” Ito’s verdict she records too: “The Ainos are just dogs; they had a dog for their father.”

Turning back from Biratori, she adds a hundred miles round Volcano Bay by a nearly disused track — tufa cones and hot springs, a fall into an old bear-trap, a swim across the Osharu, a night at Usu, which “is a dream of beauty and peace” — and reaches Hakodate again in September, an itinerary table putting the Yezo tour at about 358 English miles. She sails on 14 September, is caught in a typhoon, and is back at the Legation at Yedo within the week. What follows is a different book. Undated notes on Tôkiyô and its modern institutions cover the castle moats, cemeteries and cremation, and the College of Engineering; a letter describes a concert at the Shiba Pavilion. Then come Kôbe and Kiyôto, and with them the missionary interest that runs through both volumes — the mission work at Niigata and Hakodate, a missionary center at Kôbe, the Kiyôto college, an interview with a Monto priest at the Nishi-Honguwanji, a late letter on the prospects of Christianity — some seventy pages in all. In November she travels by kuruma with Mr. and Mrs. Gulick, American missionaries, through Uji and Nara to Yamada. Eight pages of notes on the Isé shrines, taken on the spot and corrected afterward “by the help of a paper by Mr. Satow,” leave her cold: “there is nothing, and all things, even the stately avenues of the Geku, lead to nothing.”

A matsuri at Otsu, three days at Osaka and a visit to the Kirigaya cremation ground close the letters, the last carrying a postscript from the “Volga” on Christmas Eve 1878: “three days later I saw the last of Japan — a rugged coast, lashed by a wintry sea.” That falls on page 319; the rest is of another kind. A thirty-eight-page chapter on Japanese public affairs, unsigned and undated, runs through the end of feudalism, the classes, the army and police, the post office, railroads, the mint, the press, the penal code, education and finance, crediting in a footnote the Statistical Department of the Japanese Government among others. It admires “the extraordinary progress which the Empire has made,” names the darkest shadow on Japan’s horizon as the attempt “to secure the fruits of Christianity without transplanting the tree from which they spring,” and calls the nation “sunk in immorality,” its progress “political and intellectual rather than moral,” “at present a failure” as regards “the highest destiny of man” — then closes on the hope that Japan may grasp “the truth and purity of primitive Christianity.” Four appendices follow — Aino words from Biratori and Usu, notes on Shintô, revenue and expenditure tables for 1879–80, and foreign-trade returns — then an index to both volumes. Each volume carries a frontispiece engraving, the Yomei gate at Nikkô and “Ainos of Yezo,” and twenty cuts printed in the text; both title pages promise a map that neither list of illustrations names.

Ernest Mason Satow and Lieutenant A. G. S. Hawes brought out this guide at Yokohama in 1881 through Kelly & Co., with Kelly & Walsh at Shanghai and Hongkong, and its title page states the business plainly: a guide to Tōkiō, Kiōto, Ōzaka and other cities, to the most interesting parts of the Main Island between Kōbe and Awomori, with ascents of the principal mountains and descriptions of temples, historical notes and legends. The preface names the model at once — “In the arrangement of this work, the model of the widely known ‘Murray’s Handbooks’ has been followed as far as was practicable” — and what follows is shaped accordingly: a general Introductory Information section, fifty-four numbered Routes, and an index running from page 480 to 489. A page of Addenda and Errata and a List of Maps and Plans stand at the front, the list closing with general maps of Central and Northern Japan. The book marks out its own territory in its Geography section. A glance at the map, it observes, shows the region lying between Kiōto and Tōkiō to be nearly at the center of the country; “to this the name of ‘Central Japan’ has been given,” while “Northern Japan” comprises “the provinces stretching northwards from Tōkiō to Awomori on the Straits of Tsugaru.” Yezo, “now called the Hokkaido,” appears in the geography, and again at Awomori as the island to which country people cross each spring for the fisheries, but no route goes there.

The Introductory Information is a single essay in fifteen numbered sections, listed in a headnote at its head: Geography; Climate and Weather; Language; Treaty Limits; Passports; Shooting Licenses; Money; Weights and Measures; Maps and Books; Luggage; Dress, Etc.; Provisions, Etc.; Inns; Roads, Conveyances, Tolls, Etc.; and Useful Hints. Together they equip a treaty-port resident for weeks of overland travel among arrangements he cannot take for granted. Treaty Limits fixes, port by port, how far he may go unpapered; Passports explains how to obtain one and what object to state. Weights and Measures supplies the key to every itinerary in the book: distance is reckoned in ri and chō, and “the ri is equivalent to about 2.44 English statute miles, and it is at this rate that the distances given in the itineraries in this work have been calculated.” Luggage recommends paired wicker yanagi-guri whose size “can be diminished as the stores are consumed”; Dress prescribes flannel, a sun hat and a stock of waraji, with tabi and gaiters; Provisions warns that “it is practically impossible, when travelling in most parts of the interior, to obtain anything in the way of foreign food”; Inns explains the inclusive hatago charge, the present of cha-dai made through one’s servant, and the asterisk “prefixed to the name of a house specially worthy of mention.”

A route entry opens with its number and a title in capitals, then an itinerary of stages tabulated in ri, chō and English miles, then often a paragraph on conveyance: how far kuruma will go, where pack-horses, kago, cattle or boats must take over, and at what rate. The road itself is narrated continuously, turnings marked r. and l., place-names set in capitals with their inns in italic parentheses, populations rounded, former dai-mio and their fiefs in koku, passes and peaks in feet, climbs in hours, and a parenthesized (T.) before towns that have a telegraph office. Square brackets set off side-trips, mountain ascents and alternative roads, some running for pages, and cross-references run constantly between routes. The trunk highways carry the frame: the Tō-kai-dō from Tōkiō to Kiōto, the Naka-sen-dō through the Kiso valley, whose Shinano stretch is called “undoubtedly the most interesting part as far as scenery is concerned,” the Kō-shiu Kai-dō, the Hokkoku Kai-dō along the Japan Sea, and the Ō-shiu Kai-dō from Tōkiō to Awomori. Between them run short connectors, some briskly dismissed — one is “in itself absolutely devoid of interest, but affords the most expeditious way of getting from Kiōto to Nagoya” — while the last route abandons linear form for seven numbered excursions in Shimosa, Kadzusa and Bō-shiu.

The set-piece articles are city and sanctuary monographs. Tōkiō fills forty-nine pages: a preliminary directory of hotels, inns, restaurants, libraries, museums, theaters, churches, telegraph and post offices; a jin-riki-sha fare list from Shim-Bashi; nearly three pages of named craftsmen with their street addresses; a festival calendar and a flower calendar; a history of Yedo; the fifteen city districts walked in order; and excursions to Ōji, Meguro, Ikegami, Futago and Mariko, and Koganei. Kiōto, at about forty-three pages the second longest article, opens with the principal places worth visiting and a shopping directory of potters, bronze workers and embroiderers by name, then gives history, topography, the Mikado’s Palace room by room with its paintings attributed, temple after temple in a stated order, and environs reaching to Uji, Hi-yei-zan and the rapids of the Katsura-gawa. Nikkō runs to twenty-four pages, with five approaches, the mausoleums of Iye-yasu and Iye-mitsu read carving by carving and donor by donor, then a closing third of walks, waterfalls and ascents. Ōzaka, Kōbe, Nara, Yoshino and Kō-ya-san have articles of their own, and the temples of Ise are set out enclosure by enclosure, with their measurements, their offerings and their renewal every twenty years. A plan of Tōkiō keyed to ninety-six numbered sights faces the first page of the routes, and plans of Ōzaka and Kiōto are bound in with the city articles.

Mountains get treatment as full. Fuji has a chapter that names five points of ascent and works four of them out, with the summit and the circuit of the cone; Asama-yama, a bracketed side-piece within another route, is “the best example of an active volcano in Japan, and by far the most accessible”; and one route gathers Etchiu and Hida into a regional chapter whose introductory remarks call the range bounding those provinces on the east “the most considerable in the Empire,” which “might perhaps be termed the Japanese Alps,” before surveying its geology, its plants by altitude, its bears, antelope and tame ptarmigan, and its few inhabitants “clad in hempen garments.” In the mountain routes the register turns expeditionary: a stout alpenstock and hob-nailed boots or waraji with metal kana-kanjiki, a tariff for guide, quilt and mountain pole, huts described down to the smoke that fills the Muro-dō, “blinding and painful in the extreme.” Much of this material is credited. The preface thanks Mr. B. H. Chamberlain, Mr. W. G. Aston, Mr. T. R. H. McClatchie, Mr. J. J. Quin and Mr. W. A. Woolley “for contributions of considerable extent,” Mr. W. Gowland for the geology of Yoshino and the Hida-Shinano mountains and Mr. J. Milne for three northern ascents; in the text, crater descriptions of Fuji and Ontake close with Dr. J. J. Rein’s name in brackets, particulars come from Mr. R. W. Atkinson, and the topography of Ōzaka is quoted whole and signed J. Summers.

Throughout, the authors correct as often as they report. An attribution is refused when the dates will not fit; the “Korean lantern” at Nikkō “does not owe its origin to Korea,” and it and the candelabra beside it “probably came from Europe through Dutch or Portuguese traders”; the Ke-gon fall, “according to Japanese statements” 750 feet high, “has been recently proved by actual measurement to be not more than 350”; and the name of the god to whom a Shintō temple is dedicated is “often a mere matter of conjecture at the present day.” Inns are starred when specially worth mention and marked poor, bad or wretched when not, and an inn is named whose charges are extortionate and whose landlord is rude; “as in many other large commercial towns, the innkeepers at Kō-fu are as a rule unwilling to receive foreigners.” Meiji change is registered route after route: temples disendowed and left to decay, their grounds turned to cornfields, castles razed or made over to barracks and drill-grounds, new roads and tunnels recorded as they open, and shrines stripped by “purification,” which at Mitake left “uncared-for, empty buildings” as “pitiable monuments.” Two northern routes take their materials “with very few alterations” from Miss Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, the second adding Mr. C. H. Dallas on the Okitama district. At the back, after the index, stand the Yokohama printer’s imprint, advertisements for Satow’s own dictionary and his translation Kinse Shiriaku, and a separately paginated Handbook Advertiser.

An official pamphlet of twenty-nine printed pages, The Empire of Japan was published by the Imperial Japanese Household Department and printed at the “Japan Mail” office in Yokohama in 1881. A preface signed by Michinori S. Nagasaki, Secretary of the Imperial Household Department, and dated Tokio, October 12th, 1881, reports that the original edition “was published in 1876 by the Imperial Commission to the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia,” and that the fabric of the government has since “been very much altered by the introduction of new forms and by the modification of old ones” — alterations the preface calls especially frequent “in a nation which is, like Japan, in a transition state.” What it names as “a frequent enquiry,” and sets out to answer, is “what is now the system under which she is governed?”; the object is to furnish “to foreigners travelling in Japan and to other alien friends of the country,” who are “watching our progress in the path of Western civilization,” an authentic account of the past and the present. Ahead of the numbered pages stand a roster of the reigning sovereign and his family, beginning with Mutsu Hito, born at Kioto in the fifth year of Kayei and crowned there in 1868, and going on to the Empress Haruko, two infants entered as the Emperor’s son and daughter, the Emperor’s parents, and eleven other princes and princesses — and a chronological list of emperors from Jimmu Tenno in 660 B.C. to the hundred and twenty-first, each reign dated both in years after Jimmu Tenno and in the Western calendar. Twelve sections follow.

Eight of the twenty-nine pages go to the organization of the central government. Supreme legislative and executive power, the account states, is vested in a Privy Council (Daijokwan) over which the Emperor presides in person, with First, Second and Third Ministers of State, Privy Councillors (Sangi) of no fixed number, a Cabinet Secretariat and six sections, and attached boards for decorations, audit, statistics and historiography, together with an occasional board appointed to adjudicate between governors or prefects and the local assemblies. Bills are sent down to a Senate (Genro-in) whose members the Emperor nominates from among nobles, present or former officials of the first two grades, men who have rendered meritorious services, and men of special political or legal knowledge. Nine coordinate Departments of State follow, bureau by bureau, with the Imperial Household Department, the Colonization Commission and three ranks of courts, the service graded in three divisions embracing seventeen classes, with temporary clerks, petty officers and policemen expressly outside them. Nothing national is elected: the senators are nominated, and the Assembly of Local Officials, created in 1875, is composed of the governors and prefects themselves, called together once a year to discuss drafts the Privy Council submits to it. Election appears only below that level, in the assembly each city and prefecture chooses “by and from the body of the residents and taxpayers” to settle the local estimates. Geography comes next — a total area of 23,740 square ri, Fuji at 14,170 feet and a separate table of the principal other mountains in which six entries stand as “unsurveyed,” Lake Biwa with steamboats constantly plying, 410 hot springs and 632 waterfalls, and a tally of mines footnoted as covering workings abandoned, active and unexplored alike — and the census of 1880 yields 35,925,613 souls in 2,182,692 houses. Tokio (957,121) gets three-quarters of a page, Kioto (822,098) and Osaka (582,668) some two-fifths each, the last introduced as “after Tokyohe largest city in Japan” some sixteen lines below the Kioto figure that contradicts it. Then the six ports open to foreign commerce, dated 1858 or 1868; Hokkai-Do, “commonly called Yezo,” whose “aboriginal natives (Ainos)” are said to differ from the people of Japan proper in race, language and customs and to be, “although uncultivated,” all “orderly and gentle in their habits”; and the Riu Kiu islands, to which the pamphlet gives the better part of a page, most of it spent establishing a title. Their population of about 160,000 is “ethnically almost identical with that of the main islands”; their manners, customs and religion “are exclusively Japanese,” their language “a Japanese Dialect”; at the close of the sixteenth century the Satsuma clan, “by order of the Tokugawa Shogun of that time,” “forcibly compelled the fulfilment by Riu-kiu of the feudal duties” owed to the Prince of Satsuma, after which “the subjection of Riu-kiu to the fief of Satsuma was complete and unquestioned”; and the islands, dealt with since the restoration “in the same manner as the other feudal possessions of the dispossessed Daimiyo,” now “constitute the Prefecture of Okinawa.”

“Our knowledge of the very earliest periods of Japanese history is very uncertain,” the historical outline begins, before dating the imperial line from Jimmu Tenno and declaring it “continued unbroken up to the present time” — a claim the chronological list at the front quietly complicates, entering five emperors between the ninety-eighth and the ninety-ninth without numbers and without a note of any kind, the explanation left to the history section pages later. The narrative runs through the arrival of a Buddhist idol and religious books in 552, the twelve degrees of rank instituted by Suiko Tenno, the era names begun by Kotoku Tenno (“We have up to the present time 228 periods including the present period of Meiji”), the ascendancy of the Fujiwara, the wars of Taira and Minamoto, Yoritomo’s military metropolis at Kamakura and his appointment as Sei-i-Dai-Shogun — “Thus originated the feudal system and the decline of the influence of the Imperial court” — the Mongol invasion of 1281, broken by a hurricane after which “only three persons out of one hundred thousand escaped to their homes,” the divided courts and “the treasonable Taka-uji,” a Portuguese named Pinto in 1542, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi’s invasion of Corea, the Tokugawa shoguns, the edict of 1639 barring all foreign vessels but those of Holland and China, and the American treaty of 1858; the Empress dowager Jingo-kogo is credited with conquering Corea in 200 A.D. and making it tributary. The section closes with the shogun’s surrender of power, customs of seven hundred years “cast aside in one day,” the renaming of Yedo, the abolition of feudalism, the institution of “the monarchial form of government,” the shift from the lunar to the solar almanac, and sovereign and people “united as one family in the promotion of progress and reform.” The last ten pages are what the Contents calls “Financial, Commercial, Postal &c, Statistics.” Revenue and expenditure for the fiscal year ended June 30th, 1880 are given to the nearest thousand yen — a land tax of 41,901,000 within a total revenue of 59,930,000, the public debt the heaviest charge at 21,448,000, and a recapitulation that balances to a surplus of one thousand yen. The trade tables show exports nearly flat, 27,225,000 yen in 1876 against 27,413,000 in 1880, while imports climb from 23,478,000 to 36,187,000; Great Britain stands first among the sources of imports and the United States first among the destinations of exports; and a table of principal exports, set sideways across two pages, runs to twenty-eight commodities, from raw silk down to fans, year by year from 1868 to 1879. The post office is traced from its establishment in the fourth year of Meiji, ordinary letters running from 2,430,527 in the period to the close of 1872 to 32,918,399 in the year to June 1880. The book ends in a short column of 1880 figures: 9,589 English miles of telegraph line carrying 1,935,320 messages, 99 miles of railway open and 25 in construction, an Imperial Body Guard of 3,994 men with garrisons totaling 37,812, and a navy of 27 vessels manned by 4,631 officers and men.

Four long sketches of travel and social observation in Japan, told in the first person by an American who, on the book’s own showing, kept a house and servants in Tokio, moved through the interior on a government passport that recorded even his salary, and left the country three years after the earliest excursion he recounts. The title page adds nothing to his name. A prefatory note sets out the volume’s purpose — of the inner life of the Japanese, their domestic relations and pleasures, House writes, he has found no accurate record, nor has the loveliness of the scenery been “closely or sympathetically observed” — and makes one careful admission about the sketch that portrays “the simple vicissitudes of rustic society, with the varying course of love in humble life,” evidently the volume’s opening piece: every detail of it “is authentic, although fiction may have helped to weave together the several facts.” The other three the note describes simply as scenery, official hospitality, and popular amusement, with no such qualification. The first two pieces, which together fill about three fifths of the book, narrate past journeys in retrospect; the third prints one exchange as a script, “The Consul and the Sangi: Brief Comedy of Manners,” with speech prefixes and stage directions, and the last takes the reader by the arm — “Put yourself, I pray, under my guidance for a day.”

“Little Fountain of Sakanoshita” begins on an August afternoon on the old road from Kuwana, on the Bay of Ise, toward Ootsu at the end of Lake Biwa, where a runner talks the narrator into stopping at a mountain village no foreigner has ever slept in. At the Fuku-ya inn he finds Koizumi, or Little Fountain, the landlady’s daughter, and her betrothed Yamadori, or Mountain Bird, the runner, a dandy in a red-and-blue waist-cloth and cloth tabi who has advertised his passenger through the village as an officer with a thousand riyos a month. The traveling companion presses on to Kioto, leaving the narrator seventeen days without a countryman; he is guided over Suzuki Yama by Koizumi, swims in the river, and sets down at length his admiration of Japanese scenery and of Japanese women’s figures, which he holds to be spoiled from about fourteen by tight garments and, among the laboring class, by the burden-straps that press across the breast. The plot turns on a smashed jin-riki-sha: Yamadori, hurrying home for fear the foreigner is teaching his sweetheart to swim, wrecks a vehicle belonging to Sakurai, the wealthiest man in the village and its nanushi, or magistrate, who owns them all. The narrator calls on him and pleads the boy’s case over tea, and gets him nothing better than a place under a kago-pole; so he buys at Kameyama a double jin-riki-sha “refulgent with red lacquer” and gives it to Yamadori — who, made a capitalist, begins drifting toward the nanushi’s daughter. Koizumi consults the fox deity Inari-sama, stages a farewell party at which she announces she is leaving for Tokio in the gentleman’s service, and reclaims the vehicle, which the narrator had put in her name — hers, to lend him while he behaved — so that the nanushi could raise no claim on it for the one destroyed; Yamadori collapses in shame, and the narrator makes his conditions — immediate marriage, and the kuruma hers forever. At parting Koizumi gives him a little wallet worked with her own hands and Yamadori one of the district’s paper lanterns that fold into a pocket; on the back of the jin-riki-sha Yamadori has painted the narrator’s monogram, calling it the narrator’s “crest” (mon) and vowing it shall always shine there, and he insists on bearing one end of the pole of the kago that carries the narrator away toward Ootsu.

A standing protest against the tourist superstition of starting before dawn, delivered over dinner in a Yokohama hotel, opens “To Fuziyama and Back,” the longest of the four and an excursion made a few days after the narrator’s arrival in Japan; he is overruled, as he has been in Wales and Franconia, Scotland and the Rocky Mountains, Egypt and Switzerland, and breakfast is ordered for four o’clock on the morning of the 3rd of September, the start for five. They run west along the To Kai Do, whose breadth, pine avenues, and antiquity he defends against English writers who had painted it a Valley of the Shadow of Death; cross the swollen Sakawa on plank platforms carried shoulder-high by porters through armpit-deep water; and walk the last mile into Odawara trailed by children who scatter whenever noticed, the town lying near enough to the foreign settlements, he says, to know what the roughs of the colony are capable of. An hour of leisure is decreed there, and they find the ancient castle of the daimio then resident there standing conspicuous in the middle of the town, its interior shut to them because the last representative of the feudal house of Okubo still keeps some vestiges of his former state inside. A branch road, a chasm, and a crossing in a straw basket slung from a single rope bring them to the baths of Miyanoshita, then over the Hakone range to Subasiri, where the young men wrestle for the visitors and lose. They leave at three in the morning, fall asleep in their kagos, and take to the customary poles at the point where the ascent on foot always begins, the sun rising as they fit themselves out; House advises future climbers to keep the kago far above where custom abandons it. They give out at hut “Number Eight,” where one attendant walks to the summit well and back in three hours for water and another to Subasiri and back overnight for food; the night passes in smoke and cold, the summit is reached at seven, and they walk the three-mile circuit of the filled crater past its ring of huts and its stone and bronze Buddhas, meeting Baron Richtofen and Dr. Wagener on the way down. Presiding over the second half of the journey is their man-of-all-work, engaged in Yokohama when the intended interpreter fell through — his whole claim, so far as they could tell, “much zeal, and ten words of English,” and taken on not for any sense of his fitness but for the frankness with which he owned he might not do. Once the party’s one old Japan hand turns back at Subasiri, he buys himself a straw hat, assumes “a tone and bearing of decided superiority” toward his countrymen, keeps the accounts with scrupulous care, checks the innkeepers’ extortions, and finally lays his dignity aside to take an oar on Hakone Lake, which earns him the name of Proteus. Homeward they dispute an innkeeper’s bill that charges for fine weather procured by the priests at the mountain’s base, sleep in the daimios’ room of a fine old tavern at Misima, and delight in the cliff-hung workshop village of Hata. They sail from Odawara with a superfluous crew of nine, most of whom are seasick, and are conducted to an inn at Katase — a mistake, he writes, from which he draws the rule that near the foreign settlements one avoids the lodging-places Europeans patronize, since it is “now an old story, but as true as it always has been,” that wherever foreigners “plant themselves, or circulate, upon the soil of Japan, demoralization and disaster spring up among the natives.” The Saturday-night parties down from Yokohama, thwacking coolies and handling the female servants with what he calls revolting grossness, are the illustration; the six-hundred-foot cavern shrine at Ye no Sima comes the next morning.

Two dinners carry the third sketch, “A Japanese Statesman at Home.” In the autumn of 1870 the narrator shares the long-neglected United States Legation, a temple at Zemfuku in the Asabu district, with the American consul at Tokio and with Hirosawa Kenzo, a boy lodged with them to learn foreign ways; an extra room or two are opened for the occasion, the dust of three ambassadorial regimes extirpated and the cobweb brushed off the portrait of President Pierce, and the consul entertains the boy’s father, Hirosawa Hiosuke, a sangi and formerly first officer of the Daimio of Chosiu, together with Sawa, head of the Foreign Office, a kuge in purple cap and lacquered shoes whose mouth still shows the chocolate stain of abandoned tooth-blackening. Both eat prodigiously and talk through interpreters, one of whom holds forth on the misfortunes of “Mr. Napoleon.” The request to return the visit comes a month later, and on a bright December afternoon the party sets out for the house on Kudan, where the exchange of compliments is printed as a comedy of manners, a two-storied garden pagoda frames Fuziyama in snow, and thirteen courses of soups, raw fish, and effervescing drinks are served by relays of five attendants — the narrator making a set piece of his first encounter with raw fish, and the interpreter Yegawa saying “Imitate me” and reducing the consul to a man strewn with Japanese edibles. Geishas then dance, ending with the famous jon-kina, a dance and a game of forfeits combined in which every deviation costs an article of dress; House follows it as far as the falling sleeve and no further. The piece closes with Hirosawa cut to pieces in his sleep by some thirty swordsmen on the 27th of February, 1871, and with his burial on the hill of Atanga, Kenzo as chief mourner. “A Day in a Japanese Theatre” then plants the reader in a box at Asakusa from eight in the morning: a plain hall of matted stalls like a magnified waffle-iron, holding twelve hundred, admission about two bu, programmes sold as illustrated booklets for a cent; wooden clappers, two galleries of samisen-players and singers five feet above the stage, a dozen more players coming out onto the stage itself with flutes, kotos and drums for the opening pantomime, and the entry of Bando and Danjuro down the aisles in women’s parts. House translates the badger-and-teapot tale “Bumbuku Chagama” and describes its broad stage version, objects to the choruses, the crape-veiled property men, and the shawls held before the slain, allows a cumbersome ingenuity to the revolving stage, and goes behind the scenes to meet a player painted as a tattooed beto. In the portrayal of violent emotions, he writes, “these players could not be anywhere surpassed,” though in “the gentler passions” he finds them “less successful,” no serious love-making surviving the knowledge that both parties to it are men — a matter, he adds, of less importance in lighter comedy or farce; and his verdict is that the Japanese comedians, “as illustrators of the manners and feelings of their countrymen, are on a level with those of any Western nation” — hampered by “illogical surroundings” so extraneous that they “might be swept away at once,” and by what he calls their most obvious error, “not strictly a defect of art, but a defiance of nature”: the absence of women-players. The day ends with a free performance played by six dim candles and by lights carried on rods before each actor; the crowd gropes out into the street, and the book closes not on a verdict but on the narrator’s remark that “one opinion, however sincere, does not make a verdict,” and a question: “May I have yours? And, knowing mine, do you think you can agree with me?”

Christopher Dresser opens with an apology for adding to the shelf of books on Japan and a claim to a narrow warrant: “My excuse for writing is a simple one — I am a specialist.” An architect and ornamentist by profession, he went, he says, “to observe what an ordinary visitor would naturally pass unnoticed,” and the volume divides accordingly into two nearly equal halves. Part I gives nine narrative chapters (pages 1–224) worked up from the daily record he kept in the country; Part II gives seven topical chapters (pages 225–466) on religion and architecture, symbolism, lacquer, pottery, metals, patterned fabrics, and minor manufactures. The narrative chapters are first person and slide between past and present tense from the opening page: “It was on the 26th day of December at 6.30 in the morning that I first saw Japan,” followed at once by “A cry arises from the Japanese passengers, who are earnestly looking to the left … — Fujiyama! I look in the direction in which they gaze, but see no mountain.” Dated entries — “January 18.—This morning I went with Mr. Mounsey,” “February 18.—By seven we are astir” — punctuate the journey; the topical chapters keep the first person but settle into exposition. His stay was “limited to four months,” in which the preface claims about a hundred of the finest temples seen, sixty-eight potteries visited, and some two thousand miles traveled, though the table closing his travels adds the stages up to about 1,715.

He lands at Yokohama with General Saigo, whom he had joined at San Francisco, takes his first jinrikisha to the Grand Hotel, and walks the native town with two Austrian princes. Chapters on Yokohama and Yedo carry him to Mr. Sano and the new museum, to which he brings a collection of English manufactures gathered at Philip Cunliffe Owen’s suggestion to replace specimens lost in a shipwreck; to the Castle, the Confucian temple turned national library, and the shrines of Shiba, where a priest exclaims “You are great Shogun” and lets him into a Shogun’s tomb-shrine. A fire in his hotel, a four-hour banquet with dancing-girls at which a living fish is carved and eaten — “a refinement of barbaric cruelty,” he calls it — the New Year, the firemen’s ladder feats, and the Dai-butz at Kamakura fill the early chapters. The minister Okubo asks him for a report on Japanese commerce with Europe and the means of increasing it; at his audience with the Mikado on 20 January 1877 he begs that measures be ordered to preserve “their national arts in a form unpolluted by European influences.” Then, as guest of the nation with Ishida and Sakata as escort, he sails to Kobe and visits the Awaji potteries, the Sanda celadon works, and the baskets of Arima.

At Nara, Mr. Machida has the sealed cases opened for him. In the corridors around the great Buddha are copper sword blades thirteen hundred years old from the temple Horiu-zi and a saddle of about a thousand years figured with a Persian-like peacock; in a second building two hundred yards off, mirrors, a glass ewer, and Indian embroideries twelve hundred years old. He is then taken to the log treasury on its round wooden columns that has sheltered the collection for a thousand years and that he calls probably the oldest wooden building in the world. Kioto he passes through twice. On the first visit the crowd around the station keeps him from seeing the pageant that opens the railway, and, finding little else to be done there beyond sight-seeing, he moves on to Osaka, Wakayama, and by kago up Koya-zan, where snow lies over a grove sheltering monuments to ten thousand of the great dead and a temple holds eight thousand lamps. News of the Satsuma revolt reaches him at Sakai and, he says, materially circumscribed his route; returning through Osaka he comes back to Kioto for Kiyomidsu, the Sanji-sanken-do with its thousand and one idols, Nishi-hongwan-ji, whose priests report after eighteen months in London that Christianity is the inferior civilizing agent, and the cha-no-yu. Ise brings the two rocks off Futamigaura joined by straw ropes, between which the sun rises for worshipping pilgrims, and the Kamiji-yama shrines rebuilt unchanged every twenty-one years. The travels end at Nikko, whose shrines he calls the most important and the most beautiful in Japan and where he admits, “I am getting weary of beauty.”

On the road east he twice finds Japanese work spoiled by the foreign trade: the tied-and-dyed Narumi-shibori, which “the European and American demand for a cheaper and still cheaper article” let “degenerate into the coarsest and most objectionable of stuffs,” though he believes a recent effort to revive it has had some success; and the coarse basketwork now covering the porcelain cups of Sidsuoka, whose maker “has imbibed the English commercial spirit” — “another instance,” he writes there, “of the corrupting influence of European trade on the Japanese industries,” adding that in that district the fine old work has since been produced again. A last narrative chapter translates portions of a Japanese official report of his own sayings, which represents him as giving information on seventy subjects; he calls the misunderstanding of his position as art adviser laughable, declines to sort the true statements from the false, excuses as an understandable mistranslation the paragraph that turns gingerbread into a bread made of ginger, and adds that if the rendering fairly represents the Japanese document he fears it will mislead the Japanese and injure his reputation, since on carpets it makes him sound as though he were trying to deceive rather than instruct.

Part II opens with its longest chapter, “Religion and Architecture,” pages 225 to 320. Building, Dresser argues, is the product of climate, material, and faith. Shinto, which he reduces to fire worship, hero worship, and phallic worship and whose emblem is the mirror, enjoins work as perfect where hidden as where seen; Buddhism supplies the love of birds, insects, and flowers that fills the carving. He explains houses and temples as roofs on uprights standing loosely on rounded stones, so that an earthquake rocks rather than breaks them; describes the great timber hung like a bell-clapper inside a pagoda to keep the center of gravity within the base; and treats the bracket system as the characteristic Japanese member. Walls, gable ornament, roof pitch, dovetailed joints, tombstones, and the carpenter’s tools follow, the workmen shown after native drawings. The chapter then turns to ornament — diapers on beams, crests built from maidenhair leaves, hawk’s feathers and cart-wheels, a towel figured with a gong knocked loose by an over-eager worshipper — and to drawing, which he credits to the brush, the unrested arm, and absorbent paper. Pages 287 to 315 are given over almost entirely to Japanese drawings, captioned with nothing but a figure number.

“Analogies and Symbols” proposes that ornament may trace the migrations of races as well as language does. Dresser follows cloud and flame forms out of Central Asia, links the nimbus and vesica piscis of Buddhist images to Christian usage, describes the Buddhist monstrances and tridents he was shown at Kioto, notes the swastika, and argues at length for early intercourse with Egypt — the sistrum at Nara, the wave-scroll and key pattern, and the crystal drops hung from a Nara lotus, which he matches to the unexplained drops on Egyptian papyrus drawings. The lacquer chapter dates the most artistic work before, and the most skillful work after, the moment three centuries ago when lacquerer and decorator became one man; it names Ritsuo and the lead-inlaid wares, then walks the process — turning, eleven coats for a fine piece, charcoal grinding between them, transferred outlines, gold dust shaken through silk-covered reeds, sheet gold cut into tesserae one by one, pearl inlaid and reground — and ends at the tapped trunk of Rhus vernicifera. The pottery chapter warns that marks and trade names pass to apprentices and cannot be trusted, then works through Banko, Bizen, Satsuma and its imitations at Awata, Awaji, Shiba and Ota, Kutani and Kaga, Imari, and the blue-and-white of Seto and Mino, quoting at length Satow’s paper on the Corean potters in Satsuma, a district Dresser notes he did not himself visit.

The metal chapter sets Japan’s finest work inside a history of patronage: handicraftsmen sheltered first in the Buddhist monasteries, then for seven centuries fed and clothed within the households of the Daimios who employed them. Its showpieces are the Vienna flight of birds, a continuous casting whose birds stand almost separate from each other and which he says is now in the Archaeological Museum at Edinburgh, and the life-size peacock sent by the same founder to the last Paris exhibition, its individual barbs distinct; in a small Tokio foundry he finds a fresh wax model made for every casting, so that no two kettles are alike. The fabric chapter, having walked through stenciled resists and patterns drawn in threads of rice-flour bird-lime, argues that the best cloths combine all three ways of figuring cloth — loom, dyeing and painting, embroidery — in one piece, and warns that unless English makers cross “the gulf which separates one manufacture from another” their manufactures “will ultimately be to a great extent replaced by those of Japan.”

A last chapter gathers printing, wall-papers, fans, crape-paper, baskets, and the hundred uses of bamboo and paper, and reports that the whole of Japanese manufacture is carried on “without the aid of any mechanical contrivances whatever” — a claim Part I qualifies, having recorded European mechanism at the arsenal, the mint and one Kioto weaving factory — the water-driven rice mill of Fig. 202 being “the only machine that I ever saw in Japan.” The illustrations are wood engravings printed on the text pages rather than on inserted plates, numbered to 202 and none of them chromatic. The volume closes with a list of the chief woods of the country, their botanical names and uses, as prepared by Motoyoshi Ono of Tokio for the instruction of engineers, students, and merchants.

Berry’s pamphlet prints a paper he read before the Japan Mission of the A. B. C. F. M. at Kobe in May 1882 and published, its title page notes, by request of the Mission; the letterpress runs from page 3 to page 28. It speaks to the colleagues who heard it — “you will, I am sure, agree with me that in our daily intercourse with the people, it is incumbent upon us to observe with scrupulous regard the requirements of established social customs in Japan, so far as these may not conflict with the spirit of the Gospel we preach” — and throughout in the first person plural, of what we should observe and what we should discourage. A footnote thanks Mr. N. Saisho of Okayama for assistance and Pastor Matsuyama of Kobe and others for criticisms; a second, added “in view of the publication of this paper,” concedes uncertainty, since customs have changed much within ten years, the etiquette books and the manners of men educated under the old regime no longer serve as a guide, and many younger men “take pride in their ignorance of what we would term the laws of good behavior.” The preliminary argument holds that manners are minor morals. The bases of Occidental and Oriental politeness, Berry writes, “have hitherto been as different and far removed from each other as the geographical extremes they represent” — self-respect against “professed self-abasement,” “manly worth” against social position — so that the young men’s breaking away is “a natural and, indeed, encouraging step,” provided Christianity comes in to supply what is going. He then narrows his task: he will give chiefly “the forms of expression suitable to different occasions … and largely leave for your inference the conduct such occasions may require.”

Six sections follow, the first four numbered, and romanized Japanese phrases, set in italic with English framing, run through all of them, filling about half the page at their densest, so that the paper reads as a phrasebook with an argument in front of it. On style of language, anata “should generally be employed” in addressing a person; omaye is called highly objectionable in conversation and, as a rule, never to be used without the suffix san, though Berry is told that in Tokyohe objection does not hold; and honorifics should be avoided, or at most used sparingly, with “the lower classes,” though employed in cases of doubt, since high language embarrasses the modest man and spoils the conceited one. Presents come next: the depreciating phrases used in offering one, the judgment that the thoughtless use of the stereotyped somatsu no mono, “known to be employed even in presenting a Bible,” may well be discouraged, and the wrapping — two pieces of hosho paper and the midzu-hiki tied in a double bow-knot, red and gilt, for an ordinary gift; on special occasions a square knot cut short, red and white for a marriage and white for a death, a condolence present taking a single sheet and no noshi, which is not usual with fish, flesh or fowl either and never used toward a Buddhist priest. Berry adds that among Christians a slavish obedience to “the mere letter of formal and onerous requirements” should be discouraged, that the New Year’s toshi-dama implies a wish for services to come and is a gift “which for obvious reasons we should scarcely ever wish to make,” and that “Christmas gifts may with more propriety be observed by us.”

Visiting is much the longest section, twelve pages of the twenty-six. It covers the call announced with O tanomi moshimasu, the servant who leaves the caller standing — a relic, Berry suggests, of feudal times “when a guest was suspected as a possible enemy” — the seat before the toko to be declined where possible, terms for inquiring after absent members of a household from husband and wife down to great-grandparents, the mechanics of the bow, and farewell visits carried in specimen dialogues labeled Guest, Host and Friend. Under the etiquette of table, the host invites his guests in person, the wife “from first to last on such occasions” occupying the position of a servant — a custom Berry says “we shall do well to disregard as far as possible,” in the inviting as in the entertaining, so that Christian wives may perform the legitimate duties of a hostess. Tea drinking closes the section with a long walk-through: most missionaries regard the ceremony with disfavor, he allows, but the tea-party brings them “into social relations with a class of men otherwise difficult to reach,” and he confines himself to usu-cha, a knowledge of koi-cha being almost unnecessary and sen-cha too simple to need rules, taking the guest from the flowers and hanging picture at the toko to the fresh charcoal and painted yeda-zumi, the incense-box passed down the row, and the bowl held in the left palm.

Visits of ceremony follow: New Year’s calls; the rule that congratulatory calls should never be made during a family’s days of mourning, fifty days for parents and twenty for a wife, periods he notes are the government’s leave rules for its own officers, while most people in Japan keep seven weeks after the Buddhist requirement; marriage congratulations, with a present if none was given before the wedding — a pair of live wild ducks, a pair of pheasants, two fish, or clothing, with money added for near friends; the birth of a child; and condolence calls, at which Christians frequently say nemuri ni o tsuki nasaimashita rather than go shikiyo. Two unnumbered sections close the paper, on introductions and on the requirements of travel, the last largely about money — the mashi added when a road has been unexpectedly bad or the men have worked heartily, one or two sen of chadai for each jinrikisha at a wayside tea-house, five to ten sen a person for hotel servants — and it ends on the traveler’s answer when master, wife and servants “cover and confuse one with a deluge of polite words”: Oki ni o sewa ni narimashita. Sayonara. Two lithographed plans by R. Meiklejohn & Co. of Yokohama go with the text: a seating diagram for usu-cha in an eight-mat room, keyed below the plan to seventeen items from the Chigai-Dana to the wall picture, and a plan of a tea-room and its garden, whose explanations are printed on a leaf of their own.

The Land of the Morning is a resident’s account of Japan by a writer who describes himself on the title page as “formerly one of the professors in the Imperial College of Engineering, Tôkiyô.” Dixon reached Yokohama in August 1876 and watched the coast recede from a homeward-bound steamer in January 1880; the book, dedicated to the present and former students of the Kôbu-dai-gakkô, was finished at Edinburgh in December 1881. His preface explains the motive: school geographies, gazetteers, and even books written specially on Japan were full of gross error — a Guide Round the World published that very year announced that the correct name of Osaka was Kioto and that it was the Mikado’s capital — and what was wanted was a trustworthy account in a moderate-sized volume at a moderate price. He acknowledges debts to Sir E. J. Reed, to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and to The Japan Mail, and warns that he prints only selections; his travels ran to between two and three thousand miles by land and nearly four thousand including sea voyages, and whole tours are omitted. The fifteen chapters alternate between topical survey — geography, history, the capital, students, religion — and first-person narratives of journeys, several of them into districts he says no foreigner had entered before.

The opening chapter lays out the country: a crescent of islands — Honshiu, Kiushiu, Shikoku, and Yezo, with the Kurile, Riu Kiu (“Loo Choo”), and Bonin groups — and then mountains, plains, rivers, harbors, the great forest area and painstaking tillage, minerals, a luxuriant flora and fauna, the warming Kuro Shiwo or Black Stream, typhoons, earthquakes, population, and the physical aspect, origin, and language of the people, whose cumbrous system of orthography he counts a handicap. “Old Japan” runs from Jimmu Tennô and the Mikado’s descent from the sun-goddess through the Empress Jingô’s conquest of Korea, the houses of Taira and Minamoto, Yoshitsune, Yoritomo’s shôgunate at Kamakura and the dual government, an Asiatic armada, the Ashikaga shôguns, and Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu, to the coming of Portuguese traders and priests, the spread and then the violent extirpation of Christianity, and the adoption of isolation — which Dixon argues sprang from political fear rather than any unreasoning prejudice against things foreign. “New Japan” opens with Perry’s squadron and the consternation it caused, then the treaty, a decade of intrigue and assassination, the Shôgun’s resignation, civil war, and the Restoration; the transfer of the court to Yedo, renamed Tôkiyô; the surrender of the daimiyôs’ fiefs; the commutation of pensions; the Satsuma rebellion; Okuma’s report on thirteen years of reform; and the agitation for treaty revision.

By far the longest chapter walks the reader through the capital. Dixon takes in the castle and its picturesque moats, Fukiage Park, the feudal mansions and the iconoclasm clearing them away, the officials of New Japan in European dress, the soldiers (slovenly and swaggering off duty, he thinks), and the police, drawn largely from the samurai class and so efficient that he calls Tôkiyô safer to live in than London. The prisons — Tsukudajima above all — he reports as humanely managed and busily industrious, with convicts teaching lessons and a well-stocked library; the government offices as over-officered and prone to a “slavish literalism” he illustrates with a garden door that had to be completed before a second contract could remove it. Then come the Imperial College of Engineering with its thirteen thousand volumes and its models, the Imperial University, a college for ladies, railways, street scenes, costume, sign-boards, curious specimens of English, newspapers, the jin-riki-sha and its enduring runners, shops and bargaining, canals, the post office, and Asakusa with its shrines and fair. A following chapter doubles back to his own arrival — the P. and O. steamer Malacca in Yedo Bay on 19 August 1876, the Bluff at Yokohama, the engaging of his “boy” Yasu and of Takenosuke, the cook the two bachelors shared, a shifting foreign community of some three hundred with its Saturday auctions, a first earthquake, autumn rides to Ikegami and Ôji, and the passports and tinned provisions got ready for a winter tour.

On 26 December 1876 Dixon and his colleague Marshall left by the Kôshiû-kaidô to make the circuit of Fuji-san in winter, a scheme their Tôkiyô friends thought foolish. The narrative runs through Fuda and Fuchiû to Hachiôji, over the pass of Kobotoke, past the “Monkey Bridge” at Saruhashi, to the honjin at Yoshida; then round the little-frequented north side by Naruzawa, where foreigners had come only once before, and then ten miles of silent frozen forest and a moonlit moor to Shitoana; on to the Silver Rope Falls, Ômiya, and lake Yamanaka; back to Yoshida to close the circuit to an inch; and out through a snowstorm to Gotemba, then over the pass of Otomi to the hot springs of Kiga, Miyanoshita, and Yumoto, joining the Tôkaidô on the last of the New Year holidays and reaching home by Odawara, Ôiso, and Kanagawa. An itinerary of 98 ri, about 238 miles, ends the chapter. Two chapters then treat his students — the cramming for the entrance examination, the attentiveness and prodigious memory, the long sick lists and overwork, the imitativeness, precocity, and self-conceit, and the gratitude, with extracts from essays and letters — and public ceremonies: the Mikado’s opening of the college, a graduation, illuminations at Uyeno, ancient dances at the Imperial Academy of Music, the assassination of Okubo and his state funeral, an entertainment for General Grant, and a dinner to Professor Nordenskjöld.

“Light and Shade” takes the Japanese to be essentially a pleasure-loving people and sets one side of that against the other. On the bright side: the theatre and Chiushingura (The Loyal League) with its forty-seven ronin, the actor Ichikawa Danjuro, the hot baths and Dr Baelz’s defense of them, tea-drinking, games, New Year festivities, kites, the Feast of Dolls and the Feast of Flags, blossom-viewing at Uyeno and Mukojima, the wistarias of Kameido, chrysanthemum tableaux. On the dark: licentiousness, polite untruthfulness, improvidence, the slums of Tôkiyô, disease and death-rate, a fire and the firemen who fight it, the unsatisfactory status of women, the cruel stepmother, love songs, dirges, and proverbs. A short chapter on Shintôism and Buddhism follows Mr Satow in calling pure Shintô a natural religion at a very early stage of development, notes the pilgrim traffic to Ise, distinguishes the thirty-five Buddhist sects, dwells on the Shin sect and its “Brief Account of Shinshiu,” remarks the analogies between Buddhism and Romanism, and concludes both faiths are doomed. “Pilgrimages” describes the white-robed bands with staves and straw hats, the ascent of Fuji by its eight stations to the chant of “Rokkon shôjô,” sunrise worship and the mountain’s conical shadow, and then Nikkô — the fifty-mile cryptomeria avenue planted for Iyeyasu, the gorgeous Tôshôgû, Iyeyasu’s tomb up a staircase of 240 stone steps, the pass of Chiuzenji, and sulphurous Yumoto beneath Shirane-yama.

Two summer journeys carry the book toward its close. In 1877, with Professor Atkinson, Dixon took the Kôshiû-kaidô its whole length to Shimo-no-suwa, pausing at Kôfu for its silk factory and normal school, then the Nakasendô down the Kiso valley to Oi, diverging to Nagoya with its castle ridged with two immense gilt bronze fish, and the sacred sword at Atsuta, and so by the Tôkaidô past lake Biwa to Kiyôto: 144 ri, about 350 miles. “Three Classic Cities” gives Kiyôto its Gosho, the Honguwanji temples with their Romish-seeming ritual, the monastery of Chion-in and its seventy-ton bell, and its two thousand geisha; Osaka its castle of immense stones and an Imperial Mint he judges better equipped than London’s; Nara its lake, deer park, and a Daibutsu he calls repulsive; and Hiyei-zan a panorama over lake Biwa. In 1879, with Atkinson and Mr Nakazawa, he pushed into the solitudes of Hida — fording torrents, sleeping in a wood-cutters’ hut, climbing Haku-san out of the “Hell Glen,” and standing at last on Tate-yama above a sea of cloud — 640 miles, 430 of them on foot. A final chapter presses the Church’s duty to Japan and recounts the Tôkiyô Christian Association, Bible classes with his own students, and lectures at Mr Tsuda’s college, ending in hope that “the Sun of Righteousness shall have fully risen.” Illustrations drawn on wood by J. Bayne from photographs, Japanese paintings, and the author’s own sketches, a map, and itineraries closing two of the travel chapters accompany a text prefaced by a note on Dr Hepburn’s system of transliteration.

Bridges’s Journal of a Lady’s Travels Round the World is a dated travel diary, issued by John Murray in 1883 “with illustrations from sketches by the author” — ten plates and eight woodcuts set into the text, among them a Japanese schoolmaster and his scholars, a wayside shrine in Japan, and the “Heavenly Bamboo” — with a folding map of the world bound in at the back, and dedicated to her mother, “for whom the journal from which these extracts are taken was kept.” Its epigraph is Herodotus: “I have related what I have seen, what I have heard, and what I have learnt by inquiry.” Bridges sets out with her husband, named throughout only as “H.,” on a circuit that begins one hot night at the end of August 1878 in sight of Kephalonia and closes, after “nearly two years and a half ‘all round everywhere,’” with a homeward turn. Twenty-seven chapters carry entries headed by place and date — “Sparta, September 13,” “Leh, June 5,” “Kioto, April 23” — moving eastward through Greece, Egypt, India, the Himalaya, Burmah, the Straits, Java, China, Japan, and North America. She camps, walks passes, sketches, quotes Marco Polo, Buddhist scripture, missionaries and officials, and writes in the first person plural of “we English”; when the pair separate, long stretches are given over verbatim to H.’s own journal.

The opening chapters move quickly. In Greece she rides through the Morea on “the poor horses of the country,” reads Murray under the porch of the Erechtheum, eats water-melon in the hut the Schliemanns used at Mykenæ, walks over Mount Taygetos with a soldier escort, and lodges among two hundred monks in the cliff-face convent of Megaspelion. Egypt brings a rapid voyage to the first cataract, an ascent of the Great Pyramid made on her own terms after a bargain struck with the Sheik, and a farewell to the Sphinx. Three chapters then carry her across India from the Deccan to the Khyber: the Moharram at Hyderabad, with its Arab horsemen, jeweled elephants, and the midnight passing of the “Nahl Sahib”; a visit from an educated Musalman lady whose husband says plainly that “we Musalmans keep our wives in prison”; the rock-cut sanctuaries of Karli, Ellora, and Ajanta; the Begum of Bhopal’s hospitality and the great tope at Sanchi; then Delhi, where she traces the siege of 1857 from the ridge, Lahore and its museum of Greek-influenced Buddhist carving, Peshawar amid war preparations, and one day up the Khyber as far as Ali Musjid.

Seven chapters — close to a third of the book — then describe the walk into Kashmir through famine country, the boat up to Srinagar, snow passes crossed in grass shoes, and a summer at Leh, “nearly 12,000 feet up on the world-roof.” Bridges watches polo in the bazaar, sits through the masked Lama miracle play at Hemyss with its dancing skeletons, lodges in a Lamasary among five hundred monks, records the Wuzeer’s durbars and a much-married Tartar housekeeper marched off to prison, suffers repeated attacks of ague, and prints H.’s journal of his expedition over the passes to Yarkand. Descending by Jummoo into British India, she visits the temples and sacred monkeys of Benares and watches Kinchingunga take the last light at Darjeeling. Burmah follows: elephants stacking teak in a Rangoon saw-mill, the great pagoda, the yellow-robed poonghees of a kioung. Then come the Straits of Malacca and its durians, Singapore’s Chinese citizens and a tapioca plantation, and close to a month in Dutch Java — the botanic gardens at Buitenzorg, a Christmas-Day drive into the interior, the ruins of Brambanam, and Boro Bodor, whose miles of bas-relief she thinks unmatched among the Buddhist remains of India. Chapter XVI gives Canton at the Chinese New Year: chair-coolies, ancestral tablets, the Temple of 500 Genii, the examination cells for the Civil Service.

Japan fills chapters XVII to XXI, some sixty-five pages and nearly four months from mid-February. Landing at Yokohama from Hong Kong, Bridges notes the swords and court robes now sold as “curios,” and is woken by the severest earthquake felt in twenty-five years, which brings down her hotel’s chimney and leaves the chimneys on the hill opposite “rather as if a bombardment had taken place.” From a tea-house at Enoshima she sees Fuji as “a cone of pure snow”; at Tokio she visits Asakusa with its astrologers, the lacquered Shogun tombs at Shiba, and the graves of the forty-seven Ronins. She dines with chop-sticks and singing girls, and meets a minister of foreign affairs who carries the scar of an assassination attempt. Steaming down to Kobe at the head of the inland sea, she sketches in the Shinto “parish church,” quotes the Kojiki on the sun-goddess Amaterasu, and watches the festival of Jimmu Tenno while H. is away at Pekin and the Great Wall. Later come the Dai Butsu at Nara, Kioto’s Female Model School where a girl explains why a balloon rises, the Mikado’s palace with its bedroom bare of all furniture, the rapids, the Jodo sect, “considered the Protestants of Japanese Buddhism,” and finally a fortnight and more by jinriksha and jolting kango up the Nakasendo to Nikko. She sees no beggars, hears no angry word, calls the interior “really a sort of Arcadia,” finds the educated classes professing scarcely any faith, thinks Japanese men the ugliest she has met, and complains that they “can copy anything, but are ‘impervious to reason.’”

Eighteen days at sea from Yokohama, in a ship carrying six hundred Chinese passengers and a stock of coffins, bring her to San Francisco and the fifteen-hundred-room Palace Hotel; en route she decides that “perhaps the Japanese are somewhat overrated as a nation,” clever and bright-tempered but wanting “the depth and thoroughness of their rather maligned neighbours, the plodding Chinese.” North again to a flooded Portland, then Vancouver’s Island and Victoria, a town whose grass-grown streets give it for her the aspect of having “retired from business,” and up the Frazer River among railway navvies, Chinese salmon-canners, and a backwoods innkeeper reading Carlyle. Back in California she drives to the Mariposa big trees and the Yosemite, watches the Bridal Veil Fall break into rainbows, fishes Lake Tahoe, and passes a town where a Vigilance Committee has warned off loafers. At Salt Lake City she hears Orson Pratt preach in the Tabernacle, calls at the office of the Woman’s Exponent, and sees Brigham Young’s grave; Colorado brings the cañons, the Garden of the Gods, and two-year-old Leadville with its silver furnaces; Chicago, its bookshops and its pigs. There the dated entries break off, and a closing note disposes of some months more among the lakes and rivers of the north and the autumn woods and battlefields of the south before the homeward turn. Her last counsel is that travelers should learn a country’s past before looking at its present.

Arthur H. Crow’s Highways and Byeways in Japan prints, in sixteen chapters, the journal he kept during four months in Japan in 1881, from a landfall off Cape Chichakoff on May 29 to a departure through the Tsugara Straits in September. The preface explains the book’s origin: Crow, who counts himself one of the “down-trodden race labouring under the stigma of ‘globe-trotter,’” says the journal “was written without the remotest intention of future publication,” that he has adhered “as closely as possible to the text,” and that he owes technical and statistical information to “Messrs. Satow and Hawe’s ‘Handbook to Central and Northern Japan.’” Most of the entries keep their diary headings — “Sunday, 29th May, 1881, Off Japan,” “Monday, 20th June, 1881, Fukushima” — and the two pedestrians of the subtitle are Crow, whom his companion once addresses as Arthur, and a comrade thanked in the preface as “Mr. Ernest B.” and called simply Ernest thereafter. A hired interpreter, cook and jinricksha man, Yoshi, is engaged at Yokohama in June and is still with them on the August run down to Kioto and the rapids. Most of the narrative runs on “we,” while “I” carries opinions and solo excursions and takes over in the first Hakodate chapter; Ernest is named for the last time at the Katsura-gawa rapids.

The early chapters cover the approach and the treaty ports. Crow watches the Kuro Siwo, the volcanic islands of the Van Diemen Straits and the smoking cone of Vries Island from the deck, then lands at Yokohama and describes the Bund, the Bluff, the “Swamp Settlement,” the rates given by Chinese shroffs at the Oriental Bank, the yen and the discounted paper satsu, and the jinricksha with its ten-sen coolie. A train carries the pair to Tokyoo dine at the Japanese house of Mr. Satow of the British Legation, where he and Lieutenant Hawes advise on routes; they see the National Exhibition of Japanese manufactures, the Asakusa temples with their revolving library of the Buddhist scriptures, and a tea-firing go-down, where Crow notes that women work twelve to fifteen hours a day for less than seven shillings a week. Sailing to Kobe, they take the train on to Osaka — the “Venice of Japan” — for the fish-market, the Imperial Mint, the sixteenth-century castle and a slovenly garrison, then take the rail to Kioto, Ya-ami’s hotel, a public bath-house, the Mikado’s empty palace, the temple of the thousand-armed Kwan-non and the Yasaka pagoda. Chapter IV brings them to Otsu, where passports must be copied for the police, and across Lake Biwa by steamer to Hikone.

The heart of the book is the walk. On June 12 the two men leave Hikone with wicker baskets, oiled-paper coverings, linen “flea dresses” and Yoshi hauling the baggage, and tramp the Nakasendo — the “Road of the Central Mountains” — through Gifu, Ota, Magome, Fukushima, Sakurazawa, Shima-no-Suwa, Komoro and Annaka to Takasaki, then take the Rei-hei-shi-kaido by way of Tochigi to Nikko, arriving July 3. Crow describes a Japanese inn once and for all: the doma, mats reckoned by the room, sliding shoji and fusuma, the tub heated by a stove standing in the water, the blind amma who pounds the walkers’ muscles at night. He records silkworm rearing, tea picking, rice husked by water-power, counterfeit Bass and claret, coolies harnessed to the jinricksha over the passes, and innkeepers who refuse foreigners until a policeman is fetched. Crow’s own attempt on On-take, made with Yoshi while Ernest stays behind, fails in cloud on a thirty-one-mile day, and rain drives the pair off Asama-yama, whose crater he supplies from Dr. J. J. Rein by way of Satow. Chapter VIII ends with a day-by-day itinerary totaling 328 miles. At Nikko come the sacred bridge, Iye-yasu’s shrines and curio-vendors thrown downstairs; ruined roads and a river steamer down the Watarase-gawa then return them to Yokohama.

The remaining chapters are excursions from the ports. “Idle notes in Yokohama” gather the foreign community’s clubs and athletics, the loss of the United States frigate Oneida, grooms washing ponies in the bay, a bargaining scene transcribed in yen, the French national fête and the Mikado’s opening of the Sumida-gawa. A second trip takes in Kamakura, the Dai-butsu with a table of its dimensions copied from the priests’ woodcuts, Enoshima’s cave, Miya-no-shita, Hakone lake and the sulphur springs called the “Little Hell.” After running the Katsura-gawa rapids, Crow climbs Fuji-san from Subashiri in straw waraji among columns of white-clad pilgrims, passes a freezing night in a summit hut, watches the sunrise, and descends into the crater, where Shinto priests follow to chant to Fujisengen. The last two chapters describe Hakodate in Yezo — fish manure, the seaweed and salmon trades, sea-otter schooners, a native dinner-party menu, a missionary’s meager returns, the model farm at Nanai — and an imperial visit at which Crow calls the Mikado “a fraud as a monarch.” He sometimes writes “Japps” and judges freely, yet closes praising the “uniform courtesy, honesty, and brotherly kindness” of country people. An engraved frontispiece, “Fuji-san, the Peerless Mountain,” and a folding “Map of Central Japan” marking the author’s route accompany the text.

Japan in Yezo is a book of travel assembled out of a newspaper. Its title page calls it “a series of papers descriptive of journeys undertaken in the island of Yezo, at intervals between 1862 and 1882,” issued “with itineraries of distances on travelled routes, and a sketch map of Yezo,” and records that the papers ran in the Japan Gazette from February to October 1883 and were “reprinted in this form by request.” No name appears on it — only “By T. W. B.” Much of the book is old notes reprinted whole — “I will now go back some years and give my own experience as written at the time” — under footnotes that date and correct them, and where his own observation ran out he has, he says, “drawn on information supplied by, or on the published accounts of others who have had better opportunities or been more capable than myself,” claiming to have given such observers credit, “not always done by writers even concerning Yezo”; a later chapter opens with an apology for “giving all the information in this paper as regarding the Upper Iskari from the observations of others.” He had, he says, “seven years’ residence at Hakodate,” collected birds there, compiled with Mr. H. Pryer a Catalogue of the Birds of Japan read before the Asiatic Society of Japan in 1880, reprints a corrected extract from his own “A Journey in Yezo,” which he says the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society published in mutilated form in 1872, and once held the Japanese government’s orders to inspect the guns and stores saved from the wreck of H.M.S. Rattler at Soya.

The first eight chapters keep close to Hakodate. Escaping the heat of a Shanghai July, he sails north in the barque Eva, beats up the Strait of Tsugaru past Matsumai, and drops anchor “at 4 a.m. on the 27th of July.” What strikes him on landing is the smell of dried fish and seaweed, the stones piled on shingled roofs, the universal wood and paper, the wolfish dogs, and the officials with two swords in their sashes — “the two-sworded men, the bugbears of Japan,” of whom he concludes that “the fear of the sword is the beginning of wisdom in Japan.” A cruise in a friend’s converted junk toward Awomori Bay ends with the craft on her beam-ends mid-strait, and two letters from the Hakodate custom house — one penciled by an official to the United States commercial agent, one from an interpreter to an English merchant — are given as specimens of Japanese-English.

Later passages and footnotes bring Hakodate up to date, and record the abolition of the colonization commission — the Kaitakushi, “a special department instituted in 1871 for the purpose of developing the resources of Yezo,” much of the money spent under General Kuroda — by a Daijokwan notification of 8 February 1882, the island thereafter divided into the three prefectures of Hakodate, Sapporo and Nemoro. Excursions follow to the volcano Komagatake and its lakes, including a night spent watching beside a tethered cow for bears; to the boiling craters and alum baths of Cape Esan; and to a Hakodate festival with its triumphal cars, silk-sailed model junks and life-size paper whale. Here too begins a question he returns to all through the book: the pits and coarse pottery left by a people who lived in Yezo before the Ainu, Mr. Batchelor’s Koro-pok-guru, of whom he concludes that such a race pretty certainly existed, that where they went is quite uncertain, and — a few lines later, in a theory he grants may seem far fetched — that the Ainu may have driven them south to be annihilated between themselves and an advancing tide of Japanese.

With the ninth chapter the writing goes offshore, aboard a steamer collecting salt fish from Eturup, largest of the Kurils. The voyage runs east past Cape Erimo, where the warm Kuro-shiwo gives way to a dark olive-colored current they take to be the Oya-shiwo, then through Pico Channel to the fishing stations of Furubets, Rubets and Bettobu, to Moyoro or Bear Bay — safe in northerly and westerly winds, and empty but for one hut — and back past Bettobu to Shibetoro. From the Bettobu anchorage he faults the chart of the Hydrographical Department of the Japanese Admiralty, which puts the north-eastern part of Eturup very incorrectly and Shibetoro about fifteen miles too far north, and insists that accuracy must never be made subordinate to “quantity or show”; at a small river two miles off, one of the party digs a fair collection of rough pottery out of ancient pit-dwellings; and at Shibetoro two rods take over a hundred trout each in an afternoon, with “no art or skill required.” The two following chapters walk the south-east and eastern coasts by land — Horoidzumi, Biru or Tokachi Quaisho, Ohots at the mouth of the Tokachi, the Bay of Akis and Nemoro — with close accounts of seaweed gathering and of salmon set-nets, seines and salting sheds. Few things, he writes there, probably strike a traveler in Yezo more than “the subdued nature of the Ainu”: careless and good natured as they are, they seem to have lost all idea of independence and “to have assigned themselves almost as slaves to the more civilized Japanese.” Their love of spirits, he adds, militates greatly against their social elevation, and the Japanese, who profit by it, do nothing to discourage it. He had once proposed that they would make excellent soldiers organized as irregulars, adding that the Japanese “would possibly be averse to teach the Ainu to know their own strength.”

From Tsugaru Strait the route swings west and north. Matsumai, or Fukuyama, is found fallen off — never fully recovered from the fighting of 1869, exposed for want of a harbor, and outdone by Hakodate’s safe anchorage, by Esashi for the herring, and by Otaru, which monopolizes the north-west coast trade — and the strait itself is argued to be a line of demarcation between two dissimilar faunas, Yezo belonging zoologically with Siberia, a point he is not aware of anyone having made before he and Pryer made it. A remembered encounter on the then very bad track between Yoichi and Iwanai, in November, brings an old bear and two cubs into the path and then a fourth out of the bamboo scrub at his left hand, taken for the male, which after a handful of half-dried mud walked off — convinced, he thinks, or else merely satisfied.

Then comes the roughest coast in the book, Kumaishi to Kudo, Cape Ota, Futoro, Setanai, and Cape Mota crossed on foot with hired porters — the setting for his verdict that the whole scheme of “colonization,” as it was called, “was based on wrong principles, or no principle at all: it was Utopian and impracticable,” many of the subsidized samurai villages now more or less abandoned, though he adds that not all the money has been thrown away. At Kaiyanuma, six sea miles north of Iwanai, he sees the first coal run down the tramway, “in fact, I may say, the opening of the first rail-road in Japan”; then Shakotan, Yoichi, Otaru and the rail to Sapporo. Other chapters take the Mororan road past the Nanai experimental farm, Horobets, Shiraoi and Chitose; go west of Cape Erimo to the Ainu villages of the Saru valley and their talkative old chief at Piratoru; and follow the north-east coast from Bitskai by pack-saddle and Ainu guides to Share, Abasiri and Cape Soya, then down the west coast to the Iskari and up it by dug-out canoe.

The twentieth chapter, the longest in the book, rounds the north shore of Volcano Bay and turns polemical: “It was left, however, for a traveller in modern times to attempt by a little fine writing to carry us by this route to heaven. (See Miss Bird’s ‘Paradise’ in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan.)” On that first trip round, he says, he was not bound in that direction and did not even see the gates; there seems to him “an unnecessary parade of latin names” in her book; and her preface, that in northern Japan she had to learn everything from the people themselves, he sets against Bridgford’s Journey in Yezo and the Kaitakushi reports and official letters as evidence to the contrary. On the soil — where he interrupts himself to regret “having to find fault with so pleasant a writer” — he does not dispute that Yezo has millions of cultivable acres, only that it might be cropped for a quarter of a century without manure, which is “a chimera hatched in the brain of a fleeting visitor.” The same chapter gives four pages to the Ainu, opening with an admission that readers will think it a serious omission that he has said so little about a people he lived among for weeks at a time: he “never inquired very much regarding their habits and customs” and became convinced “there was very little to learn from them,” though he grants he may have been mistaken and blamed for not making better use of his opportunities. What follows mixes his own long acquaintance — the fish-spear, the makeshift snow-shoes, the deer-call whistle, whole villages fleeing smallpox into the mountains, the crane dance he knew by its chanting — with Lyman’s and Miss Bird’s measurements and Scheube on the bear feast.

A short chapter on the Iskari valley lays out its tributaries, the levee-like banks that carry the roads, Major Bridgford’s and Mr. Fukusi’s estimates of its extent, and the Poronai coal region the Sapporo railroad now runs thirty-five miles inland to reach. Behind much of this stands Mr. Lyman, the Kaitakushi’s geologist, whose surveys and reports are quoted at length all through the book, and whose journey of 1874 — up the Iskari to its source, over a pass and down the Tokachi to the sea — he calls the most remarkable made in Yezo by any foreigner. Sapporo, left to the last chapter, is “the child of a department now abolished,” with the character of a spoiled child and the look of an exotic plant in an unsuitable climate; had the money spent on it gone instead to immigration, harbors, roads and the reduction of the fishery taxes, he writes, the country would stand today “in a much farther state of development,” and a footnote puts the island’s whole population at 226,884 in 40,810 families, of whom 16,933 were Ainu. The appendix gives eleven itineraries in Japanese ri — one ri “equal to 2.44 English miles” — each keyed back to the chapter and page that describes the route, and the volume carries a folding outline sketch map of Yezo taken from a Japanese map.

Sunny Lands and Seas gathers the letters Hugh Wilkinson, of Lincoln’s Inn, sent home during a tour in the Ceylon, a former P. and O. steamer built only for passengers, whose share of the journey ended at San Francisco. The preface recommends ocean-yachting and states the book’s quarrel: it is meant “to protest against many of the numerous books of travel — generally those most read — which cause the ‘globe-trotter’ so much disappointment.” He and a friend left England on 5 December 1881 and joined the ship at Suez; the preface dates their landing again to 5 May 1882, “exactly six months from the day of our departure,” though its own dates make five and the Conclusion still has them leaving San Francisco on the 6th. The epistolary form survives in more than forty place-headings and datelines, from “Hotel Suez, Suez, Dec. 20, 1881” to “Thursday, May 4th” in the Yosemite, after which the Conclusion runs home without them. The dedication thanks “my friend and travelling companion, Albert Wood, Esq., of Bodlondeb, Conway,” for the “accurate observation and notes” behind much of it; in the letters the companion goes by the unexplained name De Bosco.

The opening letters come from Egypt and the Red Sea: the Pyramid of Cheops and its “extortionate rabble of Arabs clamouring for backsheesh,” a block in the canal at Suez, Christmas at nearly 90° in the cabins, a child buried at sea. At Bombay the friends leave the ship to cross India by rail, rejoining her at Calcutta — elephants up to the ruined palace at Amber, five miles from Jeypore; the Cashmere Gate at Delhi shown by a guide who was in the storming party; the Taj at Agra, “the most beautiful tomb on earth”; then Lucknow, the bathing pilgrims and burning ghauts of Benares, and Calcutta, “The Ditch” rather than the City of Palaces, one of the disappointments the preface had promised.

The Indian letters set contempt against sympathy. At Delhi, humiliated by the salaams he receives, he writes of a gulf between rulers and ruled that “with gentleness and love will vanish,” but with “indifference, neglect, and injustice, will become an ocean, in whose righteous storms our rule may pass away.” A hotel notice at Agra asking guests “not to strike the servants” excites his blood “to boiling-heat.” In the Benares letter the pilgrim crowds filling the railway stations are “a poor, uncivilized, and degraded people,” a whole family to one small mud room; they look as though they expected blows, though he has never seen one struck, and he has never heard one spoken to gently — “our people never try to gain their love,” a task “too big and hopeless” for “our insensitive countrymen.”

Penang and Singapore bring marvelous vegetation and the “Dutch wife” bolster he kicks out of bed; the Maharajah of Johore gives the passengers a banquet and ball. The Spanish officials who board the ship off Manila are “animated bits of scum in gold lace”; ashore, the hospitality of the English residents is “absolutely unbounded,” there have been forty-two earthquake shocks in three months, a cock-fight is “a most disgusting institution,” and a government cigar factory employs nearly 5,000 women. Hongkong yields jinrickishaws, races in the Happy Valley and a page of “Pidgen English”; on the Pearl river, whose steamers keep loaded Winchester rifles in the saloon, so the captain tells them, he gives, slightly abbreviated, a survivor’s account of a pirate attack on the Spark. Canton is alleys of frightful smells, a prison of cangues, an execution ground with tubs of heads, three pipes of opium that have no effect whatever, and a verdict that “cruelty, falsehood, trickery, vice, and mutual distrust seem to be their chief national characteristics.”

Japan fills four chapters, roughly a fifth of the book. Nagasaki is “quaint, picturesque, and pleasing”: his jinrickishaw men stop at a wayside temple to clap and ring a bell “to awaken the god,” 700 tons of coal come aboard in small baskets, and he suggests it would be “far more pertinent, and less impertinent” to send missionaries from Japan to England and America. The ship threads the Inland Sea to Kobe, whose mixed public baths startle him; passports carry the friends beyond treaty limits to Kioto, its temple of Nishi-Hon-gwan-ji and a theater where an attendant crawls after each actor with a candle on a pole. Coolies run them thirty miles to Nara, whose brazen image he calls the greatest in the world, and thirty more to Osaka; then come Fusi Yama, Tokio, and the Kamakura Dai Butzu of 1252, not quite so large as Nara’s but “in finish and expression far superior.”

Japanese art he finds grotesque and without correct drawing, perspective or composition, while admiring its color and the temple paintings at Kioto, and he expects European contact to reduce it to “an impure, bastard art.” The residents’ charges he passes on with a caution: a short sojourn yields “the merest ‘surface’ impressions,” and a longer stay “would undoubtedly make us alter our opinions in many respects.” Their greatest sins, he is told, are licentiousness and untruthfulness; in manners, he adds, “every woman is a lady, and every man a gentleman,” but “they are like children — they lie like them, too,” lying being “a national pastime in which all are expert” and, he argues, no sin to a people who count it none. Chapter XV, on hara-kiri, is abbreviated from Mr. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, whose execution scene, that of Taki Zenzaburo, Mitford witnessed; Wilkinson’s own remarks close the chapter with the forty-seven ronin and the 1869 vote against abolishing the practice.

Fifteen Pacific days bring them to Honolulu, where “disappointment and disgust are weak words.” He and the ship together damn Miss Bird’s “poetically-written but misleading” book, and he asks how, under all the missionaries’ care, the native population has fallen from Captain Cook’s estimate of 400,000 to 44,088 in 1878, while granting that they have been taught to read and write and not to eat one another. Only the volcano and the ride through the forest escape the general disappointment; a party is lost in the Hilo forest and searched for by the ship’s passengers, and at Kilauea the lake of fire breaks up and drains away. California gives fresh bread and butter after nearly five months, the Palace Hotel breakfast bill of fare printed entire, and the Yosemite Valley; the Chinese of San Francisco are “a thrifty, quiet, hard-working and inoffensive race, and yet they are intensely unpopular.” The Conclusion runs home by Ogden, Chicago, Niagara and New York. A folding route map precedes the title page, eleven full-page engravings printed sideways — six in the Japan chapters — and twenty-eight cuts illustrate the text; after “THE END.” stands an unnumbered Table of Distances totaling 28,020 miles.

Holtham’s Eight Years in Japan is a railway engineer’s account of service under the Japanese Department of Public Works. Its preface speaks of the author in the third person — the pages were written “in an interval of leisure following upon a return home from service in Japan, by a civil engineer” — while the fifteen chapters are first-person throughout, apart from two or three pages near the start that call him “the traveller” and “the wanderer.” The narrative runs in order from his arrival at Yokohama in November 1873 to an overland journey made in March 1882, with three maps — Central, Northern and Southern Japan — at the end of the volume. It offers “a record of work, travel and recreation” but no formal summary of the results of study, and it is candid about what it withholds: the materials for a chapter on the management and direction of the Railway Department, he says, went into “a quire of black-edged paper” and were left out of “this otherwise veracious work.” The “Chief” of the early chapters is R. Vicars Boyle; the “Chief Commissioner,” head of the Railway Bureau, is Inouye Masaru.

He lands from the Avoca after a passage by Suez, Galle, Singapore and Hong Kong, reports to the railway offices and inspects the short line to Tokiyo with a skeptical eye — work that within “a very few years” had to be almost remade, as it turned out under his own superintendence. Kobe, which he much prefers to Yokohama in a prejudice he confesses with sorrow, supplies more comedy: iron columns propped in the air because their screw-piles proved not quite long enough to reach the ground, culverts of worked granite built like the abutments of a fifty-foot bridge, two river tunnels bored for a single line where, he is told, a double had been intended. Leaving the settlements on the 23rd of December 1873, he goes up the river from Osaka by roof-boat to Fushimi, reaches Kiyoto on Christmas Day, and takes the lake steamer north to spend 1874 surveying between Tsuruga, Shiotsu and Nagahama, in summer heat in the nineties and a winter, warned of as severe, that left four or five feet of snow on the roofs and did not begin to melt till February.

The next season moves him to Akasaka, surveying across the plain of Mino; then, with railway funds withdrawn and the surveying staff broken up, he takes charge of construction near Kiyoto — fifty arched flood openings, about half of them already built by his predecessor, and the big bridge over the Katsura, whose foundation wells had to be sunk by dredge and diver through shifting gravel. The line opens to Kiyoto on the 5th of September 1876, and the chapter closes on that autumn’s “jishin,” of which he says that it probably aggravated the hardships of the shizoku while aiding the financial pressure of the time in appearance only: their pensions were commuted by a measure he calls forced and arbitrary, though the great concession to the agricultural classes in the lowered land tax must now, he says, “be looked upon as a wise act of statesmanship.” In February 1877 the Mikado performs the state opening, schoolchildren bowing in ranks along the track. The Satsuma rebellion reaches him sideways, in wounded carried by train to the convalescent hospital at Osaka; for the war he refers readers to Mounsey’s “careful monograph.”

A month’s leave that June takes him by coach to Utsunomiya, over the shrines and the tombs of the first and third Shoguns at Nikko, up Nan-tai-san from the lake at Chiusenji, west along the Naka-sen-do to the crater of Asamayama, down through the Kiso valley and on over a stretch beyond Magome that he calls, advisedly, “the worst road in the whole world,” and out to the plain shrines of Isé, where he is kept outside the entrance. From the autumn of 1877 he is Principal Engineer at Tokiyo, doubling the eighteen miles of ricketty single line to Yokohama; the new Rokugo bridge, virtually complete when he arrived, is opened by Ito Hirobumi that November. The foreign staff thins around him — over a hundred at his first Imperial New Year reception, fewer than forty at his last — under what he calls the settled policy of the department, to compel recourse to the Japanese staff, which leaves him a sort of roving inspector, propping up men who claimed his assistance rather than gave it; his native assistants at Shimbashi had been, he says, “some of them of a dreamy temperament.”

On the whole, he writes, as regards the actual execution of work, the trained Japanese workmen and foremen are “both intelligent and conscientious.” A loose rail is propped across the running line by a hand never traced; Okubo is assassinated in the spring of 1878. Of the Engineering College and the University he remarks that if you ask in Japan to be shown a Japanese-bred engineer, ten to one the specimen produced has “never seen the walls of either,” though he allows that a good deal has been done by both and expects the College’s pupils to justify their teachers later in the field. An ascent of Fujisan leaves him warning readers off “that disgusting mass of humbug and ashes.” That September a flood takes his own line: the train is backed off the flooding “long straight” not a minute too soon, and he wades about a mile of it feeling for the rail with the point of his stick. The native engine-drivers taken on in the spring of 1879 prove “steady and wideawake” and economical of coal and oil.

A voyage north in the lighthouse tender reaches Kinkasan and the Kamaishi iron works, and he returns overland by Ishinomaki, Matsushima and Sendai. Then fire: the Boxing Day conflagration that destroyed eleven thousand houses, and, in February 1880, his own house with his books and papers in it. Looking back, he complains of a false economy put in place of judicious maintenance, and of credit appropriated by men who claimed to have superseded the foreigners. The transfer to Kobe in April 1881 is followed within a year by his retirement, over doings he declines to detail and events “yet too recent to be fitly chronicled.” The closing chapter is his March 1882 journey from Nagasaki back to Kobe — a hundred and ninety-eight ri, or four hundred and eighty-six miles by road and coasting vessel — by Shimonoseki and the temple built on piles over the water at Utsukushima to Himéji in unceasing rain. He recommends the trip, granted fair health and spirits, a not too luxurious habit and “a good time of the year, say May or October for choice”: it offers no crater or glacier, but “simply a fortnight… of easy travel in a smiling land.”

Round the World is a journal of an eight-month circuit of the globe, set down as dated entries, some of them headed with the place of writing, from “New York, Saturday, October 12, 1878” to “Paris, Thursday, May 1.” Carnegie’s preface explains how it reached print: the book, “like ‘An American Four-in-Hand in Britain,’ was originally printed for private circulation. My publishers having asked permission to give it to the public, I have been induced to undertake the slight revision, and to make some additions necessary to fit the original for general circulation.” The dedication runs “TO MY BROTHER AND TRUSTY ASSOCIATES, WHO TOILED AT HOME THAT I MIGHT SPEND ABROAD.” He writes in the first person, usually for a pair — himself and a companion he calls Vandy — intends the notes for “an honest record of my feelings,” and turns to his readers outright: “Go, therefore, my friends.” The opening pages lock the desk on the Union Iron Mills, Lucy Furnaces, Keystone Bridge Works and Edgar Thomson Steel Rail Works, pack Shakespeare in thirteen small volumes, and race by rail through Omaha, the Nebraska cattle plains, the desert and the Sierras to the Palace Hotel at San Francisco. The steamer Belgic sails on October 24 carrying eight hundred Chinese homeward; the crossing brings tiers of steerage cots, deaths and coffins on the wheel-house, a false alarm of fire, flying-fish, albatrosses, and a day dropped at the date line.

Japan fills pages 34 to 74, the entries of November 15 to December 3, some forty of the book’s 360 pages. Fusiyama shines out as the ship enters the bay, “by far the most impressive mountain I have yet seen,” and sampan scullers land the party at Yokohama. A first walk produces ginrikshaw men, or Bettoes, wooden clogs, the blackened teeth of married women, which Carnegie calls “the most revolting practice I have yet seen”; at the tea factories of Walsh, Hall & Co. he learns that green tea is colored with indigo and gypsum for the American market. At Tokio he sets out the recent union of the Mikado’s and Tycoon’s powers, the abolition of feudalism, and the vanishing of the Samuri and Daimios; Captain Totaki and Mlle. Rio take him to a tea-house evening with the singing and dancing “Gahazi girls,” whose fan-borne performance he calls “the very poetry of motion” though the music is “execrable.” The tombs of the Tycoons at Shibba draw his eye for their color and their old lacquer, yet they “totally failed to impress me with any feeling akin to reverence” — “the odor of the toyshop pervades everything, even their temples.” He visits the Temple of the Foxes and a Shinto sacred dance, records earthquakes and the night watchmen clapping their blocks of wood, and sets the wages paid at the naval arsenal below Yokohama beside the thirty thousand pounds a year spent on one of Queen Victoria’s three yachts.

Leaving Yokohama on November 27, he runs up by rail from Kiobe to Kioto, judging the old Mikado’s capital “only a mass of poor one-story buildings” undeserving of its name as the Paris of Japan, then sails the Inland Sea — three hundred and fifty miles through three thousand pretty islands, cultivated to their tops, with ninety-seven sails counted from the bow at once — a passage he says deserves its reputation as “the most beautiful voyage in the world.” At Nagasaki he recounts the Dutch trading island and the massacre of native Christians, and finds thirty-five thousand professing Catholics in a district with scarcely a hundred foreign Christian families — “the only real and considerable advance made toward christianizing a people” he saw in the East. Tramping the hills he counts forty-seven terraces on one slope and calls Japanese cultivation gardening rather than farming; a real fire breaks out aboard the steamer Costa Rica in the harbor. The country’s modernization is his steady theme: the post office founded in 1871 carrying ninety-five million pieces ten years later, only two short railways, several hundred newspapers evading a censorship by mock praise of “happy Japan,” a depreciating paper currency printed in New York, and the bonds issued to buy out two hundred and sixty-six daimios. He predicts Japan “will move, upon the whole, in the direction of progress.”

A section heading, CHINA, dropped into the middle of a page, opens some seventy-five pages on that country. At Shanghai he walks the foreign settlement and the walled native city, counts a hundred and thirty-four grave mounds and exposed coffins in one view, buys Joss-money, dines three hours with a Mandarin through General Bailey’s good offices, and sets down at length the marriage customs, the seclusion and purchase of wives, and the drowning of girl babies. Hong Kong yields the Peak, ascended by sedan chair, and a Christmas Day conflagration fought by the 74th Highlanders; Canton yields streets six to ten feet wide, dogs, rats and mice dressed and hung on spits, the execution grounds, a court where answers are extracted by the bamboo, the ten acres of stalls where ten thousand six hundred candidates sat the literary examinations and eighty-two passed, the boat population of three hundred thousand, and an outbreak of “curio” buying in which the guide Ah-Cum procures temple gongs. Saigon, Singapore and Penang follow — orang-outangs shipped as freight, Mr. Wampoo’s gardens, a tapioca plantation — then Ceylon, where the coach road from Galle to Colombo, Kandy and its sacred tooth, the pearl fishery, the coffee estates and the restored village tribunals make him call the island “the best example of English government in the world.”

India, announced by its own heading, takes the largest share, pages 183 to 297: the surf landing at Madras, caste, traces of the famine of 1876–77, the car of Juggernaut; Calcutta’s regiments of servants, the blood sacrifices at the Kali temple, the burning ghat; Hindoos bathing in the sacred waters of the Ganges at Benares; the Lucknow Residency and Jessie’s slogan; Agra’s carpet looms, the Moguls, and the Taj, which he refuses to describe because “there are some subjects too sacred for analysis”; Delhi’s eleven miles of ruins and the Thugs; Bombay’s Tower of Silence and the Parsees worshipping on the beach at the new moon. A long argument closes the section: were England offered India today, “Declined with thanks.” Hereditary rule is his standing target — he looks to the day when the people “sweep away the privileged classes, who live mainly through wars” — and Egypt supplies the exhibit: some thirty pages from Aden and the Suez Canal to Cairo and the ascent of Cheops, where the Khedive’s insolvency shows him “what personal rule in its fullest development is capable of producing.” Sicily, Italy, the Creuzot steel works, Paris and London follow. A closing section of general conclusions advises future travelers to go westward, recommends a month in Japan beginning in October, and argues that the tour strengthens “the sense of the brotherhood of man.” The volume carries no illustrations, maps or contents list; running heads name the subject of each right-hand page.

History of Japan is a compact one-volume history published in London in 1885, carrying its subject from the mythological creation of the islands to the state of the empire at the time of writing. Thorpe explains early on why the book is brief: recorded “even at moderate length,” the details of Japanese history would swell the work “far beyond the reach of the class of readers for whom this is designed.” The vantage is an English one — the Japanese have no beds “in our sense of the word” — and the book argues a case, that a people “so primitive in many of their customs and habits” have developed a civilization “worthy of the approval and admiration of those who consider themselves much further advanced in the path of modern civilization.” Fifteen chapters run in broad chronological order, punctuated by tabulated lists of emperors and, at the close, of the Tokugawa Shoguns, with a long appendix of notes and documents after the final chapter.

The opening chapter is descriptive rather than historical, sketching “Japan or Niphon (the Rising Sun)”: its volcanoes and recurrent earthquakes, and the wooden houses with their sliding screens, floor mats and “god-shelf.” Who the aboriginal inhabitants were is “a question much debated among ethnologists, but not yet elucidated.” Chapter II relates what mythology “teaches them to believe” — the making of the islands by Izanagi-no-kami and Izanami-no-kami, and the sun-goddess Amaterasu sending down Ninigi-no-mikoto with the Sacred Mirror, Sword and Stone — while chapter III takes up “Kami-no-michi,” or “The Way of the Gods,” quoting three precepts from Hirata and a prayer translated by “Mr. Satou, of the embassy,” and finding in the religion itself “the germ of divine truth, overlaid by many and strange imaginings.” The first historical emperor, Jimmu-Tenno, began his reign in 660 B.C., though the dates given are “merely traditional”; the record runs on through Sujin the Civilizer, the empress who led an army into Korea, and Nintoku, who suspended taxation and refused to resume it though his own palace let in the rain.

From chapter VI the book is a chronicle of struggles for power: priests raising troops, Fujiwara regents making and unmaking emperors, and the Emperor Saga “reported to have remarked” that three things lay beyond his power, “the waters of the river Kamogawa, dice, and priests.” The Taira and Minamoto wars end at Dan-no-ura, the child-emperor Antoku drowned in his grandmother’s clasp, and Yoritomo turns on his brother Yositsune, honored as “one of the noblest patriots Japan ever produced.” Under the Hojo come the Mongol demand for submission, Go-Daigo’s dream of a throne beneath a camphor tree, which brought him Kusunoki-Masashige, and Nitta-Yosisada casting his sword into the sea to work upon “the reverential superstition in the minds of his men” before the tide withdrew and opened the road to Kamakura. The Ashikaga chapter follows Taka-Uji’s rise and treachery, the Northern and Southern emperors and their reunion, and the Portuguese landing in Satsuma that taught the use of fire-arms, before the rule is wrenched from the family for ever; its emotional center is Kusunoki, who takes leave of his eleven-year-old son at Sakurai and dies by his own hand after eleven wounds.

Ota Nobunaga lets the Roman Catholic mission preach but orders the monastery of Hiyei-san demolished and its inhabitants exterminated, his followers putting to death every human being within the inclosure; Hideyoshi invades Korea, one negotiation scene quoted from Mr. Aston; and the chapter runs on past Sekigahara in 1600 to Iyeyasu’s hereditary Sei-i-tai Shogunate in 1603 and Hideyori putting himself to death at the fall of Osaka. Chapter X, the longest in the book, sets out the Tokugawa order — Daimios as nobles of not less than ten thousand kokus of rice, two-sworded samurai holding land on condition of military service, the new castle at Yedo — then the expulsion edict of 1614 and the tortures that followed it, which Thorpe lays at the door of missionaries who had brought in “persecution for toleration, torture for the right of freedom of worship” — and of whose sufferings he writes that sympathy “would be more alive had not these sufferers been themselves the teachers and leaders of acts of cruelty to inoffensive natives.”

The Shimabara revolt is put down and converts hidden elsewhere sought out and killed; afterwards the Dutch, as well as the Chinese, are permitted to trade to the port of Nagasaki. Russian, English and American approaches fill the rest of chapter X, Perry among them at Uraga, and Thorpe writes that “by show of strength” Japan was forced into concessions “repulsive to its people individually, and contrary to the laws and usages of thousands of years”; the chapter ends with Harris’s treaty of 1858, concluded without the Kioto court’s sanction, and “an angry cry for the expulsion of the barbarians.” He is harder still on what follows. Richardson’s killing is “a calamity to be expected from the reckless disregard of the English to the peculiar institutions of the country”; the American warship sent to Shimonoseki went “to vindicate might against right”; and of the three million dollars of indemnity he sets what America took against what the expedition cost her. Kagoshima is bombarded; had Japan been less isolated and less ignorant of foreign customs, he remarks, “foreigners might not have dared to defy and treat with contempt her insular prejudices.”

The Shogun resigns, fighting follows at Fushimi and Toba, Yedo becomes Tokio, feudal tenures are abolished, military service is made imperative on all males from seventeen to forty, and the Satsuma rebellion fills a chapter of its own, with two borrowed extracts, the closing one credited to Sir J. Reed and Mr. Mounsey, inside which — not in Thorpe’s own narration — Admiral Kawamura reverently washes Saigo’s head. In the last chapter elective assemblies are established in 1878, the Mikado permits the free exercise of all religions, and a great future is foreseen for a country that is “no barbarous nation to require centuries of training in the amenities of life… but a nation of singularly intelligent, highly-cultured peoples”; it closes on a population “as given this year” of 45,194,167 and a wish that Japan may become as prosperous and powerful as it is interesting. Some fifty pages of appendix follow: notes on the native names of Japan, its rivers, lakes, mountains and earthquakes, the British treaty of 1858 entire, with trade regulations and tariff, the Tariff Convention of 1866, treaty-revision resolutions from 1883, and a newspaper account of the new orders of nobility.

This book is the work of a naturalist and architect-observer rather than a travel writer: the title page identifies its author as formerly professor of zoology at the Imperial University in Japan and director of the Peabody Academy of Science, and the introduction traces the material to “an illustrated daily journal” he kept during three successive residences in the country, with travels reaching “from the northwest coast of Yezo to the southernmost parts of Satsuma.” The introduction opens by dismissing the usual run of books on Japan — potted history “from its first emperor down to the present time,” inflated itineraries, sketches borrowed “without due credit being given” — as inadequate to explain what a Japanese home actually is, and proposes instead a study centered on the dwellings of the middle classes, with the extremes of wealth and poverty brought in only for contrast. What follows is a systematic, topical account arranged in nine chapters — The House, Types of Houses, two chapters of Interiors, Entrances and Approaches, Gardens, Miscellaneous Matters, The Ancient House, and The Neighboring House — illustrated by 307 numbered figures, all the author’s own pen-and-ink drawings, which he describes as “more or less accurate drawings of the objects and features depicted” rather than exercises in artistic finish. The prose is written in the first person throughout and is frankly comparative and argumentative rather than descriptive alone: Morse repeatedly sets Japanese construction and manners against American and English counterparts — quoting Rein, Fergusson, Eastlake, Aime Humbert, and English builders’ complaints along the way — and concludes, for instance, of the Japanese carpenter that “in matters pertaining to their craft the Japanese carpenters are superior to American.”

The first two chapters work outward from the frame of the house itself. Construction begins not with a continuous foundation but with individual uncut stones pounded into the earth, on which the upright posts simply rest; ceilings of thin, overlapping boards are suspended from above with no visible nail or peg; partitions are built up in three layers of plaster — shita-nuri, chu-nuri, and uwa-nuri — over a lathing of bamboo strips; and the thick-walled kura, or fireproof storehouse, takes “two years or more” to finish, its mud-plastered walls rubbed to a black, lacquer-like polish. Morse gives as much space to the carpenter’s own kit — the sumi-tsubo ink-line, the magari-gane square, a plane drawn toward the body instead of pushed from it, a portable nail-basket worn at the waist — as to the structures the tools produce. Chapter II carries the same method into the roof, distinguishing shingled, tiled, and thatched work and cataloguing, province by province — Musashi, Mikawa, Yamato, Ise, Totomi, Osumi, and others — the many regional forms of ridge construction, which he reads as a legacy of the country’s formerly isolated provincial life.

Two long chapters on interiors move through the house room by room: the tatami mat, roughly three by six feet and never joined at a four-corner seam; the sliding fusuma and shoji that take the place of solid walls and glazed windows; and the paired recesses of the best room, the tokonoma (for a single hanging picture and a flower vase) and the chigai-dana (staggered shelves and a low cupboard), whose deliberate avoidance of matching arrangement Morse contrasts with what he calls the “intolerable monotony” of a symmetrical American parlor, mantel ornaments in pairs and all. The carved ramma, or transom panel above the sliding screens, is ranked second only to the chigai-dana as a field for the cabinet-maker’s invention. A full account of the tea-ceremony walks through its utensils — the furo, the cha-ire, the bamboo dipper and stirrer — and the second interiors chapter takes up the kitchen and its kamado range, the ji-zai pot-hook, closets and the ladder-like staircase, several forms of heated bath-tub, the wooden pillow or makura, the hibachi and the smaller tabako-bon, vegetable-wax candles and the andon lamp, the household Shinto and Buddhist shrines kept on the kami-dana, swallows’ nests deliberately protected inside the house as a good omen, and the privy — treated at length, with an indignant defense of the Japanese practice of collecting night soil for the fields against what Morse considers far filthier arrangements at home.

A further chapter follows the house outward to its entrances and approaches: the often “vaguely defined” front entrance and its vestibule, or genka; the wooden amado that close the verandah at night and the to-bukuro closets built to store them by day; the chodzu-bachi, a stone or bronze basin for washing the hands set among pebbles or fed by a bamboo pipe; and a long survey of gateways and fences, from the barred, ponderous gates of a yashiki enclosure down to the small ornamental sode-gaki, or “sleeve fence,” built to jut from the side of a house purely for effect.

The garden chapter catalogues stone lanterns, or ishi-doro; paths of stepping-stones and cut slabs; artificial hills built up “twenty, thirty, and even forty feet” above the level ground; real ponds and, occasionally, ponds made to look like water without containing any; rustic bridges; and dwarf pines and plum trees, some over forty years old and barely a few feet high, kept for decades in shallow pots — with several garden views reproduced from an old Japanese work on garden-making, Chikusan Teizoden. A closing chapter of miscellaneous matters gathers wells and the wooden and bamboo aqueducts that feed them, the etiquette of cut flowers (a single branch, never the crowded “bouquet”), the practice of rotating a single hanging picture in and out of the tokonoma rather than covering the walls, precautions taken against fire, the handful of houses built by former Daimios “in foreign style,” and the country’s want of public monuments, which Morse — quoting W. E. Griffis on the street-names of old Yedo — attributes to a deliberate policy of not perpetuating old grievances between rival provinces.

The book closes by looking outward in two directions at once. Chapter VIII, “The Ancient House,” draws on English translations then available of early Japanese texts — the Kojiki and the ancient Shinto rituals, rendered by Basil Hall Chamberlain and Ernest Satow, and the tenth-century Tosa Nikki, translated by W. G. Aston — to reconstruct an older dwelling: posts driven directly into the ground rather than set on stones, a frame lashed together with vine fiber, and a thatched roof with crossed, projecting rafters that Morse traces forward into the roofs of modern Shinto shrines. Chapter IX, “The Neighboring House,” sets the Japanese dwelling beside its neighbors in turn — the Aino house of Yezo, the farmhouses of the Hachijo Islanders, the tile-roofed houses of the Loochoo Islands, the stone-flued, floor-heated Korean house (drawn from advance sheets of Percival Lowell’s then-unpublished The Land of the Morning Calm), and the brick, tile-roofed houses of Shanghai and Canton — with further comparative material, gathered on the author’s last visit to Singapore, Java, and Anam, supplying the volume’s final figures. Morse’s conclusion is that, for all it shares in construction detail with its neighbors, the Japanese house remains “typically a product of the people,” no more a copy of Chinese or Korean models than the English house is a copy of the European continent it originally drew from.

East by West: A Journey in the Recess is a two-volume travel narrative published in London by Richard Bentley and Son in 1885, recording a westward circuit of the world begun in the autumn of 1883 — Liverpool to New York, across the continent to San Francisco, over the Pacific to Japan, and home by way of Hongkong, the Straits, Ceylon, India, Aden, and the Suez Canal. Volume I holds nineteen chapters in 303 pages; volume II, twenty-four chapters in 361. The first volume is dedicated “TO MY WIFE, COMPANION OF THE JOURNEY AND CO-LABOURER IN ITS RECORD,” over the date London, Nov. 1884. Lucy names no one in his own travelling party: they appear as “the lady of our party,” “the young gentleman from Glasgow,” and — on the Nikko circuit — a “party of three” whose expenses he totals. He writes in the first person and works like a reporter: he investigates, interviews, transcribes speech, and digresses constantly into comedy. His opening pages worry at a newspaper phrase — “It is only in the mighty leisure of a voyage across the Atlantic that one has time to formulate the question, What is Sandy Hook?” — and then admit that the ship passed it at midnight.

North America and the two ocean crossings fill the first 181 pages of volume I. Lucy sails from Liverpool by way of Queenstown on the White Star liner Britannic, notes that “there are 708 steerage passengers” aboard, and — prompted, he says, by a question raised in the House of Commons — spends some time among the steerage berths reporting on ventilation and the day’s three meals. New York earns a chapter of complaint about its streets, redeemed by Brooklyn Bridge, “which is worth a journey across the Atlantic to see.” Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City follow; he leaves Kansas City “this morning (October 4, 1883)” in the wake of an attempted train robbery and a murder at Coolidge, which he retells at length. Denver and the Grand Cañon of the Arkansas lead to Leadville, where he goes down the Chrysolite mine and afterward tours the beer halls and gambling saloons by night. He reaches Salt Lake City on conference day, sits through the Tabernacle service, and gives a whole chapter to an interview with President John Taylor on tithing, membership statistics, and the Federal law aimed at Mormon marriage. San Francisco brings an earthquake, cable cars, and the seals at Cliff Home. Two further chapters step back from the itinerary to anatomize American railroad travel and to argue economics, Lucy opposing Chinese exclusion — “Without the Chinese, California would be ten years behind the stage it has now reached” — and defending free trade.

Japan opens at page 182 of volume I and runs on through the first 110 pages of volume II — roughly 230 of some 660 printed pages, which makes it the book’s largest single subject, ahead of both India and America. The Pacific crossing takes nineteen days and 4,700 miles on the Coptic, which carries “living and dead, some twelve hundred Chinamen.” Lucy lands at Yokohama in rain, takes to the jinrikisha at once — “like an enlarged perambulator placed upon two light wheels” — and fills a chapter with street trades, sliding house-fronts, blackened teeth, and babies carried on their sisters’ backs. At Asakusa the crowd inspects the European women of the party with “good-humoured astonishment, not unmingled with pity.” On the Mikado’s birthday, 3 November, he attends the military review, describes the Emperor bluntly — “his face has about as much expression as a brick wall” — and is presented to him alongside an English M.P.; two ladies, the M.P.’s wife and a young American, are then presented as well, which Lucy is told had never been done before. A six-day circuit out of Tokio and back, 250 miles by rail, jinrikisha and river steamer through Kumagai and Tochigi to Nikko, costs the three of them “a trifle over £36”; the shrines leave him cold, since “the red temples with their gilt and gingerbread gods had nothing to say to me,” while the country astonishes him, “from no book” having gathered “that Japan is a country beautiful to look upon.” The volume ends with the Yokohama fire that burned down his guide Ito’s house, and a night at a Tokyoheatre with its revolving stage and its singers narrating what the silent actor feels.

Volume II begins where the first left off: “We lunched with Mr. Inouyé, the Foreign Minister,” with Mr. Ito present, at a country house that keeps a European suite and a Japanese wing — Lucy prefers the Japanese. Between luncheon and dinner he watches a cremation in a Tokio suburb and prices its three classes. The second chapter is the Foreign Minister’s own life as told to Lucy, “the story of his life, which is also, in a great measure, the story of the life of the new Empire of Japan”: the Prince of Chosiu has sworn to keep his province clear of foreigners, and two of his young men argue that forts cannot do it — “we must learn to sail ships and fight them” — and set out to master naval supremacy in England, at a time when leaving Japan without the Tycoon’s permission is a capital offense. Money is lodged with Jardine, Matheson & Co.; Ito and Inouyé ship as common sailors to London; and Inouyé, returning to stop his prince, is “slashed, hacked, and left for dead by the roadside.” Lucy turns it into a plea for treaty revision. A coaster carries the party to Yokkaichi, where a sampan capsizes and “a woman with a baby on her back sank”; their guide — a different Ito — loses the silver watch Miss Bird had given him. Kioto is “by far the most interesting” town open to foreigners and draws a further chapter on its temples and worshippers; Osaka is “the Birmingham of Japan.” Chapter VI drops narrative for twenty pages of official statistics, because “the Foreign Minister laid all the departments of the State under contribution.” The Inland Sea suggests a title for a book on Japan, “Sunset Land”; at Nagasaki, women are half the human chain coaling the steamer.

Hongkong occupies about ten pages and forty hours ashore. Lucy finds trade fallen off from the days of fifty per cent profits, is driven round Happy Valley by the Governor, remarks that an Englishman would never think of walking up to the Peak but hires a chair, and records that two days after he left the Chinese Government announced that France had forced war upon it and that Hongkong merchants must look out for their own interests. He is blunt about the settlers: “English residents at Hongkong have a distinct abhorrence for the Chinese. They speak of them as if they were beasts,” and he describes an Englishman in Queen’s Road clearing away chair-men with his stick as though they were dogs — while adding that the Chinese domestic servant is perhaps the best in the world. The chapter on Singapore, Jahore, and Penang opens with the chain of British stations girdling three continents, and with a question Lucy declines to press: “How it came to pass that these odd corners of the earth should belong to a little island set in northern seas, it would perhaps not be desirable too closely to inquire.” He compares the races commercially — “The Malay lives and will not labour. The Chinese does both” — sets out the Maharajah of Jahore’s revenues and coffee experiment, and misses the durian at Penang. Ceylon gets twenty-eight pages: Colombo “squalid, dirty, and ill kept,” yet its women unmatched, for “A Ceylon girl walks like a young empress”; Kandy, the chief object of attraction for the British and American tourist, with the “demoralization of the floating inhabitants” that has followed; the gardens at Peradeniya; and a call on Ahmed Arabi, whose house of exile stands about three miles out of Colombo — “There is no difficulty in approaching the prisoner of Ceylon.”

India is the largest subject of volume II, some 167 pages across twelve chapters. Bombay comes first — the island’s history, its census, the cotton boom and crash, the crowded Parell Road, the School of Art — followed by a nautch party held for a marriage, the invitation dated Monday, 17 December 1883, at which the bridegroom is thirteen while the bride, aged eleven, has long since been put to bed, and the dancing strikes Lucy as “unapproachably and inexpressibly dull.” The Towers of Silence close that chapter. Two nights and two days of rail bring him to Benares, whose temples are, “more especially to the traveller fresh from the gorgeous fanes of Japan, in all ways despicable,” though the railways impress him because “They are breaking down the barriers of caste”; he watches the bathing, and counts the Christian missions a near-failure while praising their schools. At Lucknow he walks the Residency ruins and their memorials; Christmas Day at Cawnpore sets a festival garland over the massacre tablets, “proclaiming, with grim but undesigned irony, ‘Peace on earth, and goodwill among men.’” Agra brings the fort, whose inlaid walls have been “sadly pecked at” by conquerors “notably including the British soldier,” and the Taj; Delhi the plundered palace and a barrack canteen beside the Mogul throne; Jeypore an elephant ride to Amber and the verdict that nothing in India is “more pitiful than these ill-disciplined endeavours of historic princes to graft European furniture upon Oriental life”; Ajmere a first dak bungalow. The argument chapter then states his conclusion: he went out believing India “a hopeless incubus upon the Empire” and left “full of hope for her future,” calling British rule “in the strictest and best sense a paternal government,” while granting that its earlier history holds “many pages which cannot be looked upon without feelings of shame and indignation.”

The run home takes the last twenty-six pages. Aden is judged “one of the finest sites in the world” as a harbor and “among the most desolate” as a home for man; Lucy reports its coal trade, its rivalry with Perim, the rearming its obsolete guns are still awaiting, its unmarked cholera burial ground, and the empty tanks that are its one sight. Five mornings after Aden the Nepaul anchors at Suez, and the closing set piece follows: a compulsory pilot runs her onto the bank within the hour, hawsers part, half a hundred men run from side to side at the whistle to roll her free, and she is afloat again “after twenty-one hours’ detention.” Quarantine turns the rest to farce — letters passed with tongs, passengers shut aboard at Port Said, and Malta quarantining Egypt in turn, so that the ship steams straight for Plymouth. Lucy ends by canvassing captains: what the trade wants is a canal double the present width and five feet deeper under British or international commercial direction, and failing that the widening of the one already cut. Below his last paragraph on page 361 stands a blackletter motto, “Travel east, travel west, / A man’s own house is still the best,” then THE END and the imprint of William Clowes and Sons. Both volumes are plain letterpress from first page to last, each with a half-title, a title page, and a contents leaf, and no illustration, plate, or map; volume I adds the dedication, and neither carries an index or appendix.

Gleanings from Japan presents itself, in its own preface, as “the result of gleaning in the field of Japan by the author during an opportunity of revisiting the country in the years 1883-84” — a second sojourn built on a much earlier residence. The introductory chapter recalls Dickson living in Yokohama in 1862 “under the hospitable roof of Messrs Jardine, Matheson, & Co.” and helping four young Choshiu samurai — Nomura, Ito, Boonda, and Inouyay — slip aboard a departing steamer bound for England; two decades later he returns to a transformed country, guided in his researches, as the preface acknowledges, by his friend Otomo Sadajiro, “a fountain of information upon every subject connected with the manners and customs of the country up to the recent revolution, and whose death within the past few months he has to deplore.” The title page identifies him as already the author of one earlier study, Japan; Being a Sketch of the History, Government, and Officers of the Empire. This second book is looser and more various: twenty-two chapters trace a sequence of excursions out from Yokohama and Tokyohrough the hot-spring resorts of the Kwanto, the old Nakasendo and Tokaido, and the temples of the Kii peninsula, broken twice by extended historical narratives set entirely outside the travel frame, and closed by a chapter on Buddhism and an appendix on the Ryukyu Islands.

The opening excursions move through the hot-spring country southwest of Yokohama. At Miyanoshta the book lingers over the geology of the Hakonay hot springs, the mechanics of fishing with the to-ami throw-net, a village theatrical performance of the Kumagai-and-Atsumori story, and a first-person ascent of Fusiyama by the eighth-station huts, where pilgrims prostrate themselves at sunrise. Nikko yields both a description of the Iyeyas and Iyaymitzu mausolea and a long retold intrigue — the plot to kill the boy shogun Iyaymitzu at Utsonomia with a rigged “hanging ceiling,” foiled by a carpenter’s sweetheart. From Nikko the party pushes on to Chiuzenji, where Lake Chiuzenji is restocked with carp and salmon-roe after an old religious fishing ban has lapsed, past the Kengon waterfall to the sulphur baths at Yumoto; a side trip to Choshi follows the Tone river to its silted mouth and the shrines of Kashima and Katori. A chapter on Atami and Yamanaka visits William Adams’s grave above Uraga and reconstructs, from a village priest’s old battle plan, the Hojio stronghold at Yamanaka besieged by Iyeyas and Taikosama.

Chapter VII, “Christianity in Japan — Native Account,” abandons the travel frame for a résumé, offered as a corrective to the Jesuits’ own version, of a Japanese pamphlet on the mission: Nobunanga’s audience with Père Organtin at Azutchi, the building and destruction of the church Nanbanji, and the interrogation scene in which the convert-priest Bahiang tears up a copy of the Hokekiu before a lapsed Buddhist priest unpersuaded by the demonstration. Chapter VIII, “Hanai,” follows the same historical mode to tell of Hanai Sancuro, a musician who rose to govern the Sado gold mines under Iyeyas, embezzled from them to finance a secret compact with a European king, and was exposed after his death when his abandoned concubines sued for unpaid legacies. Tokio, by contrast, returns to first-person observation — the new Uyeno museum, the crumbling Daimio yashiki, a public bath where a lady objects to sharing it with a foreign gentleman — before cataloguing the historical and legendary subjects painted on the kakemono at a local exhibition, from Shidzuka Gozen’s dance before Yoritomo to the cook who talked a shogun out of a death sentence.

From Tokyohe book moves to the iron-water baths at Ikao and on to Kofu, dwelling on Takeda Singeng’s ruined castle and the mechanics of silkworm-rearing; a run up the Nakasendo brings the party to the temple at Miogi san and a digression on the etiquette of Japanese gardens and tea-rooms. An earlier attempt on Assamayama is abandoned to mist, then renewed with a solitary climb over loose pumice from Kutsukakke to the smoking, roaring crater, quoted against Titsingh’s account of the 1783 eruption. Chapters on Kobe and Arima, and on Osaka and Miajima, describe the silting of the old harbor at Sakkye by Taikosama’s canal-cutting, the Osaka rice exchange whose prices a rooftop watchman reads through a glass off a hillside flag above Kobe that mirrors the signal of a girl waving her own flag in the street below, and a passage down the Inland Sea to the shrine island of Itsukushima, with its deer, its renewed torii, and its rule that anyone dying on the island be taken to the mainland within the hour. Kioto and Lake Biwa cover the largely emptied Mikado’s palace, the vast new Higashi Hoonganji then rising by public subscription, and, on the lake, Hikonay’s abandoned castle garden and the Nagahama matsuri cars.

The closing excursions run south into the Kii peninsula. At Narra the sacred deer of Kassunga, once protected on pain of the offender being buried alive under stones, are described alongside the great bronze Daiboots and a list of Japan’s thirty-three pilgrimage temples of Kunnon. Uji supplies an account of the tea trade and its Chashi brokers; Koyasan, reached by a stone-marked path some thirteen miles long, occupies a full chapter on Kobodaisi’s monastery, its Ihai chapels endowed by particular Daimios, and its cemetery of moss-covered tombstones — the same chapter pausing to defend the British party in the 1862 killing of Richardson on the Tokaido against an American writer’s account, citing the author’s own presence in Yokohama at the time. At Yoshino, amid Godaigo tenwo’s tomb and the legends of the Shugen ascetics Zenki and Goki, the chapter ends at the mounds identified by the government as the tombs of Kashiwabara and Jinmu Tenwo, and with a cremation the author watched by chance on the road.

The book closes with a chapter titled simply “Buddhism,” built around the minutes of a meeting of five senior priests summoned in 1874 to answer the government’s proposal to disestablish their religion, followed by a comparative table of the invocations used by the Tendai, Singong, Hosso, Nitchi ren, Ikko, and Jodo sects, and a closing speculation on Japan’s prospects as a military power against Russia. An appendix, “Notes on Liukiu,” surveys the government, ranks, harbors, and customs of the Ryukyu Islands from Chinese and Japanese sources, and reproduces in full “The Edict of Liukiu,” a translated code of civil and moral instruction on marriage, mourning, servants, and drink, before the volume closes with an index. Small woodcuts are scattered through the travel chapters — a halt on the Tokaido, the Kengon fall, the crater of Assamayama, coal-carrying girls at Nagasaki, women bathing in the open street at Hikonay — illustrating incident and scenery rather than following any single sequence.

Letters from the Far East collects the dispatches Colonel De Lancey Floyd-Jones of the United States Army sent home during a round-the-world tour of 1885–86, first published, his preface says, in “journals of the time” and now gathered “in the hope that they may interest friends and fellow travellers.” Dedicated to “my brother and sisters, for whose information these letters were mainly written,” the book opens aboard the Royal Mail steamer Germanic, dated from sea near Queenstown on October 16th, 1885, with an account of the still-unfinished pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor and quoted remarks from Bartholdi, de Lesseps, and the visiting French delegation on seeing the completed monument. From there the letters carry him through Liverpool and London and a leisurely swing through Warwickshire — Leamington, Kenilworth Castle, Warwick Castle — before crossing the Continent by way of Venice and the St. Gothard Tunnel and down the Red Sea via the Suez Canal to Bombay, where he lands in time for Christmas; a later letter breaks from the main itinerary to recall, from a visit four years earlier, an English country house at Bedwell Park.

India takes up the largest block of the book, eleven letters running from Bombay north to Delhi and Lahore — where he turns back rather than continuing on toward the frontier — and back down through Agra, Benares, Calcutta, Darjeeling and Madras before a final run through Ceylon. As a serving army officer, Floyd-Jones is among the foreign colonels and generals invited to observe the Indian Army’s “Camp of Exercise” maneuvers around Delhi, and he describes the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri near Agra, a morning on the Ganges at Benares, a climb toward Darjeeling for a view of the Himalayas, and Parsee funeral customs at Bombay’s Towers of Silence at some length. Hong Kong, Canton and Macao, then Shanghai and the Yangtze, occupy a further stretch of letters touching on Chinese fortifications, Li Hung Chang (“the Bismarck of China”), a Chinese theater, and foot-binding, before the party crosses the Eastern Sea to Nagasaki.

Japan, covered in four consecutive letters, gets the fullest and most attentive treatment of any country after India. Landing at Nagasaki, Floyd-Jones tours the porcelain and tortoise-shell shops, remarks on the low, kneeling bow with which Japanese of every class greet one another — which, he notes, the guidebooks trace to their religion and to a national regard for etiquette — and stops at the stone tablet where General and Mrs. Grant had each planted a tree in 1879, copying out Grant’s inscription in full; he also describes the former Dutch trading post on the island of Deshima and its two centuries of confined, closely guarded commerce. Passing through the Straits of Simoni-saki into the Inland Sea, he admires its terraced, cultivated mountains before landing at Kobe and going up to Kioto, where — having first secured an interior passport through the American minister at Tokio — he writes about paper windows and the morning ritual of sliding them open, the universal use of sandals and clogs, the charcoal brazier that substitutes for a chimney in most Japanese houses, the temple of Nishi Hongwanji, the cherry-blossom festival, an evening posture-dance he compares to something later worked into Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, a run down the rapids above the city, and the unfamiliar backward stroke of Japanese carpenters’ planes.

A second letter follows him from Yokohama up to Nikko with an American diplomat friend and a hired guide-cook named Hakodate, past regiments bivouacked along avenues of cryptomeria, to the shrines and tombs of the shoguns Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu, and on by pony and jinrickishaw over the mountains to Lake Chiu-zen-ji and down through the silk-growing valley of the Watarassegawa, where he examines the feeding of silkworms in the peasant cottages along the way. Back in Yokohama he watches the tea-firing houses at the opening of the season, visits friends’ houses on “the Bluff,” rides out to the hot-spring resort of Miyanoshita and the azalea-covered slopes toward Hakone, notes the flying carp and kite-flying of Boys’ Day, and, on excursions into Tokio, walks the temple grounds at Shiba and Ueno (finding two more trees planted by the Grants), sits through an evening of dinner, sake and gesha dancing, and catches a brief glimpse of the Empress’s curtained carriage passing to one of the parks.

The letters close with the Pacific crossing aboard the steamer Oceanic, whose great-circle track and passage across the 180th meridian earn a page of latitude-and-longitude tables and a shipboard toast to gaining back a lost day, and with a final excursion, once he reaches San Francisco, to the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove, where his four-horse coach is driven straight through the trunk of the sequoia named Wawona. The volume carries eleven full-page plates — a frontispiece of a Bombay bullock hack and ten others keyed to specific pages of text — of which two, a jinrickishaw and a group of girls picking tea, illustrate the Japan chapters.

Sketches of Life in Japan (1887) is a personal travel narrative by Major Henry Knollys of the Royal Artillery, written, as his preface explains, from notes “taken down day by day in shorthand” during his own journey and “safeguarded by subsequent careful revision”; he signs the preface from Arthur’s Club in April 1887 and notes that his statements have “the advantage of having been recorded on the spot, as was the case with English Life in China,” a similarly constructed earlier book of his. A companion note over his initials points readers wanting deeper knowledge toward Adams’s History of Japan, Satow and Hawes’s Handbook of Central and Northern Japan, Sir E. Reed’s Japan: Its History, Traditions, and Religion, Miss Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Dixon’s The Land of the Morning, Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, Keeling’s Guide to Japan, and several French, German, and Italian works — a deliberate signal that Knollys means his own book as anecdote and impression rather than a systematic account. The book follows a single itinerary told almost entirely in the first person, opening with his voyage out from Hong Kong and closing as he sails on from Yokohama toward San Francisco; in between, seven chapters carry him from Nagasaki and Kobe through Yokohama and the mountain resort of Miyanoshita, inland to the temple town of Nikko, into the new capital Tokio (with a chapter of his own professional notes on the Japanese army), and finally to the old capital, Kioto, before a short concluding meditation and two appendices.

Chapter I opens mid-ocean: Knollys’s steamer, the P. and O. Thibet under Captain Moodie, runs into a violent typhoon out of Hong Kong, an episode he narrates at length (the ship’s steering gear breaks, passengers cling below decks, a barometer is anxiously watched) before the ship reaches Nagasaki. There he describes coaling by chains of girls and old women passing coal-baskets by hand, a visit to a Buddhist temple, a game of go-bang at a tea-house, and the “Feast of Lanterns,” then continues through the Inland Sea to Kobe and Hiogo, the English “Bund” settlement, a side trip to inspect the Osaka arsenal, and the shipping of Kobe cattle by sling and winch. Chapter II shifts to Yokohama — its foreign community, an anecdote told him by an American about Chinese opium-smugglers using a stuffed cat to slip contraband past the Canton customs house, an earthquake that jolts him awake at night (a milder one, a few days earlier, he had slept through), and his running complaints about the Japanese passport system — before a jolting buggy ride down the Tokaido road to the hot-spring village of Miyanoshita, “Scotland for ever!” as he puts it, where he is caught by a second typhoon that causes terrible devastation and describes flooded tea-houses and travels by kango (a shouldered litter) to view Fuji-san across Lake Hakone.

The middle chapters (III and IV) cover an inland journey by rickshaw and kango from Tokyoo Nikko and back, in which the endurance of his rickshaw coolies — men he says would have outrun the Light Division’s famous forced march before Talavera — becomes a running theme, alongside close description of village tea-house lodging, food, tattooing, agriculture, and a night lost on a flooded mountain track. At Nikko, Knollys gives an extended account of the shrines: the sacred bridge legend of Shodo Shonin, the great stone torii, the carved “sleeping cat,” the Yo-mei-mon gate, and the tomb of the shogun Iye-yasu, which he calls the one section of the grounds where his “admiration was completely unalloyed.” He is otherwise sharply dismissive of the religion on display, calling Shintoism “mean, fabulous, and contemptible” and the ordinary priests “foul and forbidding,” and he records two exchanges with his guides — Kobe, who calls himself Shinto only “if I am anything at all,” and later, in Kioto, Isaki, a self-declared Christian who admits he has “never received the slightest instruction” in the faith — as evidence of what he takes to be the general native skepticism toward organized religion. The same chapters describe the waterfall of Kegon-no-taki, the pilgrimage to Lake Chiu-zen-ji, and a return route past felled cryptomeria avenues and a rural holiday at Utsu-no-miya.

Chapter V turns to Tokio: a formal inspection of an infantry battalion with General Saigo, a French-style luncheon at the Goraken-yen gardens, the contrast of “Old Yedo” and “New Tokio,” the temples of Shiba, the zoological and educational museums at Ueno, and a nighttime visit to the Yoshiwara district, which he describes at the edge of what he calls proper for the page and then defends as a licensed, orderly system preferable to unregulated vice in London. He closes the chapter with a short outline of recent Japanese political history — the Mikado, the Daimios, the Shogun or “Tycoon,” the 1868 restoration, and the 1877 Satsuma rebellion — offered as background for his allusions elsewhere. Chapter VI, flagged for the “non military reader” as technical, is Knollys’s own professional assessment of the Japanese army: its General Staff and War Ministry structure, unit strengths, barrack and hospital conditions, a cadets’ school visit (with an anecdote about General Grant’s praise of it), and detailed reviews of infantry, cavalry, and field artillery drill, ending with his judgment that the army, modeled heavily on the French, is still uneven in its higher organization but capable of inflicting “desperate losses on any European invader” in guerrilla conditions given the terrain.

Chapter VII moves to Kioto, guided by Isaki: a Kioto theater performance, visits to a porcelain workshop he compares to “the Minton of Japan,” public mixed bathing, the pilgrimage to the Kio-midzu shrine, an extended and graphic account of a cremation and funeral procession he witnesses at the city crematorium, and a side trip to Lake Biwa. The book ends with a short Conclusion, “Adieu, Fillettes — Bonjour, Lunettes,” reflecting on Japan as “a distinct species” among nations and on the speed of its modernization since Sir Hope Grant’s 1861 visit, followed by two appendices — the first correcting more emphatic opinions on the army attributed to Knollys in a War Office publication, the second an extract, credited to Mitford and to Adams’s History of Japan, on Japanese attitudes toward chastity and courtesans — and an index. The book carries seven illustrations listed in its prefatory List of Illustrations: a frontispiece of “Riksha Runners; Cold-Weather Clothing,” a “Type of Japanese Beauty” facing page 24, “Kango and Bearers,” “Tatooing. Japanese Girl,” “Avenue of Cryptomerias,” “Japanese Young Lady and Attendant,” and “Kiomidzu Shrine, Kioto.”

Simon Adler Stern’s Jottings of Travel in China and Japan is a book of letters with essays set among them. An untitled prefatory note, signed “S. A. S.” and dated August 1888, gives the occasion: early in February 1887 his friend W. B. called at his office and asked him to go to China to represent him in certain business matters, a trip expected to take about five months. Stern, who had “never been much of a traveller,” suffered a fit of homesickness before he had left home, and went anyway. “I kept no journal of my wanderings,” he writes, “but wrote fully and frequently to my kin at home”; friends who read the letters asked him to put them “in more permanent shape.” Twenty short chapters follow. Eight open under a hotel or a ship and a date, six under a city or a bare date, six under nothing at all, and rows of asterisks mark the cuts. Two of the undated ones, on treaty revision and on the railway problem, address no one and simply argue. Despite the title’s order, the route runs westward: Philadelphia to San Francisco, across the Pacific to Japan, on to China, and home again by way of Japan. Japan takes seventy-six pages, China fifty-three, the American and Pacific chapters thirty-three. The volume is dedicated to Wharton Barker.

The journey out fills three chapters. Stern leaves Broad Street Station on the Pacific Express, finds Chicago “a giant that has not done growing,” and rolls on through the Illinois prairies to Denver, the Grand Canon of the Arkansas, Marshall’s Pass, and Salt Lake City, “rather disappointing” as seen from the station. At Nevada stations he watches groups of Indians and calls them “listless, lazy-looking and unmistakably dirty.” Waiting out a postponed sailing at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, he dines with the Chinese Consul-General on bird’s-nest stew and shark’s fins, takes his first lesson with chopsticks, and judges the city’s cable cars better run than Philadelphia’s. The S. S. San Pablo carries him out on April 26 with about a hundred Chinese steerage passengers, who scatter colored papers on the water to propitiate the water-god; their American return certificates, he notes drily, seldom come back in the hands of the men to whom they were issued. Eighteen days at sea follow, one Saturday dropped at the meridian: he reads little, smokes, lounges, bores himself at whist, and on the last day out meets a gale the officers put at seventy or eighty miles an hour. He wakes on May 15 to Fujiama snow-capped some seventy miles off, and is soon ashore at the English hatoba, hurrying by jin-ricsha along the Bund to the Grand Hotel.

Stern rides the narrow-gauge railway eighteen miles to Tokio, tramps the Ginza, and finds the capital “older, larger, greater and dirtier” than Yokohama. At the Uyeno Park exposition a native band plays a selection from L’Africaine, and oil paintings in the European manner strike him as “vastly inferior” to the true Japanese work, whose most noteworthy examples are the screens. Shiba’s temples look dusty, yet he lingers an hour and a half in their death-like silence; Asakusa suggests a country fair; a Yokohama fire costs him an intaglio from his watch chain. At a Tokio restaurant with the engineering professor Shiraishi he squats on a cushion, drinks warm sake, sends for gaishas, and finds the dancing stupid and the singing doleful. The lawyer Masujima feeds him twice, in European style at a Law School banquet and again on the floor in stocking feet, his back aching, each course under a lacquered cup’s cover, the sake in tiny porcelain ones. He notes blackened teeth and shaved eyebrows on married women, underpaid jin-ricsha coolies, cart coolies gasping their chant, and at Nagasaki six or seven hundred girls passing coal baskets into a collier. At Kobé, prettier to his eye than Yokohama, he borrows one of the settlement’s two violins for a Beethoven sonata. Three weeks and ten chapters later, told that to have missed Nikko and Kioto is not to have seen Japan at all, he answers that failing a return visit he will be grateful for what he has seen.

Six chapters on China open at Shanghai, where Stern lodges at the Astor House and takes in the Bund, the Sikh police of the English settlement, and the wheelbarrows whose passengers ride with feet dangling; on a photograph he buys, one side carries a man, the other a pig. Banks are too leisurely to finish a draft before tiffin; at noon the club serves as a sort of exchange. He sits through a theater on the Canton Road, admiring the acrobats amid “one incessant, horrid din.” When he calls foot-binding unnatural and absurd, a Chinese acquaintance answers that European and American ladies have “an equally unnatural fashion of compressing their waists.” That no Chinese may enter the Public Garden their taxes help support moves him to wonder “whether there ought not to be a sort of Civil Rights Bill for the protection of the native against the foreigner.” Struck by the Jewish cast of features among the Parsees in that garden, he asks a young resident about them and is told that most deal in opium and that of course they prosper, since the Jews are all rich; when he objects that they are discussing Parsees, the man answers that everyone knows the two are the same, and he drops the subject. He hunts out the Jewish synagogue on the Foochow Road, an upstairs room whose hazan says the Sassoons keep its thirty or forty members alive. Then a fortnight of heat at Tientsin, and Peking given up.

Beneath the sight-seeing runs an argument about modern progress. On treaty revision Stern sides with the Japanese, “only asking back what, because of their weakness, they surrendered to the great powers,” against foreigners whose “interests are purely commercial; not national.” Japan’s telegraph and post office impress him; its decimal currency follows American models, but its postal savings banks came before America’s; the first railway cost enough to make engineers shrug. Seven pages on the railway problem urge trunk lines from Peking to Canton and along the Yang-tse-Kiang — for trade, for mines, for famine relief, for moving troops — and insist that China first needs orderly finances, no province keeping a budget, loans running to nine per cent. His own errand surfaces in glimpses: too busy for sight-seeing, summoned to Tientsin by telegram, unwilling to tell strangers who take him for a tourist why he is there. “Here my letters end,” he writes; a closing page brings him home to Philadelphia on September 4. An appendix reprints three credited clippings: the Evening Telegraph on pirates who boarded and burned the wrecked San Pablo, the ship that had carried him out, a year after his passage; the North-China Herald on Shanghai’s rain-drenched Jubilee; and The Times on an open letter from American women to Japanese women already adopting foreign dress: not urging them to stop, but warning of cost and of health, corsets worse than the compressing of Chinese women’s feet. The volume carries no illustrations, maps or index.

The Soul of the Far East is a work of argument rather than travel narrative. Percival Lowell, who is identified on the book’s title page as a member of the Asiatic Society of Japan and as the author of two earlier books on Korea, Chosön and A Korean Coup d’État, sets out not to recount a journey through Japan, China, and Korea but to explain the psychology common to all three as a single type. He organizes the book around one thesis, announced in its first chapter: that the Far Eastern character rests on “impersonality,” an underdeveloped sense of individual selfhood that grows fainter, he argues, the farther one travels from the West and the nearer one approaches Japan. Lowell proposes to trace this trait through what he calls three “outgrowths of a race’s character” that reveal a people’s past, present, and future respectively — its language, its everyday habits of thought, and its religion — and the book’s eight chapters move outward accordingly, from the individual’s place in the family, through the structure of Japanese speech and the national feeling for nature and art, to Buddhism and a closing theory of civilizational development.

Lowell opens with the shock, familiar to any Westerner landing at Yokohama, of a country that seems “inverted” down to its grammar and its gestures, and he uses that sense of reversal to introduce his central claim: that where the Western self is built around the pronoun “I,” the Far Oriental scarcely recognizes an “I” at all. He traces the point through the ordinary milestones of a life. A Japanese child, he notes, is given not a birthday but a “birth-year,” aging collectively with the whole nation on New Year’s Day; marriage is arranged by the family through professional brokers rather than chosen by the couple; and it is only in death, on becoming an ancestor, that a man receives any individual distinction at all. Lowell attributes the pattern to a difference in what he calls “the social unit”: in the West it is the individual, but in China, Korea, and Japan it is the family, a structure he traces to Confucius’s elevation of filial piety into the basis of Chinese morality, and which he illustrates with the fact that a Chinese son holds no legal title even to the land he farms, title resting in the family as a whole. A separate chapter takes up adoption, which Lowell reads as evidence that even the family is secondary to the abstract idea of the family: a childless man may adopt a grown stranger, rename him, later dissolve the adoption, and adopt someone else in his place, while a family with only daughters commonly takes in a son-in-law who assumes its surname outright. He closes this stretch of the argument with the Far Eastern custom of abdication, by which the head of a household formally retires from active life while still living, a practice he compares to the abdication of a king on the grounds that a Far Eastern father’s authority is as much a public office as a domestic one.

Turning to language, Lowell argues that Japanese grammar itself encodes impersonality: the language manages with almost no personal pronouns, substituting elaborate honorific circumlocutions instead — a speaker refers to himself as “the clumsy one,” inflates the plain verb “to be” into “the august seat exists,” and, in one tea-house exchange, speaks of “the honorable sugar” a guest is about to be offered — and it further omits grammatical gender and number and habitually drops the subject of a sentence altogether, so that, in Lowell’s reading, nouns and nature take precedence over verbs and human action. The same impersonality, he contends, reappears in the Far Oriental’s relation to nature and art, the subjects of the two chapters that follow. He describes a passion for flowers and scenery pursued communally rather than privately, moving through the year’s succession of festivals — plum, cherry, wistaria, lotus, chrysanthemum — each drawing crowds to a particular tree at a particular season to view it and compose poems on the spot, and he contrasts this intensity of aesthetic feeling with an almost total absence of scientific curiosity, citing China’s use of gunpowder for fireworks rather than firearms as proof that Far Eastern ingenuity has always served art rather than science. In the chapter on art proper, Lowell argues that Far Eastern painting, Japanese chief among his examples, takes Nature rather than Man as its subject, that its artists are “realists” when depicting the human figure but become idealists only before landscape, and that its governing principle is suggestion rather than completeness: a Japanese painting, he writes, “is a poem rather than a picture,” intentionally omitting whatever is not essential to a single mood.

The book’s seventh chapter turns to religion, where Lowell first describes Shinto, the indigenous faith revived under the restored Mikado, before finding the sharpest statement of his theme in a comparison of Buddhism and Christianity. The two faiths, in his account, share a common moral core and even a similar outward apparatus of images, strings of prayer beads, and votive offerings, but they diverge completely on the question of the self: Christianity promises the survival and perfection of individual identity, while Buddhism seeks that identity’s extinction in Nirvana. In a closing chapter, Lowell generalizes this contrast into a theory of mental evolution, arguing that individuality develops out of imagination much as new species develop out of spontaneous variation in nature, so that a people’s degree of individuation becomes, in his phrase, “the self-recorded measure of its place in the great march of mind.” Judged by that standard, he concludes, the Far East’s impersonality marks it as arrested at an earlier stage of development than the West, a conclusion he supports by pointing to the region’s comparative lack of both towering genius and its opposite — the ignorance found at society’s lowest levels — its habitual imitativeness rather than originality, and its historical isolation, cut off by the Pacific from the kind of travel he credits with sharpening the Western sense of self. The book ends on a note of prediction: unless the peoples of the Far East absorb enough of the West’s “newly imported ideas” to develop a stronger sense of individuality, Lowell writes, their “earthly career is closed,” and they are destined to “disappear before the advancing nations of the West.”

A Budget of Letters from Japan: Reminiscences of Work and Travel in Japan is an epistolary reminiscence by Arthur Collins Maclay, A.M., LL.B., identified on its title page as “Formerly Instructor of English in the Ko-Gakko-Rio, Tokio, Japan.” First published in 1886 and reissued in this 1889 second edition by A. C. Armstrong & Son, the book casts itself as twenty-one letters written between October 1873 and January 1878 by a young American schoolteacher to a correspondent named Julius Marcellus, wrapped in a small literary fiction: a prefatory “Explanatory Remarks,” signed “Julius Marcellus Van Tag” and dated February 1, 1886, introduces the letters as those of “my friend Theophilus Pratt” — the name under which every one of the twenty-one letters is in fact signed — even as Maclay’s own Preface, dated the same year, describes the book plainly as his personal journals from his years in Japan, “reduced,” in his words, to the form of correspondence “as being conversational in its nature.” The volume is dedicated to the memory of the author’s mother.

The letters open with Pratt’s departure from San Francisco on October 10, 1873, and a satirical account of the Pacific crossing that includes a dramatized shipboard dialogue between quarreling English and American passengers. A letter on Yokohama surveys the cosmopolitan Settlement and Bluff society there before Pratt takes his first post: an eight-month government contract teaching English at the Toogu-Gakko in Hirosaki, in the far north near Iwaki-san and the Tsugaru Straits, where he is “the only white man in the province.” From Hirosaki come a tour of the still-garrisoned castle paired with a discursive account of feudal daimio and samurai life (“A Glimpse of Old Feudal Times in Japan”); the routines of his household, his cook-boy’s disastrous experiments with Western cooking, and his running war with a neighbor’s cat and dog (“A Few Ideas About Life in the Interior”); the 1874 sword-murder of the German consul at Hakodate by a disaffected samurai, reconstructed from courtroom testimony and the American consul’s own account (“A Tragedy”); and a long comic standoff between the Hirosaki authorities and a Jesuit priest who talks his way into an open-ended stay on a fraudulently obtained passport (“A Few Reminiscences”). The scholars’ farewell address to their departing teacher, and his own farewell speech to them, are both reproduced in full.

Reassigned to Tokio in 1875, Pratt gives an extended “confidential chat about the metropolis” — its castle, its Shiba and Uyeno temples, its climate and conflagrations, and its boarding-house economics — followed by a companion letter on the mechanics of school-teaching there, with foreign teachers’ salaries running from two hundred and fifty to nine hundred dollars a month. A summer-vacation letter, built from dated journal entries, carries him to the Nikko shrines of Tokugawa Iyeyas and Iyemitsu and to Chiusenji Lake, then south by steamer through the Inland Sea to Kobe and Nagasaki, with a stop at the martyrs’ cliff of Pappenberg. Reassigned again to Kioto in 1877, he undertakes a month-long, six-hundred-mile walking and jinrikisha circuit through Echizen, Mino, Owari, Ise, and Kii to the ancient monastery of Coyasan, deliberately eating and lodging Japanese-style the entire way (“A Trip Through Classic Japan”); a separate letter describes Kioto itself and his rented temple lodgings near the Chioin monastery, and another recounts an excursion to Nara to record, in exhaustive measurements, the great bronze Dai-Butz. A retrospective letter on his 1875 climb of Fujiyama and a detailed account of the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion — Saigo’s siege of Kumamoto Castle, the fighting through Higo, and Aidzu’s revenge on its old Satsuma enemies — round out the travel narrative; no letter is set in China, though China recurs throughout as a point of comparison — in temple decoration and conversation at Hirosaki, in the derivation of Buddhism from “Corea and China” in the Hiyeisan letter, in scattered racial and political asides — and Maclay’s Second Edition preface separately recalls years spent studying Buddhism at the Kushan Monastery in Fookien before he ever reached Japan.

The book’s most sustained argumentative passage occupies Letter XVIII, “Hiyeisan,” ostensibly an account of an excursion to the long-diminished monastery above Lake Biwa but explained, in its own footnote, as a set piece “evolved from many hours of animated discussion” with skeptical Japanese scholars. After sketching the mountain’s history — Nobunaga’s destruction of its once-formidable warrior-monks — and a life of Shaka as Pratt understands it, the letter turns to rebut an unnamed “Boston philosopher” who had argued that Buddhism and Christianity share the same fundamental principles, arguing point by point that they do not: that Buddhism teaches existence itself to be a curse to be annihilated in Nirvana while Christianity teaches atonement and communion with a personal God, that Christ is a securely attested historical figure while Shaka is “almost a myth,” and that only divine origin can explain a moral code of which, as the letter puts it, “the criticism of the keenest intellects during eighteen centuries has not been able to suggest a solitary amendment.” The argument is not confined to this one letter: Letter XII, “Missionary Work in Japan,” contends at similar length that “religion is the cause, civilization is the effect” and that Japan, in importing Western civilization, is unwittingly importing Christianity itself, and the earlier Nara letter already editorializes that centuries of Buddhist chanting have done “but little to elevate humanity.” The Preface to the Second Edition, dated September 1888, returns to the fight explicitly, describing this portion of the book as showing the “measureless inferiority of Buddhism when compared with Christianity,” and quoting favorable notices from the New York Herald, the Boston Daily Advertiser, and the Alta California in its support.

Two later letters turn from travel to social argument. “Social Problems in Japan” moves from an appreciation of Japanese tobacco habits (favorably contrasted with Western spitting and chewing) and a comparatively mild view of sake-drinking, through a theory attributing racial complexion to climate and diet rather than to separate descent and explicitly rejecting Darwin, to a history of the Yoshiwara system of licensed prostitution — traced to the Legacy of Iyeyas’s aim of restraining samurai passions rather than, as Darwin’s Descent of Man had suggested, to population control — and finally to an argument against woman suffrage grounded in a division of the sexes into an “aggressive” male and a “conservative” female nature. “Our Imperial Cousins” catalogues three types of Englishman encountered in the treaty ports, disputes British handling of the Shimonoseki indemnity and the new Japanese postal treaty, and closes with an extended argument about monarchy and republicanism, extending Japan’s own samurai-tradesman-peasant caste divisions into a forecast about class, the South, and the legacy of the Civil War in the United States.

The book closes with Letter XXI, “Farewell to Japan,” dated from Yokohama on January 8, 1878: Pratt resigns after four happy years in Japan — cutting short a one-year Kioto teaching contract after only a few months — citing an intermittent fever contracted from sleeping on temple floors, a dyspepsia brought on by solitary meals, and the pull of unfinished professional studies at home, and takes leave of “Julius Marcellus” with a quotation from “The Deserted Village.” The volume is illustrated throughout with twenty-four plates — a frontispiece of Nikko’s Yomei Gateway and twenty-three further images, most captioned as native photographs, of subjects ranging from castle moats and a street vender to an Ainu group and a photograph of the executed rebel Mayebara, captioned “typical old-style samurai; beheaded in 1876 for fomenting rebellion in Choshiu”; one plate, of the death of Buddha, reproduces a Japanese temple painting that Maclay bought in Nagoya in 1877 and describes in its own explanatory footnote.

Echoes from Japan is a memoir and compilation of missionary reminiscences by M. McLean, credited on her own title page as also the author of Open Doors in Japan. A preface by “S. Uyemura,” a Japanese law student then at the Middle Temple in London who had read the manuscript before it went to press, credits her with “a residence of nine years in Japan,” a figure she repeats herself late in the book (“during my sojourn of nine years among them”). The narrative opens with her arrival at Nagasaki harbour in November 1872, sailing from Shanghai, and her onward voyage past Kobe to Yokohama, where she settles as an independent, self-supporting teacher and evangelist rather than as the appointee of any missionary society. The book unfolds not as a continuous travel account but as twenty-two loosely chronological, topical chapters — teaching episodes, temple visits, hill-station holidays, potted history and statistics — followed by three appendices of notebook jottings and other people’s letters, and a short closing appeal. In a postscript she describes it plainly as “simply what it professes to be, echoes from that country, or the substance of notes taken in the intervals of a busy life,” assembled partly from “extracts from their letters” and “American and English Missionary Reports.”

After an opening chapter sketching Japan’s mythological origins (Izanagi and Izanami) and its political history down to the 1868 restoration, McLean settles into Yokohama, supporting herself by tutoring English to the sons of former daimyo and samurai families — one ex-daimyo’s heir pays her forty dollars a month — and a young samurai pupil named Hirano is converted, copies out hymns for her sailor meetings in his own clear hand, and is baptized on his deathbed as he is dying of consumption. Three chapters here step outside her own voice entirely to reproduce, at length and in the first person, the words of others: chapter II, headed “By a Japanese Gentleman,” is an unnamed Japanese Christian’s survey of Protestant church growth (“The rumours of the British conquest of India... had already half awakened Japan”), and chapters IV and V print the conversion letters and a full sermon of a Japanese student at Cambridge, moved to conversion during D. L. Moody’s 1882 mission there (“I cannot find words to express what my heart feels... when, for the first time in my life, I am permitted to stand up before you, my fellow Christians, to preach Christ”). The real center of gravity in these chapters, though, is her own account of “an awakening among the Blue-Jackets”: from 1872 she runs Bible readings for British and American sailors and a battalion of three hundred marines out of her Yokohama cottage, backed by the British minister’s wife, Lady Parkes, and by ships’ captains such as Woolcomb of H.M.S. Thalia — sailors who, she reports, gave up “grog, tobacco, and pipe” and sang hymns in the streets. She also visits the Shiba temple and shogunal tombs in Tokyo, likening the officiating priest’s gold vestments and choir service to “Ritualism,” and describes young Japanese Christians asking her to join their newly organized, non-denominational native church, a request that pushes her — until then a member of the Free Church of Scotland — toward the anti-sectarian position she holds for the rest of the book, work she elsewhere calls keeping deliberately “outside the ruts and grooves of human formula.”

The middle chapters mix journal extracts with set-piece cultural sketches drawn from her pupils and their families. A visit to an ex-daimio’s household, that of Mizuno, brings a private recital on inlaid guitars given by an aged, blind teacher for the assembled young ladies, while a separate visit to Kobe and Osaka takes her into a merchant’s household and its storehouse of heirlooms, opened in her honor. “Self-help” tells the story of Neejima (Niijima Jō), the impoverished samurai’s son who stowed away to China, worked as a “Jack of all trades” aboard a ship bound for the United States to reach America, was educated at Amherst and Andover, and returned to found the Christian college Doshisha at Kyoto, “closed to missionary enterprise and to trade” by treaty. Chapters on social life, child life, and “Fragments” catalogue customs concretely: a merchant’s wife explaining that wives absent themselves from their husbands’ dinner parties because “we women are tsuchi (earth), while they are ten (heaven)”; the naming ceremony miya-mairi; a boy pupil re-enacting the Satsuma rebellion with paper warships while fighting rages at Kagoshima; two pupils building a miniature landscape garden stocked with tiny china figures — a policeman, a blind masseur, storks — while a visit to Osaka’s Normal School kindergarten in 1881 shows small children reproducing the same geography in stone and pebbles; the Boys’ Festival of the fifth of May and the Girls’ Festival, or Hinamatsuri, of the third of March; and tallies of Japan’s warships, telegraph and rail mileage. A trip to the Hacone hills takes her by jinrikisha along the Tokaido to Miyanoshita’s hot-spring hotels and the sulfurous crater fields of O-ji-koku, distributing tracts and a romanized hymnbook to fellow guests, and a following chapter, “How Orientals in London may be Reached,” urges readers to entertain the more than a hundred Japanese then living in England — many of them, she notes, students at English universities and public schools — quoting one student’s candid complaint that Westerners preach Christian unity while remaining themselves divided.

After five years at Yokohama, McLean moves her school to Osaka, where she is hosted for a week or two by the merchant Fujita Denzaburo — “the merchant prince of Japan” — and describes a formal tea ceremony in his house, then takes rooms in an Osaka hotel, where she witnesses the sudden death, in the small hours, of the innkeepers’ small daughter, O-Haru-san — “there were no superstitious observances that I could see,” she notes, only the family’s quiet grief and a feast afterward “to make the spirit of O-Haru-san happy” — before a side trip to Nara to view the Great Buddha, whose dimensions she records to the inch, and its tame temple deer. “Osaka Notes” gives the city’s population as 362,000 and describes its four wards and “nearly 400 bridges,” and Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s castle; a further chapter covers a summer visit to the hot-spring village of Arima. A chapter defending secular teaching as an evangelistic tool names lay educators Captain James, W. Clark, and J. Ballagh, and reproduces an American mission’s annual report naming the recently deceased pastor Paul Sawayama, “the first ordained pastor in Japan,” alongside membership statistics for Osaka’s four churches. A dispatch to the Church Missionary Gleaner, quoted in full, describes the promulgation of Japan’s new Constitution in February 1889, with the Empress riding “with the Emperor, in the same carriage, a thing unheard of before.” The closing chapters, “Moral Condition” and “The Eleventh Hour,” turn from reportage to direct appeal, comparing Japan’s sobriety favorably to Britain’s drunkenness while insisting Christianity alone can complete the nation’s transformation, and end with a repeated call, “Who will go?”, for self-supporting men and women to settle among the Japanese.

The book closes not with a narrative resolution but with apparatus. Appendix I, “Jottings from my Notebook,” is a dated diary of the Yokohama sailors’ revival that also carries, under the heading “Attacked by Chinese Rioters,” her sister’s account, signed “J. McL.,” of being set upon and injured during an anti-French riot in Shanghai after being mistaken for a Frenchwoman (“She is French, and she must be killed”). Appendix II, “Preface to the Letters of Blue-Jackets,” and Appendix III, “Crumbs from the Letters of a Soul-Winner at Shanghai,” reprint, largely unedited, letters describing shipboard prayer meetings aboard H.M.S. Thalia and Cadmus and, in Appendix III’s case, her sister’s brief later references to the riot’s aftermath. A short Conclusion, quoting 1 Chronicles 11:17, renews the appeal for missionaries and ends mid-argument rather than with any summing-up. Illustrations are set directly into the letterpress throughout rather than gathered as separate plates: costume portraits captioned “Samurai, or Gentleman of Feudal Times” and “Wife of a Daimio,” genre engravings such as “A Cooper at Work” and “Carpenter at Work,” full-page engravings of “A Buddhist Temple Bell” and of a congregation “Bowing during Prayer, at Church,” a view of “A Daimio’s Castle,” a photographically reproduced “Snowball” captioned “(Japan is not a tropical country, as many suppose!),” and a bird’s-eye view of “Kanagawa and Yokohama Harbour” facing the introduction — and the volume opens with a folding map of Japan from Stanford’s Geographical Establishment in London. The back matter carries a publisher’s catalogue of works by C. H. Spurgeon, whose firm, Passmore & Alabaster, issued the book.

From Japan to Granada collects what its title page calls “Sketches of Observation and Inquiry in a Tour Round the World. In 1887-8”: travel scenes interleaved with history, geology, argument, and advice for anyone meaning to make the same circuit. James Henry Chapin is named there as Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at St. Lawrence University and author of The Creation and Sketches of the Huguenots, and his twelve chapters run westward from Japan to Spain by way of China, Singapore and Johore, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Palestine, Palmyra, Malta, Sicily, and the Barbary States. A preface written at Meriden, Connecticut, in December 1888 disclaims any intention of replacing the guide-book, then answers four questions the author says he is often asked: be in the tropics between November first and the close of March; go west rather than east, since the traveler so reaches Japan — “the most entertaining country at present, in the whole list” — while yet fresh and full of zeal; allow a month each for Japan, China, India, Egypt, and Palestine, with another for the sea passages between; and expect five dollars a day traveling plainly, ten for the best of everything. Curios he warns against, since they “may prove a strain upon the integrity when it comes to passing the custom-house.” The first person plural belongs to the scenes; rather more than half the pages carry no “we” at all, giving themselves to third-person history and exposition, or addressing a generic “traveller” outright.

Japan fills the opening chapter and sixty-four of the book’s 325 pages, more than any other country receives. Geology comes first: a coast cut into fiords “not unlike the coast of Norway,” more than twenty active volcanoes, the earthquake waves that scoured Simoda harbor to bedrock in 1854, and Fugiama, which tradition says shot up in a single night. Then the harbor at Yokohama, reached after “the long, lonely passage from San Francisco to Japan,” where boatmen scramble for places alongside the ship; ashore, the jinrikisha, which promises little to one who has planned to see Japan, is vindicated by a little experience. A call at a prominent citizen’s house leaves the party cramped on cushions and glad to get “the warp out of our legs” on the street again. History runs from Jinmu Tenno through Yoritomo’s usurpation, Hideyoshi, Iyeyasu and Sekigahara, and Iyeyasu’s grandson Iyemitsu, who required the daimios to spend half the year at Yeddo and leave their families behind as hostages, to the revolution of 1868. Religion and reform close the chapter: the Shinto feast of the dead, the fifty-foot Daibutz at Kamakura, and the argument that Shinto and Buddhism alike have lost their hold, with the void left for the Christian churches of Europe and America to fill. Xavier’s mission and the decrees against Christianity follow, footnoted “there is no authentic record of the alleged tragedy at Pappenberg”; then the missionaries defended, the pensioning of daimios and samurai, hari-kari, and the parliament promised for 1890.

China comes next in a chapter conceding that the traveler’s first observations “do not produce a favorable impression” and then insisting the country “has been almost uniformly underestimated.” Two pages on the loess plains and their cliff-dwellings end with a footnote: Professor Pumpelly, since consulted, “now fully accepts Richthofen’s theory of the loess.” Chapin recounts the Taiping rebellion and the beheading of rebels at Canton, where a head was on exhibition the day the party was there, and describes the wall dividing Shanghai’s foreign settlement from the Chinese city and Peking, “reputed to be the filthiest city in the world.” China is “well stocked with religions, such as they are”: Confucianism, “a system of philosophy rather than a religion,” from which ancestral worship follows and on which the competitive examinations for office turn; Taoism from Laoutsze; Buddhism. A closing argument on Chinese resources remembers Ward, the American sailor, and “Chinese” Gordon, calls Li Hung Chang what Bismarck is to Germany, and rebukes American legislation and recent Australian measures against the Chinese. A shorter chapter turns on a dinner a small company of travelers were invited to take with the Sultan of Johore, who wore fourteen finger rings; at parting the gentlemen were given ebony canes, the ladies silken scarves; and on Singapore’s gutta-percha and tigers. Ceylon brings the Paredynia, the public garden at Kandy, Buddha’s tooth in the temple of Maligawa, and the ruins of Anaradhapoora: the Brazen Palace on sixteen hundred granite pillars and the sacred Bo-tree.

India, at fifty-three pages the second longest chapter, runs north from Tuticorin through Trichinopoly, hurried past because the cholera was raging; the car of Juggernaut at Tanjore; and Madras, where a Sunday walk brought the party to a cremation ground and then the discovery that the dead were cholera victims. At the University of Madras they are given places on the platform facing some six hundred candidates examined in nine languages. Chapin describes the bathing and burning ghats at Benares, and the fair at Allahabad, held in December and January, with penitents hung head downward and the New Year’s Day visit of the Rajah of Mysore, whose bath the newspapers reported was understood to have cost fifty thousand rupees. The Peacock Throne at Delhi, despoiled by a Persian conqueror, and the Táj Mahál both get set descriptions; the book returns to the Táj later to ask who carved its stones, answering that it took “the labor of twenty thousand men for nearly twenty years,” drafted from their homes and worked almost without pay. Caste, the bondage of Hindoo womankind, and child marriage occupy several pages, the Sepoy mutiny — begun at Meerut, “a military station a few miles from Delhi” — rather more, and five pages ask whether England holds India by a certain tenure, and what the displaced Mohammedans would do if Russia invaded. The chapter ends with the Parsees, whose Towers of Silence a stranger may watch only from near the garden gate as the vultures gather.

Egypt supplies camel-riding, the pyramids — no one may climb Cheops alone since an English soldier’s over-confidence cost him his life, and every Arab helper is also a curio dealer — the Sphinx carved in situ, the choice between steamer and dahabeah on the Nile, the temple of Denderah read by the light of a flickering candle, and the face of Rameses II, unwrapped by Maspero at Boulak in 1882. The chapter closes by inviting the reader off the beaten path — quit the rail at Zag-i-zig, go on by canal and whatever conveyance can be found — into the “fields of Zoan” in the land of Goshen, and reconstructs the Israelites’ route from Tanis to the sea, historians disagreeing about it and Moses watching for wind and low tide. Palestine is a series of standing views — from the Tower of David over Jerusalem, where the Mosque of Omar is believed to occupy the site of Solomon’s temple and “one of the saddest scenes in all the world” is the wailing place where Jews come to read Lamentations and “lament their lost estate”; from the site of ancient Jericho toward the Dead Sea and Nebo; at Jacob’s Well among the Samaritans of Shechem; and from the height behind Nazareth across the plain of Esdraelon — with steady skepticism about what the monks point out, the workshop of Joseph being “probably a pure invention.” The party then moves eastward and hires a boat at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.

Chapter VIII, “Zenobia’s Capital,” is a week’s round trip on horseback out of Damascus; on the last half-day’s ride before Palmyra a troop of Bedouins halts a mile off, sends one horseman halfway down the slope to inspect the party, and turns away. Zenobia’s rise, her capture in flight to the Euphrates, and her golden chains in Aurelian’s triumph fill a page and a half; the Grand Colonnade’s columns prove limestone, “not of marble, as some writers have incautiously stated,” measurement settling their number at the lower of two estimates; but the Temple of the Sun is “the ruin that attracts most attention.” Malta yields the Knights of St. John and the defense of St. Elmo in 1565; Sicily the Greek theatre at Taormina, a roped climb to a crater of Ætna, the summit out of season, and the Sybaris excavations whose finds are “neither Grecian nor Etruscan.” The Barbary States bring ruined Carthage, the piracies of Algiers, the prison at Tangiers — “We never approached a more infernal place in any land” — and the French army’s burning, in 1845, of more than a thousand mountaineers, women and children among them, in the caves at El Kantara, on which “the world will place its own estimate.” The geologist keeps surfacing: none of Malta’s rocks is volcanic “notwithstanding their proximity to one of the greatest volcanic areas on the globe”; the party collects specimens at the crater’s edge; and the “Algerine onyx” at Sekbalet is “onyx only in name.”

The last chapter opens on Spain — “the laggard among European nations” — in seven pages whose two flourishing institutions are the lottery and the bull-fight: six bulls and twelve to fifteen horses to an afternoon, and the verdict “We confess to a strong sympathy, first for the horses, second for the bulls, but none whatever for the men.” The survey takes in Lisbon, rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake in which sixty thousand died; Cordova’s cathedral, once a mosque, with some thousand columns despoiled from Sicily, Rome, Carthage, Greece, and Egypt; and Burgos, where the Cid’s bones are kept in a wooden box and his wife’s in a glass jar, both shown for two or three pesetas. The Alhambra is then walked room by room, from the Gate of Justice past the myrtle court to the Hall of the Ambassadors and the Court of the Lions, whoever has read Irving’s account recognizing its fidelity. The book ends on a sunrise over Granada one morning late in May 1888, watched on the way from the Washington Irving hotel to the early train, and on an address to the “Kind reader” promising “some account of what we saw and heard and learned, in our journey ‘From Japan to Granada.’” Nothing follows — no appendix, glossary, or index. The volume is inscribed to the author’s wife and daughter, its one plate a photographic frontispiece of the great bronze at Kamakura, captioned DIABUTZ where text and contents print Daibutz.

Impressions of a First Tour Round the World in 1883 and 1884 is a privately printed travel diary by Jehangir H. Kothari, who writes from the vantage of a returning Indian tourist — he refers in passing to his home port of “Kurachi” and to “our Sind volunteer corps” — and who says in his preface, dated London, June 1889, that he was already away on a second world tour when this account of the first went to press. The book appeared in an edition of three hundred copies “for private circulation,” and it follows Kothari day by day from his departure out of Bombay in May 1883 to his return to Kurachi some twelve months later, arranged into the sections his own Contents page lists in order: Europe, a Scotch Tour, a British Tour, an Irish Tour, the United States, Canada, Japan, China, the Straits Settlements, and a closing sweep through northern India. Europe overwhelms everything else — it alone occupies the book’s first 154 pages of 284, comfortably more than half the volume — and the three regional tours of Britain and Ireland that follow it run from page 155 to 225 before the narrative even reaches the Atlantic. Japan, against that, is a small fraction of the whole: about a dozen pages, 263 through 274, on the order of four percent of the book. It is not even set off with its own heading in the text — Kothari’s chapter titled “Eastern Tour” carries him, without a break, through Japan, China, and the Straits Settlements before a single closing paragraph on northern India ends the diary.

The itinerary before Japan is full of the kind of concrete, list-making detail that fills most of the book. Kothari arrives at Bombay aboard the “Oriental” and sails on for Suez aboard the P&O steamer “Malwa,” watching a Red Sea sports day whose animal race is “eventually won, after roars of laughter, by a sheep,” and sitting out a cholera quarantine before reaching Brindisi and crossing by way of Dover to London in May 1883. Days after his arrival he is off to the Derby, kitted out with “veils, sticks, gloves,” lunching from “no less than eight hampers,” and drawing the eventual winner, St. Blaize, in a sweepstake. A long Continental tour follows, through Geneva and Lucerne, Vienna, Venice, and Rome, where he tallies church after church (S. Pietro in Vincoli, the Sistine Chapel, the Capuchin ossuary of S. Maria della Concezione) and complains that Rome’s three hundred and sixty churches, “mostly built in the most lavish style imaginable,” stand over streets of “the most miserable specimens of humanity” while poor-houses go begging. Back in London by late August 1883, he sets off on separate Scotch, British, and Irish tours — Edinburgh Castle and a drive to Balmoral, factory visits in Manchester and Glasgow, a crossing to Belfast. In November he crosses on the Cunard liner “Servia” for an American tour of Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, then travels north into Canada, where he sees the Victoria Bridge at Montreal, the Lachine Rapids, and takes his first ride in a sleigh, before returning south to Niagara Falls and Chicago and riding the transcontinental railroad to San Francisco, arriving on the evening of December 16, 1883; there he visits the theaters and opium cellars of Chinatown and attends a public reception for General Hancock.

Kothari sails from San Francisco on the “Oceanic” on December 22, 1883, sharing the ship with some seven hundred Chinese steerage passengers whose cramped quarters he describes as “packed like sardines in a tin box,” and reaches Yokohama harbor on January 14, 1884, sighting “the world-renowned steep mountain of Fujujama” as the ship comes in. He tours Yokohama’s three quarters — the Bluff, with its rice fields and foreign residences; the European-built Settlement along the Bund; and the Native Town of wood-and-bamboo shops selling lacquer ware, bronzes, porcelain, and silk — before taking the new railway to Tokio (Yeddo), where he visits the Citadel and the Mikado’s plain wooden palace, the garden district of Shiba and the temple of Zoogoji with its lantern-lined tombs of the Mikados, a museum of Japan’s industrial and natural resources at “Kaita Kush,” a hilltop called Stazo Yemma for the view, the bullet-scarred gate at Oyens, and the temple at Asaksa with its two-inch gold image of a goddess, its wax figures dressed in green foliage, and its flocks of sacred pigeons fed by vendors of peas and rice. From Tokio he travels by carriage through Kanazawa to the Shinto temple at Kawakura (Kamakura) and its fifty-foot bronze Daibutsu, on to the seaside village of Yenoshima, then by steamer to Kobi (Kobe), Osaka — its castle and its mint, “worked on the same principle as that of the United States” — and finally through the Inland Sea to Nagasaki, from which he sails for Shanghai on January 29. He closes the Japan section with a character sketch of the Japanese as “a shrewd, skilful, ingenious, honest, and polite nation,” eager to learn and to imitate European habits, though he judges their soldiers poorly drilled despite their European-style uniforms; he is puzzled that Europeans he meets prefer Japan to their own countries, finding the place himself “very dull and quiet” for all its picturesque scenery and mild climate; and he devotes a sharp closing passage to what he calls the country’s morals, writing that “the men on this side of the world do not understand the meaning of the word ‘morality;’ in fact, they have no such word in their dictionary,” and that “no country is so base as Japan in this respect.”

From Nagasaki the “Eastern Tour” carries straight on into China — Shanghai’s foreign settlements and the “filthy and dirty” native city, Hong Kong’s Victoria and its Peak, a river trip to Canton, and gambling houses at Macao — and then to the Straits Settlements at Singapore and Penang, before Kothari lands at Calcutta and closes the diary with a single paragraph naming the northern Indian cities of his final leg — Lucknow, Cawnpore, Benares, Delhi, Lahore, Umritsar, Agra, Jeypore, Ajmere, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, and Bombay — on the way back to Kurachi. The book ends with a short note of thanks for the “courtesy, hospitality, and kindness” shown him by the English, Germans, and Americans he met, the words “THE END,” and a printer’s line naming Simmons & Bottek of Shoe Lane, London.

Japan and Its Art is a topical handbook on Japanese art and material culture, compiled by Marcus B. Huish, editor of The Art Journal, and published in London by the Fine Art Society in 1889. The book’s front matter explains that its material — published serially under the title “Notes on Japan” — first appeared in The Art Journal before being revised and expanded here, and the Preface states four claims for the book: that it aims to give an idea of the country, its history, customs, religion, and inhabitants as they appear in art; that it expresses the opinions not only of the leading European or American authorities but of “a competent Japanese expert”; that no book of its size covers so much ground or is so fully illustrated; and that it is issued more cheaply than any other English manual on the subject. Huish is candid in his Prologue about his own vantage: “I have, I regret to say, no personal knowledge of the country.” His material comes instead from text-books, from the study of collections in England and France, from information supplied by their owners, and from a year of daily intercourse with Mr. Masayuke Kataoka, whom he describes as “considered to be the most qualified expert that has visited this country.” He is, in short, a London collector and compiler rather than a traveler, and he says so plainly.

The book proceeds through sixteen numbered chapters organized by subject rather than by narrative, opening with a block covering The Physical Aspect of Japan, The History of Japan, and The Religion of Japan. The physical chapter surveys the country as artists have rendered it: Mount Fuji, worshipped and drawn by Hokusai in a hundred aspects; the Inland Sea and Lake Biwa with its “eight beautiful sights”; and the typhoons and earthquakes the Japanese attribute to the wind-god Futen and to a giant fish that shakes the earth. The history chapter runs from the mythical accession of the Mikado Jimmu in 660 B.C. through the rival Fujiwara, Sugawara, Taira, and Minamoto families, the Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates (in which Sesshu and the Kano school flourished), Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu’s victory at Sekigahara, down to the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which Huish credits with scattering the old daimio families’ art treasures onto the world market. The religion chapter sets Shinto’s spare aesthetic of plain torii and paper gohei against Buddhism’s “gorgeous ritual,” works through the iconography of Amida, the several forms of Kwannon, Jizo, and the Rakan, and notes that the 1868 Revolution disestablished Buddhism and confiscated much of its temple property.

Five further chapters catalogue the supernatural and social populations of Japanese art. The Gods of Good Fortune—Fuku-roku-jiu, Jurojin, Ebisu, Hotei, Daikoku, Bishamon, and Benten—are identified by their recognizable attributes, such as Daikoku’s rice bales and mallet and Ebisu’s rod and tai fish, while the chapter on mythical beings and animals works through the Oni, the demon-queller Sho-ki, the tengu, the dragon, the Ho or phoenix, the Kirin, the earthquake-fish Namazu — held down, when it grows too violent, by a giant named Kashima — and the tortoise. Society in Japan turns to the human orders under the old dual government of Mikado and Shogun—Daimios, the Samurai with their two swords and the privilege of seppuku, and the common classes down to Etas and geishas—and argues that Japanese artists draw the human figure poorly not from any want of skill but because their religion and their schooling gave them no anatomical study, unlike their treatment of birds and flowers. The House and Its Customs describes the fireproof-minded, foundation-less Japanese house room by room and reproduces at length, from Mr. Franks’s South Kensington catalogue, an account of the cha-no-yu, or tea ceremony, utensil by utensil. Folk-Lore and Legends retells the stories most often illustrated on lacquer and sword-fittings—Yoshitsune and Benkei, Ono-no-Komachi, Urashima (whom Huish calls “the Japanese Rip Van Winkle”), the tongue-cut sparrow, Momotaro—and notes that the Japanese recognize twenty-four paragons of filial piety, citing a handful as examples: Mo-so, Yoko (who clung to the tiger that had sprung at her father), Gomo (who would not drive away the mosquitoes stinging him, lest they settle on his parents), and Shiba-on-ko.

Flora and Flower Festivals and Zoology close the first half of the book. The flora chapter follows the plum, cherry, chrysanthemum (the imperial crest), peony, and lotus through their seasonal festivals and through the etiquette of flower arranging and of dwarfed trees, and includes Huish’s complaint that English wallpaper designers habitually mistake conventionalized Japanese floral motifs for literal ones. The zoology chapter opens from the twelve animals of the duodenary cycle used to mark the hours of the day, and moves through the crane, the shape-shifting fox and tanuki, insects prized for their song, and fish—a carp climbing a waterfall typifying “ambition and perseverance”—while noting which creatures Japanese artists render well and which, like the elephant, lion, and tiger imported with Buddhist iconography, they have never seen and draw badly.

A second part, covering what Huish calls the country’s “industrial” arts, runs from Chapter XI through Chapter XV: Lacquer, Metal-Work, Sculpture in Wood and Ivory, Porcelain and Faience, and Xylography, Engraved Prints and Books. The lacquer chapter details named techniques—nashiji, togi-dashi, hira-makiye, taka-makiye, guri lac, chinkin-bori—and named makers, from Honnami Koyetsu and Koma Kyuhaku through Korin, whose work Huish finds “always an archaic appearance” despite its “surprising vigour,” to the Kajikawa family, of whose black lacquer and gold work Mr. Gilbertson owns more than a hundred signed inro; Gilbertson’s wider lacquer collection, drawn from dozens of other named masters, totals work by some two hundred and fifty masters in all. Metal-Work is organized around sword furniture—the tsuba, kodzuka, kogai, menuki, and fuchi-kashira—and the schools that produced it, among them Goto, Miochin, Nara, Yokoya, and Omori, together with the alloys shakudo and shibuichi and the patinas they take. Sculpture in Wood and Ivory advances Huish’s own theory that the netsuke descends from an edict issued by Hidetada in 1614 requiring every household to keep a Buddhist image, which briefly employed a class of image-carvers who turned their chisels to tobacco-pouch toggles once that demand was met; it names netsuke carvers including Shiuzan, Miwa, Ikkan, Masanao, and the mask-making Deme family. Porcelain and Faience, added, in Huish’s words, because its omission would otherwise leave the book “decidedly deficient,” reprints at length a lecture by Ernest Hart on Shonsui’s blue-and-white ware, Kakiyemon’s overglaze enamels, Kutani, Ninsei, Kenzan (Korin’s brother), and old Satsuma faience. Xylography traces Japanese wood-block printing from its Chinese origins through Anderson’s six historical periods of named print designers to Hokusai, “the son of a mirror maker,” who by his own account “worked diligently from his sixth to his eighty-eighth year.”

The book closes with a chapter surveying the state of Japanese art in the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum, which Huish finds poorly and duplicatively acquired—he singles out a screen of little artistic merit bought for £150 and sixty combs bought for £98 as instances of waste—and warns that commercial demand and Japanese artisans’ catering to foreign taste threaten the arts he has described, contrasting this with Berlin’s new Oriental College, whose public lectures on Japanese art and language are well attended, while an attempt the previous spring to found an English society for the study of Japanese art failed to enroll even fifty members. Throughout, the volume is illustrated with more than 120 numbered engravings, each individually captioned and credited to its source. Many are drawn from Huish’s own collection of Japanese metal-work, said elsewhere in the text to run to about a thousand pieces, and from the collections of named private owners including E. Gilbertson, Ernest Hart, Tomkinson, W. J. Stuart, W. C. Alexander, Seymour Trower, Sir Trevor Lawrence, C. K. Read, and Z. Merton. Others are reproduced from further afield still: a market-day scene is credited to the Japanese source-book Tō-tō-sai Ji-ki, and a painting of a pheasant is credited both to “a Painting by Sosen, in the Dillon Collection, 1786” and to Anderson’s Pictorial Arts of Japan, from which it was in turn reproduced. An index closes the volume, prefaced by a short guide to the pronunciation of Japanese letters, with a note explaining that the Japanese lettering stamped on the cover is a poetical title supplied by Mr. Kataoka, rendered as “a rich weaving of Yamato’s glories.”

Keeling’s Guide to Japan is a guidebook for travelers, in its fourth edition, “revised and enlarged,” issued from Yokohama by A. Farsari and marked on its title page a “second issue.” That title page announces coverage of Yokohama, Tokio, Hakone, Fujiyama, Kamakura, Yokoska, Kanozan, Narita, Nikko, Kioto, Osaka, and Kobe, “together with useful hints, history, customs, festivals, roads, &c., &c.” The guide is organized into a sequence of numbered Routes, each broken into “Trips,” and the preface explains that this edition’s arrangement was altered so that a traveler knowing how much time he can spare in a given place can see at a glance what he should visit in that time.

The Routes move outward from the Yokohama–Tokio area. Route I covers Yokohama itself — its Settlement, Bluff, and Native Town — along with the railway stations between Yokohama and Tokio (Kanagawa, Tsurumi, Kawasaki, Omori, Shinagawa) and, just off the line, the village of Ikegami and its temple. Route II covers Tokio and its vicinity in three trips: the city proper (Tsukiji, Shiba, Atagoyama, the Imperial Palace and gardens, Ueno, Asaksa, and other quarters), further places of interest around the city (Mukojima, Horikiri, Kameido, Meguro, Sengakuji, and others), and Narita and its temple. Route III covers the vicinity of Yokohama: Kamakura, the Daibutsu, and Enoshima; Oyama; Yokoska; and Kanozan, with an added trip combining Yokoska, Uraga, and Kanozan. Route IV covers the Hakone Range, based at Miyanoshta, with trips to Ojigoku and Otometoge, to Hakone and Atami, and from Hakone toward Fujiyama. Route V covers the Fujikawa valley and the Koshiukaido road. Route VI covers the Nikko Range — the mausolea of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu, the vicinity of Nikko, and Chiuzenji and Yumoto — and Route VII covers Ikao, Miogi, and Asamayama, while Route VI A offers a longer alternative route (twelve or fifteen days) linking Nikko, its lakes, Ikao, Kusatsu, Miogi, and Asamayama by different roads. Route VIII A covers Kobe, Osaka, Nara, Kioto and vicinity, and Biwa Lake; Route VIII B covers the Nakasendo road between Tokio and Kioto, given as a station-by-station itinerary with the recommended inn at each stop; and Route IX covers the Inland Sea and Nagasaki.

Ahead of the Routes, the guide gathers substantial topical material. A section of “Useful Hints” takes up books and maps, treaty limits, passports, shooting licenses, conveyances such as the jinriksha and kago, inns and their etiquette, food, expense, and Japanese money, weights, and measures. A “General Description of Japan” follows, covering geography and climate, commerce, and government — the Ken and Fu, the cabinet and privy council, and the old feudal classes — and closing with a “Japanese Chronology” running from the legendary accession of Jimmu Tenno to events of 1889. Further sections treat religion (Shinto and Buddhism) and a calendar of religious, national, and popular festivals and flower-blooming seasons, and then architecture and customs: houses and gardens, castles, fires and firefighting, dress, bathing, food and drink, theaters, geisha and dancing, wrestling, fencing, and hara-kiri.

The guide closes with an index, and is prefaced by a printed “List of Maps” naming nine: Settlement of Yokohama, The Bluff of Yokohama, Map of Tokio, Vicinity of Yokohama, Vicinity of Fujiyama, The Temples of Nikko, Vicinity of Nikko, From Nikko to Ikao and Kusatsu, and Map of Kioto — though the title page describes the volume as containing “ten maps.” A page of “Alterations” further corrects the count of Ken given earlier in the text and revises the closing lines of the chronology to record the promulgation of the constitution and the assassination of the Minister of Public Education in February 1889.

A Voyage in the ‘Sunbeam’: Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months is a dated first-person journal of a circumnavigation made in a private yacht, published over the name Mrs. Brassey. Its title page carries an oval engraved vignette captioned “Cape Brassey : Smyth’s Sound” and the imprint “1891: J. W. Henry, St. Louis, Mo.” Twenty-eight chapters fill printed pages 3 to 488, each opening with a verse epigraph, and the narrative runs mostly as day-headed entries — “Saturday, December 2nd.—” — which give day and month, and only once, at the New Year, the year 1877. The front matter includes a dedication to friends “of the white and coloured races,” with an oval portrait medallion of the author and her engraved signature below it; a Note signed “A. B.” that thanks Mr. W. Simpson for the passages on Japanese temples and describes the vessel as “a screw composite three-masted topsail-yard schooner” of 531 tons displacement, with engines by Messrs. Laird; and a preface signed Thomas Brassey, allowing that “the practised skill of a professional writer cannot reasonably be expected in these simple pages.” The household afloat is large — “We were forty-three on board, all told” — and takes in the writer’s husband, called Tom throughout, the children Mabelle, Allnutt, Muriel and a baby, a doctor, a guest who sketches, dogs, birds, and a Persian kitten that vanished in the Channel and was given up for gone overboard.

The journal opens at noon on July 1st with the run from Chatham down to Sheerness, a swim over the side while becalmed off Brighton, and a passage out through the Needles under sail with the funnel lowered. In the Bay of Biscay a following sea pours over the stern; Allnutt is nearly carried away, and Captain Lecky holds Mabelle fast, while she says only, quietly, “Hold on, Captain Lecky, hold on!” Funchal comes next, then Teneriffe and the ascent of the Peak, where the author and children halt at Alta Vista and she photographs while they sleep, the men climbing on up a cone of ashes sloping at 44 degrees. After the Cape de Verdes come three weeks at Rio: the market, Petropolis, a coffee fazenda where the party watch the slaves mustered to hear mass. On August 28th part of the company disguise themselves, one “pretending to be a rich Yankee,” to watch a slave sale — twenty-two men and eleven women and children brought in, a brother and sister of about fourteen and fifteen “most anxious not to be separated, but to be sold together,” “the tiny children seemed quite frightened at being spoken to or touched by the white men” — and a half-column of Brazilian advertisements is then reprinted in Portuguese and English under the running head “HUMAN FLESH AND BLOOD FOR SALE.” Beyond Monte Video and Buenos Ayres the party rides into a locust swarm: “I never wish to see another locust as long as I live.”

Off the River Plate on September 28th Mabelle bursts into the cabin — “Papa says you are to come up on deck at once, to see the ship on fire.” The barque ‘Monkshaven’ of Whitby, sixty-eight days out of Swansea with a cargo of smelting coal, has been burning for days; the yacht’s boat makes three trips, and part of the barque’s fifteen men come off in their own boat; all are aboard by half-past six; at dinner she is seen “blazing like a tar-barrel,” though by nine, when the yacht steams round her, only smoke and sparks issue from the hatches. The rescued crew describe a large American steamer that had come close, hoisted her ensign, “and then coolly steamed away to the southward.” All hands go on half allowance of water. In the Straits of Magellan the yacht calls at Sandy Point, and Fuegians paddle alongside shouting “Tabaco, galleta,” trading sea-otter mantles for tobacco, beads and knives until at last the woman parts with her sole garment for a little more tobacco, beads and looking-glasses, and they depart “quite naked but very happy.” Then the glaciers and icebergs of Smyth’s Channel and the Cape Brassey of the title-page vignette; Chili, with Madame Cousiño’s smelting works at Lota; Santiago, where she stands on the site of the burnt Church of the Compañía and retells the disaster; and Valparaiso. The Pacific takes “five weeks at sea,” in the course of which the author is hoisted to the foretopmast-head in a boatswain’s chair, “very carefully secured with a rope tied round my petticoats.” A parenthesis in one of its entries records that a report of the yacht’s having gone down with all hands had meanwhile been circulated through England, dating the supposed foundering to a day in the Straits.

The first landing in the South Pacific is at Hao, or Bow Island, the gig’s crew armed with revolvers and rifles “which they were not to show unless required to do so.” It passes off in handshaking; a head-woman in a “cherry-coloured calico gown” spreads a mat, one woman holds her dress before her face until the men walk away and proves to have had her nose cut off, and no young girl is anywhere to be seen, from which the party conclude that “the girls must have been sent away intentionally when the approach of the yacht was observed.” At Maitea the boat is run ashore over rollers laid by the islanders; at Papeete, reached on December 2nd, Queen Pomare is away at Bola-Bola, and next day her brother-in-law introduces himself in the market. Hilo follows before Christmas, with the ride up to Kilauea and a descent into the crater, where at times seven fire-fountains play at once and the lava two inches beneath the party is red-hot. Surf-swimming is watched at length, the riders coming in on boards about four feet by two, “holding on, as it were, by the milk-white manes of their furious coursers.” Honolulu ends with the Royal Mausoleum opened as “a special privilege,” after which the yacht sails with forty people aboard into four weeks that bring influenza, burst boiler tubes, a smashed gig, a broken jibboom, and a Thursday that “had no existence for us, as, in the process of crossing the 180th meridian, we have lost a day.”

Japan fills the longest run of pages the volume gives any one country, close to sixty. Land is made before dawn on January 29th: the island of Vries shows its volcano by moonlight, the sun rises on Fujiyama under fresh snow — “the matchless mountain” — and the Gulf of Yeddo lies so thick with junks that the yacht creeps in to anchor off Yokohama. Next morning snow blocks the skylights and portholes and the hose water freezes on deck, and “everything betokened that our welcome to Japan would not be a warm one.” Tokio brings Sir Harry and Lady Parkes and the Temple of Shiba, and the observation that “Yokohama has been so completely Europeanised, that it was not until we had left it that we caught our first glimpse of Japanese life”; then Inoshima and the Daibutz at Kama-kura. At Kobe the Mikado opens the railway to Kioto — “a young, not very good-looking man, with rather a sullen expression, and legs that look as though they did not belong to him” — among officials whose boots are “generally put on the wrong feet”; then Kioto itself, and Osaka, “called the Venice of Japan.” Fire breaks out below at half-past two one morning, burning the cabin floor through while the children are carried up in blankets; the first day in the Inland Sea disappoints; at the closed port of Simono-seki a crowd presses round her — “I constantly felt myself being gently stroked and touched.” Leaving by the Bungo Channel and missing Nagasaki, she advises that travelers “who wish to see Japan should do so at once; for the country is changing every day, and in three years more will be so Europeanised that little will be left worth seeing.”

Hongkong comes late in February, and Canton by the river steamer ‘Kin-Shan,’ where eight hundred deck passengers are “padlocked in under the hatchways and iron gratings,” with a stand of pistols and rifles in the saloon against pirates; then Macao, Singapore and a first durian, and Ceylon, celebrated for real gems and almost as much for the imitations hawked by the natives, where half-naked men run beside the carriage producing “rubies, sapphires, and emeralds for which they asked from one to four thousand rupees, and gratefully took fourpence.” Aden and the Red Sea follow, then the Canal on April 26th at regulation speed under double awnings, while she takes the children overland by Cairo to see the Pyramids. Valetta comes on the 8th of May, and on the 14th the yacht crosses “the meridian of Greenwich; and this virtually completed our voyage round the world”; Gibraltar and Lisbon follow. The Start is sighted on the 26th, Cowes reached that afternoon, and Hastings at half-past one in the morning, where the Royal Naval Artillery Volunteers row out, and afterwards the Battle bell-ringers never stop ringing “except during service time.” The printed list on pages xi–xiv is headed “LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS” over the sub-heading “WOODCUTS IN TEXT.”; the volume also carries full-page plates that this list does not name, several of them bound without relation to the pages they face — “TEMPLE OF THE MOON,” a tiered temple tower among palm trees, faces page 329 in the Inoshima and Kama-kura pages, and “A CHINESE PEARL AND IVORY STORE,” showing turbaned shopkeepers, faces page 355 at Arrima. The last page of letterpress, 488, is headed DULCE DOMUM and closes with an unattributed quatrain, “I travell’d among unknown men, / In lands beyond the sea,” and a vignette, “Home at Last.”

Japan: A Sailor’s Visit to the Island Empire is Captain M. B. Cook’s account of two voyages to Japan, compiled from notes begun, as the opening chapter puts it, “as the land was neared” on the first crossing and enlarged on a later visit, meant at first only “with the intention of interesting my family and a few intimate friends.” Despite the title, the book indicates that Cook was not a common seaman but the master of a merchant vessel: a Japanese friend’s letter addresses him as “Dear Sir, Captain,” he later describes an evening spent “with another Yankee captain,” and he mentions “a case of oil brought by our own ship” among the reminders of home he meets ashore. The outbound crossing took five months and covered “over twenty-one thousand miles of trackless ocean” before landing him at Yokohama, where his compradore, an American named Collyer, took him in hand, and where an introduction to “the daughter of an old Daimio” — a young woman he calls Princess Kuma — gave him a guide and companion for many later excursions. His wife and a young woman he calls Grace traveled with him for at least part of the visit: a morning invitation from his friend Toyonaga addresses Cook as “Captain,” and a later letter from Kuma, sent to the family after their return to America and addressed to “Captain San,” “Ohamisan (Madame),” and “Grace-san,” follows up on the visit.

The opening chapters stay in Yokohama and its immediate surroundings: the jinrikisha trade and its “rascally” but indispensable drivers, an evening at a restaurant where a beefsteak arrives raw for the diners to cook themselves over a hibachi, the shooting galleries and tea booths of the amusement quarter, and a full day at a new theater watching the historical play of the “Forty-seven Ronins,” performed from ten in the morning past eleven at night. A day’s excursion with Kuma and a second companion takes Cook to Kamakura and Enoshima: the great bronze Dai Butsu (“fifty-two feet high… measures ninety-eight feet about the waist”), the Hachiman temple with Yorotomo’s lacquered swords and hunting gear on display, Nichiren’s legend of the executioner’s sword that broke in three pieces, and the story of Nitta Yoshiada casting his sword into the sea so the tide would recede and bare a path for his army. An overnight stay at an Enoshima inn brings a storyteller’s tale of the goddess Benten rising from the sea, a climb past her four shrines, and a torch-lit trip through the island’s caves, before the party returns to Yokohama through Fujisawa.

Two chapters on Tokio move from the climb up Atago Yama and a visit to the nobles’ clubhouse Ko Yo Kwan — including its private No-dance stage kept for the Mikado’s own visits — to the tombs of past shoguns at the Shiba temple grounds, then to Ueno Park’s museum and menagerie, the Asakusa temple of Kwanon, a bamboo tower built to resemble Fusi Yama, an excursion by boat to the plum-and-cherry groves of Mukojima island, and the boulevard of Ginza. Cook gives a full chapter to the promulgation of Japan’s constitution on February 11, 1889, which he watched at the invitation of his friend Y. Toyonaga (whose letter of invitation he reproduces); he summarizes the constitution’s provisions for the House of Peers and House of Representatives, notes that “more than two thousand prisoners were welcomed again to freedom” and that warships of “not less than six nations” answered the Japanese navy’s salute in Yokohama harbor, and describes the fireworks, kite-flying, and a procession “over an hour in passing a given point” that followed over three days. The next chapter takes up the ancient “No” dance performed during the celebration, straw-weaving households at Kanagawa, the monthly tending of family graves, a cremation he witnessed, the burial of the poor in old sake casks, and a boys’ graveyard game of courage called Kondameshi. A Yokohama shopkeeper who calls himself “George Washington” leads into an account of the Feast of Dolls and the Feast of Flags, followed by a survey of rice, tea, silk, lacquer-ware manufacture, and papermaking as Japanese products; the following chapter broadens further into schools and libraries, newspapers, music, Buddhism and Shinto, footwear and dress, and the etiquette of fans and courtship.

A separate trip down the coast to Kobe and Hiogo fills another chapter: a “Horse Temple” kept as home to a living sacred white horse, a mountain waterfall, and a side trip to Otsu on Lake Biwa for the temple of Miidera and its great bell, with legends of the bell lying twelve hundred years at the lake’s bottom and later sobbing to be carried back after the giant Benkei stole it away — the chapter closes with a page of Japanese proverbs Cook copied from an English-language pamphlet bought at the Inari temple. He then joins “a jolly party of eight” from Hiogo for Kioto, shooting the Rapids of Oigawa by boat to Arashiyama before touring the temples of Nishi and Higashi Honganji, where two ropes of woven human hair, each 360 feet long, had been used to raise the great beams; the Sanjusangendo, with its thousand large images of Kwanon and 33,333 figures in all; and the Kioto Dai Butsu, whose bell inscription he transcribes in full. A final chapter visits Mimizuka, the mound raised over the ears and noses of prisoners taken in the Korean invasion; the porcelain-lined street and temple of Kiyomidzu; the pagoda tower of Yasaka; the Gosho, former residence of the Emperors; the Kitano Tenjin shrine, where worshippers view their own faces in a large steel mirror before bowing three times; Kinkakuji; and workshops producing cloisonné ware, porcelain, and Nishijin silk brocade, ending at the Chionin temple. The book closes with Cook’s brief reflection that “the picture of Japan is a bright one” and that its people have shown “great aptitude in adapting themselves to a higher civilization,” followed by four lines of verse — “It is ended! / The last page has been written…” — that end the volume.

A reference book rather than a narrative, Things Japanese gathers under alphabetically arranged headwords the answers to questions its author reports being “perpetually” asked about the country. The title page identifies him as Emeritus Professor of Japanese and Philology in the Imperial University of Japan; the introductory chapter dates his arrival to 1873 and, in the first person plural he often adopts — “our own little ‘we,’ not the editorial ‘we’” — claims “the two well-known privileges of old age — garrulity and an authoritative air.” The answers are “put into the shape of a dictionary, not of words but of things, — or shall we rather say a guide-book, less to places than to subjects? The old and the new will be found cheek by jowl.” This is the second edition, revised and enlarged; the preface, dated Tokyo, 6th November 1891, states that it “has been enlarged by the insertion of over twenty new articles, while the old have been corrected up to date and re-written in many parts.” The introductory chapter ends by calling the volume an epitaph: “Old Japan is dead, and the only decent thing to do with the corpse is to bury it… This little book is intended to be, as it were, the epitaph recording the many and extraordinary virtues of the deceased, — his virtues, but also his frailties.”

An epigraph from Amiel’s Journal Intime on how understanding differs from judging precedes the preface, in which the author thanks W. B. Mason and names the friends who wrote or furnished particular articles, and records that the map, “now much improved, is adapted from one of those in the ‘Atlas of the Agricultural Productions of the Japanese Empire,’ by permission of Professor T. Wada.” Eight pages of introduction follow, then a drop-title reading “Things Japanese.” and, on page 9, the first entry, Abacus. Nothing serves as a table of contents; the alphabet is the finding aid, with an index at the back. Scale varies wildly. Some entries are one line of direction — “Mythology. See History.”, “Soroban. See Abacus.”, “Naturalisation. See third paragraph of p. 17.” — and EE—EE, on page 129, takes four lines to explain that the letters on forwarding agents’ signboards stand for “express”; others run a dozen pages or more, the longest above twenty. Headwords are set in bold and run into the first line of text, cross-references stand in small capitals, and footnotes keyed with asterisk and dagger carry etymologies, corrections and jokes. Many articles close with a smaller-type paragraph headed “Books recommended.”, or “Book recommended.” in the singular; the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, cited by volume and part, is the reference that recurs most.

The older Japan fills much of the alphabet and nearly all of its longest set-pieces. History and Mythology, pages 202 to 225 and the longest article in the book, moves from the cosmogony of the Kojiki and Nihongi through the Shogunate and 1868 into a year-by-year chronicle ending at 1891, then declines the usual closing formula because “there are none to recommend” and “a critical history of Japan remains to be written.” Literature, from page 267, reproduces the sixteen heads under which Mr. Satow classes Japanese literature and adds a seventeenth of the author’s own, Europeanised Literature; Language, from page 253, prints a specimen sentence with a word-for-word English gloss under each Japanese word and a free translation beside it. Belief is taken up under Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, Esotericism and Pilgrimages, antiquities under Archaeology, which came from W. G. Aston and rests on his joint investigations with W. Gowland. The crafts — Art, Architecture, Lacquer, Cloisonné, Porcelain and Pottery, Metal-Work, Carving, Swords, Embroidery — generally arrive with a verdict attached, Architecture beginning “The Japanese genius touches perfection in small things… Hence they achieve less success in architecture than in the other arts.” Festivals lays out a calendar from January to December, while Tea Ceremonies, Poetry, Theatre, Proverbs, Moral Maxims, Fairy-Tales, the Forty-Seven Ronins, Harakiri, Cormorant-Fishing, Incense Parties and Blackening the Teeth give custom and curiosity the same footing as doctrine.

Set against these is a large body of articles reporting the country as it stood in 1891, much of it in figures. Trade, pages 430 to 443 and the largest of the statistical articles, sets two or three pages of tables — imports and exports by commodity, with totals by port and by country — inside a prose account of Japanese commercial practice and of the staple exports, silk, tea and rice; Shipping, pages 379 to 385, mixes prose and tonnage tables in much the same way; Railways, Telegraphs, Posts, Navy and Population read like departmental returns of mileages, dates and totals. Treaties and Treaty Revision, pages 443 to 450, begins from the treaty “wrung from her on the 31st March, 1854, by the terror which Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ had inspired,” and Exterritoriality, Newspapers, Societies, Education and Foreign Employés in Japan handle the new institutions and the foreigners inside them. Missions, pages 296 to 307, divides into five numbered parts — Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, the Orthodox Russian Church, and General Considerations — and counts the Catholic population at 44,300 souls on the 15th August 1891. Woman (Status of), pages 451 to 463, prints in full Kaibara’s treatise, which it renders The Greater Learning for Women. Several such articles came from other hands, credited in the preface rather than at the article itself; occasionally the text says so, as when Law ends “the foregoing article must be considered as proceeding from our informant, Mr. R. Masujima, of the Japanese Bar and of the Middle Temple, London.”

The manner throughout is opinionated and frequently comic. Abacus advises learning the soroban because “you will often be able to save a large percentage on your purchases,” then admits “we have never learnt the abacus at all.” Taste holds that Japan is “only half-Greek,” her taste “faultless where line is concerned” but deserting her “whenever the appeal is to the ear,” the music “horrible beyond description”; Societies wishes “failure and disaster from the bottom of our hearts” to the Society for the Abolition of Present-Giving; Ainos states flatly that “they are filthily dirty, the practice of bathing being altogether unknown”; Woman (Status of) opens “Japanese women are most womanly — kind, gentle, pretty. But the way in which they are treated by the men has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any generous European heart.” Demoniacal Possession turns to personal narrative to record an exorcism by Shinto priests in the cholera summer of 1879. Beside all this sits plain technical exposition — the weight and dimensions of the polo racket, the optics of the magic mirror, columns of tonnage. After Zoology comes a postscript to the article on Earthquakes reporting the shock of 28 October 1891 that destroyed Gifu and Ogaki, then a page of Corrections carrying two errata, then an index of some twenty-three double-column pages, and last the Yokohama printer’s imprint, a leaf listing the author’s other books, and a colophon in Japanese.

Japan in Our Day is a compilation: a volume of other travelers’ accounts, selected, condensed and joined by connecting narrative, issued in Charles Scribner’s Sons’ Illustrated Library of Travel. A prefatory note signed “B. T.” gives the compiler’s object — “to select all that is newest and most interesting in the works of recent visitors to Japan, in order to make this volume a tolerably complete gallery of pictures, representing the life and customs of the Japanese at this time” — and names Sir Rutherford Alcock and M. Humbert among those drawn upon. A second note, signed “W. E. G.” and dated Boston, February 17, 1892, sets out the revision: obsolete statements eliminated, fresh material added “with just enough of history to give the reader an intelligent idea of the causes and processes of the profound changes which have made Japan a new nation,” and proper names respelled “according to the standard orthography and pronunciation of Tokio, the Imperial capital.” The reviser records meeting Taylor in April 1878, just before Taylor left New York “to fill the honored position of American Minister at the Court of Berlin,” and notes that Taylor had seen Japan with Commodore M. C. Perry’s expedition in 1854. Twenty-eight chapters follow, running from Marco Polo’s hearsay to the Japan of 1892.

The opening chapters are connecting history rather than extract, and the reviser has been over that matter wherever it stands — cross-referring to Griffis’s life of Commodore Perry, dating the birth of the Emperor Mutsuhito to the day Perry’s flagship was ready to sail, reporting Alcock “at this date, February, 1892, still living in London.” The first quotes Marco Polo on “Zipangu,” then traces the Portuguese vessel blown into Bungo in 1539, the Jesuit priests, Francis Xavier among them, William Adams piloting the first Dutch ship in 1600, the proclamation of 1637 banishing “the whole race of the Portuguese,” the battering down of Shimabara, and the confinement of the Dutch to Déshima, “six hundred feet in length by two hundred and forty in breadth.” A second chapter runs from Jimmu through Yoritomo, the Mongol armada scattered by a storm about 1281, Nobunanga, Hidéyoshi and Iyéyas, quoting two of the hundred rules of Iyéyas’s “Legacy” on receiving foreign envoys and wrecked ships. A third recounts Biddle’s rebuff at Uraga, the brig Preble’s rescue of shipwrecked American seamen, and Perry’s treaty of March, 1854 opening Shimoda and Hakodaté. Then come extracts from Townsend Harris’s private journals: a cavalcade of some 350 persons leaving Shimoda in November, 1857, a first sight of Fuji “like frosted silver,” and an entry into Yedo through a silent crowd he reckons at one hundred and eighty-five thousand. Two chapters compiled from Alcock’s The Capital of the Tycoon give the ascent of Fuji-yama and a thirty-two-day overland journey from Nagasaki that ends at Kanagawa.

Thirteen of the twenty-eight chapters, a little under half the volume, are M. Aimé Humbert’s, sent by the Swiss Government in 1862 to make a commercial treaty; his two quarto volumes of 1870 are paraphrased and quoted at length, the compiler’s own sentences carrying the reader from extract to extract. He sails from Nagasaki through the Inland Sea, notes the American names on the chart of the Bay of Yedo — Reception Bay, Susquehanna Bay, Mississippi Bay and Treaty Point among them — and settles at Yokohama, where neighbor women inspect his pier-glasses and sofas and a boy servant gives him “the key to conversation in three words.” At Kamakura the great city is gone and the bronze Dai Butsu sits “with folded hands, and head gently inclined in an attitude of contemplative ecstasy.” On the Tokaido he passes a prisoner carried in a basket of woven bamboo, and Shinagawa, “that suburb of Yedo which has the worst fame,” haunt of the ronin.

In Yedo the legations sit in temples, the Tozenji is stormed by night, a photographer steals two negatives of a prince’s palace, and the government is likened to Venice under the Council of Ten. The chapter on the Tycoon’s residence turns aside to what the reviser calls “the old methods of the administration of justice, which have now given way to more civilized procedures,” and Humbert’s account of them is unsparing: stone weights piled on a kneeling prisoner’s thighs, a lancet in place of the branding iron, beheading in the prison yard, the head exposed a day in a market-place. Other chapters take up the fish market, marriage and funerals, the five annual festivals, the Shibaia theater, wrestlers who win “less by their muscular strength and their agility than by their weight,” the gardens of Oji under Inari of the rice-fields and his sacred fox, and the seven gods of happiness.

The nine chapters after Humbert are credited unevenly: two to “the author of ‘The Mikado’s Empire,’” who is said to have lived in Japan from 1870 to 1874, two to Japanese Fairy World, once as Griffis’s, one to Sir Edwin Arnold, and four to no one at all — though the title page names William Elliot Griffis as reviser and the closing chapter recommends his books. The first describes New Year’s Eve in Tokio in 1872, the year the Gregorian calendar was adopted and forty-six days struck out; booths along the O-dori sell straw ropes, boiled lobsters and oranges, and skewered beef goes at a cent and a half. A chapter on art, artists and artisans, condensed from Scribner’s Magazine, explains why so little is on show in Japanese houses — the dread of fire, the fireproof dozo — then follows clay through beating and firing, bronze through lost-wax casting, and craft skill through a Fukui carpenter proud of twenty-seven generations of wood-workers. The mythology chapter sets Izanagi’s diamond-pointed javelin beside temple statistics for 1888 and the Mikado’s oath on issuing what it calls the Constitution of 1890. The literary chapter observes that most Japanese classics “are the work of women,” instancing the Genji Monogatari, which it dates to 1004 and gives to a court lady. A folk-tale hands Empress Jingu the Ebb-Tide jewel, which strands the Corean galleys, and the Flood-Tide jewel, which drowns the army charging over the sand.

A travel chapter with no credit line names the author of “The Mikado’s Empire” anyway and follows him from Fukui to a paper-maker’s village in Echizen, past a counterfeiter’s head nailed to a pole. An outline of history then carries the Restoration down to the first Diet, which met in Tokio in November, 1890, for a session of ninety-nine days, and the last two chapters turn to the new capital and the new nation. Arnold’s Japonica supplies a walk through Tokio — the jinrikisha, “not quite a quarter of a century old,” the funeral box borne shoulder-high, the blind shampooer piping on his reed-flute, and the Shiba tombs of six Tokugawa Shoguns, where the brass sea-waves on successive screens grow calmer court by court until “the waves are moulded as falling asleep; doves brood, in silver and gold; there is peace!” A closing survey of resources counts population, post-offices, telegraph miles, lighthouses and schools, prints the budget for 1892–93 laid before the Diet in November, 1891, remarks that more than a fourth of revenue goes to war purposes, and reports the dissolution of the House of Representatives that December. Three sentences end the volume: the year 1892, “exactly four hundred years after Columbus set sail from Palos to discover not America, but Zipangu”; Mutsuhito’s oath to maintain the government according to the constitution, “thirty-five years after the American treaty”; and the trust that regeneration “will be accomplished, like the operation of leaven in meal, without shivering the vessel.” No index or appendix follows.

Set beside the printing of 1872, which carried no reviser, the revision is thorough. Twenty of that edition’s twenty-nine chapters survive here, some renamed as the spelling changed, from Fusi-yama to Fuji-yama and from Scenes around Yedo to Scenes around Tokio; nine titles disappear, among them “The Court and its Revenues,” “The Bridges of Yedo. — The Police,” “The Hondjo” and “Sojourn in the Harbor”; eight are new, from the Harris journals and the art chapter to the Echizen jaunt, the outline of history and the survey of resources; and the text is reset from 280 pages to 293. The plates changed with it. Here a frontispiece, “The Musmée,” and twenty-two wood engravings on inserted leaves are listed by title, from “Hidéyoshi in Early Life” to “A Japanese School,” the last of them spread across two pages, and a dozen smaller cuts are set into the text of the art chapter; the 1872 list ran to thirty-eight in all, frontispiece included, and that volume carried besides an engraved pictorial title and a map of Japan and the Manchurian coast, printed across two pages, that its own list does not name.

Credited on its title page to Albert Tracy and published in London in 1892, Rambles Through Japan Without a Guide is the diary of a three months’ journey through Japan, undertaken as an experiment. Its preface, dated from Oxford, puts the premise as a question: what would happen to a traveler “alone in the very heart of a ‘heathen country’ like Japan, without knowing a dozen words of the native language?” No other traveler, the writer claims, has tried “plunging into the interior” with no more Japanese “than may be picked up during a fortnight at the capital, and journeying from one end of the empire to the other, with neither interpreter nor guide.” The book keeps the shape of the notebook it came from. Seventeen of its twenty chapters carry dated entries — “S.s. City of Pekin, July 10”; “Tokio, July 19”; “Mio-gi-San, August 11” — written, the preface says, “by many instalments during each day” at wayside tea-houses, on temple steps and at the foot of shrines, and offered as “a series of mental photographs of things as they were seen” rather than “the more carefully toned picture” that unaided memory would have painted later. The voice is first person singular throughout the diary, frequently in a journal’s clipped syntax: “Went out for a walk”; “Found finally a fair second-rate inn”; “In Asia at last!” The writer concedes “unavoidable egotism in expression” and occasional repetition.

The narrative opens at sea aboard the City of Pekin out of San Francisco and lands at Yokohama on July 11. Early days go to buying books and photographs by pantomime with the single word “Ikura?”, to the fall of the Bastile kept as a holiday in the port, and to the Chinese money-changers, whose self-importance the writer finds more marked than that of the laundrymen of San Francisco. A long passage records how foreign merchants take Japanese “wives” and “divorce” them on retiring, providing for the women and the mixed-race children of the treaty ports before sailing away, or else leaving them nothing — a desertion he condemns, though he declines to condemn the merchant who keeps his family. In Tokio, likened to modern Rome and called “a city of magnificent distances,” he travels by jinrikisha, visits the graves of what the book calls the forty-nine ronins at Sen-gaku-ji, and is served a fish’s head at a native restaurant, one eye to each guest. Two trial journeys follow. The first, to Sakura behind a jinrikisha-man named Matoi who knows no English, yields his first night in a country inn and the monument to Sogoro, the peasant crucified in 1644 for pushing a petition into the Shogun’s hands. The second, to Nikko with a hired servant, Waku, brings the great avenue of trees, the tomb of Iye-yasu — “the Cromwell of Japan” — and Waku caught pilfering pilgrims’ coins from the laps of the stone Amida.

Chapter VII settles the plan: the Naka-sen-do, the mountain highway of 335 miles from Tokyoo Kioto, to be done “entirely alone without courier or guide of any sort,” because a servant “stood between me and the people I wished to study.” A midnight stage-coach carries him to Honjo; from there it is jinrikisha, pack-horse and walking for three weeks, and the six chapters that follow are more than a third of the book. They record silk villages where cocoons are unwound in the cottages, a government mine worked by convicts, the ascent of the Usui pass, which he sets above the two Swiss passes he has crossed, ponies shod in straw, leeches in his stocking, and an opera-glass passed round whole villages. White-robed pilgrims are constant company — quite two-thirds of the travelers met in that region, he reckons — chanting in the next room at Karuizawa, and “a nuisance” when their early start ends his sleep. Innkeeper after innkeeper refuses him until he learns to walk in and give no opening for refusal. Children flee at his approach; fellow travelers mimic his accent behind his back. He crosses the Wada, Torii and Magome passes, is handed over midway to an old woman leading a pack-horse, passes the “head-pile” at Seki-ga-hara, recovers a forgotten guide-book from an honest lapidary at Akasaka, and finishes by steamboat up Lake Biwa to Otsu. Repeatedly he argues against bringing “the blessings of Manchester civilization” to a country that still works at home.

Kioto fills two chapters. The writer compares its grid of streets to Philadelphia’s, notes that its original name was “The City of Peace,” and works through the temples: Nan-zen-ji, the thousand images of Kwannon at San-jiu-san-gen Do, a bell of over sixty-three tons he wishes some millionaire would buy or borrow, the mikado’s plain thatched palace, a Buddhist congregation pressing forward to glimpse a high priest, and the manuscripts carried out in wooden boxes at Chi-on-in, one of them dated fifteen hundred years back. At Kiyomidzu-dera he describes at length the pilgrims praying under the sacred cascade, among them young women naked but for a cloth about the loins, whom he calls living statues and imagines as a picture for the Salon — one of several passages dwelling on the undress of Japanese women at the loom and at the bath. From Kioto he goes by Uji to Nara, with its wooden pagoda of A.D. 730, its bronze Dai-Butsu, its bell cast in A.D. 732, and its temple hung with votive pictures thanking Kwannon for rescues; then up to the monasteries of Ko-ya-san and the tomb where Ko-bo Dai-shi is held to be sleeping rather than dead. At Ozaka he inspects the castle’s colossal masonry, sits out a September typhoon in an inn roped down against the wind, and calls on two American missionaries, going with one of them to visit Japanese converts.

The last three chapters leave the diary behind. He quits Ozaka at midnight in a native steamboat; the American mission at Okayama takes him in for three days, and he calls on the governor, who praises Christian converts while keeping the faith of his ancestors. Re-embarking, he sees the Inland Sea for the first time, a perfect archipelago. At Hiroshima the teachers and officials give him a farewell dinner of impromptu poems. A jinrikisha journey of over a hundred miles brings him to Shimonoseki, where he retells the bombardment as a wrong: the local government had closed the channel, “as they undoubtedly had a perfect right to do,” and an American steamer that anchored there in 1863 was warned off, refused to go, and was attacked; the bombardment by four great Christian nations, and the three-million-dollar demand, came later — an “act of piracy”; the United States alone has returned its share. He sails to Nagasaki and leaves for Hongkong on October 14, his last sight of Japan little girls coaling the steamer basket by basket. A final chapter turns to statistics and argument — missionaries against traders, the treaties, and an electoral roll fallen “nearly seventeen per cent” between 1880 and 1888 while the number on public relief more than doubled — with Lord Elgin, who also supplies the book’s epigraph, and General Grant quoted at length. A closing “Note” advises how little a traveler need carry; a frontispiece and fourteen illustrations, several full-page, accompany the text.

The Great Earthquake in Japan, October 28th, 1891 is a compilation issued from the office of the Hyogo News in Kobe, assembling the paper’s own earthquake coverage rather than presenting a single author’s travel narrative. H. Tennant, who signs both prefaces, describes the First Edition (Kobe, 12th November, 1891) as “simply a record of what I experienced in Kobe, and a description of the scenes witnessed in travelling over the districts” — no claim to scientific authority. The Second Edition preface (10th February, 1892) explains that the book was expanded and illustrated in response to demand, and it explicitly credits its several contributors: “Mr. Sim and the Rev. W. Weston” for their “graphic accounts,” “Mr. Warren, of Osaka” for two photographs of the Naniwa Mill, and “M. Bigot” for a set of etchings. The book’s table of contents accordingly separates an Introduction (a short history of past Japanese earthquakes back to a legendary 286 B.C. event), a “Kobe and Osaka” section, the newspaper’s own “Special Correspondent’s Report,” “Prof. Sekiya’s Letters,” Weston’s “Visit to the Neodani Valley,” an account of the Kobe relief fund and committee, “The Death Roll,” “Area of Disturbance,” and an “Addendum” — a structure of distinct, differently voiced contributions rather than a continuous personal account.

The opening section reprints the Hyogo News’s own bulletins on the shock as felt in Kobe on the morning of 28th October — chimneys down at the Hyogo Hotel and Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, cracked walls, curio stock smashed — before turning to Osaka, where the Naniwa (also called Denbo) Cotton Mill’s roof and third-story wall collapsed onto workers; the mill foreman Tsuzuki and the English engineer Eastham are quoted describing the collapse directly, and the text puts the dead at about thirty. Damage to the foreign community is detailed house by house, including the household of Archdeacon Warren, where the visiting Bishop of Exeter and Bishop Bickersteth had a narrow escape, and a Kyoto correspondent signing himself “Tremor” describes lesser shocks felt during a chapel service at the Doshisha. The Special Correspondent’s Report then follows the paper’s own reporter overland from Otsu through Tarui to Ogaki — where an official at the hospital gave a death toll of “over a thousand,” with the wounded put at 637 in one passage and 687 in another — on to Gifu (about 3,000 houses lost to quake and fire, 250 dead by the correspondent’s count), the wrecked Nagaragawa railway bridge, Kano-machi, Kasamatsu (over 400 dead of a population of about 4,000), the villages around Ichinomiya where sand and hot water were reported erupting from the ground, and finally Nagoya (171 killed, a breach torn in the castle wall) and the Atsuta district, where the correspondent describes the Owari Cotton Mill’s collapse, with 35 of its 450 workmen killed.

Two further sections shift register entirely. “Prof. Sekiya’s Letters” reproduces communications from S. Sekiya, described as “Rigaku Hakushi, late professor of the Imperial University” and “a high authority on Seismology,” who — too ill himself to travel to the affected districts — wrote to reassure the public that a single severe principal shock is typically followed only by diminishing aftershocks, urged carpenters and masons to study earthquake-resistant construction, and attributed the disaster to “the breaking of the strata in Mino and Owari, which have a thinner crust than the neighbouring provinces.” The Rev. W. Weston’s “Visit to the Neodani Valley” is a first-person account of traveling from Ogaki to stay with the Rev. A. F. Chappell at Gifu and then up the valley of the Neogawa, describing the ruined villages of Gimbara and Hinata-mura, a house at Midori sunk bodily some twenty feet into the ground, a stretch of road subsided about twenty feet, and a climb up Kinkasan (part of the Inaba-yama hills) where the site of an old castle had dropped sixteen to twenty feet, leaving Chappell — who had climbed the peak several times before and knew its appearance well — puzzled at what he found.

The book devotes substantial space to relief. The Hyogo News opened an Earthquake Fund, joined by subscription lists at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and the New Oriental Bank Corporation, and a public meeting at the Kobe Municipal Hall on 7th November appointed a committee (J. J. Enslie, chairman; H. L. Baggallay, honorary secretary) that sent Mr. A. C. Sim into the devastated districts; his dated letters from Ogaki, reprinted at length, record hospital visits, the purchase and distribution of blankets and carpenters’ tools, and cash payments to named villages such as Sunomata, Imao, Takegahana, and Kasamatsu. The book states the Kobe Relief Fund totalled $5,124.51, with the Relief Fund Committee separately reporting $5,011.72 received and disbursed in cash, blankets, tools, and a remittance to the Rev. A. Chappell at Gifu, with a small balance apportioned to the Okayama Orphanage and the Ogaki hospital. “The Death Roll” reprints official returns for several prefectures, including Aichi, Gifu, Fukui, and Shiga, giving totals of 9,960 killed and 19,994 wounded, with 128,750 buildings destroyed and 52,342 partially destroyed; “Area of Disturbance,” citing the Central Meteorological Observatory, divides the shaken region into zones by square ri of severity, from 720 square ri of most severe shock in Mino, Owari, and Echizen out to 8,730 square ri of slight vibration reaching into Kyushu.

A printed “List of Illustrations” at the front names twelve captioned plates by location and page number — the Naniwa Cotton Mill’s exterior and interior, Takeshima-cho in Ogaki, the Kisogawa embankment, the Nagaragawa bridge, Gifu, Biwajima, the Nagoya post office, and the Owari and Mino villages of Odai-mura, Funamachi, Yanase-mura, and Kitagata-mura — matching full-page views inserted at those points in the text. Beyond this list, the volume also carries at least one unlisted full-page plate of a different kind: an etched view of a wrecked village, its thatched roofs collapsed and figures picking through the debris, signed in the plate itself “G. Bigot” together with a katakana signature reading “ビゴー.” This is consistent with the Second Edition preface’s separate credit to “M. Bigot” for the book’s etchings, distinct from Warren’s photographs and from the photographic subjects named in the printed list. The book closes with an “Addendum” reporting shocks continuing after publication — one near Fujiyama in early December, another at Yokohama, and a shock at Nagoya on 2nd January that threw the castle turret out of the perpendicular — along with a note on charcoal-burners found isolated and starving near the Neodani valley, a summary of rebuilding and railway-repair progress, and an acknowledgment of a further $40 donation “from Friends in England” toward the relief fund.

Henry Norman’s The Real Japan gathers into thirteen chapters a set of topical essays that grew out of newspaper work: “a number of these essays have appeared at different times in newspaper form in England (in the Pall Mall Gazette and several other journals), the United States, and France,” as the preface puts it, though “several are new, and all have been revised and extended.” Norman writes throughout in the first person as an investigator rather than a tourist, basing the book, in his own words, “upon months of special investigation at the capital, supplemented by visits for the same purpose to Siberia, Korea, and Peking.” The preface, dated “Aden, October 19, 1891,” thanks Count Ito, Count Inouye, and Viscount Aoki for the access to government departments that made this research possible, records that “a Japanese gentleman from the Civil Service was placed at my disposal as translator and interpreter,” and acknowledges his obligations to Captain F. Brinkley, “the editor and proprietor of the Japan Mail.” Rather than a travel narrative, the book proceeds through named subjects — domestic life, the press, the courts and prisons, education, the army and navy, the decorative arts, women, popular amusements, a provincial excursion, the licensed quarter, treaty diplomacy, and a closing essay on Japan’s prospects — illustrated, as the title page states, “from photographs by the author,” including a numbered series of “instantaneous” photographs of a geisha dancing and a frontispiece Norman describes taking himself: “one day I took a picture of a very pretty girl with her arm round a large carved wooden Daruma... The picture forms the frontispiece of this volume.”

The opening chapters work outward from Norman’s own rented household in the Kojimachiku district of Tokyo. “At Home in Japan” describes the earthquake-resistant construction of the Japanese house, the etiquette of a dinner with sake-cup exchanges and geisha musicians, and the ritual of the hot bath, into which Norman as guest is invited first while “the entire household stands round and suppresses its amusement.” “Japanese Journalism” walks through the vernacular press of Tokyo — the composing-room where boys chant character names as they hunt for type, and sketches of individual papers and editors, from Fukuzawa of the Jiji Shimpo to Brinkley of the Japan Mail, whom Norman calls “truly a remarkable man.” “Japanese Justice” follows an arrest from the street through the French-modeled courts and the Bureau of Newspaper Censorship at the Department of Police to the prisons of Ishikawa and Ichigaya, where convicts are trained in cloisonné enamel work, wood-carving, and printing, and where Norman is shown the cell of Hanai Ume, “the once famous geisha of Tokyo,” imprisoned for stabbing her lover. “Japanese Education” traces the system from kindergarten through the Imperial University, with tables of enrollment and expenditure, cites the Minister of Education Count Mori’s summary of the aim of Japanese schooling as instilling “obedience, sympathy, and dignity,” and ends on a visit to a class of Japanese schoolgirls taught by an American teacher, where little Miss Tomita recites “’I am hungry, very hungry,’ said the spider to the fly” — a moment Norman calls “the one thing which implies and promises most for the civilization and the future of Japan.”

“Japan as an Eastern Power” and the two chapters on “Arts and Crafts in Japan” turn to institutions and manufactures. Norman inspects the arsenal at Koishikawa and the dockyard at Yokosuka, reproduces detailed tables of conscription, regimental organization, and naval tonnage supplied by Count Oyama and Count Saigo, and concludes after watching maneuvers that “the Japanese Army, in fact, is a European force.” The arts chapters follow him into the workshops of individual Tokyo craftsmen — an ivory carver who prices four months of his own labor at fifty dollars a month, a lacquer-maker, a cloisonné enameler — and then, on material he credits directly to Brinkley, into a technical discussion of Arita and Owari porcelain, the scarcity of genuine old Satsuma faience, and a pointed correction of the collector-author Mr. Audsley, whose The Ornamental Arts of Japan Norman accuses of dating recent export enamels to nonexistent medieval schools. “Japanese Women” surveys courtship, marriage as “a civil contract, without religious or official ceremony,” the not-uncommon practice of concubinage in well-to-do households generally — though Norman’s cited authority credits officials, nobles, and leading merchants with having largely abandoned it — and the contemporary debate over abandoning kimono for Western dress, reproducing a comparative table on hygiene, art, and expense drawn up by Dr. Seiken Takenaka of the Tokyo Military Hospital.

“Japanese Jinks” describes the tea-house economy of the geisha — their apprenticeship from age fourteen or fifteen, their eventual purchase out of the profession by a devoted patron — and gives, “from another pen,” an account of an evening’s entertainment at the country estate of Mr. Iwasaki near Tokyo. “In Rural Japan: A Rush to a Volcano” is Norman’s first-person account of a journey he made in July 1888, by rail from Ueno and then by jinrikisha through Fukushima prefecture, to the eruption of Bandai-san; he climbs to the rim of the crater, examines the mud-flow that buried the hot-spring hamlet of Shimo-no-yu and the village of Nagasaka, and records survivors’ testimony of the “darkness darker than midnight” that fell in the seconds after the explosion. “The Yoshiwara: An Unwritten Chapter of Japanese Life” is his account of the licensed quarter, where, he writes, “the police authorities tell me that I am the first to whom opportunities for thorough investigation have been afforded”; he describes the contract by which a girl’s parents receive an advance against her future earnings, sits in on the police enrollment of new recruits, examines a keeper’s private ledger and seals, and watches the procession, held three times a year when the quarter’s street gardens are replanted, in which courtesans walk on raised geta in a gait called hachimonji-ni-aruku.

The closing chapters turn from manners to diplomacy. “Japan for the Japanese?” traces the history of the unequal treaties from Commodore Perry’s 1854 treaty and Townsend Harris’s and Lord Elgin’s 1858 conventions through the failed revision negotiations of Count Inouye and Count Okuma — the latter maimed by a bomb thrown by a nationalist assassin at the gate of the Foreign Office — and argues that Japan should simply “denounce” the existing treaties rather than keep negotiating with sixteen Treaty Powers including “Belgium or Denmark or Hawaii or Peru.” “The Future of Japan” steps back to ask whether Westernization is making Japan “happier,” setting what Norman calls the country’s persisting “oriental” and “barbaric” side — a matsuri procession he witnessed in Yokohama, a temple rope woven of donated human hair, the Emperor’s invocation of divine ancestors in his 1889 Constitution speech — against the first general election of 1890 and a rising tide of anti-foreign feeling. The book closes without resolving the question it poses, ending on William Adams’s description of the Japanese, from his arrival in 1600, as “good of nature, courteous out of measure, and valiant in war,” a quoted translation of the Lotus-Eaters passage, and Norman’s own admission that he has “been too happy in what remains of old Japan, and too unhappy in what is growing out of ‘civilization,’ to be prompt with my ‘Yes.’”

A record of a solo journey around the world, made between October 1888 and September 1891 by J. J. Aubertin, translator of Camoens’ Lusiads and author of three earlier travel books, who left London “just six weeks short of striking seventy” and, as usual, “starting quite alone.” Its forty chapters and 448 pages run from the outward P. & O. passage to Calcutta through India, Burma, Kashmir and Ceylon, then Java, Siam, China, Japan, Formosa, Korea and Cambodia, and finally out of Asia to Australia, New Zealand, Honolulu, Alaska and across the United States. Chapter I opens by addressing the four friends who came to Liverpool Street station to see him off — “Dear Dr. and Mrs. Alfred Barton, John Beaton, and Charles Seymour Grenfell, These pages belong to you” — and declares: “Therefore I shall address this volume to you in the form of one long letter to the end. Thus I shall be sure of, at all events, four readers.” The letter form is not sustained, though it never quite lapses. Chapters carry bare Roman numerals, and what follows is a dated, retrospective first-person narrative written afterward at his own table in England, the dedicatees resurfacing in scattered direct addresses: “Do either of you remember old King’s Cross, long and long since removed?” He disclaims “daring and original adventure” and promises instead “my own individual doings, and my own impressions and experiences of things and places.”

The outward voyage sets the tone: Naples in wet autumn weather, hot games of pyramids at Port Said, the Suez Canal by night under electric lights in which all figures “appeared to belong to another world,” and a candid refusal to go ashore at Aden. At Calcutta he takes a room at the Great Eastern Hotel, is received privately by the departing Viceroy Lord Dufferin, and remarks on “two Calcuttas,” European and native. On Dufferin’s recommendation he goes to Burma — Rangoon and the Shoay Dagon, which he calls “the most astonishing in the world,” then 410 miles up the Irrawaddy, whose banks he finds “flat and quite monotonous,” to Mandalay, where the walled city has been emptied of its fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants and Thebaw’s palace turned into government offices. A 1,689-mile Thomas Cook coupon ticket then carries him from Calcutta to Bombay by way of Benares, the Mutiny ground at Lucknow and Cawnpore, Allahabad, the Marble Rocks at Jubbulpore and the monolithic temple of Kylas at Ellora. Elephanta and the Towers of Silence follow, then the Jain temples of Palitana and Girnar and the Delwara temples at Mount Abu — “Anything more beautiful — anything so beautiful, I could say — I have never seen.” At Agra he is deliberately contrarian, arguing that the Taj owes its extreme beauty to “the very delicate material with which it is outwardly adorned, and to the very delicate manner in which that material has been put together”; then Delhi, the Golden Temple at Amritsar during Holi, and, on a permit, the Khyber Pass as far as Ali Musjid.

Five chapters and some sixty pages go to Kashmir, and they are largely a demolition. The Vale is “a very wide, flat valley, with no feature that very particularly struck me”; the banks of the Jhelum are “as flat and barren as those of a common canal”; Srinagar is “one of the most tumble-down places I ever saw”; the Pir Panjal Pass is “ugly, confined, and coarse”; and Moore, whose Lalla Rookh he holds responsible for the legend, never saw the place — “But Moore had no such solid memory of Kashmir to recall.” He travels in two boats, one to live in and one for stores, cooking and crew, dines with Maharajah Pertab Sing among hideously masked Thibet dancers, and tests Ince’s guide-book against what he actually sees, finding “fulsome and clumsy exaggerations” that “carry their own refutation.” What he exempts from the verdict: the march up the Sind Valley to Sonamerg, Nunga Perbat seen at mid-afternoon off the common path, the Surprise View going down the Pir Panjal into India, and the garden quiet of Chashma Shahi. Simla he would have left within a day but for his letters of introduction; Narkanda and Mussuri pass quickly; and he returns to Darjeeling to climb to Sundukpho and watch sunrise pick out Everest, which he prefers to call Gaurisankar. Madras, Ootacamund and Madura follow, then four weeks and three days in Ceylon — Kandy’s temple of the Tooth, Dambulla, Anuradapura, a tea factory at Nawara Eliya, and a coach shared with the Rev. Mr. Garrett that becomes a study of “the missionary mind.” He circumnavigates the island in order to be landed at Paumben for the 700-foot corridors of Ramisseram.

From Ceylon he sails by Singapore to Java, “curiously called ‘The Netherland Indies’ by the Dutch,” where the Resident at Batavia rebukes him for keeping his hat on, and where he sets down a connoisseur’s description of the Mangostine for readers who have never tasted one. Carriages take him over the mountains by Magelang to Boro Buddor and a small hotel built solely for travelers to the spot; he sees the monument at sunset and sunrise and counts its seventy-two perforated dagobas himself. Siam follows: up the Me Nam to Bangkok, Wat Po and its reclining Buddha, a cremation ground that prompts several pages arguing the English case for cremation, and a launch up to Ayutia. Against Fergusson — whose architectural volumes are the standing authority of the whole book — he defends Siamese building: “If all would not suit in London — and certainly it would not — still it is equally certain that St. Paul’s would not suit at Bangkok.” Then Hongkong and a chair up to Victoria Peak, Canton as “a glorious kaleidoscope” of gilt sign-boards and quarter-million boat population, and Macao, visited for Camoens, where he finds no grotto and the inscriptions “scarcely legible”: “I could conjure up no associations with the poet.” The northward run ends at Shanghai, the Astor House, wheelbarrows and a joke about being made to pay in taels.

Japan fills something under forty of the book’s 448 pages: chapter XXVI, “Shanghai — Japan,” pp. 262–301, the longest chapter in the volume, of which all but the opening two or three pages are Japan, and about two pages on Nagasaki in the chapter that carries him on to Korea. Of April to June 1890 he writes, “Altogether, I spent exactly two calendar months in Japan, from the 5th of April till the 6th of June, though I came back for a few more days, later on, to Nagasaki.” Warned as long ago as 1873 that the country was already spoiled, he replies that he was “perfectly satisfied with what I saw, notwithstanding all the spoiling.” From Kobe, “or Kiogo,” he goes to Osaka for cherry blossom — “a childish show at last, for they give no fruit at all” — obtains the inland passports required of travelers, loathes the theater at Kioto, and runs the Tanba River rapids down to Arashi-yama.

Then come a Nagoya hotel “Europeanized to some small degree,” thirteen wet hours by train to Yokohama, the Exhibition at Tokio, Nikko in the wet, where the cedar avenue along the old road has now been lost to the railway, and the Daibutsu at Kamakura, where he dissents from Chamberlain’s Things Japanese and ranks the face below the colossi of Rameses II at Aboo Simbel. With his guide Sosuke Yamamoto he makes the two river excursions that had become his leading objects, descending the Fujikawa and then the Tenriugawa — no other river scenery, he writes, approaches “these two most enchanting streams” — and crosses the Otoma Toge for a “surprise view” of Fujiyama that he calls “one of the leading glories of my travels.” Where Japan “most suffers by her European spoiling” is in the change of costume; his remedy, “go out into the country… and you can always find Japan enough.” He was out of season for Fuji and would not have climbed it in any case, and declines to generalize about the people on so few weeks’ acquaintance. He leaves by the Inland Sea and Nagasaki, and on his later return to Nagasaki concludes that if he ever went again he “should confine myself to the Inland Sea as far as Kobe and to Nagasaki,” with “Kioto, and the river there” added.

The remaining chapters run Shanghai to Manila and Formosa; then Nagasaki to Chemulpo and Séoul, which he calls “one of the most pleasing chapters, and certainly the most novel, in all my varied wanderings”; Tientsin and Peking, where he is Sir Robert Hart’s house-guest and inspects the old Observatory’s bronze instruments; a five-day, 125-mile ride to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall; a thousand miles up the Yang-tse to Ichang, where the celebrated gorges disappoint — “Gorges they are not, for the river… is always wide”; and Cambodia, where the south gate of Nakhon Thom is “the most majestic piece of overgrown ruin that I ever beheld.” Chapter XXXIV, “Leaving Asia,” drops the narrative for five pages against Christian missions: “There are millions who feel that Europe has no more right to intrude her religion upon Asia than Asia to intrude hers upon Europe… The assumption is tremendous.” Australia, the New Zealand Sounds and Mount Cook, Honolulu, San Francisco, an Alaskan steamer excursion to the Muir Glacier, the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, and a run east by the Shoshone Falls, Salt Lake City, Chicago and Niagara bring him home. The volume carries a frontispiece portrait of the author from a photograph by Elliott & Fry, seven plates — five of Indian subjects, one of George Sound in New Zealand, one of the Mount Hamilton observatory, none of Japan — and a folding map at the end; there is no index. The closing pages return him to his own table on 16 September 1891 and joke that he fears not criticism but “the Publisher’s bill”; the last page is a signed verse dedication.

Japonica gathers into one volume three long essays that Edwin Arnold — described on the title page as Author of The Light of Asia — wrote during a year’s residence in Japan, based at a rented house in Tokio, with illustrations by Robert Blum. The preface, signed from Kyoto at Christmas 1890, is itself a farewell letter, written “as I am quitting Japan” after a request from “the conductors of ‘Scribner’s Magazine’” to reprint the articles in book form; Arnold uses it to thank Blum for his “artistic co-operation” and to thank the “innumerable Japanese friends” who made his stay “one of unbroken grace, profit, and pleasure.” The book that follows is organized not as an itinerary but as three topical essays — “Japan—The Country,” “Japanese People,” and “Japanese Ways and Thoughts” — each moving freely between description, quoted authorities, anecdote, and Arnold’s own opinions.

The first essay opens with Arnold’s idea of “two Japans,” the mythical nation dated from the accession of the Emperor Jimmu Tenno and the new nation not yet twenty-three years old under Meiji, then works through the derivation of “Nihon” from the Chinese “Jip-pen” and its link to Marco Polo’s “Zipangu,” climate (Tokio’s 58.33 inches of yearly rainfall against 24.76 at Greenwich), and the coexistence of Shinto and Buddhist practice at village shrines. A long digression on the art of flower arrangement — much of it credited to “Mr. Conder,” with the “ten virtues” of the discipline, the Enshin school founded by Kobori Totomi no Kami, and the anecdote of the patron Yoshimasa and the basket-maker Hakoji — leads into a sequence of remembered landscapes: the cryptomeria avenue on the road to Nikko, the bronze Daibutsu at Kamakura, hill-ranges near Nagoya covered with lilac-blossoms and wild azaleas, the Benten legend at Enoshima, and Arnold’s own rented house and garden at Azabu in Tokio.

“Japanese People” changes register into an imagined walk, opening with an invitation to “take a little honorable walk” in Tokio and addressing an “unknown but respected reader” as a companion for the outing, which sets out from the Azabu house past the servants Mano and O Tori San. The route passes sake shops, lamp shops, and a rice-pounding shop, a public bath-house, a neighborhood graveyard where the “Nagare Kanjo,” or “Debt of the Running Water,” is described, and a jinrikisha stand, with a history of that vehicle and of the kurumaya who pull it; it also takes in the tombs and temples of six Tokugawa Shoguns at Shiba, a digression on the English pilot Will Adams and his estate at Hemi, and ends at the restaurant of the “Golden Koi” on Tokio Bay, where the waiting musmees, the ritual of pipe and sake, a chopstick wager (Arnold picks up twenty-two grains of rice to a Japanese lady’s forty-nine), and course after course of the dinner, down to the recommended unagi-meshi, are described in detail.

The closing essay assembles judgments on Japanese character across three centuries — St. Francis Xavier’s “This nation is the delight of my soul!”, Will Adams’s account of a people “gouerned in great ciuilitie,” Kaempfer’s catalogue of national traits, and modern critics including Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème — before Arnold gives his own verdict that self-respect is the central Japanese trait. He gives extended attention to the position of women, citing the marriage formalities of the “Sho-rei-Hikke,” 1888 statistics showing one marriage in three ending in divorce, the custom of blackening married women’s teeth, and the stories of Oto Tachibani Hime and of Gompachi and Komurasaki, “the Romeo and Juliet of Tokio.” Later sections cover the 1877 edict that disarmed the Samurai and the etiquette of seppuku, laid out step by step from the white mats to the kaishaku’s stroke; No dance performances of “Fujimusmee” and the Matsukaze legend watched at the Tokio governor’s grounds; the several layers of a Japanese personal name; a long catalogue of dream-omens; and the culture of the engraved personal seal, illustrated by a reproduction of the palm-print seal of “the Emperor Go-Shira-Kawa” (reigned A.D. 1156–58) and by Arnold’s own seal, inscribed with the proverb “I have wandered all over the world without meeting one devil!” The volume’s roughly fifty line-drawing illustrations by Robert Blum, listed by page at the front from the frontispiece “The Musmee” to the closing tailpiece “Sir Edwin Arnold’s Seal,” carry the book to its final line, addressed to Japanese women as much as to the country itself: “Mata, dozo, irrashai!” — “Be pleased to come again!”

Japan As We Saw It is a traveler’s handbook cast as a journal narrative, copyrighted by its author in 1892 and dedicated “to my friend Ernest Francisco Fenollosa,” through whom, the dedication says, “the homes and the hearts of the Japanese were opened to us.” The preface states the purpose flatly — “practical rather than literary” — and addresses “persons of moderate means and fond of travel” who want Japan but are deterred by not knowing what the journey costs. Gardiner and his wife, whom the book calls Mrs. G., devoted “exactly four months” to the trip; he reports the total, everything but articles purchased, as $1,875.05 in gold. Nine pages in ten speak as “we” — “we decided upon that method of getting there” — the party being the couple and, once they land, a hired Japanese attendant named Shimid; an occasional “I” and a steady undercurrent of impersonal advice to “the traveller” run alongside, and the plural voice thins exactly where the guidebook takes over. Practical counsel fills the preface: the best months to come, warm clothing, an inflatable rubber pillow for jinrikisha rides, bottled Hirano water, letters of introduction, a dress suit. For the historical detail he omits, Gardiner recommends Murray’s Handbook of Japan, compiled by Basil Hall Chamberlain. Eighteen chapters then follow his route, broken twice by topical essays and threaded with trips he urges on the reader without having made them himself: “Our example, however, should not be followed.”

The opening chapter weighs the two ways west and rejects the Brindisi–Suez–Hong Kong passage as arriving “by the back door,” choosing instead the Canadian Pacific to Vancouver and the steamship Empress of India across to “Japan’s front gate — Yokohama.” Landfall brings sampans, jinrikishas, a Chinese shroff checking the exchange on a soraban, and pages on treaty ports, passports, railway fares, and the hiring of Shimid at fifty yen a month. Short excursions follow: Enoshima’s hill, tea-house, and village school, the Kamakura Dai-Butsu, Will Adams’s grave above Yokosuka, the mountain road up to Miyanoshita and a chair ride to Hakone Lake, and the geyser at Atami in Idzu. A topical chapter on “Politeness, Morality, and Honesty” interrupts the itinerary. Two weeks, he says, is “but a short time” for Tokio — the Ginza, Asakusa’s tower and temple, Uyeno Park, the Koishikawa arsenal, a private look at the Mikado’s tiny lacquered railway coach. A separate chapter, “Social Courtesies,” recounts a three-hour Japanese luncheon reached through Fenollosa’s letter to a gentleman named only as Mr. K., and then the Imperial Printing Bureau, which Gardiner entered by presenting himself as a printer rather than spend days on a formal permit, and where boys ran from box to box chanting each line aloud among the roughly six thousand characters of a font. Nikko, chosen as the representative temple city, follows: “‘Nikko the beautiful’ it assuredly is.”

Turning southwest, the party watches Fuji from Gotemba, finds Nagoya’s station and streets wrecked by the earthquake of October 1891, and hires twelve coolies to drag five jinrikishas and a mail cart fourteen miles over a highway “rent open for miles.” Kioto holds them ten days instead of six — silk shops, the Chion-in bell, the Katsuragawa rapids, a steamer tour of Lake Biwa, Mrs. G.’s visit to the Doshisha girls’ school. Then Osaka, the “Venice of Japan”; Nara’s Dai-Butsu and the Kagura dancers at Wakamiya; Kobe, its club and Miss Annie Howe’s kindergarten. The most unbeaten stretch is a jinrikisha and sampan circuit through Awaji and Shikoku to Sumoto, Tokushima, and Kochi, carrying bread, cold fowl, and prepared coffee, with a long set-piece on the interior inn — the yu or hot bath, the futon, the wooden pillow, the flea powder. A steamer through the Inland Sea anchors off Nagasaki at eight in the evening, the face of the range under a myriad of lights; the town yields the Bund, the Nagasaki Club that the British consul opens to them, the seaward view through the Pappenberg narrows, and the tortoise-shell wares he calls Nagasaki’s chief purchasable novelty. A last loop by jinrikisha and small steamboat along the Gulf of Omura takes in Ureshino’s public baths and the Arita potteries, where a crowd of five or six hundred follows them and women touch Mrs. G.’s hair. Heat and cholera reports turn them home by the way they came.

Gardiner argues his opinions openly. He reports Japan’s school statistics, concludes “the percentage of immorality in Japan is no greater than exists in America and Europe, if indeed it equals it,” notes that “during our stay in Japan we failed to see a drunken native,” and answers warnings about native dishonesty by observing that on returning to America the straps were stolen from one of his trunks between the wharf and the hotel. He is equally blunt about roadside indecency, night-soil collection, and the diseased and influenza-ridden children he saw in Nagasaki, and he faults the American consular service against the British — “This is politics and not business.” He glosses pronunciations in parentheses throughout, as in Kobe (Ko-bay). Eighty-three engravings and photographic cuts, many hand-lettered with their captions, sit within the text and are indexed alphabetically in a list of illustrations. An appendix gives Japanese money, distance, cloth and land measures, steamer passenger rates, rules of pronunciation, and an English and Japanese vocabulary taken from Farsari’s pocketbook, followed by a general index. Folded at the back is Gardiner’s own colored map, “Japan (Omitting Yezo), corrected to March 1st 1892,” with plans of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Hiogo and Kobe, and Kyoto.

General View of Commerce & Industry in the Empire of Japan is a statistical and administrative handbook issued in 1893 by the Bureau of Commerce and Industry, Department of Agriculture and Commerce, Japan, and printed in Tokyo by M. Onuki. Its preface, dated December 1892 and signed by the Bureau itself, explains the occasion: with the World’s Columbian Exposition due to open in Chicago the following year, the Empire wished to place its industry and agriculture “before the world,” and this “little volume, however insignificant,” was meant to furnish only the brief outlines its title promises rather than a full account. Five substantial chapters carry that outline: a general survey of the country’s geography, cities, communications, coinage, and industry; a historical account of foreign trade before and after the Ansei treaties; a long catalog of exported and imported commodities sorted into classes, each followed by a directory of the firms that handle it; a chapter on the customs service and the diplomatic and consular establishment; and one devoted specifically to trade with the United States. Interleaved through the first chapter, each bound in beside its own city’s description, are large fold-out charts of the harbors of Yokohama, Kōbe, Nagasaki, Hakodate, and Niigata and keyed city maps of Tokyo and Osaka, each referencing consulates, banks, government offices, companies, temples, and other landmarks by number.

A geographical survey opens the book, working outward from latitude and longitude — the Empire stretching from Haterma Island in the Riukiu group to Araito Island in the Chishima, or Kuriles — to a province-by-province breakdown of its eight circuits and a population table putting the total at 40,453,461 across the four main islands and the Empire’s outlying island groups — the Riukiu, Sado, Awaji, Tsushima, Oki, Iki, and Ogasawara. Mountain and river tables follow (Fujisan tops the list at 12,370 shaku), then harbor-by-harbor descriptions of the open ports: Yokohama, “practically the port of Tokyo,” where a new breakwater begun in January 1890 was expected to be finished by March 1894; Kōbe, junction of the Tōkaidō and Sanyō railways; Nagasaki, trading with Portugal since 1570 and “the oldest of the trading ports”; Hakodate; and Niigata, whose exports were chiefly the roughly 300,000 goku of rice shipped yearly from Echigo province. Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka each get their own descriptive entries — Tokyo’s fifteen wards and 1,155,290 people, its markets, banks, and rice- and stock-exchanges; Kyoto’s Nishijin weaving, Awata ware, and cloisonné; Osaka’s position as commercial hub of western Japan. The chapter works on through railway mileage (1,750 miles completed by government and private lines together), the post and telegraph systems, and the six foreign steamship routes of the Nippon Yūsen Kwaisha alongside the Japan calls of the Occidental and Oriental, Canadian Pacific, Messageries Maritimes, Peninsular and Oriental, and Norddeutscher Lloyd lines, before turning to coinage — the decimal yen, sen, and rin fixed by the 1871 Coinage Regulation and struck at the Imperial Mint in Osaka, with paper currency issued through the Nippon Ginkō — and a table converting dozens of foreign gold and silver coins, from the British sovereign to the Persian toman, into yen. It closes by dividing Japanese manufacturing into “original” industries such as ceramics, lacquer, and silk-reeling and “introduced” ones such as cotton-spinning and match-making, and by tracing commerce from the era of seclusion to the 1890 Commercial Code.

A second chapter narrates the history of that foreign trade in far more compressed form, from the tribute shipping the book traces to Empress Jingo’s subjugation of Corea in antiquity, through the Portuguese arrival at Tanegashima in 1541 and the licensed “Goshuin-bune” of Iyeyasu’s day, to the sealing-off of Nagasaki under the Tokugawa and its reopening after Perry’s 1853 and 1854 visits and the Ansei treaties of 1858. The book’s bulk, however, is its third chapter, a two-hundred-page-plus commodity catalog running from Rice, Barley, Wheat, Flour and Pulse (Class 1) through twenty-two classes of exports — tea, dried marine products, bamboo and wood ware, straw plaits, fans and lanterns, screens, umbrellas, paper, coal, vegetable wax and oils, camphor and matches, raw silk and silk goods, raw cotton, lacquered ware, metals, porcelain and glass ware, and leaf tobacco — followed by twelve classes of imports running from rice and sugar through liquors, acids and chemicals, kerosene and other mineral oils, paper stock, raw cotton and wool, iron and hardware, scientific and musical instruments, and live animals. Each class opens with a description of the commodity and its producing districts, a table of quantity and value by destination or origin country, and then a directory of the named exporting or importing firms with their street addresses — overwhelmingly in Yokohama and Kōbe. Raw silk, occupying “the foremost place in the whole export of the country” at some 30,000,000 yen a year chiefly to the United States, and green tea, worth six or seven million yen chiefly to the United States and Canada, anchor the export side; rice, shipped mainly through Kōbe to Great Britain, and matches, sold chiefly to Hongkong and China, are treated at similar length.

Customs administration occupies the fourth chapter, which traces the tariff from the old Nagasaki “Unjō” duty through the 1866 Tariff Convention — reprinted in full over several pages together with the signatures of Sir Harry Parkes, Léon Roches, A. L. C. Portman, and D. de Graeff van Polsbroek — and sets out the 1890 Imperial Ordinances that organized the customs houses and the diplomatic and consular service, ranking officials from Minister Plenipotentiary down through Secretaries of Legation, Consuls-General, and consular clerks. The fifth and final chapter of this stretch, on Japanese-American trade specifically, likewise reprints in full the 1854 Treaty of Peace and Amity concluded at Kanagawa by Commodore Perry and Hayashi Daigaku-no-Kami and the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce negotiated by Townsend Harris — opium’s importation prohibited, extraterritorial jurisdiction for American offenders set out article by article — before closing with commodity-by-commodity tables of the trade between the two countries running through 1891.

The volume as bound does not stop there: further, shorter chapters follow on chambers of commerce, commercial and industrial unions and associations, exchanges, banks, joint-stock companies and workshops, commercial and industrial schools and newspapers, and mercantile and industrial museums, each again organized as a directory of named institutions and officers — eighteen chambers of commerce alone are listed by city, membership count, and president. The book closes with an alphabetical index running from geographical and commodity entries at the front of the alphabet through to Yokohama Port near its end.

This slim guidebook was prepared for a single occasion: visitors to the Hokkaido section of the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, to whom it was presented by the Hakodate Chamber of Commerce. Its author, the Reverend John Batchelor, explains in a preface signed at Satporo in January 1893 that the Chamber asked him to supply two things only — “a brief geographical outline of Hokkaido” and “a short itinerary for the use of intending visitors” — and that he undertook the task reluctantly, since his “first and chief duties have to do with Missionary work among the Ainus and not with book-making for English readers.” He notes that he drew the material chiefly from notes already in his own manuscript, and thanks officers of the Do-cho for statistics, Dr. Miyabe of the Satporo Agricultural College for help with the flora, and Mr. Kodera of the same college for the zoology.

Section I, “General Remarks on Hokkaido,” moves through numbered subsections on geography, history, the Chishima (Kurile) islands, volcanoes, mountains, arable land, climate, water, flora, zoology, minerals, fish, and commercial importance. It gives the islands’ area and boundaries, recounts the transfer of “Yezo” from Ainu to Japanese control (citing Murray’s Handbook for Japan on the Kaitakushi, or Colonization Commission, and its dissolution), and lists population figures — 144,069 in 1874 against 406,514 (389,749 Japanese and 16,765 Ainu) in 1891. Batchelor writes that he himself came to Yezo in 1877 “on account of ill health and has found the climate most beneficial.” Section II, “The Itinerary,” opens with general remarks on communication and on the Ainus — the latter illustrated with a full-page plate, “Male and Female Ainus of Yezo Island,” and recommending Piratoru in the Province of Hidaka, over closer villages, for the best view of a race Batchelor calls “simple, kind, truthful and child-like” and expects soon to disappear — before laying out a suggested two-week circuit beginning at Hakodate, where the “Head” resembling the Rock of Gibraltar, the Public Gardens, and the Museum’s Ainu relics and Blakiston bird collection are recommended. The route continues by horse or carriage to the lakes of Junsai-numa and the volcano Koma-ga-take, by horse to Mori and steamer to Moruran, by rail through Washibets, Porobets, and Shiraoi to Tomakomai, and by horse to Yubutsu, Sarubutu, and Piratoru itself, where the chief Penri is named as a guide and a Japanese shrine to Yoshitsune is mentioned. It returns by rail through Iwamizawa to Satporo — where the Hohei-kwan hotel, the Agricultural College, and the red-brick Capitol are noted, the last pictured in a second full-page plate, “The Hokkaido Government Building in Sapporo” — and finishes at Otaru before the steamer back to Hakodate. Throughout, Batchelor gives inn names (Kakujo, Maru-san, Yamaha, Hohei-kwan, Yoshida), distances in ri and miles, horse-hire rates, and warnings about bad water at Tomakomai and Sarubutu and about mosquitoes near Chitose. Separate short sections cover sport (trout fishing rivers and seasons, bear-shooting licenses restricted to the treaty limits around Hakodate) and outfit, down to advice on flea-powder, a mosquito net, and a personal towel, “as those given by the Japanese at the inns are usually wet.”

The itinerary closes with a tabulated fourteen-day schedule, followed by an Appendix that adds three further destinations for travelers with more leisure — the Ainu village and volcano at Usu, the twin-crater sulphur volcano at Noboribetsu, and Kamikawa, the site chosen in 1890 for a planned northern imperial palace and future capital. A closing note on Hakodate, added, Batchelor says, “before finally laying down my pen,” argues for the port’s natural importance despite Satporo’s official status, citing its harbor, its trade (nearly 2,000,000 yen in imports and exports for 1891), and merchants’ plans for a coaling wharf and a rail line via Mori to Moruran; a third full-page plate, “The Harbour and Town of Hakodate,” faces this passage. The Appendix ends with tabulated “Summary of Information” for Hakodate and for Hokkaido as a whole — population, schools, temples, shipping tonnage, exports and imports, and mileage tables to Tokyo, Yokohama, and other ports — after which the volume fills out with pages of advertisements from Hakodate and Tokyo firms: ironmongers, ship chandlers, a stationer and bookseller, a photographer, the Hakodate Shimbun newspaper, a butcher and a baker supplying foreign shipping, and the Tokyo Tsukiji Type Foundry that printed the book.

Japan As We Saw It is a missionary traveler’s record of nearly eight weeks in Japan in the autumn of 1891, published in 1893 over the name on its title page, “By M. Bickersteth.” The preface, signed “E. H. Exon” from The Palace, Exeter, on February 14, 1893, identifies the writer: it calls the book “these brief sketches by my daughter, of our eight weeks’ sojourn in the Mikado’s Empire,” and disclaims any pretension to be “a tourist’s handbook” — the chapters are “only word-photographs, somewhat loosely grouped together.” The “we” is a family party of three, the Bishop of Exeter, Mrs. Bickersteth, and the author, who is general secretary of the missionary Guild of S. Paul; in Japan they are conducted throughout by her eldest brother, Edward Bickersteth, appointed the Church of England’s second missionary Bishop there in 1886. Eighteen chapters follow a dated itinerary. The party sails from Liverpool on August 13, 1891, crosses the Atlantic in the Parisian, Canada by the Canadian Pacific, and the Pacific in the Empress of Japan, and reaches Exeter again on December 30 after a tour of “exactly twenty weeks.” Japan fills nearly the whole book: the travelers land at Yokohama on page eleven and sail from Nagasaki on page 312, sixteen chapters later, with the outward run through Quebec, Niagara, and the Rockies and the homeward run through China and Ceylon taking the rest.

Tokyo occupies three chapters. Bickersteth describes S. Andrew’s House at Shiba, her brother’s headquarters, and S. Hilda’s Mission at Azabu, where she sleeps for ten days and goes over the school, hospital, and Home for training mission women that her Guild pays for; one evening she rides out by jinriksha to the dispensary at Kyobashi, where the patients sit on the floor with their bottles wrapped in handkerchiefs. Sightseeing and mission work alternate: the eight Shiba temples with their 212 bronze lanterns, the graves of the forty-seven Ronins, the Christian relics and “trampling boards” in the Ueno Museum, a “switch back railway” spoiling the avenue to Iyeyasu’s temple in Ueno Park, the comic English signboards of the Ginza (“Wine, beer and other medicines”), a Ceremonial Tea Drinking that takes nearly two hours to produce a single cup, Mr. Fukuzawa’s Keiogijiku College, the Imperial University, and a dinner-party of some sixteen courses eaten with chopsticks on the floor. Between the Tokyo chapters comes a week in the country: Nikko’s cryptomeria avenues and lacquered temples, Lake Chusenji, a typhoon, a night in a purely Japanese inn at Utsunomiya that was “more entertaining than solidly comfortable,” and, from Ikao, an expedition to the valley of Haruna in basket chairs. Her verdict on Buddhism is blunt: “Buddhism, as we saw it in Japan, is heathen to its very core.”

A month’s tour among other mission stations of the Church in Japan follows; Yezo and its Ainu are beyond their limited time. From Miyanoshita the party crosses to Hakone and the sulfur gorge of Ojigoku; Mount Fuji is in sight for three hours of the rail journey to Nagoya, where their host, Mr. Cooper Robinson of the Canadian Church, shows them the castle with its golden dolphins and the cloisonné workshops, and where three converts are confirmed. Kyoto brings the Nishi Hongwanji, the Imperial Gardens, a canoe run down the rapids of the Katsuragawa, Otsu and Lake Biwa, the Chion-in monastery, and the temple of the 33,333 images of Kwannon. Then, at Osaka on October 28, at half-past six in the morning, comes the great earthquake. Bickersteth gives her own experience — alone in Miss Tristram’s house at the Bishop Poole Girls’ School, the staircase reeling before her so that she dared not go down, the schoolgirls screaming in the quadrangle, “a sort of prolonged wail” going up from the city — and her father’s and Mrs. Bickersteth’s, sheltering in a doorway while the chimney crashed through the drawing-room ceiling. For the devastation further north she prints other people’s words: the Hyogo News on the fallen Naniwa mill, then a whole chapter, forty-four pages, of that paper’s correspondents writing from Ogaki and Gifu and of Nurse Grace’s report to the Guild on nursing the wounded at Takasu.

Travel resumes with a day at Nara among sacred stags, stone lanterns thrown down by the earthquake, and the great Dai Butsu. She and Mrs. Bickersteth stay at Osaka while the two Bishops and Archdeacon Warren go on to Fukuyama, where her father lays the foundation stone of a mission church with a silver trowel, and they wait again at Kumamoto while he, her brother, and Mr. Brandram climb to the crater of Aso San. Between these come Kobe, with an All Saints’ Day thanksgiving for the English community’s preservation, the Mikado’s birthday, and a palanquin journey over Rokko San to Arima; and a day on deck through the Inland Sea in the Kobe Maru. In Kiushiu she sees Fukuoka; Oyamadā, a hill village of 180 people, 150 of them baptized since 1888, its heathen temple pulled down and a church raised in its place; and Kumamoto, where the road to Kato Kyomasa’s temple passes through a leper village and where her father writes the letter to the Times that its Christmas Day issue prints. A chapter on Shinto and Buddhist funerals is compiled from information given by the Rev. J. Imai Toshimichi. The last days bring the inn at Ureshino, a coasting steamer around the Gulf of Omara, and a final confirmation at Nagasaki, where the party parts from the brother.

The last chapter runs home by Hong Kong, a day in Canton, Singapore, Penang, Colombo and Kandy, and then in the P. & O. Valetta — which has come in from Australia carrying General Booth and Rudyard Kipling as far as Colombo — by Aden to Brindisi, and it ends not in anecdote but in appeal: “Now — or never,” she writes of the missionary opening in Japan. Five lettered Notes and an index follow. They name the English missions’ clergy, foreign and Japanese, each with station and date, and their foreign lay workers, mostly so, but count the Japanese catechists and divinity students and the American mission’s staff; give the rules of the Guild of S. Paul; describe the Bishop’s two Tokyo missions; summarize the synods of 1887, 1889, and 1891; and, again from Mr. Imai, explain the standing of English in Japanese schools. Archdeacon Warren’s letter of welcome, running to its signature, and an address from the Osaka divinity students, each introduced as “the following,” are printed entire within the narrative. A List of Illustrations names thirty-eight subjects, two of them headed “From a Photograph”; thirty-six are blocks printed within the text, and two are inserted plates — the frontispiece group, “The Bishop of Exeter and Party,” and a photogravure of the Bishop facing page 161, from a photograph by Elliott & Fry, with his signature in facsimile. A folding lithographed map, unlisted, marks railways, mission stations, and the author’s route in red.

A Japanese Interior collects the letters Alice Mabel Bacon wrote home to her brothers and sisters between September 5, 1888, and August 28, 1889, while she taught English at the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo under the Imperial Household Department. She kept house in the Kioi Cho section of the Kojimachi district in a dwelling she describes in her preface as “half Japanese and half foreign,” sharing it with a Japanese friend she calls Mine, several of Mine’s pupils, Mine’s cousin, and a household of servants, while taking her own meals alone, foreign style, in her single Japanese room. The preface explains that her invitation to the school came through a Japanese friend rather than any foreign recommendation, that in all Tokyo she had “no acquaintance of my own race and language” and so was thrown “entirely upon congenial and interesting Japanese friends,” and that the letters show Japanese life “from the Japanese side, and from the side of the Japanese woman,” though “undoubtedly much affected by passing through the medium of an American mind.” She calls them “simply a daily chronicle of events, sights, and impressions” rather than an authority on Japan, and the book follows that chronicle strictly by date, one dated letter after another, gathered into fifteen chapters each headed by a running list of its contents.

The opening chapters track Bacon’s first months of housekeeping and teaching: hiring a cook who speaks no English, buying china at the Shiba Kwan-ko-ba, and being introduced to her classes of “little peeresses,” who “bend themselves nearly double” bowing to their teachers. She watches a high official’s funeral procession from a gatekeeper’s house on a rainy morning, attends the Emperor’s birthday troop review at the Aoyama parade ground, and describes a No performance at a shrine festival in close detail, down to the motionless chorus of singers, the drummers who accompany them, and the comic servant scene. The death of the Emperor’s youngest son, Prince Aki, cancels a planned visit to see the chrysanthemums in the Emperor’s own garden, so she goes instead to the public chrysanthemum show at Dango Zaka, where figures of gods and heroes, their heads, feet, and hands of papier-mâché, are draped and set amid mountains and waterfalls built entirely of living, potted chrysanthemum plants. Winter brings a ball at the Rokumei-kwan for foreign naval officers, an elaborate Christmas with stockings hung for the whole household (one of them for her collie Bruce), a New Year’s Eve jinrikisha ride down Ginza that turns into her kurumaya Yasaku’s street fight with a truckman, an earthquake that “traveled diagonally across the house,” and the dismissal of a betto, or groom, who is caught racing her horse without permission and later disappears with her stable blankets under a false address.

As the promulgation of the new Constitution approaches, Bacon describes the festival decorations along Kojimachi and Nihombashi, the imperial couple riding together in one carriage for the first time, and, in the same chapter, the assassination of Viscount Mori on the morning of the promulgation ceremony — an account she says she had “directly from the lips of one of the cabinet ministers.” She reproduces at length the farewell letters of the assassin, Nishino Buntaro, to his father, mother, brother, and sister, in which he explains that he is dying “as one who fell on the battlefield before his lord.” Later chapters follow a Shinto funeral for one of her pupils, with its purifying green sprays and its custom of burying the dead girl’s personal treasures with her, and then her kurumaya Yasaku’s divorce from a wife who will not leave Utsu-no-miya and his arranged remarriage to a bride he has never met, who arrives by train and prostrates herself before Bacon on being brought in to pay her respects; and, after an evening spent viewing plum blossoms hung with visitors’ poems, the Feast of Dolls at the yashiki of a young Tokugawa daimio, where centuries-old dolls representing the Emperor, Empress, and court musicians are displayed and fed, and the daimio’s young wife, not yet sixteen, embraces Bacon’s dog Bruce. The same stretch of letters covers a picnic in the Mito Yashiki gardens and a full day at the theater watching the story of the forty-seven ronin, which Bacon calls “a little too gory to suit our present taste” for its onstage suicides even as she credits it with teaching her more about Japanese loyalty than anything else had.

The Empress visits Bacon’s classroom that April, an event for which Bacon rehearses her bows in advance and which she describes down to the black-lacquered chair set out for the visitor and the bolt of white silk, “twenty-five yards or thereabouts,” she is given on being presented; a second visit follows in July, when the Empress formally opens the school’s new brick building and hands out diplomas rolled on brown-and-gold brocade scrolls. Between the two visits Bacon attends a Buddhist funeral, reasoning her way — by analogy to Elisha permitting Naaman to bow in the temple of Rimmon — into offering incense before the coffin without qualm; walks through an evening matsuri with Mine to watch a monkey theatrical and a girl performing on the slack rope; and reports a newspaper-driven scandal that empties a Tokyo girls’ school of applicants over a teacher’s lecture on choosing husbands, alongside a dispute in which the boys’ Peers’ School petitions to take over the Peeresses’ newly finished building. She also copies out, for her family, written questions her Sunday-school pupils submit on the Gospel of John, and includes a Unitarian missionary’s public statement that he has come to Japan bringing “not conversion but affiliation.”

The final chapter carries Bacon out of Tokyo at the end of her year: a missionary summer camp on Hiyei Zan, where she is put in charge of a camp newspaper called the “Hiyei Zan Hornet”; a stop in Kioto to shop and watch the river crowded with lantern-lit floating tea-houses; and then a kuruma journey down the Tokaido toward Numadzu, begun in the middle of a typhoon that turns her umbrella inside out and washes out bridges ahead of her. She stops at inns of sharply varying quality along the way, from a first-class hotel at Okazaki where the staff greets her on its knees at the door to a flea-ridden lodging at Maizaka kept awake all night by drums and samisens next door, and arrives at last at Numadzu, where local children come daily to sit on her veranda, patting her hands and hair and marveling that they are soft. The book closes with her final letter, dated from Numadzu on August 28, 1889, laying out her plan to return to Tokyo to close her affairs before sailing for San Francisco, and signing off, “good-by until some day I sail in at the Golden Gate and bid you all good-morning.”

Presented on its title page as the work of A. B. Mitford, “Second Secretary to the British Legation in Japan,” Tales of Old Japan gathers translated Japanese narratives, sermons and ceremonial manuals inside a running commentary of Mitford’s own observation. His purpose is stated not in the brief preface but in the introduction to the opening story: with railways and telegraphs coming, “the old Japanese, such as he was and had been for centuries when we found him eleven short years ago, will have become extinct,” and no better means offered itself of “preserving a record of a curious and fast disappearing civilization” than translation, so that “the Japanese may tell their own tale, their translator only adding here and there a few words of heading or tag to a chapter.” He writes out of Yedo, where he speaks of “a residence of three years and a half” spent crossing and recrossing the city, and out of Osaka, where he lived opposite a swordsmith. The preface, dated “London, January 7, 1871,” records two absences: though he “searched diligently,” he could find no story in which the Emperor and his Court “played a conspicuous part,” and no allusion is made to the Gôshi, yeomen owning no allegiance to a feudal lord. The imprint leaf places the first edition in 1871 in two volumes and the second in 1874 in one, this printing being the last of five reprints of that second edition.

Six long narratives open the volume, each with an introduction — in Mitford’s own person in five of the six — then the tale, whose narrator breaks off to exclaim over his characters (“Admirable and faithful man!”), then a long appended editorial note. “The Forty-seven Rônins” comes quickly to the temple of Sengakuji, where forty-eight tombstones stand for forty-seven men, and tells how Asano Takumi no Kami, goaded past bearing by Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, drew his dirk in the castle, was condemned to hara kiri, and was avenged on a snowy midnight by Oishi Kuranosuké and his league, who dragged their enemy out of a charcoal outhouse and entreated him to disembowel himself; the coda prints three manuscripts in translation — a receipt for the head, the manifesto each man carried, the paper laid on the tomb. Gompachi and Komurasaki, “robber and murderer” and the courtesan who stabs herself on his grave, reach their shared stone at Meguro only after pages of country lanes, tea-houses and temple customs, and are followed by a defense of Japanese women against other Western writers and a history of the Yoshiwara with a return of its brothels and courtesans taken from the official guide for 1869. “Kazuma’s Revenge,” a sword feud widening into a quarrel between Hatamoto and Daimio, is prefaced by an essay on the swordsmith’s craft and closed by a note on the eighty thousand Hatamoto and their impoverishment.

“A Story of the Otokodaté of Yedo,” at fifty pages the longest of the six, turns on the wardsmen’s chief Chôbei of Bandzuin, locked into a bath to be boiled and speared through the partition wall by the retainers of a Hatamoto he had humiliated, and on the vendetta he shelters, in which Umanosuké and Sanza’s son Kosanza, struck blind in the course of the search, hunt Fuwa Banzayémon for their fathers’ deaths — Banzayémon having stolen the sword that ruined Nagoya Sanza and then murdered him; essays on Asakusa, the theatre and the Nô are appended. Funakoshi Jiuyémon fights pirates, poisoners and painted goblins, and carries a history of wrestling behind him; and “The Eta Maiden and the Hatamoto,” opening with the firing across the open space destined for a foreign settlement at the newly opened port of Kôbé on 4 February 1868, ends with Genzaburô banished for loving an Eta chief’s daughter and the murderer Sazen executed. Nine children’s stories follow, introduced by Mitford’s remark that these were the only ones he could find in print and that when he asked Japanese to tell him others “they only thought I was laughing at them, and changed the subject”: the tongue-cut sparrow, the lucky tea-kettle, the crackling mountain, in which a badger kills an old woman and serves her to her husband in broth, Little Peachling, the foxes’ wedding. One breaks off to tell “my children” that it is very wrong to be cruel to dogs and cats; another closes with a lesson for the envious.

Then comes “The Ghost of Sakura,” prefaced by an account of land tenure, peasant officials and death by crucifixion: the village chief Sôgorô thrusts a petition into the Shogun’s litter, wins the remission of his lord’s taxes, and is crucified with his wife while their three sons are beheaded before them, after which his spirit harries the house of Hotta Kôtsuké no Suké until it is appeased by canonization. To that story Mitford appends ghost anecdotes told him by Japanese friends around a brazier of charcoal — the maid O Kiku, mutilated finger by finger until she threw herself down a well, from which her voice was heard counting the plates as far as nine — with a description of the Tokugawa burial-places at Zôjôji and Uyéno. A conscience-tale of a rônin haunted by a priest he thought he had drowned stands alone; a section on cats, foxes and badgers, “regarded with superstitious awe by the Japanese,” collects six more, including the vampire cat of Nabéshima, foxes who kill their own cub to furnish a liver for a sick child, and a carpenter shaved bald by foxes, which closes in the first person of the Japanese author from whose book it was taken — a fact recorded only in a footnote. Preaching occupies the next fifty pages: Mitford describes attending a sermon at the temple Chô-ô-ji, accompanied by “two friends, my artist, and a scribe to take notes,” records the poor Nichiren congregation and its chanted prayer, and glosses each of its interpolated cries of “Nammiyô!” himself.

Three sermons follow, translated from the Kiu-ô Do-wa, whose first volume they compose, by a priest of the Shingaku sect, their texts taken from Môshi as an English preacher’s would be from the Bible. Next, “An Account of the Hara-Kiri,” subtitled “(From a rare Japanese MS.)” and, for roughly its first three-quarters, a translated manual: how the enclosure is fenced and its two doors named, how the cloths and two red rugs are laid so that the blood will not soak through to the mats, how loudly the sentence should be read, what the three seconds do, that the disembowelment had commonly become a form, and that “There is no heroism in cutting a man’s head off well.” Only then does Mitford break in — “I may here describe an instance of such an execution which I was sent officially to witness” — for five pages on the death of Taki Zenzaburô at the temple of Seifukuji in Hiogo, at half past ten at night, before seven foreigners and seven Japanese witnesses: “It was horrible.” A second translated memorandum on three forms of the rite follows, then a note on the 1869 motion to abolish it that two hundred members of a house of two hundred and nine opposed, and last two anecdotes of extraordinary heroism in the act. The final appendix translates the Sho-rei Hikki on marriage, on the birth and rearing of children, and on funeral rites, Mitford’s note supplying the blackening of married women’s teeth that his source passes over, and a Yedo druggist’s recipe for it.

The title page promises illustrations “drawn and cut on wood by Japanese artists,” and they are the one thing for which Mitford says he need make no apology: the drawings are by Ôdaké, an artist in his employ, cut by “a famous wood-engraver at Yedo,” and “are therefore genuine specimens of Japanese art.” Messrs. Dalziel observed that the lines were cut with the grain of the wood, after the manner of Albert Dürer. Thirty-one illustrations are listed, a frontispiece and thirty plates, each a full-page woodcut on its own leaf, printed sideways with its caption running up the margin: the Rônins inviting Kôtsuké no Suké to perform hara-kiri, the well in which the head was washed, forging the sword, a wrestling match, Little Peachling, the ghost of Sakura, the cat of Nabéshima, the feast of Inari Sama. They cluster in the first half: eighteen within the opening hundred and fifty pages, ten more across the fairy tales and the Sakura story. The list ends with a Japanese sermon facing page 281, so that the appendices carry no plate at all, and the manual’s three promises of an annexed plan go unfulfilled. The volume stops on the funeral rites with a short note in Mitford’s own voice: his source is brief because the rites vary among fifteen sects of Buddhism, and Buddhism seems likely to be swept out of Japan, leaving men to return to rites older than its introduction — “What those rites were I have been unable to learn.” “THE END.” and the printer’s imprint follow.

M. L. Gordon’s An American Missionary in Japan is a firsthand account by a missionary of the American Board (the mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions), who arrived in Japan in the autumn of 1872 and served for nearly two decades, including years as professor of homiletics and pastoral theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto, before an “enforced absence” from Japan, as Griffis’s introductory note calls it, brought the book’s composition in 1891–92 at Andover, Massachusetts. Gordon explains in his preface that the idea came to him on an evangelistic tour in Tango province, where a Japanese companion urged an older colleague to record his memories of the mission’s early years; the book that resulted is not, Gordon insists, an autobiography or a history of the mission, but “an attempt to record what I have seen of the wonderful manner in which the religion of Christ is approaching the minds, and hearts, and lives of the Japanese people.” It proceeds by topic rather than chronological narrative — twenty-two chapters moving from the practicalities of missionary life to specific fields of work to a closing assessment of “New Japan” — and carries an introductory note by Wm. Elliot Griffis, who writes not as a missionary but as a former employee of the Japanese government, framing Gordon’s book as a corrective to both hostile and merely picturesque writing about Japan and crediting American missionaries generally, and men like Brown, Hepburn, and Verbeck by name, with a formative role in the country’s modernization.

The opening chapters describe the missionary’s practical apprenticeship: the comparative ease of travel to Japan by steamship as against the months-long voyages of earlier missionaries such as Henry Martyn; the notorious difficulty of the language, illustrated with mistranslations by beginners (one who, intending to buy a meat-broiler, asked instead for a “cat-broiler,” confusing niku and neko) and with the maze of honorific and depreciatory vocabulary that makes “your house” o uchi and “my house” plain uchi; and the necessity of studying Japanese manners before attempting to teach, illustrated by an American who used the imperative form reserved for menials on a provincial governor. “Making a Start” recounts the outright hostility of the early Meiji government, including public edict boards proclaiming Christianity a capital crime as late as 1868, the exile of thousands of hereditary Catholics discovered at Urakami, and the death in prison of Ichikawa Einosuke, arrested in 1871 for possessing a manuscript Gospel of Mark; missionaries meanwhile taught English as their chief point of contact with young samurai, several of whom became the first converts, and Gordon transcribes an account of the first Japanese church, organized in Yokohama in March 1872 with nine newly baptized members. Chapter V gives an extended, quoted narrative by the Rev. P. Kanamori of Captain L. L. Janes’s school in Kumamoto, where years of quiet Bible teaching produced a revival in 1876, a covenant sworn on Hanaoka-yama, and violent family persecution of the converts — several of whom, including Kanamori, Yokoi, Kozaki, and Ebina, went on to prominent pastorates or to lead the Doshisha itself. Subsequent chapters describe the earliest preaching in rented houses (kogisho) and in rough village theatres, the rise of Japanese preachers whom Gordon judges in some respects more naturally gifted than American ones, and the physical routine of evangelistic touring by passport, jinrikisha, and village inn.

A long central stretch of the book collects individual conversion stories organized by theme — “Coming to the Light,” “By Their Fruits,” “The Growth of a Church” — including the old woman of Amino who abandoned a planned pilgrimage of atonement after hearing from Christian relatives in Osaka of their new-found peace and joy; Wakasa-no-kami, the samurai commander who found a New Testament floating in Nagasaki harbor in 1854 and was baptized twelve years later; and Kakudo Kobayashi, a blind and disfigured leper driven from his village, who told a visiting evangelist that he felt no self-pity because “God is always behind me.” Gordon then turns to institutions: the Kumi-ai churches — a name Gordon stresses is not a translation of “Congregational” but means “joined” or “associated,” marking their independence from any missionary board or American denomination — founded on principles of evangelism, self-government, and self-support, which by 1891 numbered seventy-one churches and over ten thousand members; the Doshisha University in Kyoto, founded by Joseph Hardy Neesima in 1875 over fierce Buddhist and official opposition, whose new Harris School of Science and School of Political Science and Law Gordon describes in detail (he himself appears in the Doshisha faculty list, Appendix B, as professor of homiletics and pastoral theology); the work of medical missionaries such as Dr. J. C. Hepburn, whose Yokohama dispensary treated “thousands upon thousands” of the poor, and Drs. Berry, Taylor, Laning, and others; and a chapter on Christian womanhood that quotes at length from The Great Learning for Women, a text prescribing wifely submission, obedience to parents-in-law, and the “five worst maladies” of the female mind, which Gordon presents as the old standard against which the position of Christian wives and lady missionaries had visibly improved. A chapter on Christian literature traces the wooden-block printing of tracts, the influence in Japan of Chinese-language Christian works composed for the China mission field (including the conversion of Neesima himself through one such book), and the 1872 Bible translation committee; a chapter on denominationalism catalogs more than thirty missionary societies at work in a single small country and reproduces in full a mission-comity resolution adopted in 1890.

Chapter XVIII, “Comparative Religion as a Matter of Experience,” argues from the testimony given at baptismal examinations that Christianity alone brings believers a genuine sense of sin, true repentance, and present forgiveness, in contrast to Buddhism and Shintoism as Gordon describes them; it includes a Kumamoto Band member’s written recollection of his mother threatening suicide if he did not renounce his new faith. Chapter XIX, Shin Nippon (New Japan), catalogs the material transformation of the previous twenty-five years in statistical detail — fifteen hundred miles of railway, an expanded postal and telegraph system, a new constitution and parliament — while noting unresolved deficiencies including inadequate female education and a high divorce rate. The following chapter argues that this New Japan is substantially the product of Christian influence, direct and indirect, and reports that twelve of three hundred members of the first Imperial Diet’s House of Commons, including its speaker, were Protestant Christians, a consequence Gordon traces to the parliamentary training Christians received in church governance. Chapter XXI acknowledges a real anti-foreign and anti-Christian reaction in the years just before Gordon’s departure, driven partly by treaty-revision grievances and partly by the arrival of a Unitarian “envoy” and of German missionaries teaching higher-critical views of the Gospels, but reports signs that the reaction was already receding, helped along by the shock of the 1891 attack on the Russian Czarowitz at Otsu.

The book closes with “Sayonara,” a chapter describing the round of farewell meetings (sobetsukai), speeches, Japanese and Chinese verses, and parting gifts (sembetsu) — family swords among them — that attended Gordon’s own departure from Japan, and it ends with translated Japanese farewell poems exchanged at the dockside. Five appendices follow: the 1875 mission report proposing a Christian college for Japan; the 1891–92 Doshisha University faculty list; a bibliography of Japanese Christian literature; a statistical table of Protestant missionary work in Japan for 1891, broken down by denomination; and the texts of the newly adopted creeds of the Kumi-ai churches and of the united Presbyterian “Church of Christ in Japan.”

On Short Leave to Japan is Captain G. J. Younghusband’s account of a few months’ holiday taken from his regimental duties in India, published in 1894; its title page credits him as the author of three earlier books, Eighteen Hundred Miles on a Burmese Tat, Frays and Forays, and The Queen’s Commission. A member of the Queen’s Own Corps of Guides, Younghusband made the trip with a companion, and the narrative alternates between “I” and “we” from its opening pages onward. His preface disarms the reader in advance for “inflicting” yet another book on Japan, hoping only that “the latest news of so interesting a country may not be altogether unacceptable to English readers.” The book’s seventeen chapters trace a single continuous journey: four chapters of outward travel through Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai before Japan is ever reached, eleven chapters of touring within Japan itself, a closing chapter of practical travel advice, and a wholly separate, topical seventeenth chapter on the Japanese army. Japan occupies the great bulk of the volume, and receives by far the fuller treatment below.

The opening chapters are not about Japan at all. Younghusband describes a train journey the length of India to Calcutta, a three-day cyclone that catches his ship, the Catherine Apcar, at anchor off Diamond Harbour, and the wrecks and drowned sailors he saw in its wake, along with a digression on the piracy of the Namoa in the China seas. From there the narrative moves to Penang (botanical gardens, a Dutch war in Acheen, the ubiquity of Chinese traders), to Singapore (Raffles Hotel, the colony’s coaling-station defenses, a debate on the ethics of the opium trade), and to Hong Kong, “the Naples of the East,” where he admires the Peak tramway and the harbor garrison and buys cheap Manila cigars — a plate captioned “Please Observe the Nails” is inserted among these pages, with no accompanying description in the text itself. A stop in Shanghai, reached by way of the Yellow Sea, takes in a joss-house and a rickshaw tour of the walled Chinese city; the onward run toward the Inland Sea then turns fog-bound, and ends with the ship, quite literally, brought up against a sheer cliff wall off the Japanese coast.

Japan proper opens with the Inland Sea and Kobe, “our first acquaintance with the man of Japan,” and continues through Yokohama, where Younghusband recommends Murray’s Handbook and the writings of Mitford and Professor Chamberlain as essential companions for the traveler. In Tokyo he describes watching the Mikado ride out in a French uniform and closed landau — a spectacle far removed from the Gilbert-and-Sullivan despot of English imagination — and dwells at length on the temple of Sensoji at Asakusa, with its enormous money-chest, the much-rubbed idol Binzuru, and a revolving bookcase said to confer the merit of having read its 6,771 volumes. A full chapter is given to a day at the Tokyo theatre, including a long quotation from Mitford’s eyewitness account of a formal hara-kiri, which Younghusband contrasts with the comic effect of the same ritual performed on stage by an elderly actor who insists on making a speech mid-disembowelment. A plate captioned “Tea-house Waitress” serves as the book’s frontispiece, in keeping with his recurring visits to tea-houses and their attendants throughout the Tokyo chapters, which also cover the tombs of the Forty-Seven Ronin, the Shiba and Ueno mausolea of the Tokugawa Shoguns, a case of Christian relics and “trampling boards” from the era of persecution, and the public excitement over Lieutenant-Colonel Fukushima’s overland ride from Berlin.

From Tokyo the travelers move to the hill resorts, beginning with Nikko, where Younghusband allows himself, by his own admission, his one extended excursion into history and description: an account of Ieyasu’s rise through the battle of Seki-ga-hara to the office of Shogun, illustrated by a plate labeled “A Samurai (the Fighting Class),” and a description of the mausoleum itself — its bronze stork and gateway, its zodiac carvings, its sacred sleeping cat — accompanied by the plate “The Tomb of a Great Soldier.” The Nikko chapters also record the routine of the Arai Hotel, where a small maid marshals every guest through the bathroom in turn, an episode the plate “Preparing the Bath” illustrates directly, and the comic misadventures of the hotel’s Polite Letter Writer. Younghusband follows this with excursions to Lake Chuzenji, then to the hot springs of Ikao and the moorland lake of Haruna, noting paper-walled inns, the local custom of naturally dyed cottons, and an acquaintance “educating his toes” by wearing corks between them in preparation for Japanese sandals. At Hakone the travelers lodge by the lake — a scene matched by the plate “Our Hotel at Hakoné” — climb to the sulphurous vents of Ojigoku, encounter mixed public bathing (prompting a digression on missionaries and the ethics of imposing Western dress on “guileless villagers”), and spend idle days fishing from a sampan. The journey down the old Tokaido to Kyoto follows, by kago and rickshaw through Mishima’s miniature gardens and Numadzu’s communal bath, past the cormorant-fishing of Gifu, the disagreeable inn and old castle of Hikone on Lake Biwa, and Otsu, scene of the attempt on the Czarewitch’s life — the kago itself, “exactly made to fit a little Japanese lady,” being pictured in the plate “Japanese Lady in Chair,” shown outside a hotel marked “Hafuya.”

Kyoto draws from Younghusband a sustained contrast between the fortified, martial Tokyo of the Shoguns and the open, temple-filled former capital of the Mikados, along with an account of a Kyoto merchant working his abacus, pictured in the plate “Calculating Machine,” a runaway spree of curio-buying in brocade, swords, and cloisonné, and an evening theatre performance and river festival lit by paper lanterns. A short professional visit to Osaka, oppressively hot and mosquito-ridden, is followed by a nighttime river-lantern festival of its own, and a side trip to Nara takes in the great bronze Daibutsu and what Younghusband describes, without apparent irony, as the mummified remains of a mermaid. The holiday closes at the trout streams of Takaradzuka. The sixteenth chapter turns from narrative to practical advice on the costs of travel, hotels, tipping, guides, and currency, closing with a warning against approaching Japan with either excessive rapture or excessive disillusionment. The book’s final chapter stands apart from the travel narrative entirely: an assessment of the Japanese army, based on facilities granted Younghusband by the War Minister, Count Oyama, through the introduction of the British chargé d’affaires, Mr. de Bunsen. It covers conscription, pay, barracks, rations, and the French- and German-influenced organization of the infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and ends with Younghusband’s reflections on the political value of a friendly English-language press in Japan and on the prospects of Anglo-Japanese cooperation against China.

The Flowery Kingdom and the Land of the Mikado announces itself, on its own title page, as a “complete history” of three countries “down to the present time,” and its preface confirms that ambition without apology: it is a popular compendium in three books, assembled by Henry Davenport Northrop — credited on the same page as the author of Charming Bible Stories and Peerless Reciter — and carrying a separate introductory chapter by the Hon. John Russell Young, former American Minister to the Court of China. Nothing in the text indicates that Northrop traveled to Asia himself; instead the book proceeds through named authorities whom it quotes at length and credits by name — the historian D. C. Boulger, the sinologist Robert K. Douglas, the Swiss minister to Japan M. Aimé Humbert, the Hon. George N. Curzon, Sir Edwin Arnold, and others — stitching their accounts into one continuous narrative addressed throughout to “the reader.” The preface lays out the plan explicitly: Book I carries the history of China “from the Earliest Times to the Present Day”; Book II gives “a complete account of Japan and the Japanese”; Book III covers Corea, the “Hermit Kingdom,” together with “a concise account of the war between China and Japan.” Published in 1894 by the American Book Concern of Cleveland, Ohio, while that war was still under way, the volume is timed to it deliberately: the preface calls Japan “the rising star among the nations of the Orient” and describes the Continent of Asia as “waking up from the sleep of ages,” and Young’s introductory chapter reflects at length, drawing on his own diplomatic service in China, on what the conflict might mean for the future of both empires.

Book I, occupying close to half the volume across sixteen chapters, opens with the legendary founders of the “Celestial Empire” — Fohi, credited with giving China “its first regular government,” and Hwangti, “the first to employ the imperial style of Emperor” — and moves through the sage-kings Yao, Chun, and Yu, the Hia dynasty said to begin in 2197 B.C., the Chow dynasty, “specially illustrious” for producing Laoutse, Confucius, and Mencius, and a chapter on the Han Rulers, whom the preface ranks with the Roman Caesars for arms and conquest. The narrative continues through the Mongol conquest and the installation of “the first Manchu ruler,” then turns, in its own words, to “that part of Chinese history which lies within the present century,” giving a full chapter to the Taeping Rebellion and to “Chinese Gordon” — Hung-tsuien’s rise as Tien Wang, the sieges of Nankin and Soochow, and the American soldiers of fortune Ward and Burgevine — before closing the dynastic sequence with Prince Kung and the Regency and the reign of the Emperor Kwangsu.

A second run of chapters, drawn chiefly from “Mr. Robert K. Douglas’s interesting and entertaining account,” turns from history to description: the Emperor of China and his court, rendered through the elaborate winter-solstice sacrifice at the Temple of Heaven in Pekin, where the Emperor “acknowledges in prayer… that he is inferior to Heaven, and to Heaven alone”; the punishment of criminals; mechanics and merchants; and marriage customs. A chapter on food, dress, and amusements catalogs rice and vegetables as the staple diet alongside the eating of dogs, cats, rats, and diseased horseflesh, and traces the queue to its origin as a Manchu badge of conquest, “at first… fiercely resisted, even unto death.” Later chapters take up the religions of China and country life, including the literati — prone, despite their learning, to “the same remarkable tendency towards superstitious follies” as their less-educated countrymen — and the farmers whom the Emperor honors each spring by turning the first furrow of the season, closing Book I with a chapter on agricultural products and exports.

Book II, running through fifteen chapters and roughly a third to two-fifths of the text, gives Japan the space its own preface promises. It opens with the country’s legendary founding: the conqueror Zinmou sailing from Kiousiou “after the fashion of the ancient Normans” and establishing, in 660 B.C., the line of Mikados whose “hereditary right to the crown has subsisted… for more than two thousand five hundred years.” The chapter on “The Country and the People” is turned over almost entirely to the words of M. Aimé Humbert, Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan from the Swiss Republic, whose account of sailing the Inland Sea past the castles of the Daimios and the island of Awadsi — “the dwelling-place of the gods” — carries into a chapter on domestic life describing Japanese physique, dress, and the standardized straw mats, “six feet three inches long, three feet two inches wide,” on which a household eats, sleeps, and entertains. Further chapters follow the Shoguns’ old residence, the great city of Tokio, and the shops and industries of its Hondjo quarter, where “there are no large manufactories” and work proceeds, unhurried, inside private homes.

A further sequence works through popular custom and belief: the Japanese devotion to daily bathing, taken communally at crowded public bathhouses; a history of Shintoism and Buddhism that traces Shinto through “three periods,” from an early age with “no set of dogmas, no sacred book, no moral code” through its eclipse by Buddhism and its brief official revival after the Restoration of 1868; a chapter of amusements; and one on “Peculiarities of the Japanese” centered on the University of Tokio and the lingering influence there of Confucius, whose teachings had reached Japan centuries earlier by way of Corea.

The closing chapters of Book II shift register, drawing on published travelers named outright in the text. “The New-Year Festival in Japan” is an extended, unsigned first-person account of a night at the New Year’s fair on the Ginza in Tokio, haggling over curios with an “artist friend, Henry Savage Landor,” and watching maskers and lantern-sellers by torchlight; “Japanese Women” is a similarly personal essay on geisha, teeth-blackening, and elaborate hairdressing that quotes Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème; “Striking Features of Japanese Life” is credited outright to Sir Edwin Arnold, who frames his own landing at Yokohama by quoting at length the seventeenth-century letters of “good Master Will Adams, its discoverer for English people”; and a chapter of street scenes in Yokohama lingers over curio-shopping along the Honcho Dori and Benten Dori. Book II ends with “The New Japan,” furnished, as the text states, “by the brilliant pen of one of the members of the Japanese Legation at Washington,” a Mr. Stevens, and explicitly “authorized and endorsed” by the Japanese Minister, Shinichiro Kurino — a statistical, present-tense portrait of the empire’s population, given as 41,089,940, and of its three leading cities, Tokio, Osaka, and Kioto.

Book III, the shortest of the three at roughly a sixth of the volume, opens with Corea itself — the “Hermit Kingdom” of the preface’s own description — in a chapter credited to the Hon. George N. Curzon, who describes the country as caught, “like Issachar, couching between two burdens,” between China and Japan, its yangban official class subsisting by extortion on an otherwise poor and listless peasantry. The book then turns to the war already under way as it went to press: the outbreak chapter lists the causes point by point — old mutual ill-feeling between the two countries, their rival interests in Corea, an unnamed rebellion in Corea that the chapter itself discounts as unserious, and, not least, the “brutal murder” in Shanghai of the pro-Japanese exile Kim-Ok-Kiun — before following the fighting through the battle of Ping-Yang, “Japan’s Great Naval Victory,” stirring incidents of the campaign, and the fall of Port Arthur. A further chapter, “A Japanese Account of the War,” is credited to “a well-informed Japanese, Julius Kampei Matumato, a graduate of one of our colleges,” who narrates the sinking of the transport Kow-Shing, the land battle of Asan, and the raid on Wei-Hai-Wei from the Japanese side, likening Japan to “a lively sword-fish” set against a Chinese “jelly-fish.”

True to its title-page promise to be “profusely illustrated,” the book carries well over a hundred in-text engravings, listed by the volume itself and drawn mostly from the China and Japan sections in rough proportion to their length — from “The Great Wall of China” and “Beheading a Chinese Criminal” to “Emperor of Japan” and “A Japanese Wedding” — though Corea, near the close, trails its share of the text with only a handful; a separately listed run of close to thirty unpaginated full-page photographic plates is bound in among the chapters, among them views of the Chien Mun gate and the Wan-Shou-Shau Gate bronze lions in Pekin, the great bronze statue of Buddha at Kamakura, and the garden surrounding the palace of the Mikado. The book does not end on Corea or on the war it was written to cover. Its final chapter, “The Capital of China,” opens with an extended travelogue of a journey to and tour of Pekin drawn from Pierre Loti, doubles back to narrate the Manchu conquest of the Ming, then reproduces, article by article, the new 1894 immigration treaty between China and the United States, before closing altogether with a long, unsigned extract from “a leading American journal” that calls Japan’s recent transformation “the marvel of the world” and allows, in its last lines, that Japan’s war on its neighbor is regrettable even as it may serve to “teach… the value of modern ideas” to a China still “hugging old traditions.”

Two books stand between one pair of covers. The title page announces a Book I of history “From 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D.” and a Book II of “Personal Experiences, Observations, and Studies in Japan, 1870–1874”; the Contents and the half-title before Book II both close that division at 1875 instead, and on that one span the title page stands alone. Four supplementary chapters — “Japan in 1883, 1886, 1890, and 1894” — accreted edition by edition: the title-page verso enters the book in 1876 and then prints four separate copyrights, 1883, 1886, 1890 and 1894, one to each chapter’s year, and the title page offers the seventh edition as coming with them, not as adding them, so only “Japan in 1894” can be new here. The appendices are older apparatus, enlarged as early as the second edition, whose preface claims improvement “by the addition of valuable matter in the appendix and foot-notes.” The title page calls its author “formerly of the Imperial University of Tokio,” and Griffis’s preface, signed New York, May 10th, 1876, fixes the vantage: “I arrived in Japan, December 29th, 1870, and remained until July 25th, 1874.” Nearly a year of that was spent “alone in a daimio’s capital far in the interior,” the rest chiefly in the capital. “I have not made this book in libraries at home, but largely on the soil of the mikado’s empire.” A second preface, dated January 10th, 1877, answers a reviewer in The Japan Mail.

Book I opens on physical ground — “To enjoy the picture, we must study the background” — surveying the crescent of islands, its mountains, volcanoes, minerals and meager fauna. The second chapter carries the thesis he had submitted “with modesty” in the preface: that the Ainos are the “primal ancestors of the Japanese,” standing to them ethnically “as the Saxons to the English.” A chapter on the materials of history weighs the Kojiki (“It may be called the Bible of the Japanese”) and the Nihongi, and announces that the earliest chapters will be headed not “the Dawn of History” but “the Twilight of Fable.” He then retells the Kojiki cosmogony at length — Izanagi and Izanami, the rock cave and Uzume’s dance, the mirror, sword and stone — before narrating Jimmu’s march, Sujin’s reforms and Yamato-Dake’s campaigns as full-dress legend, though in “the cold, clear eye of an alien” they are “the inventions of men shaped to exalt the imperial family.” Continental civilization arrives through Corea, with Jingu Kogo’s raid and the Buddhist missionaries of 552; chapters on ancient life, on Shinto (“Shinto has no moral code”), and on the throne, the Fujiwara and the removal of the capital to Kioto in 794 close this stretch. Book I is mostly impersonal historical narration, broken at intervals by the author deciding something aloud: “It is not my purpose to follow in detail the long series of battles… I prefer to show the condition of the people.”

Military domination begins, in this telling, with the Taira victory of 1156, which fixed the rule the book repeats for seven centuries: whoever holds the mikado’s person holds the law. Kiyomori, Tokiwa’s flight through the snow with the infant Yoshitsune, and Yoritomo’s rising build to the sea-fight at Dan no ura in 1185 and then to the constitutional chapter the whole argument turns on — the creation of a duarchy in which the shogun, appointed Sei-i Tai Shogun in 1192, governed as a vassal in the emperor’s name. The Hojo regents follow, with their child shoguns “set up like nine-pins,” and a coda conceding that “There is, however, another side to the story.” An eighteen-page chapter on Buddhism is the most confessional in Book I: “The morals of Buddhism are superior to its metaphysics,” the Shin sect are “the Protestants of Japanese Buddhism,” the Nichirenites “the Ranters of Buddhism” who will resist Christianity longest. The frontispiece points back to this chapter — a kneeling bonze under the light that “smote upon the executioner,” captioned “Deliverance of the Holy Saint Nichiren from the Executioner of Hōjō.—[Page 165.” Then the Mongol armada of 1281 and its typhoon; Go-Daigo’s brief restoration; the war of the chrysanthemums; the Ashikaga centuries, “the Golden Age of crime and anarchy”; and two long descriptive chapters on monasteries, bells, lacquer, medicine, women writers, and the samurai’s armor, hara-kiri and blade — “In no country has the sword been made an object of such honor as in Japan.”

Nobunaga enters as the breaker of the Buddhist establishment, his order to fire Hiyeizan taken from the Nihon Guai Shi and the massacre reported without flinching. Hideyoshi follows, from peasant groom to Kuambaku, and with him the invasion of Corea, which Griffis condemns outright — “nothing less than a huge filibustering scheme” against “a mild and peaceable people” — and the ear monument at Kioto, measured to the foot. The chapter on Christianity and foreigners is the most divided in the book. Mendez Pinto’s landfall at Tanegashima in 1542 is the seed whose “harvest was garnered in the blood of sixty thousand Japanese”; Xavier, the “two hundred churches, and one hundred and fifty thousand native Christians” of 1581, and the six hundred thousand he allows the missions at their highest success are set against an indictment for Mariolatry, forced conversion, imported inquisition and quarreling orders, with the verdict that a century of “Papal Christianity” left the national ethics untouched. Yet the constancy of the native converts under the trampling of the cross and the fire draws his unqualified admiration, and Shimabara, Will Adams, Richard Cocks and the Abbé Sidotti’s nameless grave are all told with care. Iyeyasu’s victory at Sekigahara then opens a survey of Tokugawa society: daimio revenues, the classes down to eta and hinin, the building and population of Yedo, the Tokaido, and the shoguns’ tombs at Shiba and Uyeno.

Book I ends with a thirty-four-page chapter, footnoted as “Reprinted and enlarged from the North American Review of April, 1875,” on what Griffis calls the recent revolutions. He lists six movements — overthrow of the shogun, restoration of the true emperor, abolition of feudalism, “the abolition of Buddhism, and the establishment of pure Shinto as the national faith and the engine of government,” expulsion of the “barbarians,” and the abandonment of that design — and argues that their causes “operated mainly from within, not from without; from impulse, not from impact.” Perry occupies about two pages, and appears as an occasion, “like an untimely thaw,” and as the dupe of a fraud: “There never was but one emperor in Japan; the shogun was a military usurper, and the bombastic title ‘tycoon’ a diplomatic fraud.” Mito scholarship, the Dai Nihon Shi, Ii’s assassination at Sakurada, Shimonoseki and Kagoshima, the burning of Kioto in 1864, Keiki’s resignation and the guns at Fushimi carry the narrative to 1868; the young mikado’s oath is quoted as “the basis of the new Government”; Fukuzawa’s books are credited above cannon-balls. The new rulers, he writes, “hold the emperor, and carry on the government in his name.” The chapter ends in Washington, where the Iwakura embassy arrived “February 29th, 1872,” presented the mikado’s letter to the President “on the 4th of March,” and was welcomed on the floor of Congress on the 6th.

Book II begins at sea. Griffis comes ashore at Yokohama, then takes the stage up the Tokaido on January 2d, 1871 — Kawasaki, the Rokugo ferry, and “just before Shinagawa” a pillory bearing two human heads. Only past the black gate at Shinagawa, “in the city,” stands the Kosatsu, a roofed frame hung with boards of edicts “centuries old,” one denouncing Christianity as “a hateful and devilish sect.” He walks to the Imperial College, map in hand; two teachers of the school are cut down in the streets at night; he takes “the early stage on the morning of the attack” to Yokohama with the news, and spends “several days and nights” attending them in a Tokio house until, after seven days, they are removed home to other nurses. A guide-book chapter on the Kuanon temple at Asakusa and an impersonal one on the castle and yashiki follow. The appointment: “I was engaged to teach the physical sciences in the city of Fukui,” on a three-year contract approved by the Foreign Office. The journey out — steamer to Hiogo, night boat up the Yodo, Lake Biwa, Tsuruga, then a road banked with snow “eight and ten feet deep” — ends at Fukui on March 4th. Reception by Matsudaira Mochiaki, a school of “about eight hundred students,” the hundred-and-ninety-seven-year-old house on Shibata’s castle site, children’s games and household superstitions fill out the section. Roughly half these chapters are sustained first-person narrative; the rest are impersonal exposition or a guide-book “we.”

The middle of Book II is topical: a chapter on mythical zoology (dragon, kirin, kappa, tengu, the earthquake fish), one of folk-tales heard “from children, or from the lips of older persons, while sitting round the hibachi,” written out at his request, or bought in the print-shops of Tokio, and one of proverbs. Then the writing becomes a diary. “The Last Year of Feudalism (Leaves from My Journal)” runs from “March 4th, 1871.—Arrived in Fukui” through gunpowder mills, a cremation, theater, the flag raised for the “glorious Fourth,” and the abolition of the han — “July 18th.—The thunder-bolt has fallen! The political earthquake has shaken Japan to its centre” — climbing on October 1st to the ex-daimio’s farewell to three thousand samurai, and running on to January 1872 and the eve of departure: “God willing, I shall be in Tokio by February 4th. Farewell, Fukui, thou hast been a well of blessing.” “A Tramp Through Japan” is Griffis’s own winter walk out of Fukui, dated January 22d to February 2d, 1872: lost in a blizzard, over the passes into Omi, across Sekigahara and through Nagoya, “my winter journey of three hundred and thirty miles,” closing “Now begins a three years’ residence in the great city.” A chapter on the position of woman argues from “several years of residence in an interior city and in the capital,” and the original last chapter carries the record to 1876 — the railway, the Maria Luz, Saga, Formosa — before ending on Christianity’s prospects.

The four supplementary chapters, written years after the residence they follow, trade the resident’s “I” for “we” and “the writer.” “Japan in 1883” resumes at the Corean treaty of 1876 and covers the sword edict, the commutation of samurai pensions, Saigo and the Satsuma rebellion, Okubo’s assassination, and the 1881 promise of a parliament; “Japan in 1886,” the shortest at eight pages, takes up Iwakura’s death, the new peerage, the cabinet of December 1885 and the Roman-alphabet movement. “Japan in 1890,” written “in mid-August with the election returns before us,” asks “Is the Constitution of 1889 a manufacture or a growth?” “Japan in 1894” calls the government “an oligarchy cemented by clan spirit” and quotes Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Things Japanese — “The foreign employé is the creator of New Japan.” It passes from the Chicago exposition through a Diet suspended in December 1893 and dissolved, and closes on “the advent of the new book in New Japan,” Sugawara Michizane and Rai Sanyo standing on the Boston Public Library’s front. Eight notes and appendices follow: associated ideas in art and poetry; the Testament of Iyeyasu; the notation of time; foreign trade; legendary art at the Centennial Exposition; the tea crop of 1875; ceramic art; and Dr. Hepburn’s meteorological tables; then the seventeen-page index. The prelims’ List of Illustrations heads its 108 numbered cuts — most borrowed from Alcock, Humbert, Hokusai and other Japanese artists — with the map “Dai Nippon (the Empire of Japan),” inset with Echizen, facing page 17.

The Nightless City, or the ‘History of the Yoshiwara Yukwaku’ carries no author’s name beyond the title page’s designation, “By An English Student of Sociology.” Its preface, signed only “The Author,” sets out the book’s purpose in openly comparative and disclaiming terms: calling himself “no partizan or special pleader,” he states that he has “confined” himself “to what I believe to be assured facts” and compiled the volume “with the object of providing foreign students of sociology, medical men, and philanthropists” with reliable information on the practical working of licensed prostitution in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara quarter. He meets anticipated objections directly, telling Japanese readers that “this Empire has by no means a monopoly of vice” and foreign critics to read Dr. W. W. Sanger’s History of Prostitution and the Pall Mall Gazette’s “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” exposé before judging Japan too harshly. What follows is not a narrative but an extensive topical reference work: a printed table of contents lists several dozen discrete sections, moving from the quarter’s founding and physical layout through its trades and personnel, its customs and slang, its medical administration, its festivals, brief lives of noted courtesans, and finally the regulations and contracts governing it, closing with an appendix of statistics and correspondence.

The book opens with a history proper: the gathering of scattered Edo brothels into a single walled quarter under Shoji Jinyemon in the early Tokugawa period, the quarter’s removal to its present Asakusa-area site (the “Shin-Yoshiwara”) after a disastrous fire, and the naming of its landmarks — the Nihon-dzutsumi embankment, the Mi-kaeri Yanagi (“gazing-back willow”), the Yoshiwara Shrine, and the O-mon or great gate, complete with the sumptuary edicts once posted there. From there it works methodically through the quarter’s trades and staff: the graded classes of brothel (O-mise, Naka-mise, Ko-mise) and of courtesan (from tayu down through sancha-joro and kirimise-joro); the hikite-jaya, or “introducing tea-houses,” that steered guests to particular houses, with named lists of actual establishments and their keepers; and the household roles inside a brothel — kamuro (child attendants taken into service young), shinzo (girls newly promoted from kamuro), yarite (the “auntie” who oversaw the women and skimmed a share of their earnings), kutsuwa (the proprietor), wakaimono (menservants, whose petty extortions from change and commissions the book describes candidly), and the hokan or “male geisha” who entertained at banquets alongside female geisha. Separate sections on zegen (procurers) and on a short-lived vogue for “Europeanized” courtesans round out the roster of who worked the quarter and how.

Later sections turn to the material culture and etiquette of the quarter: the dress and successive named styles of coiffure worn by yujo, the furnishing of a courtesan’s rooms, and the extravagant ceremonial display of pledged bedding known as tsumi-yagu. Several chapters catalogue the mechanics of the business itself — the signs and cyphers by which fees were recorded in guide-books called saiken, a uniform system of brothel book-keeping instituted by the authorities, reproduced sample brothel advertisements from handbills of different periods, and the shashin-mitate-cho, or photograph albums, that had come to replace the older practice of displaying women’s portraits in frames outside the houses. A chapter on “Kuruwa-kotoba,” the Yoshiwara’s own dialect, sets its characteristic verb endings against standard Japanese, and a long chapter of magic charms and superstitions — folding paper frogs, drawing threads from a towel, burning red paper in the privy — catalogues the divinatory customs courtesans used to learn whether a particular guest would come. Shorter sections list the quarter’s famous foods, its peddlers, hawkers, and beggars, and a “pot-pourri” of sayings about things that are long, short, funny, or detestable in Yoshiwara life.

A substantial cluster of sections addresses the licensing system’s practical operation. The book traces the medical inspection of prostitutes from its introduction, at the urging of an English naval surgeon, through the eventual establishment of a dedicated Lock hospital, the Kyu-bai-in, and gives tables of examination results, infection rates, and guests entertained. Companion sections cover the jinrikisha and horse traffic to and from the quarter, closing hours and the following morning’s routine, the formalities of a courtesan’s discharge at the end of her engagement or her redemption by a guest, and the pursuit, recapture, and resale (“kuragae”) that followed a runaway’s escape, alongside a section on death and double suicide (shinju) among courtesans and the temple grounds where they were buried. The book’s set-piece is its account of the dochu, the courtesans’ ceremonial procession through the Naka-no-cho, which it illustrates at length by quoting Henry Norman’s description in The Real Japan of the towering geta, the “figure of eight” gait, and the crowd’s silent, half-religious attention. Sections on the quarter’s annual round of festivals — flower-planting, lantern displays, the Tori-no-machi fair, Niwaka dancing — and a chronology of fires that repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt the Yoshiwara lead into brief lives of celebrated courtesans, among them the eleven successive women who each bore the name Takao, along with Hana-ogi, Tamakoto, Katsuyama, Segawa, and Usugumo, and a longer account of the merchant Kinokuniya Bunzaemon, whose fortune let him close the great gate to outsiders and buy up the whole quarter for an evening on three separate occasions.

The closing chapters shift register from anecdote to statute. The book reprints, article by article, the Metropolitan Police Board’s regulations governing brothels, introducing tea-houses, and courtesans — licensing, registration, record-keeping, the conditions under which a woman might leave the quarter, and penalties for infractions — and follows them with a specimen contract between a brothel and a courtesan, laid out in the borrower’s own voice, spelling out her debt, a fixed rate of repayment against her earnings, and the pledge of her clothing as security. For a work that claims impartiality, the book does not entirely withhold judgment here: it states plainly that the system as actually enforced makes courtesans “to all intents slaves, just as much as if they were chained to the galleys,” bound not by law but by custom, and lays much of the blame on parents and brothers who profit from a daughter’s or sister’s sale. An appendix carries the subject into live debate, reprinting a physician’s study of venereal infection rates across Tokyo’s six licensed quarters with a comparison to Paris, further monthly tables of inspection results for the Shin-Yoshiwara, national statistics on prostitutes, geisha, and brothels, and, under the heading “Pros and Cons,” a full exchange of letters from the Japan Times in which correspondents signing themselves “White Ribbon,” “Adjutor,” and “Reform” debate licensed prostitution against the paper’s own editorials, followed by a note on the “jigoku,” the unlicensed street-walkers outside the regulated system.

True to its title page’s promise of “numerous illustrations,” the book is illustrated on an unusually generous scale for its size, with plate leaves inserted through the text in addition to smaller woodcuts and diagrams. These range from monochrome photographic plates of the quarter itself — a view down the colonnaded, lantern-hung main street of the Naka-no-cho is captioned simply “Main Street of the Yoshiwara” — to hand-colored genre plates of interior scenes, such as a banquet with a samisen player and seated guests and courtesans keyed to the entry “Geisha dancing the ‘Kappore.’” Other listed plates depict the O-mon gate, a plan of the Shin-Yoshiwara, courtesans exhibited in their cages, the interior of a hikite-jaya, courtesans and guests at their toilette, a dochu procession, and a street scene reproduced from a drawing by Kitagawa Utamaro, alongside smaller in-text woodcuts of coiffure styles, dances, and figures such as Daruma and Ebisu. The volume ends not with a summary but with sheet music: two settings of the “Kappore” dance arranged to foreign accompaniment, printed after the appendix’s closing note on illicit prostitutes.

David Murray’s The Story of Japan is a one-volume popular history written for the “Story of the Nations” series and published in New York by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1894, with Murray identified on the title page as “late adviser to the Japanese minister of education.” In a preface signed simply “David Murray,” he explains that his object is “to trace the story of Japan from its beginnings to the establishment of constitutional government,” and that he relies first of all on “a residence of several years in Japan,” supplemented by the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan and the work of scholars such as Satow, Aston, Chamberlain, and Griffis, together with Hepburn’s dictionary and Chamberlain’s own handbook of Japan. The book runs through fifteen chronological chapters, opening with the geography of the archipelago and closing with the promulgation of Japan’s 1889 constitution, and its prose moves between plain narration and an authorial “we” that periodically pauses to weigh a source’s worth — as when Murray warns that the ages given the earliest emperors “must be sifted and weighed by the processes of reason,” or explains, following the historian Thomas Arnold’s treatment of early Roman legend, that he has tried “to give the early legends in as nearly the form in which they had been handed down as possible.”

After surveying the islands’ geography, climate, and earliest inhabitants — the Ainos of Yezo and the vanished “pit-dwellers,” or Koro-pok-guru — Murray retells at length the creation myths of the Kojiki and Nihongi: Izanagi and Izanami churning the islands into being with a jeweled spear, the birth and temporary retirement of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, and the slaying of the eight-forked serpent in Izumo. From this “traditional period” the story moves to Jimmu Tenno’s legendary founding of the empire in 660 B.C., then through a succession of emperors — including, many reigns later, the wanderings of the hero Yamato-dake, whose wife Princess Oto-Tachibana drowns herself to calm a storm off Sagami — with the emperors’ fabulous ages dropping abruptly once Chinese writing reaches Japan in A.D. 284, to the introduction of Buddhism under the Emperor Kimmei, its championing by Shotoku Taishi, and the long ascendancy of the Fujiwara family, who reduced a string of child emperors to ornamental abdication. Murray then follows the wars of the Taira and Minamoto clans, the drowning of the boy-emperor Antoku at the naval battle of Dan-no-ura, Yoritomo’s founding of the Kamakura shogunate and his jealous pursuit of his own brother Yoshitsune, the century-long rule of the Hojo regents, the repulse of Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet in 1281, and the rival northern and southern imperial courts under the Ashikaga shoguns.

A long stretch of the book is given to the Portuguese castaways who land at Tanegashima in the 1540s, the mission of Francis Xavier — quoted writing home that “I really think that among barbarous nations there can be none that has more natural goodness than Japan” — and the rapid rise and equally rapid suppression of Japanese Christianity. The political narrative runs on through Oda Nobunaga’s career and assassination at the temple of Honnoji, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s elevation to kwambaku, his capture of Odawara, his two invasions of Korea, and his fury on discovering that a Ming letter he had taken for tribute was in fact an “investiture” as king of Japan, and finally to Tokugawa Ieyasu’s victory at Sekigahara in 1600 and his founding of the Tokugawa shogunate. A separate chapter, “Christianity in the Seventeenth Century,” catalogues the persecution that followed in graphic detail — branding, the boiling springs of Onsen, the “Torment of the Fosse,” and the trampling of bronze crucifixes known as e-fumi — culminating in the Shimabara rebellion of 1637–38 and the slaughter of its defenders, after which, Murray notes, whole Christian communities nevertheless survived undetected near Nagasaki until their discovery in 1865. Later chapters trace Ieyasu’s consolidation of the feudal system, quoting at length from his testamentary “Legacy,” and the arrival of the castaway pilot William Adams and the Dutch and English traders who, after the expulsion of the Portuguese and Spanish, kept Japan’s one narrow window on the West open at Deshima.

The closing chapters turn to Commodore Perry’s expedition of 1853–54, printing the terms of the first American treaty, and then to the maneuvering between the shogun’s government at Yedo and the emperor’s court at Kyoto through the murders of the interpreter Heusken and the merchant Richardson, the bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki, and the last shogun Yoshinobu’s resignation of power in 1867. Murray narrates the brief civil war of the Restoration, the flight of the Tokugawa fleet under Enomoto to Hakodate, the voluntary surrender of the daimyos’ fiefs in 1869, and the Satsuma rebellion of 1877, in which Saigo Takamori’s death is followed, in Murray’s telling, by the assassination of the statesman Okubo Toshimichi the following year in revenge for it. The book ends with Emperor Mutsuhito’s promulgation of a written constitution on February 11, 1889, and with the almost simultaneous murder of Viscount Mori Arinori — “we cannot regard, except with profound regret, his untimely death” — on the very day the constitution was proclaimed.

Four appendices follow the narrative: a chronological list of emperors from Jimmu to Mutsuhito with their reputed ages at death, a table matching Japanese year-periods (nengo) to the Christian calendar, a list of shoguns from Yoritomo to the last Tokugawa, and a full translation of the seventeen-article “Laws of Shotoku Taishi,” followed by an index. Throughout the body of the book are full-page plates — a frontispiece of the bell at Kyoto, portraits of St. Francis Xavier, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu, Commodore Perry, and Meiji-era statesmen including Kido Takeyoshi, Iwakura Tomomi, Mori Arinori, Okubo Toshimichi, and Ito Hirobumi, archaeological plates of prehistoric clay images and jewelry, an engraving of old Japanese pleasure boats and a merchant vessel redrawn from Charlevoix, a full-size gold oban coin, and views of the Daibutsu at Kamakura and the Japanese kana syllabary — several credited in captions to sources such as Regamey’s Japan in Art and Industry, Chamberlain’s translation of the Kojiki, and Henry von Siebold’s Japanese Archaeology.

This is a continuous personal essay on Japanese childhood by an American woman who frames her subject, in an opening “Note,” by telling the reader what she has left out: she has, she writes, “omitted all mention of the ‘made over’ Japanese child and the institutions that have reconstructed him,” setting aside “his European knee-breeches,” “the would-be part in his hair,” and “his heavy armful of English school-books” so as to write instead about the traditional, un-Europeanized child. The book opens by invoking “two years of observation and study that we, two zealots, have devoted to the Wee Ones of Japan,” but the plural dissolves almost at once into a single voice — “that is, the scribe of the zealots now speaking” — and it is this first-person narrator, repeatedly calling her subject “my Wee One” and at the very end addressing “you, O American reader!” directly, who carries the book from there on. Dedicated “To the Wee Ones of America,” it has no table of contents or chapter titles, only four unheaded divisions marked by a roman numeral and a decorative initial, moving from a general essay on the character and marriage prospects of Japanese children, through their appearance, play, and festivals, to a separate account of children born into court and daimyo households, and finally to schooling and the year’s round of festivals, before two closing anecdotes end the text.

The first division praises Japanese children’s beauty and cleanliness — bathed in nearly boiling water at least twice daily — in frankly aestheticizing terms: the author admires their “Circean charm of bodily comeliness,” calls them “creamy sprites” and “cafe au lait elves,” and elsewhere describes the Japanese generally as a “race of little brown people.” Their good behavior she credits variously to a vegetarian diet, to play itself, and to a national horror of striking a child (a theory of Mrs. Chaplin-Ayrton’s, attributing docility to the sparseness of Japanese furniture, is aired and then rejected with a counter-anecdote from the author’s own Quaker-city childhood). From there the book turns to the marriage that awaits every daughter, quoting at length Basil Hall Chamberlain’s translation of the Onna Daigaku — Kaibara’s “Greater Learning for Women” — on a wife’s total submission to husband and parents-in-law, a text the author judges to hold “the good and the evil” together, and pairs it with Chamberlain’s Things Japanese on filial piety and the “Four-and-Twenty Paragons of Filial Piety.” The second division works through daily particulars: shaved infant heads and the elaborate hairstyles that follow; kimono, obi, tabi, geta, and zori; birth charms and engraved name-tags; honorific names such as O Gin (“Honorable Silver”) and O Kiku Yammamoto; games including ball-bouncing, an Oni-tag variant of “Pussy Wants a Corner,” the mock-battle “Genji-Heike” (reported from W. E. Griffis’s Mikado’s Empire), a race-board game to Kioto, and card games such as “A Hundred Verses of a Hundred Poets”; street entertainers from raree-shows to a candy hawker who drums, sings, and “cavorts about in a weird fandango,” and a griddle-cake seller whose whole rig is “to let by the hour for five sens”; day-long theater outings; temple excursions that culminate in the thirtieth-day miza maeri presentation of a baby; the four flower festivals of cherry, wistaria, lotus, and chrysanthemum; and the etiquette of flower-arranging traced to “Sen-no-Rikyu,” with its ten powers, a quoted passage from Sir Edwin Arnold on its rules of asymmetry, and the author’s own added gloss on the gendered symbolism of particular flower colors.

The third division contrasts this free life with that of children born behind the moat: an imperial baby is “coddled in the lap… all night” to keep its knees flexible for a lifetime of kneeling (a footnote recalls a twenty-course banquet that held the author’s own party “three hours upon bended knees”), and noble sons are raised in separate establishments under a tutor of rank, with their own retainers — as when the author sees the Emperor’s small son carried through a Nikko crowd in a “gold-lacquer palanquin” by six of his own attendants. A Tokugawa princess’s out-of-season, mid-December cherry-blossom party, staged to humor a sick child back to health, illustrates the same indulgence. The Empress’s charities are described at length — her personal economies funding the Tokyo Charity Hospital to the sum of “8446 yens, 90 sens, and 8 rins,” her visit to the dying Prince Iwakura, her reassuring verse after a palace fire, her dolls and toys handed out on a hospital ward round — alongside a passage quoted from Alice Mabel Bacon’s Japanese Girls and Women on a daimyo’s daughter’s sheltered, home-tutored upbringing ending in “an extremely early marriage.” The fourth division turns to school: children walk there armed with “copy-book, seroban, huge paper umbrella, and rice-jar,” bow the teacher in with cries of “Ohyo,” “Irrashai,” and “Oide nasai,” chant Chinese characters read bottom-to-top and right-to-left, dry brush-and-ink copybooks in the schoolyard, and work the seroban (soroban) so exclusively that a top Kyoto pupil, tested by the author, fumbles simple addition without it; the schoolmaster’s duties stretch to a pre-dawn walk with his pupils to hear lotuses open at sunrise, while girls separately study the Tea Ceremony under instructresses often “gentlewomen in destitute circumstances.” A festival calendar follows — the Hina Matsuri doll festival for girls, the boys’ Feast of Flags with its paper carp streamers (explained via Griffis), the swimming-day Tanabata festival tied to the tale of Altair and Vega, and the three-day New Year holiday with its mochi-man and midnight rice-throwing — and closes with the yaito treatment, burning cones of moxa applied to a child’s spine, dreaded enough that a gardener’s seven children are shown bolting from their house at the mere mention of the word.

The book ends on two small anecdotes rather than a summary: a Japanese boy’s apparent deference to “little playfellows of superior birth” turns out to be homage to a shared stick of American chewing gum, and Massa Ito, “the son of a wandering curio vender,” watches an American spend about a third of his purse on his father’s wares and announces, “I believe I’ll be an American.” The narrator closes by asking “you, O American reader!” to love her “Wee One,” if not for himself, then for his innocent picture of America as a land without want. The title page is itself illustrated — a torii gate framing a mother carrying a child on her back, flanked by pine boughs, a dragon banner, and a grinning mask — with the illustrations credited, in a stylized signature, to an artist surnamed Weldon. A separate “Illustrations” list keys eleven full-page plates to page numbers, each captioned with a phrase lifted straight from the text — “Sayonara,” “Slapping the Ball and Bouncing the Baby,” “The Hawker of Sugared Pease and Candied Beans,” “This Complete Equipment Is to Let by the Hour for Five Sens,” and “The Favorite New-Year’s Game for Little Girls” among them. After “THE END,” blank leaves are followed by publisher’s advertisements for other Harper & Brothers travel titles, including Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore’s Jinrikisha Days in Japan.

Seas and Lands is a travel narrative built on an outward-and-return circuit, told as a sequence of dispatches each headed with a place and a date, running from Liverpool in August 1889 to Aden in February 1891. Its title page identifies the author as the writer of The Light of Asia, and the book is dedicated to “my daughter, Katharine Lilian Arnold, the dear companion of my wanderings,” so the “we” of most of these letters is Arnold traveling with his daughter, joined at times by British and Japanese friends and by fellow diplomats. The volume carries a bibliographical note recording a first edition in September 1891, reprinted that November, followed by a cheap edition in February 1892 and a colonial edition that September, and it announces itself on its title page as furnished “with numerous illustrations”; true to that claim, dozens of captioned photographic portraits and views, beginning with a frontispiece titled “Our Garden at Azabu,” are set directly into the letterpress throughout. The book’s opening third might suggest a transatlantic and transcontinental travelogue: ten chapters carry Arnold from the Atlantic crossing through Canada and the northeastern United States to San Francisco, followed by an eleventh chapter on the Pacific crossing itself. But that proportion is deceptive. Of the book’s forty chapters, twenty-eight — and the great bulk of its nearly six hundred pages — are devoted to Japan, where Arnold and his daughter settled for over a year, and it is there that the book’s real interest and detail lie.

The outward chapters are concrete and anecdotal rather than merely scenic. Arnold sails from Liverpool on August 22, 1889, up the St. Lawrence route, past icebergs off the Belleisle Straits and shiploads of emigrants, to Quebec, where he lingers over the deaths of Wolfe and Montcalm and the epigram uniting their names on a Quebec monument; Montreal and Toronto follow, and a chapter on Niagara turns into a lengthy anthology of Canadian verse, from Isabella Valancey Crawford to Bliss Carman. In Washington he is received by President Harrison at the White House; in Philadelphia he crosses to Camden to visit Walt Whitman in his modest rooms, reading Leaves of Grass aloud with him; in New York he views Grant’s tomb and spends an afternoon with General Sherman, who talks of courage and the march to Atlanta. Boston and Harvard occupy two chapters built around the hospitality of President Charles W. Eliot, two lectures Arnold delivers on the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, and pilgrimages to Whittier at Oak Knoll, to Emerson’s house at Concord (where he sits with Emerson’s widow and walks to Walden Pond), and to Longfellow’s daughter Alice at Craigie House. A five-day rail run of some thirty-six hundred miles through Chicago, the prairie-dog country of Nebraska, and the Mormon country of Utah brings him to San Francisco, where a long chapter on the city’s Chinese quarter — opium dens, a Chinese theater, a “charcutier” whose wares Arnold says “attain the ghastly and the grotesque” — turns markedly more hostile and mocking in tone than anything he later writes about Japan. A twenty-day Pacific crossing on the Belgic, with Chinese steerage passengers and a suite of Chinese mandarins aboard, closes this first movement of the book.

Japan opens with the ship’s arrival at Yokohama, where Arnold quotes at length from the sixteenth-century letters of Will Adams, the English pilot who first described “this iland of Iapon” as “gouerned in great ciuilitie.” The early chapters are full of first impressions — jinrikisha men, geisha and musume in kimono and obi, and the observation that “all in Japan is chisai, choito [tiny], except the shrimps — which are colossal — and the sea, and the mountains” — along with Arnold’s first sight of Fuji-San from the “Hundred and One Steps” above Yokohama. Settled as a guest of the British Legation in Tokio, he makes an early excursion to Nikko, where he describes the mortuary shrines of the Tokugawa shoguns in detail and watches a shrine attendant perform the kagura, or temple dance, to “drive away devils,” and he records a strong earthquake felt one night in the capital. Subsequent chapters cover a chrysanthemum garden party at the Emperor’s Asakusa Palace (held under the shadow of a bomb attack on the reforming statesman Count Okuma), a visit from the wife of the ex-premier Count Kuroda, an audience with a Corean ambassador, the folktale of the fisherman Urashima, an evening at a Japanese theater, and a chapter on classical Japanese poetry that quotes and translates a seventh-century waka. A trip to Kamakura to see the great bronze Daibutsu closes out this run of sightseeing chapters.

The chapters that follow move through Japanese social ritual and Arnold’s own household. “A Japanese Dinner” describes a formal banquet at the Tokio Club, complete with a geisha dance re-enacting the legend of the wood-carver Hidari Jingoro and the statue he brings to life, and reprints a speech in which Arnold credits Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Japanese grammar with having drawn him to the country and calls Japanese manners superior to any nation’s he knows. In a companion lecture to the Japanese Educational Society and the Imperial University, also reprinted at length, he surveys Darwin, the spectroscope, and germ theory for his audience, illustrates a kinship between Buddhism and science partway through by reading from his own earlier poem on the Buddha, and closes by asserting outright that “between Buddhism and modern science there exists a close intellectual bond” — a claim of kinship that sits oddly beside a separate, plainly stated view, in a chapter on Japanese art, that a Japanese woman’s status is “traditionally inferior” and that she “lives a semi-slave in too many cases,” even as he elsewhere calls Japanese women “almost semi-angelic.” A chapter on the Cha-no-yu tea ceremony traces its history to the Buddhist priest Sen-no-rikiu and the “Taikoon” Hideyoshi. Having rented a house on the hill of Azabu, Arnold is formally appointed, for a nominal salary, tutor to his landlord’s children in order to satisfy Japanese residency rules, and names his household staff one by one — the cook Nakashima Yasuzo, the jinrikisha-puller Watanabe Shuzo, the gardener Suzuki Kanzo, his daughter’s maid Yoshida Tori — along with the hibachi, the charcoal fire-box he calls the true hearth of any Japanese home. Further chapters cover a grand ball at the “Hall of the Cry of the Stag” attended by more than twelve hundred guests, a visit to the ex-premier Count Ito at Odawara (whose wife recalls hiding him under the floor matting from would-be assassins), two serious fires he watches burn through wooden neighborhoods, the rules for Japan’s first parliamentary elections, and the routine of a middle-class household through a single day, ending with an invitation to the imperial army and navy review at Nagoya.

The remaining Japan chapters turn from private life to public spectacle and politics. At Nagoya, Arnold watches a full-scale mock battle of the imperial army and navy staged before Emperor Mutsuhito, complete with Krupp field guns and some thirty thousand troops, and comes away calling the Japanese soldier “excellent material.” Two long chapters titled “Japan and Foreign Powers” argue at length for ending the extraterritorial jurisdiction that exempted Westerners from Japanese courts, tracing the treaty-revision negotiations in detail and faulting Britain specifically for delaying a settlement Arnold believes Japan has earned. A chapter on the 1890 National Industrial Exhibition at Uyeno catalogues its porcelain, lacquer, and joinery; another follows the blind shampooer, or amma-san, through the practices of moxa cautery and acupuncture; and a lighter chapter records a day spent viewing irises at Hori-kiri. At the hot-spring resort of Miyanoshita he visits the sulfurous “Great Hell,” O Jigoku, where a Russian officer once died in the boiling mud, and a later chapter describes the Bon Matsuri, the festival of the dead, when lanterns are lit to guide ancestral spirits home. A chapter on the two-centuries-old grave, at Meguro, of the lovers Gompachi and Ko-Murasaki retells their story of robbery, prostitution, and murder before Arnold climbs Fuji-San itself with a Captain Ingles, R.N., an ascent of some thirteen thousand feet from which he sends home a verse letter composed at the crater’s rim; a further chapter follows him to the mountain resorts of Ikao and Haruna. “Eastern Fortitude” describes a cholera epidemic that had already killed more than thirteen thousand people nationwide by the time he wrote, crediting Japan’s public-health authorities with a “cool, fearless, practical, and enlightened” response. The political and social threads meet in the book’s last two Japan chapters: an account of being received, at the Emperor’s annual chrysanthemum garden party, by Emperor Mutsuhito and Empress Haruko, both described at length, and a detailed record of the ceremonial opening, in November 1890, of Japan’s first Diet, which Arnold calls part of “the immortal glory of Japan” and for which he reproduces the Emperor’s opening speech in full.

Only in its final chapter does the book turn for home. Arnold leaves Japan in January 1891 aboard the Verona, threading the Inland Sea to help a grounded British gunboat before a violent gale in the Yellow Sea nearly disables the ship; he stops at Nagasaki, then Hong Kong, where he inspects the bullet-scarred steamer Namoa, looted by pirates posing as passengers a fortnight before, and continues through Singapore and the Straits of Malacca to Colombo, where he notes that he has personally completed a circumnavigation of the globe. The last dated letter is written from Aden on February 13, 1891, with the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and Marseilles still ahead of him on the final run home to London.

“Wandering Words” gathers twenty short travel pieces that Sir Edwin Arnold had published, as its title page states, “in the Daily Telegraph and foreign journals and magazines,” and which he dedicated to his newspaper colleague “J. M. Le Sage, Esq.” under the heading “these Wandering Words.” Nothing in the book claims a single journey binds the chapters together; internal dates and asides show they were written years apart and stitched into a sequence afterward. The Nile chapter opens “It is now about seven years ago since we set forth on that memorable journey”; the Hawaii chapter closes with the dateline “March 8th, 1892”; the wrestling chapter is signed “Tokyo, June 10, 1892”; and the Thames-estuary chapter (“A Lucky Newspaper”) alludes to the current season’s races of the Prince of Wales’s cutter Britannia. The narrator who links them is, by his own account, a poet and journalist who had lectured across “sixty or seventy” American towns, had commanded his own yawl the Harelda on the Thames estuary, and had gone out to India as a young college principal at the time of the 1857 Mutiny — a widely traveled Englishman recollecting episodes from very different decades and continents rather than narrating one continuous tour.

The book’s opening stretch has nothing to do with Japan even though it is nominally headed that way. “An Earthly Paradise” finds Arnold aboard the steamship Belgic, “bound by way of Honolulu to Yokohama” with six hundred Chinese laborers to land, but the chapter itself stays entirely in Hawaii — Diamond Head, the reef and lagoon of Honolulu, a state dinner at the Queen’s palace with poi and golden plover, and an audience with Queen Liliuokalani, whom he describes as “every inch a queen” in her mourning silks. “Watching the Stars” moves to the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, California, where Arnold spends a night at the great telescope with its director, Professor Holden, debating nebular theory and the fate of dying stars. “An Adventure on the Nile” then jumps back to an earlier winter, when Arnold’s dahabeeah Bedouin capsized in a squall near Girgeh with his wife, son Julian, and daughter aboard, and the party swam and rowed to safety after the drowning of the cook. “In the Holy Land” traces a pilgrim’s route from Beirut through Galilee and Jerusalem, and “Indian Princes at Home” opens Arnold’s long acquaintance with British India at the courts and palaces of Rajputana, illustrated by a view of “The Tank, Ulwar Palace.”

Japan itself is confined to three chapters — a minority of the book, some seventy pages out of roughly 372 — but they are substantial and are given here in proportion. “Love and Marriage in Japan” (pp. 119–144) is an opinionated essay rather than a narrative: Arnold defends, against critics of his earlier Seas and Lands and Japonica, his description of Japanese women as “semi-angelic,” while frankly cataloguing their “deplorably unfair and subordinate position” — the ease of divorce for husbands, the practical absence of legal marriage, the daughter’s exclusion from inheritance — and crediting Confucian custom rather than any lack of natural virtue for it. He leans on Alice Mabel Bacon’s writing on Japan, praises the “good and patriotic” Empress, and worries that Western-style education and “woman’s rights” might purchase Japanese women’s independence at the cost of the very gentleness he admires. “Japanese Wrestlers” (pp. 145–158) is by contrast a piece of dated eyewitness reporting, signed “Tokyo, June 10, 1892”: Arnold describes the summer Sumo Banzuke at Ekoin in close ringside detail, naming the champions Nishinoumi, Konishiki, and Otohira, explaining the umpire’s calls of “Mada! mada!” and “Yoshi!,” and estimating the crowd at four thousand. “Some Japanese Pictures” (pp. 179–208) ranges still further — the good behavior and dress of Japanese children, the doll festival of March 3 and the carp banners of May 5, the games go and hana-awase, Buddhist funeral customs and the burying of clay images in place of living retainers, torchlit cormorant-fishing on the river Nagara near Gifu, the newly invented jinrikisha, and a closing plea that England learn Japanese habits of bathing and cleanliness. The same chapter notes, more darkly, the soshi who assassinated “my enlightened and illustrious friend Viscount Mori” and bombed Count Okuma.

England and India recur through the middle chapters in pieces that have nothing to do with Japan. “At an Indian Christmas-Time” is Arnold’s own recollection of landing at Bombay in 1857 as the newly appointed Principal of the Government College at Poona, in the middle of the Sepoy Mutiny, and of a young officer’s fatal presentiment before the siege of Rajgurh. “And Not Ashamed” is a meditation, prompted by a passage of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters,” set among the fishing folk of an English west-coast village. “A Lucky Newspaper” recounts a Thames-estuary cruise aboard Arnold’s own yawl Harelda past the Mouse Light and the sandbank maze — the Goodwins, the Kentish Knock, the Shipwash — that protects the river’s mouth, and takes its title from a chance kindness: a lady’s gift of her Daily Telegraph to two lonely lightship-keepers leaves their boat perfectly positioned, soon afterward, to save a yacht-skipper knocked overboard — “so it was,” Arnold writes, “that a lucky newspaper saved the life of a man.” “The Tiger’s Village” and “Wild Boars” return to the Deccan jungle of Arnold’s Indian years, the second an extended, admiring account of pig-sticking in which “no beast has a higher pride or finer courage” than the boar that turns at bay against mounted spearmen.

The remaining chapters keep the same scattered pattern. “The Wealth of Poverty,” “Stronger than Death” (the story of a village girl, Grace Williams, on the English coast), and “How the Dead Saved the Living” (an Essex fisherman’s tale, told to Arnold aboard the smack Gratitude, of a painter nearly drowned crossing the tidal flats of Foulness Creek, guided ashore by a candle burning in a cottage window and bursting in on the skipper’s mother as she keeps watch over her husband’s drowned body — and who, in gratitude, later paid for the very boat Arnold sails on, its bow carved with a Bible and a candle) are English coastal reminiscences; “Days at Sea” is straightforwardly autobiographical, tracing Arnold’s boyhood love of the navy and of travel books back to a father who once had a servant carry in “a large washing-basket… full to the edge with huge folios and quartos.” “Oriental Story-Tellers” compares the profession across three regions — the Hanashika of Japan, the café narrators of Egypt, Persia, and Arabia, and the wandering joshi of India — and gives over several pages, with a sequence of nine line illustrations, to the Japanese fairy tale of the fisher-boy Urashima and the Sea-King’s daughter, “as Mrs. James so well translated” it. “A Gentle Murderess” returns to Hawaii for a Kanaka legend, picked up “on the beach of Oahu,” of a woman named Mina-Mina who loses her child to a shark to save her husband. The book ends with “Tent Life,” which opens with Arnold cruising the Solent past Calshot Castle and closes by recalling the tents of his old touring days in India, and with a plain closing wish that “half enough use is not made by English tourists and holiday-seekers of the delights… afforded by life under canvas.”

The volume is heavily illustrated throughout, “with illustrations from drawings by Ben Boothby and from photographs,” as the title page states, and the apparatus is not uniform in kind. Dramatic or narrative full-page plates — the interior of the Lick Observatory, the courtyard of Ulwar Palace, the capsizing of a yacht’s boom, a boar breaking cover, a shark attack — are signed pen-and-wash drawings by Ben Boothby, each captioned in small capitals with a page cross-reference below the image. The plates and in-text pictures tied specifically to the Japan chapters, by contrast, are unsigned halftone photographs: “A Japanese Dinner” facing page 121, “A Geisha” set into the text at page 131, “Japanese Wrestlers” facing page 147, and “Rice-Cleaning in Japan” facing page 181. The nine small illustrations accompanying the Urashima folktale in the storytellers’ chapter are drawn in yet a third manner, imitating a Japanese woodblock print style distinct from both the Boothby drawings and the photographs. Even the book’s frontispiece, captioned “From the Land of the Rising Sun,” puts a Japanese image before the reader on the very first opening, though the pages that actually take up Japan amount to only a modest share of what follows.

Occult Japan is framed on its own title page as “an esoteric study of Japanese personality and possession,” and that is an accurate description: rather than a travel narrative, it is a sustained, argumentative investigation of one phenomenon — spirit possession as practiced within Shinto and its Ryobu-Shinto and Buddhist offshoots — pursued as something close to a forensic case. Lowell presents himself throughout as an eyewitness and, increasingly, a participant, stating in his preface that “the manifestations of which this book treats were witnessed by the writer in 1891 and 1893”; the account begins with a chance encounter with pilgrims in trance on Mount Ontaké and continues through interviews, private séances staged in his own house in Tokyo, and direct tests — pin-pricks, pulse-taking — performed on entranced subjects. The book pursues three linked aims: to describe the possession cult’s practices, dividing them into “miracles” worked on things and “incarnations” worked on people; to argue, against rival Buddhist claims, that the cult is purely Shinto in origin; and, in a long closing section titled “Noumena,” to set out a psychological and physiological theory of self, will, and trance that Lowell then extends into sweeping claims about Japanese national character.

The narrative proper opens on Ontaké, the “Honorable Peak” of the Hida-Shinshiu range, which Lowell climbed with a friend in August 1891 expecting nothing more than scenery. At the eighth station three young pilgrims in white performed the rite of kami-oroshi before a wayside shrine, twisting their fingers into knots while chanting until one fell into trance, declared himself the god Hakkai, and answered questions about whether the weather would hold for the pilgrimage and whether the loved ones he had left at home were safe, before being roused and kneaded back to normal; the same three men went through the cycle some ten times between four one afternoon and six the next morning, eating nothing and drinking only water throughout. A chapter on Shinto’s history follows — its eclipse under Buddhism, its revival after the eighteenth-century commentator Mabuchi and the Meiji Restoration, and the 1887 assassination of the reforming minister Mori Arinori for treading with his boots on the mat before the Ise shrine — along with a cosmology Lowell attributes to “my friend the high priest of the Shinshiu sect”: that all beings combine body (karada), spirit (shinki), and, in some cases, soul (tamashii), possession being simply one spirit displacing another. The following chapter, “Miracles,” works through the Sankei or Three Great Rites: kugadachi, in which the officiant dashes boiling water from bamboo fronds over his own body and the onlooking bystanders; hiwatari, the barefoot walk across live coals, which Lowell watched performed first by the whole priesthood and then by the lay public at the Shinshiu sect’s head temple in Kanda; and tsurugi-watari, the climb up a ladder of upright sword blades, arranged privately for him at the shrine of Hachiman Jinja near Hachioji, where his own houseboy, Asa, volunteered to make the climb, descended safely, but was found cut and bleeding shortly afterward, back among the spectators.

“Incarnations,” the longest chapter, catalogues the austerities (gyo) by which ordinary tradesmen — a barber, a plasterer, a dyer’s apprentice, a wine-shop clerk — qualify to be possessed and to practice as faith-healers: repeated cold-water dousing including a two-a.m. session (yatsugyo), prolonged fasting on buckwheat and greens, and abstention from salt and tobacco, with one subject telling Lowell that after three weeks of the regimen “he was so used up that he could hardly stand.” Lowell describes several sittings staged in his own house — a Shinshiu priest who hoped, unsuccessfully, to speak English while possessed; the eight-man Mi-Kagura-ko, or August Dancing Pilgrim Club, whose members included a plasterer, a pawnbroker, and a fishmonger; and a Nichiren-sect trance in which an eighteen-year-old girl, not a priest, became the god’s mouthpiece — as well as the Kwancho’s “kindergarten,” a standing class in which the high priest at Kanda trains boys and girls to somersault, climb walls, and dance themselves into possession. “Pilgrimages and the Pilgrim Clubs” turns to the ko, the pilgrim societies that fund members’ trips to Ontaké or Ise by internal lottery and mark their passage with towel-banners (ho-no-tenugui) left hanging at every inn; the Ontaké clubs are singled out as the only ones organized specifically to produce trance rather than simply to visit a shrine. “The Gohei” then makes the book’s central evidentiary argument: that the zigzag paper wand present at every possession, whether performed by Ryobuists, Buddhists, or Shintoists, proves the cult’s purely Shinto origin, a case Lowell supports with possession episodes translated from the Kojiki and Nihonshoki — the Sun-Goddess’s withdrawal into her cave and Uzume’s possession before it, the oracle received by Empress Jingo before her conquest of Korea, and kugadachi ordeals decreed under the emperors Ojin and Inkyo. A short chapter on the Shrines of Ise closes this half of the book with Lowell’s discovery, on a pilgrimage there, of the Ara-mi-tama-no-miya, or Temple of the Rough-August-Soul, a shrine the Ise priests told him was dedicated to the fierce aspect of Amaterasu that once possessed an imperial princess — evidence, he argues, that possession was once integral to Shinto generally rather than the property of a few sects.

The book’s final third, “Noumena,” drops the eyewitness voice for a discursive essay reducing will, and eventually personality itself, to ideas understood as modes of “molecular motion,” with consciousness explained as a kind of “nerve-glow” produced when a neural current meets resistance in the brain’s cortical cells. Lowell extends this into comparative claims about “selfhood” as a quantity that varies by sex and race, asserting “a comparative absence of Ego” in woman, a lesser degree of individuality among the French, and, at greatest length, among the Japanese, of whom a friend’s epigram — “a Japanese does not think” — is offered as essentially sound; as evidence he cites a jinrikisha driver who sets off at a run before thinking to ask his passenger’s destination, and he calls the country’s contemporary Westernization “the most stupendous hypnotic act ever seen,” “the hypnotization of a whole nation, with its eyes open.” Chapters on dreams, hypnotic trance, and possession trance apply the same “dominant idea” theory to explain why entranced subjects feel nothing when pricked with pins, why a sequence of different gods can share one trance without remembering each other individually, and why the trance state is, in Lowell’s account, atavistic — a temporary reversion from individual to racial personality.

Lowell brings the argument to a close by declaring that in Shinto god-possession one is watching “the actual incarnation of the ancestral spirit of the race,” closing the book three sentences later with the claim that “if these his ancestors were gods in the past, gods they are that descend to embodiment to-day.” Beyond its letterpress it carries four plates — a frontispiece, “A Possession by the Gods upon Ontaké,” and three further illustrations captioned “A Buddhist Divine Possession,” “The Leader of a Pilgrim Band Blessing the Holy Water,” and “A Pilgrim Club Ascending Ontaké” — which the prefatory note to the fourth edition, signed “P. L.,” credits to “photographs by the writer, taken at the time”; as printed, the plates reproduce as tinted, painterly scenes rather than plain photographic prints. That same preface reports that by the time of this edition the fire-walking ceremony at Kanda had already become one of the sights tourists were taken to see. The volume has no index or appendix; its final leaves carry only the printer’s mark of the Riverside Press.

Hearn’s own title page bills this eleven-piece collection as “Reveries and Studies in New Japan,” and the two words name two genuinely different kinds of writing bound together here rather than one blended manner: first-person travel sketches and dated diary entries stand alongside argumentative essays on Japanese society and religion, with two of the eleven pieces — “The Red Bridal” and “Yuko: A Reminiscence” — turning for most of their length to third-person narrative, though each opens (and “The Red Bridal” also closes) in the first person, and “Yuko” in particular reads as reminiscence or reportage of a real event rather than declared fiction. An unattributed line, “As far as the east is from the west—,” serves as epigraph, and the book is dedicated “To Nishida Sentaro, in dear remembrance of Izumo days,” a phrase pointing back to an earlier post the narrator held in Izumo before the setting of most of what follows: teaching English literature and composition at the Government College, also called the Higher Middle School, in Kumamoto, on Kyushu. The title page names Hearn directly, with a secondary credit as the author of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. The pieces range from Kumamoto and neighboring Hakata to Yokohama, and both of the book’s two public events — the 1894 mobilization for the war against China and the 1891 mourning that followed an attack on the Russian Tsarevich at Otsu — surface only in its second half, not at its opening: the peacetime reverie that actually opens the book is dated to Meiji 26 (1893) and contains no war content at all.

The book opens with “The Dream of a Summer Day,” a reverie in which the narrator, riding by kuruma from a seaside inn called the House of Urashima toward Kumamoto, retells the legend of the fisherman Urashima Taro and the Dragon King’s daughter, the tale’s wonder running alongside haggling with the kurumaya over fare and a wayside story of a spring that restores youth. “With Kyushu Students” turns to the classroom: a portrait of the “Kyushu spirit” among the young men at the college, filled out with English compositions his pupils wrote on subjects such as “What do men remember longest?” and “My First Day at School,” classroom debates in which the students judge Malory’s Sir Bors and Euripides’ Alcestis against their own standards of loyalty and filial duty, and a closing sketch of an elderly, much-loved teacher of Chinese classics, once a warrior of the Aidzu clan, whom the narrator likens to a Shinto kami. “At Hakata” follows him to a temple court where a colossal bronze Buddha is being cast from women’s donated mirrors, a sight that opens into a retelling of the folk tale of the Matsuyama mirror, in which a girl mistakes her dead mother’s bequeathed looking-glass for her mother’s returning face.

“Of the Eternal Feminine” is the collection’s most sustained argument: it holds that the Western literary and artistic idealization of woman which Hearn calls “the Eternal Feminine” has no counterpart in Japan, and works outward from there into the reticence of Japanese family life — a refined man, he reports, will speak of his parents but almost never of his wife — the total absence of kissing or embracing from Japanese love poetry and ballad, and, by contrast, a native aesthetic sense that prizes irregularity itself, finding beauty in an unhewn garden stone or in a sliding screen whose repeated jewel-motifs are never spaced or paired alike. “Bits of Life and Death” shifts into a run of dated notebook entries, July through December, recording the yearly cleansing of a household well in honor of the god Suijin-Sama; a neighborhood Jizo festival; a dyer neighbor’s household shrine and the story he tells of once being robbed; the reading, from a bone fragment left after cremation, of a dead child’s destiny; the case of O-Masu, who bit off her own tongue under questioning rather than risk testifying against her father; the ritual by which a two-year-old is asked to name a “former life”; an extended account of a killing committed jointly by Ichiro and O-Noto in revenge for an insult, followed by their own ritual suicide; and the death, after seven years of illness, of a man who survived a failed love-suicide only to be shunned ever after by his neighbors.

“The Stone Buddha” returns to reverie, staging, at a hillside cemetery above the college, an argument between a personified Western “Science” and Buddhist doctrine over cosmic dissolution and rebirth, carried on in the presence of a moss-covered stone image and a peasant plowing the terraces below. “Jiujutsu,” the longest piece in the book, describes an art whose name Hearn glosses as meaning “to conquer by yielding,” taught in a special hall at the college hung with a portrait of the aged Professor of Chinese, Akizuki of Aidzu, and extends it into a governing metaphor for Meiji Japan’s policy of adopting Western railways, telegraphs, schools, and armies while refusing Western dress, religion, and rights of foreign land ownership; it surveys the failure of Christian missions in Japan and the new Anglo-Japanese treaty negotiated by Aoki, and closes with a postscript, added as the proofs were going through the press, that celebrates Japan’s victory over China and argues, invoking Herbert Spencer and Dr. Pearson, that the sheer cost of maintaining Western civilization may doom the “Western Races” to extinction at the hands of more frugal, more fertile Eastern peoples capable, in Hearn’s phrase, of “underliving” them. “The Red Bridal” is the book’s one sustained third-person love story, framed by a first-person opening and close: the village boy Taro and the girl O-Yoshi, raised together since their first day at school, are parted when O-Yoshi’s scheming stepmother sells her in marriage to the wealthy, universally disliked Okazaki, and the pair perform a joshi, a double love-suicide, lying down together across the rail in the path of an oncoming express.

“A Wish Fulfilled” is set in Kumamoto at the outbreak of the war with China, during a farewell visit from Kosuga Asakichi, a former pupil now a sergeant bound for Korea; their long conversation, over coffee in place of the wine he had sworn to his mother to forgo, turns on dying without an heir, on the duties owed the dead, and on an old poem of the priest-poet Saigyo, and the piece ends with the soldier’s name on a casualty list and a small shrine improvised before his photograph. “In Yokohama” records two visits, five years apart, to a small Jizo temple decorated with incongruous foreign votive objects — a French preserve-jar doing service as a flower vase, an American cigarette box holding incense rods, a print of the actress Adelaide Neilson as Juliet — and built mainly around a long question-and-answer dialogue with the temple’s aged priest on karma, on the universal Mind he calls Shinnyo, on the illusion named Mu-myo, and on the nature of Nirvana; by the second visit the old priest has died, and a younger man has taken his place. The closing piece, “Yuko: A Reminiscence,” dated May 1891, opens in the first person with an old merchant asking the narrator to help draft a telegram to the Tsar, before turning largely to third-person narration to tell of Yuko, a young servant girl in Kanagawa who travels alone to Kyoto and takes her own life before a government gate as an offering meant to end the Emperor’s grief; the book ends with her story reaching the newspapers, the ministers of state whispering that “all else will change; but the heart of the nation will not change,” and the government, for reasons of its own, declining officially to know of it.

Katharine Schuyler Baxter’s In Bamboo Lands (New York: The Merriam Company, 1895) is a first-person travel narrative of a leisurely, roughly year-long tour that took the author and a shifting party of companions to Japan and back. A dedication (“To the Public, I dedicate the simple truth”) and preface set the terms: Baxter describes an “urgent request… from friends to join them in Yokohama” as the occasion for the trip, promises “what I saw and did” rather than “extraneous digression” or her “own reflections,” and credits background reading in Dr. J. J. Rein, the columns of The Japan Mail, and the works of B. H. Chamberlain, along with brief accounts, as promised, of pottery, damascene, cloisonné, and lacquer manufacture. She narrates in a shifting mix of singular and plural — “I made hurried preparations and started at once” opens the book, but the sightseeing that fills most chapters is rendered as “we rode,” “we climbed,” “we admired,” tracking a travelling party whose membership changes from city to city. The book runs to eight chapters — The Queen’s Highway, Around Tokyo Bay, Nikko and the North, Tokyo, The Tokaido, Kyoto, Mutsuhito and Haruko, and The Inland Sea — closing with a Glossary of Japanese Words; a printed table of illustrations lists 118 titled captions, roughly 47 of them full-page plates set on their own leaves, overwhelmingly photographs (Yokohama Bay from “the Bluff,” pilgrims bound for Fujiyama, a pine trained into the shape of a junk, the site of an official harakiri), with occasional smaller line cuts set directly into the text (a folding fan).

The opening chapter is not set in Japan at all: Baxter crosses Canada by the Canadian Pacific Railway, through Banff, Lake Louise, and the Selkirks to Vancouver, then rides out a Pacific typhoon aboard the Empress of India before landing at Yokohama. “Around Tokyo Bay” settles into the kuruma-and-guidebook rhythm that carries the rest of the book — the curio shops and villas of the Bluff, an ascent of Fujiyama made “against the wishes of our best friends,” and excursions to the Great Buddha and shrine of Yoritomo at Kamakura, the cave of Benten at Enoshima, and the grave of Will Adams at Yokusuka. “Nikko and the North” gives the fullest treatment of any single site: the mausolea of the Shoguns Ieyasu and Iemitsu, the Yomeimon gate, the sleeping cat attributed to Hidari Jingoro, and the annual festival procession watched from a bench the hotel had set up on the avenue of cryptomerias; from there Baxter continues north through the silk district around Fukushima to Hakodate on Yezo, visiting Ainos at the town and its museum before sailing back down the coast.

Back in the capital, “Tokyo” moves from a formal geisha dinner at the Koyo-Kwan restaurant — eight courses and three dances, itemized in order, with an aside on married women once being required to blacken their teeth, which Baxter calls a practice amounting to “positive inhumanity” — to the graves of the Forty-Seven Ronin, whose story she reproduces at length from B. H. Chamberlain, the flower calendars of Ueno and Kameido, General Grant’s 1879 visit, and the 1889 dynamite-bomb attack that cost Count Ookuma a leg amid the era’s treaty-revision politics. “The Tokaido” follows the old post road southwest through the mountain resorts of Miyanoshita and Hakone and the rice country beyond Hamamatsu to Nagoya castle with its golden dolphins and, at Gifu, a long quoted description — credited to a Major-General Palmer letter in the London Times — of cormorant fishing on the River Nagara.

Kyoto receives the book’s longest chapter and its densest description: Chion-in, the twin Hongwanji temples, the thousand images of Kwannon at Sanjiu-Sangendo, Kiyomizu-dera, and the potteries of Awata, set alongside excursions to the tea plantations of Uji, the rapids of the Katsuragawa, and the old capital and Great Buddha at Nara. At Otsu, on Lake Biwa, Baxter recounts in detail the 1891 attack on the Czarevitch — by the time of publication already Czar Nicholas II — by the police guard Tsuda Sanzo; elsewhere in the chapter she visits a geisha school, sits in on an Anglican service held in a Japanese convert’s house, and tours the Doshisha, the university founded under the Reverend Joseph Neeshima.

The two closing chapters shift register. “Mutsuhito and Haruko” is a set portrait of the imperial family built around the Emperor’s birthday review and a tour of the rebuilt palace, with character sketches of Mutsuhito, Empress Haruko, and the young Crown Prince Haru; Baxter returns here to a complaint that runs through the later chapters, that the court and the educated young were discarding the kimono and “national politeness” for the “stiff European” article of dress, and states plainly that she wishes Japan would keep its own customs rather than, in her words, “endeavor to be everything that is Western and nothing that is Eastern.” “The Inland Sea” carries the party from Kobe through the strait to Miyajima and on to Nagasaki, where Baxter recounts the seventeenth-century killing of Christian converts on the island of Pappenburg and the two centuries of Dutch trade confined to Deshima, before the ship sails on toward China. The narrative ends there; the Glossary of Japanese Words closes the text proper, and a large folding map of Japan, with inset maps of Yezo, the Bonin Islands, and the Loochoo Islands, is bound in after it.

Rev. John W. Saunby’s Japan; The Land of the Morning is a popular history of Japan written by a Canadian Methodist missionary who had lived in Japan since arriving in 1886, part general survey of the country’s past and, in its final pages, a memoir of his own mission work. The book carries no preface, dedication, or list of illustrations; its front matter is only a half title, an uncaptioned full-page frontispiece engraving facing the title page, the title page itself, a copyright notice, and a one-page table of contents, after which Chapter I opens directly with the geography and climate of the archipelago — there is no voyage out, no shipboard chapter, nothing set outside Japan itself. Saunby writes in an editorial “we” drawn from years of residence near Mount Fuji and later at Kofu and Kanazawa, and he states his method plainly partway through: it is not his purpose to give “a consecutive and detailed record of historical events” but to compress “the great leading features” of Japanese history “into as small a compass as possible” for the general reader. The ten chapters run in sequence from land and legend through the medieval feudal wars, the Portuguese and Jesuit century, the Tokugawa seclusion, the Meiji restoration, and finally the planting and growth of Protestant missions, ending with an account of his own denomination’s work in which he appears by name among the missionaries he describes.

The opening chapter, “The Land,” moves from the four main islands and the Kuroshiwo current to an admiring description of Fuji seen from the deck of a coasting steamer, then down to daily life on the high road: checkerboard rice paddies, jinrikisha runners (Saunby recalls being drawn forty-five miles by one man in nine hours), itinerant peddlers, Buddhist priests, and the blind beggars he blames on the Japanese habit of carrying infants face-up to the sun. “Myth and Tradition” retells the creation of the islands from Izanagi’s jeweled spear, the birth of the sun-goddess Amaterasu and her flight into the rock cave, and traces the torii gateway, the household shrine, and reverence for the emperor’s ancestors back to these stories. “In the Ancient Days” carries the record from the legendary Jimmu Tenno through Yamato Dake’s campaigns against the Ainos to the Empress Jingu Kongo’s raid on Corea, which Saunby treats as the historical seed from which continental civilization — and Buddhism with it — entered Japan. “The Scholar and the Priest” follows that seed further: the adoption of Chinese characters and invention of the kana syllabary, the ethical force of Confucianism, and a long account of Buddhism’s arrival, its reformers Nichiren and Shinran, and its decline after 1868 into what he illustrates with a temple priest’s own words — asked whether his parishioners ever visit, the priest answers, “They come when they die, and I bury them.”

“The Struggle for the Mastery” and “The Samurai and His Lord” cover the Fujiwara regency and the Taira-Minamoto wars, the careers of Yoritomo and his brother Yoshitsune, and then settle into a long, almost novelistic retelling of the forty-seven ronin’s revenge on Kira Kotsuke-no-Suke, a story Saunby calls “wild and savage” even as he offers it as the clearest window into feudal loyalty. “The Trader and the Missionary” turns to the sixteenth century: the storm-driven landfall of Mendez Pinto, the Portuguese firearms trade, and Francis Xavier’s mission, which Saunby treats warmly despite his general suspicion of Rome, quoting Griffis at length on why Catholicism spread so quickly among a people he calls already primed by Buddhist ritual and pageantry, and MacFarlane separately on Japan’s pre-existing religious pluralism and a speculative theory of earlier Nestorian contact; the chapter closes with Nobunaga’s early favor toward the new religion and its undoing under Hideyoshi, whose crucifixion of twenty-six martyrs — three Portuguese Jesuits, six Spanish Franciscans, and seventeen native Christians — ends the chapter on a note of reversal. “Tokugawa’s Triumph” opens with Ieyasu’s rise and victory at Sekigahara, then follows the Englishman Will Adams’s career at the shogun’s court, quoted from Adams’s own letters, through the Shimabara rebellion and two centuries of sealed borders — closing on the line that “the triumph of the Tokugawa was complete.”

“Daybreak” credits Japan’s reopening as much to forces generated inside the country — the revival of native historical scholarship patronized by the Prince of Mito, decades of Dutch learning absorbed through the trading post at Deshima — as to Commodore Perry, whose 1852 letter from President Fillmore Saunby reproduces in full, and it traces the shogunate’s fall through the bombardments of Kagoshima and Shimonoseki to the restoration of the emperor. The closing chapter, “Sunrise in Sunrise Land,” surveys Protestant missions generally, quoting extensively from J. F. Verbeck’s 1883 historical sketch of the field, before narrowing to the Canadian Methodist mission specifically: the pioneers George Cochran and Davidson Macdonald, the opening of stations at Shidzuoka, Numadzu, and Kofu, and the schools founded by the Woman’s Missionary Society. Here the book’s habitual “we” gives way to Saunby naming himself in the third person among the missionaries posted in 1886 — to Kofu, with F. A. Cassidy assigned to Shidzuoka — and later “set apart” to open a new station at Kanazawa on the west coast, part of a westward expansion of the mission still under way as he wrote.

The book carries no index, glossary, or appendix; it ends where the narrative does, with a plea for the five competing Methodist bodies working in Japan to unite into a single church and a closing image of the “Sun of Righteousness,” which, however hidden by storm clouds, “never retraces its steps down the eastern sky.” Its apparatus is pictorial rather than documentary: more than a dozen full-page engravings are set into the text without any accompanying list, ranging from genre plates such as “Musicians with Samisen and Koto,” “Of Low Degree,” and “An Artisan” to landscapes like “The Inland Sea, Japan,” “Fuji Yama, the Peerless,” and “Temple Avenue at Nikko,” alongside historical subjects — the outer wall and moat of Tokyo Castle, the ruined citadel of Aidzu, and a plate of Aino aborigines set into the chapter on ancient conquest.

Lotos-Time in Japan is a first-person tourist’s account of a single Japanese summer, written by an American already the author of books on travel (The Pacific Coast Scenic Tour, Spain and Morocco) and music (Chopin, and Other Musical Essays, Wagner and His Works), as the publisher’s own list of his earlier books shows. Dedicated to Henry Villard and dated “New York, March 2, 1895,” Finck’s preface disclaims any apology for adding to the shelf of Japan books, arguing that no existing volume offers “a convenient bird’s-eye view … of the principal points in which Japanese civilization is superior to our own” — a thesis he fortifies throughout with quotations from Basil Hall Chamberlain, William Elliot Griffis, Lafcadio Hearn, Rutherford Alcock, A. B. Mitford, Isabella Bird, and Alice Bacon. He reaches Japan by way of a five-hour call at Honolulu, Fuji hidden by cloud on arrival, lands at Yokohama, and bases himself in Tokyo before pushing north to Yezo (Hokkaido) and its Aino settlements, then south again through Nikko and Kyoto to Lake Biwa, a rising cholera count finally cutting short a planned continuation to Osaka, Nagasaki, and the Inland Sea. The book runs to 333 pages across twenty-six chapters; roughly the closing fifth abandons the dated itinerary for a set of essays contending that Japan’s civilization surpasses America’s.

At Yokohama he learns the kuruma (jinrikisha) and the etiquette of tipping its puller, inspects the Bund, the foreign clubs, and the tea godowns where women stir five-pound kettles of leaf by hand, and takes the new railway to Tokyo, where he settles at the Tokyo Hotel and adopts Taro, a kurumaya who speaks a little English and spends his spare hours memorizing more, as his regular runner. Successive chapters track a Tokyo day from the six-o’clock opening of the paper amado to the midnight crowds: the fish market, the public wells, the shaved-ice kori stalls, a formal tea-house visit arranged by his host Mr. Shugio, an afternoon among the temples and archery galleries of Asakusa, and the Sumida River lantern festival, where fireworks burst into paper birds and he argues the merits of Japanese versus Western civilization with a baron aboard a neighboring boat. “Wine, Women, and Song” describes a banquet at a Shimbashi tea house with the waiting maid O Haru and a company of geishas, then a walk past the barred cages of the Yoshiwara. He attends Danjuro’s company in an abbreviated seven-hour charity performance at the Shintomi Theatre, tours Count Okuma’s law school and garden, and, through an invitation Shugio secures, watches Emperor Mutsuhito preside at the Third National Exhibition in Ueno Park, using the occasion to trace the Mikado’s history from a secluded, unseen sovereign to a European-uniformed constitutional monarch.

To escape Tokyo’s midsummer heat, Finck engages a young journalist, Mr. Yabi of the Mainichi Shimbun, as travelling companion and, carrying a letter of introduction from Chief Justice Kitabatake to the Governor-General of Yezo, sails north past the Matsushima “Pine Islands” to Hakodate — the “Japanese Gibraltar” — and on to the American-planned colony city of Sapporo, where Governor-General Nagayama and Superintendent Hashiguchi show him the settlement’s imported dairy herd, its flax and beet-sugar factories, and a museum of stuffed Yezo bears. From Sapporo he goes by rail and horseback into the interior, inspecting the Poronai coal mine worked by convicts before riding overland through virgin forest to Kamikawa, meeting Aino men hired as road laborers — under contract to abstain from sake while at work — and Aino salmon fishermen along the rivers, before resting at Satomi’s inn in Takigawa, where a bearskin rug covers the floor. The book’s set-piece follows at the coast village of Shiraoi, where a beached whale draws out the whole Aino population; Finck photographs the butchering and, over the chief’s gentle objection, the elders at prayer before their whittled ritual sticks, only to find most of the film ruined afterward by Japan’s humid air. A rough steamer crossing from Mororan to Mori and a storm-damaged, bridge-washed railway line back south — improvised with relays of kuruma and rope ferries — round out the expedition, under the chapter heading “Through Mediaeval Japan.”

Back on the main island, Finck takes a private cottage above Nikko to see the tombs of Ieyasu and Iemitsu, the temple carvings and sacred dance, and the cascades and lakes above the town — Kegon-no-taki, Lake Chuzenji, the sulphur baths at Yumoto — before an attempt on Fuji fails: rain turns his party back at the third of the mountain’s six stations after a night spent sleeping under open umbrellas in a smoke-filled stone hut. The railway then carries him to Kyoto, where chapters on the old capital cover its temples — 3,500 as of 1875, sharply reduced since Buddhism’s disestablishment twenty years before — the Ear Mound of slain Corean soldiers near the Daibutsu, hand-loom silk weaving, and an afternoon with a blind koto virtuoso hired to play in his hotel parlor. A crossing of Lake Biwa to a tea house that had once been a daimyo’s palace, near Hikone, and its several acres of lotos in bloom, supplies the book’s title and an extended meditation on the flower’s Buddhist symbolism and its transplantation to the ponds of New York’s Central Park. A rising cholera count in Kyoto and Osaka then forces him to abandon the planned continuation south, and he turns back toward Yokohama.

The closing chapters drop the day-by-day itinerary for a run of essays — “Are the Japanese Topsy-Turvy?,” “The Mote and the Beam,” “Nudity and Bathing,” “The Esthetic Nation,” and “A Superior Civilization” — in which Finck draws on Chamberlain, Griffis, Bacon, and Hearn, on missionary reports, and on American statistics covering prostitution, food adulteration, and federal Indian-war findings to argue that Japan surpasses the West in cleanliness, decorative art, courtesy, kindness to animals, and the capacity for contentment on small means, turning charges of Japanese commercial and sexual immorality back against American slavery and the treatment of the Indians. The book closes by warning that Japan’s danger is to import Western factory chimneys and “division of labor” along with Western railways, and ends by quoting Captain Brinkley’s rebuke to an Englishman who called Japan newly civilized: that Japan wore silk and had reached “a high pitch of refinement” while his own ancestors “dressed in untanned skins and fed upon acorns.” The volume carries a frontispiece, “Geisha Playing Samisen,” and fifteen captioned half-tone plates keyed to facing pages — Kuruma, Beggars, A Kago, Silk Store, and the rest — genuine photographic plates rather than line drawings; several, including the Kuruma plate and two of the plates near the book’s end, are bound sideways to the page. An index running from “Ainos” to “Yumoto” closes the book.

Percival Lowell’s Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan (1895) is a first-person account of a journey across the width of Honshu to the little-visited peninsula that gives the book its title, and back again. It opens with a dedicatory letter to “my dear Basil” — Basil Hall Chamberlain — in which Lowell casts the whole excursion as a courtship consummated: “From you, my dear Basil, the confidant of my hopes toward Noto, I know I may look for sympathy now that my advances have met with such happy issue,” he writes, asking Chamberlain “to be my best man in the matter before the world.” The opening chapter explains that the fancy to go to Noto struck him one evening in Tokyo while scanning a map, “a case of love at first sight” with a province he calls “an unknown.” The twenty-one chapters are titled for stages of the route, and the narration stays in the first person throughout, with “we” used for actions shared with his companion, Yejiro, a former houseboy turned cook who carries the passport and packs the wicker travel baskets, and who sometimes cannot make out what the country folk say, the local dialect defeating him — a shortcoming Lowell says only added to his charm as a fellow-traveler. The two set out from Tokyo’s Uyeno station on the third of May, narrowly missing their train, bound west across the Musashi plain toward Takasaki.

From Takasaki, Lowell chooses to walk the old trail on foot over the Usui Pass rather than ride the new horse-tram, leaving only the baggage to go by tram, and reaches the pilgrim town of Zenkoji; it is on the ordinary train beyond the pass — its windows fitted with wood-slat blinds rather than glass — that he lingers over the half-Europeanized dress of his fellow travelers. The route continues along the Sea of Japan coast past Naoyetsu and into the sixty-mile pass between the Hida-Shinshiu mountains and the sea, a stretch that includes, partway along, the notorious cliffs called Oya Shiradzu, Ko Shiradzu — “a spot where the father no longer knows the child, nor the child the father” — once fatal to travelers caught by the tide and now cut through by a road kept up by convict labor. Lowell crosses the Etchiu delta on foot through sand dunes and by ferry to Himi, refusing on principle the women porters offered him at one stop, then climbs the Arayama Pass into Noto itself, where his first view of the province — terraced ricefields “for all the world a parquet in green and brown tiles” — disappoints him. From the capital, Nanao, he detours to the hot-spring resort of Wakura, learning that two men who had been teaching chemistry at Kanazawa tested its waters the previous summer, then continues by a small steamer through Noto’s landlocked “inland sea,” passing fish-lookout platforms where men crouch in baskets slung over the water watching for bora. At Anamidzu, where retired women called inkyo fish with hook-rigs shaped like “the forlorn remains of a hoopskirt” from the bank, he reaches the turning point of the trip and starts back.

The return begins with a chartered boat across the inland sea to Nanao, a crossing that runs six hours into the night, and continues along “the road proper” toward Etchiu, where Lowell is troubled to meet women harnessed to freight carts. At Toyama, the old feudal capital, he finds the castle turned into a school. Trusting an out-of-date guidebook, he then attempts the Harinoki Tōge across the Hida mountains: at a mountain farmhouse he witnesses the family’s evening Buddhist prayers, and that same evening the porters balk at going further, relenting only after Yejiro threatens to summon the police; they set out again the next morning, and further on, at a river crossing, woodcutters build the party a log bridge for two yen. A cliff ledge called the Oni ga Jo (“the place of many devils”), reduced to a line of footprints in the debris, badly shakes Lowell’s nerve, and at the snowbound hut of Riuzanjita the watchmen tell him a solitary woodcutter has just been lost on the route ahead. Without crampons or ice-poles, Lowell and a reluctant guide spend a day crossing steep, half-thawed snow slopes before he calculates that pressing on to Arimine and doubling back would cost more time than he can spare, and turns for home, recrossing the Oni ga Jo a second time on the way down.

Back among farmhouses, Lowell calls on a retired farmer, an inkyo living out his days in a garden cottage devoted to the view of “Etchiu Fuji” and to tea ceremony, and is later visited by a village policeman so anxious for his safety that he offers to sleep outside his door. An overdue passport — Japanese law then limited travel permits to a fortnight, a restriction tied to negotiations underway over extraterritoriality — nearly gets him arrested at Matsumoto, and he and Yejiro talk their way free by pointing out that their remaining route, the Tenriūgawa, is the one named in the document. Lowell then leases a basha, a jolting horse-coach he had sworn never to ride again, over the Shiwojiri Pass, past views of Lake Suwa and Fuji, to the head of the Tenriūgawa. From Tokimata a hired boat carries him down some sixty miles of gorge and named rapids — “the Turret,” “the Adze,” “Boiling Rice,” “the Mountain Bath” — through a wisteria-hung canon that Lowell renders in a set of inserted verses, before the river widens onto open plain and passes under the three-quarter-mile Tōkaidō bridge near the coast. The book ends there at sunset, with two wayfarers taken aboard as unpaying passengers and Lowell reflecting, as Noto recedes into memory, that “the better part of place or person is the thought it leaves behind.” Beyond the dedication and a contents page listing the chapters, the volume carries no map, glossary, or illustrations.

Our Journey Around the World presents itself as an illustrated record of a single circuit of the globe, told in two linked books bound under one cover. The longer book, running through Chapter XXXI, belongs to the Reverend Francis E. Clark, D.D., president of the United Society of Christian Endeavor, who traveled with his wife and, as the preface explains, “a lad of thirteen” — the three are called throughout “the Pilgrim,” “Mrs. Pilgrim,” and “the Young Pilgrim.” The preface states that the journey was undertaken to attend Christian Endeavor conventions in the Australian colonies and to visit missionaries in Japan, China, India, Turkey, Spain, France, and England, but that “little is said about the special object of the journey … this volume is distinctly a book of travel.” A shorter second book follows, Glimpses of Life in Far Off Lands, as Seen Through a Woman’s Eyes, in which Mrs. Harriet E. Clark retraces much of the same route from her own vantage in five further chapters. The stated itinerary runs from Boston through San Francisco, Honolulu, Samoa, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong and Canton, Japan, Shanghai, Ceylon, southern and northern India, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor and Constantinople, Greece and Italy, Spain, and home by way of Paris and London.

Clark’s narrative opens on the steamship Mariposa crossing the Pacific, with chapters on shipboard gambling and games, a stop in Samoa among “the Samoans as Nature Made Them,” and a rough landing on New Zealand’s “stern and rugged shores.” Four chapters on Australia follow — first impressions of Sydney and the colonial “new chum,” houses and church conventions, a descent into a gold mine at Ballarat, which prompts a memory of the “Welcome Stranger” nugget found elsewhere in Victoria, and a cruise on the steamer Chingtu through Torres Strait and Thursday Island, among Chinese fellow passengers Clark calls “Mr. Ah See and his Wives.” A chapter on the Malay Archipelago follows, with pearl-fishery scenes and a python “battle,” before the party reaches Hong Kong. Three chapters on China precede Japan: Canton’s crowded temples and its “Temple of Horrors,” a description of Chinese execution processions — condemned prisoners in bamboo yokes led through the streets by the headsman before crowds of spectators — and river life up the Pearl River, including a village schoolmaster, a firecracker factory, and a mandarin’s garden.

A “terrible typhoon” drove the steamer Peru through its own storm center on the run from Hong Kong, so that Clark’s first sight of Japan, on the morning of November 26, was Fujiyama “in spotless ermine” above Yokohama harbor. He gives a full chapter, “Our Stay in Charming Japan,” to the etiquette that meets a traveler everywhere — customs officials who bow before examining trunks, a lesson in the proper “hinge” for a Japanese bow, and the stock joke of an American consul from Ohio who mistook the greeting “Ohayo” for a compliment to his home state. From Yokohama the party trains to Tokio, where the next chapter, “The Mikado’s City and the Mikado’s Subjects,” centers on the Imperial University — its fish-parasite researcher, its seismology laboratory producing an artificial earthquake, and its missionary founders, especially “Dr. Verbeck of the Dutch Reformed Board” — before Clark walks a country village street past a bakery, a hand-worked rice mill, a fruit stall selling “kid glove” oranges, a barber shop, and a shoe shop hung with straw sandals, ending at a Japanese inn where dinner is eaten over a glowing kotatsu, with rice, thin soup, lima beans, fish, and the “villainous daikon,” served by a kneeling waitress.

The following chapter stages a full ceremonial tea for five guests in the old Daimio city of Okyama, performed by “an aged professor”: Clark traces the rite step by step, from the placing of black and white charcoal with turkey-feather brushes to the three ritual swallows and lip-smacking that close it, crediting its invention to “Hideyoshi, the great conqueror of Corea.” From Tokyohe party travels to Kioto, “the ancient sacred capital,” where Clark visits the Doshisha, the Christian university founded by “Joseph Neesima” and then led by “President Kozaki” — remarking, of critics who dismiss such missionary work, that “the flippant commentaries of the average ‘globe-trotter,’ as I have before remarked, often makes one’s blood boil with indignation” — and three temples: the Kyonizu, with its money changers and rows of red-bibbed stone children set up on behalf of sick sons and daughters; the Sanjusangendo, or “temple of the three thousand gods”; and the still-unfinished Hongwanji, whose massive keyaki pillars were raised with ropes plaited from the offered hair of “thousands and thousands” of women — one pillar won, Clark writes, only after a devotee hanged himself from the standing tree, an act that made it “accursed” and so free for the temple to take. A special permit admits the party to the old Imperial Palace, bare of furniture but for a throne room and a courtyard fruit tree tended, Clark notes, for “ten hundred and thirty-two years.” The Japan chapters close at Nagoya’s castle, crowned with golden dolphins, and at the fish auctions of Osaka, before the narrative returns to China.

The remaining three-fifths of Clark’s book retraces old ground in China — opium dens, fan-tan gambling, and the “Baby Towers” of Shanghai — before five chapters carry the party through the Malay seas to Ceylon and across southern and northern India: a missionary bungalow and girls’ boarding school reached on the night journey to Madura, snake charmers and the temple of Madura itself, a further stop at Vellore and its temple, the burning ghats of the Ganges, and the Mutiny sites of Cawnpore and Lucknow before the Taj Mahal. A further seven chapters follow the Suez Canal into Egypt — the pyramids, the mummy of “Sethi I… Father of Rameses II” in the Bulak Museum — then Palestine and Jerusalem, an overland “spring wagon” crossing of Asia Minor to Constantinople, and finally Athens, Vesuvius, Venice, and Spain on the way home. Clark closes his own book with a chapter of “Objects and Results,” recalling the Endeavor conventions that were the trip’s official purpose and defending missionaries against the “cruel misrepresentations” of the press and the “shallow critics” he says are not worthy to unloose their shoe latchets.

Mrs. Clark’s book, narrated throughout in the first person, gives Japan its own chapter, “Among the Women and Children of Japan,” second of her five. She rides by jinrikisha through Yokohama in the rain to a women’s prayer meeting, joins in singing “Rock of Ages” from a Japanese hymnal (“Chiyo heshi iwa yo, / Ware wo kakushi ne …”), and admits she never became “proficient” with chopsticks, losing a bean back into her soup bowl again and again at a reception where guests tucked uneaten cakes and persimmons into their sleeves to carry home. She also describes a flower-arranging lesson taught by “the floral professor,” judging the result more artistic than “our great round American bouquets,” and ranks Kobe College and the Doshisha with “Wellesley or Smith or Vassar.” Her book continues with chapters on women and children in India and a wagon crossing of Turkey, and the volume as a whole ends with her chapter “Good-bye,” a set of farewell vignettes — sung in Australia, Japan, China, and India — built around the Endeavor hymn “God be with you till we meet again.” The title page promises “steel-plate portraits” of both authors and “upwards of two hundred choice engravings, mainly from instantaneous photographs,” backed by an eight-page List of Illustrations — its Japan entries running from “A Rural Scene in Japan” and “A Japanese Ceremonial Tea” to “Washing Day in Japan” and “Street Children of Japan” — and, separately, a fold-out “New Imperial Map of the World… Showing the Author’s Journey,” engraved by W. & A. K. Johnston.

The item is not a book but an illustrated promotional program, issued by Pain’s Spectacle Co., for Pain’s Pyrotechnic Spectacle, War between Japan and China, an outdoor fireworks-and-stage entertainment presented at Pain’s Amphitheatre, Manhattan Beach, New York, and copyrighted at the Library of Congress on June 24, 1895. Its illustrated cover, headed “Manhattan Beach,” shows a Japanese warship steaming amid gunfire near a smoking, sunlit coastal mountain, set among decorative motifs — cherry blossoms, a seated Buddha figure, storks, two parasol-carrying Chinese figures, and a red dragon banner — under the words “Pain’s Superb Pyro-Spectacle, China and Japan, Grand Fireworks.” The title page opens with a short poem (“We now depict in mimic way / Fierce battles, fire and vicious hate, / How China fell ’neath Japan’s sway”) and then explains its occasion directly: the previous season Pain’s Amphitheatre had staged Moore’s Lalla Rookh, and this year’s production instead dramatizes the recent war between China and Japan. The program states that “a summary of the events of the war will enable those who visit Pain’s open-air theatre to form an idea for themselves” of how the conflict unfolded, and at several points it ties the history directly to the stage picture — crediting “Mr. Kirby, the scenic artist,” for the Wei-Hai-Wei set and calling the naval engagement there “one of the most instructive and interesting pictures yet shown on the mimic stage.”

Most of the program is an eleven-page prose narrative of the war, running from printed page 2 through page 12, written for spectators but following the war’s actual course. It opens by likening the conflict to France’s fall to Prussia in 1870, then dates the first clash to July 25, 1894, when three Japanese ironclads cruising off Phungdo engaged three Chinese warships convoying troop transports to Corea; one of the three transports was sunk with all hands. Five days later, on July 29, Japanese troops routed an entrenched Chinese force of about three thousand at Sei-Kwan, and on July 30 they took the garrison at Asan, gaining a base for further operations. The narrative then covers the siege of Ping Yang, defended by General Yeh’s Manchurian troops and surrendered on September 15, 1894, followed by the naval battle of the Yalu River on September 17 between Admiral Ito’s fleet and ten Chinese armored warships, in which one Chinese ironclad was sunk and two more set afire while the Japanese cruiser Matsushima was damaged by Chinese fire. It goes on to the fall of Port Arthur on November 21, 1894, taken after Japanese torpedo boats forced the harbor while land forces attacked from two directions, with the remainder of the Chinese fleet fleeing afterward to Wei-Hai-Wei; the subsequent siege of Wei-Hai-Wei, beginning with a landing near the end of January 1895, is singled out as the climax staged in the show. The account then follows the First Army’s four-hundred-mile march to Ninchwang, which surrendered March 7, 1895, notes that operations were turning toward Formosa when hostilities ended, and closes with Li Hung Chang’s mission to Japan as China’s plenipotentiary to sue for peace.

Physically the program is a slim booklet, not a book: the war narrative and its closing reflection fill eleven numbered pages, 2 through 12, preceded by the illustrated cover and title leaf and followed immediately by advertisements unconnected to Japan, China, or the war. These include a “Bloom of Youth” complexion preparation sold at 277 Broadway; Taylor’s dress-suit cases and steamer trunks on East Fourteenth Street; Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for teething children; the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Block System” routes to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis; the “Royal Blue Line,” running over the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad’s “North Shore Limited”; the Fall River Line’s steamboats Priscilla, Puritan, Plymouth, Pilgrim, and Providence, running between New York and Boston; and Sohmer & Co. pianos of East Fourteenth Street, with a printed warning against a “similar sounding name” of “cheap grade.” Besides the cover, the war narrative itself carries six small, uncaptioned engravings scattered through its pages and unrelated in subject to the adjacent text — portrait busts on pages 2, 5, and 8; a woman beside a loaded handcart on page 7; and genre scenes of a Japanese street peddler and a Japanese market vendor on pages 9 and 10.

Douglas Sladen’s The Japs at Home is a pleasure-pilgrim’s travel book cast as a journal, its chapters headed with a place and a date — Yokohama, December 1st; Tokyo, January 5th; Nikko, May 22nd — and narrated throughout in the first person, usually “I” but often widening to “we” to take in his traveling party: his wife, a companion referred to as Miss Aroostook, and his eight-year-old son, called “the only Charles.” Sladen, already the author of On the Cars and Off, arrived in Yokohama by way of Vancouver on the first of December and spent roughly the next seven months moving around Japan as an ordinary but well-connected tourist, breaking off in February for a crossing to Shanghai and Hong Kong that this edition sets apart at the end of the book as seven added chapters of “Bits of China,” reaching on to Canton and Macao and, afterward, San Francisco’s Chinatown. The volume is dedicated, by special permission, to the Duke of Connaught, in whose visit to Japan — the stay at Kyoto and the shoot down the rapids of the Katsuragawa — Sladen had the pleasure of giving two chapters, as the dedication puts it. In his preface to this fifth edition he adds that, writing after the war between Japan and China, he now regrets having told his story “from the point of view of the pleasure-pilgrim” rather than as “an advocate’s presentment of the greatness of Japan,” given what he calls the “valour, extraordinary ability, and civilizedness” the Japanese had just shown in fighting a war whose fruits, he notes, two of the great Powers then coerced them into surrendering.

The Japan chapters open in Yokohama, with street scenes of jinrikisha fares, curio shops, and the mixed “English as she is spoke” signage of the Benten Dori, before moving up to Tokyo for the Buddhist mausolea of Shiba and a banquet with geisha dancers at the Maple Club, an evening briefly interrupted when Sladen’s own flash-powder explodes in his hand, though the feast resumes and the dancers give an extra dance in his honor before the party leaves. Christmas is kept quietly among the English residents of Yokohama; New Year’s Eve and the New Year festival are toured at length, with borrowed passages from Mrs. Chaplin Ayrton’s writings on the symbolism of the pine-and-lobster door decorations, the ball games, and the firemen’s acrobatic parade, set against Sladen’s own account of the Ginza fair and the Asakusa temple grounds. Chapters on Japanese firemen, on a sumo tournament where every box proves already taken and the party is squeezed into the crowded pit until the giant wrestler Arakato, charmed by Miss Aroostook, clears them space, and on feeding that same Arakato an entire European luncheon in a handful of mouthfuls follow, along with a visit to Sir Edwin Arnold in his rented bungalow at Imaicho, where Arnold discourses on Buddhism, Gladstone, and his eighty or ninety cups of tea a day. Sladen goes on to Kameido for the plum blossoms at the shrine of Sugawara-no-Michizane, then to Nagasaki, where he measures the harbor and its Buddhist cemetery against Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème.

The middle chapters turn more topical. “Japanese Women” and “What the Japanese Themselves Think of Women” pair Sladen’s own impressions of musumes and geisha with a long quotation from Chamberlain’s Things Japanese, including the moralist Kaibara’s Daigaku Onna on wifely obedience. A chapter on curio shops and curio stalls catalogues his purchases at the Fine Art Gallery and among the street dealers of the Ginza and Basha Michi; another, built from an interview with the painter Henry Savage Landor, describes a funeral and cremation at Nagoya. “Japanese Novels” surveys translated romances such as Edward Greey’s version of The Captive of Love, and a chapter on the opening of the Third National Exhibition at Ueno is followed immediately by “The Martyrdom of a Missionary,” Sladen’s account of the sword killing of the Canadian missionary Mr. Large at Azabu, whom the party had been with at Miyanoshita only hours before. After Kobe and the Mikado’s naval review, the book settles into Kyoto for the Duke and Duchess of Connaught’s stay at Yaami’s Hotel, including the rapids trip and an evening at Danjuro’s theater; further chapters cover tea-houses from the Koyokwan to the rough inn at Nara, the golden shrines of Nikko, Japanese pidgin English (with a lending library’s mangled rulebook quoted in full), theaters and the Kyoto cherry dance, children’s games (“A Nation at Play”), the printing of Sladen’s own verse through the Hakubunsha publishing house, with its clerk Mr. Mayeda and proprietor Mr. Nagao, and a chapter on Landor’s own rented house in Tokyo, hung with his portraits of Sir Edwin Arnold and Countess Kuroda. The Japan section closes with “Shaking off the Dust,” written aboard ship in Yokohama Bay, a chapter of valedictory apostrophes — “Adieu Kyoto,” “Adieu Nara,” “Adieu Japan” — assessing the country as a poor place to make money in but an ideal one for a retired man of modest means to live cheaply and picturesquely.

“Bits of China” drops the dated diary headings but keeps the same first-person voice for a shorter, more compressed tour. Shanghai is approached up the Whang-Po past war junks and opium hulks, its Bund likened to the palaces on Venice’s Grand Canal; Sladen and his guide, Ah Nen, work through the walled native city — the Temple of the Hundred Josses, a mandarin’s court with prisoners in the cangue, and the elaborate rockwork of the Mandarin Tea Garden. Hong Kong is described just after a plague outbreak in its native quarter, Tai-Ping-Shan, with separate chapters on the city generally and on race week at Happy Valley, where Sladen watches the pony racing, the totalisator, and the crowds of Sikh police, English officers, and Chinese spectators. Canton supplies the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii (with Marco Polo enshrined among Buddha’s disciples), the provincial examination halls, an execution ground still stained from a beheading the day before, and the decaying gardens of the Howqua family. Macao appears as a somnolent Portuguese outpost given over to fantan gambling houses, the Camoens garden and grotto, and a walk out to the old barrier gate on the isthmus, along with a compressed history of the colony’s sixteenth-century founding.

The book’s final chapter, “The Chinaman Abroad,” shifts the scene again, to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where Sladen tours opium dens, an overcrowded tenement, a joss house, and a Chinese theater with a police detective named Davis as his guide, recording their exchanges about high-binders, rents, and the freight charges for shipping a Chinese corpse back to China, before the two of them “passed out of the Chinese slums into the French slums.” Beyond its narrative, the volume carries a collotype portrait of Sladen as frontispiece and is illustrated throughout with wood engravings set directly into the letterpress rather than gathered as separate plates — among them a full-page engraving captioned “A Japanese Theatre” inserted into the Yokohama chapters — while a printed note facing the half-title of “Bits of China” states that its illustrations were done by a Japanese artist working for the Hakubunsha in Tokyo; no comparable credit is given for the engravings accompanying the Japan chapters.

Rambles in Japan: The Land of the Rising Sun is a traveler’s narrative of a single visit of some months, written by a churchman and field naturalist who opens by apologizing for the book at all. Its preface — which speaks of the author in the third person — offers “an apology … for another book on Japan by one who has been a mere visitor, not a resident,” and describes the pages as “for the most part a transcript of the author’s daily journal, written without any view to publication,” printed only because “shortly after his visit, the eyes of the whole world were suddenly fixed upon the Land of the Rising Sun, and its unexpected display of military genius and power.” The title page names him H. B. Tristram, D.D., LL.D., F.R.S., Canon of Durham. His stated object was “to master thoroughly the position of missionary work in Japan, especially that of the Church Missionary Society, and to ascertain the practical working of Buddhism as compared with the Buddhism of China and Ceylon”; he also asks pardon, “as a field naturalist, for many allusions to zoology and botany.” He travels with his daughter, resident in the country for some years, who interprets for him and presides over a girls’ school at Osaka. Ten chapters are ordered by place rather than by date, and narrated in the first person, singular and plural, except where he drops out for pages together to retell other people’s histories.

Chapter I lands at Nagasaki thirty-six hours out from the Yang-tsze-kiang, and takes in Deshima, “the prison factory of the Dutch,” and the island cliff from which, “according to the received tradition,” native Christians were hurled. Tristram quotes his “artist friend, who landed with me soon after sunrise” on Japanese men in European clothes — “If the women are charming, the men look thorough little snobs” — a verdict he says he must endorse. Then the Inland Sea, traversed three times, the straits of Shimanoseki, and Kobe. Chapter II is “Yokohama and Tokio”: a day at Osaka, “the Manchester of Japan,” the passage in the Empress of India, Yokohama’s Sailors’ Home, then Tokio, “known as Yedo until 1868” — Uyeno and its museums, the Shoguns’ shrines at Shiba, the tombs of the forty-seven Ronins, curio shops where ancient armor was “a drug in the market” while blades by the celebrated makers still commanded “a fancy price,” six Japanese sermons heard “in whole or part” in one day, and, back at Yokohama, the Mikado driving to an English horse race — “the descent in one generation, from the offspring of the gods … to the spruce gentleman in European costume.” Chapter III is Nikko, which every Japanese firmly believes the most beautiful place in the world: the sacred bridge painted bright red, Iyeyasu’s mausoleum, the cryptomeria avenues, the Lake of Chusenji, and a midnight session over two or three hundred bird skins.

Two pages and a plate of the Nikko chapter go to falconry, prompted by Iyeyasu’s painted history of hawking — the only European art, so far as he knows, “identical in all its methods” with a Japanese one. The chapter closes with the innkeeper Kanaya producing his bill as though it were “the most painful effort,” and the rule that “to pay an hotel bill net would be considered an insult.” Rail and tramway carry him in Chapter IV to Miya-no-Shita, “the Harrogate of Japan,” and on foot to the Hakone lake; from its far end, six miles up by boat, he goes past Ubago and the sulphur waste called Ojigoku, or the Great Hell, over the Otomi Toge pass to Gotemba, where the season forbids the ascent of Fuji and he climbs only into its forest. Inn fare and the misery of sitting on the floor to eat fill a page and a half. Chapter V is Nagoya — the castle with its golden dolphins, the Higashi Hongwanji of the “reformed Buddhists” who teach “justification by faith,” and a temple of the five hundred disciples of Buddha in which “no two can be found alike.” Gifu brings cormorant fishing and a mission the Society had taken up only a year before; the plain was devastated by earthquake a few months after his visit. He reaches Lake Biwa and Otsu the day after a policeman struck at the Czarevitch, his fellow passengers feeling the deed chiefly as a national disgrace.

Chapter VI, “A Second Visit to Kioto,” gives the colossal Daibutsu, the 33,333 images of Kwannon, ropes made from the hair of some 250,000 women, the Doshisha and Joseph Neeshima’s story, a day on Hieizan — once “the sacred mountain of Japanese Buddhism,” with a notice at its foot until recently, “No woman or cow permitted to ascend this mountain” — and the palaces of Mikado and Shogun, the first seen weeks later from Osaka. Chapter VII is Osaka: Hideyoshi’s castle and the stratagem that got its stones, the Tennoji shrine hung with “the garments of deceased infants,” the Bishop Poole Girls’ School, a house hired for “preaching every night,” a match factory of “over a thousand women and girls,” and the ceremonial tea at which he was “the unfortunate victim operated upon,” silent for three-quarters of an hour. Chapter VIII crosses to Shikoku, “the Wales of Japan,” for Tokushima, a shimbokkwai he calls “the acme of dulness,” granting at once that he “understood not a word,” and the Straits of Naruto, where “there is literally a waterfall across the sea.” Chapter IX is Kiushiu: Moji and the recently opened collieries of the Kiushiu coal-field, Fukuoka with the mausoleum of the old Princes of Chikusen and the consecration of a church “built almost entirely by the people,” Dazaifu, where the temples are “the most ancient in Japan” and the priests show swords, some of them a thousand years old, and Kumamoto and the crushing of the Satsuma rebellion.

Chapter X is Aso San and the geysers of Yunotan: two days into the forty-mile primeval crater and a look into the living crater — “Vesuvius and Etna, as I have seen them, are nothing in comparison.” After the free baths of Yunotan and the Christian village of Oyamada he recrosses the Inland Sea and sails for Vancouver. Opinions are stated plainly throughout. Tristram admires nearly everything he sees of native Japan — the courtesy, the cleanliness, the trained trees, “a race peerless among Orientals” that he expects, once Christian, to be “the Britain of the Pacific” — while confessing that he was “sorely tempted” to pocket a wayside Buddha though he did not feel “justified in acting the iconoclast,” and calling the open mixed bathing at Ubago a want of decency, “but it is, so far as I saw, an exception.” He is impatient with European dress and architecture in Japanese hands, and measures Japan against home: Nikko is “the Oxford and Canterbury of the country combined,” Nagoya castle “the Alnwick Castle of Japan,” Osaka an “Oriental Venice.” Birds and butterflies, and often ferns and shells, intrude chapter after chapter. Forty-five illustrations by Edward Whymper, from sketches and photographs, are printed with the letterpress — a frontispiece of the pagoda and temple entrance at Nikko, thirty-five more full-page cuts, twenty-six of them turned sideways, and nine cuts set into the text pages. A two-page double-column index closes the volume; the title page also credits a map.

Henry Norman’s The Peoples and Politics of the Far East announces itself on its title page as “Travels and Studies in the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese Colonies, Siberia, China, Japan, Korea, Siam and Malaya,” and that description is exact: it is a large work of political travel journalism, the fruit, as Norman’s preface explains, of “nearly four years of travel and study,” in the course of which he claims to have visited every place he describes and stayed “long enough” in each to consult local authorities and “best-informed residents.” He writes throughout in the first person, as a journalist who had already published a book on Japan alone (the title page identifies him as “Author of ‘The Real Japan’”), and the book deliberately interweaves the incidents of travel with the “factors and the statistics” of what he calls “the permanent problems” of the region — colonial administration, frontier disputes, army and navy strength, trade figures. Rather than following a single itinerary, it is organized country by country and colony by colony: it opens with the British Empire in the Far East, moves through France’s, Russia’s, Spain’s, and Portugal’s possessions in turn, gives large blocks of chapters to China, Korea, and Japan, closes out with Siam and Malaya, and ends with a concluding chapter of forecasts.

The British Empire chapters cover Shanghai and Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements, and the Protected Malay States. Norman lingers over Shanghai’s oddities — its six kinds of policemen, its Mixed Court, its volunteer artillery — before turning to Hong Kong, whose “first sight...is disappointing” but which becomes, on closer acquaintance, “a revelation”; he catalogs its mildew and cockroaches and its opium-smuggling frontier at Kowloon, and reprints at length a ratepayers’ petition for local self-government, a cause he strongly endorses. In the Straits Settlements chapter he describes Singapore’s Chinese secret societies and, in a lengthy footnote, defends the colonial practice of regulating rather than abolishing prostitution among Chinese women, arguing that European laws are unsuited to Asian conditions. A chapter on the Protected Malay States credits British Residents such as Swettenham with turning Perak and Selangor into some of the most prosperous statelets under the flag, while Pahang, still recovering from a sultan’s debt-slavery and forced concubinage of local girls, lags behind; Norman closes by urging that the several Protected States be merged into a single Crown Colony of the Malay Peninsula.

France’s possessions in Indo-China receive four chapters, and here the travelogue turns pointedly critical. Norman recounts, as notebook entries, a tiger hunt near Cape St. James with an Annamite hunter named Mitt, the bizarre career of the French adventurer Marie David de Mayréna, self-proclaimed “King of the Sedangs,” and a grim account of the 1884 naval action at Foochow, which he calls a massacre rather than the “gloire” claimed by French writers. A chapter on the Franco-Chinese frontier follows him to the smuggler’s town of Monkay, leveled by the French army in reprisal for the torture-killing of a French official. The book’s real indictment of French rule, though, comes in two further chapters: one describing a colony split into mutually hostile castes of official, soldier, and settler, throttled by an obstructive “Administration”; the other a painstaking financial accounting, built from French budget documents, showing Tongking to have cost France some 534 million francs against a trickle of trade with the mother country — “a colossal error,” in the words of the economist Leroy-Beaulieu, whom Norman quotes approvingly.

Three shorter sections follow. Russia’s Far East is represented by Vladivostok, whose fortifications, garrison, and strict military censorship Norman inspects with evident surprise at how much access he is granted, and by a chapter on the Trans-Siberian Railway, whose seven engineering sections he tabulates before predicting that its completion will give Russia an open Korean port and place “the whole of the Far East,” “always excepting Japan,” “almost at the mercy of Russia.” Spain’s only Far Eastern possession, the Philippines, gets a single chapter on Manila — its cigar factories, a cockfight he describes bout by bout through a session of a hundred and five fights, earthquake damage to its churches, and the near-total power of the Catholic religious orders over the colony’s people and property. Portugal’s Macao gets a chapter of its own, opened with an extended image of China as a “carcase” being picked over by the “eagles” of the great powers, with Portugal cast, in a fall from her old imperial grandeur, as a mere “beetle” among birds of prey.

China occupies the largest block of the book: eight chapters running from Peking to “The Future of China.” Norman rides overland from Tientsin and pronounces the capital “a gigantic disappointment,” filthy and hostile to foreigners, redeemed for him only by the Great Wall and the Ming tombs he reaches by camel-track and donkey; a chapter titled “Chinese Horrors” describes, from firsthand observation, the bambooing of prisoners in a Canton magistrate’s court and a mass public beheading of fifteen men, material he defends as necessary to seeing “the real China, as opposed to the China of native professions and foreign imagination.” Two long profiles follow: an admiring portrait of Sir Robert Hart, the Inspector-General of the Chinese Maritime Customs, whose houseguest Norman was for a fortnight, and an account of the statesman Li Hung-chang, built around a two-hour interview at his Tientsin yamen. Writing as the Sino-Japanese War unfolds around him, Norman treats its course as proof of a position he says he had already taken against most contemporary opinion, that China was no “Great Power,” and catalogs the corruption behind its defeat — a warship’s deck gun pawned by its own commander, a quick-firing gun found full of rice and pickles, Admiral Ting Ju-ch’ang caught playing pitch-and-toss with the sentry at his door, another officer gambling on the quarterdeck with a common seaman he staked to keep the game going. He closes the section arguing that Chinese officialdom is characteristically dishonest, that foreign missionary work has done “far more harm than good,” and that the Tsungli Yamen exists chiefly “to head off foreigners.”

Korea gets three chapters bridging China and Japan. Norman crosses the peninsula from Won-san to Seoul by an unusual overland route arranged through the local customs commissioner, describing a night ride through tiger country behind torch-bearing guides and a stay at the mountain monastery of An-byon; in Seoul, “the City of Ichabod,” he mourns a lost native craftsmanship and singles out the nyangpan officeholding class as parasitic extortioners of the common people. A third chapter narrates, largely through the diplomatic notes exchanged between Tokyo, Peking, and Seoul, the sequence of incidents — the 1882 and 1885 uprisings, the assassination in Shanghai of the Korean reformer Kim Ok-kyun, the Tonghak rebellion — that led directly into the Sino-Japanese War, and it comes down squarely on Japan’s side: “I am unable to see,” Norman writes, “how Japan could have acted with greater moderation.”

Japan itself is a comparatively small piece of this large book: two chapters running to about thirty pages out of more than six hundred, and carrying no illustrations of their own — the sequence of engravings that runs through the volume breaks off after a Korean scene and does not resume until Siam some fifty pages later. Unlike almost everything around them, these two chapters are not travel writing at all; Norman refers readers wanting that to The Real Japan, and instead writes as a political journalist assessing Japan in the autumn of 1894, in the middle of its war with China. “The Japan of To-day” opens by declaring that Japan “has at length come into her inheritance,” tabulates the strength of its six army divisions and Imperial Guard, and reproduces Count Oyama’s proclamation invoking the Geneva Convention toward Chinese prisoners alongside the story of Genjiro, a bugler who kept sounding his call after being shot until he died. It goes on to detail Japan’s rise as a manufacturing rival — cotton-spinning statistics, child laborers paid three pence for a twelve-hour day, matches and watches undercutting British goods across Asian ports — and narrates in full the decade-long fight over treaty revision that had just culminated, that same year, in a new Anglo-Japanese treaty granting Japan judicial and tariff autonomy. The chapter closes by warning of dangers ahead: unregulated factories, a fractious new Parliament, and above all a militarism it illustrates with a long, boastful speech by Count Okuma declaring that the European powers are already “showing symptoms of decay” and will be succeeded by Japan. The second chapter, “Asia for the Asiatics?,” looks past the war to the peace terms Japan is likely to demand — Korean autonomy, a large indemnity, Formosa, Port Arthur — and argues that these alone will not satisfy a Japan haunted by the prospect of a rearmed China; it credits Japan with an unspoken, Monroe Doctrine-like ambition for Asia, weighs the “everlasting gulf” of race between European and Asiatic, and sets out, as a direct recommendation to British readers, a proposed three-way carve-up of Chinese and Korean territory among Britain, Russia, and Japan as the alternative to a dangerous, isolated “victorious and foiled Japan.”

The book’s remaining third turns to Siam and Malaya. Five chapters on Siam move from Bangkok’s court etiquette and titulature — Norman is scornful of Europeans who translate Siamese ranks into “Marquis” and “Baron” — to a department-by-department indictment of the Bangkok government as dysfunctional or fraudulent, an idle Cabinet, a stalled railway concession, a customs service undercut by court jealousy of its British adviser, and then, at length, to the diplomatic history of the 1893 Franco-Siamese crisis over the Mekong frontier, reconstructed largely from British Foreign Office correspondence between Salisbury, Rosebery, Dufferin, and the French foreign minister Develle. Three chapters on Malaya return to travel narrative: a journey by elephant and then by bamboo raft across the unmapped northern Malay states and into the closed sultanate of Kelantan, whose Sultan had threatened mutilation for any subject who helped a white man enter his territory; Norman defends the Malay character against its reputation for treachery, calling an unspoiled Malay “one of nature’s gentlemen.” The book closes with “An Eastern Horoscope,” a concluding chapter that forecasts the fate of each region in turn — Macao reabsorbed into China, the Philippines passing to Japan, Siam’s monarchy extinguished, China’s fate to be “partition among other nations” — and ends, after a troubled report of the killing of unarmed Chinese prisoners by Japanese troops at Port Arthur, with an extended argument that Great Britain has “the right and the opportunity, and therefore the duty,” to extend its empire in the Far East. Sixty illustrations, mostly Norman’s own photographs, and four maps drawn under his supervision, are distributed through the book accordingly: thick through the British, French, Chinese, Korean, Siamese, and Malayan chapters, and entirely absent from the two on Japan.

The Religions of Japan is a work of comparative religious history, not travel writing: it began as the Morse Lectures at Union Theological Seminary and grew into a five-hundred-page survey carrying Japan’s religious life from prehistory to “the era of Meiji (a.d. 1868–1894+).” William Elliot Griffis, D.D., writes as someone “formerly of the Imperial University of Tokio,” who lived in Japan from 1870 to 1874, first organizing schools for the daimio of Echizen and then in the service of the national government, and who taught ethics there on his own initiative while nominally hired to teach physical science. He dedicates the book to the faculty of Union Theological Seminary and to “that trio of English students, Ernest M. Satow, William G. Aston and Basil H. Chamberlain, who laid the foundations of critical scholarship in Japan,” whose translations of the Kojiki and the Shinto liturgies he leans on throughout. Under the epigraph “I came not to destroy, but to fulfil,” the book’s twelve chapters carry a real argument, not just a chronicle: Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism each met a genuine need of the Japanese people and each, in Griffis’s telling, foundered on the same want — none gave them a personal Creator-Father — so that their successive rise, corruption, and exhaustion had, by his reading, prepared the ground for Christianity to fulfill rather than displace them.

Griffis begins beneath what he calls the “dead level of paganism” that predates any “book-religion”: Shamanism among the Ainos of Yezo, a mythical zoology borrowed from China (the Kirin, the Ho-wo or Phoenix, the Tortoise, the Dragon), fetichism illustrated by a Fukui peasant bowing to a roadside stone before he will plow his field, and a phallic cult once “vastly more prevalent” that the government finally suppressed in 1872. From this substratum he traces Shinto, or Kami no Michi, to the Yamato clan’s conquest of Idzumo, Tsukushi, and the aboriginal tribes, and to the compiling of the Kojiki in a.d. 712 from the prodigious memory of Hiyeda Are; following the native critic Professor Kumi, he argues that the Yamato clan’s own original religion was a rude Heaven-worship bordering on monotheism, and reads Mikadoism — the doctrine that the emperor descends from the sun-goddess Amaterasu — as a political substitution for that earlier cult, even as the conquered aborigines’ own earth-gods survived alongside it. Quoting Satow’s renderings of the norito at length, he finds in the Kojiki itself real reverence for cleanliness and purification side by side with, in his words, “abundant filthiness,” cannibalism, and human sacrifice by drowning or live burial, and no code of ethics whatsoever — evidence, he argues, that Buddhism and Confucianism arrived as historical necessities. He carries Shinto forward through its eighteenth-century revival under Kada, Mabuchi, and Motoori, its 1870 restoration as state religion, and the 1892 imperial rescript on the emperor’s photograph, judging the system in the end either “a cultured and intellectual atheism” among the learned or “blind obedience to governmental and priestly dictates” among the people.

Two chapters follow “the Chinese ethical system in Japan.” Griffis presents Confucius as a historical compiler rather than an original thinker, born in 551 b.c. into an older Chinese monotheism centered on Shang Ti, and argues that by substituting the abstraction of Heaven (Tien) for a personal God, Confucius “cut the tap-root of all true progress.” Working through the Five Relations, he shows Japan reordering the Chinese scheme so that loyalty (Kun-shin) displaced filial piety as the supreme virtue, making the Forty-Seven Ronin, rather than any reformer, the nation’s moral exemplars, and sanctioning the sale of daughters, the near-erasure of wives as legal persons, and centuries of seppuku. A second chapter follows the seventeenth-century importation of Chu Hi’s Neo-Confucianism by scholars fleeing the fallen Ming dynasty into Yedo and Mito, describing it as a “pantheistic medley” in which “everything in general is god, but nothing in particular is God,” a philosophy that armed the Samurai against Buddhism even as it helped, in combination with Shinto nationalism, to topple the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868. Griffis closes with a point-by-point program of “revision” for each of the five relations, ending in a call for a “Sixth Relation” — of God to man — that Confucius never supplied.

The book’s longest stretch traces Buddhism from Gautama’s renunciation and the Vedic and Upanishadic philosophy that preceded him, through the schism into Northern and Southern canons, to its sixth-century entry into Japan under the minister Soga no Iname and its establishment by the regent Shotoku. Griffis narrates in detail how the priest Kukai, born in 774 and known posthumously as Kobo Daishi, engineered the syncretism called Riyobu Shinto after a vision at Ise in which the goddess Toyo-Uke-Bime revealed that every Shinto kami was an avatar of Buddha — a scheme he calls ingenious but “hardly to be called honest,” under which, as one of his own section headings puts it, Shinto lay “buried in Buddhism” for nearly a thousand years. Successive chapters catalogue the scholastic sects — Kusha, Jojitsu, Risshu, Hosso, Sanron, Kegon, Tendai, Shingon, Zen — and the later, more distinctively Japanese developments: Honen’s Jodo Shu, with its faith in Amida’s Western Paradise; Shinran’s Shin sect; and Nichiren’s fiery, ultra-patriotic Saddharma Pundarika sect, founded in 1282. Quoting Chamberlain’s judgment that Buddhism “was the teacher under whose instruction the Japanese nation grew up,” Griffis credits it with roads, medicine, cremation, the kana syllabary, garden and temple art, and a national tenderness toward animals — set against, in his own accounting, an absence of organized charity, priest-armies that fought pitched battles, and a doctrine so altered from Gautama’s teaching that “Northern Buddhism…had drawn into itself a large part of the Brahmanism out of which it originally sprang.” The sequence closes with Griffis asking, in his own voice, whether the Japanese possess “that tormenting sense of sin” the Gospel requires, and answering, “We think not.”

A chapter on “Roman Christianity in the Seventeenth Century” follows Francis Xavier’s 1549 landing at Kagoshima with the convert Anjiro, baptized Paul, his failed attempt to preach in a war-ruined Kioto, and a century of Portuguese and later Spanish mission work that Griffis credits with two hundred churches and some hundred and fifty thousand converts by 1581, under the patronage of the daimio Nobunaga, who welcomed Christianity chiefly as a weapon against the armed Buddhist monasteries he hated. He dates the reversal to Hideyoshi’s edict expelling the Jesuits and the crucifixion, at Nagasaki in February 1597, of three Portuguese Jesuits, six Spanish Franciscans, and seventeen native Christians, and to Iyeyasu’s proclamation of January 1614 branding the missionaries enemies of country, Kami, and Buddhas alike; the chapter climbs to the 1636 Shimabara rising, in which some thirty thousand Christian peasants, without a single foreign priest among them, held an abandoned castle for four months before being slaughtered. Griffis’s judgment cuts both ways: Portuguese Christianity was “military, oppressive and political,” carrying “the spirit of the Inquisition” into Japan and inviting its own destruction, and yet it was “immeasurably superior to anything that the Japanese had hitherto known,” and its converts held to a single standard of chastity and a condemnation of suicide, polygamy, and slavery that neither Buddhism nor Confucianism had taught.

The final chapter, “Two Centuries of Silence,” follows the Tokugawa policy of exclusion and inclusion after 1637, the confinement of Dutch traders to the islet of Deshima from 1640, and the underground history of “seekers after God” — an unnamed convert stirred by a Latin Bible washed ashore from a wreck, the nobleman Watanabe Oboru, thrilled by the story of Jesus as retold to him by the Dutch interpreter Takano Choyei, and Yokoi Heishiro, who preached something close to Christian ethics from the Confucian classics until assassins cut him down in the street. Griffis credits Dutch learning at Deshima, more than any other channel, with keeping Western science and rational medicine alive through the isolation, and carries the story through Perry’s 1853 squadron, Townsend Harris’s treaty, Dr. J. C. Hepburn’s presentation of a Bible to the newly restored emperor, the founding of the first Protestant church at Yokohama on March 10, 1872, and the round-the-world embassy under Iwakura — half of whose members, Griffis notes, had been pupils of the missionary Guido Verbeck, who had planned its itinerary. The book ends in the present tense of its writing, with Japanese armies then on Chinese soil in the war of 1894 and a closing prayer that “the sons of Dai Nippon…see more clearly and welcome more loyally that Prince of Peace whose kingdom is not of this world.” A substantial closing section headed “Notes, Authorities and Illustrations” gathers chapter-by-chapter citations — to the Kojiki, the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Legge, Satow, Aston, and Chamberlain — together with biographical notes on those scholars, and the volume closes with an index.

This Goodly Frame the Earth is a personal travel memoir told as a sequence of short, digressive essays rather than a day-by-day itinerary, recording a round-the-world tour that carried Francis Tiffany — writing chiefly as “I,” often shading into a reflective, essayistic “one,” and into “we” whenever he describes something done jointly with his companion (“We embarked at five p. m. on a fair-sized steamboat”) — from Boston across the American continent and the Pacific to Japan, then on through China, the Malay tropics, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and finally Asia Minor and Greece. All three registers of voice recur from the opening chapters on the Canadian Pacific Railroad to the closing scene on the Acropolis. Tiffany identifies himself in passing as a preacher (musing that, faced with Japanese girls, “as a preacher, one would hardly know how to adapt a serious sermon to their spiritual estate”) and describes his unnamed “traveling companion” as “a veteran editor”; the book is dedicated “To Edwin B. Haskell” for “these few out of the countless happy experiences we shared on our trip round the world,” apparently the same companion who appears throughout the narrative without being named in the text itself. The book is organized into ten titled parts — Getting Under Weigh, Japan, China, The Tropics, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Palestine, Baalbec and Damascus, and Asia Minor and Greece — the longer ones (Japan, China, India, Egypt) further split into several untitled, numbered subsections, the rest running their short, punningly or topically titled chapters directly, and the prose throughout favors extended comic analogy and armchair philosophizing (Buddhism likened to Calvinism, Confucian China to Plato’s Republic, the Rocky Mountains to the Alps) over plain description of sights.

Japan is the second part, running from page 13 to page 96 of a roughly 360-page book — something like a quarter of its bulk — and covering, in Tiffany’s own words, “a two months’ stay.” It opens with the arrival at Yokohama, jinrikisha rides he compares (at length, and only half in jest) to a healthy exercise American husbands might take up, pulling their own wives about for their mutual benefit, and chapters on Japanese women and “the Japanese smile,” which he treats as a disciplined social institution rather than an individual feeling. His traveling companion catches the “curio fever” in Yokohama, in three days buying, by Tiffany’s tally, enough Samurai swords “to equip a regiment of cavalry” and screens “enough to fence in Boston Common.” An excursion to Kamakura to see the Daibutsu becomes an extended meditation on Nirvana, quoting Keats’s Hyperion on Saturn; further chapters cover Miyanoshita, the Fujiya Hotel, and the Ten Province Pass to Atami, then the temples and cryptomeria groves of Nikko and their bells. A chapter on Japanese manners invokes the actor Delsarte’s theory of externally trained expression to argue that Japanese courtesy is a thousand-year-old acting tradition with “nothing behind” it; a chapter on Japanese art dwells on cranes as a favorite decorative motif before turning to the painted screens of the Nijo Palace at Kyoto, each room given its own single repeated motif of bamboo or wild geese. Tiffany visits the graves of the Forty-Seven Ronins, citing Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, and devotes a chapter, “The Question of Missions,” to defending missionaries against both dissolute expatriates and aesthetes, while also condemning “the brutal international treatment” Japan had received, chiefly from England. He closes the section by casting Japan as “the French of Asia,” poised to lead a “new crusade” of Western ideas against “the immobility of the East,” in a footnote written before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war likening a prospective fight between the two nations to “a race between two steamboats, the one with a paddle wheel on either side, the other with a paddle wheel on one side and a clumsy oar on the other.”

China and the countries that follow are handled at a brisker pace. In Shanghai, Tiffany contrasts Chinese and Japanese “conservatism” and, against friends’ warnings, walks unescorted with his companion through the walled Chinese city; in Hong Kong he notes the Sikh police England has imported; on the Canton River he describes the boat-dwelling population and, in Canton itself, the examination halls where, he writes, 12,000 candidates are shut in individual pens for days at a stretch, an occasion for a long portrait of Confucius as, in his own phrase, “not an originator but only a transmitter.” A short Tropics section covers Singapore, whose population he catalogues nationality by nationality. In Ceylon he describes Kandy, the tooth relic at the Malagawa temple, an early-morning Christmas swim, and an “ecclesiastical interview” with a seventy-year-old Buddhist high priest, questioned through an inadequate interpreter about Nirvana, creation, and what he would do if a cobra entered the room. India takes him from Calcutta up the Hoogly, by rail toward Darjeeling — where clouds at first hide the Himalayas, until a clear sunrise delivers, in a chapter titled “At Last the Himalayas!,” the extended view of Kinchinjanga he had traveled to see — into an account of Thibetan “machine-praying” by prayer wheel, and to the Jain temples of Mt. Abu, which he calls “a veritable hasheesh delirium of symbolism,” explaining their carvings partly through a Hindu sect’s parable about a baby monkey clinging to its mother. Throughout this stretch Tiffany groups Japan, China, the Malay Archipelago, and Thibet together as one “Mongol-Malay race,” against which he sets the “Aryan” peoples of Ceylon and India in openly celebratory terms — “Heaven be praised! we are once more among an Aryan people! Blood is thicker than water!”

Egypt is approached, deliberately, by way of the desert rather than the Mediterranean, so as to feel the country’s aridity before reaching the Nile; Tiffany dwells on Mohammed as a product of that landscape, then describes Ismailia, where he draws a sharp line between the “magnificent-looking” Arabs and the Fellahin, whom he watches being driven and beaten toward tourists’ donkeys in a chapter titled “The Land of the Rod.” At Memphis he lingers over the tomb of Thi, using it to explain the Egyptian doctrine of the “double” — the belief that every object pictured on a tomb’s walls had its own spirit-counterpart for the dead man’s use — and contrasts the cheerful domestic scenes of the earlier tombs with the judgment scenes of later dynasties, in which Anubis and Thoth weigh the heart against a feather; the great temples at Karnak, Luxor, Denderah, Abydos, Edfu, and Philae are named but treated as beyond verbal description. In Palestine, the train from Jaffa gives him his first sight of Jerusalem across a ravine by moonlight; he lays out “three frames of mind” in which a visitor can tour the holy places (that of the devout Russian pilgrim, that of a debunking imitator of Mark Twain, and that of a “mediævally scholastic” believer of the Cardinal Newman type) before describing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Stone of Unction, and a walk to Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity, which he finds “bedizened with marble and tinsel”; at the Wailing Wall, by contrast, he says the Jewish mourners’ grief struck him as genuinely “affecting.” A side trip to the Dead Sea and the Jordan is made under armed Bedouin escort hired for safe passage.

Baalbec and Damascus bring a visit to a wealthy Damascus household in which the men of the party stay in the courtyard with, as Tiffany puts it, “the improving society of the coal-black eunuchs,” while “the ladies with us” are admitted to the harem — an occasion for an extended, unfavorable comparison of Mohammed’s character to those of Confucius, the Buddha, and Jesus as founders of religion. The final part, Asia Minor and Greece, sails from Beyrout to Smyrna, skips both Constantinople (cholera quarantine) and Ephesus by choice, and reaches Attica off Cape Sunium; Tiffany records a first, rain-soaked visit to the Parthenon as a “sensation of painful disappointment” — he argues a ruined Greek temple, unlike a ruined Gothic hall, was “never made for a ruin” — followed by a second visit in sunshine and a final nighttime climb of the Acropolis by full moon, in a closing chapter titled “Athens’ Parting Benediction,” where the broken columns of the Parthenon are “transfigured into a still dream-world of light and sweetness.” No table of illustrations, maps, or plates accompanies the text, and the sparsest pages in the volume turn out to be simply blank leaves left between sections; the book’s only apparatus is an alphabetical index running from “Abana” to “Yumoto” at the back, and the dedication to Edwin B. Haskell on an early, unnumbered leaf.

Advance Japan: A Nation Thoroughly in Earnest is a wide-ranging topical survey of Meiji Japan by J. Morris, who identifies himself on the title page as “formerly of the Imperial Public Works Department, Tokio” and the author of War in Korea and A Samurai’s Daughter. In his preface to the first edition he explains that his portrait of the country draws on “a long residence in the Japanese Empire,” including a “stay in the interior in connection with public works” that gave him, in his words, “uncommon facilities for acquiring a knowledge of the habits and ideas of the rustic population.” The book — dedicated to “His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Japan” — reached this second, revised edition in 1896, the first edition having gone to press within months of Japan’s victory over China in 1894–95; a new preface added for the second edition reports on the pacification of Formosa and on Japan’s trade in the months since. Rather than a single journey, it is organized as sixteen topical chapters — administration, geography, natural history, diet, dress, and manners, early history, the Restoration, the early Meiji years, the principal cities, the treaty ports, communications, language and literature, mines, armaments, the war with China, colonization and trade, and a closing chapter on Japan’s future — followed by a sixteen-part statistical appendix.

Opening chapters lay out how Meiji Japan governs and looks. Morris introduces Emperor Mutsuhito and Empress Haruko, sketches the Cabinet by name — Ito Hirobumi as Prime Minister, Mutsu Munemitsu at Foreign Affairs, Saigo Tsugumichi at the Navy, among others — and walks through the machinery of the new Diet, down to members’ salaries of “800 yen annually” and the tax qualifications required of voters and of provincial-assembly electors. A geographical chapter follows the old Tokaido highway from Tokyooward Kioto and Osaka, past Fujiyama, the sulphur springs of Hakone, and Lake Biwa, repeatedly measuring Japan’s coastline, population and latitude range against Britain’s. Later chapters catalogue the country’s fauna and flora — its fish markets, its tea, rice and silk cultivation — and its domestic customs: table etiquette, the order in which sake and rice are served, the kimono and haori, and the position of Japanese wives: Morris credits Empress Haruko herself as “a sturdy champion of the rights of her countrywomen” behind this improvement, and calls the result “among all women in the East, the most respected and free.” He treats the Empress’s 1886 promotion of Parisian court dress among Japanese women as a separate episode, one he thinks could still give way to “a complete return to the original costume.”

A long historical section works from the founding of the imperial line by Jinmu Tenno in 660 B.C. through the rise of the Shoguns, insisting at length that the Tenshi at Kioto, not the Shogun, was always Japan’s true sovereign, against what Morris calls an “altogether erroneous” foreign notion that Japan was a “dual monarchy” in which the Shogun held real, co-equal power. He traces Yoritomo’s founding of the Shogunate at Kamakura, the Ashikaga and Tokugawa successions, the sixteenth-century admission and subsequent three-century suppression of Christianity, and Kublai Khan’s repulsed thirteenth-century invasion, before reaching the fall of the last Shogun, Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu (later known simply as Keiki), in 1868. The narrative grows more anecdotal as it nears the present: the 1874 Saga insurrection and execution of Yeto Shimpei, the punitive expedition to Formosa that same year under General Saigo Tsugumichi — which Morris uses to defend the restraint Japanese troops showed in fighting the aborigines — and the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, whose leader Saigo Takamori, “the heart and sword of the Mikado’s cause,” is followed from his defeat and ritual suicide at Shiroyama to the memorial later raised to him in Tokio’s Aoyama cemetery.

Tokio receives the fullest treatment of any place in the book: its transformation from the Shogun’s Yedo into an electrically lit capital of trams and jinrikishas, the shops of the Ginza, the moated Imperial Palace, the cherry blossoms and museums of Ueno Park, the Kuan-non temple precincts at Asakusa, and the Sho-kon-sha shrine to the war dead on Kudan Hill. Shorter chapters move on to Kioto, Osaka, Nagoya and other cities; the open treaty ports of Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki; the jinrikisha, the expanding railway system and the telegraph network; the hirakana syllabary and the vernacular press; the coal, copper and silver mines worked in Kiushiu and elsewhere; and the organization of the army and navy, the Murata rifle, and the Red Cross Brigade and field ambulances that served in the recent war.

That war supplies the book’s set-piece chapter, narrated engagement by engagement: the destruction of Admiral Ting’s fleet at the Yalu River; the capture of Port Arthur under Marshal Oyama, where Morris takes pains to rebut foreign press reports of a massacre, tracing the “most sensational stories” then current to a single overwrought war correspondent; and the siege of Wei-hai-Wei, where Japanese torpedo boats sank the ironclad Ting-Yuen and several cruisers and crippled her sister ship, and Admiral Ting and his captains chose suicide over surrender. Morris follows the peace negotiations to Shimonoseki, including the attempted assassination of the Chinese envoy Li Hung Chang by a soshi, and the cession of Formosa and the Pescadores. A following chapter on colonization and trade treats Japan’s settlement of the Ainos of Yeso as a rehearsal for governing the “Pepahuan” and “Che-huan” tribes of newly acquired Formosa, and works through import and export figures for silk, cotton, rice, tea and coal.

The book’s argument comes to a head in its closing chapter, “The Future of Japan,” where Morris insists that Japan “did not put on ‘Western civilisation’ as though it were a mantle” but selected deliberately between Eastern and Western practice, and predicts that Japan will use its new leverage over a defeated China to build Chinese railways, supply drill-sergeants and arms, and open a vast Chinese market to Japanese manufactures — an argument the chapter’s own subheadings sum up as “Japan Fought China in Earnest” and “Japan Was Resolutely in Earnest,” language that echoes the book’s title. The volume closes with a sixteen-part appendix of route mileages, population and trade tables, mining and telegraph statistics, and average food costs, and with a list running to some eighty-four illustrations — portraits of ministers and admirals, city and temple views, and maps of Japan’s provinces, railways, telegraphs and Formosa — credited chiefly to “R. Isayama, Military Artist of the Buzen Clan” and to photographs “kindly lent by the Japanese Legation.”

Japan: Its People and Missions announces itself on its title page as the work of Jesse Page, already credited there as author of three earlier missionary biographies — Bishop Patteson, Henry Martyn, and Amid Greenland Snows — and issued by Fleming H. Revell Company, “Publishers of Evangelical Literature.” It is not a travel book. Page’s preface is explicit that the volume was assembled rather than observed at first hand: “the highest authorities on the subject have been consulted, and many books, viewing Japan from various standpoints, have been pressed into service,” and he names them — William Elliot Griffis’s Mikado’s Empire and Religions of Japan, George Curzon’s Problems of the Far East, Sir Edwin Arnold’s By Sea and Land, Eugene Stock’s Japan and the Japan Mission, Henry Norman’s Real Japan, John Batchelor’s The Aino of Japan, B. H. Chamberlain’s Things Japanese, J. D. Davis’s Life of Neesima, and Cassell’s Conquests of the Cross. He also thanks the Church Missionary Society for “again so courteously placing at my disposal their library, journals, and letters,” Dr. W. N. Whitney for instruction “from his personal knowledge of the country and its people,” and the Rev. John Piper, “so long resident as a missionary in Japan, who has at great pains revised every page of the work before going to press.” What results is a missionary-society survey built from published authorities, society archives, and missionaries’ letters and reports, organized into ten chapters running from Japan’s early history through its religions to the Protestant mission record, closing with an appeal keyed to the recently concluded war with China. Long stretches of the book are given over verbatim to these borrowed voices — extended block quotations from Griffis, from Arnold, and from missionaries’ own letters recur in every chapter — with Page’s connecting narrative, predominantly in the third person though punctuated by occasional first-person authorial asides, stitching the quoted material together.

The first four chapters lay out Japan’s past and its religious landscape before any missionary arrives. Chapter I traces “old-fashioned Japan” from the legendary Jimmu Tenno through the rise of the Shoguns, the naval battle between the Taira and Minamoto fleets off Shimonoseki, the repulsed Mongol invasion of 1281, and Hideyoshi’s invasion of Corea, closing with Marco Polo’s report of “Japangu” and Mendez Pinto’s shipwreck landing in 1542. Chapter II follows Francis Xavier and the Jesuits from Xavier’s meeting with the fugitive Anjiro at Goa through mass conversions claimed at six hundred thousand, the crucifixion of nine missionaries and seventeen converts at Nagasaki under Hideyoshi, and the massacre of the Christian garrison of Shimabara, ending with the edict, quoted in full, threatening death to any Christian who dared come to Japan “as long as the sun shall warm the earth.” Chapter III covers the two centuries of closure — the Dutch trading post at Deshima, the Abbe Siddotti’s failed 1709 landing — through Commodore Perry’s visits and Lord Elgin’s treaty, the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries (Liggins, Williams, Hepburn), Dr. Hepburn’s twenty-seven years compiling his Japanese dictionary, and the secret 1866 baptism of Wakasa and his brother by Dr. Verbeck, ending with Griffis’s eyewitness account of the Daimio of Echizen’s farewell to his retainers in 1871. Chapter IV surveys Shinto — the mirror at Ise, the recitation of a Shinto prayer given in full, the paper mannikins thrown in the river for purification — and Buddhism, tracing the Jodo sect to Honen’s revelation of the invocation “Namu Amida Butsu” and the Shin-Shu sect to Shinran’s marriage and doctrine of salvation by faith, and describing the bronze Dai Buts at Nara and the pilgrimage up Fuji-San.

Chapters V through VIII turn to the missionaries themselves and to Japanese life. Chapter V follows the Rev. George Ensor, the first English missionary (1869), through his conversion of the would-be assassin Futugawa, the building of the first Church Missionary Society church at Deshima, the arrival of fourteen missionary societies within four years, Hepburn’s and Piper’s Bible translation work, and the conversion of the Buddhist priest Yohoi. Chapter VI, “The Japs at Home,” turns topical: the Ainu contrasted with the Japanese proper via a long quotation from Griffis, the Feast of Dolls and Feast of Flags, the four social classes (Samurai, Hiyakusho, Shokonin, Akindo) and the outcast eta, the theater and its violence, lacquer work, and — quoting Sir Edwin Arnold’s Seas and Lands at length — the position of Japanese women, whom Page and his sources describe as beautiful, dutiful, and yet, in Arnold’s words, living “a semi-slave” status that Page argues only Christianity can remedy. Chapter VII covers medical missions: acupuncture and moxa as traditional remedies, Hepburn’s and then Dr. J. C. Berry’s and Dr. Wallace Taylor’s hospital work, and the Red Cross Society of Japan (the Hakuaisha), followed by an account of Bible distribution to soldiers and sailors during the war with China, including a Japanese soldier’s letter of thanks quoted in full. Chapter VIII, “Among the Hairy Ainos,” describes Ainu religion and the bear sacrifice (quoted at length from an 1863 account in the Leisure Hour), the Rev. H. Dening’s and then John Batchelor’s mission work among them, Chief Penri’s repeated failures to give up drink, the baptism of the first Ainu convert at Hakodate on Christmas Day 1885, and, by 1895, a roll of four hundred and seven baptized Ainu Christians — closing with Batchelor’s complaint of Roman Catholic priests undercutting his converts.

Chapter IX is given wholly to Joseph Hardy Neesima — the longest continuous narrative in the book — following him from his boyhood discovery of a fragmentary Chinese Bible, through his 1864 flight from Japan by stowing away on an American ship, his education and conversion in America, his return in 1874, the founding of the Doshisha college at Kioto in the face of Buddhist opposition, and his death on January 23, 1890, with his own letters and diary quoted throughout. Chapter X, “Looking Ahead. Clouds and Sunlight,” reflects on Japan’s position after the war with China, weighing the danger that Japan might prove “too willing to imitate the militarism of Western nations” against the greater danger, as Page and his quoted authorities (Bishop Bickersteth, Dr. Whitney) see it, of Western “Agnosticism, unbelief, and rank infidelity” spreading alongside Western science, and it details renewed Buddhist and Shinto resistance to Christianity, including a boycott of an American missionary’s outpost recounted by the Rev. G. W. Fulton. The book ends on this note of appeal, without any appendix, index, or glossary. It opens with a full-page wood-engraved frontispiece, “A Car Procession in Japan,” facing the title page, and the Preface itself is headed by a small illustrated vignette of a “Japanese Shop”; the chapters that follow are illustrated throughout with wood-engraved portraits and scenes — among them Francis Xavier, Dr. Hepburn, Murata Wakasa-no-Kami, the old and new churches of St. Andrew’s at Deshima, an Ainu family, Chief Penri, and Neesima himself and his grave — and several chapters, including the last, open with a small pictorial headpiece, such as the view of “The First Railway in Japan” that heads Chapter X.

Notes in Japan is a landscape painter’s record of nine months spent working out of doors in Japan, written and illustrated by Alfred Parsons, whose title page announces the volume as “with illustrations by the author.” It opens in the plural — “We had left Hong-Kong enveloped in its usual spring fog” — aboard a steamer that anchors in Nagasaki Bay at six in the evening on the 9th of March, in the rain, off “the country which for years it had been my dream to see and paint.” Parsons declines the hospitable invitations of the English residents there, goes on with the ship to Kobe, and within an hour of landing has set off for a village six miles away famous for its plum orchards. Six unnumbered chapters — “The Japanese Spring,” “Early Summer in Japan,” “The Time of the Lotus,” “Fujisan,” “Some Wanderings in Japan,” and “Autumn in Japan” — do not follow the calendar: the last dated day of the fifth is the 3rd of November, and the sixth turns back to the middle of September. Five of the six begin with a page or two of general observation before settling into narrative. Most of the book is singular; the plural takes over for the voyage and the landfall, for the whole Fuji excursion, and for later journeys made with a friend, or with his boy Matsuba and hired men, though “we” and “our” do occasional editorial duty elsewhere.

What organizes the movement is where the flowers are and whether the weather will permit work; he lodges mostly in tea-houses, but also in a temple, in a lava hut on Fuji and at the club-house in Kobe. A first sketch, made at Okamoto in a bitter wind, costs him a fortnight of the plum blossom to lumbago, but by mid-April he is installed at the Kiku-sui-ya beside Kasuga Park in Nara, painting the stone lanterns that tradition says have never been counted and, above all, the old wistarias, whose “great snaky stems” writhe along the ground and twist “up to the tops of the highest trees.” He picks up Japanese words from O Nao San, a young lady of about twelve who has appointed herself his protector. On the 25th of April he leaves for Yoshino and the cherry groves, too late: three days of wind and rain have covered the ground with pink petals. He takes rooms built out in a garden, gambles for beans at vingt-et-un with the household, and goes on by jinricksha to Hase, where peonies are banked up the steps of the Kwannon temple. Early summer brings the tea plantations of Uji under acres of matting, then Hikone on Lake Biwa, with its pony races in a dry river-bed, and finally Tennenji, an almost deserted temple whose priest’s family adopt him, feed him experimentally, and raise silkworms in the Hondo under the eye of the Buddha.

The government, foreseeing that a traveler “might be tempted to neglect his duties and become a mere loafer,” sends Parsons back to Kobe for a new passport. On the 9th of July the heat drives him from Yokohama to Nikko, by the old road under its close-grown cryptomerias, not the new railway — the mortuary temples of Ieyasu and Iemitsu, five days of unbroken rain at Chuzenji. Back on the plain he wrestles with the lotus at the Benten pond in Shiba and the lotus-ponds at Kamakura — “one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my lot to try and paint.” From it comes his one sustained argument: Japanese flower drawings — “they usually draw them beautifully” — are “often influenced in some way by a tradition” whose followers look through the founder’s eyes, so the spots on lotus stems get “bigger and bigger,” and will until “some original genius” arises who “will dare to look for himself”; Japanese landscape, he adds, is no more conventional than Claude or David Cox. Fujisan, plural almost throughout, opens with a friend’s proposal, the first week in August: an aged man leads them astray in the mist; thirteen sleep in a lava hut whose keepers copy every passport into a book; the crater takes two miles to walk round; and the glissade of fine ashes ends at Number Five station, forest and moorland short of Yoshida. A dated note, “Fuji from Suzukawa. Oct. 3, 1892,” closes the chapter.

“Some Wanderings” follows the five lakes north of Fuji, a typhoon on the 4th of September, the Nakasendo and the Kisogawa, and the rapids of the Tenryugawa, Parsons and his boy Matsuba seated on the piled baggage, five hired men at the oars; it ends at Atami — over the backbone of the Idzu Peninsula, on the western coast of Odawara Bay — and with the walk of the 3rd of November, made with a friend over the Ten Province Pass to a turf plateau commanding Fuji. Autumn carries the book south and west. Near Hamamatsu, reached on the 16th of September, he finds the scarlet lilies of the field, whose name changes from place to place — commonest, he thinks, higambana, the equinox flower — beautiful to European eyes but to the Japanese a flower of ill omen, gathered by children in armfuls but never carried indoors; on the Tokaido white-clad engineers lay a field-telegraph past fishermen and peasants “all working and living as they have done for centuries past.” He paints Suma and Maiko, settles at Maibara for the blue-flowered water-plant in the flooded lake-side fields, and drives out to the Nagahama matsuri, where twelve towering cars called yama, hung with Chinese embroideries and Persian rugs — two with Flemish tapestry that “must have come over with the Dutch centuries ago” — carry stages on which small boys act scenes from history. Figures clothed in growing chrysanthemums at Dangozaka and the maples at Oji end the year.

His opinions are stated plainly: admiration for Japanese cleanliness, for family affection, and for a people whose idea of a holiday is to wander in the open air gazing at landscapes and flowers; distaste for daikon; irritation at crowds that squeeze up close to his elbow. The best singer in Hikone strikes him as “quite devoid of melody,” “disagreeable and harsh,” though at Gotemba the same verdict is qualified — “queer, tuneless, and often harsh to the European ear, but with the blood-stirring quality of all genuine national music.” One of his last days in Tokyo is spent showing his drawings to the students of the Uyeno School of Art, whose president, Professor Okakura, is working to keep the artistic tradition alive; then good-luck emblems at the Asakusa matsuri, and on the 10th of December he sails “across the dreary and flowerless Pacific.” The four-page list of illustrations catalogues a hundred and twenty items, from the frontispiece and the dedication drawing of lilies and millet to the lychnis of the Misaka-toge; it passes over the chapter openings, each of which sets a drawing beside the first paragraph under a large initial — ornamented in some chapters, a plain roman letter in others — so the book carries more pictures than it lists. All are printed with the text rather than as inserted plates — halftones of tonal originals, pen studies of single plants, tail-pieces — and nearly all are his own.

Problems of the Far East: Japan—Korea—China is a political and economic survey of three East Asian states by George N. Curzon, M.P., self-described veteran of “two journeys round the world in 1887-88 and in 1892-93.” The preface to the first edition insists the book “does not pretend to be a book of travel,” but is instead an attempt “to examine, in a comparative light, the political, social, and economic conditions” of Japan, Korea, and China, treated as a natural trio bound by a shared Pacific outlook (a companion volume on Indo-China was promised but is not part of this book). The work first appeared in August 1894, within weeks of the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War; this “New and Revised Edition” of 1896 keeps the original argument nearly intact but adds a new closing chapter, “After the War,” reprints the July 1894 Anglo-Japanese commercial treaty and the Treaty of Shimonoseki as appendices, and opens with a preface that quotes at length a hostile contemporary review of the first edition (accusing Curzon of underestimating China) before rebutting it. The book is dedicated “to those who believe that the British Empire is, under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen”; it opens with an essay on “The Far East” (epigraphed from Wordsworth) before settling into four titled parts — Japan, Korea, China, and three closing “Prospect” chapters — each carrying its own literary epigraph: Keats for Japan, Victor Hugo for Korea, Sir John Maundeville’s Travels for China, and Virgil’s Aeneid for the Prospect. Throughout, Curzon writes in the first person, moving freely between personal anecdote (“I enjoyed the pleasure on several occasions of meeting and conversing,” “I was admitted to an audience with His Majesty”) and sustained political argument, a mixture that runs consistently across all three country sections.

Japan occupies chapters II and III, the shortest of the book’s three country sections at roughly seventy pages. Curzon opens with the visible modernization he found on returning in 1892 after a five-year gap — new railways linking Tokyo and Kyoto, tramways and electric light in the capital, a fledgling Diet meeting in a temporary wooden chamber. Most of “The Evolution of Modern Japan” is given over to the young parliament’s constitutional crises of 1892-93 and 1893: repeated deadlocks over the naval budget and land-tax reassessment between Count Ito’s cabinet and an opposition split between Okuma’s Kaishinto and Itagaki’s Jiyuto, two dissolutions of the Diet, and an Imperial Rescript in which the Emperor surrendered part of his own Civil List to break the impasse. Curzon reduces the underlying stakes to three “real points at issue”: the survival of Satsuma-Choshiu clan oligarchy against democratic pressure, the constitutional role of the Throne, and whether ministers should be responsible to the Diet or to the Emperor alone. He profiles Ito, Inouye, Yamagata, and Mutsu at length, quotes a British officer’s admiring assessment of the Japanese army, and tallies national finances, trade, and the rapid growth of Japan’s own cotton-spinning industry. A section on Japanese attitudes to foreigners catalogues the Ravenna-Chishima collision riots, boycotts of foreign goods, and three episodes of what he calls “schoolboy patriotism” — a doomed amateur colonizing expedition to the Kurils, the lionizing of a military attaché’s ride from St. Petersburg, and a banquet for a diplomat recalled from Korea in disgrace — before concluding that Japan is unlikely to turn Christian. Chapter III traces the two-decade campaign for Treaty Revision, from the extraterritoriality granted under Perry’s 1855 treaty through the failed Inouye and Okuma negotiations (the latter ending in a 1889 bomb attack on Okuma himself) to Viscount Aoki’s eventual success in 1894 with Lord Rosebery’s Government, under Foreign Secretary Lord Kimberley, whose text Curzon reprints in full as an appendix.

Korea receives the book’s most expansive and most personal treatment, four chapters and well over a hundred pages, which Curzon justifies in his preface by the country’s “intrinsic novelty that is not yet exhausted” and his claim to “break almost new ground” where existing literature was thin. He lands at each of the three treaty ports — Fusan, Gensan, Chemulpo — before striking inland to the Diamond Mountains (Keum Kang San), visiting Buddhist monasteries such as Chang An Sa and Sak Wang Sa and describing monks, tiger-hunting, and the Korean pony and its driver in close, often affectionate detail; he also, without euphemism, repeatedly characterizes ordinary Koreans as good-natured but idle, attributing their poverty less to want of resources than to an official class that “subsists by extortion.” A full chapter is devoted to Soul itself — its walls and eight gates, its beacon-fire towers on Nam San, its filthy streets and elaborate hierarchy of hats — and to the court: King Li Hsi, whom Curzon interviews in a formal royal audience (a separate, joking exchange about ages and salary belongs to an earlier interview with the Korean Foreign Minister, not the King), the politically dominant Queen and her Min relatives, and the old Regent, the Tai Wen Kun, whose career of coups, a poisoned rival, an exploding-bonbon plot, kidnapping by the Chinese, and, in 1895, alleged complicity in the Queen’s assassination, Curzon narrates as a connected saga. He is present for a royal procession and for a once-in-a-generation military review that leaves thirty thousand spectators waiting from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. Later chapters turn to Korean administration, currency, and missionary work, and to “The Political Future of Korea” — the country’s ambiguous vassalage to China, the 1885 British occupation and voluntary evacuation of Port Hamilton, and the rival pressures of Japan, China, and Russia that Curzon reads as making Korea “the carcase and the eagles.”

China, covered in four chapters of comparable length to the Korea section, opens with Curzon’s own audience with Li Hung Chang at Tientsin — a long, probing interview he recounts almost stenographically — before he continues by boat and pony to Peking, whose triple-walled, fourfold city (Chinese, Tartar, Imperial, Forbidden) and roaring street life he describes at length, alongside the tangled palace intrigue by which the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi and her co-regent installed the infant Kuang Hsu on the throne in 1875. Chapter IX, “China and the Powers,” is built around two extended set pieces: a history of the Tsungli Yamen, which Curzon calls “a Board of Delay,” and a detailed account of the “Right of Audience” controversy — the kowtow refused by Lord Macartney in 1793 and by Lord Amherst in 1816, and the eventual imperial audiences of 1873 and 1891 — through which he argues that Russia, not Britain, is China’s true adversary and natural obstacle; the same chapter gives comparably extended treatment to the Missionary Question in China — persecution, converts, and doctrinal disputes over “the right policy” toward it. “The So-Called Awakening of China” surveys railway schemes, the reorganized Manchu armies, and what he judges “the reality of standstill” beneath a surface of reform, while a shorter chapter, “Monasticism in China,” examines Chinese Buddhist temple life as a counterpart to the Korean monasteries described earlier in the book.

The book’s final third, “The Prospect,” was substantially rewritten for this edition to absorb the war’s outcome. “After the War” apportions blame for the conflict — China’s obstructionism provoked it, but Japan “was pointedly the aggressor” — and then, having praised Japanese patriotism, secrecy, and organization, deflates the resulting reputation for martial prowess by setting Japan’s own published casualty figures against each other: of 3,284 dead, only 795 fell in combat, the rest to cholera and disease. China’s collapse he attributes bluntly to civil corruption at every level and to officers who “stole the men’s pay” and fled the field, and he sketches, in some detail, the reforms — a national army, an independent navy staffed by foreign officers, an overhauled civil service — that he believes could still save the country if it were not, in his phrase, “untaught and unteachable.” The same chapter tracks, almost blow by blow, Japan’s attempt to impose sweeping reform on a newly “independent” Korea: the fourteen articles the King swore before the royal ancestral tablets in January 1895, Count Inouye’s effective dictatorship, the installation of Pak Yong Hio and So Kwang Pem as ministers, a subsequent decree of eighty-eight new rules touching everything from calendars to concubinage to hat colors, and the program’s collapse amid popular resistance, court counter-plotting, and the Queen’s murder, an event Curzon calls “scandalous” and in which he says the Japanese were “alleged” to be implicated. The remaining chapters weigh the late Mr. C. H. Pearson’s thesis of a coming Chinese racial “resurrection” against Curzon’s own sustained disagreement with it, and close with a survey of British commercial supremacy, missionary and press life, and the diplomatic service in the Far East, including a proposal that British legations keep proper reference libraries and a prediction that English will become the region’s common language. The volume ends, after a closing quatrain of unattributed verse on imperial destiny, with two further appendices reproducing in full the Treaty of Shimonoseki and an Imperial Rescript of May 1895, and an index. Its illustration program is substantial: a frontispiece photographic portrait of “His Majesty Li Hsi, King of Korea,” further full-page plates of the Japanese Houses of Parliament and its two chambers, the King in state procession, Korean cavalry and “Modern-Drilled Korean Infantry,” the Temple and Altar of Heaven, and the Great Wall of China, together with some three dozen smaller photographic illustrations worked into the text — Marquis Ito, Li Hung Chang, the gates and palaces of Soul, the streets of Peking — and two maps, one of Korea and Peking and a larger map of Japan, Korea, and China bound in at the very end.

The Yankees of the East is a set of topical sketches of Japan as Curtis found it in 1895, in two volumes paginated continuously to p. 644. He arrived in May 1895, “shortly after the ratification of the treaty of peace,” spent four months there and “visited nearly all of the principal cities,” writing in the first person singular, with “we” only for excursions in company, and naming “Renzo Sano … the best guide I found.” The book never names a newspaper or calls him a correspondent, but it is dedicated to Victor F. Lawson, “the prince of employers,” a front leaf headed “Books by the same author” gives three earlier titles and an “etc., etc.,” and for at least three months he takes “notes of the telegraphic news in the Japanese papers.” He prints his purpose in the first paragraph rather than at the end: to encourage “every man, woman and child, twelve years old and upward, who have the time and money, to visit the land of fans and flowers before its original picturesqueness is entirely overcast with the commonplace and colorless customs of modern civilization.” Merchants and manufacturers are addressed beside travelers. The organizing contrast is between “the Japan upon which the sun of the nineteenth century rose, and the Japan upon which it sets.” Eleven chapters fill the first volume, twelve the second, whose printed headings skip from XIII to XV and run to XXIV while its contents list numbers the same chapters XII–XXIII. The title phrase stands on the title-page and at the head of every verso except where a chapter opens, and the book leaves it unglossed.

Government fills the second chapter: ten administrative departments, a privy council, prefectures on the French model, and the judgment that “Judged by the American standard the Japanese are a much-governed people, the officials being numerous, their authority great…” He praises the constitution of 11 February 1889, by which an absolute monarch “voluntarily presented his subjects with the gift of self-government,” then details the House of Peers, a House of Representatives elected by men paying fifteen yen in taxes, the land tax, the licensing of public meetings, and a police order, reprinted entire, dissolving a political society. “The rich man does the voting; the poor man does the shouting.” Hostile pages follow on the soshi, “the most reckless and dangerous portion of the community.” The imperial-family chapter reports Japanese reverence without sharing it: Mutsu Hito is “the 122d emperor”; the prince imperial is “almost continually ill”; of the empress Haru Ko he writes, “I suppose I should say that she is beautiful and graceful and all that, but she isn’t if one judge by the classic types”; and the emperor’s consorts are, in a joke off Artemus Ward, “nine in number — one empress and eight imperial concubines.” He watches the emperor’s return from Hiroshima in June 1895, received in silence and then with “Banzai!” A further chapter runs from Ieyasu and his tomb at Nikko to Shizuoka, where Curtis and his companions—“three Americans, one of them an officer in the United States army”—call on Hitosu-Bashi, “the last of the tycoons,” are refused admittance, and get their information from the porter’s wife and mother.

The opening chapter is the traveler’s: steamship lines, the estimate that “Three months and $1,000 are sufficient to see Japan…,” a route from Yokohama to Nagasaki, and a survey of existing books: Murray’s guide “incomplete and unsatisfactory,” Chamberlain, Scidmore, Griffis, Rein and Alice Bacon recommended, and pointed paragraphs on Sir Edwin Arnold’s “roseate views” and on Lafcadio Hearn, whose “prose poems and pictures” are “a little more accurate than the writings of Sir Edwin.” The shopping chapter, framed at both ends by the fall of silver, covers tailors, obis, embroideries and the second-hand shops, and what the makers get: women at an Osaka cotton factory paid no more than nine cents a day, gold, for twelve hours’ work, and the fifteen sen (seven and a half cents) charged him for making up a silk kimono — a day’s work, he supposes, to which “the merchant must have added a commission for himself.” Commerce, built from official statistics, states the grievance: “We have the friendship of the government and the people. Great Britain has their hostility and their trade.” Railways bring the Imperial Railway Bureau’s tables and fares, ’rikishas their hire rates. The volume’s last chapter, on trade and investments, opens with Mr. Dun, the United States minister, on the outlook, then the treaties that end extraterritoriality in 1899, an interview with the merchant Yesabro Wooyeno, and the boycott declared by Kimura’s guild against the English house of Cornes & Co. It ends among lost contracts: Tokyo’s water pipe let at Liège and then at Glasgow, and steel railway bridges let to a British company after the only American estimates Mr. Morse could get, at San Francisco, came in far above the European bids.

Police, courts and prisons make the eighth chapter. The Japanese policeman “never sits on the cellar stairs and gossips with the servant girls”; judges sit from eight in the morning to eight at night, and “No lawyers are allowed except in extraordinary cases.” Curtis visits the Ishikawa island prison, counts 2,848 men and boys, and describes dormitories of “enormous wooden cages” holding ninety-six convicts each, the nightly hot bath, the tenth of their earnings paid over on discharge, and the guilds of thieves and beggars outside. Marriage and divorce follows, describing the system with evident disapproval: the go-between, the interview over tea, the three cups of saké, the rule that “It is disreputable for a Japanese young man to marry for love,” and official figures showing divorces about a third as numerous as marriages. Its last pages are given to a Japanese writer, Daigoro Goh, whose long reply is aimed not at Curtis but at The Japanese Bride, by the Rev. Mr. Tamura — the book that got its author expelled from his presbytery, not for falsehood but for advertising the faults of his race among foreigners. Journalism brings nearly six hundred newspapers, the “jail editor” who serves sentences for offenses he did not commit, the complaint that the news agencies are “under British influence and control” and ignore the United States, and the government printing office, whose single font runs past ten thousand characters, with composing rooms where small boys and girls pick the type.

Labor opens the second volume. Originality is not wanted, he argues, but adaptability and imitation, powers “going to make Japan a dangerous competitor for the European nations in manufactured merchandise”; the war, he adds a page later, taught employers they have “the best, the cheapest and most skillful labor for the money in the world.” Wage schedules from Col. M. W. McIvor, the United States consul-general, run by trade, and Middleton & Co.’s tea-shipping house down to the thirteen sen (six and a half cents) a day paid to the boys and girls who pick over its leaves for about twelve hours. No unions exist, but guilds run “from the bankers … as far as the massage operators, the story tellers and the thieves,” and a first strike he believes came in the summer of 1895. Farming is “one vast garden”: two acres is a large tract, most are smaller, women “carry their half of the load” and get “all the back breaking work,” and a farmer with a reaper “would cut down everything in the way of crops while he was turning it around.” The dinner chapter takes in saké, soyu and a banquet for ex-Secretary Foster at Mr. Okura’s; of the tea-house nesans or geisha he writes, “these girls are not pretty. Their figures are shapeless, their features are flat, their complexions are muddy, their teeth are bad.” Education takes up Joseph Neeshima and the Doshisha, its enrollment fallen from 1,200 to about 300, but gives its largest block to an essay on language and poetry.

The missionary chapter, the longest in the volume, opens on whether foreign missionaries should be withdrawn. The Rev. Tamura, a Japanese pastor educated at Princeton and Auburn, is quoted for withdrawal: “If all the foreign preachers were to leave Japan to-morrow do you suppose a single church would be closed?” Against him Curtis prints pages of question and answer with the Rev. Joseph M. Francis of the Episcopal seminary, who answers “By no means,” puts all the churches’ communicants at about one in four hundred of the population and, asked whether the Japanese have any religion, replies “I do not think they have.” Curtis’s own verdict is warm—the missionaries “drove the wedge that split the conservatism of the ancient Japanese empire”—though he holds too many weak ones are sent out, and he reports the quarrel between the missionary and merchant colonies from both sides. The next chapter calls Shinto “nothing more than patriotism, hero-worship and the adoration of the spirits of the dead,” and Buddhism “beautiful in theory, but invariably disappoints its admirers when they see it in actual application.” He interviews a named Buddhist priest, Renjo Akamatzu of the Nishi Honganji at Kyoto—“I do not believe in proselyting”—attends a memorial mass at Ikegami for soldiers killed in the war, and at Nikko prints, unanswered, a young priest’s long statement working clause by clause through the Apostles’ Creed, balking at the atonement—“I never could understand it. It does not seem logical”—and asking “whether your morals are any better than ours.”

“A Peculiar Institution” treats licensed prostitution as an administrative system, “novel and severe” but “a marked success from a police and sanitary point of view.” Curtis prints the machinery—police licensing, a monthly tax of ten per cent on gross receipts, a visitors’ register “open to the inspection of the public,” weekly medical examination, contracts of no more than seven years, a keeper forbidden to punish or detain a woman—and states the traffic plainly: “men who are well posted assert that sixty per cent of the inmates of the yoshiwara are there not only with the consent but with the encouragement of their parents, who sell the bodies of their daughters.” The scale is national — “there are said to be 18,000 kashi-zashiki in Japan, with 250,000 inmates” — with Tokyo’s three yoshiwaras as the leading case and one of the finest houses in them owned by a bank president. “The Advancement of Women” calls the change in their condition the most radical reform since the restoration, sets the Empress’s schools and the Marchioness Oyama, a Vassar graduate, beside falling enrollments in the girls’ seminaries, and quotes Fukuzawa—“It is simply a spasm”—against an unnamed woman educator of many years’ standing in Japan whose testimony is far bleaker: “It is no advantage for the average girl to have an education in Japan.”

Theater and wrestling share a chapter; both, Curtis says, began as religious worship. He describes the police censor’s box, all-day performances, and Ichikawa Danjuro, “the Henry Irving of Japan”; then four grades of wrestler, 384 recognized grips and positions, and a tournament of sixty-two that ran from one until nearly seven without a dispute. The art chapter begins at the Chicago exposition and Okakura’s art school, gives the verdict that the Japanese “have never yet produced one grand historical scene,” then turns straight to the nude: “An artist can find models au natural in any direction he may look.” Kamakura’s Great Buddha follows, and the chapter closes on Japanese religion, the soshi and an 1892 order to salute the Emperor’s portrait in every school. A miscellany empties the notebook—reversed customs, shop signs in improvised English, Chinese cashiers—before the last chapter takes up the crisis after the forced return of Liao-tung: fifty daily newspapers suppressed in one week, the greater part of an army of four hundred thousand disbanded, lavish official honors for Prince Komatsu at Kobe but “a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm among the people,” two suicides. By surviving it “without a revolution,” he concludes, the Japanese showed “they have acquired something more than a veneer of civilization”; he quotes Lafcadio Hearn on “the primitive clay” beneath, and ends by clearing the ministers of blame. An index to both volumes runs pp. 635–644; the first volume lists twenty-three halftone illustrations, the second twenty-one; a colophon dated June 1896 closes each.

A collection of fifteen papers and an appendix, Kokoro bears on its title page the character for kokoro above an engraved portrait head, and opens with a prefatory note dated “Kobé, September 15, 1895.” The papers, the note explains, “treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan,” and the word signifies heart but also “mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning, — just as we say in English, ‘the heart of things.’” The pieces differ sharply in kind and scale: the shortest run seven pages apiece, the chapters of sustained argument past thirty, the longest of them to forty-one. Among them are third-person tales and dated diary entries. Hearn keeps a Japanese household and goes about with an old man, Manyemon. The datelines range from the twenty-sixth year of Meiji to June 1895, and footnotes gloss Japanese words throughout. The volume opens at a Kumamoto railway station, where a captured murderer is confronted with the widow and small son of the policeman he killed. He beats his face into the dust begging the child’s pardon, and Hearn sees “the tears of a Japanese policeman.” “The Genius of Japanese Civilization” argues that Japan’s victory over China and her use of Western methods involved no change of race character, and dwells on impermanency — the shrine of Ise demolished every twenty years — and on a strength that “needs little material display” and exists “in the Race Ghost.”

The essay is not impersonal: one section walks a Western megacity, “I am tired, because I have walked many miles between those precipices of masonry.” Another turns impermanency into an argument for mobility and freedom: the Japanese man of the people can “get ready for his journey in five minutes,” and “On ten dollars he can travel for a year.” It closes by quoting Ferdinand Brunetière on individualism as “the enemy of education, as it is also the enemy of social order.” In “A Street Singer” a blind, smallpox-scarred peasant woman sings a printed ballad of a double suicide in Ōsaka. “From a Traveling Diary” collects dated entries from Kyōto and Kobé: the national Exhibition, and a scorned canvas of a nude. The painting sends the diary into six pages on beauty. Ideal nudity may be divine, a naked person is not; the shock given by Greek marbles is akin to the shock of first love. Plato explained the shock of beauty as the soul’s sudden half-remembrance of the World of Divine Ideas, Schopenhauer the shock of first love as “the Will-power of the Soul of the Race,” and the positive psychology of Spencer declares the most powerful of human passions, on its first appearance, absolutely antecedent to all individual experience. The sense of beauty is therefore inherited, and “In every aesthetic sensation is the stirring of trillions of trillions of ghostly memories buried in the magical soil of the brain.”

The diary pairs two new Kyōto constructions, the Imperial Government’s gift and the common people’s: the Dai-Kioku-Den, a facsimile of Kwammu Tennō’s palace dedicated to his spirit, and the Higashi Hongwanji, whose roof-beams were “hauled to Kyōto from far-away mountain-slopes, with cables made of the hair of Buddhist wives and daughters.” At Hyōgo comes “the exhibition of fishes and of fisheries … in a garden by the sea. Waraku-en is its name.” O-Toyo, in “The Nun of the Temple of Amida,” outlives husband and son among children in the nun’s-temple built for her. Paper carp fly over the roofs as “After the War” opens at Hyōgo on May 5, 1895; the chapter catalogs war toys, prints, and theatricals. A two-page footnote translates the soldiers’ song of the bugler Shirakami Genjirō, who sounded the charge once more with a bullet through his lungs and “fell back dead.” Russia, France, and Germany interfere; the government “played jiujutsu,” yielded, and returned the Liao-Tung peninsula for a larger indemnity; “the national pride has been deeply wounded.” Crowds swarm over the flagship Matsushima Kan, anchored “before the Garden of the Pleasure of Peace.” Two passages of engraved music, the only ones in the volume, reproduce a bugle call; between them the regiments march back into Kobé in silence. The last word is Manyemon’s: “There are no Japanese dead who do not return. … And they will hear them also in that day when the armies of the Son of Heaven shall be summoned against Russia.”

“Haru” narrates the death of a wife neglected for a geisha, her widower haunted by the single word “Anata?” “A Glimpse of Tendencies” opens on an open port’s foreign concession and traces how Japanese storekeepers, physicians, and shipping companies were displacing foreigners. A guild’s threatened boycott in July 1895 forced a British house, victorious in a Japanese court, into a costly compromise. A middle section anatomizes the mutual dislike of Oriental and Occidental, and the foreign editors who “at the outbreak of the war with China openly took the part of China.” The foreign settlements, Hearn expects, will disappear “as communities,” leaving “only some few great agencies”; mission work “must be left to native missionaries,” and a remodeled Christianity “can scarcely hope to exist except in the form of a few small sects.” Japan “will have some Christian sects of her own,” the essay ends, but will “not preserve relics of our sojourn, carefully wrapped in septuple coverings of silk … because we had no new lesson of beauty to teach her.” “By Force of Karma” sets Western theories of first love beside a young priest’s suicide under the express from Kobé, and a scholar’s verdict that he was one of those “whom the Teacher called fools.” “A Conservative,” the longest single narrative, follows an unnamed samurai from a boyhood of executions and icy water through the Black Ships, apostasy, and exile to a sunrise sight of Fuji, and closes on the prayer of his childhood before the ancestral tablets.

A curio dealer in “In the Twilight of the Gods” shows a go-down of bronzes he calls “josses,” and recalls a syndicate’s offer for the Daibutsu at Kamakura. “The Idea of Preëxistence” takes what passes on to be karma, not a soul. Its closing NOTE warns that “soul,” “self,” “ego,” “transmigration,” and “heredity” all carry meanings foreign to Buddhist thought, and insists that karma “does not descend from parent to child; it is independent of the line of heredity.” “In Cholera-Time” watches an epidemic from a balcony and ends with a widowed pipe-stem seller wheeling his baby beside his wife’s mortuary tablet. Shintō’s “peculiar element of truth,” argues the book’s longest chapter, “is the belief that the world of the living is directly governed by the world of the dead.” The hypothesis is underwritten by psychological evolution: “each living brain represents the structural work of innumerable dead lives.” “Some Thoughts about Ancestor-Worship” finds there a “loving gratitude to the past” having “no real correspondence in our own emotional life.” Western luxury comes first, its wastefulness such that “the cannibals of civilization are unconsciously more cruel than those of savagery”; “In the Far East, on the other hand, the moral duty of simplicity of life has been taught from very ancient times,” and two sayings of Iyeyasu on the labor embodied in things exemplify it. The chapter widens near the close to an Earth ruled “by ghosts of spheres innumerable: dead universes.”

In “Kimiko” a samurai’s daughter sold to a geisha house refuses to marry her lover, and vanishes. Years afterward a traveling nun comes to his gate and sends a message in through his small son, and “he, and only he, knew who had been at the gate, — and the sacrificial meaning of all that had been hidden.” The appendix, “Three Popular Ballads,” read before the Asiatic Society of Japan on October 17, 1894, quotes Hearn’s 1891 letter to the Japan Mail on the outcast yama-no-mono of Matsué in Izumo, who keep a hereditary art of song, the Daikoku-mai. Three girls with paper-and-bamboo mallets for the hammer of Daikoku sang the ballads, while three others with castanets formed the chorus. Much of the ballad of Shūntoku-maru belongs to Otohimé, who sets out alone in a pilgrim’s dress after a blind beggar cursed by his stepmother with a sickness his father says “seems to be leprosy”; she vows seven days of fasting, and Kwannon answers her dream. Teruté-Himé carries much of the ballad of Oguri-Hangwan: ordered drowned by her father, sold seventy-five times, renamed Kohagi in a jorōya, and granted five days’ freedom to draw the cart of the formless gaki-ami who is her unrecognized husband. The last, of O-Shichi, a greengrocer’s daughter of fifteen burned alive for arson committed to see her lover again, ends the book with one italic line: “Even so the insects of summer fly to the flame.”

A Circuit of the Globe collects the dispatches A. McLean sent home while making a year-long inspection tour of foreign mission stations as corresponding secretary of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society, the missionary arm of the Disciples of Christ. J. H. Garrison’s two-page introduction explains the errand: at the society’s national convention at Richmond in 1894 a resolution citing McLean’s “need of a rest” and the encouragement a visit from him would give the workers abroad was adopted unanimously, and “in a few moments a large sum was raised to cover the expense of his journey.” Garrison sets his author apart from “globe-trotters in these days who go around the world without seeing or hearing anything that is of any great value to anybody,” and records that the publishers asked the secretary “to arm himself with a kodak.” That introduction fills pages 7 and 8; the sixty-two numbered and titled chapters that follow run from page 9 to page 376. The letters had already appeared serially in the denomination’s papers, but no chapter carries a dateline, a salutation, or a signature. McLean lays out the whole route on his first page and adds, “This tour will occupy about a year, and will cost about $2,000.” Three registers alternate through the book: first-person travel narrative; station-by-station mission reporting thick with names, enrollments, building costs, and convert totals; and a standing topical survey of geography, population, history, and custom, in which the traveler disappears from his own pages.

The journey starts at home. A farewell reception at the Mt. Healthy church near Cincinnati on the evening of July 21, 1895 is followed by an evening service at St. Louis; a meeting at the Kansas City depot with E. S. and G. W. Muckley and Judge Clarke, who “refreshed my spirit. I was hungry and they fed me”; church gatherings at Denver and Salt Lake City; and a stay in San Francisco at the hospitable home of H. H. Luse, from which McLean goes on to the state meeting at Santa Cruz, where a generous offering is made toward the expenses of the journey. Sailing on the City of Peking, he spends three days at Honolulu while the ship is repaired. One chapter opens with Henry Obookiah weeping on the doorsteps of Yale in 1809 and the band that sailed in the brig Thaddeus; the next reports both the mission’s beginnings — “The first missionaries landed in 1820,” the two clergymen among them Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston — and what McLean himself sees: the Bishop Museum with its fifty to sixty thousand curiosities, the legislature debating a cable subsidy, and a drive past the palace as “ex-Queen Liliuokalani came out on her balcony. She is a state prisoner.” The lepers, he reports, are segregated on Molokai. The Republic’s constitution, he observes, “was ‘promulgated;’ it was not adopted by the people.” The crossing to Yokohama yields a sour verdict on his fellow passengers: “They think with their teeth.”

Japan runs from chapter VIII to chapter XVIII, pages 50 to 123. The ten chapters set inside the country fill sixty-nine pages — the same extent China gets across eleven chapters. McLean casts anchor in the Bay of Tokyo on August 24, is met on the water by the missionary H. H. Guy, and goes up to the capital by jinricksha and railway. The missionaries plan his route and send him north first: Nikko, where he endures his first Japanese inn — the chopsticks that defeat him, the bath whose water “is kept at a point near boiling” — and where he decides that “More magnificent than the temples and the grounds are the trees,” an avenue of white cedars running twenty miles toward Tokyo. Then Yuzawa, the mining town of Innai, Arakawa, and Akita, where the Disciples’ Japan work began and where he scatters flowers on Josephine W. Smith’s grave. “We traveled three hundred and fifty miles in wagons propelled by human strength.” A working week in Tokyo follows: charity schools, Miss Rioch’s Girls’ Home, an address to President Iwamoto’s girls’ school, the Imperial University with its thirteen hundred students and its apparatus for registering earthquakes, a Y.M.C.A. meeting, and a long talk with Dr. Verbeck, who had been “sent to Japan. That was in 1859.” Then south by Kamakura, Nagoya, Kyoto — 3,500 Buddhist temples, the Ear Monument, the Doshisha and Neesima’s unhewn block of stone — Osaka, “the Chicago of Japan,” Nara, and Kobe.

Three of those chapters never leave the desk. “Missionary Methods in Japan” sets out seven numbered methods over pages 83 to 89: preaching, at which a man announcing he will speak “in some temple or in the theater” can call “from five hundred to a thousand people together”; Sunday-schools and women’s meetings; charity schools; teaching English; Bible classes; Bible distribution; and talking with the people. “The Work of the Disciples of Christ in Japan” tells the founding story over pages 90 to 95 — the Indianapolis Convention of 1881, George T. Smith and Charles E. Garst with their wives, a fire that destroyed almost all of Akita, a cholera season in which “More than 200,000 died in Japan” — and hands the northern stations to Japanese evangelists: Saito at Akita, Noto at Tsuchizaki, Kudo at Innai, Yokotsura at Arakawa, Tashiro at Honjo, Kawamura at Akodzu. “Trampling on the Cross” opens with bronze plates in the Imperial Museum at Tokyo on which suspected believers were made to set their feet, then works back to Xavier’s landing in 1549, Hideyoshi’s edict giving foreign religious teachers twenty days to leave on penalty of death, a year in which “three hundred and eighty-four persons were tortured,” and a Nagasaki where in 1567 “there was hardly a person within its borders who was not a Christian” and by 1629 none would admit to being one. It closes: “No one can pay a higher tribute to the Japanese than to recite this chapter in their history.”

What McLean concludes about Japan pulls in two directions. “There is no Sunday in Japan. That is an infallible proof that we are in a non-Christian land.” The priests at temple worship “have blank, leathery faces”; the temple grounds at Kyoto “afford the children a fine place for play,” but “The temples, as such, are dreary places.” The same chapters call the Japanese “the most patient and polite people on the globe” and “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.” He counts thirty Protestant societies, six hundred and twenty-five missionaries, four hundred organized churches, and thirty-nine thousand two hundred and forty Protestant Christians, and elsewhere withdraws the older hope that Christianity would be adopted as the national religion: “This expectation is not likely to be realized.” Leaving Kobe on the Empress of China and watching the coast fade after going ashore and coaling at Nagasaki, he writes: “The Japanese are a great people… God has a high mission for this nation. It seems to me that Japan is to be the leader of all the peoples of the East… This is the nick of time.” China then receives exactly what Japan received — sixty-nine pages, across eleven chapters — and draws colder judgments: “Peking is the filthiest city in the world,” “The mandarins are greedy cormorants.” It also draws the book’s sharpest words against the West: “The opium wars were the most unjust wars ever waged,” and, of the Chinese, “They are not an inferior race.”

From Hong Kong the route runs west. Singapore, Penang, and Rangoon share a chapter — “Wherever the British rule the people prosper” — and India fills eleven, from Calcutta and Serampore through Benares, Delhi, and Madras. Eleven pages cover the Disciples’ stations at Bilaspur, Mungeli, Damoh, Bina, Hurda, and Mahoba, where crops have failed four years at Damoh, three at Mahoba: “Some brought their little ones and said, ‘We are dying of hunger; we have had nothing to eat for days; take our children and give us some food.’” At Poona he visits Pandita Ramabai — widowed at eighteen, converted in England, keeping fifty girls, forty of them widows — “a quiet, modest, gentle soul.” Of caste: “Caste is a curse… This evil system is doomed. God is smiting it with both hands and it cannot long survive.” Ceylon is given as area, crops, population; six Australian chapters are denominational business. In Egypt the Pyramids “grew on our thought and assumed colossal proportions”; the chambers inside hold “some empty coffins, but nothing else.” The Syrian call is spent in ten days’ quarantine off Beirut — “we are in quarantine, and can not go ashore for any purpose” — broken by a fumigation ashore that was “a roaring farce. We were pronounced ‘clean,’ but we were no cleaner than before.” At Jerusalem the sects at the Holy Sepulchre hate “each other with a perfect hatred”; the Turk in Europe is “as much out of place as a pig in a parlor.”

The next-to-last chapter ends the journey: “So ended my circuit of the globe. I was gone a year and two weeks, and traveled about forty thousand miles. In all that time I met no accident and missed no connection or appointment.” The last, “Some Impressions—Conclusion,” is an essay. It opens, “A tour of the world increases one’s respect for the peoples of all lands,” and turns on the club men: “Men live in Shanghai and Tokio and Calcutta all their lives and know nothing at all about what the Lord is doing through his servants in these cities” — though “Some of the most devout men in the East belong to the Military or Civil Service.” On women: “The Japanese think ignorant woman more easily managed.” Three consecutive sentences carry the arithmetic: India’s adherents “number 600,000,” China’s “about 85,000,” and in Japan, where “In 1872 the first church was organized,” the communicants “exceed 40,000, and the churches number 364.” Some hundred and sixty captioned photographs fill roughly sixty plates, many of them composites carrying several pictures apiece; they are mostly missionary portraits, mission houses, schools, orphanages, with a scattering of monuments — the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, St. Sophia, the Parthenon. The Japan plates show Tokyo mission schools, an English class, a missionary in a jinricksha, and Josephine Smith’s grave and memorial chapel at Akita; none is a view of Japanese scenery, architecture, or a temple, though the publisher printed monuments freely elsewhere. An eight-page double-column index closes the book.

Impressions of a Journey Round the World is a voyage narrative in diary form, a seven-month circumnavigation begun at Southampton on Sunday, December 11th, 1892, and closed in London the following July — “our voyage round the world in just upon seven months.” In a preface signed at London in December 1896, George Henry Peters calls the book “the enclosed rough notes of a voyage round the world,” warns that readers hoping for “stirring incidents and exciting adventures” will scan it in vain, and states his method: “The diary form is observed almost throughout.” Dated entries — “April 2nd, Easter Sunday” — carry most of the narrative, interrupted by topical digressions on Shinto and Chinese customs. The voice is plural: Peters boards the North German Lloyd mail steamer Preussen with his brother, and by Kyoto belongs to “our pleasant party of five,” so “we” governs nearly every scene and “I” surfaces mostly when he steps out to judge, apologize, or hand the reader someone else’s text. He is present in most of what he narrates — bargaining with priests to see a sacred dance, washing in turn on an inn balcony, passed over by ’ricksha coolies because he and “the Major” weigh “about 29 stone between us.” But much of what he prints is other men’s words — Mr. Ferguson on Indian architecture, Murray on the gate at Nikko, an unattributed Forty-seven Ronins, a thirteen-page Appendix out of a pamphlet; in the Japan chapters alone, a fifth of the pages.

Chapter I runs under a Byron epigraph and opens by asking whether it is now impossible “to write a simple record of travel that will amuse and interest the blasé fin de siècle reader,” and whether the public taste is “so vitiated and impregnated with Zolaism” that nothing but “excitability, realism and sensationalism” will please. What follows is the mail-steamer route east: a gale in the Bay of Biscay, Genoa, a German Christmas Eve kept at Port Said with a lighted tree and a camel impersonated by two stewards, the eighteen-hour transit of the Suez Canal, and a deck cricket match, “Germany versus England,” which England wins by an innings and ten runs. Ceylon fills Chapter II — a Mount Lavinia tiffin menu printed in full, the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, and an expedition after wild elephants that turns up two tame ones: “It is of no use, we can get up no adventures.” Chapters III and IV cross India from Bombay’s Towers of Silence to Ahmedebad, Jeypore, Ambere by elephant, Delhi, where “the British have committed a frightful act of vandalism” by building a barracks in the palace grounds and pulling down the harem courts, the Taj Mahal seen again by moonlight, the Mutiny memorials at Cawnpore and Lucknow, the cremation ground and the bathing ghats at Benares, and Calcutta. Chapter V descends the Irrawaddy from Mandalay to Prome, then takes in Rangoon’s Golden Pagoda, Moulmein, Penang, where a Chinese troupe acts out a burning, and Singapore.

China occupies Chapter VI, pages 160 to 202: Hong Kong and the view from the peak, a sedan-chair ride that deposits the party at “Police Station, No. 9,” Canton with a boatwoman named Susan and a guide named Fong, the temple of 500 Genii, a “temple of horrors,” tiffin eaten in a pagoda among the josses, the flower boats, and Macao, where Peters sets down how fantan is played and stands at the grave of “Luiz de Camoens.” He copies out a burlesque of Longfellow’s “Excelsior” in pidgin English, gives the conventions of the Chinese stage — “the villain always has a white nose, and men always impersonate women” — quotes a translated lyric by Li-Taipo, then crosses to Shanghai’s English and French settlements and its native city. Japan begins at page 203 and holds the book until the ship sails, partway down page 281: a little over a fifth of its three hundred and seventy-three printed pages. The party wakes at anchor off Nagasaki “in the land of the Rising Sun” and watches coal come aboard in twelve-pound baskets. Kobe follows, and on landing there he is struck by “the merriment and jollity depicted in the faces of these Japanese” set against the “stolidity” of the Chinese. Then Ozaka’s castle and a studio where Satsuma ware is painted, and Nara, with a long account of a first night in a Japanese inn — sliding oiled-paper panels, futons, hibachi, and a waitress who will not leave the room.

At Nara he pays a dollar to watch the kegura, the ancient sacred dance, performed by giggling girl priestesses, and digresses on Shintoism, “the way of the gods,” which he finds “a convenient religion.” Twenty-seven miles by jinricksha bring them to Kyoto, where day fireworks fly, a new wing opens at Yaamis’ hotel, and a geisha dance is watched in the tea-house next door. Chapter VIII is largely a temple tour: Chion-in and its seventy-four-ton bell, the thousand gilded Kwannon of the San-ju-san-gen-do, a day’s “principal sight,” Fujiama, and Yokohama, “perhaps, one of the least interesting of Japanese cities.” From Miyanoshita’s sulphur baths he goes to Tokio, “the ancient Yeddo,” whose electric-lit streets show “the progress the Japanese are making in civilizing or rather Americanising themselves” — a change he thinks “only ruining their natural courteous manners.” The Tokio pages take in the Shiba tombs of the Shoguns and the burial place of the Forty-seven Ronins, “visited by most travellers,” whose story the book reprints at length; then ten pages on Nikko — the avenue of cryptomerias, the Shoguns’ mausolea and the carved Yo-mei-mon, “the principal sights of Japan” — and the Kamakura Dai Butsu, with a list of dimensions. Chapter IX opens on his plainest verdict, “Japan has interested us more than any other land yet visited,” then gathers specimens of “English, as she is Japped” and two sets of verses by “Dr. William Hellmuth, of New York,” one rapturous and one beginning “Oh, hang Japan! oh, dang Japan!”

Chapter IX ends in the Pacific: sailing from Yokohama on April 29 aboard the Oceanic, he crosses to Honolulu, notes the flag of the Provisional Government and dethroned queen Liliokalani’s villa, and admits that Kilauea is beyond his time — “we could not afford the time to visit it” — quoting “Miss Bird” at length instead. Chapter X is American: San Francisco’s cable cars and the China Town he calls “a blot upon this handsome city,” the Yosemite valley and the Mariposa giants, Salt Lake City and the Mormon tabernacle, Chicago’s World’s Fair, itemized down to the dollar cost of its piers, the Armour stockyards, Niagara, New York, a handshake with President Cleveland at the White House, and Boston. Peters is candid about his likes — India, whose people “seem now to be prosperous, happy, and contented under British rule” though the hotels are “execrable,” the Chinese “the Imperial race of the Orient” held back by “ultra-conservatism,” American cities marked by “the usual dreadful sameness and newness.” The Conclusion has him in London turning his diary’s pages as Ceylon, India, China, “the delights of happy Japan,” and the Yosemite pass in procession. The Appendix, “Of Buddha and Buddhism,” closes the volume, dismissing the Kandy tooth legends as “devoid of truth”; a footnote to its doctrines section credits “a pamphlet issued by a Madras Educational Society” and a priest. The book carries no plates or maps — only decorated chapter initials and the printer’s ornaments that close the chapters.

A traveler’s narrative of a journey through rural Japan, published in Chicago by Belford, Middlebrook & Company in 1897 and, as its title page announces, “illustrated and embellished with one hundred and thirty-eight reproductions of photographs.” The text runs from page 3 to page 112, unbroken by chapter divisions; its text pages carry a running head that reads simply “JAPAN,” and the text begins on the leaf after the copyright page, beneath an ornamental headpiece spelling out the book’s title. The book opens not with travel but with a forecast: “The most important dramas of the coming century will probably be enacted on the shores of the Pacific.” Japan, “central to all these various lands,” has in less than twenty-five years shed feudalism for constitutional monarchy. Stoddard establishes his vantage and his prejudice in the same breath: “In 1892, the writer visited the Mikado’s empire, and on his return spoke enthusiastically of its people. But what he said of China was precisely the reverse.” Eleven photographs are printed full page, on pages bearing neither folio nor running head and backed by blank versos — eight turned sideways, three upright — so that twenty-two of its hundred and ten pages carry no letterpress. The rest are halftone blocks set into the text, more of them squared-off rectangles than vignettes; the photographs are captioned in small capitals, beginning with a vignetted portrait of Prince Ito on the opening page. An uncaptioned carved fish with a dragon’s head closes page 112.

The narrative proper begins “on a beautiful October morning,” when the party — Stoddard, a friend, an interpreter, relays of bearers — leaves cities and railways behind, seats itself in jinrikishas, and dashes up a mountain gorge toward Miyanóshita. The road yields ethnography: farmers who “hardly know what meat, milk, and butter are” and have never eaten bread, having “no word for it in their language”; the Buddhist doctrine “that to destroy any living creature is a sin”; and a country postman running the mail, whose only garment is a cloth about the waist and whose tattooing a stranger takes at first for “a gaily-colored jersey.” Most of the book is told as “we,” but Stoddard shifts to “I” for farce and awe — crawling into a kago, “a shallow basket, suspended from a bamboo pole,” “like a dog into its basket,” settling at last upon his side, where “Even then, the lower half of my body kept falling asleep,” and, four hours later at the pass of Otemetoge, catching first sight of Fuji-yama and feeling “as if I had been ushered into the presence of some mighty sovereign.” The mountain’s last eruption was in 1707, and more than ten thousand pilgrims a year climb it in straw rain-coats and mushroom-shaped hats. Many belong to associations whose members “pay one cent a month into a common treasury,” so that a few, “chosen by lot,” visit the shrines and “represent those whose circumstances compel them to remain at home.”

From the mountains the route crosses the “Ten-province pass” to Atami, past a colossal Jizo carved from the cliff eleven hundred years before and heaped with pebbles left by wayfarers, past Hakone Lake and a palace the Mikado has never occupied, ending at Atami’s paper-makers and a geyser that convulses every four hours behind a fence. There the road gives way to description and opinion: old-style physicians who cure by driving in a long needle or branding with the burning weed moxa; the peasant’s near-nakedness (“It is not the exception here to be undressed — it is the rule”); blind masseurs who advertise themselves with two plaintive notes on a reed; women’s coiffures, of whose making “the writer dares not hazard a conjecture”; the wedge of wood that serves as a pillow; and the obi, “fourteen feet” long, whose bow a widow ties in front if she means never to marry again. Stoddard deplores Japanese women in European dress, recording that in 1885 the Empress and her suite appeared for the last time in public in the costumes of the past. The geishas’ drums and samisen are “instruments of sound (one can hardly call them instruments of music)”; when a voice is added, “our teeth were set on edge”; and yet “A Japanese dancing-girl forms a charming picture.” Ideographs “look like the meanderings of intoxicated flies that have been immersed in ink”; after a string of proverbs he adds, “And yet we send missionaries to Japan!”

Pages go to the earthquake of October 1891, rails bent “like a chain irregularly thrown upon the ground,” and to nights in tea-houses, where the landlord and his servants drop to their knees. Kioto is “what Moscow is to the Russians.” From a hotel on a wooded hill “sacred to Buddha for a thousand years” the party hears a bronze bell of seventy-four tons — “Except in Russia I had never heard such notes.” In a temple’s lacquered porch hang “five bells, with long white cords attached”; there a baby three months old, “brought hither in its mother’s arms,” is made to pull the bell-rope, and its great-grandmother, “herself almost eighty-six years old,” rings it a second time. Shintoism has “no bible, no dogmas, and not even a moral code”; at the half-built Higashi Hongwanji lies “a pile of rope … made of women’s hair, twisted and spliced with hemp,” from poor women in nine provinces. A matsuri is “a show, a brilliant pageant — nothing more”; the music on the river-bank is “positive torture”; near the city lie a bamboo grove and Uji’s tea-plantations. A Vancouver fellow-passenger talks the party into “six hundred miles of extra travel” to Haruna; they start at four in the morning, climb a sacred gorge where cryptomerias “like those of Nikko” ring an obelisk of rock, and find beyond a second arch a shrine on a shelf where one pilgrim already kneels: “we felt that we had reached the Heart of Old Japan.”

Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese was issued by the J. B. Millet Company of Boston in 1897 in ten silk-bound sections that together make one continuously paginated volume of fifteen chapters running to 382 pages. The title page presents the work as “Written by Eminent Japanese Authorities and Scholars,” edited by Captain F. Brinkley of Tokyo; no Japanese author is named anywhere in the ten sections, and the table of contents bound in after the final chapter carries a single attribution, of the first chapter, “By the Editor.” What the sections hold is one sustained expository essay in the third person — Japan is “she” throughout — by a writer who calls himself “the writer of these pages,” addresses “Western readers,” and reaches for an editorial “we” about once a page. He translates from Japanese chronicles himself, taking several pages on the Mongol invasions out of the Hachiman Gudoki, and works up the Chinese annals, Ma Twan-lin’s account of Japan among them, from E. H. Parker’s translations; the third chapter is a narrative reproduced from another hand. Photographs run through the whole: mounted, hand-colored plates at four points in every section — a frontispiece and three more, each of the three preceded by its own leaf of descriptive letterpress — and more than a hundred smaller half-tones set into the text, with a pictorial initial opening each chapter, a copyright leaf in every section, and “(Concluded.)” under the chapter head wherever a chapter had to be cut in two to fit the parts.

The opening chapter measures the empire as it stood in 1897 — Hondo, Yezo, Kiushu, Shikoku, the Riukiu or Loochoo islands, the Bonins, and Formosa and the Pescadores newly acquired — with the areas of the main islands set down one by one and an account of Saghalien, traded to Russia in 1875 for the northern Kuriles. Earthquake and fire are made the determinants of Japanese building: the eruption of Bandaisan ten years before, the tidal wave of June 1896, the proverb naming the four terrors as earthquakes, thunderbolts, fires and fathers, and the flat verdict that “a Japanese city is little better than a collection of shanties.” Kyoto and Yedo are then read as records of the nation’s politics — Kwammu’s grid-planned Heianjo of 794 against Ota Dokan’s fortress and Ieyasu’s triple moats, the yashiki quarters emptied after 1867, and Osaka rising as a commercial capital where a thousand factory chimneys stood that had not existed a quarter-century before. Chapter II turns ethnological, tracing the Koro-pok-guru, the Ainu and successive Malayan and Mongoloid immigrations before compressing the annals from Jimmu and the Empress Jingo through the Fujiwara regents to Sekigahara. Chapter III reproduces from another hand the story of the forty-seven ronins, then adds material from Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan — the Sengakuji relics, the ronins’ own declaration — and an account of hara-kiri as ceremony taken from “a rare old Japanese manuscript.”

Chapter IV analyzes Ieyasu as a statesman rather than a general: the sovereign shut behind a bamboo curtain so that no rising could borrow imperial sanction, a feudal map in which a hundred and fifteen Tokugawa vassals were woven among a hundred and twenty-two doubtful houses, the Sankin Kotai that drained the daimyo’s wealth on mansions and processions, and the arrangements safeguarding the succession. It then reaches back to Japan’s earliest dealings with the continent, quoting Chinese annals at length on the Korean peoples; chapter V presses the argument that the “age of the gods” was assembled out of Chinese fable, and catalogs what came from Korea and China — weaving and sericulture, tile-makers and blacksmiths, paper, ink, medicine and the calendar. Chapter VI covers the ending of the embassies to China on Michizane’s advice in 894, Buddhism as the civilizing engine of the Nara epoch, Heian court luxury, the Taiho code, and the Kamakura and Muromachi epochs with their Golden and Silver Pavilions. Chapter VII pairs a life of Yoshitsune with the belief, entertained by “many erudite Japanese,” that he escaped to the mainland and became Genghis Khan, laying the philological coincidences out one by one before turning to the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, translated in long stretches from the Gudoki compiled in 1289.

Three chapters then treat belief. “Creeds and Castes” describes Shinto as ancestor worship and above all a family creed — the shrines at Ise, the kami-dana in every house, the torii explained as a bird-perch rather than a gate — and rebuts at length the Western charge that Shinto is not a religion, before turning to Confucianism and to the five castes as they stood when Ieyasu took control, with an unusually full treatment of serfdom that the writer defends partly on the ground that the subject has been “virtually excluded from the purview of writers on Japan.” “Religion and Rites” opens by rejecting the Western textbook account of the creed — “Such is not the Buddhism of Japan” — and traces the Tendai, Shingon, Jodo, Shin and Hokke sects, then leaves doctrine for practice: the sermon pitched at the shop boy and the housemaid, the Ikegami festival with its acrobats and penny shows in full view of the open hall, and a sharp indictment of the priesthood as idle and absent from sickbeds. “Superstitions and Divination” runs from the catfish beneath the islands through foxes, badgers, the kappa and the tengu to haunted houses, then explains the fifty-rod method of the Yih King, physiognomy, and the aspect divination that puts a thicket in the northeast corner of every garden.

Festivals and pastimes fill the book’s most crowded pages. The matsuri is defined as a parish picnic in which the tutelary deities are “taken out for an airing”; the lacquered mikoshi and the towering wheeled dashi are described, and the Sano and Kanda festivals of Tokyo and the Gion festival of Kyoto are followed in procession order, along with provincial fêtes — the wives and widows of Omi who carry one earthenware pot for each husband, the laughing festival of Wasa in Kishu, the naked scramble at Saidai-ji in Bizen. The next chapter walks the ceremonial year on the old calendar: New Year with its young water, spiced sake and pine-and-bamboo gates; the chopping of the seven herbs; kite-flying, including the two-thousand-sheet kites of Suruga and a Nagasaki kite feud that for a moment threatened to destroy the town; hand-ball, bean-bags, poem-shells, cards, go and shogi, and the guilds of professional gamblers; the dolls’ festival and the shell-gathering picnic. Its concluding half covers the boys’ fête, Bon and its dances, the no and its kyogen, the geisha and the licensed quarters, the yose halls and their story-tellers, wrestling from its legendary origins to the grades of the ring, and the theater from O-Kuni’s dancing on the Kitano moor to Ichikawa Danjuro’s fees.

A long chapter on commerce and foreign intercourse begins, deliberately, with prices, coinage and official meddling — rice, charcoal and labor priced across a thousand years, the first practical copper coinage of 708, edicts to force coin on a barter economy, and a debasement driven by the casting of idols. It then accounts for the seclusion: the Japanese pirates who had preyed on the China and Korea coasts since the fourteenth century, the Portuguese arrival of 1542 and the swift growth of the Christian mission, Hideyoshi’s crucifixions at Nagasaki, the edict of January 1614, the Shimabara revolt, and the Dutch confined to Deshima — from which the writer argues that the policy “was an anti-Christian, not an anti-foreign, policy.” The chapter that follows is his most pointed. He sets out the currency clause of 1858 and the loss Japan took on it, refuses the account in which the foreign resident is “sinned against and never sinning,” quotes Sir Rutherford Alcock’s dispatch of 1859 on the conduct of the settlements, and follows the fourteen-year struggle over extra-territoriality to the abolition agreed for July 1899. It goes on to the paper-money crisis after the Restoration, when 1,694 varieties of note circulated in the two hundred and seventy-seven fiefs, and to the retrenchment that restored specie payments in 1885.

The final chapter, “Modern Japan in Brief,” sets out public finance — the commutation of the nobles’ and samurai’s incomes as the foundation of the national debt, the cost of the war with China, and a post-war program to raise the army from six divisions to twelve and the fleet from thirty-three ships to sixty-seven — and argues that Japan is lightly taxed and short of capital rather than overburdened. It then describes the parties and the Diet: Itagaki’s Liberals and Okuma’s Progressists, grouped “about persons, not about principles”; a franchise of some 460,000 electors; the numbered wooden indicators hinged to the members’ desks; and a House that passed fifty-five bills in a hundred and sixteen hours of sitting. A passage on language predicts the abandonment of the ideographic script for an alphabetical one, against the seven or eight thousand ideographs an educated man must carry. The book ends on the samurai’s road as a survival that Japanese statesmen may find embarrassing — self-interest being, in the writer’s account, “the solid ballast” that keeps every Western state’s foreign policy on an even keel — and on the prediction that these old-fashioned sentiments will not survive. Footnotes throughout cite Satow, Percival Lowell, E. H. Parker, Aston, Lloyd and Rutherford Alcock, while Mitford is worked into the text of the ronin chapter rather than into a note. The plates keep a register of their own, plainer than the essay they interrupt and pitched at a traveler the essay itself never has in view: the months in which Fuji can be climbed, the day rate of a jinrikisha in gold cents. The half-tones talk the same way — one warns that inlaid woodenware will not withstand “the furnace-heated air in American houses.”

Japan and Korea: Questions and Answers for Mission Circles and Bands is a catechism-style study pamphlet issued in 1897 by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, priced at five cents and credited to no individual author — the title page names only the Society. Its closing pages place it within a “Question Book Series” of companion pamphlets on Africa, China, Chinese in America, India, Mexico, Persia, Siam and Laos, South America, and Syria, sold at the same price or fifty cents a set, alongside a notice for the Society’s monthly periodical, Over Sea and Land. The pamphlet itself runs entirely as short numbered questions followed by short answers — “Give a general description of Japan. / The Empire of Japan lies off the eastern shore of Asia...” — and falls into two unequal parts: a longer Japan section filling roughly the first two-thirds of the book, followed by a shorter Korea section for the remaining third. Each part moves from a country’s geography, history, and customs into questions on Presbyterian and other Protestant mission work there — the Japan section marking the shift with its own printed “Missions.” heading, the Korea section making the same turn without one — and each closes with a “How They Say It” appendix of pronunciation notes, place names, coinage, weights and measures, and a glossary of transliterated local words, ending with the Gospel of John’s third chapter, sixteenth verse, rendered in the local language.

The Japan section opens with orientation for a traveling reader — the two routes by sea, via England and the Suez Canal or by rail to San Francisco or Vancouver and across the Pacific to Yokohama, and the fourteen-hour difference in sunrise between Japan and New York — before turning to political history: the old belief that the country was made by the gods and the emperor descended from them, the title Tenshimma (given as meaning “Son of Heaven”) set against the foreign name Mikado, the centuries in which the Shogun held real power from Yedo, and the 1868 restoration that returned the Mikado to authority and renamed Yedo as Tokyo, “Eastern Capital.” Later questions track Japan’s recent standing — the 1889 Constitution and its Diet of a House of Peers and House of Representatives, the 1896 Civil Code giving Japan jurisdiction over foreign residents, and a reported swing in popular feeling from suspicion of foreign influence toward acceptance after the war with China. The pamphlet then moves through the land and its people in short strokes: Fujisan’s summit, “more than 12,000 feet above the level of the sea,” climbed each summer by white-robed pilgrim bands; a population of “over 40,000,000” and three great cities, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto; and a people it describes as “kindly, impressible, gentle and contented, but lack many of the higher moral virtues.” Domestic detail follows — mat-floored houses without chairs or bedsteads, meals of rice, fish, and tea eaten with chopsticks, the belted gown and wooden geta, the game of Go, and citywide kite-flying — and then religion: Shintoism called “a political principle rather than a religion,” Confucianism “a system of philosophy,” and Buddhism, taught by “a man named Gautama” some five hundred years before Christ, named the prevailing faith, with its doctrine of merit and rebirth toward “Nepon” and its three classes of temple (plain Shinto shrines built around a mirror, ornately carved memorial shrines, and idol-filled Buddhist temples). A “Missions.” section then traces Christianity’s introduction by Portuguese Jesuits under Xavier in 1549 and its later suppression on pain of death, the Presbyterian mission’s start in 1859 with Dr. Hepburn’s medical work, the union of several denominations into a self-governing body first named the “United Church of Christ in Japan” — “United” was dropped from the name in 1890 — with 74 churches and 11,000 members reported in 1896, a roster of Presbyterian stations from Tokyo and Yokohama to Hiroshima and Fukui, schools including Meiji Gakuin and the Joshi Gakuin, Hepburn’s Japanese-English dictionary and the translated Bible, and an estimate of about 39,000 Japanese Christians, closing with the claim that Japan needs the gospel because its people are “drifting away from their old false faiths” toward the danger of atheism.

The Korea section describes a peninsula “west of Japan,” between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, its area likened to Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined with New Jersey and Maryland, its population put at “about 13,000,000,” and a dynastic history running from a tenth-century unification under “Wang” through the fourteenth-century overthrow of that line by “Ni Taijo,” who was made king. The pamphlet notes that the recent war between Japan and China left Korea under a partial Japanese protectorate. It reports a poor, largely unschooled population living in mud houses thatched with straw, women “considered as inferior” though “not treated with such harshness as in some countries,” and a religious landscape of fading “devil-worship,” Buddhism (said to have arrived in the fourth century), a moralized Confucianism, and ancestor worship with memorial tablets and food offerings — a state the pamphlet sums up by saying the nation “may almost be said to have no religion,” which it reads as evidence that God is “preparing the way for the Gospel.” Its questions on missions cover early Roman Catholic missionaries who gained many converts but were repeatedly driven out, leaving their followers to flee, recant, or endure what the text calls “horrible tortures”; the Korean convert Rijutei, baptized after meeting an American missionary in Japan, who then prepared a Bible his countrymen could read by adding marks to Chinese characters; Dr. H. N. Allen’s arrival in 1884 and his rise in royal favor after treating a wounded nephew of the king; the prominence of medical work, centered on the government hospital at Seoul and a dispensary at Fusan; and a rapid sequence of firsts — the first ordained missionary in the spring of 1885, the first convert baptized in July 1886, the first Presbyterian church organized in the fall of 1887 — bringing the Presbyterian communicant roll to “nearly 300” by the time of writing, with stations at Seoul, Fusan, Gensan, and Pyeng Yang. The pamphlet has no illustrations, plates, or maps; it closes, as the Japan section does, with a language appendix — notes on Korean pronunciation and word order, tables of place names, coinage, weights, measures, and a glossary of transliterated terms — ending with John 3:16 set in Korean characters.

Journeys Among the Gentle Japs in the Summer of 1895 is a clergyman’s travel narrative of a single tourist’s circuit through Japan, written by the Rev. J. Ll. Thomas, M.A., F.R.G.S., Vicar of Aberpergwm, who had been traveling in the United States on a journalistic commission for the Western Mail when he found himself able to make the long-wished-for trip to “the land of the Rising Sun.” The book is dedicated to Mr. H. M. Stanley, M.P., “as a humble tribute to his unrivalled services to the cause of geographical science, and in grateful acknowledgment of a personal friendship,” and it carries a map and a photogravure portrait. Its preface, signed from Glyn-Neath in December 1896, states Thomas’s aims candidly: he has tried to guard against “the suspicion of...want of self-restraint and the temptation to ‘enthuse’” about Japan while also “not to be too niggardly” in his praise, and he distinguishes his book from what “a returned missionary or merchant who has resided in the country for years” would write — this, he says plainly, is “the book of a tourist,” its impressions “such as they were first written down,” the narrative “but slightly altered from the form in which it was first entered in my journal.” The sixteen chapters trace one continuous itinerary: an outward transit across Canada and the North Pacific, some two months of touring within Japan, and a closing chapter devoted entirely to the country’s religions.

The opening chapters are transit rather than Japan proper: a Canadian Pacific Railway journey from Montreal through Winnipeg, the Rockies and the Selkirks to Vancouver, and a thirteen-day Pacific crossing aboard the Empress of India, filled with shipboard routine, typhoon lore, a mid-ocean Sunday service, and the loss of a calendar day at the 180th meridian. Once ashore at Yokohama, Thomas works through the practicalities of travel — jinrickishas and their fares, the hotels facing the Bund and his own lodging in a missionary boarding-house on the Bluff, currency, the new railways, and the passport rules governing travel beyond the Treaty Ports — before making excursions to Kamakura, where he describes the Dai-Butsu’s dimensions and the Temple of Hachiman, and to Enoshima, with its cave sacred to Benten. A side trip to the Hakone Hills, begun on the day of a Yokohama earthquake, takes in the hot-spring inns of Tonosawa and Miyanoshita and a kago ride up to Ashinoyu, with running commentary on inn customs, baths, and the courtesy of coolies and innkeepers that recurs throughout the book.

Three consecutive chapters are given over to Tokyo: its history and statistics as former Yedo, the parks of Shiba and Uyeno with their Shogun mortuary temples, the Uyeno Museum (including Christian relics surviving from the seventeenth-century Hashikura embassy to Rome), and the Asakusa Kwannon temple with its fairground bustle of “raree-shows, penny gaffs, performing monkeys.” Thomas lodged at Bishop Edward Bickersteth’s mission house, St. Andrew’s, in Azabu, where he attended a confirmation service, addressed the Divinity School students, and met the traveler Mrs. Bishop (Isabella Bird). He recounts at length the story of the Forty-Seven Ronins at Sengakuji and the lovers’ romance of Gompachi and Ko-Murasaki at Meguro, and takes up the contemporary debate among Japanese women over national versus foreign dress. A further chapter carries him north to Nikko, to the mausolea of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu, and on foot over the hills to Lake Chuzenji and the hot-spring village of Yumoto.

Traveling the Tokaido line south, Thomas stops at Kobe, Osaka — where he quotes Captain Saris’s seventeenth-century description of the castle — and Kyoto, then in the midst of an exhibition marking the city’s eleven-hundredth anniversary. A separate chapter on “Kobe and Neighbourhood” covers excursions to the hot-spring resort of Arima, to Takarazuka, and to Nara, with its colossal Buddha and Kasuga Temple, along with a night at Archdeacon Warren’s earthquake-damaged house in Osaka. The Sanyo line then takes him to Hiroshima, which he found “overrun by the military” and in the grip of a cholera epidemic during the Mikado’s wartime residence there, and out to the sacred island of Miyajima. From Hiroshima he crosses — by his own account into territory “almost a terra incognita” to tourists — to Shikoku, visiting Matsuyama, attending a geisha party at the Wayo-tei restaurant, and taking the waters at Dogo. The return journey runs back past the wreck of a troop train near Onomichi, then on through Nagoya, where he visits the castle and watches porcelain and cloisonné being made, and home across the Pacific on the Empress of Japan, whose passengers included the exiled Korean prince Pak Yong-ho.

The book closes with a chapter apart, “The Religions of Japan,” in which Thomas surveys Shinto — its nature- and ancestor-worship, its countless deities headed by Ama-terasu, and its purging of Buddhist accretions after the Revolution of 1868 — the Buddhist sects introduced from the sixth century onward, with their differing teachings on Nirvana, and the history of Christianity in the country, from Francis Xavier’s landing in 1549 through the persecutions culminating at Shimabara to the missions re-established after 1859 under the religious freedom of the 1889 constitution. Throughout, the volume is accompanied by the map and photogravure portrait announced on its title page.

The Story of Japan is a school and home-reading history of Japan written for American children, published in 1897 by the American Book Company. R. Van Bergen dedicates the book to his son, Edgar M. Van Bergen, “of Tientsin, China,” and opens with a preface explaining its purpose: because Japan had lately “humiliated” China in war and become one of “the foremost nations of the earth,” while American schoolbooks “touch but lightly” on the Japanese empire, the book aims to give children “a correct idea of the people” and of the forces behind the country’s rapid modern progress. Van Bergen states outright that the key to the whole story is the samurai, “who were and still are the makers of the nation,” and he organizes the book as a chronological sequence of short, titled chapters running from the legendary first emperor Jimmu to the reigning emperor, Mutsuhito, whose era the book calls “Meiji, Enlightened Progress.” He writes throughout in direct address to the child reader — “If you look on the map, you will see…” — and occasionally speaks as someone who has himself been in East Asia, recalling in later chapters that he “knew Saigo well” and had “seen Chinese soldiers going to fight the Japanese, armed with bamboo poles.”

The early chapters retell Japan’s origin legends as Japanese “books” tell them before edging into history proper: the sun goddess sending her descendant Ninigi to earth with a mirror, sword, and crystal ball; the warrior prince Yamato Daké, called “Bravest,” subduing Kiushiu and the eastern tribes; and Empress Jingu’s invasion of Korea, aided by tide-controlling crystal balls from the Dragon King — a story Van Bergen tells straight through before noting afterward that “there is about as much truth” in it as in the sun-goddess myth. Chapters on the introduction of Buddhism and writing from Korea, the rival Fujiwara, Minamoto, and Taira clans, the wars that made Yoritomo regent and, in their aftermath, the assassination of his half-brother “Young Ox” (Yoshitsuné), and the long Hojo and Ashikaga regencies carry the story into the sixteenth century, where the fighting Buddhist monks of Osaka, the landing of Francis Xavier’s Portuguese mission in Kiushiu in 1542, and the careers of the generals Nobunaga and Hideyoshi — “the Lord of the Golden Water Gourds” — dominate several chapters, including Hideyoshi’s brutal second invasion of Korea and the mound of ten thousand Korean ears displayed afterward in Kyoto.

The chapter “The Three Hollyhock Leaves” introduces Ieyasu — nicknamed “Hollyhock” for his clan crest before the book gives his name — founder in 1600 of the Tokugawa regency and, in the book’s telling, of the policy of national seclusion that lasted more than two hundred and fifty years. Van Bergen quotes at length the English pilot Will Adams’s own account of his 1600 shipwreck at Bungo and his examination before Ieyasu (“Your worships shall understand that I am a Kentish man…”), and he reproduces the 1637 exclusion edict itself (“no Japanese ship or boat… shall henceforth presume to quit the country, under pain of forfeiture and death”), alongside chapters on the crucifixion of Japanese converts and the Shimabara revolt. To show what the seclusion meant in practice, he describes the closely escorted journeys the Dutch factory chiefs at Deshima had to make to pay homage at Yedo, and quotes two older accounts of the audience ceremony verbatim — a first-person narrative from an unnamed Dutch “general agent,” describing being carried in norimono to “the hall of a hundred mats” and announced with a shout of “Capitan Horanda!,” and a third-person description by “a most trustworthy eyewitness” of the agent being made to prostrate and “crawled backward like a crab, without uttering a single word”: “so mean and short a thing,” the witness concludes, “is the audience we have of this mighty monarch.” Folk-style chapters on a shrewd Osaka judge, the vendetta of Tosa’s son, a regent’s wife who kills her husband and herself, and an extended retelling of the Forty-Seven Ronin round out this section, each offered as evidence of samurai loyalty and hara-kiri.

The second half of the book turns to Japan’s reopening and its aftermath. Chapters trace failed Russian, English, and American attempts to trade — including the imprisonment of the Russian captain Golownin, whose captors treated him, the book says, with an odd mixture of cruelty and kindness — before Commodore Perry’s 1853–54 mission, narrated largely through the diplomatic byplay between the “mysterious Great Man” and the Yedo officials, secures the first treaty. Later chapters follow the murders of foreigners at Yokohama, the fall of the Tokugawa regents in 1867–68 (with an eyewitness account of a samurai’s ceremonial hara-kiri at Kobe for firing on foreigners), the Meiji government’s reforms under Okubo and Kido, Saigo Takamori’s Satsuma rebellion and death, and the 1894–95 war with China, closing with the treaty of Shimonoseki and the European powers’ forced retrocession of the Liao-tung peninsula. The book ends with a chapter on Emperor Mutsuhito himself — his secluded boyhood, marriage, and reign — and with the line, “American boys and girls will heartily join those of Japan in shouting: ‘Nippon Ban-zai! … Long live Japan!’” It is illustrated throughout with in-text engravings and full-page photographic plates of Japanese scenes and daily life, including one captioned “Work in a farmyard” showing farm laborers outside a thatched building; an index follows the final chapter.

Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East gathers eleven chapters — 296 pages in all — by Lafcadio Hearn, whom the title page identifies as “Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Japan.” No one form governs the book, and the chapters change form inside themselves: the first moves from reverie before a Shintō shrine, through exposition of a custom of the years before Meiji, to a third-person retelling of an event Hearn did not witness. He writes in his own person almost everywhere. “As for myself, whenever I am alone in the presence of a Shintō shrine, I have the sensation of being haunted,” he says on the fourth page; “I have wandered to the verge of the town” opens “Dust”; “I confess that I went to Ōsaka chiefly to see the temples.” Two chapters stand apart: “Nirvana,” which argues rather than narrates across fifty-six pages, and “The Rebirth of Katsugorō,” chiefly translated documents in other men’s voices. Footnotes run heavy in the translation chapters: in the folk-song chapter they fill half a page at a time with romanized originals and literal glosses. Buddhism supplies the through-line. Hearn reads Japanese art, poetry, commerce, household custom, and grief as saturated by it, and treats its doctrines as more compatible with nineteenth-century science than Western creeds are.

“A Living God” begins among the archaic unpainted shrines of pure Shintō and imagines at length what it would be to be one of the ghosts housed in them. It then turns to the practice, before Meiji, of building temples to persons still alive, and tells of Hamaguchi Gohei, a headman who, seeing the sea run away from the land after an earthquake, set fire to his own rice-stacks to draw four hundred villagers up the hill before the tsunami struck. They declared him a god and built a temple to his spirit while he went on living in his old thatched house above it. The chapter closes on a Japanese friend’s reply that “if we accept the doctrine of the unity of all mind, the idea of the Japanese peasant would appear to contain at least some adumbration of truth. I could not say so much for your Western notions about the soul.” “Out of the Street” grows out of forty-seven “Vulgar Songs” — street-songs of washermen, smiths, and rice-cleaners — written down for Hearn by the old man Manyemon; the best are rendered into English and arranged in three groups tracing a love affair from first pain through union to parting.

“Notes of a Trip to Kyōto” fills forty-one pages with the eleven-hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding: a specimen of calligraphy sealed with the crimson handprint of a child of six, whom the prime minister, Marquis Ito, saw and adopted; the great palace garden lately opened to the public, called the Garden of the Cavern of the Genii and attached to what “was once a monastery”; a costume procession in which “at least two thousand persons marched,” watched in complete silence; the grave of Yuko Hatakeyama, who cut her own throat out of loyalty. At a second-hand furniture shop he finds “a big volume bearing in letters of much-tarnished gold the title, Atlantic Monthly” — “Vol. V. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860” — priced at fifty sen because it was “a very large book.” Roughly a third of the chapter argues instead. Hearn finds in the cheapness of Japanese pleasure “the extraordinary phenomenon of poverty as an influence in the development of aesthetic sentiment,” sets against it “a hell of eternal ugliness and joylessness invented by our civilization” for the Western poor, and ends, “Happiest he who, from birth to death, sees ever through some beautiful haze of the soul…” “Dust” opens with an epigraph from the Saddharma-Pundarîka and with children modeling mud villages and miniature graves by a roadside; of the ground underfoot he writes, “Dust it is of Karma, waiting to enter into novel combinations,” and the self is not one but “a population.”

“About Faces in Japanese Art” answers the adverse criticisms made of Mr. Edward Strange’s lecture at the Japan Society in London — criticisms the Japanese Minister himself corroborated. Its spine is a physiognomical argument from Spencer — “Expression is feature in the making” — by which the West, admiring “certain strong aquiline faces, certain so-called Roman profiles,” is “commending the traits that mark a race of prey.” Japanese drawing gives type rather than person; Western engraving looks “coarse and hard”; and “one key to the enigmas of Japanese art is Buddhism.” In the second of two experiments, Hearn shows a girl of eleven “drawings from life, in a New York periodical” of “mostly country folk, farmers”; she answers, “They are like Oni [demons] from the jigoku [Buddhist hell].” “Ningyō-no-Haka” runs eight pages. Iné, a girl who “appeared to be about eleven years old,” tells in a level, unemotional voice how her father, mother, and brother died in turn: “it is believed that when two of a family die in the same year, a third also must soon die,” Manyemon explains, and “by making a ningyo-no-haka it is thought that a death may be prevented.” It ends not on the deaths but on the “indescribable sign” Iné makes when Hearn moves to sit in the warm place she has left — “the master will honorably strike the matting first,” Manyemon relays — and on his “the master takes your sorrows upon him… He wants to understand the pain of other people.”

“In Ōsaka,” the second-longest chapter, opens with the Emperor Nintoku’s song of cooking-smoke and Captain John Saris’s town “as great as London within the walls,” still “almost equally true of the Ōsaka of to-day.” Twenty pages take city and trade: distances reckoned by bridges, one hundred and eighty-nine principal — too many to serve a stranger; detchi bound for board and clothing, “from twelve to fourteen years” in the dry goods business, where a boy may “work fifteen hours a day.” Twenty more, the largest block, the temples: Tennōji, or Shitennōji, founded by Shōtoku Taishi, whose bell-tower chapel keeps hundreds of children’s mortuary tablets among thousands of toys, its ceiling hidden by dead children’s dresses, its bell-rope of their bibs; and a spring where posthumous names on paper, held under a stone tortoise’s gush, wash into the basin. Of interiors: “familiarity with Japanese interiors has equally disgusted me with Occidental interiors.” A silk house works its men “not more than twelve hours a day” for “fourteen or fifteen years” unsalaried. Perhaps one third of the country’s business work “is done without wages; the relation between master and servant being one of perfect trust on both sides” — “the fact most deeply impressed upon me.” At dusk, above chimneys “forever sending up their offering of smoke to the shrine of good Nintoku,” the old pagoda of Tennōji rises into the sunset, and he asks whether the faith it symbolized “had not helped to create” the trust the city’s wealth rests on.

“Buddhist Allusions in Japanese Folk-Song” gathers “between forty and fifty” dodoitsu whose lovers speak of former births; it closes not with Kido’s coded loyalty song but pages predicting “a Neo-Buddhism inheriting all the strength of Science.” “Nirvana” calls the Western equation of Nirvana with annihilation “erroneous only because it contains half of a truth”: it does signify the extinction of “individual sensation, emotion, thought, — the final disintegration of conscious personality.” Hearn climbs the Six Heavens of Desire, Seventeen of Form, and four of Formlessness, footnoting the last with “Mr. Spencer’s beautiful definition of Equanimity”; eight diagrams a Japanese friend drew fill two unnumbered pages — dotted zigzags between bars marked MAN and HEAVENS, each ending at NIRVANA. Spencer, Wundt, and Huxley recur: “the Buddhist doctrine of impermanency is the doctrine also of modern science,” and, faith in a personal God passing away, “light is offered from the East.” It closes by declaring that “for thousands of years we have been thinking inside-out and upside-down,” that “the outer-man is the ghost.” “The Rebirth of Katsugorō” is an 1823 dossier: an estate-holder’s report, two letters to Sengakuji’s priest, the boy’s account of dying of smallpox at six, of an old man’s “You are to be reborn in that house,” then stopping “three days in the garden.” “Within the Circle,” six pages, is a dream of former births: “Circle there is none but the great phantom-whirl of birth and death… But this has being only in Time; and Time itself is illusion.”

The title page announces A World-Pilgrimage as the work of John Henry Barrows, “edited by” his daughter Mary Eleanor Barrows, who explains in her preface that the book gathers letters her father wrote “to the ‘Chicago Record’ and to ‘The Interior’” and publishes them now, she says, in the hope of strengthening the growing belief in a shared human “atmosphere of faith, hope, and love,” since they were written “at the time of the impressions, before intermediating experiences dulled them.” A couplet from Keats sits under the title — “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, / And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; / Round many Eastern islands have I been” — and it announces the book’s real shape: thirty-eight chapters recording one continuous, chronological trip around the world, opening with a transatlantic crossing on the German liner “Havel” and moving through Germany, France, England, Italy, and Greece; on to Constantinople, the Holy Land, and Egypt; across India and Ceylon; along “the China coasts”; and finally to Japan before a Pacific crossing home. The frontispiece, captioned “Dr. Barrows and Party at the Pyramids,” and a later passage recalling the address he once delivered “before the representatives of twelve hundred millions gathered at the World’s Parliament of Religions,” identify the author as a Chicago clergyman turned itinerant lecturer, traveling throughout with his wife, referred to as “we.” Ten more full-page plates — of Paris, the Wartburg, Oxford, Florence, Bethlehem, Cairo, Alexandria, a Bengali maharajah, the Taj Mahal, and Madura — illustrate the earlier legs of the route; an eleventh, captioned simply “DAIBUTSU,” is the only plate that falls inside the Japan section.

Nearly half the book is given to Europe. Barrows and his wife spend weeks in Germany — Göttingen, Cassel (with a chapter on “the Fourth of July” there), the Hartz Mountains, Eisenach, Weimar, Jena, Leipsic, Dresden, Wittenberg, and Berlin — before Paris and “A Little Tour in France,” then “Old England,” including Oxford, and Italy (Turin, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples) and Athens. From Constantinople, Smyrna, and Ephesus he moves on to “the Holy City” and to Jericho, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, then to Alexandria, Cairo, the Pyramids, the Nile, and Memphis. His commentary along the way is often pointed rather than reverent: he calls the Church of the Holy Sepulchre “this shrine of hoary deceptions” and describes the Greek clergy’s annual “miracle” of the Holy Fire as a fraud worked with “some easily combustible substance” lit by “the atheist-priest inside.”

The next quarter or so of the book follows Barrows from Bombay to Benares, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Lucknow, and Cawnpore, then Delhi, Lahore, and Amritzar, Agra and the Taj Mahal, Jeypore to Madras, the Malabar Coast and Madura, and finally Ceylon. This leg is not incidental sightseeing: Barrows is lecturing under what he calls “the Indian lectureship,” a University of Chicago lecture series he says was made possible by “the faith and foresight of Mrs. Haskell.” He describes receptions with the Brahmo Somaj leaders P. C. Mozoomdar and the late Keshub Chundar Sen, an audience in a maharajah’s palace, and, in a chapter titled “Christian Missions — the Brahmo Somaj,” his reading of Hindu reform religion against Christian missionary work. Throughout, he is markedly more generous toward Indian manners than toward English colonial ones, writing that the British “have wrought for the Indian peoples an immeasurable service” but “have not gained their hearts.”

Only after Bombay, Benares, Calcutta, Agra, Madras, and Ceylon does Barrows turn toward the Pacific, sailing from Singapore “for China, Japan, and home.” Chapter XXXVI, “On the China Coasts,” covers Saigon, Hong Kong, and Shanghai in a brief, largely unhappy visit; of Shanghai’s native quarter he writes: “I have seen nothing, unless it be the shores of the Ganges at Benares, so unspeakably shocking and horrible as the native quarter of this great Chinese city.” Even as the ship enters Japan’s Inland Sea, he admits that his thoughts still “lingered in that prodigious Chinese world” he had just left. By the time Japan itself appears, in Chapter XXXVII of thirty-eight, the book has already covered more than four hundred pages and every other stop on the itinerary; Japan and the nineteen days Barrows spends there occupy a comparatively small final stretch, followed only by the homeward Pacific voyage recounted in the closing chapter, “Home Coming.”

Barrows lands at Kobe on April 5, writing that his strongest feeling on arrival was “one of joyful thankfulness” to have left China at last for “a beautiful country,” and he is candid about the limits of his Japan reporting: “If I do not write as enthusiastically of Japan as most travellers, it will be partly because I was too busy with my lectures to see it thoroughly and sympathetically.” Hosted first by Dr. and Mrs. Atkinson, he tours Hiogo, sees a Daibutsu and tries in vain to buy a small bronze Buddha-as-a-child from its temple priests, and lectures that evening at Reverend Ebina’s church to the assembled Kumai (Congregational) Association through an interpreter who, he learns, was left “struggling on … till about midnight” with the part of the audience that knew no English. He goes on to deliver twenty-two addresses across Japan in all. In Osaka he addresses Japanese evangelists, lectures to eight hundred people at the Y.M.C.A., tours the old Castle and a prison holding four thousand inmates, and meets missionaries including Reverend Dr. A. D. Hail. Six days in Kyoto, staying with Reverend and Mrs. Porter, bring lectures to Buddhist priests and to the professors and students of Doshisha University, a meeting with “the eloquent Mr. Hirai,” “who spoke so powerfully at the World’s Congresses,” visits to the Higashi Hongwanji and Nishi Hongwanji temples, a cherry-blossom dance, and, on Lake Bewa, a morning with the Buddhist priest Reverend Zitsusen Ashitsu that Barrows calls “one of the supreme days in my journey round the world.”

From Nagoya, where he watches infantry and cavalry drilling at the castle, Barrows goes on to Yokohama and then six days in Tokyo with Reverend and Mrs. McNair, addressing a company of missionaries at the Union Church, touring the University and Ueno Park, its cherry trees in their richest bloom, or slightly past it, and attending a mixed reception in the Botanical Gardens where “Christians, Buddhists, Shintoists, and Confucianists” all turn out to greet him, followed by a call on Count Inouye, who tells him Japan cannot presently afford a war with anyone. His last outing, the day before sailing, is to Kamakura to see “the stateliest and finest of all the Buddhas” — the Daibutsu that furnishes the book’s one Japan plate — and Fujiyama, which he takes as “a prophecy of the time when this mountain of the gods shall be a mountain of the one true God.” He sails from Yokohama on April 24; “Home Coming” then follows the Pacific crossing on the steamer “China,” the ceremonial repetition of a Thursday at the 180th meridian, a day in Honolulu with Reverend Dr. Charles Hyde, arrival at the Golden Gate on May 10, and a cross-country train journey to Rockford, Illinois, where the youngest children have been waiting. After six weeks of lecturing and preaching in Chicago and a visit to Smith College to collect the older children, the book closes with the household reunited at the family’s Mackinac Island cottage on June 25, Barrows looking back once more on the World’s Parliament of Religions address that had first “sent me as a pilgrim around the world.”

Glimpses of the Orient presents itself, in its own preface, as a compilation of existing knowledge rather than a personal travel account, “complied” (its own word) so that “every inhabitant of this country” might “enroll himself in the well informed class” about a set of nations newly in the American public eye. It is organized in four parts — Part I, China, “The Celestial Kingdom” (Chapters I–IV, pp. 1–186); Part II, Japan, “The Island Empire” (Chapters V–VIII, pp. 187–316); Part III, Corea, “The Hermit Nation” (Chapters IX–XI, pp. 317–390); and Part IV, the Philippines, with the Caroline and Ladrone Islands and “an Account of American Naval and Military Operations in the Philippines” (Chapters XII–XV, pp. 391–441+) — credited to Trumbull White, previously the author of The World’s Columbian Exposition, War in the East, and Silver and Gold, with illustrations by Teitoku Morimoto, J. C. Fireman, “and others.” The preface dates the book’s motive precisely: it was “one of the results of the war between the United States and Spain,” a war whose effect, the preface says, was “to arouse the liveliest curiosity regarding the nations of the East,” beginning with “the thunder of Admiral Dewey’s guns on that fateful May morning” in Manila Bay. No passage in any of the four parts narrates a journey of White’s own; the text instead cites named authorities throughout — Dr. William Elliot Griffis’s The Mikado’s Empire, Sir John Davis, Archdeacon Gray — and on the one occasion a first-person account of daily life appears, a passage on housekeeping in Manila, it is explicitly introduced as the words of “a former resident of Manila,” not the author’s own.

Part I, at 186 pages the longest section, opens with a chronicle-style history running from the legendary “golden age” of Emperor Shun through the Chow, Han, Sung, Mongol and Ming dynasties — the “burning of the books” under the First Emperor, Kublai Khan’s fleet wrecked in its attempt against Japan, the careers of Confucius, Mencius, and the commentator Chu Hsi — before a second historical chapter carries the story forward to “the Outbreak of the War with Japan.” Two further chapters, illustrated at points with views of Port Arthur, turn to geography, the walled provincial cities, and a government White calls “one of the great wonders of history,” a “patriarchal despotism” run through six boards and marked, he writes plainly, by bribery, extortion, and judicial cruelties such as Ling-che, “ignominious and slow death.” His chapter on the Chinese people opens by insisting that “each nation is apt to see the worst side of the other,” defends Chinese “intellectuality” against American condescension, and credits China with printing, the compass, gunpowder, and porcelain — even as it catalogues footbinding, concubinage, and prison conditions “too horrible to draw in detail” as unremarkable features of the country under description.

Part II, “Japan, the Island Empire,” runs from page 187 to 316 — some 130 pages, close to three-tenths of the whole book — and receives the closest, most continuous treatment outside China. Chapter V opens with the mythic accession of Jimmu, “two thousand five hundred and fifty-four years” before the book’s own present, moves through the Empress Jingo’s legendary invasion of Corea, the rise of the Fujiwara, Taira and Minamoto houses, and Yoritomo’s founding of the shogunate, to the failed Mongol invasion of 1281, scattered, White reports, by a providential storm (“We call them typhoons”). Chapter VI follows the “Christian century” — the landings of Xavier and the Jesuits, who by their own count converted “six hundred thousand” Japanese, the persecutions and the 1637 massacre at Shimabara, and two and a half centuries of Tokugawa seclusion — through Commodore Perry’s 1853 arrival, when, as the book puts it, “the United States of America knocked at the door of Japan,” and the Meiji restoration of 1868 to Japan’s own swift modernization: its abolition of the Chinese coolie trade in 1872, the Satsuma rebellion of 1877, the annexation of the Liu Kiu Islands in 1879, and General Grant’s visit to Tokyohat same year.

The next two chapters turn from history to geography, government, and people. White surveys Fuji-yama, the Inland Sea, and the port cities of Tokio, Yokohama, and Nagasaki, then the 1890 constitution and Diet, noting that “the war between China and Japan,” then a live conflict, had helped “weld the people of opposing political faiths into harmony.” His chapter on the Japanese people sets the samurai and the farming class as the empire’s two great castes, walks through betrothal, wedding, and funeral customs, house construction, cuisine, and dress, and surveys Shinto and Buddhism, observing that native Christian chaplains “accompany her armies in their marches against China.” He praises Japanese women as treated “with respect and consideration far above that observed in other quarters of the Orient,” gives a page to the Ainos of Yesso — “a people hardly past its first infancy” — and closes Part II by predicting that Japan will become “the civilizing influence in the east of Asia.”

Part III, “Corea, the Hermit Nation,” covers pages 317 to 390 and is the shortest of the four parts, its treatment compressed to match: a founding legend traced to the Chinese exile Ki Tsze, centuries in which Corea alternated tributary status between China and Japan, Hideyoshi’s ruinous invasion of the 1590s, and an isolation broken only by episodes such as the burning of the American schooner General Sherman in 1866, the punitive United States naval expedition up the Han River in 1871, and the treaties of 1876 (with Japan) and 1882 (with the United States) that make “the year of the treaties.” A chapter on geography and government is followed by one on manners and customs describing a rigid caste system running down to “the seven vile callings,” a form of hereditary slavery, a married woman who is “absolutely nameless,” and Corean table manners — “to eat much is an honor” — closing with the hope that “the leavening influence of Christianity and western civilization” might yet draw out “many excellent qualities” the chapter credits to the Corean people.

The final part turns to the Philippines, the Carolines, and the Ladrones. White opens with Magellan’s discovery of the islands and Legaspi’s conquest in 1565, sorts the population into five “grand divisions” running from the “dwindling” Negritos to Chinese and Spanish minorities, and portrays a colony governed in practice by its friars — controlling schools, the press, marriage, and a state lottery — alongside chapters on the pina-cloth and cigar trades and on daily life in Manila, where “the whole population rises at four and five A.M.” to work ahead of the tropical heat. A shorter chapter on the Carolines and Ladrones follows, describing outrigger canoes that “lie closer to the wind than any other sailing craft known” and islanders of reputedly mixed Polynesian and Malay stock. The book ends where its preface began: with Commodore Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898 — “Not a man on board the American fleet was killed” — an uneasy alliance with the insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo, and the storming of the Spanish lines by the First Colorado Volunteers on August 13, after which, the last chapter notes, “the blockade was raised, and the shops were opened for business.”

Guide Book for Tourists in Japan, published in Yokohama in 1898 and sold by Z. P. Maruya & Co., with offices in Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kobe, and distributed through the Japan Gazette office in Yokohama, credits no individual author and reads as an institutional production rather than a personal account. It opens with an alphabetical index of place names and subjects that doubles as a table of contents, ranging from hundreds of towns, shrines, and railway lines down to phrasebook headings such as “Human Body,” “Writing Materials,” “Numbers,” “Time,” and “Distances,” and an entry for “Marriage Customs in Japan.” A short section titled “Golden Rules and Practical Hints for Travellers in Japan” follows, offering brisk advice on carrying small change, packing light, seeing that one’s watch is in good going order, soap, wax matches, and a soft hat, and then “Information for Tourists and Visitors,” which lays out the steamship lines serving Japan — the Peninsular and Oriental Company from Hongkong and the Messageries Maritimes, Norddeutsch Lloyd, and Nippon Yusen Kaisha from Shanghai calling first at Nagasaki before Kobe, and the Pacific Mail, Occidental and Oriental, Toyo Kisen Kaisha, and Canadian Pacific lines landing at Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki — along with the rail connections onward from Kobe through Osaka, Kyoto, and Otsu on Lake Biwa to Maibara, Nagahama, and Tsuruga. A further block of general information on currency, public holidays, guides’ fees, postal and telegraph rates, rest houses, game laws, and the charges at Japanese inns precedes the book’s main business: route descriptions covering the country railway by railway.

The routes proceed outward from the two chief ports. After surveying Tokyo and Yokohama themselves — their consulates, hotels, clubs, and sights such as the Shiba temples, Ueno Park, and Asakusa — the guide follows the Tokaido Railway south from Tokyo to Kamakura, Yenoshima, and the Yokosuka naval station, then to the hot-spring district of Hakone around Miyanoshita and to Atami, with a separate account of the ascent of Fuji that unusually quotes, at length, one visitor’s first-person narrative of the climb by way of Subashiri. The same line is traced northward from Kobe through Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara, each given room for its temples, palaces, and gardens, before the guide turns to the Sanyo Railway running west along the Inland Sea coast through Suma, Akashi, Himeji, and Okayama to Hiroshima, the shrine island of Itsukushima (Miyajima), and Shimonoseki. Further chapters cover the Kwansai and Osaka railways around Nara and the Ise shrines at Yamada, the North-western (Shinyetsu) line over the Usui Pass to Karuizawa and the hot springs of Ikao and Kusatsu, and the Northern Railway to Nikko — whose shrines and mausolea receive the book’s most detailed single treatment — and on to Sendai and the Matsushima coast. Entries throughout give distances in ri and cho, running times, jinrikisha and boat fares, and the inns or foreign-style hotels available at each stop.

The closing third of the book is given over to reference material. A “Japanese Language” section supplies pronunciation notes and vocabulary grouped by practical heading — port and hotel phrases, food and table requisites, weather, geography, the human body, writing materials, animals and harness, colors, days of the week, and numbers, time, and distances — followed by a genealogical register of the reigning Emperor Mutsuhito, the Empress Haruko, their children, and the several branch houses of the imperial family. The longest piece of connected prose outside the route chapters is an essay on “Marriage Customs in Japan,” surveying wedding practices province by province, from the go-between system and miai meetings of Tokyo and Yokohama to distinctive local rites recorded in Awa, Shinano, Okinawa, Formosa, and among the Ainu of Hokkaido. The volume ends not with any summary or reflection but with a classified directory, “Where to Stay At, to Make Purchases, Etc.,” listing by name and address the hotels, fine-art dealers, steamship agents, brewers, booksellers, tailors, chemists, and photographers of Yokohama, Tokyo, Kyoto, and towns and resorts across the country.

Walter Dickson’s Japan is an institutional and historical survey of the country that Dickson dates, in his own closing chapter, to “the present year 1869” — the year in which, as this 1898 Collier edition’s added material confirms, his book first appeared. The present edition reprints Dickson’s eleven original chapters and appends, “with two supplementary chapters of recent events,” two further chapters by Mayo W. Hazeltine carrying the story down to 1898. In a short preface Dickson explains his method: having lived some time in Japan, he was assisted there by “a Japanese gentleman in Yokohama, whose name, for obvious reasons, it is prudent not to mention,” who helped him work through “the red-books of the empire” — official pedigree and government-office records — for the chapters on rank and administration; for the history of Jesuit contact with Japan “the letters of the fathers have been almost the only authorities relied upon”; and for more recent events he used “contemporary publications.” He apologizes for notes taken from a Japanese informant’s broken English, or “pigeon English,” whose “cramped nature...has not been entirely removed,” and “craves the indulgence of the reader.” The volume carries four plates — a frontispiece titled “Tokio — Pagoda and Bell Temple,” and further views titled “Scene on Japanese Man-of-War,” “Yokohama and Harbor,” and “Japanese Shipping Prior to 1865” — and moves in two movements: a description of the imperial court, central government, and feudal nobility (Chapters I-II and VII-X), and a chronological history running from Japan’s legendary founding to 1869 (Chapters III-VI and XI), before Hazeltine’s two chapters take the story further.

Chapter I opens not with Japan itself but with a discursive meditation on world progress — “The leaven is working in the minds of men, whether they will it or not; and no nation will feel the effects of this fermentation more than Japan,” Dickson writes, since Japan “above all nations...to this hour retains her feudal system intact.” From there he narrows into concrete description: the person and household of the Mikado, whom he insists is wrongly called “Spiritual Emperor” by foreigners; the palace buildings and their Japanese names; the imperial regalia of mirror, sword, and jewel; the customs of tooth-blackening, eyebrow-shaving, and twice-yearly imperial processions; and the hierarchy of Koongay court nobility, down to poorer families who eke out a living teaching flower-arranging, football, or the dressing of dinners. Chapter II turns to administration, translating and paraphrasing the fourteenth-century Shoku gen sho to lay out the eight boards of government at Miako, modeled, Dickson notes repeatedly, on the six boards of Pekin, with their proliferating officers, ranks, and Chinese-derived titles.

Chapters III through VI carry the history — passing over, as Dickson puts it, “fables” of “the different generations of heavenly and earthly emperors” — from Yamato Daki no Mikoto through the long wars of the Gen and He (Minnamoto and Taira) houses, the Kamakura shogunate, and the Ashikanga collapse, to the death of Nobunanga in 1582 (Chapter III); the rise, government, and death in 1598 of Taikosama, or Hideyoshi (Chapter IV); Iyeyas’s victory at Sekingaharra in 1600 and his founding of the shogunal capital at Yedo (Chapter V); and the destruction of Hideyori at Osaka, Iyeyas’s death in 1616, and the mounting persecution of Christians (Chapter VI). Across these chapters Dickson leans heavily on “the letters of the Jesuits,” quoting them at length on the mission’s early favor under Nobunanga and Taikosama, the baptisms of converts such as Konishi Yuki Naga — called “Don Austin” by the fathers — and Justo Ucondono (Takayama), and the crucifixion of twenty-four Franciscans, Jesuits, and Japanese converts at Nagasaki on February 5, 1597. He does not simply reprint these sources: he calls one Jesuit claim “hardly correct” and observes elsewhere that “the Roman Catholics set the example of intolerance” in Japan, and he gives equal narrative weight to Taikosama’s own cruelty, most vividly in the forced suicide of his nephew Hidetsoongu and the beheading of “thirty-one ladies and three children” of his household.

Chapter VII translates — in what Dickson calls “a mere sketch, or such defective information as a Japanese who understood little English could convey to the author, who understood little Japanese” — Iyeyas’s testamentary code of “one hundred rules,” the Bookay hiak kadjo, covering succession, the ranking of officers, and punishments for crime. Chapter VIII works through the titles and residences of the Shiogoon — Tycoon, Kubosama, Daifusama — and his relation to the Mikado’s court. Chapters IX and X classify the Daimio nobility into four ranks (Koku shiu, Ka mong, To sama, and Fudai), tabulate their revenues in koku of rice, and describe the pedigree records, retirement customs, and disgrace of individual families; this institutional material runs surprisingly close to Dickson’s own moment, citing the “disturbances consequent upon Ee Kamong no kami’s vigorous action in 1857” and Choshiu’s armed defiance “in 1866.”

Chapter XI, “The History of the Empire Continued,” spans the two and a half centuries from Iyeyas’s death to 1869. It covers the Simabara rebellion of Japanese Christians, “massacred...to the number of 31,000,” the closing of the country to all but Dutch and Chinese trade, the institution of alternate-year attendance at Yedo (Sankin and Kotai), and a run of shogunal successions, before turning at length to the opening of Japan: Commodore Biddle’s rebuff in 1846, Perry’s treaty of 1854, Townsend Harris’s commercial treaty of 1858, and Sir James Stirling’s British treaty, and the domestic crisis these provoked — rivalry between the regent Ee Kamong no kami and the house of Mito, the killing of the British merchant Richardson near Kanagawa, and the bombardments of Kagosima and Simo no seki. Dickson translates at length from Japanese pamphlets and letters, including a memorial from Choshiu and several letters attributed to the Emperor, to show the Mikado resisting treaties his own Shiogoon had signed. The chapter, and Dickson’s book with it, ends in the middle of unfolding events, recording that in “the present year 1869” the Daimios had begun surrendering their fiefs to the throne.

Hazeltine’s two added chapters open by naming the seam directly: “Mr. Dickson’s history was published in 1869. During the thirty years that have since elapsed we have witnessed a complete transformation of Japan.” Chapter XII compresses that transformation into a dense, statistic-laden chronicle, markedly different in texture from Dickson’s discursive, quotation-heavy narrative — the abolition of the Shiogoonate and the Daimio class, the Emperor’s move from Kioto to “Yedo, thenceforth called Tokio,” new prefectures, railways, newspapers, medical and legal reform, the 1877 Satsuma rebellion of Saigo Takamori, and the 1889 Constitution and 1890 Diet elections. Chapter XIII turns to foreign policy: the settlement of the Bonin, Saghalien, and Kurile questions, the annexation of the Riu Kiu, or Loo Choo, islands over Chinese protest, the 1874 Formosa expedition, escalating rivalry with China over Corea, and the war with China of 1894-95, narrated engagement by engagement from the sinking of the “Kowshing” through Pingyang, the Yalu, Port Arthur, and Wei-hai-Wei, to the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the Triple Intervention by which Russia, France, and Germany forced Japan to give up the Liau-tung peninsula. The book closes with Japan’s diplomatic recovery from that reversal and the abolition of Western extraterritorial privileges, ending on the observation that “the Mikado’s empire may be said to have taken a recognized place among highly civilized nations.”

Reading List on Japan is an annotated bibliography of English-language books and magazine articles about Japan, compiled by Helen Kilduff Gay and issued by the University of the State of New York as State Library Bulletin, Bibliography No. 6, in February 1898. Its title page identifies it as work of the “Class of 1895,” “submitted for graduation, New York State Library School,” placing it as a student bibliographer’s exercise rather than a commissioned survey. A prefatory “Abbreviations” section sets out Gay’s own citation conventions: a lower-case “e” after an entry marks a book she personally examined (a variant mark shows the edition examined differed from the one listed), multivolume works are cited by volume and page “in the same form as in Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature,” and library initials following an entry — B.P., Cin., N.Y., P., S. — record that a copy was consulted at the Boston Public, Cincinnati Public, New York State, Peabody Institute, or Salem Public library. The same note specifies that quoted annotations carry their source’s name while unsigned ones are Gay’s own.

The list runs through nine further named sections after the abbreviations — General history, Government and constitution, Foreign relations, War with China, Religion, Description, Scientific, Fine arts, and Arts and industries — each entry giving author, title, pagination, format and price before an annotation that is either Gay’s own summary sentence or a passage quoted from a contemporary review, with journal and date cited; the Nation, the Critic, the Dial, the Academy, the Athenaeum, the Saturday Review, and the Spectator recur throughout, though a number of entries, especially the shorter magazine references, get no annotation beyond the citation itself. General history opens with Francis Ottiwell Adams’s two-volume History of Japan (1874) and William Elliot Griffis’s The Mikado’s Empire in its 1895 edition, “supplementary chapters on Japan in 1883, 1886 and 1890” added, alongside Richard Hildreth’s Japan as It Was and Is (1855) and David Murray’s Story of Japan (1894) in the “Story of the Nations” series, which the Dial is quoted praising for telling how Japan moved “from its beginnings to the establishment of constitutional government.” Government and constitution centers on Walter Dickson’s Japan (1869) and on Hirobumi Ito’s own Commentaries on the Constitution of the Empire of Japan (1889, translated by Miyoji Ito), which the Nation is quoted calling the work of “one of the ablest living statesmen of Japan,” exhibiting “the conservatism of the old statesman and the liberalism of the new.” Foreign relations lists George N. Curzon’s Problems of the Far East, Griffis’s Townsend Harris, First American Envoy in Japan, and Inazo Nitobe’s Intercourse Between the United States and Japan; War with China is anchored by Vladimir’s compiled The China-Japan War (1895), drawn “from Japanese, Chinese and foreign sources,” supplemented by a long run of magazine pieces from the war years by writers including Sir Edwin Arnold, Sir Edmund Fremantle, and Viscount Garnet Joseph Wolseley. Religion pairs Griffis’s Religions of Japan with Percival Lowell’s Occult Japan, quoted from the Nation as “a model of keen observation, deep insight, and scientific analysis.” Description, the longest section, ranges from Sir Rutherford Alcock’s Capital of the Tycoon and Isabella Bird Bishop’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan to Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Things Japanese and four books by Lafcadio Hearn (Gleanings in Buddha-Fields, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Kokoro, and Out of the East); Scientific covers John Batchelor’s The Ainu of Japan, praised in the Nation as “replete with information of all sorts about the Ainu men and women and children,” and Josiah Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan; Fine arts lists William Anderson’s The Pictorial Arts of Japan and Edward S. Morse’s Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings; and Arts and industries includes Johannes Justus Rein’s Industries of Japan and James L. Bowes’s Japanese Marks and Seals.

Stories about Japan, a short section of five works of fiction, lists Sir Edwin Arnold’s play Adzuma; or the Japanese Wife, Edward Howard House’s Yone Santo, John Luther Long’s Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo, Arthur C. Maclay’s Mito Yashiki, and Louis Wertheimber’s Muramasa Blade, before the bibliography closes with Literature. There Gay lists Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Classical Poetry of the Japanese, Griffis’s Japanese Fairy World, and Algernon Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, quoted via Chamberlain’s Things Japanese as rendering “the whole picturesque life of old Japan” in “a style that renders them doubly attractive,” together with Roger Riordan and Tozo Takayanagi’s Sunrise Stories, an attempt “to re-tell Japan’s ancient and medieval myths, legends, poetry and novels.” The section, and the pamphlet, ends with a cluster of brief magazine references on Japanese verse and folk-tale — pieces by Frank Abell and Mrs. E. M. Davy among them — and a final, unannotated line citing the “Japanese literature” article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Gist of Japan presents itself on its title page as the work of “the Rev. R. B. Peery, A.M., Ph.D., of the Lutheran Mission, Saga, Japan,” and a preface signed “R. B. P., Saga, Japan” explains why he wrote it: although a great deal had already been published in English about Japan, he knew of no book that attempted “a full treatment of mission work in Japan” apart from one of much narrower scope, Dr. Gordon’s An American Missionary in Japan. Peery says he wrote “for the common people,” aiming at “a plain, popular treatment” rather than an exhaustive one, and that for the general chapters he consulted freely a list of English-language authorities — Rein’s Japan, Griffis’s Mikado’s Empire and Religions of Japan, Chamberlain’s Handbook of Things Japanese, Miss Bacon’s Japanese Girls and Women, Dr. Lawrence’s Modern Missions in the East, the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, files of the Japan Mail, and reports of missionary conferences — while for the chapters on history, morality, and religion he also drew on unnamed Japanese-language sources. The book runs to sixteen chapters over some three hundred and seventeen pages of text: the first seven, ending at page 143, survey the land, history, national character, customs, civilization, morality, and religions of Japan; the remaining nine carry the story into the history of Christian missions there and into a lengthy practical treatise on how missionary work should be undertaken. The volume is dedicated “To My Wife.”

The opening chapter surveys the islands — Hondo, Kyushu, Shikoku, and Yezo, the last home to the dwindling Ainu — along with their volcanoes, earthquakes, rivers, roads, and crops, and here Peery’s own experience keeps surfacing: he recalls climbing Asama by night in 1894 when part of its crater had just collapsed, standing on the 12,365-foot summit of Fuji-san in August 1893 where the ground still gave off vapors hot enough to cook an egg, and losing the shade of four camphor-trees near his former Saga home that sold standing for $2000 silver; writing the chapter in June 1896, he reports the tidal wave that had just killed more than 30,000 people on Hondo’s north coast. Chapter II carries Japanese history from the mythology of Izanagi and Izanami and the mythical accession of Jimmu Tenno, through the Fujiwara ascendancy, the rise of feudalism under the Taira and Minamoto, the shogunate founded by Yoritomo, the landing of the Portuguese adventurer “mendacious” Mendez Pinto in 1542, Commodore Perry’s forced opening of the country in 1853–54 (won, Peery insists, by “intimidation” and “a show of strength,” not by prayer, whatever the “pretty story” claims), the Restoration, the 1889 constitution, treaty revision, and the recent war with China. Chapter III catalogues national characteristics — physical slightness, cheerfulness, intellectual keenness, an undeveloped sense of individual personality, fanatical patriotism, filial and political obedience, a highly developed aesthetic sense, inconsistency, a want of originality redeemed by skill at imitation, and a low value placed on human life, illustrated by a servant girl from Kagoshima who hanged herself in his Saga household after her mistress refused to send her home — and it weighs, without wholly accepting, Townsend Harris’s charge that the Japanese are “the greatest liars upon the face of the earth,” noting that in public office they are by contrast scrupulously honest. Chapter IV works through manners and customs by systematic contrast with the West, in what Peery calls “Topsyturvydom”: books read back to front, letters addressed in reverse order, houses entered barefoot and warmed only by a hibachi, meals of rice and fish eaten with chopsticks, geta and tabi in place of shoes and stockings, universal daily bathing, funeral customs down to hired mourners, hara-kiri described step by step, and a sample dialogue of two men trading elaborately self-deprecating greetings.

Chapter V asks whether Japan is “civilized” and answers that it is, tracing the 1872 mission of seventy Japanese gentlemen sent to inspect the Western capitals on the advice of the missionary Dr. Verbeck, then president of the Imperial University, and surveying newspapers, the four-tier school system, native art, and an infrastructure of narrow-gauge railways, steamers, a telegraph system running its own Japanese Morse code, a post office doubling as a savings bank, and electric lighting in the larger cities — quoting Lafcadio Hearn for the claim that Japan has been civilized for a thousand years and for the judgment that she “has become industrial without becoming essentially mechanical and artificial,” before concluding, in Peery’s own words, that Japanese civilization, in its parts, is “miniature.” Chapter VI turns to morality, contrasting Confucian ethics — in which Japan, unlike China, ranks loyalty to one’s lord above filial duty — with Christian, and gives several pages to the story of the forty-seven ronins of Ako, who avenged their lord Asano’s forced hara-kiri by killing his tormentor Kira in 1703 and were sentenced to hara-kiri themselves and afterward buried together at the temple of Sengakuji, before surveying sake-drinking, sharp trading practices, and suicide statistics. Chapter VII sketches Shinto (“the way of the gods,” with no moral code or sacred books), Buddhism, imported from Korea in the sixth century and credited, quoting Chamberlain, with having shaped “every sphere of social and intellectual activity,” Confucianism, and the new faith-healing sect Tenrikyo, founded by the peasant woman Nakayama Miiki after visions that came to her in her fortieth year, closing by predicting that all three older faiths will eventually cede the field to “their younger and more vigorous antagonists, Christianity and civilization” — the pivot on which the book turns to its second half.

That second half opens with Francis Xavier’s landing at Kagoshima in 1549 and the Catholic mission that grew, under the patronage of Nobunaga, to some 150,000 converts by 1581, only to be broken by Nobunaga’s successors: Hideyoshi’s crucifixions at Nagasaki in 1597, Iyeyasu’s 1614 edict branding missionaries “triple enemies,” the fall of Hideyori’s Osaka castle, mass burnings, and finally the rebellion and massacre at Shimabara, after which Japan sealed its borders for two centuries behind sign-boards threatening death to any Christian. Chapter IX resumes the Catholic story after the 1859 reopening — including the discovery of secret Christian communities near Nagasaki that had preserved a corrupted faith for two centuries — and adds the Russian Orthodox, or “Greek,” mission built almost single-handedly by Bishop Nicolai Kasatkin, whose Tokyo cathedral, begun in 1884 and finished in 1891 at a cost of $177,575 silver, Peery praises particularly for its choir. Chapter X narrates Protestant missions from the landing of the first Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Reformed missionaries in 1859, through years when preaching was still forbidden and hired native teachers turned out to be government spies, the completion of a full Japanese Bible in 1880, the removal of the anti-Christian edicts from the sign-boards in 1873, a “pro-foreign” boom in the 1880s followed by a nationalist reaction after 1888, and then a denomination-by-denomination account current to 1895–96: the Congregationalist American Board mission and its Doshisha University in Kyoto (whose drift into “higher criticism” troubles him), the Presbyterian–Reformed “Church of Christ in Japan,” five uncoordinated Methodist bodies, five Episcopal societies jointly building one Nippon Sei Kokwai, four Baptist societies, and, briefly, his own four-year-old Lutheran mission at Saga — two missionary couples, two native helpers, one Bible-woman, and about fifty-five converts baptized since the station opened in 1893.

The book’s final third turns from history to practical counsel, and Peery writes it continually in the first person — “in my own mission,” “the writer has lived in such a home” — drawing on his own post as much as on colleagues’ testimony. Chapter XI argues, quoting fellow missionaries Wallace Taylor and Edward Lawrence, that sound health and “common sense” matter more in a candidate than burning zeal, and that a missionary should be a married man; Chapter XII describes mission-house life, salaries and child and health allowances, summer retreats at Karuizawa, Arima, Hakone, Sapporo, and Mount Hiezan, and periodic furloughs, quoting Lawrence’s description of the missionary as an “exile”; Chapter XIII details local chapel evangelism — including his own catechetical classes built on Luther’s Small Catechism — itinerating by jinrikisha and, increasingly, bicycle (he pictures fellow missionaries setting out “in negligee shirts and knickerbockers”), and a sustained argument that Japan’s costly mission academies and girls’ boarding-schools do more harm than good, illustrated by a former pupil, admired for her piety, who stopped attending church entirely once she married into a non-Christian home; Chapter XIV runs through hindrances from Christianity’s own exclusiveness to Japanese nationalism, the memory of the seventeenth-century persecutions, a secularizing school system, the continuing vitality of Buddhism, the social ostracism of converts (told through a student disowned by his mother and brothers after his baptism), denominational sectarianism, the poor example set by foreign merchants in the treaty ports, and the difficulty of the language, which he says leaves a third of missionaries unable to speak it intelligibly to the people; Chapter XV works through unresolved problems of policy — how long to test inquirers, whether to require abstinence from tobacco and drink, how to support indigent converts, what polity and self-support to expect of the native church, and the failure of five separate Methodist missions to unite; and Chapter XVI, “The Outlook,” totals some 100,000 Japanese Christians of all confessions and 876 foreign missionaries, sets against them a newly tolerant government that had permitted three native army chaplains and Bible distribution to soldiers during the war with China, and weighs these against a native temperament he judges nationalistic, materialistic, and largely indifferent, closing not with a prediction but a profession of faith: “It may not be in the present century; it may not even be in the lifetime of any now living; but it will surely be when God’s time is fulfilled. May God hasten the day.” The volume’s own “List of Illustrations” names nine full-page plates — Fuji San, A Bridge Scene, A Kitchen Scene, Hara-kiri, A Shinto Temple, A Buddhist Priest, A Buddhist Cemetery, The Author’s Home, and Jinrikishas — and it closes with an index.

“What Will Japan Do? A Forecast,” published in London by Lawrence and Bullen in early 1898, is a work of political and military forecasting rather than travel writing, though its method is unusual: most of it is written as a narrated future war rather than as direct argument. In a preface signed “J.M.” and dated “London, January 1898,” Morris frames the book as the latest in a personal sequence of predictions about Japan, going back to a book he wrote “some eleven years ago” about the inner life of the Japanese people, continuing through his War in Korea, in which he says he “was sanguine enough to predict success for the armies of the Ten-Shi” against China, and Advance, Japan!, “an approximately up-to-date account of the actual progress made in that country under the present Emperor’s rule.” He writes as a British commentator on Far Eastern affairs for whom Japan’s rise and Russia’s southward advance are the central fact of the age, stating plainly that “in great part the book is a forecast... founded on admitted facts and figures,” meant to “furnish information in a readable form.” Its governing prediction, worked out chapter by chapter, is that Japan and Russia will collide over Korea in the near future, that Japan’s army and navy have been built for exactly that contest, and that Britain’s interests in the Far East are bound up with Japan’s success against the “Colossus of the North.”

Seven of the book’s fourteen chapters carry the forecast forward as a narrative of a Russo-Japanese war Morris imagines breaking out at the close of the century, interleaved with essayistic chapters — taken up below — on the partition of China and on commercial policy. It opens with a Tokio ministerial newspaper’s editorial taken as a virtual pledge of war over Russian encroachment in Korea, the Mikado’s single-word mobilization telegram “PREPARE” reaching every depot within the hour, and a review of Japan’s readiness: an army of 503,384 officers and men (seventy percent infantry, seventeen percent artillery, eight percent cavalry), a navy of four battleships, twenty-three cruisers, twenty-four gunboats, seven torpedo-boat destroyers, and fifty-seven torpedo boats being built toward a programmed strength of 200,000 tons, coastal forts such as the six 25-centimetre guns at Moji commanding the 600-yard Shimonoseki strait, and grievances running back to the loss of southern Sakhalin, the forced retrocession of Liao-tung, and Russian financial control at Seoul. One chapter turns coal itself into a strategic argument: Japan, holding nearly every accessible coal store in the Far East, can starve a Russian fleet that must bring its own colliers. The war is then narrated engagement by engagement: a first naval action in the Formosan Channel in which the battleship Fuji sinks a Russian flagship by torpedo after a ramming attempt fails, at a cost of two Japanese ships to three Russian; landings at Fusan, Gensan, and Chemulpo and the capture of Seoul after only a brief tussle at one gate, after which the Korean king, Li-Hsi, is imprisoned in his own palace; a second fleet action off Tsushima in which the battleship Kwanto and a Russian ironclad destroy each other in a torpedo-and-ram duel while the Yashima’s squadron drives the rest of the Russian fleet back to Vladivostock for repairs; an episode in which the telegraphist Takasaki Genji, captured at a lonely cable station on the islet of Kuro-shima, secretly warns Tokio before being shot while trying to escape, dying with the word “Teikoku” on his lips; and the land battle of Wang-neun Pass, where nine thousand Japanese troops, supported by naval gunfire, hold a fortified defile against fifteen thousand Russian infantry and Cossacks and force a retreat. By the pause in hostilities, the Japanese squadron engaged off Tsushima is down to seven of its original ten ships, Japan holds all of northern Korea, and Russia’s Pacific squadron lies laid up at Vladivostock.

Woven through this narrative, and dominating the book’s second half, is an analysis of the broader partition of China and of Japan’s commercial ambitions. Morris traces Russian, French, and German advances against the Manchu government — the Cassini Convention’s railway concessions toward Port Arthur, a proposed British-backed loan to let China discharge her war indemnity to Japan and recover Wei-hai-wei, Germany’s seizure of Kiao-chau in Shantung province — and argues that Britain’s proper role is to keep the Yangtse ports, Hankow’s trade, and the northern treaty ports of Tientsin, Newchang, and Chefoo open to all comers rather than let any one power claim exclusive rights. He credits Japan, after her insistence on opening Hangchau, Soochow, and Sha-shih to general trade, with acting on the same free-trade principle, and he doubts China’s collapse is imminent, arguing that “the mighty mass” is more likely to be undone from within — pointing to the reviving Triad and Tungani risings — than dismembered from without. Once the new treaties abolish extraterritoriality in 1899, he describes both the jubilation and occasional truculence of Japan’s “lower classes” at their new legal standing, and a return from wartime “shoddy goods” to higher-quality manufacture as labor shortages pushed export prices up. Osaka, with its hundreds of factory chimneys, has become “the Manchester of the Far East,” exporting cotton twills to Hong Kong, China, India, and the United States and matches to the Straits Settlements, India, and China, while Japan’s raw silk goes largely to the looms of Europe. Russia’s professed need for an “ice-free port,” he argues, is a pretext for outright annexation of Korea, since she already enjoys unrestricted use of Nagasaki harbor, with its own “Russian village,” without needing to own it.

The book closes by projecting these trends into the new century: Korea governed as a Japanese vassal kingdom, its exiled emperor an honoured guest in Tokio and his son on the throne at Seoul; Japan’s finances balanced on a forecast 1903 budget of 179,715,000 yen in both revenue and expenditure; and a projected foreign trade of 534,830,000 yen in which Great Britain’s share (forty percent) dwarfs that of the United States (twenty-two percent), France and Germany (about ten percent each), and China (eleven percent). Morris ends by making his own policy recommendation the point of the whole exercise: that Britain and Japan share “a like indisposition to submit to coercion in any form,” and that whether or not a formal alliance proves possible, Britain’s interest lies in making sure Japan never allies with a rival power instead — closing with the warning that Britain “should make sure that she does not join with any other in a league which may some day be detrimental to our prestige in Asia.”

Exotics and Retrospectives collects sixteen essays by Lafcadio Hearn, who identifies himself on the title page as “Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University, Tokyo” and as the author of Out of the East and Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. A prefatory note signed “L.H.” and dated at Tokyo, February 15, 1898, states that “all but one of the papers composing this volume appear for the first time,” and it confirms that the two-word title tracks a real division in the book’s own table of contents: six essays are gathered as “Exotics,” beginning with “Fuji-no-Yama” on page 3 and running through “Of Moon-Desire” on page 175, and ten more make up “Retrospectives,” from “First Impressions” on page 187 to “The Eternal Haunter” on page 293. Hearn’s note calls the second group “little essays, or rather fantasies” that “deal with experiences in two hemispheres,” and says their common title, rather than their setting, is what holds them together. In practice the Exotics essays stay close to observed Japanese particulars — a mountain climb, an insect trade, a graveyard’s inscriptions, a frog’s song, a child’s question — while the Retrospectives drift into speculative essays on memory, color, touch, and desire, several of them drawing on Hearn’s earlier years in the American tropics rather than on Japan at all.

“Fuji-no-Yama” is a dated first-person diary of Hearn’s own ascent of the mountain in August 1897 by way of Gotemba, climbing with two goriki guides through the ten numbered stations, past the volcanic wastes buried by the 1707 eruption and the “Sea of Cotton” of clouds below the summit, and closing with the guides’ own account of the meteorologist Nonaka and his wife, who tried to winter on the peak and had to be carried down half-dead by rescuers, one of them Hearn’s own guide. “Insect-Musicians” traces the Tokyo insect trade from its founder, an itinerant food-seller named Chuzo who began selling suzumushi caught in Negishi in the late eighteenth century, through the breeders Kiriyama and Yasubei and the thirty-six-dealer guild called the Oyama-Ko, gives a table of 1897 Tokyo prices for twelve species, and works through matsumushi, suzumushi, kirigirisu, hataori, umaoi, kutsuwamushi, kantan and others one by one, each with translated classical poems and, for several, a small illustration captioned “natural size”; a full-page plate opposite page 51 shows three labeled types of insect cage. “A Question in the Zen Texts” is a dialogue in which a friend retells, from the Mu-Mon-Kwan, the Chinese story of the girl Ts’ing, whose spirit runs off with her lover while her body lies sick at home until the two Ts’ings merge into one — a story cited in the source text only to pose, and deliberately leave unanswered, the koan of which Ts’ing was the true one. “The Literature of the Dead” describes the cemetery of the temple Kobudera (Ji-sho-in) behind Hearn’s own house, with its demon-tiled gate (illustrated facing page 97), and works through the doctrine of the Five Great Elements, the wording of sotoba inscriptions from the Nichiren, Jodo, Zen and Shingon sects, and dozens of translated kaimyo, including those of the Forty-Seven Ronin buried at Sengakuji; two further plates show a sotoba-marked tomb (facing page 102) and a tomb sculpture of the Bodhisattva Mahasthama (facing page 137). “Frogs” distinguishes the true singing kajika from ordinary ricefield frogs and surveys frog-poems from the Manyoshu and Kokinshu down to Basho’s first hokku and a contemporary Osaka poet’s privately printed collection. “Of Moon-Desire” opens with a two-year-old child asking the narrator for the Moon and expands into a meditation on the difference between wishing to have and wishing to become, ending in a dialogue about the Buddhist parable of the ape reaching for the Moon’s reflection.

The Retrospectives essays return repeatedly to a single idea: that any strong sensation — a face, a color, a scent, a touch, a piece of music — awakens not personal feeling but “organic memory,” the accumulated experience of countless dead ancestors. “First Impressions” develops this through the figure of the composite photograph, arguing that the impression a stranger’s face makes is really “the verdict of the dead.” “Beauty is Memory,” addressed directly to “you,” argues that romantic infatuation is the ancestral dead recognizing, in a beloved’s features, echoes of “bodily fitness” prized in countless earlier lives, and “Sadness in Beauty” extends the same logic to landscape, tracing the melancholy of a fine view to inherited longing for a freedom lost since “the building of walled cities.” “Parfum de Jeunesse,” prompted by a friend’s memory of a cloak that smelled of milk, and “Azure Psychology,” which moves from the color scheme of an ordinary Japanese street to a ship captain’s story about buying blue silk in Canton to match the color of the Gulf Stream, apply the same theory to smell and to color. Three essays are set explicitly in the tropics: “A Serenade” recalls a night of flute-and-mandolin music heard in the West Indies and reads it as an appeal to a “feminine element” surviving in every man from past lives; “A Red Sunset” describes a tropical sunset so intensely red that it produced “a vague strange horror,” which Hearn traces to inherited associations with fire, blood, and volcanic destruction, and predicts that the human eye may eventually lose the capacity to perceive red at all; and “Vespertina Cognitio” narrates a specific night in a lodging-house on a Caribbean island, where Hearn and his guide Louis independently dream of a towering female “Zombi” entering their locked room, an experience Hearn later attributes to heat-warped floorboards but treats as evidence of an “ancestral fear of the dark” older than any belief in ghosts. “Frisson,” citing the psychologist Bain, speculates that the pleasurable shock of certain human touches may be an “electric” individual quality perceptible only to inherited sensitivity.

The collection closes with “The Eternal Haunter,” framed as Hearn describing a newly bought color-print by the artist “Chikanobu,” priced at three sen, showing a cherry-tree spirit passing through falling blossoms; from this single print the essay builds outward into an address to an unnamed feminine “haunter” who visits every man once in youth and is identified, by the essay’s end, with the tree-spirit and with the “billion-branching Tree of Life” itself, closing the volume on the same theme of universal inherited memory that runs through the Retrospectives. Several of the essays carry their own opinions plainly stated rather than argued at length — “Insect-Musicians” ends by warning that only after Western “blind aggressive industrialism” has “wasted and sterilized” Japan’s natural paradise will its destroyers begin, too late, to comprehend the beauty they destroyed, and “Frogs” pauses to wonder, without resolving the question, whether Japanese poetry’s silence about touch and taste reflects “the particular temperament or mental habit of the race.” Throughout, the register shifts by essay rather than holding to one voice: the Exotics pieces are largely documentary first-person narration or exposition with footnoted Japanese and Sanskrit terms, while several Retrospectives — “Beauty is Memory” prominent among them — address the reader directly as “you,” and others, such as “Azure Psychology” and “Vespertina Cognitio,” are cast as first-person recollection with reported dialogue, in the latter case rendered partly in Creole patois.

“Travels through Asia with the Children” presents itself, in its preface, as a geography reader for young people: Frank G. Carpenter tells his readers that he has “taken them on an imaginary tour” through Asia so that “what seemed before to be little more than a mere skeleton of dry facts becomes a living and potent reality,” and he says the book grew out of two years he spent traveling through the continent, with many of its illustrations reproduced from photographs he took himself. The children he addresses—always as “we”—cross the Pacific from Puget Sound to Japan, sail north to Korea and eastern Siberia, double back past Korea to the Chinese Empire, drop south from Hongkong to Siam, pass through the Straits of Malacca to Singapore and Burma, spend an extended stay in India, continue into Tibet, Persia, and Arabia, and finish in Palestine, Turkey, and the Russian provinces of west Asia, the tour ending at the unfinished western terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad in the Ural Mountains. Difficult place names and foreign words carry pronunciation marks throughout, and Carpenter says the book is meant to be “used as a supplement to the lessons in the text-book on geography.”

Japan opens the tour and gets sustained, chapter-by-chapter treatment—roughly as much space, in fact, as the book later gives China or India in turn. The steamer approaches past a smoking Fusiyama, “the extinct volcano and the famed sacred mountain of Japan,” and Carpenter describes an empire of “more than thirty-eight hundred mountainous islands” that “winds in and out like a snake,” shaken, he says, by earthquakes almost daily; he recounts an old quake that leveled Yeddo and killed, he writes, two hundred thousand people, a second in 1855 that toppled sixteen thousand houses, and adds that he himself “narrowly escaped death” in a Tokyo earthquake in 1894. Landing at Yokohama, the children pass customs officers checking for opium—banned outright, unlike in China—and are hauled about by jinrikisha; Carpenter retells the story of Commodore Perry’s 1854 visit, when dignified Japanese crawled atop a toy railroad car too small to sit inside. In Tokyo, moated and holding “a million and a half of people” behind sliding paper walls, he traces how the shogun and the daimios and their two-sworded samurai once ruled from Yeddo while the emperor was kept nominally too holy to govern at Kioto, until the 1868 restoration brought the emperor to the renamed capital. Later chapters carry the children to the emperor’s palace grounds, where his majesty nets ducks with his nobles for sport, past police and passport checks, into the Houses of Parliament, the War Department, and the Treasury, with explanations of the yen-sen-rin currency and of the postal and telegraph systems that Carpenter credits to American advisers.

A full chapter is given over to a night in a Japanese home: sliding walls, floor mats woven to a fixed size so that a room’s dimensions are counted “by the number of mats required to cover the floor,” hibachi charcoal boxes in place of stoves, a scalding communal bath, a floor supper of sake, raw fish with soy, pickled green pears, and rice served again and again because “no one need go away hungry,” ending with a wooden pillow-block for sleep. Children’s schooling gets equal attention—kindergartens, a forty-seven-character syllabary, brush-and-inkstone writing done from the top down starting at the right, the soroban counting frame, and newspapers and books that read back to front—alongside a long account of play: rented street ovens for baking dough cakes, the Feast of Dolls, balloonlike paper-fish streamers and glass-stringed fighting kites for the boys’ festival, and card games such as “One Hundred Verses of One Hundred Poets.” Carpenter sets Shinto and Buddhism side by side, visits the bronze Dai Butzu at Kamakura (“as tall as a four-story house”), and then follows the children into the countryside for chapters on rice and tea cultivation—with a stop at the fine tea gardens of Uji—straw-shod pack horses, and finally Kioto and Osaka, where he describes silk weaving, cotton mills fed by raw cotton shipped from the American South, camphor distilling, and jute-rug shops where, he notes in passing, children of ten and up earn five to ten cents a day. He calls Japanese custom “naturally modest” and repeatedly praises Japanese cleanliness and industry, while also noting fading practices—teeth-blackening and eyebrow-shaving among wives and widows as tokens of devotion or mourning—that he says the empress has already given up.

The tour does not stop there. A short “Hermit Nation” section on Korea—opened to travelers, Carpenter notes, only after Commodore R. W. Shufeldt’s 1882 treaty—describes walled, gated Seoul locked down each night by a curfew bell, hats that mark a man’s marital status, and elaborate mourning customs, before the children cross to Vladivostok and ride the still-unfinished Trans-Siberian line into China. China gets a comparable stretch of the book: walled Peking, wheelbarrow and cart travel, queues and bound feet, cash coins strung on strings, and a chapter titled outright “Curious Chinese Customs,” with Carpenter exclaiming of Peking’s streets, “How dirty, how vile, how shabby everything is!” From Hongkong the children sail to Siam, where Bangkok’s floating houses and King Chulalangkorn’s white elephants appear alongside blunt judgment—the Siamese, Carpenter writes, are “sunk in superstition, laziness, and vice”—then on through Singapore’s spice groves and bounty-hunted tigers to Burma, noted for its rubies and its working elephants. India receives an extended stay of its own: British rule and the East India Company’s origins in “a pinch of pepper,” Calcutta’s crowds, bathing and cremation on the Ganges at Benares, a temple of sacred cattle, the caste system, and a visit to a native rajah’s court, before a chapter on the Himalaya leads into Tibet, where Carpenter dwells at length on polyandrous marriage and prayer wheels at Lassa. The closing chapters move faster through Persia and the nomads of Afghanistan and Baluchistan, Bedouin tent life and camel travel in Arabia, the black stone of Mecca, walled Jerusalem and the shepherd villages of Palestine, the sultan’s Turkey, and finally Russia’s Caucasus, Central Asian, and Siberian territories, where Kirghiz herders and their koumiss, a fermented mare’s-milk drink, close out the Asian leg of the journey.

The book ends simply, with the children riding the Trans-Siberian line to its Ural terminus and then by rail through Russia and Germany to a steamer home, so that, as Carpenter puts it, “within a week after sailing we find ourselves again on American soil.” Throughout, the text is carried along by engravings and photographic plates: a color map titled “Asia” opens the volume with the Empire of Japan laid out alongside Korea, China, India, and the Middle East, and a further map introduces nearly every regional chapter, from “Japan and Korea” and the “Chinese Empire” to “India and Indo-China,” “Persia, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan,” “Arabia and Turkey in Asia,” “Palestine,” and “Russia in Asia”—eight maps in all. Full-page plates include a canal-and-temple “Scene in Tokyo” and Seoul’s “Main Gate to the Palace,” while smaller cuts scattered through the Japan chapters carry captions such as “Japanese Family at Dinner,” “Japanese Bed,” “Japanese Postage Stamps,” “Japanese Newspaper, One Page,” and “Japanese Priest.”

Captain S. C. F. Jackson, D.S.O., of the Hampshire Regiment and Deputy Assistant Adjutant-General, Bombay Command, published this account of a ninety days’ leave taken with his wife in the spring of 1899, traveling from Poona to Japan and back by way of Ceylon, the Straits, French Indochina, Hongkong, Canton and Shanghai. His preface, signed “Poona, Nov., 1899,” frames the book in the first-person singular even as its substance already speaks as a couple: Jackson writes that “it is with considerable diffidence I venture to place these pages before the public,” then recounts that existing travel literature had told them “all about Shoguns and Daimyos, Hara-Kari and Geishas” and shown them “pictures of Fujiyama and Yokohama,” but “we had never been informed, for instance, that the roads throughout the country are invariably execrable, or that the trains are always late and overcrowded” — offering “the notes and experiences of our journey” to fill the gap. This “we” of husband and wife together, sounded from the narrative’s opening line (“For some time my wife and I had been looking forward to spending my ninety days’ privilege leave on a trip to Japan”), carries the book from start to finish. Roughly the first third — chapters I through VII — covers the outward voyage before Japan is reached at all: departure from Bombay on the Messageries Maritimes steamer Ernest Simon on 9 March 1899, three days’ quarantine at Colombo, a damp morning among Singapore’s gardens and at Raffles’ Hotel, the passage up the Domai River to Saigon, a tour of French Cochin China and its Annamite Rifles, and a departure for Hongkong delayed a full day when a cracked engine cylinder forced the ship back to Cap St. Jacques to await coal barges; a side trip from Hongkong up the Pearl River to Canton under the guidance of the well-known Ah Cum follows, and a cold Easter stop at Shanghai’s British, American, French and German concessions before rejoining the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamer America Maru for Japan.

The America Maru entered Nagasaki harbor at daylight on 5 April, with the fruit trees in their “gayest bloom,” and the Japan portion of the book, chapters VIII through XXI, occupies roughly the remaining two-thirds of its length. From Nagasaki the couple crossed the Straits of Simonosaki and the Inland Sea to Kobe and the adjoining native town of Hiogo, watched a sumo tournament (“these wrestlers are as popular in Japan as are successful matadors in Spain”), and went on through Osaka — “invariably described as the Birmingham of Japan” — to Kioto, timing their arrival to the twenty-night Miyako-Odori cherry-blossom dance given by Maikos at the Hanami-Koji geisha training hall. Kioto also brought a day shooting the rapids by barge from Tamba to Arayashima, a passage through the tunneled high-level canal from Otsu, an evening at a Kioto theatre catching the close of a historical tragedy and a burlesque of the cherry-blossom dance performed by men, and an excursion to the temples of Mayurama and to the deer park and Daibutsu at Nara. From Kioto they crossed Lake Biwa by steamer to Hikone and continued by rail to Nagoya, where Jackson, drawing on his own profession, describes at length Japanese soldiers at drill outside the castle — infantry, cavalry and field artillery at exercise, uniforms and salutes copied from German instructors, and a bugler class chanting “ta ta te, ta ta ti” before the instrument itself is attempted.

A wet, ten-hour rail journey to Yokohama — shared with the Japanese Minister of War’s staff and a card-playing party of Americans, one of whom is silenced when a Japanese officer asks whether “Amurrican” trains carry billiard tables — was followed by day trips to Kanazawa’s three-hundred-year-old peony garden, the naval dockyard at Yokosuka, where seven new Japanese battleships lay beside H.M.S. Victorious, and the great Daibutsu at Kamakura and the sea-cave of Enoshima. At Tokio, based at the Métropole, they visit the shogunal tombs in the Shiba and Ueno parks, the Asakusa temple and its theatre street, the canal-ringed Yoshiwara, and the tombs of the forty-seven Ronin at Sengakuji; see the actor Danjuro, then sixty-seven and capable, by his own reputation, of appearing in as many as three different characters within a single hour, take the roles of a proud usurper and then a humble young maiden of sixteen at the Kabukiza; and dine, uneasily, on lotus root and raw fish at the Maple Club before watching the Maple, Spider Web and Nunobiki dances. A slow train north to Nikho takes in the sacred red bridge, judged “a very ordinary piece of work,” the tomb of Ieyasu, and a climb to Lake Chiuzenzi, still under snow so early in the season. Their stay ends at Miyanoshita, at the Fujiya Hotel, with excursions to Hakone and the sulfur springs of Ojigoku, or “Greater Hell”; only on their last day in the hills, from the shore of Hakone Lake, do they finally see Fujiyama clear of cloud, after “nearly five weeks in Japan.”

Back at Yokohama they watch the Mikado’s rare visit to the town for the races on 9 May, the Bund decorated and the crowd silent as the open state carriage passes with its Lancer escort, before sailing for home the next day aboard the Indus and breaking the return voyage at Kobe for a last look at the Kioto Palace and Castle, finally open to them on permits that had not arrived in time for their first visit. The book closes on a double reckoning rather than a verdict: bad roads, unreliable trains, staring and rudeness from “the ordinary Japanese of the lower middle class,” business dealings Jackson calls “utterly untrustworthy,” and an arrogance he attributes to the recent war with China, weighed against real attachment to the scenery and festivals, concluding that “we thoroughly valued the charms and beauties of the country which a skin deep civilization can never spoil.” An appendix then itemizes the costs of the whole ninety-day trip — steamer fares, hotel tariffs from Hongkong to Miyanoshita, rickshaw and sedan-chair rates, Ah Cum’s bill for the day in Canton, and advice on curio-buying and banking — reckoning three hundred pounds “a liberal estimate for the three months’ trip for two people.”

Stafford Ransome’s Japan in Transition (1899) presents itself, in its own introduction, not as a portrait of “old Japan” — already, Ransome says, “thoroughly thrashed out by many competent writers” — but as an analytical account of the “transition Japan” passing through its “most critical throes” in the years after the war with China. Ransome, a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and formerly special correspondent of the Morning Post in the Far East, lived in Japan for under two years, part of 1896 and the whole of 1897, writing simultaneously for the Morning Post on “Japan Since the War” and for the engineering trade journal The Engineer on the country’s industrial progress; both series feed directly into the book. He states his method plainly: he compares Japanese “methods” not against an idealized Japan of the past but against “the ordinary methods of the men one finds elsewhere in the civilized world,” giving “my own opinions without any attempt at hedging” rather than writing as either “pro-Japanese” or “anti-Japanese.” The book runs to sixteen numbered chapters on discrete topics — misconceptions of Japan, travel and lodging, the standing of the foreigner, education, drama, Christianity, morals, commercial integrity, international trade, industry, the effects of the war, politics, strategic geography, colonization, alliance prospects, and the revised treaties — rather than a travel itinerary, though several early chapters carry a good deal of first-person anecdote alongside the argument. The introduction also compresses his overall thesis: that Japan’s political, commercial, and industrial progress is solid rather than a “thin veneer,” that Japanese moral instincts are “not, as a rule, of a lower order” than the European average even where they diverge from Western theory, that the reputation for commercial dishonesty rests largely on “a misconception as to the fundamental principles which guide the conduct of modern business,” and that Britain, the United States, and Japan share, for the time being, an identical Far Eastern policy.

The opening chapters work this comparative method out concretely. “Popular Misconceptions of Japan” blames the country’s persistent misconceptions on both “treaty-port pessimism,” driven home by an extended analogy imagining a colony of Japanese merchants settled at Wapping Old Stairs, and the opposite excess of the visitor who “Japonifies” himself and comes home gushing about “dear little giggling dolls”; several pages go to demolishing the “littleness of Japan” trope associated with Sir Edwin Arnold’s claim that everything there was little “except the shrimps,” pointing out among other things that the Japanese railway gauge is wider than half the lines in India, before closing with a nod to the writers Ransome judges to have already “fully and extremely carefully dealt with” old Japan — Rein, Mitford, Satow, Brinkley, Hearne, and Chamberlain. “Travelling and Accommodation” turns largely autobiographical, recounting Ransome’s own struggles with the chadai, or tipping, system at Japanese inns, a convalescence spent living on rice and fish eaten with chopsticks, and a detailed account of Japanese bathing customs and etiquette. “The Standing of the Foreigner” sorts resident foreigners into four classes — business men, missionaries, “passing visitors,” and technical advisers — crediting the last and least visible group, men such as Will Adams three centuries earlier, with having “done far more than all the rest of the foreigners” to build modern Japan, and quoting at length a speech by Count Okuma recalling how unremarkable the foreigners of thirty years before actually were. The education chapter traces Japanese schooling from the eighth-century code of the Emperor Mombu through the 1871 Department of Education and Henry Dyer’s 1873 Kobu Daigaku, whose amalgamated technical schools became, by 1886, the Imperial University of Tokio under its first president, Hiromoto Watanabe, and the career of Mr. Fukusawa Yakichi and his Keio-gijuku, alongside an account of the Kioto Christian college where Japanese administrators eventually “turned their American colleagues out of the place” — cited as “a painful example of Japanese duplicity.” “The New School of Drama” contrasts the classical actor Ichikawa Danjuro, whom Ransome interviewed repeatedly in his dressing-room, with the innovator Kawakami, whose realistic war play “The China War” and a stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Round the World in Eighty Days, described scene by scene, are both discussed.

A middle run of chapters carries the book’s most argumentative material. “The Position and Prospects of Christianity” sorts missionary converts into categories such as “Professional Christians,” “Interested Christians,” and “Nominal Christians,” puts genuine converts at fewer than one in a hundred thousand, and blames much of the failure on quarrelsome, ill-educated Protestant missionaries, illustrated with an anecdote of an American missionary badly out-argued by Li Hung Chang over the meaning of the word “Christ.” “The Moral Standard” opens by quoting and rejecting the treaty-port proverb that Japan is a land of “flowers... without perfume,... men without honor, and... women without virtue,” defends Japanese wives as no less faithful than their European counterparts, and explains the mekake, or concubine, as a socially tolerated but legally unprotected position rather than sanctioned polygamy, while describing the licensed Yoshiwara quarter as “glaring and obvious” rather than secret. “The Commercial Integrity of the Japanese” runs through a mock dialogue on why Japanese merchants seem honest in London but dishonest in Yokohama, cites Yokohama court records showing thirty-six of fifty clear verdicts going to foreign plaintiffs over the six years to 1896, and tells of a rigged Government contract in which a bribed clerk and rival British, Japanese, and unnamed foreign firms all outmaneuvered one another. “International Business Relations” details the income-tax and cash-deposit requirements that steered Government contracts toward Japanese firms, quoting at length Ransome’s own Engineer article on the rejection, under a punishing local-inspection regime, of Belgian and British cast-iron pipe shipments for the Tokio Waterworks. “Modern Industrial Japan” surveys the railways (three thousand miles by 1899, run with “only three foreigners left in the employ” of the Imperial lines), the subsidized mercantile marine, the 6,150-ton Hitachi Maru, and Osaka’s rise as the industrial city that Englishmen, Scotchmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Americans variously nicknamed the “Manchester,” “Glasgow,” “Lille,” “Hamburg,” or “Chicago” of Japan.

A further cluster of chapters turns to international and military policy. “The Effect of the War on Foreign Relations” condemns the Triple Intervention of Russia, France, and Germany as “a gross act of injustice,” sets Russian administration of Saghalien unfavorably against Japanese rule of neighboring islands, and describes a new postwar habit among Japanese of ranking foreigners by nationality, with Britain and the United States coming out ahead of Germany and Russia. “Politics in the Past and Present” runs from the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion and the 1867 Restoration pledge of a popular Diet through the Cabinet splits of 1873 and 1881 that produced Count Itagaki’s Liberal Party and Count Okuma’s Progressive Party, the 1890 opening of the Diet, and an interview in which Okuma tells Ransome that Japanese statesmen, unlike Salisbury or Gladstone, still lack “the practical support of a large section of the people.” “Outline of Strategical Geography” surveys the twelve territorial army divisions and the naval yards at Yokosuka, Kure, Sasebo, and a projected Maidzuru, along with the disadvantages of the single-track, narrow-gauge railway system for moving cavalry. “The Question of Colonization” takes up the loss of Corea to the Triple Intervention, the small Japanese population in Hawaii (about 24,500), a failed agricultural colonization scheme in Mexico championed by Viscount Yenomoto, the administration of Formosa under Baron Nogi — including an anecdote of tribal chiefs politely requesting a supply of Chinamen’s heads for their ceremonies — and an argument that Japan’s natural field for future expansion lies among the islands of the Southern Pacific rather than the Asiatic mainland. “Japan as an Ally” lays out the unwritten Anglo-Japanese “understanding,” Britain’s stake in the Yangtse Valley, the exchange by which Britain took Wei-hai-wei as a counterweight to Germany’s Kiao-chau, and Count Okuma’s avowed dream of an eventual alliance between Japan and a reformed China against the West.

The book closes with “Our Prospects Under the Revised Treaties,” on the coming abolition of extraterritoriality and the opening of the whole country to foreign residence and trade. Ransome quotes at length Basil Hall Chamberlain’s pessimistic postscript warning that British subjects stand to lose “their birthright of free speech” and that it is doubtful whether their “doctors and lawyers will be allowed to practise without a Japanese diploma,” but argues that such fears are overstated, that British negotiators simply drafted the 1894 treaty more carelessly than the French and German officials who followed and improved on its terms, and that “the unprejudiced man” has little real cause for alarm under a Japanese legal code and judiciary he judges competent and fair. The final pages hope that British and Japanese interests remain “practically identical,” and that in adopting Western methods Japan will not let die the qualities of “the Old Japan... the Japan of Mitford and Lafcadio Hearn; a far more aesthetic and possibly more virtuous country than the one it has been my lot to write about as ‘Japan in Transition.’” Alongside its sixteen chapters, the volume carries four special maps prepared by Ransome himself and an unusually large illustration program set out across two separate front-matter “Illustrations” lists totaling more than fifty plates: society and theater subjects such as a geisha at home, a geisha orchestra, a Tokio dancing-girl, and Ichikawa Danjuro in and out of costume; military and naval views including the battleship Shikishima and Japanese mountain artillery approaching Port Arthur; a long run of named portraits of Meiji-era statesmen — Counts Okuma, Itagaki, Inouye, and Matsukata, the Marquis Ito, Marshal Oyama, and others — and views of Tokio newspaper offices; and, several credited as reproduced by permission of the editor of The Engineer, the Imperial University’s college buildings, a group of engineering students, the Department of Agriculture and Commerce offices, Viscount Yozo Yamao’s portrait, and the Yokosuka naval dockyard.

Annual Events in Japan is a compact, calendar-organized handbook that walks through Japan’s festivals and annual observances month by month, opening with January and closing with December exactly as its table of contents promises — twelve chapters running from New Year’s to Omisoka, the “Great Last Day.” A short preface frames the whole enterprise: Japan, it says, “is a land of festivals and amusements,” and administration and festival were once pronounced identically — both maturigoto — because Japan’s first Emperor, Zinmu-Tenno, is said to have joined divine worship with rule when he ascended the throne in Yamato. The preface recommends that “the foreign visitor become acquainted with festivals and other annual events” as the surest way to understand the Japanese people, and a prefatory note explains that the calendar follows the Gregorian system now general in Japan, though some country districts still keep the old lunar dates about a month behind. A further note lays out a revised system of romanization then newly adopted by the Japanese government — si for shi, tu for tsu, hu for fu, and so on — which the book uses throughout, even respelling familiar names such as Mt. Huzi and Sinto shrine.

The chapters follow the year’s rhythm festival by festival. January opens with the New Year proper: Kadomatu, the bouquet of pine and bamboo before every entrance, and door decorations of straw rope, dai-dai orange, fern, seaweed, and a lobster, while households drink toso and eat ozoni for the first three days and many make a hatu-mode, or first pilgrimage, ideally to the Great Shrines of Ise. February brings Setubun’s Mame-maki, when households scatter parched beans through the house shouting what the book translates as “Fortune in, Devils out!,” and the lighting of the more than 2,800 stone, wood, and bronze lanterns of the Kasuga Shrine in Nara. March is given to Hina Maturi, the Girl’s Doll Festival of March 3, with its ceremonial dolls arranged on tiered shelves and its offerings of “white sake.” April carries the cherry blossom at its height and Zinmu Tenno Sai on the 3rd; May brings Tango-no-Sekku, the Boy’s Festival of May 5, with iris baths, miniature armor and dolls, and Koi-nobori, carp streamers flown one per son; June opens with the Tosyogu Shrine’s Grand Festival at Nikko, when an Imperial Messenger in classical dress crosses the Sacred Bridge and the shrine’s deities are borne down the mountain in three palanquins by a procession in ancient armor and masks, and closes with Tokyo’s Hie-Maturi, which the book ranks, with Kyoto’s Gion-Maturi and Osaka’s Tenzin Maturi, among “the three greatest Sinto festivals of Japan.” Midsummer chapters describe Tanabata, the Star Festival of July 7, when leafy bamboo hung with colored paper poems is set out to mark the once-yearly meeting of the stars Vega and Altair, the Gion-Maturi’s procession of Yamahoko cars through Kyoto on the 17th and 24th, and the Bon Festival of July 13–15, the Feast of Lanterns for returning ancestral spirits, capped by the Bon Odori folk dance. September centers on Tukimi, moon-viewing, with rice dumplings and autumn grasses offered to the moon goddess Otuki-sama; October covers the chrysanthemum shows at Hibiya Park and the Kokugikan, and the Zidai Maturi in Kyoto commemorating the founding of the old capital of Heian in 794; November describes Siti-go-san, the children’s shrine pilgrimage for those turning three, five, or seven, and Niiname-Sai, the Imperial harvest thanksgiving. Several chapters close with a short section on how the corresponding season is observed “In Tyosen” (Korea) and “In Taiwan,” noting, for instance, that Korean New Year’s customs there center on ancestor-tablet worship and that Taiwan’s mid-year observance corresponds to Obon in “Japan Proper.”

December brings the Gisi-Sai, the annual festival of the “Forty-seven Ronin” held at both Ako and Tokyo’s Sengakuzi Temple, where the loyal vassals of Asano Naganori, who avenged their lord’s forced suicide by killing Kira Yosinaka on the night of December 14, 1702, are still honored as models of bushido, and where many theatres stage the drama Tyusingura in the same month; the calendar then closes with Omisoka on December 31, when, the text says, people sit up to hear a temple bell struck one hundred and eight times as the old year passes into the new. Throughout the twelve chapters the text is accompanied by tipped-in photographic plates illustrating specific festival scenes and decorations, captioned individually: one plate reads “Kadomatu or ‘gate pine’ in the New-Year’s decorations,” showing a bamboo-and-pine entryway hung with a Japanese flag; another, “New Year’s decorations in the parlour,” shows a kimono-clad figure arranging a hanging scroll, a tiered ornament, and flowers in an alcove; and a third, “Hina Maturi, the Girl’s Doll Festival,” shows two girls in kimono before a tiered display of dolls. Other plates throughout the book pair two photographs under a single caption — dances, processions, shrine visits, sporting events — so that nearly every chapter’s text is set beside its own illustrated record of the customs it describes.

This guidebook presents itself as a practical manual for passengers of the Peninsular and Oriental, Messageries Maritimes, Pacific Mail, and Canadian Pacific lines landing at Nagasaki, Kobe, or Yokohama, and it opens accordingly: a section headed “Information for Tourists and Visitors” traces how a visitor arriving at Kobe travels on by rail through Osaka and Kyoto to Otsu on Lake Biwa, while one arriving at Yokohama fans out toward Tokyo, Kamakura, and the Hakone hot springs. A page of “Golden Rules and Practical Hints for Travellers in Japan” precedes this — carry small change and wax matches, wear a soft hat with a silk umbrella, never leave valuables unguarded in a Japanese inn — before the book settles into its working structure: chapters of general information (currency, postage, jinrikisha fares, hotel charges) followed by a place-by-place, route-by-route guide keyed to the railway lines of Japan, with an alphabetical index of place names near the front pointing the reader to a page for each. A reader is meant to consult the front matter for logistics and fares, then follow the relevant railway chapter in the order the trains actually run.

Two cities receive sustained separate treatment before the railway chapters begin: Tokyo, with its Shiba temples, Uyeno Park, Asakusa, the Ginza, and the tomb of the Forty-Seven Ronin at Sengakuji, for which the guide directs the reader to F. V. Dickens’s Chushingura, or the Loyal League; and Yokohama, complete with directories of its consulates, banks, hotels, and newspaper offices. The Tokaido Railway chapter then works south from Shimbashi station through Kamakura and its Daibutsu, the island of Yenoshima, the naval port of Yokosuka (where photography is expressly forbidden as a fortification zone) and the grave of the English pilot Will Adams nearby, the hot-spring district of Hakone and Miyanoshita, and the geyser resort of Atami — pausing for a long first-person account, quoted at length and attributed only to an anonymous “visitor,” of an ascent of Fuji via Subashiri, with a night spent at the eighth station watching sunset and sunrise above the clouds. The same chapter then resumes from the Kobe end, running north through Osaka — its castle, its canals, the Temma Tenjin and Shitennoji temples — and into Kyoto, where temple after temple is described in turn (Higashi and Nishi Hongwanji, Kiyomizu, Chion-in, Kinkakuji, Ginkakuji, Sanju-sangendo), before the line reaches Otsu on Lake Biwa.

Later chapters follow the other trunk lines in the same fashion: the Sanyo Railway west from Kobe through Suma and Himeji to Okayama and Hiroshima and the shrine island of Itsukushima, on to Shimonoseki, where a named restaurant is identified as the site where Li Hung-chang met Japanese representatives to conclude the treaty that ended the war with China; the Kwansai Railway to the Imperial ancestral shrines at Yamada; the North-western Railway over the Usui Pass to Karuizawa on the cogged Abt-system track, with its twenty-six tunnels; and the Northern Railway to the temples and mausoleums of Nikko, the castle town of Sendai, the pine islands of Matsushima, and Aomori at the line’s northern end. Throughout, the guide supplies jinrikisha and kago fares between named points down to the sen, distances in ri and cho, hotel and tea-house recommendations, and warnings against overcharging boatmen and against unguided travel on rough mountain roads. Address to the reader shifts between impersonal third person — “the visitor,” “the tourist” — and, occasionally, direct second person, as when a walker descending Tsukuba-san is told that “the jinrikisha should be directed to await you and convey you back to Shimodate.”

The book closes with a run of reference appendices rather than a final chapter of touring. A “Japanese Language” section gives pronunciation notes and vocabulary organized by situation — words for arrival in port, a full sample dialogue titled “At a Japanese Hotel,” general conversational phrases, then word-lists for the human body, writing materials, animals and harness, miscellaneous terms, numbers, time, and distances. This is followed by genealogical notices of the reigning Emperor and the several collateral Imperial houses — Fushimi, Kan-in, Kuni, Kita-Shirakawa, and others — with birth dates and civil-list stipends in yen, and then by an extended essay, “Marriage Customs in Japan,” surveying wedding practices province by province: the miai meetings and sansan-kudo cup-drinking of Tokyo weddings, a bride-selection custom in Awa, a stone-throwing custom once practiced at Numadzu, courting rites on Hachijo island, and betrothal customs among the Ainu of Hokkaido and the aboriginal peoples of Formosa. The volume ends with a directory, “Where to Stay At, to Make Purchases, Etc.,” listing named hotels, fine-art dealers, steamship agents, booksellers, and other tradesmen concentrated in Yokohama, with further listings in Tokyo and Kyoto and a long tail of resort-town hotels — Nikko, Hakone, Karuizawa, Atami, Ikao, and others — by name and street address.

Herbert Moore’s Half-Hours in Japan announces itself, on its own title page, as the work of a “sometime S.P.G. missionary in the country,” and the preface explains that he wrote it because of “the large number of questions with which I have been assailed since my return to England.” That returned-missionary vantage shapes the whole book, which unfolds not as a travel narrative but as twenty-seven short topical chapters — Geography, History, Babies, Boys and Girls, School, Feminine Accomplishments, Marriage, Houses, Gardens and Castles, Food, Fruits and Confections, Fires and Earthquakes, Travelling in Japan, An Inn, Flowers, Boats and Ships, Hot Springs, Religions in Japan, Funeral Rites, Dress, Temples, Money, Flags, and Stamps, Rice, Tea, Tobacco, Silk, Festivals, Stories, Etc., Christianity in Japan, and The Emperor — followed by the Emperor’s Rescript, the national anthem, and a glossary. Moore tells much of this in his own first person, drawing on incidents from his years in the country (“I have often slept in a room containing one or more [hibachi], with no ill effects”; “I was once assured that the owner of a burnt house thought it beneath him to take a lodging elsewhere”), but just as often turns to address a reader directly as “you,” inviting comparisons to English schoolboys, English gardens, and English winters; this blend of missionary reminiscence and second-person address runs from the first chapter’s mock dialogue — “‘Is it true?’ do you say? No, the Japanese know now that it is not true” — through to the close, and gives the book the feel of material meant for a general family readership rather than specialists. He credits some illustrations to “Col. Cotton-Jodrell, M.P.,” others to Rev. J. H. Pettee’s pamphlet Mr Ishii and his Orphanage, and some information to Miss Bacon’s Japanese Girls and Women; the title page advertises “over 70 Illustrations and Map,” and the volume delivers on this with a full-page photographic frontispiece captioned “Everyday Dress,” further plates such as “A Japanese Baby” and “An Elaborate Toilette,” and numerous smaller illustrations woven through the text.

The early chapters move from map to family. Geography opens with the mythological origin of the name “Nippon” and the story of Izanagi and Izanami before turning practical, naming Hondo, Kiushiu, Shikoku, and Yezo among the “crescent” of islands, along with the Loochoo and Bonin groups and a Formosa “ceded to Japan” after the war with China. History compresses Francis Xavier’s 1549 landing, the growth and violent suppression of Japanese Christianity — including a battle near Nagasaki in 1638 in which “37,000 Christians were killed or driven over the cliffs into the sea” — the Tokugawa shogunate’s two hundred fifty years of seclusion, and the reopening forced by Commodore Perry’s 1854 treaty, ending in the Meiji Restoration and the shogun’s peaceful surrender of “their power, their castles, their revenues.” Babies, Boys and Girls, and School turn to social custom: infant naming by a lottery of paper slips before a Shinto priest, the March Dolls’ Festival and the May carp-streamers flown for sons, games such as “onigoto” (blind man’s buff) and wrestling, and a visit to a common school where boys and girls sit on opposite sides, learn thousands of characters, work sums on a “soroban,” and stumble through English readers (“A worm was praying in the garden, and the rittle duck raughed”). Feminine Accomplishments walks through flower arranging and the ceremonial tea-making, “O Cha no yu,” in its four prescribed stages, and Marriage describes courtship through a professional go-between, or “Nakadachi,” the private “Sakazuke” cup ceremony repeated nine times between bride, bridegroom, parents, and go-between, and a bride’s trousseau of lacquer furniture and enough kimono “to serve a lifetime.”

Domestic and material life fills the next stretch. Houses opens with an anecdote about a newly arrived missionary who preached that no one builds a roof before the walls, unaware that Japanese carpenters frame the roof first, then moves on to tatami, shoji, the household hibachi, and the tokonoma alcove, praising the Japanese room as “the model of neatness” beside English clutter. Gardens and Castles moves from pond-and-pine garden design to the moated castles at Tokyo, Osaka, and Himeji, home to the legendary “old woman’s stone,” and to Nagoya Castle’s gold dolphin roof ornaments, once stolen by a climbing thief and later shipwrecked on the way home from the Vienna Exhibition. Food and Fruits and Confections catalogue rice, salmon, carp, and raw “sashimi,” the etiquette of rice bowls and chopsticks (including the author’s own mishap dropping a millet cake into his tea), the turnip-like “daikon,” and sweets such as “yokan” and “mizu-ame.” Fires and Earthquakes recounts a Tokyo blaze that “burnt down two thousand six hundred houses” in ten hours, the cutting of the Ginza firebreak after an 1870 conflagration, standard earthquake advice to stand in a doorway rather than run outside, the 1891 Gifu earthquake that killed worshippers gathered in a Christian chapel and workers in a collapsed cotton mill, and an 1897 “sea-quake” that drowned “about ten thousand people” on the northern coast. Travelling in Japan, An Inn, and Boats and Ships trace transport from the daimyo’s silk-draped “kago” and the American-invented jinricksha to the Tokyo–Yokohama railway and the merger of rival firms into the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, and credit Japan’s naval victory in the Chino-Japan war to good equipment, discipline, and “those five Confucian duties of obedience”; An Inn follows a night’s stay step by step, from futon and wooden pillow to a morning bill of “one shilling” charged to foreigners. Flowers supplies a month-by-month calendar from January willow to December nanten, and Hot Springs surveys the volcanoes Fuji, Bandai, and Asama, spa towns such as Miyanoshita and Kusatsu, and the sulphur baths credited with treating skin diseases the author calls “very prevalent.”

The last third turns to belief, custom, and the state. Religions in Japan describes Buddhism as “a system of moral teaching,” counts Shinto’s kami at “800,000,000,” and closes with a prayer for Japan’s “glad enlightenment,” while Funeral Rites gives an eyewitness account of a procession the author watched in Kobe — robed priests, floral “pyramids of evergreens,” a gauze cage believed to hold the departed’s spirit — whose mourners he candidly finds rather “irreverent” in their chatting and smoking. Dress and Temples catalogue the kimono, the obi (one servant, he notes, earning seventeen yen a month with her husband, spent sixteen of it on a single obi for her daughter), geta, zori, and waraji footwear, then the torii gateways, carved guardian figures, and the temples at Nikko, with their three carved monkeys covering ears, mouth, and eyes and their hundred-handed goddess Benten. Money, Flags, and Stamps and Rice, Tea, Tobacco, Silk track the yen’s 1897 shift from a silver to a gold standard, the postage-stamp series issued from 1871 onward, and the cultivation of rice, tea, tobacco, and silk, including a Japanese firm’s rival cigarette brand “Sanrise” copying an American “Sunrise.” Festivals moves through New Year calling-cards and mochi-pounding to local temple “Matsuri” with fortune slips and sideshow booths, and Stories, Etc. retells “Momotaro” the peach-boy in full alongside a folktale of two wood-cutters and their wens and the author’s own account of his household near Kobe, too afraid of being carried off by the Tengu to travel after dark. Christianity in Japan counts roughly 100,000 Christians — about half Roman Catholic, 16,000 under Bishop Nicolai’s Greek Orthodox mission, and 8,400 in the independent “Nippon Sei Ko Kwai” organized with the help of the late Bishop Edward Bickersteth — and closes by naming several hindrances to the Gospel’s spread in Japan, among them “the divisions which exist among us.” The Emperor sketches Mutsuhito’s life and the Crown Prince’s poor health before the book ends, in Moore’s words, by “giving you the Rescript, and last of all the national anthem of Japan”: the Emperor’s Rescript printed in full, “Kimi ga yo” set out in both romanization and Japanese characters, and a closing glossary of Japanese terms keyed back to the page numbers where they occur.

J. C. Calhoun Newton’s Japan: Country, Court, and People is a missionary-educator’s compendium, written, as its introduction explains, out of “the enforced leisure of a couple of years” that followed Newton’s residence in Japan “as missionary and engaged in educational work.” That introduction is itself a telling piece of the book’s apparatus: it is signed not by Newton but by Bishop Alpheus Waters Wilson, “a leader in foreign missions,” to whom the volume is also dedicated, and it states the book’s premise without apology — Japan is “still substantially a heathen nation” whose “old faiths” cannot survive contact with “the higher forms of thinking and living” from the West, and the book is offered so that Christian readers may “aid in the development of Japan…upon foundations of righteousness and truth.” Around that avowedly missionary purpose Newton builds a wide popular survey in three parts: a topical account of the country’s geography and natural history; a chronological history running from mythical origins through two and a half centuries of Tokugawa seclusion; and a narrative of “Japan in Modern History,” from Commodore Perry’s opening of the country to the revised treaties of 1899, closing with a forecasting chapter called simply “The Future.” The narration is almost entirely third person, but Newton periodically steps forward as “the writer” to drop in a personal recollection — an earthquake he lived through in Tokyo, a Gion festival crowd he stood in at Kioto with a fellow missionary, an irrigation system he inspected near the Kwansei Gakuin mission college at Kobe — brief, occasional intrusions rather than a sustained memoir voice.

Part I, “The Country,” moves subject by subject through Japan’s physical character. Newton compares the island chain to Great Britain, traces its “sea serpent” shape from the Kuriles to Formosa, and lingers over Fuji — “over twelve thousand feet high,” last erupted in 1707 — before cataloguing the archipelago’s earthquakes (Kioto in 1830, Yedo destroyed with, he says, over a hundred thousand dead in 1855, a Gifu-Osaka quake in 1892 that wrecked 62,091 houses, and a 1895 tidal wave north of Sendai that killed some thirty thousand) and the warm Kuroshio, or “Black Current,” that Newton likens to the Gulf Stream. The flora chapter, quoting Professor Chamberlain on chrysanthemum varieties named “Sleepy Head” and “Starlit Night,” calls Japan a “bamboo civilization” built on a plant used, by Newton’s list, for everything from flutes to palanquins, and notes that meadow grasses are almost unknown; the fauna chapter treats the fox as messenger of the rice god Inari and notes the near-total absence of cattle; a short chapter on fish counts six hundred distinguished species and recalls the naturalists of Perry’s own expedition, who left “beautifully colored drawings of several varieties”; and the minerals chapter repeats Marco Polo’s story of a Japanese palace whose floors were paved with gold plates “a good two fingers thick,” which Newton credits with luring Columbus toward “Zipangu.”

Part II’s history opens with the myths of the Ko-ji-ki and Nihongi and the arrival of Buddhism under Empress Suiko and Prince Shotoku; later, in the Nara period that Gemmyo founded in A.D. 710, the court built the fifty-seven-foot bronze Buddha at Nara. Newton is blunt about the new religion’s content, calling Nirvana “a salvation that ends in losing all individual existence” and Buddhism, before its later accretion of gods, “atheistic and materialistic,” knowing “nothing of the one true and living God.” The narrative then follows the rise of the military nobles into the age of the Shoguns (1192–1603): the Portuguese landfall of 1542, St. Xavier’s 1549 mission at Kagoshima, the embassy of four young Japanese nobles sent to Rome in 1582, and Ota Nobunaga’s campaign against the fortified Buddhist strongholds of Mount Hiei and Osaka even as he sheltered the Jesuits at Kioto. Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu succeed him in turn, the latter’s victory at Sekigahara in 1600 founding the Tokugawa shogunate at Yedo. The following chapter on the settled Tokugawa era (1603–38) turns to the “stained” persecution of the Christians — the fumie trampling-test, the 1636 siege and massacre of Christian peasants at Shimabara, whose dead Newton compares to the martyrs “in the Coliseum or Roman arenas” — and the exclusion of all Europeans but the Dutch, confined at Deshima, a policy Newton illustrates through the adventures of the shipwrecked English pilot William Adams.

“A Hermit Nation” then surveys two centuries of Tokugawa peace by social rank — Shogun, Daimyo, Samurai (“the sword is the soul of the Samurai”), the priesthood, and the common people subdivided into farmers, artisans, traders, and the outcaste etas — before walking through the etiquette of a formal tea-serving, rice cultivation and terraced irrigation, tea curing at Uji, tobacco and the miniature Japanese pipe, a night at an old-time inn, and a great Daimyo’s retinue processing to Yedo in reverential silence — unlike the Shogun’s own train, before which a runner cried “Shitaye! shitaye!” (“down! down!”) to clear the road. A chapter on nineteenth-century religion describes Shinto shrine architecture and ritual, the Gion festival at Kioto with its portable mikoshi shrine, and Buddhist temple practice, and a closing chapter on “Japanese Arts” sketches lacquer work, bronze casting and sculpture (illustrated by a photograph of a great seated bronze Buddha), painting, pottery, and landscape gardening.

Part III opens with Commodore Perry’s expedition, quoting Millard Fillmore’s letter to the “Emperor of Japan” at length and dwelling on the Sunday, during Perry’s 1853 arrival off Uraga, when the American squadron held Christian worship — hymn-singing to “Old Hundred” — before his return in 1854 to conclude the treaty that opened the country. Townsend Harris’s 1857–58 embassy follows, with long extracts from Harris’s own diary describing his procession to Yedo and his audience with the Shogun, and the commercial treaty he negotiated after six weeks of “tedious and vexatious” negotiation. Newton then narrates the 1868 Restoration and the young Emperor’s Charter Oath of April 17, 1869, judging the new government’s renewed persecution of Christians its “one serious mistake,” before tracing the difficult 1859–72 years of Protestant mission work and the career of Joseph Hardy Neesima — the Samurai’s son who fled Japan for Boston, was educated at Phillips Academy, Amherst, and Andover, returned to Japan in 1874, and in 1875 founded the Doshisha school at Kioto with eight pupils, dying in 1890 at forty-seven. Subsequent chapters cover the 1889 constitution and the first Diet, the 1894 war with China (the Shimonoseki treaty, and the joint remonstrance of Russia, France, and Germany — “a very unjust demand,” Newton calls it — that forced Japan to give back the Liaotung Peninsula it had won), the treaty revision of July 1899, and a chapter on Japanese-American relations crediting American advisers and missionaries — Guido Verbeck as first president of the school that became the Imperial University, J. C. Hepburn’s dictionary, General Grant’s visit and the Emperor’s remark that the two countries would only grow “more and more closely connected” — with founding much of “New Japan’s” schools, postal system, and coinage laws.

The book ends on the note its subtitle-like promise has been building toward. Its closing chapter, “The Future,” argues that Japan’s “peace, progress, and power can…be secured permanently only upon the acceptance of Christianity,” weighs Buddhism, Shinto revivalism, and imported Western “agnosticism” as rival claimants on the Japanese mind, and predicts flatly that Japan “will be the first great Oriental nation of modern times to embrace the religion of Jesus.” The very last page looks further still, to Japanese ships flying “the red banner of the Rising Sun” in American Gulf ports and to a combined Japanese-American influence on Asia’s future that will be “full of blessing and glory.” A frontispiece plate, “A Samurai and Wife of Former Times,” signed in the image by the illustrator E. M. Gardner, opens the volume; the text itself is illustrated throughout with halftone photographs and portraits — Fujiyama, the Bund at Kobe, a Shinto temple entrance, a great bronze Buddha, Iyeyasu, Commodore Perry, the Emperor and Empress, and Joseph Neesima among them — together with a map of Japan, and the volume closes with an index running past page 430.

Japan and Its Regeneration is not a traveler’s narrative but a missionary history, written for classroom use. Its author, “the Rev. Otis Cary,” is identified on the title page only as “Missionary in Japan,” and an unsigned prefatory note dated “New York, June 1, 1899,” explains that the book is one of a series of text-books prepared for mission-study classes under the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, and that it draws heavily on an earlier British volume, Japan and the Japan Mission, published by the Church Missionary Society of London, though “more than half the present volume is wholly new.” The text itself twice refers to its own author, in the third person, as “the editor.” The book’s preliminary pages give two different years for its publication: the title page reads “1900,” while the copyright notice on the leaf facing it reads “Copyright, 1899, by Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions… The Caxton Press, New York.” Eleven numbered chapters, a short closing section called “The Final Outcome,” and three appendices carry the book from a general sketch of Japan’s land and people, through its pre-modern history and native religions, into a sustained account of Christian missionary work—Jesuit and Protestant—concluding with a chapter on “Present Conditions and Opportunities” written as Japan’s new treaties, due to take effect in July 1899, were about to open the whole country to foreign residence.

The opening chapters set the missionary’s stage. “The Land of the Rising Sun” explains the name Dai Nippon, surveys the islands’ area, volcanoes, and typhoons, and describes the leading cities—Kyoto, “the once sacred capital,” Tokyo (formerly Yedo), Yokohama, Osaka (called, “somewhat extravagantly,” the “Venice of Japan”), Kobe, Nagasaki, and Hakodate—along with population figures current to the mid-1890s. “The People of Japan” takes up the Ainu of Yezo, the physical and “mental characteristics” the book attributes to the Japanese—intelligence, cheerfulness, an inventive streak it defends against the charge of mere imitation, and a tendency, in a phrase it cites with reservations as “not wholly devoid of truth,” to be “great in little things, and little in great things”—and a section on Japanese standards of morality that is candidly mixed, praising loyalty and filial piety while judging truthfulness “not a prominent characteristic of the Japanese” (quoting Townsend Harris’s harsher verdict) and chastity a virtue Japanese public opinion does not demand of men or of unmarried women as insistently as in the West; a further section describes “the three obediences” that it says define a woman’s life, quoting at length from the moralist Kaibara’s The Great Learning for Woman. “Japan in Past Times” runs from the legendary Emperor Jimmu Tenno through the rise of the daimyo and samurai, the rule of Hideyoshi—who, the book notes, never took the title of Shogun—and the Shogunate that Ieyasu founded after his victory at Sekigahara. “Religions of Japan” covers Shinto mythology and shrines, the doctrines of the popular Shin sect of Buddhism, Confucianism, and two newer sects, Kurozumi and Tenrikyo.

The central chapters carry the missionary narrative itself. “The Jesuit Missions” follows Francis Xavier’s landing at Kagoshima in 1549, the rapid growth and then the persecution of Japanese converts under Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, the 1638 revolt and massacre at Shimabara, and the two centuries after which, the book says, Christianity was remembered chiefly “as an awful scar on the national annals.” “The Locking and the Unlocking,” “The Revolution,” and “New Japan” trace the political story from the seclusion policy and the Dutch post at Deshima through Commodore Perry’s expedition, the 1868 restoration of the Emperor, the abolition of feudalism, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, and the war with China. “Modern Missions,” the longest chapter, returns to religion: the 1865 discovery, near Nagasaki, of communities of hidden Christians descended from the seventeenth-century converts; the Russo-Greek mission of Bishop Nicolai; and the Protestant missions from their first arrivals in 1859 through a “Period of Preparation,” a “Period of Popularity” that followed the 1873 removal of the edicts against Christianity (the book quotes the Japanese ambassador in Washington, Mori Arinori, praising “the growing influence of the Bible”), and a nationalist “reaction” in the later 1880s and 1890s that included a public catechism, issued by promoters of a revived Shinto, asking whether a Japanese Christian could also be a loyal subject of the Emperor. “Methods of Work” walks a hypothetical new missionary through language study, preaching, itinerating, schools, medical dispensaries, and Bible translation and other literary work. “Present Conditions and Opportunities” answers travelers who call missions a failure with membership and contribution figures, points to Christians in public life such as the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, Kataoka, who told political allies, “I would rather lose my chance of going to Parliament than give up my office in the Church,” and the orphanage founder Ishii, and closes by weighing America’s responsibility for the unbelief that Western-style schooling had helped spread among young Japanese.

The main text ends with “The Final Outcome,” a page of scriptural quotations promising that God’s word “shall not return unto Me void.” Three appendices follow: Appendix A sketches Formosa, annexed by Japan in 1895, and the missions there of the Canadian and English Presbyterian churches, including Dr. Mackay’s work; Appendix B, “A Select Bibliography,” briefly annotates some three dozen English-language books on Japan, remarking of Lafcadio Hearn’s essays that he “embraces every opportunity to say unpleasant things about missions and Christianity” while praising Buddhism and Japan “in extravagant terms”; and Appendix C tabulates, denomination by denomination, “Statistics of Christian and Missionary Work in Japan for the Year 1898,” arriving at a total Protestant church membership of 40,981. An “Analytical Index” and a short guide to the “Pronunciation of Japanese Words” close the volume. Pages examined across the front matter and body of the book show only plain letterpress text and tabular statistics, with no plates or engravings among them.

Letters Written by the English Residents in Japan, 1611–1623 is a documentary collection assembled by N. Murakami and K. Murakawa and published in Tokyo by the Sankosha in 1900. Its full title page describes it as letters “with other documents on the English trading settlement in Japan in the seventeenth century,” and the editors organize that material into two parts plus an appendix rather than a single narrative. Part First reprints “The Letters of William Adams” from Thomas Rundall’s 1850 Hakluyt Society volume, Memorials of the Empire of Japon in the XVI and XVII Centuries, “with some slight alterations in arrangement, and a few additional notes and appendices.” Part Second reprints, as Murakami’s preface puts it, “all articles relating to Japan” found in W. Noel Sainsbury’s Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, East Indies, China and Japan, 1513–1624. An appendix separately reproduces a sixteenth-century description titled “The Kyngdome of Japonia,” also taken from Rundall. The volume opens with a photographic frontispiece captioned “Tombs of William Adams and His Wife at Hemi” and a two-column list of errata; the preface recounts, as background to the documents that follow, the English pilot Adams’s 1600 arrival at Bungo aboard the Dutch ship de Liefde, the ship’s later wreck on its way to Uraga, Adams’s entry into Tokugawa Iyeyasu’s service and estate at Hemi, Captain John Saris’s 1613 arrival at Hirado in the Clove and the founding there of an English factory under chief merchant Richard Cocks, the factory’s closing after ten years in 1623, and the 1872 rediscovery of the Adams graves shown in the frontispiece.

Part First gathers ten letters by Adams, dated 1611 to 1617. The first and longest, addressed “to my vnknowne frinds and countrimen” who might be found “in Limehouse or else wheare, or in Kent in Gillingham, by Rochester,” lays out Adams’s own account of the 1598 Dutch voyage, the wreck of the fleet, and his years at the Tokugawa court; a second letter, to his wife, survives only as a fragment. Further letters go to Augustin Spalding, to the East India Company, and to Captain Best, all from 1613, and the set closes with five more (numbers VI through X, written between 1614 and 1617 to Richard Wickham and Sir Thomas Smythe from Suruga, Hirado, Osaka, and Sakai), four of which — VI, VII, IX, and X — an editorial note credits to material Murakawa supplied from Dr. Ludwig Riess. Footnotes to Letter I flag points where Samuel Purchas’s 1625 printed text departs from the manuscript version reprinted here, marking each variant reading “[P.].” Eight further documents, lettered A through H, are appended to Part First: a summary of a narrative by the shipwrecked Spanish governor Don Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco on his 1608–10 residence in Japan; an abstract of Saris’s journal of the Clove’s voyage; the text of King James I’s letter to Iyeyasu, known to the editors only through a surviving Japanese translation; Saris’s original English petition for trading privileges from the Cotton Charters, together with a separate, later-abridged petition surviving only in a Japanese translation facsimiled from Purchas; Iyeyasu’s reply to James I, reproduced in Japanese with an English translation drawn from Hildreth; the original privileges granted by Iyeyasu; the November 1613 contract of employment between the East India Company and Adams, recording his eventual salary of £100 a year; and a fresh translation of Hidetada’s 1616 modified privileges, added because the editors judged Rundall’s earlier translation, while substantially correct, too amplified in its wording.

Part Second, headed “Calendar of Japan Papers, 1613–1623,” reprints well over a hundred numbered entries drawn from Sainsbury’s Calendar, running chronologically from Cocks’s first dispatch to the East India Company in January 1613 through the Company’s correspondence and Court Minutes covering the Hirado factory’s decade of trade. The entries are mostly letters among Cocks, Richard Wickham, William Eaton, Adams, and Saris, reporting on cargoes, prices, and the difficulties of competing with Dutch traders, and among them is inserted an invoice of goods sent to Wickham at Yedo. Following the numbered Calendar, an Addenda section adds fifteen more documents that Sainsbury had not printed — letters among Wickham, Cocks, Eaton, Jourdain, and others (a bare majority of them to or from Wickham) on cloth prices and Dutch competition in 1614–1616, along with Court Minutes and correspondence such as a letter from Victoria Sackville to Secretary Winwood; a footnote explains that most of these were “taken from ‘Supplement to China Materials, Book I., Japan’ in the India Office.”

The volume closes with the appendix on “The Kyngdome of Japonia,” which opens with a section headed “The Description” and continues into one headed “The Hystorie”; a footnote traces the text to “The Firste Booke of Relations of Morderne States” among the Harleian manuscripts, with some passages, set off between asterisks, incorporated by Rundall from the narrative of Arthur Hatch as printed in Purchas. A running Index occupies the book’s final pages.

Life in Japan, As Seen Through a Missionary’s Spectacles in the Twilight of the 19th Century is a Cumberland Presbyterian missionary’s combined travel narrative and topical handbook, built around Ella Gardner’s own years in Japan. She sailed from San Francisco on the steamer City of Peking on June 24, 1893, in company with the Misses Leavitt and Freeland, reached Yokohama after a two-week crossing, and settled with the mission at Osaka; failing health — “nervous prostration, caused primarily by the need of glasses for astigmatism” — sent her home in January 1897 after about three and a half years, and she returned to Japan in October 1899, this time to be stationed at Wakayama. The book runs from an unnumbered Introduction through fourteen numbered chapters, moving from personal travel narrative into topical surveys of the country and its customs and then into a sustained institutional history of the Cumberland Presbyterian mission’s schools, stations, and missionaries. Gardner states her purpose plainly in the Introduction: the book was “prepared especially for the purpose of increasing the interest of the women and children of the church in worldwide evangelization,” an aim carried through to its closing chapter.

The Introduction narrates the outbound and return voyages in Gardner’s own first-person voice: seasickness the first night out, a Fourth of July dinner at sea, a thirty-six-hour storm that rolled passengers back and forth in their berths, sighting the white sails of fishing boats as the ship neared land, and, after being rowed ashore to clear customs at Yokohama, a first jinrikisha ride — “where we felt very much like overgrown babies being pulled about by men.” From Yokohama she went on by the steamer Saikyo Maru to Kobe and by rail to Osaka, then to the mountain village of Arima, carried part of the way “in a kago, or basket chair,” and began language study there with Miss Leavitt and her helper, Miss Yone Kawashima, as teachers — including the well-worn anecdote of ordering a “tegami” (letter) on toast when she meant an egg. Chapter III, “A Trip from Osaka to Karuizawa,” follows a specific journey made with Miss Agnes Morgan on July 5, 1894: an overnight stop at Nagoya to see its castle, whose gilt roof-top “gold fish” ornaments are valued, she reports, at one hundred and eighty thousand dollars; a side excursion to the great bronze Diabutsu at Kamakura and to Enoshima, where a cave is divided into a Buddhist half and a Shinto half; and a day in Tokyo — recounted in a long letter from Miss Morgan, quoted in full — taking in Shiba Park’s Shogun mortuary chapels and Ueno Park, before the party pushed on to the mountain retreat of Karuizawa and the lava fields of nearby Mount Asama.

Between and after the travel chapters, Gardner surveys Japan topic by topic, in a voice that is mostly impersonal exposition punctuated by first-person recollection. Geography covers Mount Fuji (“14,000 feet above the sea… almost a perfect cone”), the damp climate with its typhoons and tidal waves, three earthquakes she felt during her residence, the railway network built since 1870, and a table of yen, sen, and rin against dollars, cents, and mills; Government describes the 1889 constitution and Diet, the old treaty-port and passport system — reproducing, name and all, the English translation attached to her own year-long interior passport (“Name of Bearer, Miss Ella Gardner… Period for which this passport is granted, 12 months”) — and the 1899 treaty revision that abolished extraterritoriality. Farmers describes rice cultivation, the two-crop year, and fenceless village life; Flowers moves through the chrysanthemum as imperial crest, the lotus sacred to Buddha, cherry and wisteria blossoms, and autumn maple-viewing at Mino, where fried maple leaves are sold as a delicacy. The Customs chapter catalogues things done differently from American practice — sewing, reading right to left, mounting a horse from the right side — and reprints a set of etiquette rules for ladies from a native preacher’s article in the Japan Evangelist, followed by an account of go-between courtship and marriage. Festivals and Funerals covers the Girls’ and Boys’ Festivals and Bon Matsuri, then Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian funeral rites, including a Buddhist cremation service she watched from a temple yard. English-Japanese Etymology reproduces the iroha and goju-on syllabaries and a verb-conjugation table credited to William Embrie’s Handbook of English-Japanese Etymology, the Lord’s Prayer and John 3:16 in Japanese, and a list of Japanese proverbs matched to English equivalents. Religions surveys Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism in turn and states her own hope directly: “Christianity is now firmly planted in Japan, and we hope to see the day that these vain hopes and delusions will vanish, and God will be honored as Creator, Lord, and King, together with Jesus Christ as the Light of the world and Savior of men.”

The last five chapters turn from survey to institutional history, and here Gardner’s own narration gives way for long stretches to other missionaries’ letters, quoted at length in their own first-person voice. Allied Presbyterian Churches and Mission Schools describes the 1877 alliance of seven Presbyterian bodies into the “Nippon Kirisuto Kyokwai” (Church of Christ in Japan); Cumberland Presbyterian Missionaries: Their Field and Work traces the Osaka mission from Rev. J. B. Hail’s arrival in 1877 through touring circuits in the province of Kii and stations at Wakayama, Tanabe, Shingu, and Tsu, Ise, by way of extended quotations from J. B. and A. D. Hail and their wives, Julia Leavitt, Agnes Morgan, Sallie Alexander, the Van Horns, Mrs. Drennan, and Mrs. Lyon, and closes with its own twentieth-anniversary count — 1,086 baptisms over twenty years, 668 members still connected to the churches, and six native ordained ministers. Wilmina Girls’ School, named by joining donor William Saunders’s own name “Will” to that of his late wife “Mina,” recounts the school’s 1884 founding in Osaka, a boarding-school day running from the six o’clock breakfast bell through Bible lessons to Saturday “play night,” and Mrs. A. D. Hail’s description of the 1894 graduation exercises. Home Life of Missionaries answers questions Gardner says she was often asked — whether missionaries have real houses, furniture, food — describing concession houses built in European style, universal mosquito netting, provisions ordered from San Francisco, a cooperative “Mothers’ School” for missionaries’ children, and summer retreats to Arima and Karuizawa to escape Osaka’s heat. The book closes with “Foreign Missions,” a direct exhortation rather than a narrative chapter, citing a nationwide count of “40,980 Christians in Japan and 423 churches, with 308 ordained ministers” across all denominations before urging readers to give a tenth of their income and to pray for the mission field; it ends not in Gardner’s own words but in a quoted hymn stanza, “By the power of the cross shall the world be swayed… Christ for the world! we sing.” Photographs “taken by Japanese photographers in the cities and towns mentioned below the cuts,” as Gardner notes in the Introduction, illustrate the volume throughout — portraits of the mission’s Japanese pastors, teachers, and Wilmina graduates, churches and chapels, temple and shrine scenes, and views of Osaka, Tokyo, Nikko, and Kamakura — alongside a frontispiece view of Yokohama and maps of the routes to Japan and of Japan itself.

Westward to the Far East is a travel guidebook issued by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company for its own passengers, in an eighth edition dated 1900. It opens with a note signed by D. McNicoll, the company’s Passenger Traffic Manager, explaining that the book is meant to supply “general information in a concise form” to travelers bound for Japan and China by the C.P.R. route — “not an elaborately descriptive work,” he writes, but one meant “to tell the possible traveler what there is to be seen and the actual traveler how to see it.” Its author, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, keeps to that impersonal guidebook register throughout, addressing “the tourist” and “the traveler” in the third person rather than writing in her own voice, and she fills out her own description at almost every stop with quoted passages from other writers on the Far East — John La Farge, Percival Lowell, Christopher Dresser, and Miss Bisland among them. The book is built as one continuous itinerary: the transcontinental rail crossing of Canada and the Pacific voyage on the C.P.R.’s Empress steamships, an extended tour of Japan’s principal cities and resorts, a short “note” on Korea, a longer account of China’s treaty ports, and a closing run of practical apparatus for readers pressing on around the world.

The guide gets to Japan by way of the company’s own line, walking the reader from Montreal across the prairies to Winnipeg, into the Rockies at Banff, Lake Louise and the Great Selkirk Glacier, down through Revelstoke to Vancouver and Victoria, and out onto the Pacific aboard the Empress ships, with a chapter of advice, “in the leisure days on board,” on the literature of Japan — Griffis’s Mikado’s Empire, Nitobe, Chamberlain’s Things Japanese, the new Murray’s Japan, and Percival Lowell — before the ship raises Fujiyama and anchors in Yokohama harbor, its arrival described at length in a quotation from John La Farge’s An Artist’s Letters from Japan. From there the book turns practical: jinrikisha fares, the numbered street system, the Grand, Club and Oriental hotels, banks and consulates, the passport and tariff changes following the 1899 treaties, servants’ wages, and the curio shops of Isezakicho and the Bluff, before sending the traveler out to Kamakura’s Dai Butsu, the hot-spring hotels of Miyanoshita, Atami, and the ascent of Fujiyama from Gotemba — a climb it credits first, in the third century B.C., to the Chinese sage Sin-fu, and first by a European to Sir Rutherford Alcock in 1860.

This account of Japan, running without a real break from the Yokohama wharf to Nagasaki, occupies some thirty pages — considerably more than the chapters on Korea and China put together. In Tokio it takes the reader through the Tokugawa mortuary temples at Shiba and Uyeno, the Asakusa temple with its booths and side-shows, the wrestlers near the Ryogoku bridge, the night shops of the Ginza (quoted at length from Percival Lowell), and a full calendar of Tokio fetes — cherry blossoms at Uyeno and along the Mukojima, the Hori Kiri iris in June, wistaria at the Kameido temple, lotus and morning-glories in summer, and the great chrysanthemum show at Dangozaka in October. From Tokyohe route runs to the shrines of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu at Nikko, the silk town of Ikao, and down the Tokaido through Shidzuoka and Nagoya to Kobe-Hiogo, Osaka, and Kioto — where it lists the Chion-in, Kiyomidzu, and the two Hongwanji temples, the Nijo Castle, the Kinkakuji and Ginkakuji gardens, and the cherry blossoms of Arashiyama and Maruyama — and on to Nara’s Dai Butsu and tame deer, before threading the Inland Sea past Miyajima’s torii to Nagasaki, with its Deshima porcelain bazaar and tortoise-shell workshops and its scenes, the guide notes, out of Pierre Loti’s Mme. Chrysantheme.

At Nagasaki the itinerary turns aside briefly for “a little of Korea,” in a little over a page: a Nippon Yusen Kaisha steamer to Fusan and Gensan, the new railway inland from Chemulpo to Seoul, and a spare description of the capital’s eight gateways, its palace, marble pagoda, and streets that the guide calls “filthy,” with a population it describes as “indolent, poor and unambitious.” China follows at greater length — Chefoo, the Taku forts and Tien Tsin, the rail journey to Peking and the four days’ trip to the Great Wall and the Ming tombs, then Shanghai and its Bund, a steamer trip up the Yang-tse to Hankow and Ichang, Foochow, Amoy, and finally Hong Kong, Macao, and Canton, with its temples, its floating boat population, and its streets that by law run no narrower than seven feet — before the route is carried on toward Manila, Singapore, Java, Ceylon, and India for travelers continuing their circuit of the globe. The book closes with its apparatus: a pronunciation guide and phrasebook of Japanese words and sentences for shopping, traveling, and everyday needs; a list of “Books of Reference on Japan and China”; blank ruled pages for the tourist’s own steamship log of latitude, longitude, and distance run; and a worldwide directory, city by city from Adelaide to Yokohama, naming the agents from whom Canadian Pacific sailings and tickets may be obtained.

A Handbook for Travellers in Japan is a route-by-route guide to the whole Japanese empire, issued in a sixth revised edition dated 1901 under John Murray’s imprint in London and that of Kelly & Walsh. The title page offers “the whole empire from Yezo to Formosa” and names two compilers, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Emeritus Professor of Japanese and Philology in the Imperial University of Tōkyō, and W. B. Mason, late of the Imperial Japanese Department of Communications. The preface, dated Tōkyō, October 1900, is two short paragraphs. The edition “has been revised throughout with minute care,—as well the beaten as the unbeaten tracks.” Several Northern routes and some in Shikoku have been rearranged to follow new railway. Then “the compilers” thank “various correspondents who have kindly supplied information” and invite further corrections. There is no preface to an earlier edition and no account of the book’s descent from its predecessors, so beyond that nothing is said about where the volume came from. It falls into two typographic halves: an introduction of nearly a hundred pages set in a single wide column of large type, and eighty-five numbered Routes, grouped into nine regional Sections, set two columns to the page with historical and legendary matter dropped into a smaller size. One arabic pagination runs through both. An index of over three thousand entries three columns to the page, a colophon recording the sixth edition at seven yen fifty sen, and ninety-three separately paginated pages of advertisements close the volume.

The introduction is not the short practical preamble its position suggests. It divides into twenty-eight numbered sections, and only the first eighteen are advice — steam communication and the custom-house, public holidays, guides, currency, weights and measures, the section headed “Inns; Travelling Expenses,” climate and dress, provisions, means of locomotion, where to go and what to see, purchases, shooting, fishing, and a run of miscellaneous hints on fleas, bathing, and the removal of boots — occupying its first sixteen pages and part of the seventeenth. That advice is priced throughout. Guides who understand English are engaged through the Guides’ Association at 2½ yen a day for a party of one or two, with 50 sen added for each tourist beyond; sampans put passengers ashore from the steamers at 15 to 25 sen a head; what is termed hatago at a Japanese inn covers supper, bed, and breakfast under a single charge and ranges from 75 sen to 2½ yen; telegrams in the principal European languages cost 5 sen a word; and the yen is “about two shillings English, or 50 cents U. S. gold.” Distances are reckoned in ri and chō as well as in miles, thirty-six chō to the ri. The very first section turns at once to books, opening with an unattributed “series of sketches entitled Things Japanese” and going on to Griffis’s Mikado’s Empire, Rein, Anderson, Aston, Morse, and Lafcadio Hearn. Those who wish to see the old order of things “should come quickly.”

The remaining ten sections are reference matter. Twenty pages on the language give the pronunciation of the vowels and consonants and the diacritics used in the vocabulary that follows — not the volume’s own romanization policy — together with a sketch of the grammar, an English–Japanese vocabulary, numerals and hours, and a long class of “Useful Sentences” for the inn, the shop, and the road, each printed with an interlinear word-for-word gloss beneath the romanized Japanese. Accounts of Shintō and of Japanese Buddhism follow, each carrying a numbered key to the parts of a temple; then thirteen pages of gods and goddesses in alphabetical order, described so that their images may be recognized; Christian mission stations; an outline of history and ten pages of chronological tables adapted by permission from a work compiled for private circulation by Sir Ernest Satow; eighteen pages of celebrated personages “likely to be mentioned by guides when explaining objects of historical or artistic interest”; the populations of the chief cities; and twenty-three outline tours that cross-refer to route numbers. The glossary that closes the introduction is set two columns to the page in the routes’ body size rather than in the introduction’s wide column, with small woodcuts standing among the entries; its definitions convert as they go: sen, “a Japanese cent, worth half of an American cent, one farthing.”

A route article opens with its number and title, and then with whatever suits the way one travels rather than with how far out the country lies. Railway routes begin with a station table whose third column, headed Remarks, works as an alighting index — “Alight for ascent of Fuji,” “Alight for Nasu.” Road routes begin with an itinerary of stages in ri, chō, and miles, closing in a printed Total. Steamer routes begin in prose, the voyage from Yokohama to Kōbe timed by the hour out of port. A line of small capitals naming the places the article will take in may stand alone, or precede a station table, or precede an itinerary. None of this thins as the country roughens: a station table opens the run from Nagasaki to Moji, an itinerary opens North-Western Shikoku, the remotest Yezo route opens with an “Itinerary (approximate),” and the Formosa article, last of all, opens with a numbered list of its own contents. An article may say early whether the trip is worth making: one is “specially recommended to lovers of ancient religious art, but not to persons unfamiliar with the native language, customs, and history.” Inns follow place-names in parentheses, an asterisk sometimes prefixed to a house specially worthy of mention. Description runs along the road, with r. and l. for the traveler’s right and left, square brackets around detours, and cross-references by route number and page.

The judgments are blunt. Naoetsu is “stuffy, uninteresting”; of Karuizawa, tourists “should understand that in itself the place possesses no attractions.” Legend and local history are carried in the smaller type and rationalized there — a conflagration’s death toll “no doubt a gross exaggeration,” the immemorial antiquity of the Ise shrines “only the antiquity of a continuous tradition, not that of the actual edifices” — though the parenthesis on “the (clearly apocryphal) grave of Urashima, the Japanese Rip Van Winkle” stands in ordinary route type. Earlier European visitors are quoted and then checked against the present: at Ōsaka Castle the book prints Will Adams on a court “beeing a wonderfull costly house guilded with gold in abundance” and Captain John Saris on a town “as great as London within the walls,” then adds that “excluding the palace, this remains an excellent description of the locality as seen to-day.” The article on Nagasaki opens not with the town but with general remarks on Kyūshū quoted from Dr. Rein. The weight of the book is very unevenly spread. Eastern Japan runs to a hundred and thirty-four pages and Central Japan to a hundred and fifty-two — together nearly two-thirds of the four hundred and fifty pages of routes — with twenty-six more for the roads connecting Tōkyō with Kyōto. This is overwhelmingly a book about the Tōkyō–Nikkō–Fuji–Kyōto quadrilateral.

Beyond it, Kyūshū takes thirty-six pages, Northern Japan thirty-four, Western Japan and the Inland Sea twenty-six, Shikoku twenty-two, Yezo fourteen, and Luchu and Formosa together eight. The treaty ports are directories rather than journeys, and the fullest is Yokohama’s: hotels, banks, consulates, churches, clubs, “Steam Communication,” “Photographs of Japanese Scenery and Costumes,” curio dealers, silk stores, cloisonné, theatres, and newspapers, with firms named by settlement lot number. The others are shorter, and their heads shift with the place: Ōsaka’s runs to Sakai rugs, Kōbe’s to steamer agencies. Tōkyō, nearly thirty pages, adds railway schedules, a festival calendar, a flowering calendar from plum to maple, and eight numbered district walks, since “it is impossible to combine the chief sights in a single round.” Kyōto’s article, the longest in the book, sorts the shops by trade — pottery and porcelain, old embroideries, bronze and damascene, curios, cloisonné, lacquer, bamboo work, fans and toys — lays out a “1st Day” through a “7th Day,” offers an eighth for Nara, and adds a compressed round for those “so unfortunate as to have but a single day at their command.” It gives the founding grid, “Nine wide streets, called Ichi-jō, Ni-jō, San-jō, and so on up to Ku-jō,” and teaches the addresses: “The nomenclature of the Kyōto streets, apparently complicated, is in reality quite simple.” Nikkō opens on a proverb, “Do not use the word magnificent till you have seen Nikkō,” and keys its temples to a numbered index of twenty-eight.

Whole routes exist for a climb, one titled simply “Ascent of Sobo-san”; Fuji’s huts are closed outside the season, the 15th July to the 10th September, 1 yen a night, its coolie guides, goriki, “fearing to go up so long as any snow remains on the path.” Bath resorts like Miyanoshita and Ikao draw whole itineraries; the rapids of the Tenryū-gawa are “the finest in Japan.” The book registers native pilgrimage too: the Shikoku Eighty-eight Holy Places, the Thirty-three Holy Places of Kwannon, and at Kōya-san an “Office for the Examination of Pilgrims” and hosts who “are monks, not innkeepers.” Ise warns that the interest of the trip is chiefly antiquarian and that “none but priests and Imperial personages are allowed to penetrate into the interior”; it describes the approach, then gives the fences in feet. Nara moves through a deer park to a Daibutsu “larger than the one at Kamakura, though far less admirable as a work of art.” Formosa is “scantily peopled by savage aborigines of Malay race,” and “the Japanese administrative system has been introduced, though not as yet with much success.” The routes end with Rev. Dr. Mackay’s attempt on Mount Sylvia “under the guidance of a friendly savage chief,” abandoned when the chief listened to the song of birds and found the augury unfavorable. Of the twenty-eight maps and plans, the sectional sheets are large folding color lithographs; they and the page-size maps alike carry the imprints “FOR MURRAY’S HANDBOOK” and “TOYODO ENGRAVING OFFICE TOKYO.”

Japan: A Record in Colour is a color-plate album built around Mortimer Menpes’s paintings, published by Adam & Charles Black in 1901 as one of a series of similarly formatted travel volumes “by Mortimer Menpes” advertised at the front of the book. A prefatory “Note,” signed by Dorothy Menpes and dated November 1901, explains the arrangement behind the text: she has undertaken “to present, with whatever skill of penmanship I may possess, my father’s impressions of Japan,” impressions she says are “closely intermingled with my own,” since she herself passed through Japan “four or five years” earlier “as a child.” Despite that preface’s account of a joint father-daughter authorship, the chapters themselves carry no audible trace of Dorothy’s separate voice: they run throughout in the first person of a working painter — present at sittings with actors, buying screens, hiring craftsmen, matching Menpes’s own trade — reading as a continuous travel narrative in his persona alone rather than any blended or secondhand account. Its eleven chapters are arranged by topic rather than by itinerary, moving from theatre and “living art” through painters’ methods, placement, art in practical life, gardens, flower arrangement, the geisha, children, and workers to a closing chapter of general “Characteristics,” and they return again and again to a single argument: that art in Japan pervades ordinary life in a way the book holds it no longer does in the West.

The opening chapters lay out that argument at length. “Art and the Drama” contrasts the Japanese stage’s disdain for realism — a deliberately wooden horse, a pasteboard moon held up on a broomstick rather than worked by clockwork — with the London stage’s taste for scenery lifted wholesale from a Belgrave Square drawing-room, and it builds its case largely through reported conversation: a visit to the actor Danjuro, who explains that he never copies a single drunkard or madman but paints “the aggregate of all the drunkenness I have ever seen,” and to the playwright Fukuchi, who designs his own costumes and sets because “I must make the pictures.” “The Living Art” argues that art in Japan, unlike in Europe, is “universal and instructive, and therefore living” rather than a possession of the few, and offers as evidence a screen-dealer who admits that the gaudy black-and-gold screens sold to English and American buyers are not what Japanese customers keep in their own houses. “Painters and their Methods” describes a day spent watching the aged painter Kiyosai work — his practice of studying a bird for hours and then painting it from memory rather than from the live model, his habit of pointing his brush between his lips and swallowing quantities of ink in the process, and a story, told to Menpes by an English friend resident in Japan, of Kiyosai ruining four silk panels while drunk, panels that were kept anyway and became reckoned among his masterpieces. “Placing” extends the same argument to ordinary objects, as when a servant silently rearranges the narrator’s fan-holders on a wall. “Art in Practical Life” turns to manufacturing and the modernizing military — insisting that Japan’s adoption of rifles and battleship-building has not touched its artistic instinct — before returning to travel incident: an arrival in Tokio, a fortune-telling American woman with a monkey on her shoulder, and Osaka, called here “the Venice of Japan,” with its canals, junks, and unpainted timber houses.

The middle chapters move from theory to particular places and customs. “The Gardens” opens with the story of a landscape gardener found sitting on a box outside a silk-store for three straight days, simply “thinking,” before he draws a single line of a commissioned garden, then turns to an evening visit to the iris gardens at Horikiri, where the changing light on lantern and blossom is described as an effect “impossible to put… on canvas.” “Flower Arrangement” holds that mastery of the art requires “at least fourteen years” of study, follows a Tokio master’s step-by-step arrangement of reeds, lilies, and irises in the narrator’s own hotel room, and closes with his abrupt, wounded departure after a guest’s husband hangs his straw hat on the finished pine branch. “The Geisha” calls her “the educated woman of Japan,” contrasts her frank use of white powder and vermilion paint with the concealment practiced by Western women at their toilette, and sets her against the wife kept out of sight of guests as the “honoured interior,” whose position the book insists is in fact the happier of the two; a long passage describes one particular geisha’s vermilion, orange, and gold costume at a tea-house dinner in the language of a painter matching pigments.

“Children” reads Japanese childhood through costume and custom: the individually designed baby dress that can cost as much as an Academy picture, a training in deportment so thorough that a three-year-old strapped to an older sister’s back has already learned to bow correctly, the retelling of the Momotaro folktale as mothers tell it under the cherry trees, and a village kite-flying festival in which old men and infants take part as equals. “Workers” is organized around the narrator’s second trip to Japan, made to furnish a newly built London house, and around “Inchie,” a curio-seller turned interpreter and foreman who assembles metal-workers, wood-carvers, porcelain-painters, and lacquer-workers for the project, explains in his own pidgin English how an “old” kakemono is manufactured by staining fresh paper and how a two-cent porcelain pot might be sold to a “big-pockety man” for two hundred dollars, and is seen off at the Yokohama dock with a suspicion of moisture in his eyes and a slight twitch of the lips. The final chapter, “Characteristics,” catalogues Japanese self-control — an old woman calmly discussing, minutes after being seen sobbing, the deaths of her husband and son in a tidal wave — patriotism, and a native politeness illustrated by two men who part as friends after one tears the roof off the other’s house and is in turn shamed for having kept his head covered while making his apology. The text ends there, unsummarized, followed only by a printer’s note that its plates were “engraved and printed by the Carl Hentschel Colourtype Process” — plates that, as the title page announces, run to 128 full-page illustrations in colour and tint among 500 illustrations in the book altogether.

Twelve volumes issued under the name of Captain F. Brinkley, and issued twice over: a J. B. Millet printing from Boston and Tokyo, copyright 1901, and a T. C. & E. C. Jack printing from London and Edinburgh dated 1903 and 1904, both in numbered limited editions. The two differ on the title page. Millet gives the author’s name alone; Jack adds beneath it “editor of ‘The Japan Mail’ and special Japan correspondent of ‘The Times,’” so what a reader learns about the author depends on which issue he holds. Nothing further about him is stated, and nothing about the work’s design: no preface, introduction, or dedication stands at the front of any of the twelve, and the set nowhere announces its plan. The nearest approaches lie deep inside the text — a remark in the third volume that “Campaigns, battles, and political intrigues do not find a place in these volumes,” and a passage in the eleventh which, having called the historian who ignores the Chinese point of view “pernicious,” continues: “It is in obedience to that conviction that these pages are written, not with any purpose of extenuating China’s faults or pleading her cause.” The manner is impersonal; on the few occasions the author appears he is “the writer of these pages.” Volumes one through eight are titled Japan: Its History Arts and Literature, the last four China. Together they run to roughly 3,800 printed pages, two-thirds of them on Japan.

Volumes one to three run from origins to 1867. Volume one opens on “Present Japan,” works back through the Ainu and the dolmen builders, and quotes third-century Chinese annalists who counted tattooing among “violations of the rules of civilisation.” Buddhism’s planting, the Soga quarrel and the Tenchi–Mommu reforms make a political revolution wrought by Chinese civilization “through the medium of Buddhist priests,” as a later one came from the West “through the medium of gunboats”; the Nara and Heian chapters are inventory, not chronicle. Volume two settles the military epoch’s political history in thirty-eight pages, then turns to outcasts and their chief Danzayemon, castles measured with a soldier’s eye, swords, and “Bushi-Do or the Way of the Warrior,” which prints Katō Kiyomasa’s house code entire, then denies at length that industrial or political veracity ever took root in Japan and calls Japanese patriotism “a sentiment of modern development.” Refinements close the volume — landscape gardening making “a strange juxtaposition of terms” with a military epoch — running through dwarfed trees and Sen-no-Rikiu’s tea ceremony into a third of volume three: incense-comparing, a translation of the Ataka Nō, wrestling. The rest sets the Tokugawa settlement, which left the throne “A magnificent abstraction,” and a seclusion “anti-Christian, not anti-foreign,” against debased coinage, the 1783 famine — “dogs, cats, rats, herbs, roots, and bark” — Russian ships at Yezo and Dutch learning got secretly from Deshima. It ends with the Shogun’s resignation of October 1867, “among the signal events of the world’s history.”

Volumes four through six leave chronology for society. The fourth anatomizes Tokugawa life — Tsunayoshi’s dog kennel of a hundred and forty-eight acres, an inner palace of six hundred and ten women, prisons, torture, slavery and the licensed quarters — and gives its longest chapter to philosophy, education and costume, where rival Confucian schools quarrel until a Shōgun’s decree makes Chu’s doctrines alone orthodox and sumptuary law makes being in financial difficulties a crime. Meiji follows: the surrender of the fiefs, the Satsuma rebellion, specialists hired by nationality — Englishmen for railways and a navy, Germans for medicine, a commercial code and local government — and an election law enfranchising four hundred and sixty thousand in forty-three millions. The fifth opens on financial and economical conditions, argued against Western skepticism, with only four hundred and forty-one men worth fifty thousand pounds; then extraterritoriality, Korea, the war with China and the joint note of Russia, Germany and France; then compulsory schooling, press laws, police, local government and railways; then, for over half its length, Shintō, Buddhism and superstition, fox possession included. The sixth divides in two: festivals and pastimes — the Sano and Kanda processions of Tōkyō, the Gion cars of Kyōtō, a naked midnight scramble for amulets in Bizen, the theater down to the actor Danjuro — and a history of commerce filling the other half, from third-century markets and the copper coinage of 708 through the Dutch at Deshima and the guilds to the cotton mills of the 1890s.

Argument is constant, and its usual antagonist is anonymous. “Foreign writers,” “imperfectly informed critics” and “globe-trotters” are corrected page after page, while named Western authorities are met mostly in the endnotes and mostly in support — Satow, Baelz, Wigmore’s “admirable essay.” Not invariably, though: the third volume’s opening note quotes Chamberlain calling the incense game “an innocent, not to say insipid, little jeu de société,” which the text answers. Corrections come with documents and figures: a British dispatch of 1859 on traders shipping off Japan’s gold, school returns, crime statistics and wage tables. Some passages are frankly polemical — a defense of licensed prostitution “for the sake of correcting false impressions,” a defense of the “cruel excesses” at Port Arthur in the war with China, and attacks in both halves of the set on the local foreign journalists “whose sense of proportion is much marred by their spurious patriotism.” His own paper is named just once, in an endnote, as another man’s venue. Nor is the work an apology: the traffic in girls, the politicians, the journalists and the “defective integrity” that spoiled trade after trade all come in for severity, and Japan “is dressing herself in a material civilisation that was made to the measure of alien nations.” In the art and ceramics volumes the quarrels turn personal: Bowes and Gonse in the seventh, joined in the eighth by Jacquemart, Audsley and “So respectable an authority as Mr. Ninagawa Noritane”; three of the indexes file critics under their errors.

The seventh volume, on pictorial and applied art, starts from the proposition that “There is no such thing in Japan as a picture gallery”: the painter worked for screens, sliding panels and the alcove recess, so linear perspective and cast shadows were eschewed rather than unknown, and “The nude had no place in his repertoire of subjects.” It proceeds from Kose no Kanaoka through Tosa and Kano to the color print, where the throne goes, against the partisans of Kiyonaga, to Utamaro, “alike for vigour, for versatility, for tenderness, for truth of line, and for beauty of colour harmonies.” Living painters are named beside “a great crop of wretched pictures” for foreign buyers. Forty pages then follow Buddhist sculpture, mirrors and temple bells intervening, from Tori Busshi in the sixth century through the clay Deva Kings and dry-lacquer figures of eighth-century Nara and Jocho’s serenity to the martial anatomy of Unkei and Kwaikei, after which elaboration replaced idealism. Bronze-casting, architectural carving, masks for the mimetic dances, netsuke — “A netsuke gains nothing from age” — inro, ivory and Nara puppets follow, with modern realist wood-carvings sold abroad, not at home. Armor and sword furniture take over a hundred pages, the Miyochin armorers among them, and 1876, when sword-wearing was interdicted, may be taken as that art’s demise: “thousands of grand specimens found their way at once to the melting-pot.” Enamels and lacquer close the text; behind the index run three dictionaries of artists, the last forty-one pages of sword-furniture chiselers.

Ceramics take two volumes. The eighth, on Japan, opens with Katō Shirozaemon, whose Seto kilns gave the language its generic word for ceramics, then proceeds province by province: Hizen, with Imari, Nabeshima and Hirado, the last “perhaps the finest porcelain manufactured in Japan”; Satsuma, its Korean potters and a long warning against forgery; Kyōtō, where Ninsei “was the first to shake himself entirely free from alien influences”; Owari and Mino, whose Seto kilns and Tōkyō ateliers “constitute the Stoke-upon-Trent of Japan”; a hundred-page gazetteer; and a close in which the best modern potters, thrown on foreign markets when the fiefs were mediatised in 1871, revert to Chinese models at seven kilns. Verdicts run both ways. Japanese ignorance of the finest Chinese blue-and-white “is in itself sufficient to prove their keramic inferiority”; and in the ninth volume — title page and running heads now China, the limitation leaf still JAPAN — “the genius of the Chinese keramist was mechanical rather than artistic,” though technically “he has no equal.” Its sequence runs from the first manufacture of true porcelain through Sung wares, the Céladon, porcelain decorated under the glaze and then over it, where the potters of Ching-te-chen “departed from their own canons to meet the taste of European dealers,” to monochromes, flambé glazes, pottery, Chinese porcelain in the West, and manufacturing processes. The Japan volume points eight times to a table of Marks and Seals it does not contain; the China volume prints one of Chinese marks, unlisted, behind its index.

China fills the last three volumes, close to three-fifths of it foreign relations. The tenth gives its first three chapters to the country — the eighteen provinces and their 400 millions, the Yellow River and the Yangtse; then the Throne, the Six Boards and the Censorate, with the Tsungli Yamên and its “art of inaction”; then the land tax, likin and the maritime customs. Foreign intercourse comes only afterward, from the Nestorian stone of 781 to the opium crisis, ending with Captain Elliot’s surrender of the drug. The eleventh opens on its destruction and the war, judged against England — “But for opium-smuggling by British subjects the war would never have taken place, so far as human intelligence can discern” — though the next page finds “much to extenuate England’s offence.” Nearly half the volume then leaves diplomacy for the propaganda and Chinese religions: the quarrel over tien and Shang-ti, ancestor worship, fifteen pages of Confucian sayings taken from Ku Hungming’s version, Laotsu, Buddhism, popular superstition, then Ricci, Schaal and Verbiest, the controversy over the Chinese rites and the persecutions. Diplomacy resumes with the Nanking treaty’s working out, the examinations and secret societies, and stops mid-story: “It was thus that the Second War commenced.” The twelfth carries the allies to Peking and Lord Elgin’s burning of the Summer Palace, the Tientsin treaty and the Taipings with Ward and “Chinese Gordon,” Kiaochow and the Boxers, closing in September 1902: “The Far East, then, is the storm-centre of the world to-day.”

Every volume is illustrated, and the plates sit oddly with the text. Most are tipped in on a mechanical sixteen-page grid rather than beside the passages they belong to; but the first carries only six plates, the sixth spaces its plates by a four, five eights, nine sixteens and a twenty, and the seventh by fours, eights, sixteens and twenty-fours. Most are printed sideways and left uncaptioned, their titles carried on tissue guards, the ninth volume’s adding dynasty, height and source. Which they use follows no rule: the first letters a photograph on the plate itself; the fourth gives a photograph a guard, then letters a reproduced drawing on the plate with a paragraph of explanation beside it; the eighth has neither guard nor caption anywhere, its plate titles surviving only in the front list. Genre photographs — raking a rice field, washing kimonos, a Chinese hand loom — run through nine of the twelve volumes, thickest in the fifth and the last three; only the seventh, eighth and ninth keep to paintings, prints, armor and single pots. Eleven carry an appendix of endnotes, from five on one page to sixty-eight, and seven close with it; the ninth has none. Five carry indexes, the sixth’s covering the first six volumes and the twelfth’s the last three; each also ends its half of the set with tables of rulers and dates, a dictionary of celebrated characters — the Chinese one breaking off at T — and a large folding color map.

Japanese Plays and Playfellows is a collection of essays and personal reminiscences on Japanese theater and society, illustrated with twelve coloured plates by Japanese artists and dedicated to “Yakumo Koizumi and Lafcadio Hearn, poet and friend.” In the preface, Osman Edwards states that his stay in Japan was “limited to half a year,” during which he studied the language with native teachers and read the accounts of earlier foreign travellers; he concluded that “theatrical matters had been less fully described than any other,” and so gave them most of his attention, supplementing these “impersonal essays” with “personal reminiscences,” for which he asks the reader’s “indulgence.” He also warns that “austere critics will assuredly resent the excess of incense burned in these pages in honour of the musume,” and that he has dwelt “at some length” on “certain symptoms of anti-foreign feeling.” The book is organized by named part rather than by itinerary: an opening essay, “Behind the Scenes,” airs disputes over the Japanese press, politics, and resident foreigners’ grievances before the book turns to “Religious Plays,” “Popular Plays,” “Geisha and Cherry-Blossom,” and “Vulgar Songs,” and then to the more autobiographical “Taking the Waters,” “Playing with Fire,” “Afternoon Calls,” and “The Scarlet Lady.”

“Religious Plays” traces No and Kiogen drama from Kagura temple dance through the reciting Biwa-hoshi and dancing Shirabyoshi to the fixed repertoire fixed by Kiyotsugu and his son Motokiyo, a repertoire to which, Edwards notes, “since the sixteenth century none have been written.” He describes at length a program of five No plays and three kiogen given by Mr. Umewaka’s troupe, which traced its descent “through its chief from the Kanza school of music appertaining to the Yusaki family of Nara”: “Shunkwan, the High-Priest in Exile,” “Koi no Omoni, the Burden of Love,” “Aoi no Uye, the Sick Wife,” “Funa Benkei, Benkei at Sea,” and “Tsuchigumo, the Earth-Spider,” with the farces “Kitsune-Tsuki,” “Roku Jizo,” and “Fukuro Yamabushi” between them. Particular attention goes to stagecraft that substitutes objects for absent characters — a folded brocade standing in for the sick Aoi no Uye, a wrapped bundle for the burden that crushes the lover Yamashina — and to the masked duel between a mountain-priest and the Hanja-masked “Devil of Jealousy.” Edwards closes the essay by ranking No above the miracle and morality plays of medieval Europe for beauty and pathos, while granting that “no student of dramatic art could think for a moment of bracketing Chikamatsu with Shakespeare.”

“Popular Plays” turns to kabuki, opening with a critique of English stage images of Japan — Gilbert’s “The Mikado,” whose “gentlemen of Japan,” Edwards says, “were not Japanese at all, but Chinamen without pigtails”; Owen Hall’s “The Geisha”; Fernald’s “The Moonlight Blossom”; and Belasco’s “Madame Butterfly,” admired for its silent twenty-minute lighting effect but doubted for the plausibility of its heroine’s suicide — before describing the 1900 London engagement, billed as “the celebrated Japanese Court Company from Tokyo” (a title Edwards calls misleading, since “there is no ‘Japanese Court Company’”), in which Otojiro Kawakami and Sada Yacco performed “Zingoro, an Earnest Statue Carver,” “Kojima Takanori” (“The Loyalist”), and Kawakami’s own “The Geisha and the Knight.” The essay then surveys kabuki’s descent from Chikamatsu’s marionette plays and Takeda Izumo through the historical jidaimono (“Nakamitsu,” “Ichi-no-tani Futaba-gunki”), the love-and-loyalty sewamono built around geisha and courtesan heroines, and the oiemono, or household plays, built on the private troubles of noble families (“Kagamiyama-kokyo-no-nishiki,” a feud between the court ladies Iwafugi and Onoye over a stolen Buddha statue and perfume box, with Danjuro playing the villainess Iwafugi), alongside theater customs — the hana-michi, the revolving stage, the onnagata female impersonators, an actor’s possible earnings of “£5000 in four weeks” against an author’s “£50” — and closes on the reform efforts of Tsubouchi and of Fukuchi, whose “Kasuga-no-Tsubone” Edwards singles out as evidence that popular drama could be raised “from a somewhat crude condition to the level of serious art.”

“Geisha and Cherry-Blossom” describes geisha training and status and the annual Miyako-odori danced at Kyoto’s Hanami-koji in honor of Hideyoshi, its dancers passing through a re-created version of the gate carved by Hidari Jingoro; “Vulgar Songs” translates some thirty Dodoitsu, the four-line popular quatrains that B. H. Chamberlain called “despised by all well-bred persons,” setting them against the classical Tanka and Haikai and against Albert Chevalier, Yvette Guilbert, and “The Barrack-room Ballads” as instances of “non-literary poetry.” The book returns to the theater in “Afternoon Calls,” which records a visit to a yose hall to hear the raconteur Sukeroku, and a lengthy interview, conducted through the interpreter Kishimoto Bunkyo, with Ichikawa Danjuro VII — the seventh actor to bear the name since his father’s death in 1874, from a family that had acted, he tells Edwards, for nine generations — on his favorite role (Benkei in “Kajincho”), his reforms of diction and facial expression, his receipts of “130,000 yen” for a season, and his dismissal of the reformist soshi-shibai as men with “splendid theories” but no stagecraft.

The book’s remaining chapters are the “personal reminiscences” promised in the preface, and the longest of them by far is “Taking the Waters,” which gives over several weeks in turn to three separate hot-spring resorts — Ikao, Akakura, and Dogo — among merchants, students, and geisha; “Playing with Fire” follows, the story of a French acquaintance’s temporary liaison with a Japanese girl, O Maru, traced through their exchanged letters and telegrams to its end at the Kobe dock; and “The Scarlet Lady” closes the book with a history of the Yoshiwara and Shimabara licensed quarters and their hierarchy of taiyu, oiran, and kamuro, ending with a visit to a Yoshiwara house where Edwards is shown a courtesan’s sale contract, or nenki-shomon, reproduced in the text, though, as Edwards notes, with the names altered. Its List of Illustrations, printed after the preface, names sixteen items in all: the frontispiece “Benkei at Sea” and eleven further named plates — from a “Shinto Temple at Miyajima” to “The Taiyu waves her Sake-cup” — making up the twelve coloured plates by Japanese artists the title page advertises, plus four further monochrome photographic portraits of Sada Yacco, Kawakami, and Danjuro, in two of his roles, grouped together under one heading; the volume ends with an index of plays, persons, and places.

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore’s Jinrikisha Days in Japan, issued by Harper & Brothers in a revised edition in 1902 over a copyright of 1891, is part travel narrative and part topical survey, written, as its preface says, by “one who was both a tourist and a foreign resident” in the country. That preface — signed E. R. S. and dated at Washington, D. C., March, 1890 and again March, 1902 — records that Japan has been “six times revisited” since the author “first went ashore from the wreck of the Tokio,” and lists what has changed meanwhile: the treaties revised, extra-territoriality and the passport system abolished, the railway extended to Nikko, to Nara, from end to end of the main island and twice across it. Thirty-seven chapters follow a rough geographic progression from Yokohama to Nagasaki; forty-one illustrations — a frontispiece and forty printed among the pages — are listed at the front, and an index closes the volume at pages 377–386. The early chapters are mostly topical exposition addressed to “the traveller,” “the visitor,” “one,” though the author appears in them from the fourth page on and one Tokio chapter of entertainments is largely first-person narrative; from the Nikko chapter the book becomes a first-person plural narrative of a party on the road — “we packed our koris,” “our seven jinrikishas” — with the chapters on the potteries, the tea trade and the country’s future returning to impersonal exposition.

The voyage across the North Pacific from San Francisco or Vancouver opens the book, along with the first sight of Fuji from the sea and the disappointment of Yokohama’s Bund, “too European to be Japanese, and too Japanese to be European.” The vehicle of the title is introduced at the hatoba as “a comfortable, flying arm-chair — a little private, portable throne,” with its price, its license lantern and its straw-sandalled coolie. The coolie himself waits until Kioto, where ninsoku sits in his “decorated skin,” back, breast, arms and thighs often tattooed, and lives on rice, pickled fish, fermented radish and green tea, and where the author’s own picks his teeth with a camera tripod stick — “a toothpick four feet long.” Scidmore then takes the port by quarters: the Bluff with its hospitals and missionary houses; the florists’ toy-gardens of hundred-year-old dwarf trees; Honchodori and Benten Dori, where crapes are brought out by the basketful; the shows and cook-stalls of Isezakicho; and the Chinese corner of the Settlement, which she dismisses for its greasy walls and vile odors. Chapters on foreign society cover the chit-book, the trained servants, the mutual suspicion of missionaries and merchants, and the unwelcome “globe-trotter.” The environs follow — Richardson’s grave on the Tokaido and “black-eyed Susan’s” tea-house, the chrysanthemum grower of Kawawa, Sugita’s plum blossoms, the moxa priest of Mine, Uraga where Perry’s ships anchored and where midzu ame is made — and then Kamakura’s Dai Butsu and the island of Enoshima.

Tokyoakes eight chapters. The Ginza disappoints as Yokohama did, but the spiral moats with their pine-crowned walls remain “the one perfect feudal relic of Japanese Yeddo,” and a jinrikisha man named Sanjiro, full of gossip and baby-English, carries his fare from the Tokugawa mortuary temples at Shiba to Uyeno and on to the Asakusa Kwannon. A chapter of city life gathers the Feast of Dolls, the boys’ paper carp, the opening of the river, conflagrations, earthquakes, and the silk bazaars of Echigoya and Dai Maru. The flower festivals run from Kameido’s couchant dragon plum-trees through cherry-blossom Sunday at Uyeno, the sake-soaked carnival along the Mukojima, and the chrysanthemum tableaux of Dango-zaka. A six-hour dinner at the Koyokwan leads into lessons in cha no yu from Matsuda at the Hoishigaoka. Then come the theatre — the No, Danjiro’s dressing-room fees, the revolving stage, an itemized bill for a party of seven at a Yokohama theatre — and the imperial family, where Mutsu Hito is “one hundred and twenty-first Emperor of his line,” a chrysanthemum-bordered card summons guests to the palace garden-party with “Frock-coat required,” and at the fête of 1885 the Empress and her suite make their last appearance in the red hakama and brocade kimonos of the old regime. The new palace, with a plan of the Emperor’s private apartments, and the suburbs close the run, with the October matsuri at Ikegami and a Buddhist service held by Japanese wreckers for the American dead of the Oneida.

The road chapters begin with a flight from August heat to Nikko: the twenty-seven-mile cryptomeria avenue from Utsonomiya, a midnight arrival in a thunderstorm, and tea-house life — tatami, shoji, futons, fleas, and guides who “know more than the guide-book.” Nikko yields the Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu temples, the mossy row of Buddhas called Gamman, and two acquaintances met on the same green stairway, a Western scholar overwhelmed by its magnificence and a missionary friend who sees only “emblems and monuments of heathenism.” Above Nikko a chapter on the kago and the pack-horse gives the road to Chiuzenji and “the finest country walk in Japan,” on to the sulphur pools of Yumoto. The ascent of Fujiyama is made in the third week of July from Subashiri by nine — four men, three women, two Japanese valets — and ends short of the summit; the next chapter keeps them three days storm-bound in the lava-faced hut of Station Eight, then on a clearing morning up to the station on the crater’s rim, where the clouds shut down again and those who have looked in creep back on hands and knees, and slides them down the cinders to a chanted bill of fifty-eight dollars “for the seven of us,” beaten to thirty. Two chapters run the Tokaido from Miyanoshita to Nagoya, the first stage in pole-chairs over the Hakone pass, the rest by jinrikisha from Mishima; Nagoya gives its castle and golden dolphins, a four-hour matsuri, and a geisha dinner.

Kioto, reached by way of Lake Biwa and Otsu, gets nine chapters and the author’s declared preference among Japanese cities. She lodges at Yaami’s on Maruyama, first sees the city on the last day of the Gion matsuri, the summer river-bed “like a scene from fairy-land,” and works along the chain of temples — the Yasaka pagoda and Teapot Hill, Kiomidzu with its hanging platform, the great bell of the Chioin — before the imperial gosho, the Nijo castle, and the Ashikaga retreats of the Kinkakuji and Ginkakuji. At the Monto temples she notes the cables twisted from the hair of women too poor to give money and the scholar-priest Mr. Akamatsu, and she watches the Daimonji fires at the close of the Festival of the Dead. Four chapters turn to what Kioto makes: the Nishijin looms and the named varieties of crape; embroideries, fukusa and curios; the Awata potteries turning out “Kioto Satsuma” by the ship-load, with screens, fans and lanterns. The fourth is an afternoon with Nammikawa, “the first cloisonné artist of the world,” who serves tea in his garden, refuses commercial orders, and puts no mark on enamels “so unlike the crude and commonplace enamels exported from Japan by ship-loads for the foreign market” that they need none; the same chapter acknowledges Griffis, Dresser, Morse, Rein, Mitford and Percival Lowell. A last chapter records a cha no yu granted by the aged master Senke and a merchants’ dinner at which a carp is served still breathing.

The last chapters run south. Through the Uji tea gardens the party reaches Nara and stays for weeks among the deer, the more than three thousand stone lanterns of Kasuga, and the child priestesses who repeat the sacred dance as long as anyone pays; at Horiuji a priest unwraps bag after bag of brocade to show the crystal reliquary holding “the veritable eyeball of Buddha.” Osaka gives its castle, mint, arsenal and hakurankwai bazaar, Kobe the falls of Nunobiki and the baskets of Arima; and a trade chapter watches green tea “polished,” or coated with indigo, Prussian blue and gypsum, to a gray lustre “that no dried tea-leaf ever naturally wore, but that American tea-drinkers insist on having,” then raced to New York by way of Suez. Then the Inland Sea and Nagasaki, with Miajima, the Shimonoseki forts, Deshima, the Christian communities discovered there after the Restoration, and the hand-coaling of a steamer in the cholera summer of 1885. The book opens by setting the Japanese, “the fine flower of the Orient,” against “the brown hills of China” and “the desolate shores of Korea”; it is angry at the “unjust treaties” and at the Shimonoseki indemnity the United States withheld a quarter of a century before returning it. The closing chapter opens with questions it calls “unsolvable,” then argues that the Christian nations have bullied Japan and western trade “wrought artistic havoc” on its crafts, and ends by promising “some better lot” than to become the play-ground of all nations.

Japan and Her People is a two-volume survey of Japan, published at Philadelphia in 1902. Its preface accounts for itself plainly: everyone who goes to Japan writes home at first on thin Japanese paper, until the letters shrink to a page or two, in the knowledge that the simplest daily thing will not carry — “How shall I make them understand?” Out of that effort, and out of the answers to questions asked in America, “these rambling pages have grown.” The vantage she claims is one phrase, “three happy years in Japan”; in what capacity she lived there she never says, in either volume. The dedication is to an uncle, “best of uncles and most delightful of traveling companions, who came far to make her last weeks in Japan a happy memory.” She credits the patient teaching of friends, above all Miss Umé Tsuda of Tokyo and Dr. Inazo Nitobé, “whose suggestions and supervision of a large portion have made the attempt possible.” She names her books: Chamberlain’s handbook and Things Japanese, de la Mazelière’s Histoire du Japon, Fenollosa and La Farge on art, Aston on literature. Several return as epigraphs, for chapters open under other people’s sentences — Kipling’s verse and de la Mazelière’s French over Kamakura — the French untranslated. The chapter titles read like an itinerary, but much of the writing is explanation: history, legend, and topical essay hung on place names.

The habitual address is a guidebook “you,” an impersonal “one,” and a hortatory “we” — “let us not judge Japan by the open ports, till we are ready to have others judge America by Chinatown,” and “We who love the North.” Her own “I” is scarce, and six chapters of the first volume, Kamakura and Enoshima among them, carry none at all. When it comes it attributes a source, registers an opinion, marks the limit of what she knows, or — rarely, and this is the only place she appears as a resident — testifies, as at the inn supper that was “my first experience of tori-nabe.” The first volume opens with a primer for the traveler, then makes landfall past the islands of Yedo Bay, places of banishment for criminals, “usually political ones.” Yokohama is refused as a specimen of the country: “That it is not strictly Japan goes without saying.” Kamakura, two fishing villages left of a city of nearly a million, brings the Daibutsu and open dissent from Hearn, who writes of Kenchoji “with a sympathetic enthusiasm most of us cannot share.” Enoshima is “the sacred island of Benten, Goddess of Luck,” whose sons are six: Daikoku with his rice-bag, Ebisu with his fish, and long-headed Fukurokuji, happy old age.

Two consecutive chapters compress the whole history into one narrative, from the Kojiki and Nihongi through the Gen-pei war to Ieyasu, Tokugawa centralization and exclusion explained as politics rather than religion. Perry’s expedition she declines to call peaceful — he “merely asked the Shogun’s representatives to call and see his guns” — and the abolition of feudalism is given from the samurai’s side, their attempts at business “pitiful beyond words.” The history runs on past the samurai: Saigo fallen by his own hand at the close of the Satsuma Rebellion, the Constitution promulgated in 1889, of which “the plan is based chiefly on the Constitution of Germany,” and “in 1897 the gold standard was adopted.” Tokyo takes two chapters, a place argued to be “not a city really, but rather a bunch of villages clustering round the moat and the castle.” Their best pages are the surrender of Yedo: Count Katsu riding alone to Saigo’s camp at Shinagawa, then taking Saigo up Atago Hill to look out over the city — “If we cross swords, these innocent people will have to suffer.” The Regent Ii Kamon is killed at the Sakurada Gate in broad daylight and in “the muffling, slippery snow of the south,” in the midst of his train. The Forty-seven Ronin are told out, and Tokyo’s foreign-style buildings are “horrors of building,” since “when Western civilization first reached Japan, the most rampantly atrocious architecture was at its height.”

A chapter on the household turns from a frame socketed on round stones that “rocks together like a ship” to the family as the unit of society and the seven Confucian grounds of divorce. It has too the Countess Hosokawa, who cut down her children and thrust the dagger into her own throat rather than be held hostage. Elsewhere the place is only the hook: a temple at Ikegami carries a life of Nichiren, maples at Oji an essay on garden theory, the hot spring at Ikao a defense of the Japanese bath. Japanese folk tales are told at the same length as the Ainu ones later on: the ruined samurai turned waste-paper man who cannot learn to cry “Old paper”; the temple foxes near Iwanuma, called to their banquet at sunset by beating drums; Gompachi and Komurasaki, told with open dislike. Nikko is the largest subject in the volume after Tokyo. It carries a full life of Ieyasu — “The country needs peace… Better I should die than bring on another civil war” — and the legend of Shodo Shonin, ferried over the Daiyagawa by the King of the Deep Sand on two snakes that reached across as a bridge. The architecture is given at length: the terraces, the Yomei-mon, the color scheme read as “the forest-motive accented, set in a higher key,” and above it the bare bronze tomb, which La Farge called “the acme of costly simplicity.”

Farther north, the siege of Aidzu castle is quoted from an account written in English by Mrs. Iwamoto of Tokyo, “from her own childish recollections and those of three friends.” A treatise on lacquer and the tidal wave of 1894 follow, and the volume ends in the Hokkaido, among the herring-oil villages. The unsubmissive Tokugawa clansmen took possession of Hakodate in 1868, and their “Three Days’ Republic” failed, its leaders Enomoto and Kuroda giving themselves up to save their followers — Kuroda presently back in the Hokkaido as head of the new Colonization Office. General Horace Capron was then sent for “to introduce the American system of agriculture into Japan,” which meant stock raising, forestry, surveys, engineering, agricultural schools and experiment farms. The college town that grew up under him “looks far more like a bit of New England than any part of Japan.” The volume’s last sentence calls that spirit the old “Yamato Damashii,” “translated into modern, yes, and Christian life — and a legacy, too, of Enomoto and Kuroda’s brave failure.” The second volume opens with thirty pages on the Ainu: the retreat northward, tattooed moustaches begun in childhood and now forbidden by law, the bear feast, a blunt verdict — “it is a doomed race, lessening year by year.” At the end come the graves rifled near Mori, when “English and Continental scientists” sent skulls and bones off to London and St. Petersburg and the consuls were required to punish them.

An Ainu substratum runs on under the rest of the book: place-names under Chinese characters, the shell mound opened at Oji, and the claim, repeated at the head of the Fuji chapter, that “even Fuji, the peerless mountain, was almost certainly the Ainu Fuchi or Huchi, the goddess of fire.” At Hakone the trained kago-bearers are argued to be what made the jinrikisha possible; at Fuji she stops to say she knows the mountain “from many points of its beautiful ‘skirts’ — no farther.” The Tokaido chapter turns from the road and railway into an essay on the peasant: the five-family kumi, the headman Sogoro crucified with his wife, his children killed too, and Ninomiya, the peasant philosopher “who based all his political economy upon morality,” who proposed to fast in the guard-room with a granary’s keepers till they gave up the keys. Nagoya brings its castle and golden dolphins and a history of ceramics. Its judgment has two halves: the town is responsible for “a very large share” of the cheap trash “that has deluged the world under the name of ‘Japanese china,’” besides much that, “though made for the foreign market, is really pretty and tasteful.” Gifu brings the earthquake of 1892 and cormorant fishing by pine-fire. Ise sets out Shinto at length — the plain torii, the two chief temples pulled down and rebuilt every twenty years on alternating sites, the creation myths of Isanagi and Isanami.

The Ise chapter closes with Viscount Mori, stabbed on the morning the Constitution was signed by a young man who, after Mori pushed aside the shrine’s white curtain with his walking-stick, “resolved to kill the evil-doer and save the country.” At Kyoto — “Tokyo, the Japanese say, is the brain of new Japan, but Kyoto is its heart” — the Gosho and the Nijo palace stand for “two diametrically opposed tendencies,” the one “original, Shintoist, strictly national,” the other “offspring of Buddhism.” The reading attaches to the walls, the Gosho’s “a screen and not a defence” against the Shogun’s moat and cyclopean masonry. The temples bring the ropes of women’s hair given toward the building of the Higashi Hongwanji, and cha-no-yu likened to “the parlor of an old-fashioned Quaker house.” The theatre chapter opens from a dance in the Nihongi and branches into “the sacred Kagura dances of the Shinto shrines, and the comic Saru-gaku.” It prints “the stilted, archaic phraseology of the Nô verses,” and holds it “one of Danjuro’s glories that he acts equally well either as a man or a woman.” The longest chapter is as much flower calendar as festival. It has the Feast of Dolls; the boys’ day, with a paper carp for every boy in the household; cherry crowds at Uyeno and Mukojima; the rules of flower arranging, five branches or seven, never an even number; Bon and its boats set adrift for the dead; and the chrysanthemum figures at Dangosaka.

Nara stands “to Kyoto somewhat as Canterbury does to London,” an age when the Emperor actually ruled “and when women had a position and freedom that later Chinese influences stole quite away.” Osaka has “entirely too many of the worst features of American factory life.” Kobe’s chapter is only partly about Kobe: more than half is the opening of the port, the Bizen retainers who fired on a couple of French soldiers, and the Minatogawa — Masashige’s farewell to his son, Nitta cutting off his own head with his sword when mortally wounded. The Inland Sea carries “the three bullies — Russia, France and Germany,” who “forced Japan to give up Port Arthur”; Nagasaki its record of Christian mission and persecution. The last chapter, on Formosa, rests on a footnote: the publishers wished Dr. Nitobé, head of the Bureau of Products and Industries there, to write it, and when that proved impossible Mrs. Nitobé gave her access to personal letters. The last words are not the author’s — she closes “these rambling chapters” with De la Mazelière’s parting judgment on Japan and her people. Each volume lists twenty-five uncaptioned photogravures, “made by Gilbo & Co.,” many of them printed sideways on inserted leaves. Behind an index covering both volumes lies a folding map, the Lu Chu islands in a separate inset and a key headed GLOSSARY.

A commercial handbook rather than a book of travel, Japan and Its Trade is one of Harper’s International Commerce Series, edited by Francis W. Hirst, whose introduction gives the series a double object: to supply “managers, clerks, and agents of commercial firms” with accurate information about the commerce and resources of the principal countries, and to give teachers and students in technical schools, colleges and commercial universities what he tentatively calls guide-books to the wealth of modern nations. The title page names the author only as J. Morris, “author of ‘Advance, Japan!’ ‘War in Korea,’ etc.” His preface undertakes to state the commercial position of the Japanese Empire in concise terms, holds that its finances have been widely misapprehended, and observes that perpetual leases are not yet granted to aliens, which he takes to be the chief remaining obstacle to the empire’s commercial development. Morris credits the Statistical Bureau of the Imperial Cabinet at Tokio for details furnished in M. Hanabusa’s statistical compilation for 1901, the General View of Commerce and Industry in the Empire of Japan prepared for the Paris Exhibition of 1900, Count Matsukata’s report on the adoption of the gold standard, and Viscount Hayashi and Minoji Arakawa. The reader addressed is British: of Clyde-built steamers Morris warns that “We cannot afford to rest upon our oars,” and he judges the sugar returns of 1900 the safer basis for calculation “where the export trade of our colonies is in question.” Thirteen numbered sections follow.

Section I opens on population: the empire, Formosa included, numbers 46,444,524, densest in Awaji near Kobé and thinnest in the Kurile chain, which Morris gives by its Japanese name Chishima. He runs through the growth of the chief towns, ascribing Osaka’s leap to cotton-spinning, shipbuilding, cigarettes, matches and brewing, Nagasaki’s to shipbuilding and coal, and Otaru’s to the colonization of Yeso, and he keeps the old classification of inhabitants into kwazoku, shizoku (samurai) and heimin. “Wealth” narrates the boom that followed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the money stringency of 1897 and 1898, Count Inouyé’s use of the Chinese indemnity to steady the market, and the drain of gold that came with the outbreak of hostilities in the Transvaal, with tables of bank deposits, railway and tramway receipts, national revenue and the national debt. “Wants” turns to imports, first tabulating alphabetically which country supplies each article, from alcohol and alizarine dyes to woollen cloths and sheet zinc, then giving short articles on beans and peas, blankets, coal, raw cotton, cotton yarns, shirtings, flour, horses and cattle, indigo, iron in several grades, kerosene, lead, leather, machinery, oil-cake, printing paper, rice, steamships, steel, sugar, tobacco, watches and wool.

Japanese industry is then divided into arts practiced from early days — bamboo and other wood-work, ceramics, embroidery, ivory carving, lacquer, paper-making, raw silk, weaving, and the making of camphor, indigo, saké, salt, soy, sugar, tea, tobacco and vegetable wax — and those established since 1868, among them cotton spinning and weaving by foreign machinery, shipbuilding, the construction of all kinds of machinery and scientific apparatus, woollen manufactures, bricks, cement, glassware, matches and soap. Agriculture is called the fundamental basis of the country’s prosperity, and Japanese acreages and yields of rice, wheat, barley and rye are set beside those of the United Kingdom. Exports are taken commodity by commodity: camphor and the Formosan monopoly, mats and matting, porcelain and pottery, coal from the Miike and Takashima mines, copper prized for its conductivity, cotton yarn sold into China, fans, kerosene from Echigo and Yeso, lacquer and bronze, matches, mushrooms, rice, raw silk (practically one-third of the whole export trade), habutaye and kaiki silks, silk handkerchiefs, tea, bat’s-wing umbrellas, and the straw-plait of Osaka that Morris presents as Luton’s rival. Communications, the longest section, begins with the telegraph rather than the railway: the eighteen-mile line from Yokohama to Tokio, begun in 1869, was not opened until 1872, while the 376-mile telegraph along the Tokaido, started at the end of 1871, was in use by October of the following year and had been carried on to Nagasaki within six months more.

Railway mileage and working expenses follow, then the Nippon Yusen Kaisha’s ten services set out one by one, and the foreign lines beside them: the Messageries Maritimes from Marseilles, the Ocean Steamship Company’s weekly cargo boats from Liverpool, North German Lloyd’s forty-two-day run from Southampton, the Canadian Pacific Empress boats that bring Japan within three weeks of Great Britain, and the P. and O., whose Hong Kong and Yokohama ships have been sold to a Japanese company. A roster the book believes complete names forty-two steamship lines trading to Japan, Japanese-owned ones included. Tonnage entering and leaving is given by flag, and a port-by-port survey runs from Yokohama and Kobé to Moji, Otaru and the ports of Formosa; at several ports not formerly open to foreign vessels, Morris says, he personally witnessed the growth of commerce from very small beginnings. Posts, telegraphs, telephones, electric lighting and tramways end the section, and what remains turns from trade to the conditions behind it. Physical conditions gives the area of the empire, the volcanic origin of the islands, Fujiyama at 12,230 feet, and mean temperatures and rainfall at seventeen observing stations from the Pescadores to Nemuro. The tariff is printed group by group, sixteen groups of dutiable articles running from arms and clocks through drugs, dyes, metals, tissues and tobacco to wines and a closing miscellany, with lists of duty-free and prohibited goods. Bounties and subsidies sets out the shipbuilding and navigation law of 1895 and the payments made to steamship lines.

Finance traces the currency from the debased coinage of the Restoration through inconvertible paper, the Satsuma Rebellion, the founding of the Bank of Japan and the adoption of the gold standard in 1897, and shows all nine legal-tender coins in small engravings, from the twenty-yen gold piece to the five-rin bronze. Weights and measures explains shaku, ken, ri, tsubo, tan, koku and momme; mineral resources treats Miike coal, the Yuwata iron foundry, the naval arsenal at Kuré where armor plate is eventually to be rolled, and a gold output too small by itself to replenish the reserve; commercial education counts staff and pupils at Tokio, Osaka and Sapporo. A last section on the commercial situation reviews the government’s undertakings since 1896 — armaments, the iron foundry, railways, telephone and telegraph lines, the Kioto Imperial University, the Industrial Bank of Japan — and the additional taxes on land, income, soy, saké and registration, with a monopoly in leaf tobacco, that met the demand for revenue, before declaring that what Japan needs is capital and predicting a great and permanent expansion of her trade. An appendix lists Japan’s consuls and agents in Great Britain and the United States, established foreign firms at Yokohama and Kobé, foreign banks, the fifteen foreign consulates, workmen’s wages trade by trade, and current prices of merchandise, and ends with a note on trade names as a stumbling-block to a consumer whose language has no “l”: “London” becomes “Rantan” or “Ronton.” An index closes the text.

Japan, Our New Ally is a partisan survey of Meiji Japan, written in the months around the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and prefaced by Marquis Hirobumi Ito, who notes that the book “is going to appear at the moment when the problems of the Extreme Orient are the order of the day.” Alfred Stead gathers his material at first hand — touring Baron Shibusawa’s Tokyo poor asylum, lunching with Marquis Ito at his villa in Oiso, learning jujutsu from a police instructor at Kobe, and sailing with his wife aboard the armored cruiser Asama when the Japanese fleet made its first foreign cruise, from Chemulpo to Chefoo — and builds around this travel and interview material a case, chapter by chapter, for Japan’s fitness as a world power. The book runs to twenty-one chapters and an appendix, moving from the opening of the country by Commodore Perry through the imperial family, religion, labor, education, commerce, industry, finance, the army and navy, the police, sketches of leading statesmen, diplomacy, and finally the balance of power in the Far East and the new alliance with Britain. Roughly two-thirds of it is not narrative at all but compiled trade statistics, quoted interviews with named officials, and, in places, government documents and treaty articles reprinted whole; sustained first-person narration — the naval cruise, the visit to Oiso, the jujutsu lesson — is concentrated in a handful of chapters rather than spread evenly through the book.

The early chapters set this method. Chapter I, “The Opening of Japan,” insists that Commodore Perry’s 1853 landing only interrupted a civilization already fifteen hundred years old, and backs the claim with trade and population statistics — 43,760,815 people at the 1898 census, only 11,684 resident foreigners — and the example of the Ashio copper mine, worked by 10,000 Japanese laborers under Japanese engineers alone. Chapter II, on the imperial family, quotes fourteen of the seventeen articles of the 1889 Constitution bearing on the Emperor’s powers and reprints, in a translation Stead says he commissioned himself, the Imperial Rescript on Education recited in every school. Chapter III, on religion and charity, turns most of its pages over to a long extract from a privately printed pamphlet on ancestor worship by Nobushige Hozumi, professor of law at the Imperial University, while Chapter IV describes Baron Shibusawa’s Tokyo Poor Asylum since its founding in 1872, closing with a table of admissions, discharges and deaths at roughly five-year intervals. Chapter V, “The Labour Problem,” sets low wages and the absence of factory law against the sawyers’ guild and the Ironworkers’ Union, quotes Mr. Katayama’s paper the Labour World on millgirls “treated like animals,” and prints in full the five resolutions passed at a 30,000-strong Tokyo workingmen’s rally that the police had tried to cap at 5,000. Chapter VI, on education, works through conversations with Marquis Ito on founding Japan’s engineering college and with Count Okuma on his Senmon Gakko and the burden of a language split between spoken and written Japanese, before explaining Bushido as the common root beneath Shinto, Buddhist and even Christian practice in the country.

Trade statistics dominate the chapters that follow. Chapter VII tracks Japan’s export growth to China, Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, Siberia and the Philippines yen by yen, weighing Baron Shibusawa’s and Bank of Japan president Yamamoto’s judgments on whether Japan can yet compete with Europe and America in finished manufactures; Chapter VIII does the same for railways, telegraphs, cotton spinning, weaving, silk, tea, paper, glass and porcelain. Chapter IX, “The Feeling of the Nation,” turns from figures to reported speech: Stead recounts the assassinations of Count Mori and of the parliamentarian Hoshi and quotes at length the pidgin English of his Japanese servant, whom he identifies only as “my man,” on the killing of Count Mori — “if very good, then no kill; if no very good, then killing — that proper” — as evidence that the old samurai temper survives, and describes the vernacular press gathering gossip from foreigners’ own servants’ quarters. Chapter X opens with an American hat manufacturer’s complaint that his trademark was pirated in Japan, which Stead uses to argue that Japanese patent and design law is in fact adequate, reprinting its fee schedules and penalties in detail. Chapters XI through XIII cover the merchant marine, with tonnage tables for the Nippon Yusen Kaisha and its rivals; the state of Japanese finance, drawn, Stead says, from direct conversations with six named authorities — Counts Matsukata, Inouye and Okuma, Vice-Minister Sakatani, Baron Shibusawa and Mr. Yamamoto; and the new Credit Mobilier bank founded to draw in foreign capital, whose enabling law Stead reprints article by article.

Firsthand observation returns in the chapters on the army, the navy and the police. Chapter XIV traces conscription through conversations with Marquis Yamagata, the army’s founder, and praises the decorum of off-duty soldiers who, Stead writes, could be seen walking Tokyo’s streets “holding each other’s hands like little children”; Chapter XV tabulates every capital ship in the fleet by builder, tonnage and speed before shifting into narrative, as Stead describes sailing with his wife aboard the armored cruiser Asama on the fleet’s first foreign cruise, from Chemulpo to Chefoo, through a typhoon that had the escorting destroyers rolling forty-five degrees. Chapter XVI, on the police, credits the Hyogo police chief Hamada for its detail, describes Stead learning jujutsu from “a celebrated police professor,” and sets a quarantine inspection at Kobe against an incident in which, he writes, American sanitary officers in Honolulu subjected two Japanese ladies to degrading treatment. Chapter XVII profiles Marquis Ito from personal acquaintance: a visit to his villa at Oiso, lunch, and an afternoon’s talk about China and the missionaries yield most of Ito’s biography and his own account of drafting the 1889 Constitution. Chapter XVIII turns to six more statesmen Stead names as his subjects — Marquis Yamagata, Count Inouye, Count Okuma (recalling the 1889 bomb that cost him a leg), Count Matsukata, Baron Shibusawa, and the younger official K. Tsudzuki. Chapter XIX turns to diplomacy, arguing that Japan’s envoys are handicapped by foreign ignorance — Stead cites Britain’s transfer of the long-serving Tokyo minister Sir E. Satow to Peking as an example — and tables Japanese emigration, trade and postal traffic country by country.

The closing chapters make the book’s argument explicit. Chapter XX, “Japan Paramount in the Far East,” reasons from geography, coaling stations and the shelter of the Inland Sea that Japan must hold the Far Eastern trade whatever the other powers do, and Chapter XXI narrates the negotiations behind the Anglo-Japanese Alliance — Marquis Ito’s soundings of Russia, Germany and Britain, and the signing by Lord Lansdowne and Baron Hayashi on January 30, 1902. The Appendix reprints the treaty article by article together with Lansdowne’s explanatory despatch to Sir Claude Macdonald, and the book closes with an index. Its illustrations open with a frontispiece portrait of the Emperor Mutsu Hito and continue with full-page plates of the Ashio copper mine, the labor rally, the Senmon Gakko, banknote examiners at the Government Printing Office, and portraits of General Kodama, Admiral Yamamoto and Marquis Ito, along with smaller diagrams of Japan’s Asian trade and a map of the country’s central position in the Far East.

Sea-girt Yezo is a missionary memoir written explicitly for young readers, as the Rev. John Batchelor explains in his Preface: “This book is written for young people and is intended to give a few peeps at missionary work as carried on in the Hokkaido Jurisdiction—North Japan. While it is largely autobiographical, it also gives many short glimpses of various aspects both of the work of the preacher and teacher and also of the psychological development of the believer.” Batchelor was a Church Missionary Society worker who migrated to Yezo in May 1876 after a severe attack of fever in Hong Kong, and who since 1878 had made the Ainu village of Piratori, in the Saru district, his own headquarters among the Ainu before later taking charge of the Sapporo district of the mission. He frames the book as a running answer to a barrage of questions a curious young reader might ask about Yezo — its climate, its Japanese and Ainu inhabitants, its missionaries and their stations — and organizes his eleven chapters by topic rather than by strict chronology: the island’s geography, the missionaries’ own health and stations, “Summer Pests,” “Winter Troubles,” “The Beauties and Comforts of Yezo,” the mission’s beginnings, its early friends, some converted and some not, a church fire, its methods, the difficulties standing in the way of conversion, and finally “The Harvest,” the whole spanning more than two decades between his own arrival and the book’s publication in 1902.

The opening chapters lay out Yezo itself before turning to mission business. Batchelor explains that “Yezo” is probably an Ainu word meaning “abounding in game,” while “Hokkaido,” the newer, Japanese-imposed name, is Chinese in origin and means “Northern-sea-circuit”; the island, “about as large as Ireland,” holds a little more than a million Japanese and “just under sixteen thousand” Ainu, overseen by Bishop Fyson, a former Niigata missionary and Bible translator appointed to the see in 1896. Batchelor corrects an assumption of his own early years in the field: he once thought Ainu reluctance to farm or mine was mere idleness, but came to understand it as religious caution, since digging into the earth was believed to disturb the gods and demons who lived there — a point he illustrates with the old man who refused to put manure on Batchelor’s own garden for fear of offending them. Chapter II catalogues the Yezo missionaries and notes how many, including Batchelor himself, had been invalided out of hotter fields before recovering in Yezo’s bracing climate: Williams from East Africa, Andrews from the heat of Nagasaki, Dr. Colborne from South China, Miss Payne from India, Miss Tapson from Osaka. Summer and winter each get a chapter of hardships recounted mostly through personal anecdote: mosquitoes so thick in swampy passes that Ainu hunters say they can blind and kill a bear, gadflies “as large as hornets,” and ague treated with twelve grains of quinine a day; then frozen rivers more than two feet thick, snow averaging five feet around Sapporo, and two blizzard deaths — a Kushiro catechist found frozen not far from his path, and a Hayakita postman found dead half a mile from the post office after being warned not to go out with his letters that day. Batchelor’s own worst winter memory is a December 8th at Piratori, living in Chief Penri’s hut while compiling his Ainu dictionary and grammar, when the ink froze on his pen and he woke stuck fast to his bearskin bed after the hot-water bottles he had improvised from stone bottles leaked out in the night. A chapter on the island’s “beauties and comforts” catalogues Yezo’s England-like flora and fauna, the mission garden at Sapporo stocked with seeds sent free by Sutton’s of Reading, and a comic aside about a Tottori Mura farmer so afraid of his new cow’s kick that he tied it to a fence and milked it through the rails.

The middle chapters trace the mission’s founding and its early converts and setbacks. The Rev. W. Dening arrived as the first C.M.S. missionary to Yezo in 1874, preaching from a hired carpenter’s shop in Hakodate with the convert Mr. Futagawa as his assistant; Ogawa was baptized in 1875 as the second Hakodate convert (the first, Batchelor notes, “was a thief” who left the church and the town and was never heard from again), and in 1876 Dening paid the first visit to Piratori, “the old Ainu capital of Saru,” beginning the work among the Ainu that Batchelor would later take up. Batchelor devotes a chapter to “Early Friends,” several of them men he watched come to faith and a few who did not: Mr. Kimura, a consumptive who tried a folk cure of stewed cat (eaten, Batchelor later learned, “to expel cats” believed to cause the disease) before dying at peace in hospital; Mr. Terata, a soldier who once resolved to kill the missionary whose sermon he took as a personal attack, then converted and was eventually ordained and posted to Formosa; Mr. Sano, baptized against his family’s wishes in the newly built Hakodate church in 1878 but later a “backslider”; Mr. Murai, who trained as a doctor; and, among those who never converted, the Buddhist nun Mrs. Watanabe, who stayed loyal to her late husband’s faith, and old Mr. Jinno, a self-taught scholar of “Christian books, Shinto books, Buddhist books” who broke off Batchelor’s language lessons in anger after Batchelor turned one of Jinno’s own parables back on him. The 1878 Hakodate church itself does not last: its fire-bell, mistaken by the town for a fire alarm, once packed the building with startled worshippers, but on December 6, 1879, an actual fire swept through Hakodate, destroying some 2,500 houses along with the church and a mission house — Batchelor describes rushing to get the sleeping Dening children up and dressed before the flames reached their home. He illustrates the itinerant preaching that followed with an overheard inn conversation between two skeptical travelers, debating what could possibly induce a foreigner to trek miles through snow just to preach, who end by going to hear the sermon themselves.

The closing chapters turn to method and to results. Batchelor recounts language blunders in the mission field — a fellow missionary once confused kami (“God”) with kame (“tortoise”), and Batchelor owns to his own worst slip, dodai (“foundation”) for daidai (“orange”), plus an honorific mistake that had him asking a Christian mother after her “odious youngsters” instead of her “honourable children” — alongside an inventory of the mission’s institutions: Bible classes begun in the Williams household, Sunday schools with more than 2,000 children enrolled, night schools such as Miss Bryant’s at Piratori, a school for Ainu boys under the Nettleships and a girls’ school under Mr. Andrews at Hakodate, a “Home” for Ainu girls at Sapporo, a Home for Japanese girls and prospective Bible-women run by Miss Tapson and Miss Jex-Blake, and medical work under Dr. and Mrs. Colborne, including a daily service held in the Hakodate dispensary and the Hospital Rest House at Sapporo, completed in December 1892 and treating between 100 and 160 Ainu patients a year since. A chapter on the obstacles to conversion lists the Ainu and Japanese gods and demons believed to inhabit sky, sea, mountains, and even weeds, under one supreme god and one chief demon, and the fear that abandoning ancestor offerings of wine and food will bring disease and ruin to a household’s gardens. The final chapter, “The Harvest,” closes the book with conversion stories: a wife who mocked her husband for attending services, went herself meaning to disprove the preaching, and ended up converted alongside him; an elderly Christian woman who kept an idol hidden in a chest of drawers for twelve years after her own baptism before finally handing it over; and a woman who surrendered her amulets — a Suii Tengu charm carried against shipwreck and an Aizen charm meant to secure her children’s affection — which are reproduced in a photograph captioned “Women’s Charms” on the book’s next-to-last page of text. Batchelor ends by “commend[ing] these pages to the young people of England” and asking each reader to pray for the C.M.S. mission in Yezo, its church, its ministers, and its people.

This is a domestic and social study of Japanese women’s lives, cast as a revised and enlarged edition of a book that, Bacon says in her preface, had “been before the public for more than ten years.” She writes as an American woman who had lived in Japan and taught English at the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo — she refers, in one aside about her Peeresses’-School pupils, to “my scholars” and “my little peeresses” — and who traces her authority less to formal research than to what she calls, in the preface to the first edition, “the privilege of long and intimate friendship with a number of Japanese ladies” — an intimate association she says “no foreign man can ever hope to gain” — which let her “study life from the point of view of the refined and intelligent Japanese woman.” That first edition, written at Hampton, Virginia in February 1891, was “carefully revised and criticised” by Ume Tsuda, “teacher of English in the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo,” and its dates, names, and historical incidents were checked against Griffis’s Mikado’s Empire and Rein’s Japan. For this 1902 edition Bacon returned to Tokyo, drawing on what she calls “two years’ experience of the present state of affairs” to fold into the chapter “Within the Home” a body of household-custom material that, she explains, “could not be written in America,” and to commission illustrations from Takenouchi of Tokyo, whom she calls “one of the foremost illustrators of Japan.” The book’s thirteen chapters move from a Japanese woman’s life stages — childhood, education, marriage and divorce, wife and mother, old age — outward into rank and occupation — court life, the daimio’s castle and yashiki, samurai women, peasant women, city life, domestic service, home customs — and close with a chapter of contemporary stocktaking and an index.

The life-stage chapters open on the ceremonies of a girl’s upbringing: the miya mairi temple visit at one month, the gift of an inu hariko papier-mâché dog, and the Feast of Dolls, which Bacon describes generically and then through a visit of her own to “the house of one of the Tokugawa daimios,” where “five or six broad, red-covered shelves, perhaps twenty feet long or more” held generations of Emperor-and-Empress dolls and their miniature furnishings. New Year games such as Hyaku Ninisshu, the card game built on a hundred classical poems, and early theatre visits round out girlhood before marriage narrows a young woman’s world; “with the close of her childhood,” Bacon writes, “the happiest period in the life of a Japanese woman closes.” Education (Chapter II) moves from calligraphy, flower arrangement, the tea ceremony, and etiquette instruction under the old private-tutor system to the government and mission schools of “new Japan,” including the 1889 backlash against female education touched off by a German medical professor’s warning that literary education and good wifehood were incompatible. Marriage and Divorce (Chapter III) walks through go-between courtship and the bride’s dowry-like trousseau, costing “as much as one thousand yen” among the moderately well-off and four or five thousand among the wealthy, and illustrates the old ease of divorce with the story of Bacon’s own rikisha man Yasaku, who married and discarded one bride within two months after putting “his winter clothes in pawn” to pay for the wedding feast. Wife and Mother (Chapter IV) describes the young wife’s subjection to her mother-in-law and her husband’s daily comfort, and closes by comparing her legal position to that of slaves in “the old slave times in the South”: “a condition that was wrong in theory, and so could not be righted in practice.” Old Age (Chapter V) turns the same logic forward, presenting seniority as the compensation that makes the earlier servitude bearable, and ends with Bacon’s account of attending, at the Aoyama cemetery, the Buddhist funeral of an old friend she calls “a heroic woman.”

Chapters VI through IX turn from life stage to rank. Court Life traces the imperial line’s legendary descent from Jimmu Tenno and retells at length Empress Jingo Kogo’s conquest of Korea, quoting her charge to her generals — “I am a woman and young. I shall disguise myself as a man, and undertake this gallant expedition” — before turning to the reigning Empress Haru, whose visits and personal economies on behalf of a Tokyo charity hospital are described through a quoted newspaper editorial, and to the courtship of Crown Prince Haru and Princess Sada, who had been raised by foster farmers in the country and was chosen, Bacon writes, “largely on account of her great physical vigor”; the chapter closes with the 1901 birth of Prince Hirohito. Life in Castle and Yashiki describes the daimios’ compulsory residence at Yedo under Iyemitsu’s law, and includes two anecdotes from Bacon’s own acquaintance: a daimio’s household that concealed his death for forty days so that a pardon could arrive before the funeral, and a lady-in-waiting’s uniform for fire or attack — black broadcloth hakama, cap, and spear-cover — which Bacon bought as a curiosity. Samurai Women sets out the ethic of loyalty and hara-kiri through the tale of the Loyal Ronins and the stage story of Onouye, struck with a sandal by the proud Iwafuji and avenged by her maid O Haru; it also recalls, from the siege of Wakamatsu, an eight-year-old girl who carried a small sword “so that I would have it if I was taken prisoner,” and quotes at length from an 1895 magazine article by Ume Tsuda on wartime self-sacrifice, including the mother of a naval commander who met news of her son’s death with, “So it seems by your tidings that my son has been of some service this time.” Peasant Women, the longest and most anecdotal chapter, ranges from an 1850 petition by a village headman denouncing samurai extravagance to the women of Yase who carry loads on their heads for the imperial nursery, tea-pickers and silk-raising households, and a Nara innkeeper whose “buxom” hospitality and late-night bath Bacon recalls fondly; it closes by finding among peasant wives “the women who have the most freedom and independence” of any class in Japan.

Chapters X through XII widen the lens to city and home. Life in the Cities describes the low repute of the merchant calling, a shopping expedition at the Mitsui silk store, night-market festivals with their towering dashi floats, and, candidly, both the training of geisha and the licensed joro quarters, which Bacon treats as a system of debt bondage rather than simple vice. Domestic Service explains why Japanese servants exercise independent judgment rather than blind obedience — an attitude Bacon illustrates through her Peeresses’-School pupils’ astonishment at a passage in Little Lord Fauntleroy — and closes with affectionate portraits of two servants of her own, the rikisha man Yasaku and her maid O Kaio, who traveled with her “through floods and typhoons” on a summer journey by Japanese hotels alone. Within the Home surveys the household shrine, kamidana or Butsudan; zodiac-based divination of lucky and unlucky days; house-building and moving customs; an extended account of funeral preparation and the forty-nine-day mourning period; and the year’s festival calendar from New Year through O Bon to the boys’ Feast of Flags. The closing chapter, Ten Years of Progress, takes stock of legislative, educational, journalistic, and religious change since 1891: a fall in the divorce rate from one marriage in three to one in five under the new civil code; 1898 school statistics showing, in the “special schools,” only seventy-three women enrolled against 11,069 men; the 1901 opening of an institution called the Female University, founded by Jinzo Naruse, with an opening address by Count Okuma; Fukuzawa’s tract answering the centuries-old “Great Learning of Woman” with a “New Great Learning of Woman”; new occupations for women from telephone operating to counting government banknotes; and the Salvation Army’s 1900 campaign against the licensed houses of the Yoshiwara, which Bacon credits with freeing more than a thousand women within four months.

The illustration program credited throughout to Takenouchi is unusually large for a book of this kind: twelve full-page plates printed in soft washes of color — the frontispiece, “Under the Cherry-trees,” and others captioned “The Miya Mairi,” “A Wedding Ceremony,” “The Insult with the Sandal,” “Pilgrims going up Fuji Yama,” “A Matsuri Procession,” and “The Feast of Flags” among them — together with forty-three further black-and-white drawings keyed to the text by page, running from “Inu Harico” and “Clings like a Kitten” near the opening to “Visiting the Grandparents” and “In a Buddhist Convent” near the close. The book ends with a double-column index that opens at “Adoption” and runs on for several pages, indexing people, customs, and Japanese terms down to individual anecdotes — the story of a village Buddhist priest that closes the final chapter earns its own entry, “Buddhist priest, story of a, 327–329.”

A round-the-world travel narrative assembled out of newspaper letters. The title page of Around the World Via Siberia identifies Nicholas Senn as “Professor of Surgery, Rush Medical College” and “Chief of Operating Staff with the Army in the Field during the Spanish-American War, and Surgeon-General of Illinois,” and notes that the book comes “From Articles that Originally Appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Reprinted by Permission of the Author.” Senn leaves Chicago with three medical friends — Professor D. R. Brower of Rush, Dr. Jacob Frank of Chicago, and Dr. William M. Mastin of Mobile — crosses to Bremen on the Barbarossa, works eastward by rail and river steamer to Vladivostok, then goes by sea to Nagasaki, Shanghai, and Japan, and home across the Pacific through Honolulu and San Francisco, reaching Chicago on October 20 after some twenty-five thousand miles. Nineteen of the twenty chapters open with a tag — Seneca and Ovid most often, but also Catullus, Cicero, Byron, Livy and Midsummer Night’s Dream — and more are strewn through the text. Senn writes mostly in the first person, singular and plural — “It is my intention to encircle the world from east to west,” “We took the slow train from Moscow to Ssamara” — though three times he calls himself “the writer,” and in the survey chapters on Siberia and on China the traveling party all but disappears, the China chapter using the first person only in quoted speech and expository formulas.

The first eleven chapters, roughly half the volume, carry the party out to Vladivostok. Senn admires the German police, army, and Kaiser; at Konigsberg he watches Professor Garre operate for tuberculosis of the ankle joint. In Russia he mocks the pronunciation of Virballen, dismisses George Kennan’s account of Siberian cruelty as a “sensational book,” praises Czar Nicholas, and turns from Moscow to Sparrow Hill, Napoleon’s headquarters during the siege and now the site of a first-class restaurant, to retell the disaster. A profession-shaped attention runs throughout: he inspects the hospital at Ssamara, the military and children’s hospitals and foundlings’ home at Irkutsk, and the civil, military, and marine hospitals at Vladivostok, counting beds, noting scurvy and venereal disease among the troops, and recording the training of “barber surgeons,” male and female. He digresses on the virtues of birch and fir and the selfishness of the oak, apostrophizes a stunted birch, and hunts the Transbaikal edelweiss from a train window. Chapter IX carries him down the Schilka and Amur on the steamer Ural; before it sails he sees two prison barges towed toward the penal island Ssachalin, and at Blagovestchensk, opposite the ruins of a second Ssachalin, “a large Chinese village destroyed by the Russians last year,” he says Russian troops drove some five thousand Chinese into the river at the point of the bayonet and more than half of them “found their graves in the turbid waters of the river” — “a black spot in the history of Russia.”

Japan first appears at the middle of Chapter XII. Crossing what Senn calls the Japanese Sea — a chapter that opens with typhoons and pirates — the party lands at Nagasaki on September 2 and finds the United States Army transport Grant in the harbor. Nagasaki is “a good representation of new Japan”; Senn takes his first jinrikisha ride with misgivings (“It appeared to me like an inexcusable imposition to be drawn by a fellowman”), is hauled by three men over the mountain to the fishing village of Mogi, watches a street vendor’s price for an umbrella drop from two yen to one, and records the hotel’s flat eight-yen tariff and the laundry charged by the piece. A planned visit to Korea is abandoned — the monthly steamer was missed “only by a few hours,” and the hermit nation is never reached — so the party detours to Shanghai instead, and Chapters XIII and XIV go to China: the walled city, a wheelbarrow ride, a street dentist and an herb doctor, a long letter from Dr. N. Macleod on Shanghai medicine, and a topical history of opium, treaties, and the massacre of the Sisters of Charity at Tien-Tsin. Japan proper resumes at page 268 and holds the book to page 378.

Chapter XV is a standing survey of the country rather than a day’s travel. Senn dates “the awakening of Japan” to Commodore Perry, whom, he reports, Commander Suzuki called the Washington of Japan at the parting banquet in Tokyo, and traces the treaty of 1854 and the constitutional government of 1889. He calls the Japanese “great imitators,” counts a standing army of 136,000 men, praises the navy and the compulsory school system, gives the census of 1900 at 40,453,461, and works through habits, cleanliness, footwear, and jewelry with a clinician’s eye: the wooden clogs, he observes, spare their wearers ingrowing toe-nails, bunions, and metatarsal neuralgia, while a diet of boiled rice and fish leaves the jaw underdeveloped — a defect “tough beef and chewing gum would in less than a century remedy.” He sets the modesty of Japanese women against American “new women” who “would rather be men,” in a scolding page and a half, yet calls the blackening of a bride’s teeth a disfigurement that in justice ought to be inflicted on the husband instead. He describes Shinto and Buddhism, St. Xavier’s two and a half years in the country, landscape gardening and dwarf trees, and closes by predicting that Japan and Russia will fight over Manchuria and Korea, Japan winning early and Russia perhaps prevailing at ruinous cost.

“Twenty days is too short a time in which to see Japan,” Chapter XVI begins, and the route Brower mapped out is crowded. Returning from Shanghai the party coals at Moji, where Senn calls on a blind healer, buys “the torturing needle” rather than let the healer’s wife be needled in his place, and describes the burning moxa; then crosses to Shimonoseki, past a graveyard holding only ashes, and takes the one meal the four doctors eat squatting on cushions, from which he rises with difficulty. Then the Inland Sea; Kobe, with its Nunobiki Falls and Daibutsu; Osaka — “the Chicago of Japan” — with its snake show, Hideyoshi’s castle and two hundred singing cadets; and Kioto, where he sees the temple of the 33,333 images of Kwannon, ropes twisted from the hair of female believers at the Hongwanji, the great bell at Chionin, a boat run down the rapids toward Arashi-yama, and a pine said to be 1,300 years old. A Geisha dance strikes him as “child’s play” and he leaves after the third; a wrestling match he judges “harmless and useful.” From Yokohama come excursions to Miyanoshita, Enoshima, and the Kamakura Daibutsu, and to Nikko, whose Cryptomeria Avenue, temple of Ieyasu, and hillside tomb of the first Shogun draw the book’s most reverent pages. Fujiyama shows itself once, from Fujisawa, then goes into “deep mourning”; he addresses it directly: “You are no longer in a land with locked doors. You must not hide your face to foreign nations.”

Tokyo takes two chapters. At the great temple in Ueno Park Senn watches women rub a stone god’s forehead for headache and its stomach for stomach-ache, and prices their offerings against those of fashionable Chicago churches, where “a nickel makes as much noise as a five-dollar gold piece.” Guided by Commander B. Tomatsuri, he goes through the Imperial University, quoting two of its regulations, on degrees and sureties, then the medical school’s two hospitals, the Army Hospital and Army Museum with Baron Ishiguro, and Kitasato’s Hygienic Institute and leprosery; he argues that the capital’s missionary hospitals have outlived their usefulness and should be transferred to “smaller cities on the coast and the interior.” He attends the McKinley memorial service at Holy Trinity Cathedral on September 26 and interviews the minister of education, urging that more Japanese students be sent to America. Chapter XIX belongs wholly to the Red Cross Society of Japan — its hospital ships, storerooms, and nurses’ training school — and ends with Senn and Dr. Frank enrolled as titular members. Leaving Yokohama on the America Maru on September 28, he fills the homeward chapter with seasickness and snoring, a day at Honolulu, and the run east from San Francisco, closing at Chicago on October 20 with a tag from Melanchthon. Ninety full-page halftone plates, listed in the front matter, are bound in through the text; thirty-two of them show Japan, from the Mikado and the Empress to the graduating class of the Red Cross Hospital in Tokyo.

The Heart of Japan is a resident’s book of sketches rather than a journey: thirty-seven short chapters offering, in its title page’s words, “Glimpses of Life and Nature Far from the Travellers’ Track in the Land of the Rising Sun.” Brownell writes in the first person and usually as one of a pair, himself and a companion he calls Gardner, though one late chapter predates Gardner’s arrival. Of the geisha he remarks that “In five years I never saw a gathering for pleasure without them.” Foreigners, he explains, could then neither own nor rent property in their own names except in restricted districts of what he calls some half-dozen cities, and the two had no wish for the concessions, “where one never is quite in touch with real Japan.” So they went to the west coast, to a province no foreigner had lived in before, and hired a landlord: Okashi Kintaro, a spendthrift samurai who rented them two disused temples, one for a school in which they taught English, one to live in. They put off foreign clothes for kimono, ate with chopsticks, slept on futon, and lived in temples for the greater part of their time in the country. Much of the talking is Gardner’s own, and his first Tokyoub, heated by a charcoal pipe, boiled him until he bolted out naked into two calling American missionary ladies.

At the Yokohama United Club he tells globe-trotters that the bath is the best point of view from which to study human nature, and sends them along the unfrequented routes foreigners do not take. To the same men at One Hundred Steps next day he describes the cremation of Okashi’s father, dead at the lucky age of eighty-eight, where a party of twenty-nine banqueted and exchanged saké cups while relatives turned the body in the oven with an iron rod. Later he holds forth to globe-trotters at the Club Hotel on the women who run Japanese households, and to friends at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyon the bed that comes to the sleeper. The early chapters otherwise keep to the west coast, where Kono Hito, the thriftiest man in Japan, wastes away praying and pumping at a rival’s bath-shrine, never guessing that its image of Buddha hides an American chain pump watering his neighbor’s rice-fields. At Tatsumi in Echizen, Brownell meets O Toyo San, sent home by her husband after he installed a geisha not yet fourteen, and left to wait outside the walls for a sight of her children. Okashi supplies the third chapter’s comedy: a household bill unrolled nineteen feet six inches along the matting, a separate one of twenty-one feet six from his wife, his son’s tailoring charged to the tenants, and sixty dollars wired to them gone in three days but for thirty-seven cents.

“In the Kindergarten Days” surveys the national remaking after Perry — swallow-tails, silk hats and white gloves, officials dosed with a liqueur glassful of milk every morning at eleven. Schoolgirls at Sappuro swallow egg and claret under the rule of “no flip, no futon,” and the Board of Public Works’ London agent ships, precisely as ordered, one professor of electrical science, one of mining, and two blast furnaces. Elsewhere the wooden makura leaves a beginner’s neck too stiff to turn, and a night’s poker in a Sumida Gawa tea-house ends with Prince Sakusama winning the indenture papers of the whole procession of geisha. Grammar and honorifics are set out in interlinear specimens borrowed from Chamberlain, and children’s games fill a chapter of battledores, kite battles and kitsune ken. “O Jo Sama” sets a samurai’s daughter against long extracts from the “Onna Daigaku,” with a grandfather who warns her that badly boiled rice is a most just cause for divorce. Brownell describes the three New Years, the gift eggs and sponge cake that circulate a fortnight without growing fresher, and the chits on which a penniless man may drink himself to death in Yokohama. He reports a censorship that suspends newspapers without naming the offense, and the “prison editor” formerly kept on the staff to go to jail for his colleagues — a proxy given up once the censor demanded three at a time.

Other chapters take up the samurai policeman who binds his captives in twine, the theaters and Danjuro, and “gaku,” which the dictionaries wrongly render “music.” A barber’s schoolboy son paints an English signboard reading “BARBER TO SHAVE BEARD OR TO ORESS HAIRS WAY,” and a craze for such lettering follows, from “Butterfly and Worm Merchants” to “Cowmeat and Pigmeat.” Brownell is there for the first election the country ever had, and measures it out in bows — half a million at the lowest count, and, once the franchise widens, seventy-five million foot-pounds of folding. Fires are “Tokio no hana,” the flowers of Tokio, welcomed by carpenters and followed by banquets. On trade, an English merchant at Yokohama complains that orders are repudiated when exchange turns against the buyer. He reads out of Chamberlain the case of a firm that won its suit over a hundred bales of yarn but had to settle at a loss under a guild boycott; Japanese merchants answer that foreigners sold them worthless goods first. Gardner reports a hidden hamlet in Noto where the women dive as deep as fifty feet for shell-fish, the men keep house, and a husband who misbehaves is ducked in the sea by them. A chapter among temple images takes in Binzuru rubbed hollow by the sick, Amida, legless Daruma who is credited with tea, Ama-Terasu at Ise, and Kwannon with her Thirty-Three Holy Places. The clerk who stabbed Viscount Mori for a sacrilege at Ise is now prayed to as a saint.

The later chapters mix legend and sport with the book’s longest sustained argument. At a dinner in the old Government Observatory at Kaga Yashiki, a seismologist with a reputation as an earthquake prophet promises his guests a shock and delivers three. They ride them out under a table built on the earthquake plan, and he warns against windows stacked in a line “like the holes in a sheet of postage-stamps.” The chapter on missionaries, at whose tables the two are always welcome, gives most of its pages to Japanese speakers. A Hongwanji friend asks why missionaries condemn Buddhism without studying it, since “our Foreign Office officials study Christianity before going abroad,” and says that in China the foreign missionary has become “a sort of advance-agent of the gunboat.” A Foreign Office man schooled by missionaries finds that they “herd together too much” in Tsukiji, and counts the six meals a day he was served in one of their houses. He repeats a coolie’s verdict on a teacher who cannot read the street signs: “He has come to teach us! Why, he can’t even read!” Elsewhere the Prince of Sendai hires the whole Yoshiwara and pours a fortune into the tea ceremony; a young man of Nachi plots his kinsman’s murder for love of the man’s wife but kills the wife, who has taken her husband’s place under the quilts.

Kade, boyhood playmate of the Emperor, barters six repeater watches for six cakes and, offering a ten-yen gold piece to an old sandal-maker by night, takes fright at her moonlit face and flees, leaving the coin in her dead hand for a guardsman. Allen, a professor with degrees from four countries, loses his pupil O Toku San to a betrothal made before her birth and gets a letter declining “for ever your impliteness letter.” Sport has a chapter of its own: netting at Count Kuro’s caged duck-pond beyond Oji, where seven men take between forty and fifty birds; then Fukui, where the netters wait at numbered hillside stands leased by a duck club, squatting in straw until they look like small ricks. There follows a shoot after “yama kujira,” mountain whale, the name by which an early priest made venison lawful to Buddhists; then cormorant fishing by bonfire at Gifu, and monkeys taken with cups of saké. An old village chief fires his whole harvest to draw his people up the hill ahead of a tidal wave, and is afterwards worshiped as a god. It ends with a potter whose obedience to the master his father chose for him costs his wife, his children and his own reason — “Filial piety had its reward” — before unpaginated publisher’s advertisements. Twenty-four halftone plates from photographs, captioned but unattributed, are the only apparatus.

Ernest W. Clement’s A Handbook of Modern Japan announces its purpose in its introduction: to portray Japan “as it is rather than as it was,” chapter by chapter, as “a compendium of condensed information, with careful references to the best sources of more complete knowledge” for both the specialist and “the average general reader.” Clement, writing from Chicago in August 1903, disclaims any attempt at an “exhaustive encyclopaedia of ‘things Japanese’”; instead nineteen of the book’s twenty-one chapters close with a bibliography of English-language reference works, a feature he calls “a special and very important feature of the volume.” The chapters proceed topically rather than as a travel narrative — physiography, industry, and transport first, then society and history, then government and law, then language, education, art, religion, and a closing pair of chapters on Japan’s twentieth-century prospects — backed by an appendix, beginning at page 305, of statistics, tables, and reprinted documents. One chapter, “Æsthetic Japan,” is credited in the introduction as “entirely” the composition of Frederick W. Gookin, a Chicago art critic, rather than Clement’s own writing.

The opening chapters lay out the country in survey fashion. “Physiography” fixes Japan’s position relative to the United States and Asia, runs through its Fu and Ken administrative divisions, and catalogues its mountains (Fuji foremost, “a dormant volcano” last erupted in 1708), lakes, rivers, hot springs, and recurring hazards of earthquake, typhoon, and epidemic. “Industrial Japan” moves through farming on “petty” holdings (a five-cho farm, about twelve acres, counts as large), the staple crops of rice, tea, and tobacco, the silk and new cotton-spinning industries, Formosan camphor, and shipbuilding at Nagasaki and Uraga. “Travel, Transportation, Commerce” covers jinrikisha, railway, and steamship travel alongside banking and coinage, closing with remarks attributed to Baron Shibusawa on Japanese business prospects. “People, Houses, Food, Dress” opens with the Ainu as a vanishing people of Yezo and the Kuriles before turning to family structure, domestic architecture, gardens, and diet, and “Manners and Customs” and “Japanese Traits” follow with birth, marriage, and funeral customs, the “five festivals,” the theatre and the No, and a chapter-length inventory of supposed national characteristics — minuteness, politeness, stoicism, filial piety, and the rest.

A run of chapters then takes up history and governance. “History (Old Japan)” outlines the mythological and dynastic record from the “Divine Ages” through the Tokugawa; “History (New Japan)” dates the birth of the modern nation to July 14, 1853, “when Commodore Perry and his suite first landed on the shore of Yedo Bay at Kurihama, near Uraga,” and traces six periods from seclusion through treaty-making, civil commotion, reconstruction, internal development, and constitutional government. “Constitutional Imperialism” walks through the Charter Oath, the Emperor’s prerogatives, the Privy Council, the Cabinet departments, and the House of Peers and House of Commons; “Local Self-Government” covers prefectural and municipal administration and the colonial government of Formosa. “Japan as a World Power” takes up conscription, the army and navy, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which Clement calls a “guarantee of peace” and “admission of Japan’s strength”; “Legal Japan” surveys the new law codes, courts, and the position of foreigners under Japanese law; and “The New Woman in Japan,” reprinted in part from the American Journal of Sociology, addresses marriage, divorce, and concubinage law and expanding education and employment for women, explicitly disclaiming any satirical sense of the term “new woman.”

The next block of chapters turns to language, learning, art, and religion, closing with two chapters of forecast rather than description. “Language and Literature” explains the kana syllabaries and reviews poetry, the press, and modern Japanese reading habits; “Education” traces the shift from Buddhist and Confucian instruction to the modern school system under the Imperial Rescript. Gookin’s “Æsthetic Japan” chapter treats painting as “the key-note” of Japanese art before covering sculpture, ceramics, lacquer, the tea ceremony, and flower arrangement. “Disestablishment of Shinto” argues that Shinto is “only a cult... not a religion,” and “Confucianism, Bushido, Buddhism” and “Japanese Christendom” carry the religious survey forward, the latter opening with Francis Xavier’s 1549 mission and the 1638 edict threatening death to any Christian who came to Japan. The book closes with “Twentieth Century Japan,” contrasting conditions in 1801 and 1901, and “The Mission of Japan,” in which Clement predicts that Japan will serve as intermediary between East and West and states plainly, “We believe in Japan” — these last two chapters, unlike the preceding nineteen, carry no bibliography, reading instead as summary and prophecy in Clement’s own voice, including his forecast that Shinto “will have entirely disappeared as a religion” and Japan “will have become practically a Christian nation” by 2001.

The appendix that follows, covering pages 305 through the mid-370s, is where the “Handbook” label is most literal: lists of provinces and prefectures; conversion tables for Japanese length, weight, capacity, and money; a chronological table of Japanese year-periods (nengo) and of emperors and empresses; statistics on factories, railways, postal savings, wages, and the “Wealth of Japan”; an account of the 1903 Osaka Exhibition’s machinery and manufactures; army and navy strength tables; the full text of the 1894 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between Japan and the United States; membership figures for Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Greek Church missions; three English translations of the national anthem “Kimigayo”; a floral calendar; and closing notes on Formosa under Japanese administration. The volume’s illustrations, gathered under a separate list headed by the frontispiece “Perry Monument, near Uraga,” run to photographic plates of harbors, castles, government buildings, and military and naval reviews, composite oval-portrait plates grouping multiple named statesmen, generals, and educators under single captions (“Statesmen of New Japan,” “Educators and Scientists of Japan”), two paintings reproduced by Yasunobu and Ho-Itsu, a small map of the Pacific, and a large folding “Official Map of the Empire of Japan” with inset maps of the Kurile and Bonin Islands; an index closes the book.

An Artist’s Letters from Japan collects the correspondence John La Farge sent home during roughly three months in Japan, from his arrival at Yokohama on July 3, 1886, to a kago-borne crossing of the Hakone Pass in late September. The book carries two dedications: an English one “To Henry Adams, Esq.” — “Without you I should not have seen the place… If only we had found Nirvana — but he was right who warned us that we were late in this season of the world” — signed “J. L. F.,” and a second, printed as a full page of Japanese cursive script glossed “WHICH IN ENGLISH MEANS,” addressed “And you too, Okakura San.” The letters that follow are dated and placed (Yokohama, Nikko, Kioto, and so on) and continue to address a “you,” while a traveling companion who shares La Farge’s rooms and opinions throughout is named in the text only as “A—.” The book moves geographically rather than by argument: Yokohama and Tokio, six weeks based at Nikko, a return through Kamakura, Kioto with side trips to Nara and Osaka, and a homeward run by Lake Biwa, Gifu, and the Tokaido to Hakone. Much of it is close description of temples, streets, and weather in the moment of travel, but long stretches — above all at Nikko — turn into essays on Buddhist and Taoist thought and on the principles of Japanese art, so that the book reads as travel letters interleaved with art criticism rather than as a continuous journal.

The opening letters set the keynote of arrival — the harbor “like the picture books,” a jinrikisha run into Tokyoo see a Japanese-art scholar’s collection of paintings, an evening of Noh at a private theater near the Shiba temples — before a cholera outbreak sends the party north to Nikko, where they take a house inside a Buddhist priest’s compound for the rest of the summer. More than half the book is set there. Several letters describe the shrines of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu gate by gate and bracket by bracket, paired with an account, hedged only by La Farge’s own admission that he writes from memory without books at hand, of Iyeyasu’s rise after the battle of Sekigahara, the Tokugawa laws, the extinction of Christianity, and the story of the forty-seven Ronin. From the temples the letters turn to essay: “Tao: The Way” translates Chuang-tzu-style parables and argues that Japanese and Chinese craftsmen still work by an unwritten discipline that Western architects and decorators — chasing commercial demand, or restoring old buildings on paper in the manner of Viollet-le-Duc — have lost; “Japanese Architecture” explains temple construction as an engineered answer to earthquake and monsoon; and the long “Bric-a-Brac” traces Japan’s debt to China, names painters from Kano Motonobu and Okio to Hokusai (whose two “Old Man gone Mad for Painting” colophons are quoted at length) and Kanaoka, and argues that Japanese decorative art keeps a wholeness that Western art has traded away for anatomy, perspective, and portraiture. “Nirvana” and two further letters titled “Sketching” return to the shrines and waterfalls, working through Buddhist ideas of compassion and contemplation by way of the goddess Kuwan-on while La Farge paints among the cryptomeria, in a downpour, and at dusk.

Leaving Nikko at the end of August, the party works back through Utsunomiya — where La Farge retells two versions of a plot involving a rigged bath-house ceiling: a first, theatrical version he flags as legend, aimed at the young Iyemitsu, and a second, which he calls the correct historical account, in which the real target was not Iyemitsu but his father Hidetada, and the accusation itself was probably invented by Lady Kano against the castellan Honda — and through Tokio, where the letters return to bric-a-brac shopping, before a last excursion to the great bronze Daibutsu at Kamakura and the gilded standing Kuwannon at Hase. A letter dated from Kioto in September opens a second phase of the journey: the Kioto art school and girls’ school, merchants’ houses where old marriage trousseaux and porcelain are brought out for inspection, and temple after temple, including the reception hall and tea pavilion associated with Hideyoshi and an excursion to Nara and to the ancient Horiuji, where La Farge lingers over the Golden Hall’s centuries-old wall paintings and a Kanaoka lotus painting. Along the way he retells legends attached to the places he passes — Yorimasa’s death at Uji bridge, the killing of the boy warrior Atsumori, the mound raised over the ears and noses taken in Hideyoshi’s Korean campaigns — and describes an evening of ancient temple dances at the “Green Lotus” temple and a farewell dinner in Kioto with geisha entertainers, whose doll-like smallness he dwells on at some length.

The last letters cover the road home: a day’s run by kuruma from Kioto to Lake Biwa, by steamer across it, and by kuruma again to Gifu, where “A Japanese Day” describes watching cormorant fishing by torchlight on the river at night; and, further along the Tokaido, a letter written from inside a moving kago that records a clear view of Fuji from Kambara beach, a flood that has carried away the bridges over the Fujikawa, an improvised night crossing of the river’s mouth by junk in a rising storm, and the final stage of the journey by kago over the Hakone Pass to the hotel at Miyanoshita, where the book’s letters end.

A short postscript explains that most of the letters had already run in The Century Magazine, regrets that failing health and time kept La Farge from adding further notes on Japanese art, and takes stock of other writers on Japan who had appeared since — Loti, Lafcadio Hearn, Percival Lowell, Basil Hall Chamberlain, Mrs. Coates, Miss Scidmore, and others, “the list is too long” — before thanking Mr. H. Shugio for the “grass characters” of his translated preface and Mr. M. Tsuchiya for information supplied. An appendix follows: a translated letter attributed to Iyeyasu, the “Suruga Gobunsho,” written to a daughter-in-law on the upbringing and self-command of a prince. A prefatory List of Illustrations catalogues more than forty small images printed within the text — sketches credited to no one in particular alongside reproductions of a Chin-nan-pin painting, a Kuwanon attributed to Okio, and Hokusai’s signature — and an uncredited full-page halftone of a painting of the Great Statue of Buddha at Kamakura serves as frontispiece.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan gathers twenty-seven sketches in two volumes, numbered continuously from chapter I through chapter XXVII and paged continuously from 1 to 693. The preface, signed at Kumamoto, Kyūshū, in May 1894, quotes Mitford on the inner life of the Japanese, which earlier books had failed to reach, names that invisible life as the Unfamiliar Japan of which Hearn has obtained a few glimpses, and grants that little more than four years’ residence scarcely lets a foreigner begin to feel at home. Volume I calls Hearn “the foreign teacher” and credits a footnote to one of his Japanese pupils; volume II’s diary chapter opens with his contract to serve as English teacher in the Jinjō Chūgakkō, or Ordinary Middle School, and also in the Shihan-Gakkō, or Normal School, of Matsue, Izumo, for the term of one year. The forms mix: a dated diary running from 1890 into 1891, a notebook of dated July entries kept at Kitzuki, standing essays with no journey in them — the household shrine, women’s hair, festival emblems, the Japanese smile — a documentary on the geisha with a long legend attached, Hearn absent from both, and stories set down as Akira or an old gardener told them. First-person travel and residence make up the greater part. The first day is spent in Yokohama behind a kuruma-runner named Cha, whose one recurring question is whether the foreigner wants another temple.

Hearn finds behind one poor seaside altar only a mirror and his own face in it, and meets a temple student who lends him an English Buddhist catechism and, on parting, answers, “Call me Akira,” when asked his name. A hilltop carries inscriptions in English forbidding injury to the trees, which tell Hearn that foreign tourists of the brutal class have been there. The five-page chapter that follows, the shortest in the book, has no scene in it — seven legends of Kōbōdaishi, who letters a palace wall in China with five brushes at once and, adding the dot a boy-god forgot, turns a dragon-character on a river’s surface into a dragon, all credited at the close to Akira. A chapter on Jizō moves through a temple on the Buddha’s birthday, an old cemetery where six stone Jizō stand hung with bags of pebbles, and scrolls of hell and paradise unrolled at Kuboyama. The longest chapter of volume I, forty-three pages, takes the two through decayed Kamakura — the great bell, the colossal Jizō, the Dai-Butsu — and across the sands to Enoshima, whose dragon cavern yields no Benten, the goddess having been hidden away by Shintō hands. A shorter chapter explains the Bon, the festival of the dead, then walks by night through the market of its goods: lotus flowers, straw horses for the dead to ride and straw oxen to do shadowy labor for them, red unglazed ghost-dishes.

The book moves west, four days by kuruma from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan, the Buddhas thinning out of the roadside as Shintō takes over, until in a Hōki village women dance the Bon-odori by moonlight in the court of a Buddhist temple turned schoolhouse. Matsue gets thirty-three pages, built as one day from the pounding of the rice-cleaner’s pestle before dawn to the night cries: the caged uguisu sent to the foreign teacher by the governor’s daughter; the old bridge whose middle pillar rested on a man buried alive, though some say Gensuke was an era’s name, not a man’s. Pilgrims travel, he thinks, as much to please themselves with the sight of rare and pretty things as to please the gods, every temple being a museum. At Kitzuki, admitted by a letter from Nishida Sentarō, Hearn is told by the Guji that he is the first European ever permitted to enter the great shrine, and is given its rebuilding history and its yearly count of pilgrims from other provinces, about two hundred and fifty thousand. That chapter then leaves the shrine to say what Shintō is: no philosophy, no code of ethics, no metaphysics, and yet by its very immateriality able to resist the invasion of Occidental religious thought; its reality lives not in books, nor in rites, nor in commandments, but in the national heart.

“It is forbidden to go to Kaka if there be wind enough to move three hairs.” Waiting months for a calm, Hearn is sculled to a sea-cave whose slow white drip is the fountain of milk at which the souls of dead children drink, and to a cavern whose slope is covered with little towers of pebbles piled nightly, they say, by the ghosts of children. At Kaka the whole village silently packs every opening of his inn, and the landlord’s rebuke and the children’s reply are printed word for word in literal English. At Mionoseki the god hates eggs, hens, and above all the cock, so the town keeps none; the first work of little girls, of every kind, hangs before the Thirty-three Kwannons of a hill temple; and the whole port rows out to an Imperial cruiser, to be turned away at the iron steps. A notebook of dated July entries from Kitzuki opens by reporting that Akira is no longer with him, gone to Kyoto, and that Hearn feels without him like one who has lost his way; it finds the holy shrine town also the most fashionable bathing resort. Hinomisaki is reached through a cleft in the cliff, millions of cuttlefish drying on frames below its double shrine.

Eight pages on love-suicide give the methods, the two coffins made into one, and a dead girl’s farewell letter. Yaegaki-Jinja, the shrine lovers visit, gives the fullest account of what people leave at a shrine: tied to the weathered gratings, knotted white papers by the hundred with nothing written on them, tresses of girls’ hair, paired bamboo tubes of sea-water, sun-blackened seaweed that passes for shorn hair. In the grove behind are sweethearts’ names cut into bamboo bark that blackens as the bark grows, camellias tied together in pairs, and paper boats weighted with a coin sunk over red-bellied newts, whose approach is the good omen. One wish is cut there five times in English. Volume I ends with thirty-three pages on foxes — stone foxes, possession and the exorcist who bargains aloud with the fox, and the cost of the belief: girls of fox-owning families who cannot marry, land that will not fetch its price. Hearn concludes that the belief is dying, killed not by missionaries but by the public school, and closes on the children who break the fox-god’s nose. Volume II opens in a samurai residence of fourteen rooms behind the mouldering castle at Matsue, with a treatise on gardens — that nine gardens in ten hold nothing resembling a flower-bed, and that one must learn the beauty of stones.

The garden chapter gives its last twenty-odd pages to a folk natural history of the grounds: eleven kinds of butterfly at the lotus pond, seven kinds of cicada of which Hearn knows four, the hototogisu that is no creature of this living world but a night wanderer from the Land of Darkness, the crow credited with feeding its parents in turn. A systematic chapter on the household shrine follows, covering the Shintō god-shelf and the Buddhist cabinet and pausing to call Shintō religion transformed into hereditary moral impulse, religion transmuted into ethical instinct, the whole emotional life of the race, the Soul of Japan. When a husband dies, two tablets may be made: his posthumous name in gold on one, on the other the widow’s own posthumous name, made while she lives, its first character in crimson as her pledge never to remarry. Women’s hair gets a short chapter, ending with the whole shorn hair of a widow who has taken that vow laid upon the knees of the dead. Then the diary, sixty-one pages, reports the two Matsue schools from inside: Governor Koteda Yasusada, with whom the contract was made; an athletic meeting of nearly six thousand children, closing in a game in which two paper castles are pelted with balls till both blaze, the side whose castle burns first losing; the reading of the Imperial Words on Education.

The diary also records that in Japan the pupil expels the master quite as often as the master expels the pupil, prints students’ English compositions with only their commonest mistakes corrected, and reports two pupils’ deaths, one boy carried on a servant’s back after midnight to see his school once more. Festival decorations are decoded next as puns and emblems, from the New Year pine to the dried peas thrown at Setsubun. A journey along the Hōki coast during the Bon collects the tide of returning ghosts and the story of a secondhand quilt in which two children’s voices ask each other whether the other is cold; a documentary account of the geisha is joined to a long tale of a dancing-girl. The longest chapter, seventy-three pages, begins, “I resolved to go to Oki,” where not even a missionary had been and whose shores no European eye had seen except from men-of-war cruising by. Hearn adds that warships have touched at Saigo, where English and Russian naval officers have been seen. He sails in a steamer he decides was planned by demons, sitting on watermelons on the cabin roof, and gives a month of islands: ghost-ship stories, a city of a thousand houses reeking of cuttlefish and offering beefsteak, a silent crowd that stares him out of a town. Then a gardener who reckons his own souls at four and allows a man as many as nine, and a night among goblin shows where one sen buys admission to hell.

The Japanese smile, Hearn argues in a late chapter, is a part of deportment, taught like the bow. Into it he sets extracts spanning six pages from a Japanese conservative, footnoted as Viscount Tōrio’s essay: that the state of things obtaining in the West is based upon the free play of human selfishness, and that liberty and equality would render the disposition of the people harsh and unfeeling. Japan, Hearn predicts, will wonder at many things but will regret, and perhaps will wonder most of all at the faces of her ancient gods, because their smile was once the likeness of her own. He writes four days after a farewell banquet at the Normal School: two nights ago Asiatic cholera broke out in the city and school. Students and teachers die at their posts, the survivors are sent home, and one boy, seeing his president approach, finds strength to rise on his elbow and give the military salute before passing into the Great Silence. Some two hundred students escort Hearn to the wharf, and a steamer carries him farther from the Province of the Gods. His footnotes are frequent, a few of them filling half a page or more. Only the second volume carries plates: four unpaginated sheets of mostly numbered line drawings, all in the household-shrine chapter, of Shintō and Buddhist sacred objects, from the fire-drill of the Great Temple of Kitzuki and a straw ship of the dead to the mortuary tablets the text cites by figure number.

Progress of India, Japan and China in the Century is the fourth volume of “The Nineteenth Century Series,” a set of retrospective popular histories edited by Justin McCarthy and published by W. & R. Chambers in 1903. Its author, Sir Richard Temple, identifies himself on the title page as “Ex-Governor of Bombay” and the author of India in 1880 and Men and Events of My Time in India. In the Preface he explains his method plainly: “For Part I. and the largest, namely India, I am myself the witness for a great part of the century. For Parts II. and III. I have consulted the best and newest authorities in England.” This is a synthetic popular history rather than a travel account — Temple never claims to have set foot in Japan or China — arranged in three unequal parts: India (Chapters I–XIV, pages 1–195), Japan (XV–XXI, pages 196–287) and China (XXII–XXXI, pages 288–495). Each part opens with an “Introduction” sketching land and people, moves to a chapter on the country’s state in 1800, and closes with one on its state in 1899; the chapters in between follow whatever course, as Temple puts it, “the arrangement of the subjects” requires for each country. The narrative itself alternates between Temple’s own first-person framing — Part I opens “I am about to trace succinctly the progress during the nineteenth century…” and Part III “I am now going to sketch the progress of China…” — and long, explicitly credited quotations from named authorities, above all David Murray’s Japan (in the “Story of the Nations” series) and the Chamberlain and Mason guidebooks for the Japan Part, and Lord Charles Beresford’s 1899 commercial report and Professor Robert Douglas for the China Part.

Part I traces India from the wreck of Mughal authority and the Mahratta confederacy around 1800 through Wellesley’s conquests, the frontier question, the machinery of British government, the Mutinies of 1857 (Meerut, Delhi, Lucknow, John Lawrence, Colin Campbell), law and justice, land revenue and famine, trade and railways, municipal reform, education and Christian missions, and revenue and the opium controversy, closing with a chapter on the state of India in 1899 that tabulates every nineteenth-century Governor-General from Wellesley to Lord Curzon “of Kedleston. Still ruling.” It occupies close to two-fifths of the book’s narrative pages — by a rough count, about 195 of some 495.

Part II, on Japan, opens with a chapter of geography — Yezo in the north, the “Main Island” (which Temple, following Murray, calls Hondo rather than Nippon), Fuji-yama, Nikko, Tokyo and Yokohama, Kyoto and Lake Biwa, Osaka and Kobe, the Inland Sea, Shikoku and Kyushu, Nagasaki and Satsuma — and gives the population as “more than 45 millions.” The following chapter on the state of Japan in 1800 lays out the dual constitution: the Mikado at Kyoto, “heaven-born” and hedged by divinity; the roughly three hundred Daimyo, each ruling a domain answerable to the Shogun; and the Samurai, of whom Temple quotes Murray’s judgment that despite their “arrogance and overbearing pride,” “nearly all that was good and high-minded and scholarly in Japan was to be found among the ranks of the feudal retainers.” He traces the Shogunate from Yoritomo’s assumption of the title “Sei-i-tai-shogun” in the twelfth century, through Hideyoshi’s rise to supreme power and, after Hideyoshi’s death, Ieyasu’s victory over his rivals at Sekigahara in 1600, which founded the Tokugawa line that still held Yedo in 1800, and describes a country closed to all trade but the Dutch at Nagasaki, its arts — lacquer, ceramics, sword- and metal-work — at what he calls their “acme and zenith” between 1650 and 1800. A separate chapter, set off because the subject is “too sad and too sacred” to mix with ordinary Shogunate history, recounts the Jesuit mission that followed Francis Xavier into Kyushu, its six hundred thousand converts at its height, Hideyoshi’s and then Ieyasu’s suspicion that the missions were a cover for Spanish or Portuguese ambitions, and the persecution completed by Ieyasu’s grandson: a besieging force of some 160,000 troops sent against a Christian stronghold near Nagasaki, and the massacre of “every Christian, man, woman and child” inside it. Temple appends a footnote reporting that “from my own inquiries I understand that enlightened Japanese do not deny the severity of the persecution; they only urge in extenuation the strength of what they regard as the patriotic motive,” and closes the chapter by proposing “a monument … in the memories of European Christendom” to the Japanese martyrs.

The next two chapters carry the Shogunate from 1800 to its fall in 1868. Under Ienari and then Ieyoshi, repeated approaches by American, British, Russian and Dutch ships were turned away at Nagasaki until Commodore Perry’s squadron entered Yedo Bay on 8 July 1853; Perry returned in 1854 to conclude the first treaty, followed by British, Russian and Dutch agreements and, in 1858, full commercial treaties opening Nagasaki, Hakodate, Yokohama and other ports. Temple describes the domestic convulsion that followed in concrete episodes: the assassination of the regent Ii Naosuke in 1861; attacks on foreign legations by masterless Samurai, or “ronins”; the killing of an Englishman near Yedo that brought a British squadron to bombard Kagoshima in Satsuma in 1863; the Choshu Daimyo’s attempt to close the Shimonoseki strait to all foreign shipping, answered by an allied naval expedition in 1864; and the death of the Shogun Iemochi and of the Emperor Komei, succeeded by Mutsuhito. The last Shogun, Hitotsubashi, resigned in November 1867 — “from this month,” Temple writes, “must the date be taken for the end of the Shogunate which had lasted for over six hundred and fifty years” — and a short civil war carried the fighting north to Hakodate, where the Shogun’s fleet finally surrendered in July 1869.

The reign of the Emperor Mutsuhito occupies the two longest Japan chapters. Temple narrates the Emperor’s reception of foreign representatives at Kyoto in March 1868 (marred by an attack on the escort of the British minister, Sir Harry Parkes), the move of the capital to Yedo, renamed Tokyo, the surrender of the Daimyo’s fiefs beginning with Satsuma in 1869, the Formosa expedition and the 1876 treaty with Korea, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 led by Saigo, and the assassinations of the ministers Okubo and Mori Arinori. He sets out the 1889 Constitution in some detail — the two-house Diet of Peers and Representatives, the Emperor’s powers of war, peace and treaty-making, the new army raised on conscription and the navy built largely in Britain — and then the war with China of 1894–95: the naval action off the Yalu, the capture of Port Arthur and Wei-hai-Wei, the Treaty of Shimonoseki, and the Triple Intervention that forced Japan to retrocede the Liaotung Peninsula while keeping Formosa and the indemnity, Wei-hai-Wei itself passing to Britain in 1898. The closing chapter, “The State of Japan in 1899,” is built largely from quotation: Bishop Bickersteth of Tokyo on the Japanese, who “have a civilisation of their own,” one that is, in its own way, “as real as our own”; Temple’s own figure of about 85,000 Japanese Christians, of whom 44,000 were Roman Catholic, alongside the Church Missionary Society’s 1898 report, quoted at length, on the disestablishment of Shinto and Buddhism and on a separate, Protestant-only count of roughly 39,000 to 41,000 native Christians; statistics on compulsory elementary schooling, 631 miles of state railway and 1,873 of private line, an army of 284,700 and a navy of twenty-one ships; and several pages drawn from Lord Charles Beresford’s 1899 tour of Osaka’s arsenal and cotton mills and Kyoto’s municipal electric works. Temple ends the Part by judging that Japan is “arming steadily and determinedly” against the anticipated partition of China, and that “the key-note of the present Japanese character appears to be a strenuous patience.”

Part III turns to China, organized chapter by chapter around the reigns of five nineteenth-century Emperors — Chiaching, Taokwang, Hsienfeng, Tungchih and Kwanghsu — through the opium trade and the First Opium War (Lord Napier’s rebuff at Canton, Commissioner Lin’s seizure of British opium, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking), the Taiping Rebellion and its suppression by the ever victorious army under the American Ward and then “Chinese” Gordon, the war with Japan narrated again from the Chinese side, and the scramble that followed it — Russia at Port Arthur, Germany at Kiaochow, France on the Lienchow peninsula, and Britain at Wei-hai-Wei and Kowloon. The volume closes with a bibliography headed “Books and Publications by Which the Facts Mentioned in This Volume May Be Verified” (Hunter’s Indian Empire, Temple’s own earlier books, Murray’s Japan, Chamberlain and Mason, Beresford’s The Break-up of China, among others), a year-by-year “Chronological Table of Events” running from 1800 to 1899 for India, Japan and China side by side, and an alphabetical Index. Seven photogravure portraits are tipped into the volume on their own guard-leaves, each with a blank verso: Lord Curzon as frontispiece, then Admiral Ito facing page 1, Marquess Wellesley (“The Great Proconsul of India”) facing page 24, Lord John Lawrence facing page 63, the Emperor Mutsuhito facing page 246, the Emperor “Keen Lung” (Qianlong) facing page 298, and General Gordon facing page 363.

Kotto, subtitled Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs, presents itself on its own title page not quite as authored but as gathered: Lafcadio Hearn is named there as the man who “collected” it, identified as “Lecturer on English Literature in the Imperial University of Tōkyō, Japan,” with illustrations credited to Genjiro Yeto. The book is dedicated “To Sir Edwin Arnold, in grateful remembrance of kind words.” Under its curio-cabinet title it holds three distinct bodies of material: nine short old tales retold from Japanese sources, a much longer diary that Hearn presents as his translation of a dead Tokyo woman’s own manuscript, and ten further essays and sketches mixing folklore, natural history, and philosophical reverie. The nine tales, roughly a third of the book by length, are told in the third person as retellings; the diary that follows is framed by Hearn’s own first-person introduction and epilogue but is voiced, in translation, in the diarist’s own first person throughout its body; and nearly everything after that is narrated in Hearn’s own first person, with one further partial exception, “A Matter of Custom,” which encloses a priest’s first-person told story inside Hearn’s frame.

The book opens with “Old Stories,” introduced by a note explaining that “the following nine tales have been selected from the ‘Shin-Chomon-Shū,’ ‘Hyaku Monogatari,’ ‘Uji-Jūi-Monogatari-Shō,’ and other old Japanese books, to illustrate some strange beliefs. They are only Curios.” In order: “The Legend of Yurei-Daki,” where a woman who dares a haunted waterfall for a wager brings back the shrine’s money-box only to find her sleeping infant decapitated; “In a Cup of Tea,” which Hearn calls a “typical example” of a story old Japanese writers left deliberately unfinished, about a samurai’s attendant who swallows a face he finds reflected in his tea; “Common Sense,” where a hunter’s arrow proves that a priest’s nightly vision of Fugen Bosatsu on his six-tusked elephant is a shape-shifting badger; “Ikiryō,” in which a merchant’s wife’s unconfessed jealousy stalks a young clerk as a living ghost; “Shiryō,” where a wronged dead official speaks through a possessed maidservant to clear his name and recover his family’s fortune; “The Story of O-Kamé,” whose dead wife is found warm and unstiffened in her coffin after nightly visits to her husband; “Story of a Fly,” in which a devoted servant’s spirit returns as a marked fly seeking a Buddhist memorial service; “Story of a Pheasant,” where a farmer wrings the neck of the bird that is his reborn father and is banished for it; and “The Story of Chūgorō,” in which a young retainer is drained of blood, night after night, by a lover who proves to be a giant frog.

“A Woman’s Diary” follows. Hearn frames it in his own voice as a manuscript “put into my hands” — seventeen sheets found in a dead woman’s work-box — which he has translated “as closely as I could,” omitting only what he thought “sacred.” The diary itself, titled “Mukashi-Banashi,” runs from a matchmaker’s negotiations for her marriage to Namiki-Shi through theater outings and festival visits to the births and infant deaths of three children, breaking off undated not long before her own death; Hearn adds that she died before that month was out, in a two-room house kept on her husband’s ten yen a month. The essays that follow turn to Hearn’s own reflections: “Heiké-gani” considers crab shells bearing warrior-like faces, legendarily the drowned samurai of the Heiké clan; “Fireflies” mixes the biology of Professor S. Watase with an account of the commercial firefly-catching trade near Ishiyama and a long gathering of translated hokku; “A Drop of Dew” is a brief address to a dewdrop on his study window as an emblem of the Buddhist self dissolving into atoms; and “Gaki” opens with an epigraph from the Questions of King Milinda and moves from a reverie on the Suruga coast into an account of the thirty-six classes of hungry ghosts recognized in Japanese Buddhism, closing with Hearn’s own hope, should he be reborn an insect, to become a cicada or a dragon-fly.

“A Matter of Custom” encloses a story within a story: a skeptical Zen priest tells Hearn of the one thing he could never explain away — a mokugyō sounding and a chant rising, in the night, from a dead parishioner. “Revery” and “In the Dead of the Night” are philosophical set-pieces on death and dissolution, the second staged as a dialogue between the narrator and a personified Darkness pressing him on what pain might mean for “the atoms of your soul.” “Pathological” is a domestic sketch about Hearn’s cat Tama, who cries out and grips at nothing in her sleep for kittens that died soon after birth. “Kusa-Hibari” describes a caged cricket the size of a mosquito, bought for twelve cents, whose nightly song Hearn reads as the retrospective longing of organic memory, and which starves to death when its keeper forgets to feed it. The book ends with “The Eater of Dreams,” an account of the Baku — part horse, lion, elephant, rhinoceros, cow, and tiger — followed by Hearn’s own dream of striking down his own corpse with an axe, which the Baku, arriving at his window, declines to devour because it is “a most fortunate dream.” Genjiro Yeto’s illustrations run through the volume as full-page plates and decorative headpieces, among them a plate of Fugen Bosatsu seated on his elephant inserted partway into “Gaki” and a plate of the horned, taloned Baku inserted partway into “The Eater of Dreams,” with a smaller in-text figure of the creature on the essay’s final page; a photographic frontispiece of a Japanese cemetery monument precedes the title page.

Walter Del Mar’s Around the World Through Japan narrates a circuit of the globe begun on the P. & O. steamship Oceana, joined at Tilbury on the 12th of January and kept in the river by a gale till nearly midnight, getting away at last only by leaving an anchor behind her; it ended when the Oceanic cast anchor in the Mersey on the afternoon of September 27, 1899. Thirty-five chapters carry the traveler out by Gibraltar, Marseilles, Suez, Aden, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canton, Macao and Shanghai, and home by Hawaii, California and the American continent — but Japan takes nineteen of those chapters and rather more than half the pages, from the landfall at Nagasaki to the departure from Yokohama fourteen weeks later. The first preface hopes the book will “prepare those who are about to make a similar tour for some of its inevitable disappointments as well as enjoyments.” The Japan chapters open on the charge that “a clever group of missionaries and teachers” has thrown “such a halo of romance around Japan and the Japanese” that no visitor can arrive unprejudiced. This second edition of 1904 adds a long new preface, dated May of that year, which calls the book an “unvarnished tale” and traces European knowledge of Japan from Mendez Pinto and Xavier down to the outbreak of the war with Russia and to Japanese war finance. The narrative is carried in the first-person plural, and turns to “you” whenever it becomes practical.

The chapters of the voyage out run a day’s sights into long expository digressions — the ship’s sweepstake pools, their rules and takings, coolie wages in Ceylon. Port Said is “an emporium of the indecencies of literature, art, and nature.” Ceylon occupies three chapters — Colombo, Kandy, the Matale coach, sixty-eight miles behind thirty-two broken-down horses, its fare table graded by race, Dambulla, and the dagabas of Anuradhapura measured against St. Paul’s and the Great Pyramid. Java is a side trip with Ferguson and Royds, Singapore’s hotels being full: Papandajan climbed with a retinue of ten men, Dutch rule through “elder brothers,” the Sumatra indenture law. Singapore brings Raffles’s epitaph and admiring pages on its Chinese. The passage to Hong Kong on the Austrian Lloyd’s Maria Valerie, with 520 Chinese forward, brings a riot over burnt rice met with muskets and hot-water hose, fan-tan worked out at nine per cent to the banker against Monte Carlo’s odds, and a coolie brought aboard dying and put overboard without ceremony one morning. Hong Kong’s club, Peak and plague returns; Canton by the paddle-steamer Hankow, armed against pirates, where Ah Cum Senior shows the Western Suburbs and Ah Mak the execution ground, a potter’s drying yard five days out of six, and the Examination Hall’s nearly twelve thousand cells. Macao advertises itself as “the Monte Carlo of the Far East”; Shanghai gives the Bund, the compradores, and a dozen pages of essay on China — the Manchus, mandarins, merchants, missionaries, the Empress-Dowager.

Japan opens with the Osesaki Light on the evening of April 4th and an entry into Nagasaki harbor in the dark. Women pass coal aboard in rope baskets through the night, so that the first sight of Japanese women “was therefore not a favourable one”; jinrikishas run out to Mogi; the Inland Sea proves “barren-looking, bare, and brown.” At Kobe and Yokohama the practical apparatus of the book assembles itself: the guide Kin Nagura, engaged by letter before the party left England, whose English is reprinted verbatim as a specimen of “English as she is Japped”; some two pages on old and new currency; the dwarf trees of the Bluff nurseries; railway statistics ending in the observation that Japan has the world’s cheapest fares and, on a sixth of Britain’s mileage, three times as many derailments. He travels by Murray’s, defers to it on routes, distances and inns — “you may believe ‘Murray’s’ against all the world” — and quarrels only with its adjectives, which run riot. In Tokyo the cherry-blossoms are found no better than an English orchard’s, and the Imperial garden party of April 13th at the Enryo-kwan yields a close description of the Emperor Mutsuhito’s walk and ill-fitting coat, and of the Japanese guests — generals, officials, noblemen — filling their handkerchiefs with cake at the buffet. Kyoto brings thirty-eight maiko, the bibbed Jizo of Kiyomizu-dera, a Hongwanji cable woven from poor women’s hair, Namikawa’s cloisonné, and rapids compared unfavorably with the water chutes at Coney Island.

Westward and southward the traveling grows rougher. Nara’s deer are deflated, Horyuji’s seventh-century halls and paintings admired, and the pilgrimage to Koya-san ends in a temple that admits the party only after Nagura explains that his master has shaken the Mikado’s hand — after which Del Mar earns his supper by describing the Grande Chartreuse to the priests while he bathes. Shikoku produces the landlady of the Hiragame-ro at Tokushima and several pages anatomizing the Japanese inn, from the footwear at the entrance to the shared quilt and the vermin in the matting; then Kompira’s counted steps, a wedding concluded without priest or official, Miyajima’s votive rice-spoons, and the baths at Dogo. In Kyushu come Beppu’s solfataras and gravel troughs, the country basha with its nine-inch seats, the Nunobiki cascades measured against Murray’s estimate and found a quarter the claimed height, and the Satsuma pottery at Oniwayaki, where he watches men throw glaze at a vase with their eyes shut and teaches them to dip it instead. Ama-no-Hashidate is dismissed; Lake Biwa’s celebrated eight views are answered with a mock catalogue of the eight famous views of St. James’s Park. At Ise the trees are magnificent and the buildings not worth seeing; the Ise Ondo is a brothel-keeper’s parade of his inmates. Nagoya, Fuji as “the gigantic ash-heap that it really is,” Hokkaido and its Ainos, Matsushima, Nikko as “the Mecca of European tourists in Japan,” the Kamakura Daibutsu, sumo and Danjuro in the Forty-seven Ronin fill out the narrative.

Five chapters then leave the road for the people. “The Japanese” divides the country into an official class of about five per cent and the mass beneath, sets the franchise at fifteen yen of direct taxes and just over five hundred thousand voters, calls the government an oligarchy, and closes on two indictments headed “Commercial Dishonesty” and “Evasions of Veracity.” “Japanese Women” walks the Yoshiwara — the barred show-windows, the gilt screens, the joro at their little lacquer tables — then gives the tariff of the houses, the mortgaging of girls against a family debt, the evasion of the protective laws, and woman as a chattel of father, husband or son; the marriage, divorce, illegitimacy, still-birth and suicide returns are set against Mrs. Hugh Fraser, Chamberlain, Henry Norman and Hearn, and Bryce’s test of civilization yields the verdict that “Japan has not advanced very far.” “Japanese Traits” has the official who asks whether Japan is destined to rule Asia and, teased with “Why be satisfied with Asia?”, answers “Asia first, more will follow!”; it grants that “in cleanliness of person the common people of Japan surpass any other nation,” but “it is the cleanliness of the Russian who washes his skin and wears his dirty clothes.” “Japanese Arts and Artisans” traces Japan’s debt to China and the schools of painting down to Hokusai; “Trade and Finance” runs from the boom after the war with China through the gold basis of 1897 to the crash of 1901.

“Impressions of Japan” gathers the case. Alcock, Dr. Peery, Miss Scidmore, Knapp and Hearn are quoted and then answered: “Japan is, in fact, a sterile country, largely volcanic,” whose beauties lie scattered “like plums in a pudding,” and where “the scenery that is characteristic is generally not beautiful, while that which is beautiful is generally not peculiar to or characteristic of Japan.” More natural beauty, he writes, can be seen in a fortnight on the continent of Europe than in three months in Japan. He names nevertheless the best scenery he saw — the walks to Tonomine and to Koya-san, the valley of the Watarase-gawa, Fuji from Hakone — gives the rainfall and the roads in figures, complains for a page and a half of night-soil agriculture, and makes the cicada the country’s characteristic sound. A Japanese newspaper’s plaintive question why foreigners either laud or decry is answered by polling his fellow-travelers — “Most overrated country,” “Japan fearfully overwritten,” “Most things a fraud” — and by the American woman who was disappointed but means to send glowing accounts home regardless. Scholars, teachers and missionaries resident in Japan idealize, resident merchants disparage, and the juster view, he concludes, is that of globe-trotters like Curzon, Norman and Kipling. Hawaii is then treated warmly, with Honolulu, the Oahu sugar mill, its Japanese plantation labor and Mauna Loa in eruption; California brings San Francisco, Yosemite by stage-coach and the Mariposa Big Trees; and Pike’s Peak, Chicago and New York carry him home.

The last chapter is not narrative but “Suggestions to Tourists”: a model timetable pivoting on arrival in Japan in the first week of April, his own dates set down port by port, an estimate of two guineas a day for a bachelor traveling first class, and then an inventory of things to carry — two dozen linen shirts, five hundred wax matches in a tin box, a canteen weighing two pounds two ounces, a traveling filter, a kodak that must be slowed down in the Japanese damp, a medicine chest. The book ends on the last item of that list, the yanagi-gori basket trunks that nest inside one another as their contents are eaten; there is no closing flourish. An unnumbered appendix follows on Japan’s three naval arsenals and the Manchurian railway mileages, with a note that Japanese railway time is kept on the 135th meridian and a full-page table of steamer distances between the ports in “the area of hostilities.” Fifty inserted plates carry fifty-two half-tone photographs, the list of illustrations crediting them, where it credits them at all, to Farsari of Yokohama, Plâté of Colombo, Davey of Honolulu, Fiske of Yosemite and Hiestand of Manitou; it names no map. A nine-page double-column index follows, and eight pages of the publisher’s press notices, separately paginated, end the volume.

This is a compact trade handbook produced for English-language readers around Japan’s exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, written by Hajime Hoshi, who elsewhere in the book identifies himself as publisher, from an office at 203 Broadway in New York, of the monthly Japan and America and of a Japanese-language weekly aimed at merchants. His preface states the book’s aim outright: since “the wide difference between Japanese writing and the written languages of Western countries” has kept Japan poorly understood abroad, the book means to present “the real conditions of Japan to foreigners” and so widen her foreign trade. Hoshi backs the appeal with figures — Japan’s total foreign commerce rising from 26,246,545 yen in 1868 to 582,581,800 yen in 1903, a gain of 2,219 per cent — and with quoted endorsements from the Japanese Minister at Washington and from the chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics. Portrait plates of Baron Matsudaira and Mr. Otani face the title page, and photographic plates run through the volume, among them a tea plantation, Yoro Fall in Gifu Province, and cormorant fishing on the Nagara River. The book runs in two main parts: a statistical handbook on Japan and her colony of Formosa filling nearly a hundred pages, followed by a shorter, building-by-building account of what Japan showed at St. Louis.

The handbook opens with the reigning house, the constitution and cabinet, and the prefectural system, then moves through area, geography and population, with tables of year-by-year totals, marriage and death rates, and the populations of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and some twenty other cities. Manufacturing is taken industry by industry — raw silk, cotton spinning, matting, straw plait, match-making, paper, camphor, lacquer, porcelain, bronze, ivory, sake and shoyu each given output figures and named centers of production — and agriculture follows the same pattern through rice, mugi, beans, tea, sericulture and livestock. A long foreign-trade section tabulates exports and imports by country and by article for 1901 and 1902, with a separate accounting of trade with the United States; chapters follow on tariffs, banking, currency, insurance and clearing houses, transportation (railways, shipping lines, shipbuilding), communication (post, telegraph, telephone), forestry (with entries on individual timber species such as hinoki, sugi and akamatsu), fishery, mining, the army, the navy and education. A separate chapter on Formosa, ceded by China in 1895, covers its administration, finance and trade before dwelling at length on its tea industry — cultivation, manufacture, refining, the export market — and on camphor and the Tamsui hat; a short account of the Imperial Red Cross Society’s organization and membership carries the statistical survey through page 111.

The second part walks building by building through Japan’s display at the fair: the Japanese Garden with its pavilion, tea house and a reproduction of Kyoto’s Kinkaku Temple; the educational exhibit in the Palace of Education; a fine-arts selection of under 300 pieces chosen by a thirty-one-member national jury; the Manufactures building’s displays of silk, matting and straw braid; the Varied Industries hall, entered through a gateway modeled on Nikko’s Yomeimon, where the text prices individual pieces — a pair of embroidered screens and a pair of cloisonné vases at $9,000 each, a silver vase at $4,500, a reproduced Nikko palace room shown by Yamanaka & Co. at over $45,000; the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy, with models of the Ashio copper mine and the Mitsui company’s Manda pit; the Palace of Agriculture and, opposite it, the Formosan exhibit built around a tower of solid camphor and a display of oolong tea; the electricity, forestry and fish-and-game exhibits, the last including a $12,000 pearl shown by Mikimoto of Tokyo; the Nippon Yusen Kaisha’s $50,000 reception room in the Transportation building; a working Japanese typesetting exhibit in the Liberal Arts palace, run by Hoshi himself; and the privately operated “Fair Japan” concession on the Pike, built around an antique, three-hundred-year-old Nio-mon gate reassembled from a temple in Hidachi province, and featuring a Japanese theater with eighty actors and actresses, a tea house staffed by fifteen geisha, and an art collection. The volume ends with a bibliography — an English-language reading list on Japan sorted by topic: history, industry, finance, commerce, literature, law, religion and the rest — followed by a run of paid pages, nearly as long as the statistical handbook that opens the book, taken out by individual prefectural guilds, manufacturers and the two steamship lines, each describing its wares, export volumes and prices for the benefit of American buyers.

Impressions of Japan is George H. Rittner’s personal record of a journey through the country, organized not as a day-by-day itinerary but as eleven chapters on separate themes: the country’s natural beauties, its art, its people and their homes, bathing customs, children, the geisha, the stage, “civilisation,” missionaries and religion, the temples and their gods, and a closing farewell titled “Sayonara.” The preface, signed only “G. H. R.,” states that Rittner’s object was not merely to describe his journeys through Japan but to record impressions of the rapid changes the country had undergone over the preceding decade, above all the decline of an art that had been, twenty years earlier, its “chief and most distinguishing glory”; the book is dedicated “to Dorothy,” and Rittner thanks a Mr. Max von Grunelius for photographs that helped complete the illustrations. He traveled at least part of the time with an unnamed male companion — for three weeks the two went on foot through the interior with a single hired Japanese coolie as guide, interpreter, and porter — and moved between Yokohama, Tokyo, Kioto, Nikko, Kamakura, Osaka, Kobe, and Miyajima by steamer, train, and jinrickisha; recurring comparisons to Shanghai, Hongkong, Macao, and Canton suggest a wider Asian itinerary of which the Japan visit was a part. He writes mostly in the first person — “I formed ideas of Japan before I ever intended to visit the country” — but repeatedly shifts into direct second-person address of the reader, a device that recurs from the opening chapter (“Imagine a steamer slowly gliding into port”; “Fancy yourself for the first time in a strange land”) through the account of the social order (“Go anywhere in that country; see everything; study the people”) and an extended bathing scene (“You are conducted out into the garden … you notice persons of a different sex … you inwardly curse Japan”); at some points he shifts instead to “we” when his traveling companion is present, as when chapter six opens, “My friend and I spent some time at Kioto.”

The book opens at Yokohama harbor with a first sight of the junks, the Bund, and Fujiyama in the distance, then works through the Japanese flower calendar month by month — plum blossoms in January, cherry blossoms in April marked by the geisha’s “cherry dance,” wistaria and azaleas in May, irises and peonies in summer, and chrysanthemums in October at the Mikado’s garden fête at Akasaka — before describing a boat shooting the rapids of the river Fujikawa and the three-week walking tour round the base of Fuji with the hired coolie. Chapter two turns to Japanese art: garden design at a tea-house near Nagasaki, the deliberately unconventional method of Japanese painting, the manufacture of Satsuma ware at Kobe and damascene and cloisonné work at Kioto, and gold and cherry lacquer, which Rittner ranks as the finest of all the arts of Japan and sets against what he calls the soulless, subdivided labor of a European cabinetmaker’s shop. Chapter three surveys the social order and the home: the shizoku class risen from the samurai and daimyo, the degraded status of the eta street-sweepers, the subordinate position of wives under a mother-in-law’s authority, marriages arranged by a go-between called the nakodo, the practice of concubinage to secure a male heir, the double suicide called shinju, and a passage from Will Adams’s 1612 letter calling the Japanese “good of nature, courteous above measure, and valiant in war.” The chapter closes inside a country chaya, with its removal of boots, its nightly futon and wooden makura pillow, and its predawn disturbances by a massaging amma-san and a shutter-opening “Boy.”

Bathing customs fill chapter four: the small charcoal-heated tub in a tea-house garden, a second-person account of a scalding bath endured before mixed onlookers, the mixed public hot springs at Atami, Kawara-yu, and Yumoto, and the 1,200 public baths of Tokyo. Chapter five catalogues the children’s year of festivals and games — the two New Years, the doll festival of the third of March, the carp banners of Tango no Sekku on the fifth of May, the book’s “Evening of Stars” in the seventh month, the Bon Matsuri feast of lanterns, kite-fighting with glass-coated strings, top-spinning, the paper-butterfly trick he could never catch out as a fraud, and the board game go. Chapter six narrows to the geisha, setting the “uncorrupted” country geisha he watched perform the cherry dance at a village tea-house — her makeup applied in front of the guests, her nine-strong troupe, the sake and raw fish that followed — against the geisha of the treaty ports, whom he judges corrupted by European visitors rather than by anything native to the calling. Chapter seven recounts an afternoon at a Tokyo theater watching the actor Danjuro, “the ninth who has distinguished himself on the stage,” perform a death scene, and sketches the history of the no and kabuki traditions and the former social disgrace of acting.

The book’s longest and most argumentative chapter, “Civilisation,” abandons description for polemic: Rittner argues that the treaties following the opening of the country enriched Japan in trade while corrupting its art, its morals, and its women, and extends the argument into current politics, defending Japan’s conduct in the war with China, denouncing the 1895 Triple Intervention of Russia, France, and Germany that forced Japan from Port Arthur, and citing the Kaiser’s “Yellow Peril” allegorical picture — showing the Archangel Michael pointing the powers of Europe toward a flaming image of Buddha — as evidence of a deeper design against China. Chapter nine turns the same argument on Christian missionaries, whom he calls “mostly narrow-minded, brainless fools” ignorant of the Shinto and Buddhist religions they set out to displace, again quoting Will Adams — this time on Japanese “relligion” — alongside Sir Ernest Satow and Arthur Diosy’s The New Far East. Chapter ten returns to description, touring the temples of Nikko and the legend of their sacred red bridge, the bronze Daibutsu at Kamakura, and a crowded pantheon of Shinto and Buddhist deities — Amida, Jizo, Daruma, Fudo and Emma-o, the three monkeys of Koshin, the healer Binzuru, the many-armed Kwannon, and the seven gods of luck.

A rickisha collision that Rittner offers as proof of Japanese good manners opens the closing chapter, “Sayonara,” which follows his departure by steamer from Yokohama harbor past Enoshima and Kamakura, through the inland sea past Osaka, Kobe, and the floating temple of Miyajima, and through the Straits of Shimonoseki to a last stop at Nagasaki before the ship stands out to open sea. The book is illustrated throughout with photographs “taken by the author and his friends,” as the title page states: a frontispiece captioned, in the book’s own List of Illustrations, “Shell Picking at Kamakura” (the mounted plate itself carries the shorter caption “Shell Picking”), and a further series of plates, each captioned in capitals and keyed “to face page” a stated number, opening with “A Street Scene in Yokohama” facing page 6 and closing with “Sayonara” facing page 212. A List of Illustrations precedes the text and an index follows the eleventh chapter.

Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation is a sociological and historical essay on Japanese national character, built through analysis and argument rather than as a travel book or memoir of a journey. On the title page Lafcadio Hearn identifies himself only as “Honorary Member of the Japan Society, London; formerly Lecturer in the Imperial University of Tōkyō (1896–1903), and Fourteen Years a Resident of Japan,” and sets beneath his name an epigraph from Walter Bagehot — “Perhaps all very marked national characters can be traced back to a time of rigid and pervading discipline” — that states the book’s thesis before its first chapter begins. That chapter, “Difficulties,” argues that no full interpretation of Japan is yet possible: of the “thousand books” written about the country, the “really precious volumes,” Hearn says, number “scarcely a score,” owing to the sheer difficulty of perceiving what underlies the surface of Japanese life, and to most such books’ neglect or misrepresentation of Japanese religion. A second chapter, “Strangeness and Charm,” builds from Hearn’s own arrival in Japan “in the white sunshine of a perfect spring day,” and his admission that, after fourteen years, he still cannot fully understand the Japanese, into an argument that the deepest strangeness of Japan is psychological rather than visual — “a psychological differentiation measurable by scores of centuries,” comparable in kind, though not in degree, to the discipline behind early Greek civilization. The chapters that follow move systematically through Shinto and Buddhism, the old class system and the rise of military government, the Jesuit missions, the Tokugawa peace, the Meiji Restoration, and modern industrial Japan, arguing throughout, with constant reference to Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology and to the author of La Cité Antique on ancient Greece and Rome, that Japanese institutions and Japanese character are a still-living stage of the same evolutionary sequence that ancestor-worship once produced in the antique West.

The chapters “The Ancient Cult,” “The Religion of the Home,” “The Japanese Family,” “The Communal Cult,” “Developments of Shinto,” “Worship and Purification,” and “The Rule of the Dead” lay out the argument in detail. Shinto, Hearn argues, is not one religion but three superimposed forms of ancestor-worship — the domestic cult of family ancestors, the communal cult of the Ujigami or tutelar clan-god, and the national cult of the Sun-goddess and her imperial descendants — so that, as he puts it, “the history of Japan is really the history of her religion.” He traces the domestic cult from primitive grave-rites and the abandonment of the house where a death occurred, through the hitogaki or “human hedge” of buried human sacrifices abolished by the Emperor Suinin, to junshi, the practice of following a dead lord in suicide, restrained by Iyeyasu’s edicts but recorded, Hearn says, even “during my own time.” “The Japanese Family” describes the patriarchal household — its power of life and death over children, its polygyny, its subordination of women, its rights of adoption, disinheritance, and divorce — as a religious rather than an affectionate bond, set point by point beside the Greek and Roman patriarchal family. “The Communal Cult” describes the coercive power of the village, quoting Professor Wigmore’s translated Kumi-chō, the five-household group regulations that made every family answerable for its neighbors’ conduct, and Hearn’s own account of the results of a Shinto festival procession’s breaking into the house of a family that had wronged the community. “Worship and Purification” describes the rites of the great shrines of Ise and Kitzuki, the twice-yearly o-harai lustration, and the child priestesses called miko; “The Rule of the Dead” catalogues Tokugawa sumptuary law in comparably minute detail — the permitted length of a farmer’s house, the material of his wife’s sandal-thongs, the number of dishes at a wedding feast, all fixed by income — as evidence of a discipline that was, Hearn insists, “self-imposed” and that produced “a wonderful average of character” at a cost “only the evolutionist can imagine.”

Buddhism enters the argument in “The Introduction of Buddhism,” which describes how the new faith, reaching Japan from Korea about 552 A.D. but not spreading widely until the ninth century, succeeded by absorbing rather than attacking the ancestor-cult, as it had already learned to do in China: it declared the Shinto gods incarnations of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, taught that the dead still needed the offerings of the living, and added to the older cult a doctrine of karmic reward and punishment, the judge of the dead Emma, the hot hells called To-kwatsu and the cold hells called Abuda, and consoling figures such as Kwannon and Jizo. Hearn credits Buddhism with bringing to Japan nearly all of its painting, sculpture, and temple architecture, and, through the parish priest’s double office of teacher and public registrar, most of premodern popular education. “The Higher Buddhism” turns from the popular cult to Buddhist metaphysics proper, arguing at length, with parallel quotations from Herbert Spencer’s First Principles and from Haeckel’s monism, that the higher doctrine’s teaching of a single underlying Reality, of matter as an aggregate of Karma, and of a moral order pervading even inorganic substance, anticipates or parallels contemporary Western evolutionary philosophy — while insisting that this philosophy of Nirvana was never preached to, or understood by, the ordinary Japanese believer.

Two chapters then turn from religion to social structure and power. “The Social Organization” sets out the class system that, Hearn says, never developed before Meiji beyond “the clan-stage”: families claiming descent from the gods, divided into the Kobetsu (“Imperial Branch”) and Shinbetsu (“Divine Branch”), down to the Bambetsu or “Foreign Branch” comprising the mass of the people; the Kuge court nobility, dominated for centuries by the Fujiwara; the Buke or samurai, graded from the great daimyo down through hatamoto and gokenin; the Heimin, or common people — farmers, ranked highest of the three, then artisans, then merchants, ranked lowest despite their wealth; and, outside the four classes altogether, the outcast Eta and the wandering hinin, “not-men” whose killing was not counted as murder. “The Rise of the Military Power” narrates the long eclipse of direct imperial rule: the Fujiwara regency; the Minamoto-Taira wars, ending at the sea-fight of Dan-no-ura in 1185; the Hojo regents; the Ashikaga shogunate and its ruinous division of the imperial line into Northern and Southern Courts; and the eventual pacification of the country by Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu, whose victory at Sekigahara opened two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule — while insisting throughout that the Mikado’s religious authority as “Heavenly Sovereign” was never usurped even by the shoguns who stripped him of every civil power. “The Religion of Loyalty” follows filial piety as it widens into loyalty to a lord, through junshi, ritual suicide (harakiri for men, jigai for samurai women), and the vendetta or kataki-uchi, illustrated at length by the story of the Forty-Seven Ronin and the address, quoted in full, that the avengers left at their dead lord’s tomb at Sengakuji.

Religious conflict returns, now with the West, in “The Jesuit Peril,” which tells the story of the Portuguese mission, from Xavier’s landing at Kagoshima in 1549 through its rapid early success — some two hundred churches by 1581, eleven converted daimyo by 1585 — its intolerant destruction of Buddhist temples in Kyushu, its suppression under Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu, and its final extinction in the massacre of Christian rebels at Shimabara in 1638. Hearn quotes at length from the letters of the English pilot Will Adams on his interviews with Iyeyasu, and argues that Iyeyasu’s edict against Christianity, and the two centuries of national seclusion that followed it, were a defensible act of political self-preservation rather than simple bigotry, since Roman Christianity, unlike Buddhism, refused to tolerate the ancestor-cult on which the whole social order rested. “Feudal Integration” turns to the Tokugawa peace, arguing that its very rigidity — its sumptuary law, its universal etiquette, its guild communism — gave Japanese aesthetic culture, from color-printing to the tea-ceremony and the art of flower-arrangement, room to develop as it never had during centuries of war, and closes with an extended, admiring portrait of “the Japanese woman as prepared and perfected by the old-time education,” compared to Antigone, to Alcestis, and to a Sister of Charity, as the supreme and, Hearn insists, unrepeatable product of that training.

By Hearn’s own account, the Meiji transformation completes the argument rather than escaping it. “The Shinto Revival” credits three scholars — Mabuchi, Motowori, and Hirata — with the philological and religious revival of native Shinto learning that, patronized unwittingly by Tokugawa princes themselves, eventually supplied the intellectual case for restoring the Emperor and ending the shogunate. The chapters that follow argue that this restoration was far more superficial than it appeared. “Survivals” compares reorganized Japan to an ornamental garden tree that keeps its clipped shape after the shears are removed; “Modern Restraints” and “Official Education” find the old communal coercion intact in customs as different as the jinrikisha-runners’ code against overtaking a slower colleague, a Japanese master-carpenter’s guild monopoly over his clients’ houses “for the rest of your life,” and the transformation of the gentle, deferential schoolboy into the “secretive and inscrutable” university graduate bound for government service. “Industrial Danger” works through the four revolutionary periods that, on the authority of the author of La Cité Antique, mark the history of ancient Greece and Rome, to argue that Japan, having begun its own “second revolutionary period” only in 1871, is already sliding toward a third and fourth — an industrial oligarchy, a factory system reproducing servitude “under harsher forms than ever were imagined under the feudal era,” and a real danger of anarchy — and quotes Professor Huxley’s 1888 warning to English manufacturers as advice equally needed by Japanese legislators.

The book’s final chapter, “Reflections,” steps back to acknowledge the “illusion” in the charm it has been describing throughout, and ties the argument explicitly to current events: written while Japan was at war with Russia, it reads the early Japanese victories, and the ritual suicide of soldiers aboard the sunk transport Kinshu Maru, as evidence of the same ancestor-religion described in the book’s opening chapters, and closes with a warning that foreign capital’s right to hold Japanese land, not Russian arms, is the danger Japan cannot survive conceding. An appendix, “Herbert Spencer’s Advice to Japan,” reprints in full a private letter of August 1892 from Spencer to Baron Kaneko Kentaro — released to the London Times only after Spencer’s death in December 1903, while this book was itself in preparation — urging Japan to keep foreigners “at arm’s length,” and forbidding them to own land, work government mines, engage in the coasting trade, or intermarry with Japanese; Hearn adds his own note tracing how closely actual Meiji law on land and marriage had followed that advice. The volume ends with a short section of “Bibliographical Notes” acknowledging Hearn’s debt to specific papers in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan — by Sir Ernest Satow on Shinto ritual and the revival of “Pure Shinto,” by Professor J. H. Wigmore on land tenure and local institutions, by W. G. Aston on early Japanese history, and by J. H. Gubbins on the Tokugawa feudal system and the introduction of Christianity — followed by an alphabetical index.

Japan: The Place and the People advertises itself, on its own title page, as a book “illustrated with over three hundred coloured plates and half-tones,” and that program is close to the point of the volume. G. Waldo Browne’s text is a topical, pictorial survey rather than a travel narrative: forty-one chapters move in turn through geography, native customs, religion, popular pastimes, feudal history, and recent political and military events, doubling back across the map whenever the subject calls for it rather than following one journey from start to finish. An Introduction “by the Hon. Kogoro Takahira, Japanese Minister to the United States” opens the book on Japan’s own terms, arguing that the “rapid progress” astonishing foreign observers is “nothing more than the normal development of the national life,” rooted in an imperial line he says has “continued unbroken for 2,560 years”; he worries that Japan’s recent “exploits of arms” will eclipse her “other and equally meritorious attributes,” and closes instead by pledging that Japan seeks “good will and cordial relations with all nations,” especially, he adds, her “immediate neighbours.” Browne’s own descriptive chapters are carried in a touring “we,” a party guided by “our Japanese friend” from temple to legend; that frame loosens once the book turns to feudal wars and Meiji-era politics, which settle into ordinary third-person history.

The early chapters follow a fairly standard itinerary for the period — landing at Yokohama, “the New York of Japan,” touring Tokyo’s parks, moats, and fire-towers, then striking north to Nikko — but Browne keeps breaking off the itinerary for set-piece description: the volcanic chain running from the Kuriles to the Kyukyus and the 1887 eruption of Bandaisan, the etiquette of dress and diet, the mausolea of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu at Nikko with their carved “three monkeys” and Yo Mei Gate, and a Rip-Van-Winkle-style legend (the woodsman Visu, who watches two unearthly maidens play go and comes home a lifetime later) offered to explain Fujiyama’s origin. Whole chapters turn to nature and custom rather than incident: fox- and deer-lore of the “green woods,” a Hokkaido detour among the Ainu, described as a conquered and physically distinct race being resettled into farming under a government colony at Sapporo, Shinto and Buddhist doctrine with their nearly two hundred thousand shrines and over a hundred thousand temples, and a run of chapters on flower festivals, sumo wrestling (traced to a legendary bout “twenty-five years before Christ”), kite-tournaments at Nagasaki, and geisha dance. Kyoto, “the heart of Japan,” gets its own chapter as the old imperial capital, its bells and shrines set against the bronze Buddha of Kamakura, called “the finest work of its kind in Japan.”

A run of ten chapters is given to history, opening with Japan’s own creation myths — the sun-goddess Amaterasu lured from her cave, the legendary first emperor Jimmu Tenno — and moving through Empress Jingu’s invasion of Korea, the five-hundred-year Fujiwara regency, and the Taira-Minamoto war that ends at Dan-no-ura in 1185 with Yoritomo’s rise to power. Browne devotes real space to the general Yoshitsune, whom a long antiquarian aside entertains as possibly identical with Genghis Khan; to the Hojo regents’ defeat of Kublai Khan’s Mongol armada, wrecked, in this telling, by a typhoon the Japanese credited to prayers sent to the shrines at Ise; and to the unifying generals Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu. A full chapter retells the revenge of the forty-seven ronins against the official Kotsuke no Suke, which Browne calls “to Japan what the Iliad is to Greece,” and a following chapter, “The Soul of Japan,” strings together quotations from Lafcadio Hearn and the old chronicler “Kampffer” on samurai loyalty and daimyo processions to argue that Yamato Damashii, the “Soul of Japan,” outlasted feudalism’s collapse.

The book’s later chapters turn to Browne’s own era. He walks through the 1868-69 restoration, quoting the daimyo’s own instrument surrendering their fiefs to the throne, the October 1872 opening of the Tokyo-Yokohama railway, and Japan’s move against the “coolie trade” after the Peruvian ship Maria Luz put in at Yokohama with kidnapped Chinese laborers aboard. Formosa and Korea occupy him at length, in terms that present Japanese expansion as an unambiguous civilizing benefit to “savage” islanders and a “hermit nation” alike — the 1874 punitive expedition to Formosa, the opening of Korea by treaty in 1876 — before a full chapter on the 1894-95 war with China, tracing the battles of Ping-Yang and the Yalu River, the fall of Port Arthur, and the Treaty of Shimonoseki. “Men of the Times” profiles the restoration’s leaders by name — Kido, Okubo (assassinated in 1878), Iwakura, and Ito, framer of the Constitution — while Saigo appears twice over, first leading the Formosa expedition and later as the doomed leader of the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, dying, Browne says, “as befitted a true defender of Yamato Damashii.”

Osaka, “the shrine of Mammon,” gets a chapter of its own as Japan’s commercial capital, its cotton mills, silk exports, and Mint set against Kyoto’s temples and Tokyo’s politics; a companion chapter, “The Power behind the Throne,” works through the national debt, the war indemnity from China, and the Constitution and Diet of 1890-91, with the rival parties of Counts Itagaki and Okuma sketched by name. The closing chapter, “The Course of Empire,” steps back to divide Japan’s history into eight self-defined eras and set them against Rome, Greece, and the Arab and Moorish centers of Bagdad and Cordova, credits Commodore Perry and Townsend Harris above every other foreign agent for Japan’s opening, and ends by predicting that Japan will do for China what earlier empires did for their own neighbors, “westward the course of empire” taking its way once more.

That argument sits underneath a plate program the front matter itself spells out in detail. Two successive lists titled “Full Page Illustrations” run to sixty-seven full-page plates, sixteen of them marked “Coloured,” starting with a frontispiece captioned “A Buddhist Temple” and a map facing page 6, and ending with a view of the “Entrance to Uyeno Park, Tokio” facing page 434. Three further lists of “Text Illustrations,” printed in double columns, add several hundred smaller photographs worked directly into the running text: costume studies, temple and garden views, cormorant fishermen, tea-pickers, rickshaw men, and street scenes in Yokohama, Tokyo, and Osaka. Together the two kinds of plate bear out the title page’s claim of “over three hundred coloured plates and half-tones,” spread across all forty-one chapters rather than gathered at the front or back of the book.

Karl Kiyoshi Kawakami’s Japan and the Japanese As Seen by Foreigners Prior to the Beginning of the Russo-Japanese War is not a personal narrative but an edited anthology—a compilation of excerpts and essays by dozens of foreign, mostly American and British, writers on Japan, with a few German pieces given in English translation, arranged under short thematic headings and credited by name in the table of contents. Kawakami explains in his own introduction, dated Seattle, May 1904, that the project grew out of research he had done for an earlier book, The Political Ideas of Modern Japan, and that he assembled the collection during “a period of idleness” caused by illness while living in Seattle. He states his editorial aim plainly: to act as “an impartial reader,” making “no discrimination between views favorable or unfavorable to Japan, between correct or incorrect representation,” and including “even malignant and sinister criticisms” had he found any—though he admits he found “eulogists” far more abundant than “denunciators.” He also says the book was “primarily conceived to furnish the younger element of our nation”—young Japanese readers of English—“with wholesome reading,” and that he “deliberately avoided quoting criticisms and observations on such matters as might offend a keen sense of propriety.”

The excerpted material ranges widely across Japanese life, art, and manners, each piece attributed to its author rather than narrated by Kawakami himself. Andrew Carnegie’s diary-style “First Impressions of Japan” entries, describing his 1878 arrival at Yokohama and Tokyo, open the collection, followed by Basil Hall Chamberlain on “Japan Old and New” and Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore on “The Most Paradoxical Race.” Lafcadio Hearn contributes several pieces, including “The Impermanent Character of Things Japanese” and “About Ancestor-Worship,” the latter contrasting Japanese reverence for the dead with what he calls the comparative indifference of Western societies. Other selections address gender and domestic life: Mrs. Hugh Fraser writes on “The Japanese Girl” and on “Samurai and Samurai-Women”; Alice M. Bacon contributes “The Noble Influence of the Japanese Mother”; J. J. Rein writes on “The Japanese Wife,” describing the Confucian “three great duties” of obedience historically expected of women. Sir Rutherford Alcock’s “Japanese Cultivation Not Civilization” argues, by way of a comparison to imperial Rome, that artistic refinement does not by itself constitute civilization, while Henry T. Finck’s “Commercial and Sexual Morality” and “Indifference to Nudity” defend Japanese customs against foreign charges of dishonesty and immodesty, citing figures on prostitution and food adulteration in New York and America to turn the accusation back on Western critics.

A substantial portion of the anthology is devoted to Japanese arts and letters. Percival Lowell’s “The Japanese, Not Scientific but Artistic” and “Japanese Painting a Poem” argue that Japanese visual art favors suggestion over completeness, likening a Japanese painting to a poem rather than a photograph. W. G. Aston contributes “Characteristics of Japanese Poetry” and a piece on the novelist Bakin, weighing the latter’s “prodigious fertility of invention” against his reliance on supernatural plot devices and his neglect of romantic sentiment. Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore profiles the cloisonné artist Nammikawa of Kyoto at length, describing his workshop, his tea ceremony, and his refusal to mark his own pieces since, as he tells her, “if my work will not declare itself to be mine, then the marking will do no good.” Captain F. Brinkley’s “The Essence of Bushi-do” and “Bushi” trace samurai loyalty and self-sacrifice to a fusion of Confucian and Buddhist influence and to the older custom of junshi, or “associated death,” by which retainers followed a lord into death until the practice was suppressed under the Tokugawa. Arthur Diosy’s “Divergent Views on the Character of the Japanese” surveys centuries of foreign opinion, from Francis Xavier’s and Will Adams’s praise to hostile accounts by “disappointed would-be exploiters,” and defends Japanese conduct at Port Arthur during the China-Japan war as a response to Chinese atrocities against captured soldiers rather than evidence of Japanese barbarity; his companion piece on the “humane character” of Japanese troops describes the civil administration Japan set up in occupied Chinese territory.

Later sections turn to institutions and everyday observation. Isabella L. Bird describes philosophy and Bible classes at the Doshisha College in Kyoto, where students debate Mill, Herbert Spencer, and questions of Christian doctrine, and contributes separate pieces on Japanese food and on being cheated by shopkeepers who sold counterfeit foreign goods under forged labels. Lafcadio Hearn’s “Superstitions in Japan” argues that the beliefs of the common people, dismissed as backward by the “Occidentalized Japanese,” give Japanese life “rarest value” and a charm foreign observers cannot find in Europeanized circles, while Sir Edwin Arnold’s “The Japanese Vision-Readers” catalogues the thirty-eight varieties of dream-omen recognized on the night of January 2nd. John Barrett, describing Japan as “the schoolmaster of Asia,” argues that its kinship with other Asian peoples fits it to modernize China, Korea, and Siam. W. E. Griffis writes on foreign benefactors of Japan, Stafford Ransome on foreign missionaries, “Popular Misconceptions of Japan,” and the Imperial Hotel at Tokyo, and W. E. Curtis on foreign costume as worn by Japanese men and women and on Yukichi Fukuzawa. The final entries, credited to A. B. Mitford and drawn from his Tales of Old Japan, address sanitary conditions along country roads and the “alleged unchastity” of Japanese women, which Mitford attributes to foreigners judging the whole nation by the vice found in port-town quarters and by the practice, among the poor, of communal bathing.

Kawakami’s introduction returns repeatedly to a tension he sees between this abundance of foreign praise and the treatment of Japanese people abroad. He writes that a Japanese reader who has been “delighted with the charming compliments expressed by the writers represented in this book” is likely to feel “gravely deceived” upon traveling to “such places on the Pacific coast of America as Seattle and San Francisco,” where he will be met with epithets like “John Chinaman,” and where the press prints “such slipshod vulgarisms as ‘Jap,’ ‘little brown man.’” He objects to the recurring foreign habit of describing Japan as populated by “dear giggling dolls” in “miniature houses made of card board,” arguing that such praise, however admiring, denies Japan that “solid and endurable nature … which forms the backbone of a strong nation,” and instead casts the country as “an innocent sweet damsel to be petted and played with” rather than “a strong man commanding the respect of all who come in contact with him.” He closes by expressing hope that the war then beginning with Russia would help dispel the idea of Japan as “a land inhabited by dear little doll-like people,” quoting a passage he offers in evidence that the “steam-whistle,” the “postal-box,” and “the railway replacing the palanquin” testify that Japan has been “transported ten thousand miles away from her former moorings.”

W. Petrie Watson spent three years in Japan “in close, daily, arduous association with its people, with its problems, with its politics,” part of it writing leaders in a newspaper office there; Japan: Aspects and Destinies is the book he made of it — issued in February 1904, second edition in March, as Japan and Russia went to war. His preface records a change of plan: he began hoping to execute “something in the nature of a vignette of manners,” and circumstances made him responsible instead for “something of the nature of a political, even a polemical, treatise.” It also enters the confession governing all that follows: Japan is “incomprehensible, not to be understood.” Thirty-seven short chapters and a postscript follow: a hundred pages of manners are prologue to some two hundred and thirty of argument on industry and commerce, politics, education, religion and the Pacific. An authorial “I” runs through the book, but is chiefly the essayist’s — “I have said,” “I think,” “I suppose” — not the traveler’s, leading mainly in the argumentative chapters; in the chapters of manners Watson writes to a generic “you,” the newcomer, addressed some three times as often as the “I” speaks. A “we” stands for Europe and England. Ten plates and two maps, of Eastern Asia and Korea, are announced in the front matter; the frontispiece and a late plate are Japanese newspaper cartoons on the Anglo-Japanese Alliance; other plates show a Battledoor and shuttlecock game, a polling-station, an Alliance fête.

The opening chapters lay out a paradox. Men still living in Yokohama had watched samurai swordsmanship; a living man was lately proposed for burial in a bridge pier; a friend of Watson’s on an Inland Sea island was asked by an old lady whether a foreigner ate men — while Marquis Ito, “a professed Agnostic,” told him in effect that Japan has knowledge, science and culture for a religion. Tokyo is the first long subject: the Ginza, “Tokyo’s Cheapside,” now less than half Japanese, with a Parisian kiosk beside a fragment of Whitechapel; three government offices in a “Moorish-American style” among the Shoguns’ moats; the temple of Kwannon at Asakusa, where brass bands, phonographs and beer stalls press on the crowds flinging coppers into a chest as big as a bed. From dress Watson builds a working theory of the upheaval — one man in ten in European clothes, so manners changed a twentieth, ideas a fortieth, the soul an eightieth — and then tests it indoors. The Japanese house and garden he finds unconquered, and the wife, introduced by her husband and thereafter “companion to the vase in the recess,” untouched. Marriage still runs through the nakodo, or middleman, and ends in a shared cup of sake; the eight or nine hundred public bath-houses of Tokyo make the Japanese “the bathers of the world”; and the Eta, abolished by law, are still refused in marriage.

Away from the capital the book turns reporter. One March night Watson and a companion he calls the Alter Ego walk nine miles from Okayama to Saidaiji for the eyo festival at the temple of Kwannon, where the newspapers claimed two hundred thousand people — he answers that there might be twenty thousand, or thirty, or even fifty — half of them naked in the night wind, fighting till dawn was near over the blocks and toothpicks of a blessed tree flung from the temple front. Another chapter protests that the tinted photograph and native art have made the country seem merely quaint, and insists on its sublimity: Fujiyama from the Otome-toge pass, the mountains of Nikko, unfathomable Hakone, Biwa, the Inland Sea, and Nara in Yamato. A chapter on pleasures sits with theatre parties from ten in the morning until seven or nine at night, and walks out with families to view cherry blossom. Then, in “Parting of the Ways,” Watson turns on his own material: the pickaback baby, the paper walls, the thousand-year-old festival and the Yoshiwara are “the mask of manners and customs,” a deception behind which the Revolution goes unseen by the visitor — though he notes that the Revolution has lately ruled that in Tokyo at least the woman of the Yoshiwara is “entitled by law to walk off with her own body when she pleases.”

A great man of the Revolution used to tell how as a young samurai he met a farmer who jumped off his own horse to beg pardon and would remount only on threat of a sword-thrust; that story is “an epitome of the Japanese achievement.” Daimyo is now “a synonym for ‘fool’”; the Emperor’s Rescript grants the work of the Restoration half done; and Watson puts it his own way — “Japan’s Revolution has made of a piece of goods a man ; of a toy it has not yet made a woman.” Industry is where he finds ballast. Take the Japanese industrial and commercial economy on what flank you like, he writes, and “you encounter a grave reality and serious purpose” chiefly absent from its religions, art, politics and social canons — a five-thousand-spindle cotton-mill ablaze with electric light after dark in the factory quarter of Osaka, the Mitsui Bank in white granite, trade guilds at least a century and a half old. An American engineer arrives dreading a Yellow Peril “with a chisel for a sword” and leaves reassured; foreign merchants complain that Japanese buyers repudiate contracts whenever the market falls. Against the “hundred and one factory stacks” of Osaka he sets its mill girls — children of ten, a few of eight, even of six, on eleven-hour shifts with Sunday a working day — and records that in 1900 forty of them died in a mill in Central Japan, their blazing dormitory doors locked from outside and the owner unpunished.

Quoting Ito that “Geography has decreed that Japan shall be a commercial nation,” he asks whether the heart of the Revolution is not “packed away in a bale of cotton yarn.” Politics takes the longest run of chapters, and there the judgments are severe. Driving round the Osaka polling stations on election day in August 1902, Watson finds so little astir that a stranger “might take it for a funeral”: fewer than a million electors among forty-five millions, and 418 election offenses in that campaign. The constitution is “the great, the conspicuous failure of the Revolution” — “Born it has been, but still-born” — which he reads as evidence that constitutional government is “in a special sense foreign to the Asiatic idea”; parties play the game with counters, and since the unofficial Elder Statesmen actually rule, “Japan is an oligarchy with the forms of popular government.” Japan has, he insists, no plutocracy and no surviving aristocracy, only a “Mediocracy” of the old barons’ retainers, and he asks whether it may not become “a nation without classes.” Education has no canon, only a saving dissatisfaction, and reported visits break up the argument: an exhibition day at the Women’s University in Tokyo, a wet morning at the Ueno Academy of Music where Mendelssohn restored him briefly to Europe, a December night in Kyoto with the young priest-authors of Buddhism’s circular “for all the ecclesiastics in the world,” and interviews with Ito, “the Revolution Incarnate,” and Count Okuma at Waseda, the Revolution’s Rousseau.

Of forty-five millions, he reckons, only fifty thousand worship Reason; ancestor-worship — Lafcadio Hearn’s “whole emotional life of the race,” quoted here — “must be the Soul of Japan.” The closing chapters argue rather than describe. Watson names the upheaval “the accession of the Despotism of Reason”; where reason was not admitted it failed: “the fiction of a god-emperor is adequate explanation of the failure of the Constitution.” Two scenes stand as illustrations: the Imperial University, descended from a bureau once called the “Place for the Examination of Barbarian Writings,” and a review of fifty ships in Osaka Bay. Japan’s relations are with the whole rim of the Pacific: Australia dismisses her as “coloured labour,” British Columbia as “Mongolian or Asiatic labour,” Oregon and California as “the little brown men.” Korea is necessary to one power, essential to the other, accommodation is impossible, and he expects the Revolution to prevail “even if — as is possible — the tonnage and the battalions of the Tradition should for a time succeed.” The Alliance is “the climax of the Revolution,” since “Japan is the last hope of Asia.” The last chapter draws the balance — prestige gained abroad, the constitution lost at home — and closes, “As this book issues from the press Japan throws down the gage of battle.” A postscript to the second edition, written after Japan’s “success in the sea campaign,” calls the Revolution “terribly lop-sided”: “The Japanese Navy is an illustrious creation. But there is hideous chaos elsewhere.”

Douglas Sladen’s Japan in Pictures (London, George Newnes; New York, Frederick Warne, 1904) is a topically arranged picture-book built around nearly seventy full-page photographic plates. Each of its six chapters — “Its water life,” “Its crops and its flowers,” “Japanese landscapes,” “Japanese temples,” “Japanese streets and street life,” and “How the Japanese live” — opens with several pages of continuous prose that surveys the subject and points forward to “the illustrations” or “the picture of” a particular scene, then gives way to a long run of plates, one photograph to a leaf, each with its own printed caption and page number, opening on a frontispiece titled “A Garden of Irises.” Sladen writes mainly as an impersonal describer of scenes and customs, but he steps into the first person at the book’s frame and at intervals throughout: he opens by recalling Japan while “sit[ting] on the Palatine looking over the Forum,” reports having watched the cherry-blossom ballet, the Miyako-Odori, at Kyoto “in the presence of the Duke of Connaught, and therefore presumably at its best,” recalls sitting with a companion in a wistaria arbor at Uji (“While we were sitting in that very arbour…”), and three times notes that he had already touched on the same ground in his earlier book, Queer Things about Japan — evidence of firsthand travel in Japan, though the book itself narrates no continuous itinerary.

The first three chapters move from water to land to designed scenery. “Its water life” covers junks and sampans, the rapids of the Katsuragawa below Kyoto — shot in a single hour’s run of thirteen miles by the visiting Duke and Duchess of Connaught — and the harbor of Nagasaki, where the island of Takaboko is where, legend has it, forty-six thousand Christians “were hurled into the sea,” and where Pierre Loti “laid the scene of his inimitable romance of Japan, ‘Madame Chrysantheme.’” It goes on to the picnic point of Tomioka, the cave-temple of Benten on Enoshima, the old high-roads Tokaido and Nakasendo, the “Bridge of the Damask Girdle” at Iwakuni, Nara’s pagoda and its Dai-Butsu (which Sladen ranks well below the “exquisite gigantic Buddha of Kamakura,” describing its features in openly racially disparaging terms), the tea-gardens of Uji and Yorimasa’s eleven-eighty stand there, and the hot-spring resort of Miyanoshita below the volcano Oji-Goku, with its view of Fujiyama. “Its crops and its flowers” runs from rice cultivation and the old koku-income ranks of the nobility through millet and bean farming to the calendar of flower pilgrimages — Horikiri for irises, Yoshino and Mukojima for cherry blossoms, Kameido for wisteria — quoting, from Queer Things about Japan, an accepted table of monthly flower emblems. “Japanese landscapes” treats garden design itself as a Japanese art, describing how mossy stairways, torii, bridges, and artificial hills are combined into scenery at Nikko, on Lake Biwa, and at Hakone, where one view mirrors Fujiyama in the lake and a separate plate shows the Great Torii of a lakeside temple flanked by stone lanterns against a background of lake and mountain.

“Japanese temples” leans on “Murray’s simply admirable new edition of his handbook for travellers in Japan,” prepared by “the great Japanese scholar, Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain, and Mr. W. B. Mason,” to lay out the parts of a Shinto shrine (using Izumo as the model) and a Buddhist temple (using Ikegami), before giving its longest treatment to Nikko’s mortuary shrine of Iyeyasu — the Yomeimon gate, the carved Karamon, the treasury carved by Hidari Jingoro, the mad white pony kept because madness is sacred in Japan, and the tomb itself — alongside Kyoto’s Kinkakuji, Kiyomizu-dera, and Chionin with its giant bell, and the bronze Daibutsu at Kamakura. “Japanese streets and street life” turns to the canal streets of Tokyo and Osaka, likened to Venice; the ladder-and-bell fire-stations and their ceremonial fire brigades; and the year’s festivals, from the Emperor’s birthday and New Year decorations to the carp-flying Feast of Boys and the doll displays of the Girls’ Festival, whose miniature furniture, Sladen notes, was once exhibited by the Japanese Minister at the Whitechapel Exhibition. The closing chapter, “How the Japanese live,” describes the amado-and-shoji house, furniture kept in storage until needed, the tea-house banquet with its hired geisha and its koto, biwa, and samisen music, and children’s games, ending on a picture of two coolies carrying a woman in a kago and Sladen’s own sign-off comparing the book to a lantern-lecture reaching its final slide: “Limitations of space have forced me to give my Japan in pictures with the brevity and abruptness of a lantern-lecturer… Ladies and Gentlemen, that is all.”

Compiled by the Department of Agriculture and Commerce for Japan’s participation in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, this official survey of the country’s economic life was printed at the “Japan Times” office in Tokyo and published by Tokyo-Shoin in 1904. Its single page of preface, signed by Haruki Yamawaki, Secretary of the Department and Japanese Commissioner for the exposition, and dated May 1904, sets out the premise: Japan’s development since she gave up “the policy of exclusion” has won “the acknowledgment of the world,” yet what that world knows of things Japanese is “at best superficial,” chiefly because “reliable publications specially compiled for foreign readers” have not existed. Compilation began in May 1903 at every office of the Department, with the other Departments of State asked to furnish material on their own provinces, and the preface admits that want of time has “caused redundancies in some chapters and omissions in others.” What resulted runs to 828 pages of letterpress and statistical tables in eight Parts and a supplement, entered through eight pages of contents, carrying no inserted plate, map or folding sheet, and closing without index or errata. The compilers write in the first person plural — “our farmers,” “our country,” “our fishermen” — and the volume’s only pictures come after the text has ended, among English trade advertisements for silks, sake, shipping lines and Kyoto curio dealers, one of them headed “Grand Show at the St. Louis World’s Fair.”

Method shows in the headings. Most sections open with an “Introductory,” though Part I begins abruptly on position and latitude and Manufacturing Industry on history; each then sorts its subject into classes, sets out its returns in statistical tables and, more often than not, argues from them, more than once closing an admission of failure with an assurance about the near future. The opening Part takes up geography, population, the administrative system, and land as an institution. The geographical chapter fixes the empire’s extremes of latitude and longitude, puts its area at 27,063 square ri and measures that against Russian Siberia, China, Korea and the United States, then works through mountain ranges, plains, rivers, lakes and coastal indentations before turning to ocean currents, storms and rainfall, with temperatures set city against city — Kagoshima against Shanghai, Niigata against San Francisco. Population starts from ancient census orders and Tokugawa returns and reaches a registered figure of 44,260,604 for 1899, then treats density, the four social classes of Imperial family, Peers, “Shizoku” and “Heimin,” marriage, births, deaths and emigration. The administrative chapter enumerates the Emperor’s prerogatives, cautions that “it must not be supposed that the Diet enjoys part of the rights of sovereignty,” and calls the doing away in 1899 with extraterritorial rights the most noteworthy chapter in the history of the Japanese judicial system. A promised section on geological formation fills nine lines and refers the reader to the mining section instead.

Primary Industries, the longest Part, gives agriculture pride of place and about a sixth of the book. The thesis comes at once — “Japan is still essentially an agricultural country” — and foreigners puzzled that a farming family tills no more than a hectare are told that thorough cultivation and two or three crops a year make such a farm the equal of two or three hectares elsewhere. The farming classes are put at 60 per cent of the whole population; tenants and part-tenants are reckoned at about double the number of free-holders, on returns of 1888 that the book calls the latest available because accurate data “are not procurable”; and in extreme cases the tenant’s share of the harvest is “barely sufficient to pay the cost of the manure applied to the fields.” Sericulture runs from a Chinese prince naturalized in Japan in 195 through legislative measures and a model filature at Tomioka, Joshu, under a French superintendent, to the repeal of those enactments, after which “the once good name of Japanese silk” fell “very low indeed abroad” and the Government answered with model regulations for the formation of silk guilds. Tea reaches Togano and Uji and the tea ceremony before conceding “even signs of a decline,” and of the earliest experiments in scientific agriculture a later chapter records that “most of these attempts ended in failure.”

Forestry treats woodland put at over 59 per cent of the country and ventures that the Japanese “may owe their patriotism and aesthetic sense” to its influence, likens feudal timber protection to that of “France before the Revolution,” and points to the granite hills of Omi and Mino stripped by reckless felling soon after the Restoration. Mining and metallurgy work through coalfields and petroleum, the copper of Ashio and Besshi, silver in decline with “the universal fall in the silver market” and gold advancing on the alluvial deposits of Hokkaido, and the Imperial Iron Works at Yawata; of the 150,169 persons employed in the mines in 1902 the book reports that they “are generally satisfied with their lot and go to work with light hearts,” and that cheap food supplied at remote workings “is adopted with a view to checking any movement for the rise of wages.” Fishery ends the Part with fishing grounds, the distribution of the principal fish, and the financial standing of the fisherman, where the whole investment of 900,000 fishing families in boats and nets works out at about 27 yen a family and the means at their disposal “must be said to be extremely limited,” though the book holds that this economy admits of great improvement; aquiculture, salt-refining and markets follow.

Manufacturing Industry opens among the feudal provinces’ workshops and the Dutch connection at Nagasaki, then reports manufactured exports advanced about ninefold between 1890 and 1902, so that agricultural goods, formerly “the most important item in the economy of export trade,” “began to be superseded by manufactured goods.” Its account of factories and workpeople is the book’s fullest treatment of labor: women are 64 per cent of operatives; in power-driven workshops about eight per cent are under fourteen, four-fifths of them girls; working hours are “11 hours a day, but sometimes they extend as long as 16 or 17,” though the regular day is put in general at 12, with one or two hours’ overtime; in match factories women and children are the bulk of the workpeople, the youngest about nine. Government model factories — filature, spinning mills, cement and glass works — were sold from about 1880, all but the Senju woolen factory; chapters on industrial education, corporations, technical associations and industrial property follow, the last on how a foreign applicant files. Foreign Trade traces the tariff from the treaties to the law in force from 1899, names the principal exports — raw silk, habutaye, cotton yarns, matches, tea, camphor, copper and coal — against imports of machinery, iron ware, petroleum, sugar, raw cotton and woolen goods, and tabulates a trade twenty times its 1868 value, Asia overtaking Europe, with a last chapter on chambers of commerce, agents sent abroad and sample museums, some closed as “not justified by results.”

Finances, the longest Part after Primary Industries, is also the one that tells a continuous story. The Restoration inherits a wreck: the systems of 277 feudal daimyates to be unified, a feudal tenant-rate “excessively heavy, ranging from 30 to 70 per cent. of the yield of the field,” a Land Tax that supplied no more than a tenth of the whole expenditure, and inconvertible notes issued to meet the deficit. Land valuation completed in 1881 and a widening range of taxes are then described at length, as the book says, “from our desire to show the soundness of our finance.” The war with China is the hinge: the indemnity of 230,000,000 taels is paid in London in sterling and supplies the fund that a commission’s recommendation of the gold standard had lacked, so that bullion is bought abroad and struck into coin for the change of 1897. A post-war boom claimed more capital than the country could supply and ended in unpaid subscriptions and “the spectre of a panic,” met by spending what remained of the indemnity. National debts of 584,620,000 yen at the end of the 1902 fiscal year are set out with the insistence that “none of them have been engendered by deficit in the ordinary revenue of the State,” and the gold standard is credited with bringing Japan’s money market “directly into touch with the central markets of the world.”

Army and Navy, on returns compiled at the end of 1901, calls conscription a social revolution accomplished “without any heavy price being paid in bloodshed,” and closes on the Red Cross Society of Japan, formed in the civil war of 1877 to tend the wounded of both sides. The Part names no war in progress, though its list of the Imperial fleet enters two armored cruisers built in Italy and launched in 1904; the fighting reaches the volume in a railway’s advertisement at the back, which lists among Shikoku’s sights Matsuyama, “where the wounded Russians are nursed by the members of the Japanese Red Cross Society at present.” Communications, the longest of these later Parts, runs from ancient post stations through post offices in China and Korea, a telephone whose benefits “the people did not appreciate at first,” railroads extending 4,237 miles in 1903 against one short line in 1872, and a chapter on ships and shipping; Education follows, its attendance ratios 93.78 for boys against 81.80 for girls. A supplement on Formosa closes the volume with monopolies in camphor, salt and opium and an opium policy of “gradual suppression” licensing confirmed smokers — 51,581 on the first list of 1897, 169,064 by 1900, 152,044 by 1902 — the authorities confident of eradicating the custom “in about thirty or forty years.” The finance chapter grants that Formosa “can not yet claim to be financially independent”; the last page counts its Buddhist preaching places and Christian churches, then “The End.”

James A. B. Scherer’s Japan To-Day presents itself, on its own title page, as the work of a man “Formerly Teacher of English in the Government School at Saga, Japan; Now President of Newberry College, South Carolina,” and it reads accordingly: not a tourist’s circuit but the retrospective account of a five-year residence, most of it spent teaching English at the government middle school in Saga on the southern island of Kyushu, with excursions to Tokyo, Nikko, the Inland Sea, and the northern island of Yezo. Scherer calls his own method a “kaleidoscope” rather than a system, and the book is arranged into eleven loosely thematic chapters that mix travel narrative, ethnographic sketch, comic anecdote, and long quotation from other writers; the final two chapters drop travel altogether for a missionary’s brief — a biography of the pioneer missionary Guido Verbeck and a geopolitical argument, written while the Russo-Japanese War was still being fought in the spring of 1904, for why Japan’s cause and the cause of Christian missions in Asia stand or fall together.

The opening chapter, “The Cynosure,” credits Japan’s rise since Commodore Perry’s 1854 opening entirely to education, traces the school system from its Buddhist origins through the 1872 imperial decree that founded universal schooling, and closes with facing tables, credited to the London Times, comparing the Japanese and Russian battle fleets ship by ship. “Sunrise-Land” follows the etymology of the country’s name into a description of a newcomer’s first sights — the bronze Dai Butsu at Kamakura, measured out in feet and inches, the island of Enoshima, the tombs of Ieyasu and Iemitsu at Nikko — then to earthquakes and a tidal wave that Scherer says killed forty thousand people, and finally to his recurring complaint that Japan has taken on Western “manners” without Western “morals,” illustrated by a schoolboy essay contest in which pupils named the suicide of Admiral Ting, and one boy a father’s murder of his wife in place of his child, as “the noblest thing” they had ever heard of. “Views Awheel” moves to Tokyo seen from a rainy-season window and from a jinrikisha — the Ginza, the moated palace, Asakusa Park — then to a long bicycle tour from Tokyo toward Atami and Fuji with an international party nicknamed for a Russian diplomat, “Bottle-o’-whiskey,” and closes by reprinting Bishop Henry Potter’s account, from his The East of To-Day and To-Morrow, of girls coaling a Canadian Pacific liner at Nagasaki.

“Glimpses of Home Life” centers on several days as the guest of a student, Suzuki, at his family’s home in Karatsu — the food, a koto recital, bathing customs, the household’s Buddhist observances — and widens into children’s festivals (the feast of Amanogawa and its legend of a weaving-girl separated by the Milky Way from her lover, the boys’ carp banners), the myth of Izanagi and Izanami, and a long, largely unflattering portrait of Japanese women that quotes at length from a Confucian treatise on “The Whole Duty of Woman,” with its “five worst maladies” of the female mind and its seven listed grounds for divorce, alongside anecdotes of Christian bridegrooms mortified at having to touch their brides’ hands during the ceremony. “The Awful Japanese Language” catalogues the grammar’s indifference to number, gender, and person and its double vocabulary of spoken and literary Japanese mostly through comic misadventure — a missionary who preaches on “turtles” instead of God, shop signs such as “SAVINGS & CUTINGS OF HAIRS WITHIN,” and Scherer’s own attempt to have his servant, Toku San, shave him. “Sermons Garnished with Smiles” quotes A. B. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan on a Nichiren temple service, translates a Buddhist sermon he obtained himself and adds two folk-tales that reached him as students’ English essays, surveys Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and closes by printing in full the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Morals in Education, which he calls the empire’s real “Bible.”

“Life in the South” opens with the storm-tossed crossing at Shimonoseki that first brought Scherer to his post, saved when a boy leaps ashore with a rope, then covers Saga’s feudal history, his own school’s routine and curriculum, an episode of schoolboys weeping over a photograph of the Emperor burned in a fire, and, prompted by his own surprise that his rationalist teachers accepted it as simple fact, a long clinical account of fox-possession (kitsune-tsuki) drawn from a German physician’s case notes. “The People of the North” describes a recuperative trip to Yezo, guided by the missionary John Batchelor, among the Ainu, whom Scherer finds more open and trustworthy than the Japanese; it introduces “King” Penri of Piratori, reprints Batchelor’s account of an Ainu bear hunt, and sets out Ainu beliefs in a round earth, the meaning of solar eclipses, and a single God called “the Over-Shadower.” “Japanese Traits” catalogues reversed customs under the heading “Topsy-Turvydom,” weighs negative traits — indifference to time, absence of nerves, want of sympathy and of mutual confidence — against positive ones of frugality, politeness, and industry, and closes with an extended contrast against the Chinese, crediting China with printing, gunpowder, and the compass and allowing Japan only imitation and aesthetic sense.

“An Opener of Gates” leads into a biography of the missionary Guido F. Verbeck with a review of Nagasaki’s Christian history — Francis Xavier’s 1549 arrival, several hundred thousand converts won within decades, and persecution beginning under “the famous ‘Napoleon of Japan,’ Hideyoshi,” renewed by Ieyasu, and reaching, in Scherer’s account, its cruelest extreme under Iemitsu — then opens the Verbeck story itself with a Saga nobleman, Murata, converted after finding a Dutch Gospel adrift in Nagasaki harbor in 1854, and follows Verbeck from his 1859 arrival through his tutoring of future statesmen such as Okuma and Iwakura, his part in organizing the Great Embassy of 1871, and his death and state honors in 1898. “The Gates of Asia” casts Japan and Palestine as the two “gates” through which the Gospel is meant to circle the globe, briefly recalls that Christianity’s earlier favor in Japan gave way to persecution and apparent extermination, and closes the book with seven numbered reasons Japan may defeat Russia, ending on the question, “Who shall hold the key to the Orient?” The volume’s own contents pages list a table of the eleven chapters and, separately, its twenty-eight illustrations — the publisher’s back-matter description credits them to “photographs and prints by native artists” and specifies that two are in color — opening with a frontispiece titled “Japan To-Day” and continuing through photographic plates such as “The Great Buddha at Kamakura” and “Mother and Child”; the book closes with several pages of publisher’s advertisements for other Lippincott travel titles, including Scherer’s own earlier Four Princes; or, The Growth of a Kingdom.

Augusta M. Campbell Davidson’s Present-Day Japan is a resident-traveler’s account built, by its own preface, out of letters home that were “not in the first instance intended for publication.” The letters are not dated or printed in the order written; Davidson explains that she rearranged them by place and subject so that “the places and subjects spoken of might be treated with some degree of continuity,” keeping each chapter’s earliest, freshest impressions as its opening passage and then expanding the historical and religious notes she had originally jotted down “for the information of an intending visitor.” The result reads as a hybrid: a woman making an extended stay in Japan — she travels without guides, gets by on phrasebook Japanese, and revisits Yokohama after a trip to Hokkaido — narrates her adventures and opinions directly to an unnamed correspondent (“you”) who appears to be weighing a visit, while long stretches of the book, especially the two chapters on religion and the biographical excursus on Ieyasu, drop the letter-writer’s voice for pages at a time in favor of straight third-person history and doctrine. The eight chapters move geographically through Yokohama, the roads of the interior, Kyoto, and Nikko, pause for two chapters of religious background, and end in Tokyo — by a wide margin the longest chapter — and a coda on the theater.

The opening chapters are the most purely personal. Davidson’s first sight of Japan is a storm-battered sunset off a coast of fishing junks and paper lanterns, followed by a comic disembarkation at Yokohama — American hotel, jinrikisha, and “a hideous iron bridge” dividing the foreign settlement from the native town. She describes a Yokohama matsuri and a lantern-lit garden fête, then a solo bicycle excursion to Enoshima (losing the road, addressing a farmer in phrasebook Japanese with “admirable fluency but no particular result”) and on to Kamakura: the temple of Hachiman with its ancient icho tree, the lotus pond, Hasedera’s golden Kwannon shown by candlelight, Ennoji’s image of Emma carved “from the life,” and finally the Great Buddha, sitting alone since the tidal wave that swept away its temple five centuries before — an occasion for a digression on the Taira–Minamoto wars and Kamakura’s rise and burning. Chapter II, “Travelling in Japan,” answers the correspondent’s question about hardships with an extended, wry survey of second-class railway carriages, box lunches thrown from train windows, the word “tadaima,” jinrikisha and kago travel, and above all the country inn — the ordeal of the entrance step, the rat-infested night, the watchman’s hourly rattle, and the crash of the shutters thrown open at dawn — closing with an account of the white-hatted, mat-backed pilgrims she meets on mountain roads.

Chapters III and IV turn from narrative to sustained exposition, still framed as answers to the correspondent’s questions. On Shinto, Davidson describes the “cold, empty void” of Shinto shrines against Buddhism’s color and crowds, a night kagura dance by a wandering shrine, and her own pilgrimage to Ise, complete with a policeman ordering her to remove her hat before the veiled inner gate. From there she retells, at length and largely without personal voice, the cosmogony of the Kojiki and Nihongi — Izanagi and Izanami churning the islands from the sea, Amaterasu’s withdrawal into her rock-cave, the Empress Jingo’s divinely sanctioned conquest of Korea — before arguing that Shinto, having “no ethical system at all,” survived Buddhism’s thousand-year eclipse only to be revived after 1868 as something closer to state patriotism than religion. Chapter IV on Buddhism opens with a dawn Goma fire-ceremony at Narita and the picnic-like Nichiren festival at Ikegami, then a sermon heard at Kyoto’s Higashi Hongwanji, before laying out the Buddha’s teaching on suffering, karma, and Nirvana and tracing the sects that reached Japan — Tendai, Kobo Daishi’s Shingon, Jodo, and finally the native Shin (Hongwanji) sect, whose social progressiveness, including its willingness to let women attain Buddhahood without prior rebirth as men, Davidson singles out as Buddhism’s one living force in a “progressive” Japan.

Kyoto and Nikko share a chapter apiece. In Kyoto she shops for cloisonné and lacquer (with a digression against printing photographed landscapes onto cut velvet as “perverting art”), watches a wrestling match in the dry bed of the Kamogawa, sits through an interminable ceremonial tea, and sketches the city’s medieval history — Yoshimitsu’s golden pavilion at Kinkakuji, Yoshimasa’s silver one at Ginkakuji, Nobunaga and Hideyoshi’s rise, and the transfer of real power to Ieyasu at Yedo while the Mikado remained a cloistered, almost powerless figure in Kyoto for three centuries. Nikko opens with the twenty-mile cryptomeria avenue and the Sacred Bridge, moves through the gold-and-lacquer courts of the Toshogu mausoleum and a description of its autumn festival procession, and then turns to a biographical sketch of Ieyasu himself — his rise after Sekigahara, his friendly dealings with Will Adams and other early European arrivals, and his eventual, fatal turn against Christianity, which Davidson traces from St. Francis Xavier’s mission through the mass conversions of southwestern daimyos to the thirty years of persecution under his son and grandson that closed the country for two centuries — “the dark shadow which lurks in the solemn groves of Nikko.”

Tokyo occupies roughly a quarter of the book and ranges the widest of any chapter. Davidson describes the plain wooden Ueno station, mile after mile of low gray shop-streets, the castle moat and its surviving gates, and the fate of the old samurai class — some risen to the “new nobility,” many reduced to shopkeeping, domestic service, or, in a great many cases, the police force. She attends the Emperor’s birthday review at Aoyama, reads the English-language press for lack of Japanese, sits through a dull sitting of the House of Representatives and a more ceremonious one of the House of Peers, and reflects at length on the Emperor as an almost abstract object of loyalty and on the still-real subordination of Japanese wives, illustrated by visits to the Tokyo Normal School and the Peeress’s School (the latter credited to the Empress’s patronage) and by a nobleman’s garden party where she catalogues kimono, obi, and haori in detail. A description of a Japanese house — its mat-sized rooms, sliding shoji and fusuma, tokonoma alcove — sits alongside a frank discussion of Japanese commercial reputation among foreign merchants, a shopping excursion to the Kwankoba bazaar in Shiba Park, and, on a wet December afternoon, a visit to the graves of the Forty-seven Ronin at Sengakuji: standing in the rain to watch incense smolder on the grave of Oishi Kuranosuke, she reads their story not as a curiosity but as proof of “a hidden continuity between the practical and…materialistic spirit of the Japan of to-day and its unpractically heroic past,” since, she writes, “Yamato damashi will never be extinct so long as this deed of old-world chivalry appeals so strongly to the national imagination.”

The final chapter turns to the stage. Davidson recounts her first, disorienting visit to a Tokyo theater — a robber’s den, a captive samurai hurling defiance at his captors, and a revolving stage that swings the actors bodily around between scenes — then a second visit, to a play starring the actor Danjuro and Kikugoro, reached by the wooden “hana no michi,” or “paths of flowers,” running from the stage into the audience: an intricate feudal plot of rival heirs and scheming mothers that turns on a lady-in-waiting, falsely accused of theft, who takes her own life rather than survive her dishonored name — along with, throughout both visits, the falsetto convention by which men play the female roles. She then describes a No performance, whose masked, chorus-driven solemnity she compares point by point to the early Greek drama, and traces the form’s descent from the Shinto kagura through the priestess O Kuni’s Kabuki and the Joruri puppet theater to the present-day stage, dominated by tragedies of feudal loyalty in which, she argues, “Yamato damashii” survives most visibly now that it has gone underground everywhere else. The book closes without further comment on this note, followed only by its apparatus: a frontispiece view of the Kara-mon gate of Ieyasu’s temple, roughly seventy further captioned illustrations — photographs of streets and festivals, a full-page reproduction of an Ise kakemono of the Sun Goddess, a chart of the Japanese syllabary, portraits of the Emperor, the Empress, St. Francis Xavier, and Danjuro — and an alphabetical index.

“Queer Things About Japan” is a comic memoir of residence and travel by an Englishman who had already lived in Japan and written about it once before — the title page names him as author also of The Japs at Home, A Japanese Marriage, In Sicily, and On the Cars and Off. Two prefaces frame the book: one dated November 1903, the other dated August 29, 1904, from Tenby, written after, as Sladen puts it, “the Japanese have altered the course of history” in their war with Russia — a country the Introduction had already named as the power Japan “stands in the path of” — and the later preface adds a passage likening Japanese soldiers to the Greeks at Salamis and praising their “valour and magnanimity.” Both prefaces insist the book itself is not serious: Sladen says he is saving an account of Japan’s “proud history, the glorious art, and the national life” for a future book, and offers instead, with the help of an uncredited illustrator he calls “the Japanese Phil May,” a chronicle of “the humours of Japanese street-life” among servants, shopkeepers, and riksha boys. His own vantage is that of a repeat visitor who kept house for months at a stretch in Tokyo and Yokohama with his wife and a changing party of friends, then traveled on to Nikko, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, and Nagasaki. After a long statistical Introduction — much of it drawn wholesale from “Keeling’s Guide” on Japan’s geography, coinage, weights, wages, social ranks, and yearly round of festivals — the book runs to twenty-seven numbered chapters, organized first by topic and, in its final third, by place, before closing with five appendices.

The opening chapters move through the physical furniture of daily life in the order the contents page promises. Chapter I turns the paper-walled Japanese house into a catalog of things its occupants do without — no beds, no chimneys, no forks, no wine-glasses — and passes from there into gardens, from a bamboo trellis in a city backyard to a nobleman’s miniature Fujiyama. Chapter II describes women: teeth-blackening explained as a device for making a wife deliberately unattractive, the “three obediences,” the seven grounds on which a husband may divorce her, and the netsuke as nearly the only jewelry a Japanese woman is permitted. Chapter III argues that domestic servants rank above riksha boys and grooms, dismissed as mere “tradesmen,” and tells of a bedroom boy at a Kyoto hotel who turns out to be a dispossessed samurai, the only person in the house able to read the classical characters on an old book Sladen has nearly ruined. Street life (Chapter IV) supplies note-taking policemen, giant radishes, and university “soshi,” and Chapter V is built around one set-piece: a riksha boy who talks a Nara policeman out of expelling the party over a missing passport by invoking their acquaintance with the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, then produces and serves an entire imported dinner in a native inn. Chapter VI walks through the etiquette of shopping in Japan — five cups of tea before any transaction, bargaining conducted partly by reading a shopkeeper’s soroban, a preference for pawnshops and second-hand dealers over regular stores — and ends with the five packing-cases of curios Sladen shipped home to furnish a room in London.

From Chapter VII the book widens into urban amusement and status. That chapter, on the Chinese tailors who copy a foreign dress stitch for stitch, is explicitly a reprint — a footnote notes it has been “changed from the first to the third person” to match the rest of the book, from an American-magazine article by Norma Lorimer — and follows one client, “Miss Aroostook,” through fittings with “Ching Lee.” Chapter VIII catalogs the New Year, the Girls’ and Boys’ festivals with their historical dolls, and the Bon Matsuri lantern-boats; Chapter IX recalls the Ginza’s own New Year’s Eve fair, a two-mile double avenue of torch-lit stalls where the author, guided there by the traveler Henry Savage Landor, buys netsuke and miniature temple ornaments for his own toy garden, and, on a separate occasion later in the New Year’s festival, an outing in which he and his wife follow three little mousmees to the temple of Asakusa, treat them to sweets and tea, and take them on to the “Zoological Gardens,” which turn out to be more devoted to training fir trees in flowerpots than to animals. Chapter X collects specimens of Japanese-English, from a guide nicknamed “Man Sunday” (“Honourable inside become empty?”) to newspaper advertisements quoted from Basil Hall Chamberlain, and Chapter XI turns to books — Bakin’s hundred-and-six-volume novel, a revolving library that lets pilgrims “read” the Buddhist scriptures by turning it three times, and the printing of Sladen’s own poem Lester the Loyalist at a Tokyo publishing house. Chapters XII through XVI cover tea-houses and geisha (including the flash-powder explosion that burned Sladen’s hand at the Maple Club, and a defense of the licensed Yoshiwara quarter as an orderly institution rather than a “house of ill-fame”), the dwarfing of garden trees, sumo wrestling set against a demonstrated jujitsu bout between “Mr. Tani” and “Mr. Yamamoto,” the No-dance and kabuki stage conventions together with a full description of the tea ceremony quoted from Marcus B. Huish’s Japan and its Art, itself based on a South Kensington Museum catalog, and a long quoted account, from Osman Edwards, of a Miyako-odori performance at Kyoto, and finally the double life of the “smart set,” who wear frock coats in public and kimonos at home under an unrelaxed father’s authority.

Three chapters step back from comedy. Chapter XVII surveys Shinto and Buddhism at length, retelling the myth of Izanagi and Izanami, quoting Aston and Satow on the torii gateway’s rival etymologies and Chamberlain on the doctrinal gulf between Buddhism and Christianity, and reproducing Dr. Baelz’s case history of a girl “possessed” by a fox that bargained, speaking through her own mouth, for cakes to be left at a particular temple; the chapter ends with Sladen hoping Japan is never converted, since Christianity’s command to “forsake your father and mother” would undercut the filial piety he takes to be the country’s finest trait. Chapter XVIII tells the story of Will Adams, the shipwrecked English pilot who built warships for Ieyasu, was made “Lord of Hemi,” and is still honored as a Shinto kami at his tomb near Yokosuka, quoting at length from Adams’s own seventeenth-century letter to English merchants in Java. Chapters XIX and XX return to comedy with Sladen’s arrival at Yokohama by steamer — the customs launch, the numbered hotel menu, the riksha stand — and then a chapter contrasting foreign-run hotels with native inns, where paper walls are assembled fresh around the guest each evening, dinner is eaten off the floor, and summer nights are spent fighting fleas.

The book’s closing third turns into an itinerary. Chapter XXI covers Yokohama’s curio streets and side trips to the Kamakura Buddha and the crab-haunted island of Enoshima; Chapter XXII follows a picnic to Miyanoshita and Hakone, up the mud-crusted volcano Ojigoku (“Big Hell”) to a view of Fujiyama and down again to its sulphur baths; Chapter XXIII covers Tokyo’s castle moats, the twin temple parks of Ueno and Shiba, and the university. Chapters XXIV and XXV give Nikko and Kyoto the fullest architectural treatment in the book, walking gate by gate through Ieyasu’s and Iemitsu’s mortuary shrines and the Yomeimon gate at Nikko, and through the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the Inari shrine, and his own visit to the Miyako-odori dance, staged that night with English scenery in honor of the Duke of Connaught, at Kyoto. Chapter XXVI treats Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, and Nagasaki more briefly, closing with a set-piece description, borrowed from Keeling, of the Bon Matsuri lantern-boats at Nagasaki and a nod to Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème. The final chapter leaves Japan altogether to describe, in close practical detail, the miniature “Chinese garden” of dwarf trees, bronze model temples, and a modeled Fujiyama that Sladen built in a mahogany frame in his own flat in Kensington.

Five appendices follow: a reprint of Keeling on Japanese houses, dress, food, and etiquette; a catalog of the lacquer furniture from a girls’-festival doll set that the Japanese Minister exhibited at the Whitechapel Exhibition in 1902; a guide to collecting netsuke, describing and illustrating sixteen pieces from Sladen’s own hundred-odd specimens; a review of The Ideals of the East by Mr. Kakasu Okakura; and a chronology of Japanese history running from the legendary accession of Jimmu Tenno in 660 B.C. to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. The book is illustrated throughout: colored end-papers reproduce a Hokusai print of a thunderstorm over Fuji, a colored frontispiece titled “In Cherry-Blossom Time” shows a lone woman in kimono standing among blossoming trees by a lake, and the book’s own list of illustrations names fourteen further double-page plates in the same brushy monochrome technique, quite unlike the frontispiece’s careful color work: most are comic street scenes of peddlers, mousmees, and children, but a few — a dusk view of a torii gate at Yokohama, the temple of the Golden Pavilion at Kyoto — are atmospheric landscape or architectural views rather than comic vignettes, each plate backing a specific pair of facing pages through the text.

To the Golden East presents itself, in its own preface, as an apology as much as a narrative: Hubert Holliday warns readers that they will “hardly fail to notice its egotistical tone” and “the constant use of the first person,” defending the choice on the grounds that first-person telling lets “events—opinions—descriptions carry more weight.” What follows is a diary-like travelogue, dated almost day by day, of a voyage that began at London on January 13th, 1902, aboard the tramp steamer S.S. “Glamorganshire,” on which Holliday sailed as one of three saloon passengers rather than in any official capacity (the ship’s articles listed him, “merely as a matter of form,” as an Assistant Engineer). Across forty-two chapters the book follows the ship out through Gibraltar, Port Said, and the Suez Canal to Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, then to Nagasaki and the Inland Sea ports of Japan, on to Sourabaya in Java, and at greatest length to Calcutta and inland India, before doubling back through Colombo, Suez, and Gibraltar to Hull. Japan occupies roughly six of the book’s forty-two chapters—a real but comparatively brief leg set between Shanghai and Java—while India, reached only after both of Holliday’s original traveling companions have long since gone their own ways, is by far the largest single destination in the book.

The early chapters are built from shipboard incident and port-day sightseeing rather than sustained argument: coaling by hand at Port Said, where “sinewy, brown Arabs” swarm up the planks from the coal-lighters by torchlight; a night passage of the Suez Canal lit by hired searchlights; ping-pong and rat-hunting at sea; and, at each stop, a round of rikisha rides, tiffin, and curio-bargaining. At Penang and Singapore, Holliday and his two fellow saloon passengers, “D—” and “B—,” tour the Botanical Gardens, get hauled around in circles by a rikisha coolie who cannot decipher “Chiboong boongah, jitanglin,” and watch, while Holliday is buying a pith helmet at a Singapore outfitter’s, a shopman use a sheaf of golf-sticks as a pretext to let him study the King of Siam and his retinue without staring. Hong Kong, reached with some 180 Chinese deck passengers taken aboard at Singapore for the passage, supplies a harbor full of British warships (the “Terrible,” fresh from Ladysmith, among them), an evening at the Town Hall’s little theater, and an ascent of the Peak by tramway; Shanghai supplies bad coinage, cholera and scarlet-fever stories, the second officer’s account of being lost for a day and a half inside the walled native city, and Holliday’s own discovery, made in Shanghai, that a cheap Hong Kong walking-stick had been a cracked one disguised with wax. By the time the “Glamorganshire” clears the Yangtse-kiang for Japan, “D—” has already left the ship at Singapore and “B—” is bound by steamer for Tientsin.

Japan, reached through the “Gates of Paradise” fiord at Nagasaki, gets the closest and most affectionate attention in the book. Warned that “photography is prohibited by the Government on account of the fortifications,” Holliday leaves his camera aboard on his first afternoon ashore and works instead from a sketchbook—the harbor doctor’s gold-braided staff, the wooden pattens and sandals that keep pedestrians out of the mud, the paper-windowed shopfronts, and the Temple of Osuwa, whose cherry-blossom gardens he calls “a dream of beauty, a glimpse of paradise on earth.” He is drawn into a hillside tea-house by its geisha—“O Sada San” among them, aged nineteen, eighteen, and fourteen—for repeated evenings of tea, cakes, port, and lemonade, all billed to him afterward, and comes away judging their dancing “posing, frolicking, anticking” rather than true dancing, while praising a five-year-old child’s imitation of it as more graceful than the adults’. From Nagasaki the ship works up the Inland Sea to Moji and Shimonoseki, where women as well as men load coal basket by basket in an operation Holliday clocks and prices out; where the chief officer’s camera is nearly confiscated by “gold-braided Japanese officials” on suspicion of spying on the Shimonoseki forts, and saved only by his sacrificing an unexposed wrapper instead of the film; and where Holliday haggles in pidgin (“I speakee fair price”) over an inlaid cabinet he never buys and a china tea-set he does, watches two Japanese girls smoke pipes and gossip through his haircut, and sits through the government-“modified” version of the “Jon-kino” dance on a wet Easter Sunday night. A country walk behind Shimonoseki and one last cheap bargain over a dusty teapot round off the visit before the ship clears the straits for Java, Holliday looking back at what he calls the “Britain of the East.”

Sixteen days out from Japan the ship reaches Sourabaya, in Dutch Java, where cholera is reported, in its worst weeks, to kill natives “at the rate of six or seven hundred weekly,” a boatman named “Jamey” ferries Holliday about for the ordinary fare and separately trades him a chatty, a porous water-cooling jug, for an old blazer, and a Sourabaya shopkeeper corners him into a long grievance about the cost of the Boer War to England. From there the “Glamorganshire,” running light, threads the Malay Archipelago and the Bay of Bengal for Calcutta, taking on a Hugli pilot whose leadsman chants the river’s depth, “Attyra meelyonah-li-h-h,” hour after hour. Calcutta, “the City of Palaces,” receives by far the fullest treatment in the book: the Kidderpore Docks and their hydraulic cranes, the Maidan and the Zoological Gardens, Fort William and its rows of spiked captured guns, the Bara Bazaar’s shawl-dealers and its “Rain Gamblers,” a sight he concedes he never actually witnessed himself, the temple and burning ghat at Khalighat, a Bengali theater performance praised for its “total absence of vulgarity,” and the marble pavement Lord Curzon laid in 1901 over the site of the Black Hole. Impatient at a week’s delay in loading, Holliday also breaks away from Calcutta for a two-day rail excursion three hundred miles up-country to Jamalpur, where an old friend, “Charley” F—, an engineer at the East Indian Railway’s locomotive works, drives him out at sunset to the fort and the Ganges at Monghyr—past a wedding procession and a leper on the temple steps—and instructs him in caste, kraits, and the running of a bungalow with thirteen servants. Holliday closes the India chapters with an opinion as much as a description, praising the “enormous resources” of the Empire and the loyalty of its people while naming drink and gambling among young Englishmen in the clubs “one of the greatest evils” of colonial life—worse still, he adds, in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The homeward chapters retrace the outward route more briefly—Colombo in pouring rain, a second run of the Suez Canal, an Arab conjuror’s tricks at Port Said, a last look at Gibraltar—and close on two different notes rather than one. On June 30th, in the Bay of Biscay, a Chinese sailor named Wong Look dies of beri-beri and is buried at sea by the “foreign devils,” since his shipmates, whom Holliday calls “John” throughout the book, will not touch the body for fear of devils; days later the “Glamorganshire” reaches Hull, ending the “six long months” the ship had been Holliday’s only home. The book itself, however, ends not on that scene but on a page of shipping statistics—days at sea, tons of coal burned, engine revolutions, best and worst days’ runs—offered, Holliday says, to “the reader who has had the endurance required to reach this stage.” It opens, in turn, with a dedication to his father framed by two stanzas of Rudyard Kipling, one of them a jab at “the fools like Pagett who write of their ‘Eastern trips,’” a technical specification page for the “Glamorganshire” herself, and the “numerous Photographs and Sketches” promised on the title page—plates scattered the length of the book rather than gathered in one section, opening with a frontispiece photograph of Holliday himself, signed “Yours faithfully, Hubert Holliday,” and mixing further photographs, such as a “General view of the heights above Hong Kong,” with pen-and-ink sketches signed with Holliday’s own monogram, among them “A Street in Nagasaki” and a page of “Sketches at Penang.”

Published in 1904 by The Hobart Company of New York, Wonders of Japan: A Portfolio of Views in the Enchanted Bamboo-land is a souvenir album of photographic views rather than a travel narrative or history. It opens with a short essay of a few hundred words on Japan’s rise from what it calls a “sealed book” to the outside world — recalling Commodore Perry’s 1853 demand that Japan open her doors, the centuries in which a Shogun ruled as military governor while the Mikado remained “a mere figure-head,” and the war with China, which the essay says first opened the world’s eyes to Japan’s progress, only for the “legitimate fruits” of that victory to be denied her, it argues, “mainly through the influence of Russia,” which coveted Manchuria and Korea. Writing with the Russo-Japanese War already under way, the essay describes an army approaching half a million men and a navy it judges to outrank Russia’s “as has been promptly demonstrated,” and it voices “concern and even apprehension” at Japanese manufacturing skill, warning of the influence these “Yankees of the East” may have on the nations “so proudly in the van to-day.” It presents the photographs that follow as authentic, “taken on the spot by an earnest traveler,” meant to convey Japan’s “domestic affairs” and “throbbing daily life” more vividly than “cold type.” After this introduction the book becomes a long run of full-page photographs, each with a caption of a sentence or two, covering roughly fifty subjects with no further connecting text.

The captions move through Japan’s religious and civic monuments and its everyday work and customs. One cluster covers the shrines at Nikko — the tombs of Ieyasu, the Yomeimon and Yashamon gates, a granite Holy Water Cistern fed by the Shiraito, or White Thread, cascade, and the moss-covered stone images of Amida along the sacred river — while another covers Kyoto and Osaka: the Chion-in temple with its cherry-lined avenue, the sixty-three-ton bronze bell at the Yasaka temple, the thousand-handed Kwannon inside the San-ju-san-gen-do, a fox shrine to Inari, the golden pavilion Kinkakuji (where, the caption notes, the former shogun Yoshimitsu used to sit and meditate), and the Tennoji temple at Osaka. Other captions describe daily life and industry: rickshaws and the kago litter as modes of travel, small trades along Motomachi street such as cooperage, idol-carving, and basket-, doll-, and sandal-making, tea-picking (with the finest tea said to bring “six dollars the pound”), rice cultivation along a rice-producing province that runs “for a hundred miles along the coast,” a fishing industry the caption calls of “vast importance,” and marriage customs involving an arranged match, a feast, the drinking of sake, and a divorce “easily obtained by the man.” Scenic subjects include Fujiyama, Yumoto Lake and its hot-spring resort (where, the caption notes, mixed bathing still persists though it has been abolished in the large cities), the Daibutsu at Tokyo, the Inland Sea, and the sacred island of Miyajima, where no one may be born or die; port views cover Yokohama Bay and the neighboring Mississippi Bay, named for a vessel in Perry’s squadron.

A small number of captions break from Japan altogether to picture the trans-Canada route the American tourist takes to reach it: the Illicilliwaet River and Hermit Range in the Selkirk Mountains and the Valley of the Bow in the Canadian National Park, each captioned as scenery passed “on the way to Japan,” and Lake Agnes, captioned as a sight for the tourist “crossing the mountain ranges of the British Northwest territory, on the way to Vancouver to take steamer for Yokohama.” The portfolio closes on two southern port images. Nagasaki is pictured as unusually busy “since war was declared against Russia,” with the main body of an army embarking for Korea, war vessels “continually arriving or departing,” and American transports “bound to or from the Philippines” stopping to let their soldiers ashore; five miles away, the road to Moji is shown amid tea- and rice-terraced hills during the annual “Feast of the Dead,” or “Feast of Lanterns,” when the cemeteries, lit with lanterns, are thronged by relatives of the departed.

Arthur Diósy’s The New Far East is a work of contemporary political analysis and argument about Japan, China, Korea, and the great-power rivalry over them, not a travel narrative; nowhere does the author narrate an itinerary of his own through the region, though he draws throughout on personal encounters and conversations, and once even recalls standing at Li Hung-chang’s elbow during a London reception. Diósy identifies himself on the title page as Chairman of Council of the Japan Society, London, and his preface to the first edition, dated November 1898, sets out at length the romanization scheme he has adopted for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names — vowels as in Italian, consonants as in English, family names printed in bold type ahead of the given name — and defends his preference for “Tokio” and “Kioto” over the newer “Tokyo” and “Kyoto” on the ground that they follow the spelling already used by the Japanese Post Office. He states plainly that the Japan Society bears no responsibility for the opinions expressed, which are “entirely my own personal opinions.” The fourth edition, issued in March 1904 amid what its new preface calls “the intense interest aroused by the outbreak of the war between Japan and Russia,” reprints the 1898 text “absolutely without alteration,” adding only a short preface pointing to the Anglo-Japanese alliance, the war itself, and the stirrings of a Japanese-led awakening of China as confirmation of arguments made six years before. The book unfolds across ten numbered chapters, moving from the origins of the “New Far East” in the war of 1894–95 through comparative studies of national character, women, economics, military strength, the “Yellow Peril,” the policies of the rival powers, and, finally, a prescription for British policy.

Chapter I, “The Birth of the New Far East,” opens on the Battle of the Yalu, fought on 17 September 1894, in which Admiral Ito’s fleet broke the sea power of Admiral Ting’s Chinese squadron in what Diósy calls “by its consequences the most important naval action since Trafalgar.” He then spends most of the chapter explaining why British opinion so badly misjudged the belligerents’ chances at the outset — misplaced sympathy for China, an unfounded belief in a Chinese “alliance,” untrustworthy reporting from the foreign press in the treaty ports — and recalls a London dinner conversation, a little more than two years before the war, at which fellow students of Japan dismissed as fantasy his own forecast that Japan would become “the Great Britain of the East.” Chapter II, “Parting, Pigtail, and Topknot,” opens instead on a personal reminiscence of Japanese bluejackets from the cruiser Yoshino going ashore at Plymouth in November 1893, then develops into an extended comparison of three “typical” men of the ruling classes — a Japanese Shi-zoku, a Chinese Mandarin, and a Korean Yang-ban — set side by side for build, complexion, eyes, hair, and dress: the sober silk kimono, hakama, and haori of the Japanese gentleman against the Mandarin’s embroidered robe and the Yang-ban’s spotless white cotton and elaborate horsehair hat, built to protect the cherished topknot beneath it. The chapter widens into a history of Korea’s forced opening — the failed 1867 attempt by Oppert and Jenkins to steal royal gold coffins, the punitive landings of the French admiral Roze and the American admiral Rogers, and the 1876 treaty that Japan herself exacted from Korea after an attack on the warship Unyo-kan — and closes with the Korean king’s reluctant assumption, in October 1897, of the title of Emperor of a newly renamed Dai-Han.

By far the longest chapter, “The Men of New Japan” runs to some eighty-five pages, nearly a quarter of the book, and carries the fullest weight of Diósy’s case for Japan. He surveys sharply conflicting Western judgments of Japanese character, from Francis Xavier’s and Will Adams’s admiration to the grudging or hostile verdicts of later critics, then turns to the conduct of the war itself: care for the wounded, the newly founded Red Cross Society of Japan, whose Ladies’ Branch under the presidency of the Empress supplies the subject of one of the book’s plates, the harrowing fight of the gunboat Akagi — the smallest and slowest of Admiral Ito’s ships, which took heavy casualties but drove off its attacker and rejoined the fleet before the engagement’s close — and the correspondence between Admiral Ting and Admiral Ito arranging the surrender of Wei-hai-wei in February 1895, reprinted at length as an example of a chivalry Diósy finds largely absent from Western press accounts of the war. He also takes up Japan’s new administration of Formosa, quoting a missionary’s testimony to Japanese efficiency in surveying, road-building, and the suppression of opium, and works through what the book calls “the secret of the success of New Japan” — its language, its detective police, inherited, he argues, from two and a half centuries of Tokugawa-era spying, and its national temperament — concluding that “the people of New Japan have no great vices” that a further generation will not remove.

Chapter IV, “The Men of Old China,” turns the same comparative method on China’s collapse: the loss of the fleet, the workings of the Mandarinate and its examination system, official resistance to railways and the telegraph, corruption in the awarding of “commissions,” and the competing claims of Confucianism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship on the Chinese mind. Diósy recalls standing beside Li Hung-chang at his reception by the London Chamber of Commerce and watching the old statesman’s “amused, cynical twinkle” as British manufacturers courted him with sample goods and hopes of contracts that never materialized; the chapter closes on the idea, echoed in the later prefaces, that China’s regeneration will have to come through Japanese rather than Western agency. Chapter V, “The Women of the New Far East,” is again weighted heavily toward Japan, covering the Japanese wife, the geisha, a rebuttal of Pierre Loti’s “rash judgment” of Japanese women, the licensed Yoshiwara quarter, courtship, fashion, and divorce law, before turning more briefly to China, where foot-binding is discussed alongside the 1897 formation of a Cantonese society for its abolition, and to Korea, where Diósy describes the strict seclusion of respectable women and the freer lives of the kisaeng, or dancing-girls, comparing both Chinese and Korean domestic life to the position of women in classical Athens and Rome.

The next three chapters move onto harder political and economic ground. “The Almighty Dollar” traces the commercial classes of New Japan, singles out Osaka as “the Manchester of Japan” for its rapidly multiplying cotton mills, and describes Japan’s new commercial schools and the fields open to foreign investment, before glancing more briefly at the corrupt “concessions” system in China. “Fighting Power” sets Japan’s expanding navy and its efficient army organization against China’s poorly maintained equipment, its Mandarins directing troops from a safe distance, and its continuing dependence on foreign instructors. “The Yellow Peril” dismisses the popular fear of an armed Chinese horde overrunning the West as a fantasy already answered in the previous chapter, then gives an extended, wry reading of the book’s frontispiece — the allegorical cartoon designed by the German Emperor and executed by H. Knackfuss, in which an archangel summons the female figures of the European powers against an approaching “Yellow Peril” whom Diósy identifies, to his own amusement, as an image of the Buddha — before arguing that the real peril lies not in Chinese armies but in a future China industrialized and competing with Western labor on its own terms, an idea illustrated by Kubota Beisen’s companion plate, “The Real Yellow Peril: China Awakened. A Forecast.”

The book’s last two chapters turn to the other powers and to Britain herself. “Russia, France, and Germany in the Far East” admires, with evident unease, the single-mindedness of Russian policy in Asia and its meritocratic diplomatic and consular corps, follows France’s support of her ally, and traces Germany’s consolidation of her hold on Kiao-chau through Prince Henry of Prussia’s “Mailed Fist” expedition. “Britain’s Clear Course” is the book’s culminating argument: a critique of decades of vacillating, ill-informed British policy toward China, and a call for Britain to make herself strong by land as well as at sea, so that Japan will become her natural and valuable ally and China may eventually seek regeneration at British, American, and Japanese hands rather than Russian ones; the book closes not on a summary of its argument but on a forecast that “peace, prosperity, and the dawn of a brilliant era will come to the New Far East.” Beyond its text, the volume is illustrated only lightly: a frontispiece reproducing the Kaiser’s cartoon, five plates by Kubota Beisen of Tokio depicting scenes of old and new Japan, Korea, and the Red Cross committee — an artist, Diósy notes, directed to draw “in purely Japanese style” and “much happier in his representations of thoroughly Far Eastern scenes than in depicting figures in Occidental costumes” — a sixth Kubota plate on the Yellow Peril theme, and a single map, “Russia’s Advance in the Far East, 1858 to 1898,” drawn under the author’s direction by H. J. Evans.

Two Years in Three Continents gathers the weekly letters Edgar M. Condit mailed home during a two-year tour of Europe, Egypt, the Holy Land, Syria, Asia Minor and “the far East Orient,” made with his wife after he retired from business early in 1902. The Prefatory Note supplies his credentials in a comic register: born in Ohio in 1840, a farm boy who at sixteen drove a covered two-horse wagon five hundred miles from central Ohio to Iowa, a course at Oberlin College broken off by the Civil War, then three years of farming before he “plunged into the general insurance business and a little later included banking,” twenty-one years managing a Western field for an Eastern insurance corporation, and city real estate after he settled in Chicago. The volume is dedicated to two friends who “materially assisted Providence” in saving his life in that war. “The editor of my old home paper in Iowa — where I lived for 30 years” published the chapters in weekly installments; the facts and impressions, he insists, were not taken out of memoranda “in cold storage” but “hustled off across the seas to these waiting friends.” The seams of that origin show. Chapter XI is a letter headed “Heidelberg, Germany, Nov. 2, 1902.” over the salutation “Dear Mr. Booth:” — a memorial for his brother William G. Condit, prompted by a copy of the newspaper the Eureka that reached him abroad — and it contains nothing of the tour at all.

The book opens in May in Ireland. Mrs. Condit’s jingle on the two-wheeled jaunting car that carried them out to Blarney Castle — “Oh! the jolly jaunting car / That whirs ’long the streets of Cork” — is quoted whole. From Cork it is a hundred and ten miles to the lakes of Killarney, twenty-five of them by rail to Macroom and the remaining eighty-five by four-horse open coach, with the first night out at Glengarriff on Bantry Bay. Then Burns’s Ayr, the Trossachs, Edinburgh, Melrose, the English lakes, Stratford, Oxford and London, where he visits two Whitechapel institutions: the People’s Palace, with two thousand students drawn from the “‘arab’ or street gamin class,” and Tournby Hall, a charity school of eight hundred whose teachers are all supplied by Oxford men. On the same walk he watches an old woman buy “a farthing’s worth of some vegetable for dinner.” Paris follows, with nearly an hour’s cab hunt for Lafayette’s flat granite slab; then Waterloo, Holland, where the “May Flower” tablet at Leyden “touched me as if standing on holy ground,” Denmark, three hundred miles by carriage through the Norwegian mountains, Stockholm, and St. Petersburg, where the Czar’s winter palace makes him revise a judgment: he had thought Paris the acme of European prodigality in squandering the people’s money, “but in this respect Russia is an easy winner.”

Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Dresden, the Rhine and Switzerland lead into an Italian winter. The approach to Venice gives him his first “head-end” collision — grips flying, passengers sprawling — and Venice itself lies under snow that the municipal force has been “cocking up” all morning, as he has seen it done in Chicago. Fifteen days at the Florence pension “Villa Trollope” with an American Thanksgiving dinner, three weeks at Rome over Christmas, then Naples, Pompeii and Sorrento. In one place the printed order is not the order of the tour: a footnote to the Gibraltar chapter states that “Our tour through Spain was taken during our second year out — on our return from the Orient,” and a late chapter breaks off with “(If taken in the order of our tour, here would follow the chapters on Spain found elsewhere.)” Spain, printed among the European chapters, was traveled last, and gets three of them. The mail waiting at Gibraltar was “the saddest mail we had received in all our experience”: his Chicago acquaintances and friends “decimated to the extent of thirty by the Iroquois horror,” among them two daughters of an old Anamosa friend; his best Chicago friend dead; one very near to them in hospital after an operation. Ronda’s gorge, Granada and the Alhambra, Seville, Cordova and Madrid follow, and the last Spanish chapter goes to Toledo — its cathedral, its sword blades tempered until they can “literally be rolled up as a scroll” — and the Escorial.

A second track runs beneath the sightseeing: a printed note in the Contents names ten chapters of observations gathered “while visiting Christian Missions, Schools and Colleges in so-called ‘Heathen Lands.’” Egypt carries the first of them. Condit boards a Nile steamer in January so crippled by phlebitis that all he sees of the first week is through the door of his stateroom, and at Luxor is carried from the boat to the hotel; afterwards a little backsheesh gets his jinrikisha wheeled inside Karnak, and four Arabs carry him in a sedan chair over the Theban west bank, while Mrs. Condit makes the fourteen-mile trip to Abydos on the shoulders of eight Arabs in two shifts. He prices the labor clearing the ruins at twenty cents a day for the best men and five to eight cents for the hundred boys, driven at a jog trot by an overseer with a rawhide. Turkey has lifted its quarantine against Egypt but kept the medical examination, which costs the party three days, two fares and “a contribution of twenty-five cents each to the port physician,” who “never asked a question,” and lands them at Beirut, where he visits the Syrian Protestant College. Jerusalem draws the book’s harshest verdict on a city — “Few in a lifetime will visit a more unholy city” — Gethsemane excepted; and at the Church of the Nativity what he carries away is “the needed presence of Mohammedan soldiers to keep the peace between these warring church factions.”

Twenty-five pages go to Greece. The Condits carry a Testament up Mars Hill and spend hours reading there the sermon Paul preached from it — “To us this sermon seemed almost like a new message as read from Mars Hill.” Eleusis, Corinth, Mycenae and Epidauros follow, then Olympia, since “to leave Greece without seeing the ruins of Olympia is to leave the best unseen,” and Praxiteles’ Hermes, for which he is “devoutly thankful.” A second Greek chapter is all country: men and women swinging eight-inch hoes, and a currant crop whose acreage “would correspond to Iowa’s corn crop.” Walking behind the royal gardens he meets the king face to face; “each bowed rather coolly and passed on. I never did care very much for kings, anyway.” At Smyrna he walks into the meeting of the western Turkey missions; at Constantinople he sets the howling dervishes of Scutera against the American College for girls, under Miss Patrick “formerly of Lyons, Iowa,” with Robert College coming afterwards, across the Bosphorus, and a Stambul congregation worshiping in a board shack because no permit for a Protestant church has been granted in twenty years. Bulgaria, Hungary, five weeks in Vienna, Prague, a three-week course of the Carlsbad waters, Nuremberg and Munich close Part I, before the book turns east: out of Vienna on 24 July 1903, the Trans-Siberian, the Baikal ferry, Manchurian tillage — “I never saw in any state such clean cultivation” — and a sailing from Dalny past Port Arthur and Chefoo.

The six Japanese chapters, XXXIV through XXXIX, run to seventy-eight pages, a little over an eighth of the narrative and the largest block the book gives to any one country, five of them still in China, covering two and a half months from late August 1903. At Nagasaki he watches a widow scull a house-boat, feeding her baby from the rim of her rice plate and then slinging it on her back — “a phase of home life … for woman I had not noticed anywhere else in the world.” Coaling by hand at Moji and the Inland Sea bring them to Kobe on 23 August, and a night train to Tokio. A hundred-mile ride to Nikko crosses rice land worked by hand, on farms “no larger than the ‘truck patch’ of our thrifty granger.” There he explains Shinto’s fusion with Buddhism, describes the lacquered mausolea of Ieyasu and his grandson Iemetsu, and calls the cryptomeria “easily the king of all trees that have come under my eye in visiting more than half the countries of the globe.” Nikko’s Shinto festival of 17 September, one of the year’s two principal festivals, draws the harshest judgment in these chapters — “As a procession it was a failure by any American or European standard,” the armor “quite ready for the scrap-pile.” He skips the ceremonies, coming away with “only one ray of hope,” that “so many seemed to regard the whole demonstration as a big fake.”

Tokio, “one vast sea of one and two story frame buildings with tile roofs,” has a university of six departments, 3,500 students and a Japanese president, “a Ph. B. of Yale.” The Condits call on Mr. Okura, who “made a bank of money out of army contracts while Japan was at war with China”; before his private museum “the best things we have seen in the best public museums of Europe would not stand comparison,” and across the street he schools five hundred waifs. At a Home for ex-convicts, Mr. Harra shows a record of some seven hundred reclaimed men, and Condit leaves “realizing that life’s opportunities and self-sacrificing for others were not always confined to Christian nations.” The funeral of the second Danjuro, “the Edwin Booth of Japan,” is “far and away beyond the most imposing demonstration of the kind we ever saw in any land”: a reported 8,000, all but officials under umbrellas, a floral piece from “the premier, Marquis Ito himself.” Yokohama, Kamakura’s Daibutsu and Kioto follow, with the “Nokodo” who arranges marriages in which the bride “has no choice in the matter,” and Neesima, founder of Doshisha in 1875. Soldiers on the road are men “of spirit and courage, and of the two I would rather take my chances facing two hundred Russians,” while a private draws sixty cents a month, “or 2 cents a day.” Osaka is “the Chicago of Japan,” also “the Pittsburg of Japan”; Kobe has “the seat of highest learning to women.”

The farewell is comparative: “Of all the semi-civilized countries visited he comes the nearest to our heart. As a rule he is eager, courteous, teachable” — whereas in Palestine, Syria and Turkey “one is never freed from the feeling that the Mohammedan would gladly butcher you if he dared.” Sailing from Kobe on 1 November, three chapters go to China and the Malay states: Hong Kong, where families in house-boats and junks show “squalor and poverty such as the reader never dreamed of in any land,” though “the Chinese end of the city is of brick and fairly well built,” and ten days at Canton. Six cover India, Ceylon and the voyage home: a high-caste Brahmin servant renamed John, famine orphans in mission schools, the Taj by moonlight and Benares. The last chapter refuses to name a favorite country — the seasons made the pictures — and admits Mrs. Condit to “a partnership in this my last chapter” for four poems, one on Japan, which “is now drawing the attention of the whole world.” Copyrighted in 1904, the book nowhere mentions a war between Japan and Russia, though Russia dominates its eastern chapters: ten thousand soldiers at Harbin, Russian-built Dalny, warships off Port Arthur. Spain is the last canvas; the text ends with “(The End.)” The printed list of illustrations redirects five of the book’s sixteen plate leaves to text elsewhere; the Japanese leaf is bound at the pages on babies carried on the back. A topical index closes it.

Letters from Japan: A Record of Modern Life in the Island Empire collects the letters Mary Crawford Fraser — writing as Mrs. Hugh Fraser — sent home from Japan, beginning at sea in April 1889. Her preface calls them letters “written during a three years’ residence in Tokyo,” in which “no method was followed beyond that suggested by the interests and the fancy of the moment.” Each chapter opens under a topic string and a flush-right dateline, salutations and signatures cut away. She writes to family in Rome: “How shall I describe it, so that you in Rome can see it, dear people?” The preface also says what the book is against. The days when a foreigner could describe “the ‘toy country’ and its ‘fairy-like’ inhabitants with glib security in large print” are “gone for ever”; Japan “has set the doors of her secret shrines ajar,” and the first step in wisdom is to “realise how little we know.” She calls the book “a record — and an appreciation,” “in no way a handbook or a history.” It supplies her frame: “With the proclamation of the Constitution on February 11th, 1889, Japan came of age,” and “the war with China in 1894 and 1895 showed that she knew how to maintain” her rights. She thanks Captain Brinkley of the Japan Mail and two Japanese friends, Miss O’Yei Ozaki and Mr. Yasuoka, who gave her legends and points of etiquette and went over the letters with her.

The vantage is the British Legation in Tokyo, in the district of Kojimachi “where our Legation now stands,” and Fraser writes as the wife of the Minister, Hugh Fraser. Their social life, she notes, “only really begins after H—— has presented his credentials”; at Odawara a police inspector takes “the honourable interpreter’s word for it that this was the British Koshi Sama and his family.” Her husband is “H——” in her pages, and “the Chief”; but a frightened acquaintance wails that assassins “will kill him instead of Mr. Fraser,” and an author’s footnote names him among the Ministers under whom the escort’s Inspector Peacock has served. Her own circle is reduced to an initial and a dash; public men are named in full. She writes from an upstairs verandah above the palace moat, in a compound holding the Chancery, the flagstaff called Haman’s Gallows, and Sir Harry Parkes’ enormous watch-tower, built to fly the British flag until it was found the flag would rise higher than the Imperial roofs, and now cracked by earthquakes and used as a water reservoir. She watches the servants’ courtyard “through the closed blinds of an upper window,” lets every man bring wife, children and mother but draws “the line at grandmothers,” and gives a Christmas tree on January 3rd to the fifty-eight children of the compound, Ogita’s list of them running to entries like “Minister’s second cook’s girl, Umé, age 2.” Her dachshund Tippoo Tib is “popularly known as the Brown Ambassador.”

“Treaty Revision, which is for us the question of the day,” is named in the first letter and expounded in the third, where Fraser goes back to Townsend Harris and the fall of the Shogunate to explain how foreigners came to be tried by their own consuls — the arrangement that “constitutes extra-territoriality” — and how each settlement became a lawgiving, untaxed enclave. Japan demands that the settlements be ceded and foreigners tried by Japanese law; British commerce, she writes, “absolutely requires” the abolition of the rules barring foreigners from travel, landholding and trade outside settlement limits. The deadlock is over foreign judges seated alongside native ones: “the now famous nineteenth article of the proposed treaty. It cannot be granted, and it cannot be renounced.” Around it runs violence. A soshi of eighteen gets into the Chancery to tell the Minister he is “doing a great wrong in pressing Treaty Revision”; others come to the gate, and “swordsticks are their favourite weapons.” In October 1889 a well-dressed young man throws a parcel “rolled up in a violet handkerchief” at the Foreign Minister, Count Okuma, and cuts his own throat as it explodes; Okuma loses a leg, and Fraser records “a kind of futile and unreasonable self-reproach, because the catastrophe was caused, however indirectly, by our Treaty Revision business.” His successor, Viscount Aoki, drives up to her door in an open victoria with a loaded revolver chained inside the hood on either hand.

Chapters I through XX cover thirteen months, from the voyage in to the following May. She comes up the Inland Sea past a fleet of junks, dismisses Yokohama — “As scenery Yokohama does not exist” — and finds Tokyo “a city of gardens, where streets and houses have grown up by accident”: wistaria at the Kameido temple; an audience at which the Empress asks after the Queen’s health and after the “two sons whom I had been obliged to leave in England”; an obituary of the painter Kyōsai, whose drawings the book reproduces; the murder of Arinori Mori, “a friend of ours in Peking days,” on the February day the Constitution was promulgated; and five hundred candles sent anonymously to a new temple at Kobe, the first of which explodes and the rest stuffed with dynamite. Rheumatism and Doctor Baelz send her to Atami — rail to Kodzu, a tramway to Odawara, then eighteen miles with the party in jinrikshas and Fraser in a Hong Kong chair carried by four coolies — where a night festival ends with a score of young men, “wildly intoxicated,” wrecking the stage while the child dancer is carried off on her master’s back. November brings the maples, a Thursday call on the Empress’s ladies and the chrysanthemum gardens at Dango-Zaka; January New Year’s Day at the Palace and then the national New Year of pine garlands and bought dreams; March the Dolls’ Festival; April the Uyeno Exhibition and the Duke and Duchess of Connaught.

A fortnight at Kamakura closes the first part, with Yoritomo’s history at length and a moonlight walk to the great Buddha, standing “in a wide temple, roofed only by the sky, lighted only by moon and stars.” Fraser writes as a Catholic and does not disguise it. She spends hours in the Tsukiji convent of the “Black Nuns,” and watches her godson baptized with water poured “out of a nice little china teapot, kept by the nuns for the purpose.” Father Testevuide’s leper hospital near Gotemba — begun when he found a woman cast out to die in a shed — is described at length, and a later chapter opens “Father Testevuide is dead. Father Vigroux takes his place,” then reckons what Catholic priests in Japan live on: fifteen yen a month, out of which come rent, food, travel and “their charities.” Of the Anglican St. Hilda’s she writes that ancestor worship, “instead of being transformed into tender and prayerful remembrance of the dead… is stigmatised as idolatry,” and that “system for system, the Anglican one, costly as it is, compares badly with that adopted in our convent schools.” Introducing the murder of a Canadian schoolmaster by two masked men carrying sword-blades fastened to bamboo sticks, she writes: “I do not want you to think that existence is one long series of cotillon figures out here; it can be very sad and very bitter.”

The second part opens on Enoshima, “the island of the tortoise,” in May 1890, and pushes out to new ground: Ikao in the hills, the climb over the Usui Toge, and Karuizawa, where she builds a two-storied Japanese house and names it the Palace of Peace, sitting out two typhoons there; then Nikko in November, and the stories of Iyeyasu and of Will Adams, the Rochester pilot. Whole chapters in both parts stand still and describe. Here she retells the star-lovers of Tana-Bata and O Sho Kung; the legends of Fuji and Jofuku’s search for the elixir of life; the pilgrim clubs and their chant; the Boys’ Festival, with its armored hero-figures and Hideyoshi’s standard of clustered gourds; and, in a chapter of its own, the definition of a samurai. One of the longest chapters argues about women: her fortnightly reading society for Japanese ladies, marriage which “is not, and never can be here, the supreme relation of life, as it is in Europe,” motherhood which is, concubinage “greatly on the wane,” and the new laws of inheritance. In March 1891 Ogita dies of the influenza sweeping the capital — “Ogita, our samurai, guide, interpreter, my right hand in a thousand matters of life,” a man she introduces on the road to Atami as “friend, servant, interpreter, and samurai,” and whose death takes with him “a part of my Japanese life.” Later letters divide between Tokyo, a second summer at Karuizawa and a cottage at Horiuchi.

Three public occasions have chapters to themselves. The attack on the Cesarévitch at Otsu in May 1891: she prints the Emperor’s rescript, repeats as “rather an amusing story is told here” the judges’ refusal to execute Tsuda Sanzo outside the promulgated laws, records that he “is undergoing a term of imprisonment,” and ends on a samurai girl who cut her throat in a government doorway at Kyoto — “Yuko, which means full of valour.” The opening of the first Diet in November 1890, with the speech from the throne printed entire — Fraser was at neither this nor the Russian Legation, where a crowd stoned the pavilion from which foreign women and children watched the procession from a vantage “quite forbidden to his own subjects”; told the riot had no political significance, she notes that “the actions of an excited crowd seldom have, especially if the apologist be a member of the Government.” The death and State funeral of Prince Sanjo: the Emperor at the dying man’s bedside (“you were to me as a teacher and a father”), the rank of Sho-ichi-i, not granted “for over eleven hundred years,” Shinto rules that “forbid pomp,” a bier carried by fifty men, and his daughter Chiye walking the six miles bareheaded in rough sandals — the same Chiye who marries Prince Kanin later that same year. The burnt Houses of Parliament, reduced to “forty brick chimneys,” and the great October earthquake, with 42,345 houses destroyed, take a few pages each.

The last letter, dated Tokyo, April 1894, opens “Two years have passed since I wrote my last letter from home to home.” Its subject is the Emperor’s silver wedding, the anniversary, March 9th: a morning reception where “H—— and I led quite an imposing staff up to the steps where they stood”; a dinner for eight hundred in different banqueting-halls, the Emperor’s candlelit because “no electric light has been used in the Palace since the burning of the Houses of Parliament”; silver cranes over four feet high, gifts to the Emperor from Imperial Princes, and at every guest’s place a miniature crane and tortoise covering a casket of bonbons. Looking down the table at old antagonists of the Restoration, she writes: “I do not believe there is a man of any party in Japan who would not be glad and proud to lay down his life for his Emperor. If a war should come, Japan’s armies will gather of themselves from every home in the empire.” The evening ends in the throne-room with four nō pieces — Banzairaku, Enguiraku, Taiheiraku, Bairo — and her program card translated in full. The title page promises two hundred and fifty illustrations, printed within the letterpress, the type running round them, with occasional full-page plates. Two frontispieces head the two halves; the rest range from court portraits and Kyōsai drawings to small studies of a pine branch, a gheta shop, a tortoise.

Rear Admiral John D. Ford’s An American Cruiser in the East — issued as a third edition in 1905, though its copyright reads 1898 — is a naval officer’s own account of a three-year Pacific and Far Eastern cruise, framed by a short introduction that supplies its whole rationale. Ford recounts that after several years running the Baltimore Manual Training School, an order in July 1890 sent him to San Francisco and then to the Mare Island Navy Yard, where he joined the U.S.S. “Alert” for, in his words, “a cruise in Behring Sea and the far East”; his stated aim is “to show those countries and their people as I saw them.” What follows is a place-by-place itinerary matching the title page’s own list — the Aleutian Islands, Behring’s Sea, Eastern Siberia, Japan, Korea, China, Formosa, Hong Kong, and the Philippine Islands — closing with historical appendices and an index. The book is illustrated throughout with numerous engravings set directly into its printed pages rather than gathered as separate plates, and its prose moves between the collective “we” of a ship’s company ashore and afloat and Ford’s own first-person asides.

The cruise opens roughly: the “Alert,” an old iron, bark-rigged steamer of 1,020 tons, puts out from Mare Island on June 18, runs into weeks of head winds, and has to duck into Victoria, British Columbia, before finally threading Onalga Pass into Behring Sea and mooring at Iliuliuk, the harbor of Unalaska. Ford lingers over the Aleutian settlement — its Russian church, its Aleut and half-breed inhabitants living on salmon and cod and the raw rum called “hoocheno” — and over the seal rookeries of St. Paul and St. George Islands, describing the “harems,” the lamenting “bachelor” seals, and the killing of the young males for their skins in close detail. A month of chasing sealing poachers follows, along with the still-growing volcanic island of Bogaslov and a passage within sight of Behring Island, where the “Alert” passes the wreck site and grave of the navigator Behring. Two chapters on Petropaulski and the rest of Kamtchatka, Eastern Siberia — its log houses, its samovar tea, its monument to a Russian naval victory over combined British and French forces in 1854 — close out this opening leg, which runs to some forty-five pages of the book’s roughly five hundred before the passage south to Japan.

Japan occupies six chapters and close to a third of the whole book, by far its longest national section, and gets the fullest treatment here. At Yokohama, Ford describes jinrikisha men — an “excellent authority,” he notes, gives them less than five years of life at the work — the curio bazaar of the Benton Dori, and an excursion to the bronze Dai Butsu near Kamakura and to the grave of the Englishman Will Adams at the Yokasuka naval arsenal. At Tokio he dwells at length on the mortuary temples of the Tokugawa Shoguns at Sheba, cataloguing their lacquer, bronze, and carving; describes a Japanese wrestling match near the Ragoku Bashi; recounts a volcanic eruption (Bandaisan, 1888) and an earthquake (the 1891 shock in the prefectures of Aichi and Gifu); and gives an extended, admiring account of a chrysanthemum garden party at the Emperor’s palace, where he dines within sight of Mutsu-hito and reflects on “the wonderful changes this great man has wrought in this fair land and its people” since the Restoration.

Kobe and neighboring Hyogo follow, anchored by a set-piece description of a middle-class Japanese household Ford is invited into — its sliding paper doors, charcoal brazier, and tea service — before the passage through the Inland Sea past Shimonoseki to Nagasaki, where he visits Deshema, the fan-shaped island on which Dutch traders were once confined, recalls the martyrdom of Japanese Christians thrown from the cliffs of Papinberg, descends into the undersea coal galleries at Yackashema, and tours a Japanese crematory before reaching the fishing village of Moji. Osaka, the “Venice of the East” with its three hundred canal bridges and a castle dating to 1583, gets briefer notice. Two further chapters step back to survey Japan systematically: one on the 1889 constitution, the Diet, and the army and navy, down to the tonnage and armament of individual warships; the other on population and foreign trade, on Shinto and Buddhism, on a historical sketch of Japan’s old system of slave and outcast classes drawn from the Tokio Historical Society, and on a long survey of Japanese lacquer work, sword- and armor-making, bronze casting, and the porcelain schools of Satsuma, Hizen, Kutani, and Kyoto.

Leaving Hyogo, the next chapter, titled “A Trip to the Northwestward,” is in fact not about Korea at all: it carries the “Alert” first to Chefoo and to Wei-Hai-Wei on China’s Shantung coast, described — before China has otherwise been introduced in the book — as “the most important stronghold and arsenal in China,” and only afterward turns to Korea proper. At Chemulpo he calls on the Korean governor and describes the settlement’s filth and its Japanese-run rice mill; at Seoul he is received in a palace audience-room furnished, incongruously, with a carpet “made near Boston,” and notes the city’s half-past-eight curfew, after which the streets belong to women. Up the coast at Ping-yang Inlet he visits the river town of Chelto and photographs its native breastworks, not knowing, he says, that within months “one of the most important battles of modern times would be fought over these walls,” and judges Korean women glimpsed along the way “well satisfied” with lives he otherwise describes as narrowly confined; further sections take him to Gen-san, Fu-san, and the exile island of Quelpart. A closing chapter surveys Korea as a whole — its mountains and rivers, King Li-Fin’s government, the long seclusion policy of the “Hermit nation,” and a domestic life he describes as leaving husband and wife “separate apartments” and, in his words, “no feeling of home.”

China occupies eight chapters, more space than any leg but Japan’s, moving from Shanghai — its walled old city, its charity hospitals, its tea-firing sheds — to Ningpo, with its straw ice-houses and seven-storied hexagonal pagoda; to Formosa, where Ford distinguishes the settled Pepo-hohans from unsubdued aboriginal tribes still waging head-taking wars and keeping “skull-chambers”; to Amoy and Swatow, with a frank account of female infanticide and foot-binding; to Canton, the fullest of the China chapters, covering its prison and courtroom, its examination hall, its almshouses for the blind and the old, a New Year’s Eve fire he watches consume whole streets, and a judgment that Chinese lacquer-ware is markedly inferior to Japan’s; to a systematic chapter on Chinese government, mandarin rank, filial piety, agriculture, and the written language; and finally to Hong-Kong and to Macao, where a visit to the grotto of the exiled Portuguese poet Camoens — whose Lusiad supplies the book’s own epigraph — occasions a lengthy biographical digression. Two Philippine chapters, on Manila and on the archipelago generally, describe the walled old city, the government’s cigar factory where thousands of women are employed, and the islands’ peoples, Spanish friars, and history from Magellan’s landing through Legaspi’s founding of the colony, before the narrative itself closes with the “Alert’s” return to San Francisco after three years abroad. The book does not end there, however: four appendices covering events well after the cruise itself retell the 1894–95 Japan-China War theater by theater, revisit the Philippines’ geography and peoples at greater length, and, in dispatches Ford dates from aboard the U.S.S. “Baltimore” off Cavite and, that August, at Manila, narrate the 1898 naval battle of Cavite and the capture of Manila, complete with casualty lists, ship rosters, and a translated Spanish newspaper’s own account of the fight, before the volume finally closes with its index.

Henry M. Field, D.D., presents this book on its title page simply under his name and clerical degree, and a note printed just before that page tells the reader what kind of book it is: the second half of a round-the-world journey, “complete in itself” yet uniform with an earlier volume, From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn, with which it was meant to be read as a pair. The narrative opens on the Bosphorus in the autumn of 1875, as Field and his niece — a young woman he calls only “C.” — leave Constantinople after six months in Europe to “push on to the farthest East,” and it carries them, over the following year, through Egypt, India, Farther India and the Dutch East Indies, and China before reaching Japan in its final chapter. Field writes as a clergyman surveying the non-Christian world: chapters turn as readily to comparative theology — whether Moses learned his law from the Egyptians, whether Buddhism copies Rome — as to landscape, and church services, mission compounds, and biblical parallels recur at almost every stop. The prose itself moves between two registers, description carried in the first-person plural (“we came in sight of a low-lying coast, with not a hill or elevation of any kind rising above the dreary waste, the sea of waters breaking on a sea of sand”) and judgment or private reflection dropped into the first-person singular (“I do not justify such reasoning”; “I have had some sober thoughts while floating on the bosom of the Nile”); the same alternation recurs from the opening chapter in Egypt to the closing one in Japan.

Egypt fills the book’s first quarter. Field’s party lands at Alexandria, rides the new railway to Cairo, and climbs the Great Pyramid past importuning Arab guides before taking one of Cook & Son’s Nile steamers up to Thebes and the First Cataract, stopping at Karnak and Luxor, the rock tombs of Beni-Hassan, and the buried Sacred Bulls of Sakkara. A chapter on “The Egyptian Doctrine of a Future Life” reads the tombs and temples as evidence of a real, if unrevealed, faith in immortality, and a following chapter, “The Religion of the Prophet,” sets out Field’s considered view of Islam: he credits it with strict monotheism, temperance, and a rough equality among believers, but calls its God cold and unapproachable — “This God is not our God” — and names its treatment of women, together with its cruelty, as its chief offense against humanity. A separate chapter narrates a midnight descent into the King’s Chamber in the company of a Cairo physician the book calls only Dr. Grant, in which Field lays out, without fully endorsing, Piazzi Smyth’s theory that the Pyramid’s measurements encode a divine revelation. A further chapter on “Modern Egypt and the Khedive” weighs Ismail Pasha’s canals, railways, and sugar factories against his debts and his use of unpaid forced labor, which Field compares directly to the bondage of the Israelites, and concludes that “the best possible government for Egypt is an enlightened despotism.” The section ends as the travelers leave Cairo on the day of the Mohammedan feast of Bairam, embarking at Suez for India the next day.

India occupies the largest block of the book, well over one hundred and fifty pages. At Bombay, Field visits the rock-cut Caves of Elephanta, the temple of Momba Davi, the Parsee Towers of Silence, and a Hospital for Animals whose careful nursing of broken-down horses and camels leads him to complain that retired ministers at home are treated worse than the beasts. At Allahabad he rides an elephant through the great pilgrim festival called the Mela, counts the fakirs and bathers by the tens of thousands, and pronounces Hindooism “a mountain of lies.” At Agra, arriving in the midst of the Prince of Wales’s own state visit, he tours Akbar’s fort and views the Taj Mahal by moonlight; at Delhi he watches the Mohammedan mourning-festival of the Mohurrim and retraces the siege that ended the Mutiny of 1857, gate by gate. A week in the Himalayas, from Dehra Doon up to the hill station of Mussoorie, is followed by long chapters on the Cawnpore massacre and the siege of Lucknow, told partly in the words of survivors, and by two extended essays: one on whether the English have a “right” to rule India, which frames the issue as “a question of civilization against barbarism”; the other on whether missionaries “do any good,” which he answers plainly in the affirmative. Benares, “the Holy City of the Hindoos,” brings the Monkey Temple and the bathing ghats of the Ganges; Calcutta, “the City of Palaces,” brings farewell visits among American missionaries and English officials before the party leaves for Rangoon.

A further hundred pages carry the travelers through what Field calls “Farther India,” the Malay world, and China. At Rangoon he climbs the gilded Great Pagoda and, at the timber yards of Rangoon and Maulmain, watches elephants stacking teak logs, and gives a long comparative account of Buddhism, which he judges “an immeasurable advance” over Hindooism and finds strikingly close, in its monastic vows, incense, and rosaries, to Roman Catholic practice. A stop at Singapore is followed by a detour to Dutch Java: Field visits Batavia and the mountain botanic garden at Buitenzorg, is entertained overnight by the Regent of Magellang and his two amicable wives, and on Good Friday of 1876 climbs the ruined Buddhist pyramid of Borobodo (Borobudur), which he judges the greatest monument on the island, though smaller than Cheops’s. From Hong Kong he goes up to Canton, where he watches a criminal court apply torture to extract confessions, tours the walled Examination Hall in which candidates for office are shut for days in narrow stone cells, and closes with an account of the Opium War that calls England’s cause “the wrong” and China’s “the right,” alongside genuine admiration for Chinese filial piety, industry, and public order.

Only in its last chapter, some twenty-eight pages out of four hundred and twenty-four, does the book finally reach Japan, and Field gives it the warmest treatment of the whole journey. Sailing from Hong Kong on the American steamer City of Peking, just a year to the day after leaving New York, he lands at Yokohama, rides his first jin-riki-sha — “exactly like a baby carriage,” he writes, “only made for ‘children of a larger growth’” — and tours Yedo (he keeps the old name rather than “Tokio”), with its Tombs of the Tycoons, a government college staffed partly by American professors, and the Mikado’s modest new residence. For a week he and his niece join the veteran missionary translators Dr. Brown and Dr. Hepburn on an excursion along the old Tokaido highway under its giant cedars, past Kamakura’s forty-four-foot bronze Dai-Buts, to the hot-spring village of Miya-no-shita and the pass of Otometoge, where clouds hide the Fusiyama he has come seventy miles to see. He is struck everywhere by how recently, and how completely, Japan has remade itself: the Mikado has ended centuries of seclusion, the feudal daimios and their two-sworded retainers have been pensioned off, and a Western postal system, telegraph, navy, and national school system have all appeared within a single generation. He traces this transformation to Commodore Perry’s 1854 treaty, achieved, he writes, “without shedding a drop of blood,” and closes the chapter urging his countrymen to treat Japan, “our nearest neighbor on the west,” with the friendship that first opened its ports.

The book ends in reflection rather than in another scene. As the coast of Japan sinks behind the ship, and the party crosses seventeen empty days of Pacific toward San Francisco, Field draws the moral of the whole two-part journey: that seeing distant peoples at close range breeds sympathy rather than contempt, since, whatever the color of the skin, “the race is the same… and under a white or black skin beats the same human heart.” His final page hopes that these “pictures of Asia” will bring its peoples a little nearer to his readers, so that, as he puts it in the book’s last sentence, “a traveller’s tale may serve as a kind of lay sermon teaching peace and good will to men.”

Imperial Japan: The Country and Its People presents itself not as a travel narrative but as a systematic historical and topical survey, working outward from Japan’s mythic origins and political history through its major intellectual and religious traditions to the structure of its society, before closing with a portrait of its new capital. In an opening chapter titled “Introductory — The Point of View,” the author frames his own position against the two stock foreign verdicts on Japan then current — the tourist’s uncritical delight and the disillusioned long-term resident’s contempt — proposing instead to study the country “as a part of our common humanity” rather than judge it by either. He identifies his own vantage directly in the body of the book: writing of the missionary effort in Japan, he notes that “one cannot pass over the service of missionaries, especially when one has been a missionary himself for fifteen years,” a stretch of residence also recalled in the book’s dedication to his wife, “with memories of fifteen happy years in Dai Nippon.” A prefatory note further explains that three chapters draw on his own translations of Japanese texts already printed in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and a fourth on material first published in The Independent. The fifteen chapters move from tradition, the absorption of Chinese civilization, feudal warfare, and the nineteenth-century opening, through Buddhism, Confucianism, and a popular “philosophy for the people,” to the samurai’s code and daily life under both the old regime and the new, the common people and the merchant and servant classes, language, literature, and education, ending in Tokyo.

The historical chapters carry Japan from the primitive society recorded in the Ko-Ji-Ki, the “Records of Ancient Matters” first written down, the book states, in 712 A.D. and reconstructed here largely through Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain’s translation, through the wholesale importation of Chinese civilization that began, by the book’s reckoning, with the arrival of Buddhist missionaries from Korea in 552 A.D., bringing with them Chinese writing, law, and court ceremony, and ending in the decayed, powerless imperial court of the twelfth century that finally gave way to four centuries of feudal war. Within that war the book pauses over the sixteenth-century episode of European contact: St. Xavier’s mission of 1549, four decades of open missionary success, and then fifty years of persecution that, the author writes, “contains no chapter more bloody” in the whole history of the Church, ending in national seclusion under Tokugawa Ieyasu, whom he compares at length to Napoleon for succeeding, through hostage-taking and the enforced residence of rival barons in his capital, where the Frenchman failed. The chapter called “The Awakening” then carries the narrative from Commodore Perry’s arrival and Townsend Harris’s 1858 treaty through the bombardment of Satsuma and Choshu by British and allied fleets, the Three-Clan League’s overthrow of the shogunate between 1867 and 1871, and the wholesale hiring and later dismissal of foreign advisers, closing with an account of the missionary effort itself, naming Verbeck, Hepburn, and S. R. Brown among those who won the trust of Japan’s new rulers.

Three chapters set out the country’s major belief systems as functioning among different classes. Buddhism, “the religion of the common people,” is described through its philosophy of universal impermanence — quoted at length against parallel verses from Ecclesiastes — and through a visit to a temple at Nikko that ends with a reported exchange in which the priest insists that his sect worships “your Jesus as willingly as the rest.” Confucianism, “the religion of educated men,” appears as an imported metaphysics of an eternal, impersonal “Way” underlying all change, set out at length through a translated sermon by the seventeenth-century writer Kyuso Muro on “the study of martial fortune,” built around the image of the morning-glory that “differs not in heart from the pine of a thousand years.” A further chapter, “Philosophy for the People,” reproduces a complete popular Confucian sermon from an 1838 collection, built around the parable of the servant Chokichi, sent to market with five coins for household offerings and returning having spent them all on food for himself, used to reproach listeners who forget the duties owed to Heaven.

Three further chapters take up the samurai directly. “The Way of the Samurai” collects stories of loyalty unto death, again drawn from Kyuso Muro — the retainer Andozaimon, who kills himself rather than desert his defeated lord even at his niece’s urging; the wife of Tadaoki, who kills herself before she can be taken by an enemy; the minister Sugita Iki, who risks execution to remonstrate with his lord after a hawking party and is rewarded with a sword instead of a death sentence. “The Life of the Samurai in Old Japan” builds around the autobiography of the statesman-scholar Arai Hakuseki, not published, the text notes, until 1890, more than a century and a half after it was written for his own family in 1716; it follows Arai from a punishing childhood education through years as a masterless ronin who refused marriage into a merchant fortune, to his years as lecturer and effective minister to the sixth Tokugawa shogun, his handling of a disputed Korean embassy, and his interviews with the imprisoned Jesuit missionary Sidotti. “The Life of the Samurai, New Japan” shifts into the author’s own travels, recounting weeks spent as a guest of samurai families in Tosa, with a formal tea ceremony, a No drama performance, and a swordsman’s demonstration of instant-draw technique, before turning to the nationwide Liberal party led from Tosa by Count Itagaki, the imprisonment of the author’s friend Kataoka Kenkichi, and the era’s continuing culture of political assassination, including the killing of Viscount Mori in 1889 and the bombing of Count Okuma.

Later chapters survey the common people — farmers bound to landlords by tenancy rather than ownership, jinrikisha-pullers recruited from the farming class, artisans and artists whose guild secrecy extends to manufacturing “old” bronzes to order, servants organized into guilds who take a customary “squeeze” on household purchases, and merchants, held in traditional contempt (“trade is the only game in which the winner is disgraced,” an old samurai tells his pupil) — before turning to the position of women, whose treatment the author calls “the great blot on the social structure of Japan,” describing marriage arranged through go-betweens, a bride’s subjection to her mother-in-law, and licensed prostitution in the Yoshiwara. A chapter on language, literature, and education works through Japanese honorific grammar, the long dominance of the Chinese ideograph over scholarship and daily speech alike, and the new ladder of primary schools, middle schools, high schools, and the universities at Tokyo and Kyoto. The book closes in Tokyo, set against Kyoto as the present against the past — Kyoto called “beautiful, but it is finished,” Tokyo raw and unglamorous but the place where, in the author’s words, “all ways lead” and where the country’s government, press, and commerce are concentrated — and ends by casting Japan’s transformation as a test of whether an Asian civilization can absorb Western science while remaining itself, closing on the hope that Japan will prove itself made of “men of like passions with ourselves.” The volume’s own list of illustrations names two dozen plates, opening with a frontispiece captioned “A Tea House” and continuing through further plates captioned “The Home of a Buddhist Monk, Tenanted by Foreigners,” “Dancing Girls, Sixteenth Century, Court of Hideyoshi,” “A Japanese Theatre,” “Wrestlers Waiting for the Signal,” and “The Palace in Kyoto.”

Robert Grant Webster’s Japan: From the Old to the New announces its structure in its title: rather than following a single itinerary, it moves outward from the author’s own first impressions of the country to its feudal past, its scenery, the position of its women, and finally its emergence as a modern power allied with Great Britain. The book opens with a dedication to “our gallant allies of Dai Nippon” and a preface in which Webster — a barrister who notes that he sat “for thirteen years in the House of Commons” before withdrawing from politics — calls his account “perfectly unbiassed” and recalls a residence in Japan that the book itself dates to 1870, decades before its 1905 publication in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War. He writes throughout in the first person, addressing the reader directly and quoting his own old letters at length, and he frames Japan’s rise as proof that Britain and Japan — “the two island-empires of the world,” one Western and one Eastern — share a common interest in checking Russian expansion in Asia.

The early chapters move through the sensations of arrival: the harbor at Nagasaki, which Webster compares to the Kyles of Bute on the Clyde, only grander and more luxuriantly wooded; the earthquake-braced wooden house with its sliding paper screens and raised straw-matted floors; the etiquette of “tea-money” at a country inn; the scalding communal bath, taken by men and women together “in the altogether”; and the curio shop, where the price asked rises or falls according to the buyer’s apparent rank. He describes tattooed bettoes, the New Year custom of settling debts and exchanging presents, the paper “chits” used in place of cash for everyday purchases, and Tokyo’s bell-signal system for locating fires, before turning, in “Old-World Japan,” to the country’s feudal history — the destruction of Kublai Khan’s invasion fleet in 1281, Ieyasu’s rise to power after the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the persecution of Christian converts that followed, and the Englishman William Adams’s role in founding Japanese shipbuilding — and notes that Japan’s ancient rulers included nine reigning Empresses. He gives an extended account of the Samurai caste and Bushido, quoting maxims such as “though a lord ceases to be a lord, a servant does not cease to be a servant,” and retells the legend of Yamato Také and his wife Oto Tachibana, who drowns herself to calm a storm, as an illustration of the code’s demands on women as well as men.

“The Eden of the East” surveys Japan’s natural beauty by traveling from Fuji-yama and its white-robed pilgrims to Hakoné Lake, where a colossal bronze statue of Jeso Sama stands on the shore, and on to the country’s forests — which Webster puts at 59 per cent of its land area — and the island of Enoshima, sacred to Benten-Sama. “The Status of Women” traces female influence through the “Three Obediences” imported from China, the mother-in-law’s near-absolute authority in a household, and the etiquette of marriage arranged by a “go-between,” to newer institutions such as the Red Cross Society, patronized by the Empress. Webster also describes the geisha as a paid entertainer whose social position he compares to “a Parisian actress,” the mousmé servants of inns and tea-houses, and the women divers of Noto, who support their households by diving for shellfish while their husbands keep house — adding that a wife there punishes an unfaithful or drunken husband by ducking him at sea “until he is half drowned.”

Political modernization occupies the middle chapters. “The Old Order Changeth” visits the gilded temples at Shiba and describes a wrestling match and a jujitsu exhibition in Tokyo; “The Terror of the Typhoon” recounts a night at Chuzenji, near Nikko, when a typhoon nearly brought down the house Webster was staying in; “The Transition Period” covers Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1853, Lord Elgin’s mission in 1858, and the Shogun’s resignation in 1867; “The New Era” follows the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion and the drafting of the 1889 Constitution under Marquis Ito, quoting the Emperor’s rescripts at length; “In the Path of Progress” surveys compulsory education, the 1901 opening of a women’s university, the growth of the merchant marine from 110,000 to nearly 800,000 gross tons between 1879 and 1900, and Japan’s export trade in silk, cotton, and tea; and “Modern Japan” covers the war with China in 1894–95 and the Triple Intervention that forced Japan to return the Liaotung Peninsula, which she did not recover until the war with Russia a decade later.

The final chapter, “The Far East,” carries the narrative through the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the Russo-Japanese War, dwelling on Admiral Togo’s destruction of the Russian Baltic Fleet at Tsushima in May 1905 and on President Roosevelt’s mediation of the Portsmouth peace conference, and it credits the resulting peace to “the illustrious virtues of the Emperor” and to Roosevelt’s persistence. The book closes with two appendices reproducing official documents: Appendix I reprints the text of the renewed Anglo-Japanese Treaty of August 1905 in full, together with Lord Lansdowne’s covering dispatch, and Appendix II sets out the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth between Japan and Russia of September 1905, article by article, accompanied by a sketch map of the Manchurian and Sakhalin territory affected by the settlement. Sixteen photographic plates illustrate the volume throughout, from a frontispiece portrait of the Emperor and scenes such as “A Curio Shop” and “Sleeping Beauties” to portraits of Marquis Ito, Field-Marshal Marquis Oyama, and Admiral Togo.

Rather than a single traveler’s continuous narrative, this volume is an anthology: forty-six short chapters on Japan, each excerpted from a different contributor’s own book or article and credited to that writer by name, gathered and — where the original was in French — translated by Esther Singleton, who is identified on the title page as the author of Turrets, Towers and Temples, Great Pictures, and A Guide to the Opera, and as translator of The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner. Singleton arranges the chapters into six parts — The Country and the Race, History and Religion, Places and Monuments, Manners and Customs, Arts and Crafts, and Modern Japan — and explains in her preface that she has drawn “on the records and impressions of those who have been allowed especial opportunities for examination and forming their own conclusions.” She notes, for instance, that her extracts from Lafcadio Hearn are taken, by special arrangement with his publishers, from his own Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan — a detail that signals how the book as a whole is assembled, part by part, from roughly thirty different writers, several of whom recur across more than one section.

The opening part surveys Japan in general terms: Louis Gonse (his name garbled as “Louis Const” in some renderings of the table of contents, though the chapter itself is plainly signed “Louis Gonse,” and he is cited again later in the book as an authority on Japanese art) writes on the country’s climate, volcanic geology and flora and fauna; A. H. Keane gives a more technical account of the archipelago’s mountain systems, its volcanoes and its history of earthquakes; and Jean Jacques Élisée Reclus describes the Japanese people, their physical types, dress and temperament. History and Religion follows: Basil Hall Chamberlain traces Japan’s story from the legendary reign of Jimmu Tenno through the rise of the Fujiwara, the Taira and Minamoto clans, the Tokugawa Shogunate and its two centuries of seclusion, Commodore Perry’s arrival, the Meiji reforms, and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95; Toshitaro Yamashita explains Shinto as a form of ancestor-worship centered on the Imperial line and describes how Buddhism, introduced under the Emperor Bitatsu in 584 A.D., brought with it sculpture, temple architecture and, he argues, doctrines refined in Japan beyond their development in India or China; and Samuel Tuke examines the Shinto torii gateway, weighing the “bird-rest” etymology recorded by Ernest Satow against a theory tracing both the form and the Shinto cult itself to a foreign, possibly Indian, origin.

Places and Monuments is by far the longest part, moving the reader from site to site through nineteen chapters. Sir Edward J. Reed contributes an account of a jinriki-sha journey along the Great Tokaido Road from Kioto to Tokio and a separate description of the Dai-Butsu of Nara; Frederic H. Balfour calls Tokio “less a city, as we understand the word, than a huge, straggling, beautiful village”; Judith Gautier describes the temple of Asakusa, its incense-clouded hall and its gallery of “living dolls”; Aimé Humbert writes both on the Hatchiman shrine at Kamakura and on a voyage through the Inland Sea; Christopher Dresser visits the Shiba Temple and its shogunal tombs; Lafcadio Hearn contributes his first ride through Yokohama and a separate essay on Enoshima; Sir Edwin Arnold writes on Fuji-San, on Miyanoshita, and on travel in the Japanese mountains; Pierre Loti supplies three chapters — on the temples of Nikko, on Kioto, and on the Mikado’s Palace; Isabella Bird Bishop describes the Ise shrines; André Bellessort gives his impressions of Kobe; Noel Buxton writes on Ena-San and Misakatoge; and Professor John Milne describes a large crater.

Manners and Customs turns from place to daily life. Arthur Diósy details the dress of the Japanese gentleman, from the silk kimono and haori down to the tabi sock and folding fan; a contributor identified only by the initials T. E. M. writes on Japanese ladies, their courtship and wedding customs, and their legal subordination within the household; Mortimer Mempes contributes essays on Japanese children — comparing a group of them at play to “a grand picture-gallery, a picture-gallery of a nation” — and on the geisha; Marcus B. Huish describes the house and its customs; Sir Edwin Arnold returns with an essay on the Japanese hearth and its charcoal hibachi; J. J. Rein surveys the Japanese ornamental garden; Josiah Conder devotes a long, season-by-season essay to the flowers of Japan, from the plum and cherry blossom to the wistaria and iris; Augustus W. Franks describes the tea-ceremonies, or cha-no-yu, utensil by utensil; and Basil Hall Chamberlain closes the part with an essay on pilgrimages to shrines such as Ise, Kompira and Fuji.

Arts and Crafts assembles a specialist for nearly every medium: George Ashdown Audsley writes on ornamental arts; Sir Rutherford Alcock on decorative arts and the Japanese preference for conventionalized natural motifs over pictorial realism; Christopher Dresser, in a second contribution, on architecture — houses, castles, pagodas and bridges, including the earthquake-resistant construction of the Japanese house; William Anderson on painting; Augustus W. Franks, in a second chapter, on pottery and porcelain, tracing wares such as Kutani, Satsuma and the export porcelain known as “Old Japan” to particular provinces and kilns; Marcus B. Huish, likewise returning, on sculpture and carving, with an extended account of netsuke carvers such as Miwa and Ikkan; Ernest Hart on lacquer, tracing the craft through named emperors and artists from a legendary guild founded under the Emperor Koan in 392 B.C. to the Genroku period (1688–1704); W. G. Aston on literature, from the Manyoshiu through the Heian-period classics Genji Monogatari and Makura Zoshi — both, he notes, written by women — to the later Tokugawa-era literature written exclusively by men; and Mortimer Mempes, in a third appearance, on the Japanese theatre and its flower-path stage.

The closing part, Modern Japan, shifts from craft to geopolitics. Arthur Diósy’s “The New Japan” opens with the naval battle fought off the mouth of the Yalu River on September 17, 1894, and argues that Japan’s victory over China forced the Western powers to abandon their habit of treating her as “an interesting, clever child, not to be taken seriously for a moment.” The book then closes with “Present Conditions,” credited only to the initials E. S. — evidently Singleton’s own — a statistical chapter tallying Japan’s islands and population, her cabinet ministers, army and navy strength, foreign commerce, currency, religious sects and universities as of the early 1900s. Throughout, the text is accompanied by a substantial illustration program of some forty plates, opening with a photographic frontispiece captioned simply “Yokohama” and continuing through further photographic views of temples, streets, gardens and mountains, alongside plates reproducing individual art objects discussed in the later chapters — a kakemono by Hokusai, lacquered boxes, vases of Owari porcelain, a carved ivory group — and one plate of children credited to the contributor Mortimer Mempes himself.

Japan, the Eastern Wonderland is framed, in its introduction, as a piece of family correspondence rather than a conventional travel account: a Japanese man who had studied English law at University College in London, taken in by a professor’s family, promises the youngest child, Nelly, the stories of his boyhood he had no time to tell her in person. He explains the title through a conversation with the children about “Alice in Wonderland,” insisting that his own country needed no borrowed heroine to be a wonderland in its own right, and signs the introduction “Your Japanese Brother.” The eight chapters that follow are narrated in the first person by that Japanese brother, a boy named Kotarō, addressed throughout to Nelly (with occasional asides to “Bob”), and trace his life from a farmer’s son on the coast near Kanagawa through apprenticeship to a swordsmith uncle in Yedo, a spell as a young courtier and poet in Kioto, service in the wars that ended the Shogunate, and study abroad, before closing on Japan’s transformation in the 1870s.

The opening chapters set Kotarō’s childhood beside his sister Hana, “Blossom,” on their father’s rice farm: the naming ritual at the Buddhist temple that produced the name Kotarō, lessons in fan etiquette, wandering minstrels and story-tellers, winter evenings around the hibachi, and Hana’s doll-like preparations for receiving child visitors. At eight, Kotarō declares he will “be a samurai,” and a priest directs him instead toward apprenticeship with his mother’s brother, Daremo, an armorer and swordsmith in Yedo; the family’s journey there, through cherry orchards and past a daimio’s procession before which they prostrate themselves, culminates in an evening of conjurers at a wayside tea-house. The morning after their arrival, while his parents are still visiting, the family attends the great fair at the Asakusa temple, with its carved gateway, the two guardian idols before which straw sandals are hung, the temple’s pigeons and sacred horse, and its thirty-five waxwork groups depicting the miracles of the goddess Kannon, in a digression that also defines Shinto as a worship of ancestors bound up with reverence for the Mikado. Once his parents have gone home and he is settled in Daremo’s household, Kotarō describes Yedo itself—its scale, the sliding paper walls and kotatsu of a middle-class house—and his lessons in the Japanese and Chinese systems of writing, digressing to praise the Heian court author Murasaki Shibiku and her Genji Monogatari as “the parent of the Japanese novel”; the Boys’ Feast of Flags and Hana’s Feast of Dolls are described as celebrated for each of them in turn.

“Ranks and Religions” lays out the feudal order Kotarō grew up under—Mikado, Shogun, daimio, the courtier kuge, the hatamoto and samurai proper, and, below the farmers and merchants, the eta and hinin barred from ordinary houses—alongside an account of Buddhism, whose ritual he compares point by point to Roman Catholic practice (rosaries, incense, vestments, preaching), recalling a sermon he often heard at Shiba and describing the Ainu Feast of the Bear and fox-worship at Inari shrines. “Tales of My Ancestors” turns personal: Kotarō receives his first two swords and hears talk at Daremo’s forge of the foreign ships newly anchored in Yedo Bay and the opening of Yokohama, and of ronin sworn to assassinate strangers. After the boy stamps on a wooden cross in a fit of childish anti-Christian fervor, Daremo reveals the family’s hidden history: Kotarō’s own grandmother, a secret Christian, was crucified during a wave of persecution for possessing a Christian prayer book; Daremo, denying that he is a Christian himself, refuses all the same to speak against his mother’s faith—a secret Kotarō is made to swear, in his own blood, never to disclose. The chapter closes with the family’s declining fortunes under heavy rice taxation, a train of ill omens preceding his father’s illness, and his father’s death and funeral rites on the family hillside.

In “Court and Camp,” Kotarō’s verses in praise of the Mikado win him a place in a noble’s household at Kioto, where he describes court dress, poetry contests, and a courtship that will later become his marriage; this idyll ends when Daremo vanishes, and is later confirmed to have been arrested for openly professing the Christianity he had adopted after finding a New Testament floating in Yedo Bay. Kotarō flees south disguised as a ronin to take service with the Satsuma clan under the younger Shimadzu, fights in the campaigns that end the Shogunate—a three-day battle near Kioto, the abolition of the Shogunate in January 1868, the restoration of the young Emperor Mutsuhito—and pauses to explain hara-kiri as a practice of the samurai caste. The closing chapter follows Kotarō to America to study, where he publicly professes Christianity, and back to a Japan remade by the reforms of the early 1870s: the surrender of the daimiates to the crown in 1871, new law courts and the end of torture, the renaming of Yedo as Tokio, and an encounter with the Emperor in person at the opening of the Yokohama–Tokio railway; the chapter closes by registering the 1878 Satsuma rebellion and the abolition of the samurai’s privilege of wearing two swords, “so I shall end my life as I began it—swordless and casteless.” The volume carries a frontispiece, “Geisha and Dancing Girl,” and nearly fifty further full-page photographic plates credited to named photographers, illustrating scenes named in the chapters—among them “Shinto Priest Offering ‘Saké,’” “‘Daibutsu,’ or Great Buddha, at Kamakura,” “Dancing-Girls Going into a Tea-House, Kioto,” and “Hair-Dressing”—interleaved through the narrative to the final pages describing jinrikishas, European dress, and schoolbooks translated into Japanese for “New Japan.”

The Peace Edition of More Queer Things about Japan is not a single travel narrative but a bound-together miscellany in four parts by two authors, framed by material added for this 1905 printing. Douglas Sladen supplies a Preface to the Peace Edition, dated “Peace Day, Sept. 5th, 1905,” a day-by-day chronology titled “The War at a Glance” running from February 1904 to the Portsmouth settlement, a full précis of the Treaty of Portsmouth’s articles as telegraphed by Reuters, and a general Introduction; only then does the book proper open. Part I, “Japan from a Woman’s Point of View,” is sixteen essay-chapters by Norma Lorimer; Part II is a Japanese-authored, English-translated “History of Napoleon” with attached lives of Peter the Great, Alexander the Great, and Aristotle; Part III reprints, via the Hakluyt Society, the original seventeenth-century letters of the pilot William Adams; and Part IV, “Japan from a Man’s Point of View,” collects eleven further chapters and an appendix by Sladen. Sladen notes that he had already told Adams’s story in his earlier book Queer Things about Japan, of which this volume presents itself as a continuation.

Lorimer’s part moves topically rather than chronologically, opening with an account of how European residents live apart from Japanese life on the Yokohama Bluff and at resorts like Miyanoshita, then contrasting that insulated existence with her own experience of native inns, riksha travel, and servants such as “Také,” who cooks her a beef-steak on the landlady’s stove after a provision-riksha supplies the table and utensils. Successive chapters take up childhood (the Boys’ and Girls’ festivals, doll-keeping, street toy-sellers), courtship and the “first-seeing” arranged by a go-between, the sake-drinking marriage ceremony and the registration of a bride as her husband’s property, housekeeping and etiquette, clothes, shopping, and the laboring classes. One chapter, “Lie-Europeans,” reports the Chinese merchant’s contemptuous term for the Japanese and argues, with anecdotes from Yokohama racing and Canton tea firms, that Japanese business honor differs fundamentally from Chinese or English notions of a man’s word. The section closes with “Keeping the Fifth Commandment,” which ties Shinto ancestor-worship and imported Confucian obedience to instances of extreme filial sacrifice, including daughters who, in her account, sell themselves to “a house of ill-fame” to support their parents — the same institution Sladen’s closing appendix will examine from the inside.

Part II reproduces a manuscript said to have been written by a Japanese author in the first half of the nineteenth century and translated by Yoshio Markino, whose own preface warns readers to laugh at his word-for-word rendering; an unsigned editorial note before the narrative describes the double-page illustrations plate by plate and cites J. H. Rose’s biography for comparison, while a separate list, “A Few Corrections of the Mistakes in Proper Names,” signed by Basil H. Soulsby (with one geographical note credited to J. B. Bury), corrects the manuscript’s garbled names and battles after the fact. The narrative itself recasts Napoleon as “the Pretender Mikado of France,” dates events by Japanese era-years alongside Western ones, and gives a lopsided account of his wars — Trafalgar goes unmentioned, England’s part at Waterloo is minimized, and Holland is compared to ancient Greece. The illustrations reimagine Napoleon’s coronation, his wedding to Josephine (conducted as a Japanese sake ceremony), the attack on Moscow, and his funeral car (rendered as a temple mikoshi) in Japanese dress and setting; the same treatment extends to a companion life of Peter the Great — styled Russia’s “Mikado,” its one illustration showing him pursued by Charles XII of Sweden — and a life of Alexander the Great with notes on Aristotle, and closes with a separate Dutch-derived Japanese account of the Greek war of independence from Turkish rule.

Part III shifts voice entirely, presenting Adams’s own six letters of 1611–1617 in their original spelling, reprinted by permission of the Hakluyt Society with identifying notes signed by Basil H. Soulsby, Maunde Thompson, and Sladen himself. The first letter recounts Adams’s 1598 voyage as pilot major of a Dutch fleet bound for Spanish America, the losses to storm and sickness off Guinea and in the Strait of Magellan, and the eventual wreck that brought him into the presence of “the Emperour” Ieyasu. Letter IV incorporates, as a distinct narrative voice, Captain John Saris’s own log of the Clove’s 1613 approach to Hirado, day by day soundings and sightings included. Letter VI describes the 1615 destruction of Osaka castle, the death of Hideyori, and the new shogun’s edicts banishing Jesuits and friars and forbidding Christianity on pain of death, along with the narrowing of English trading privileges to Hirado and Nagasaki. The section ends not with a letter of Adams’s own but with correspondence from Richard Cock reporting Adams’s death on Firando in May 1620, followed by the itemized inventory of his estate.

Sladen’s own part opens with the Japanese soldier and the samurai class, tracing jujitsu-trained police, the peacetime surrender of swords and stipends, and the ethic of service he sums up as Ich dien, before turning, in “Japan, the Italy of the East,” to a sustained comparison of Japanese and Italian poor, patronage of artists, and climate. Chapters on travel, on Tokyo’s “topsy-turvy” customs, on how the Japanese spend holidays, and on bargain “job-line” shops lead into essays answering Lorimer’s from the other side — “The Cheerful Lot of the Japanese Women” and “The Japanese Girl” — and into “Japanese Domestic Joys for England,” which turns skeptical, cataloguing a Japanese moosme’s unfamiliarity with English carpets, beds, cutlery, fireplaces, and furniture before allowing, as an aside, that Japanese men might make good house-stewards. After a “Bird’s-Eye View of Japan,” Sladen closes his own chapters with a theatre review of David Belasco and John Luther Long’s London production of The Darling of the Gods, praising Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s stage management and the dumb manservant’s performance as authentically Japanese while judging Lena Ashwell’s love-making and the play’s comic touches false to Japanese practice, and comparing the piece’s effect to Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème.

The book’s final section, an appendix titled “The Yoshiwara from Within,” has Sladen assembling material from Chamberlain, Delmar, and Osman Edwards to describe the licensed quarter’s history and daily operation; at length he quotes Edwards’s own account of a visit arranged through a Japanese acquaintance who explained his “mission” to the proprietor, including conversation with named courtesans such as “River of Song,” the madam “Spear-hand,” and the geisha Miss Wistaria, and the full text of a girl’s nenki-shomon, or certificate of sale, naming her price in yen and its division between dress allowance and payment to her father — set apart from “the naive confessions of the Japanese,” Englished separately by a Mr. Takahashi. Throughout the volume the double-page plates carry the weight of a second commentary: ten scenes attributed to Hokusai depicting Tokaido way-stations and Will Adams-era travel, and fourteen further Japanese-artist illustrations, ten tied to the Napoleon history and four — two in Lorimer’s part, one facing her Ch. XIII, and one in the Yoshiwara appendix — scattered elsewhere in the book. Set against that apparatus, the Peace Edition’s own additions — the dated Preface, the month-by-month war chronicle drawn from the Japan Chronicle and London dailies, and the fifteen-article Portsmouth treaty text — stand at the book’s threshold as the occasion that prompted this reissue of four otherwise separate pieces of writing about Japan.

A first-person record of one continuous journey, My Travels in China, Japan and Java, 1903 carries H.H. the Raja-i-Rajgan Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala from Mussoorie by way of Bombay to Ceylon, the China coast, Japan, and Dutch Java, and back to Kapurthala — a journey the closing pages reckon at twenty-five thousand miles. The preface states the aim plainly: the book is “written chiefly as a record of my brief visit to the Far East and for the purpose of presentation to my friends,” makes “no pretension to literary excellence,” and may interest “those who are now following the course of the war between Russia and Japan,” since “impending hostilities rendered my visit to Japan peculiarly opportune.” The same preface fixes his estimate of the peoples he saw: Japan is “perhaps one of the most interesting countries in the world”; of the Chinese and Javanese “I have little to say in praise,” the Chinese seeming to him to “possess no national ideals,” the Javanese “absolutely apathetic” — and then, at once, “Both countries are, however, interesting and well worth a visit.” Five chapters fill 226 pages, dated almost day by day and thick with steamers, trains, hotels, and official calls. He travels in company: a group plate at the head names the Rani Sahiba, Dr. Paira Mal, and Lala Shivnarain, his acting secretary, and his own cook, brought from India, makes a polau for his birthday dinner at Tokio. Comparisons with India appear in all five chapters.

The opening chapter runs down the sea route. He puts up at the Galle Face Hotel in Colombo, notes at Singapore a mixture of Malays, Javanese, Tamils, and Sikhs among whom “the Chinese predominated,” and reaches Saigon, his first French colony, where he dines at Government House and presses his hosts on why the nominal sovereigns of Annam and Cambodia receive allowances but no share in government — “Mais ça n’entre pas dans l’esprit français,” comes the reply — then tours the college. At Hong-Kong all the policemen are Sikhs. The China chapter opens at Shanghai, where he takes the seat of honor on the bench of a mixed tribunal, walks the Chinese city with a handkerchief to his nose, looks into an opium den, visits the Jesuit orphanage and observatory at Zikawei, and counts seven post offices; then Chifoo; Tien-Tsin, with its eight foreign settlements; Pekin, which he would rename the “City of Chaos and Evil Odours,” where he calls on Sir Ernest Satow and sees the Temple of Heaven and the Lama Temple; back to Tien-Tsin, where Captain Menzies shows him the yamen of the Viceroy Yuanshikhai; Shanhaikwan and the Great Wall, where an officer of the 30th Punjab Infantry proves to be his own subject from Dhilwan; and Newchwang, the Trans-Siberian line, and Russian Dalny, whose governor drives him out to see some twenty battleships and cruisers “intended to fight Japan.” Two spare days take him on to Port Arthur, garrisoned by about fifty thousand men.

Japan takes the third and longest chapter, a little over a hundred pages. He lands at Nagasaki on November 2, in time for the Emperor’s birthday and a Governor so overcome that he forgets his English and falls back on the British Consul. Rail along the Inland Sea carries him past Osaka to nine days at Yokohama. Then a round of engagements: a British Legation garden party where he converses with Count Katsura, Baron Komura, Viscount Tanaka, Admiral Togo, General Oku, “who attended the Delhi Darbar,” and Baron Sannomiya, Grand Master of Ceremonies; the American cruiser Oregon, whose “muscular negroes,” he learns, are never promoted to commissioned rank, prompting him to ask whether the negro will “always tolerate being told of his equality with the white man” while “forever kept out of appointments … only because God made him black”; the Empress’s chrysanthemum party, where Sir Claude MacDonald presents him and she is astonished to hear that parts of India are at times almost as cold as Japan; a Legation ball where he wears his best Punjabi costume and dances the State quadrille with Princess Nashimoto; the Shiba temples, which set off a page on Buddhism and Shintoism — the latter chiefly ancestor worship and “the deification of the Mikado” — though “the average Japanese does not trouble his head seriously about religion of any kind”; a wedding reception, and a passage on go-betweens, the loose marriage tie, and a wife’s three obediences; and an Imperial duck-hunt taken with nets.

Institutions interest him as much as sights. He watches maneuvers at Utsonomiya, where the infantry does “nothing but excite my admiration” while the cavalry’s undersized ponies leave him doubting it can face the Cossack; inspects the Imperial University, the High Court, a prison whose living quarters seem to him “a model of its kind,” the Peeresses’ School, and the Guards’ barracks; and prints a scale of army pay. Dr. Baelz, at luncheon, yields “more information from him in a short time” than the country’s people gave in the whole trip. Nikko and Chuzenji, “the Simla of Japan,” precede an audience with the Emperor on his own birthday: Sannomiya interprets, a loud “Ha-Ha-Hum-Hum” greets each answer, and the Imperial uniform seems “to have been made by guesswork as regards its dimensions,” no subject, by “common gossip,” being permitted to touch him. Then Lake Hakone, Nagoya, Kioto, the Katsura Gava rapids, and Nara; back at Kioto he overcomes “the conservative prejudice of our Japanese friends to anything out of season” to have the spring geisha dance performed, his coat-of-arms on the lanterns and his Kapurthala flag in the finale, to cries of “Indo-Banzai”; then Lake Biwa. Osaka, the Manchester of Japan on the way up and the Birmingham of Japan on the way back, yields the Imperial Mint and the Military Arsenal, whose guns are “probably now being used against the Russians in Manchuria.” He sails from Kobe in the Koenig Albert, and at Nagasaki takes his last look, “full of regret.”

A short chapter returns him to Shanghai, Hong-Kong, Singapore, and Johore. Java, the second-longest chapter, has a purpose: in “the largest non-British colony in the East” he can “make comparisons and note differences.” After the “Riz-tafel” at Batavia and the Buitenzorg botanical gardens comes a chiefs’ college at Bandong where Dutch “happens to be the only European language taught,” the Dutch objecting to the mass learning it “because it would make them too learned.” At Boroboedoer the carvings illustrate the Mahabharata, and the work tells him “beyond doubt that Indian workmen were imported.” Three court occasions follow: a formal evening at Djocjokarta; a night at Solokarta with a corps de ballet of some fifty girls of the Sultan’s family, a host “popularly known as the ‘Nail of the Universe’” whose servants may approach only crouching, and “perhaps the most intensely interesting day of many I spent in the Far East”; and a second, public entertainment at Djocjokarta with a dagger dance and a Mahabharata play acted by the Sultan’s sons. A Dutch fort commands the Solokarta palace, a Dutch bodyguard attends the Sultan, the Resident is “touchingly designated ‘elder brother’”; he concludes that these princes are “little better than political prisoners,” worse placed than the rajas in India. Fifty-six half-tone illustrations, a photogravure frontispiece with the author’s engraved autograph, and a map of the itinerary accompany the text; several royal portraits are captioned as presented to the author or Rani Sahiba; the book stops at “FINIS,” without index or appendix.

Religion in Japan: Shintoism—Buddhism—Christianity is a doctrinal survey rather than a travel account, written by George A. Cobbold, B.A., of Pembroke College, Oxford, and issued by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge under the direction of its Tract Committee. In an introductory section, Cobbold frames the book as an attempt to fill a gap he perceived in the crowded shelf of books produced by interest in Japan’s rapid “Europeanization” after 1868: most such books, he writes, allow readers to form a good idea of the country, its people, and its customs, while comparatively little has been written on the country’s religious life, which was the object of his own attention “from the time of my leaving England” throughout his visit. He acknowledges that his account will be imperfect and possibly marked by “inaccuracy or mistake,” and credits an unnamed friend for material supplied to him, along with Chamberlain and Mason’s Handbook for Japan and Dr. E. J. Eitel’s Lectures on Buddhism as consulted sources; the introductory section itself is dated November 1893, and the statistics cited in the later chapters are keyed to 1892 and early 1893, though the volume was not published until 1905. Five chapters follow in sequence — Shintoism, Buddhism, Buddhism in Japan, Buddhism and Christianity, and Christianity in Japan — moving from Japan’s native cult, through a general account of Buddhism, to its Japanese forms, to an extended comparison of Buddhism with Christianity, and finally to a survey of the Christian missions then at work in the country.

Cobbold opens with Shintoism, tracing the term to the Chinese “Shinto” and its Japanese equivalent, “Kami-no-michi,” which he renders as the “Way of the Genii, or Spirits” rather than the more usual “Way of the Gods.” He describes it less as a religion than “patriotism exalted to the rank of a creed” — a veneration of legendary and historical heroes traced to the mythological accession of Jimmu Tenno in 660 B.C. and to the sun-goddess Amaterasu, combined with a nature-worship he attributes partly to contact with Chinese Taoism. He details the plain wooden shrines, the torii gateways, the mirror, sword, and stone kept as regalia in the sanctuary, the Gohei wands, and the Kagura dance, and notes that Shinto supplies no moral code, no public worship, and no sermons, applying only to subjects of the Mikado. He recounts its adoption as state religion in 1868 for frankly political reasons — including a government grant supporting some 98,000 shrines — and its subsequent decline, capped by an 1892 government announcement that Shinto rites were merely “traditional and commemorative” rather than religious; he concludes that its remaining hold is confined to “the superstition of the poor and illiterate” and to an educated reluctance to break with a venerable past. Turning to Buddhism in general, he first cautions readers against two popular sources of misinformation, the “esoteric Buddhism” associated with Madame Blavatsky and Mr. Sinnett and, more temperately, Edwin Arnold’s poem The Light of Asia, which he credits with genuine power but faults for placing terms such as “Our Lord” and “Saviour” before Buddha in ways he thinks liable to mislead readers about the relation between the two faiths. He then narrates the traditional life of Gautama Buddha — the Great Renunciation, the enlightenment beneath the Bo-tree, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the founding of the monastic Brotherhood — and explains Nirvana as a state disputed among Buddhists themselves, along with the five prohibitions against killing, theft, falsehood, impurity, and intoxicants. He judges the resulting system one that “knows no God” and attaches no value to prayer, built on a self-denial that is, in his view, only “selfishness after all” for want of Christianity’s “supernatural weapons,” while allowing that it proclaims “a message of undeniable, if most imperfect, truth” in urging self-reliance and self-control.

The third chapter, “Buddhism in Japan,” traces the doctrine’s transmission from India through China — including its division, after a council held under King Kanishka, into the Mahayana and Hinayana, or “Greater and Lesser Vehicles” — before describing its arrival in Japan in 552 A.D. and its establishment through the patronage of the Mikado’s young son, later known as Shotoku Taishi, whom Cobbold calls the “Constantine of Japanese Buddhism.” He surveys roughly a dozen Japanese sects, setting the ascetic, closely regulated Hinayana schools such as the Kusha against the more accommodating Mahayana schools — the contemplative Zen, the mystical Shingon and Tendai, the intolerant, narrow Hokkai founded by Nichiren, and the Jodo and Shin-Jodo, devoted to Amida Buddha and the Western Paradise, the latter of which he calls “the Protestantism of Japan” on account of its married clergy and vernacular scripture. He also describes the cult of Kwannon, illustrated by the temple of San-ju-san-gen-do at Kyoto with its 33,333 images of the goddess. In the fourth chapter, “Buddhism and Christianity,” he walks the reader through the architecture and furnishing of a Japanese Buddhist temple — the guarded entrance gateway, the Hondo or main shrine, and the Rinzo, or revolving library, that he saw at Asakusa and at Ikegami, headquarters of the Hokkai sect — and records a generally favorable personal impression of the priests he met, despite their common reputation for laziness and corruption. He devotes much of the chapter to the resemblance between Buddhist and Roman Catholic ceremonial — incense, vestments, rosaries, side-altars bearing an image of Buddha’s mother Maia with her infant son — which he attributes tentatively to early contact between China and Nestorian Christianity, and to similarly striking parallels between episodes attributed to Gautama, such as a virgin birth, a temptation by an “Evil One,” and a descent into hell, and the Gospel narrative, parallels he argues could not have arisen before the Christian era was already centuries old. The chapter closes on an explicitly missionary argument: Cobbold insists that Christian work in Japan must engage Buddhism’s genuine, if “imperfect,” truths rather than proceed by “reckless denunciation,” criticizes those at home who speak carelessly of “the perishing heathen,” and weighs Japanese criticism of the gap between Christian profession and English conduct abroad.

The closing chapter, “Christianity in Japan,” opens with the religion’s history in the country from Francis Xavier’s arrival in 1549 through the persecutions and martyrdoms of the following century — including the armed rebellion of 1637, after which some 37,000 were reportedly killed, and more than two centuries of roadside notices threatening death to any Christian who set foot in Japan — before turning to conditions after the ban was lifted in 1872. Drawing on statistics compiled by the Rev. H. Loomis of the American Bible Society up to the start of 1893, Cobbold tabulates the Roman Catholic mission (the largest body, at roughly 45,000 adherents), the Greek Orthodox mission (over 20,000), and some thirty Protestant missions and denominations — among them the Anglican Nippon Sei Kokwai, the Presbyterian-aligned Church of Christ in Japan, the Congregationalist Kumi-ai churches, and various Methodist and Baptist bodies — for a combined Christian population he puts at under 100,000 against a national population of thirty-eight to forty million, or “not more than one person in every 400.” He singles out for criticism the Congregationalists’ recent revision of their confession of faith, which replaced a reference to Christ’s atoning death with looser language, quoting at length a rebuke from Bishop Bickersteth, and weighs other obstacles to missionary progress, including rivalry among competing Christian bodies, the poor example set by some resident Englishmen, and a debate over the relative merits of married and unmarried missionary clergy. The volume ends by urging that Christianity in Japan “be ready to prove herself man’s friend in the things of this life” if it hopes to be trusted for “the things that lie beyond.” Throughout, the text is accompanied by plates keyed to the chapters they illustrate, including photographic views of the Daibutsu at Kamakura, the guardian Nio figures, a Buddhist priest, and the temple precincts of Kiyomizu-dera and San-ju-san-gen-do at Kyoto, together with a labeled architectural plan of the Buddhist temple at Ikegami and a sketch map of Japan supplied through the Guild of St. Paul.

Published in 1905 by the P. W. Ziegler Company of Philadelphia, The Japan-Russia War: An Illustrated History of the War in the Far East, the Greatest Conflict of Modern Times presents itself as the work of a serving war correspondent, Sydney Tyler, already the author, per the title page, of The Spanish War and The War in South Africa. Its introduction, signed by the publishers, addresses American readers directly, tying the conflict to their own stake in the Pacific — the Philippines, it notes, are “Japan’s nearest neighbors” — and claims for Tyler a vantage “within sound of the roaring guns, within sight of the onrush of resistless battalions, elbow to elbow with Japan’s brilliant history makers.” Twenty chapters carry the story from the diplomatic quarrel over Manchuria and Korea through the naval and land campaigns to the peace conference at Portsmouth, illustrated throughout with photographs, sketches, and battle maps credited to eyewitnesses; land and naval chapters are interleaved in the order events occurred rather than grouped by theater.

The narrative opens with a decade of diplomatic maneuvering rather than with fighting: Russia’s seizure, after the Treaty of Shimonoseki, of gains Japan had won from China; the leasing of Port Arthur and Talienwan; the building of the Manchurian Railway; the Boxer-era occupation of Manchuria that Russia never fully withdrew; and the stalling of Japan’s negotiators by Admiral Alexeieff and the Russian foreign office, a pattern the book repeatedly calls Russian “bluff” and “discourtesy.” War begins on February 8, 1904, when Admiral Togo’s torpedo boats strike the Russian fleet at anchor in the Port Arthur roadstead, disabling the battleships Retvisan and Czarevitch and the cruiser Pallada; the same chapter follows the near-simultaneous action at Chemulpo, where the cruiser Varyag and gunboat Korietz steam out under their own colors to fight Admiral Uriu’s squadron rather than surrender in the neutral harbor, returning disabled to be destroyed there by their own crews.

From there the account traces the Japanese advance through Korea — landings at Chemulpo and Chinampo, the occupation of Seoul and Ping-Yang — to General Kuroki’s crossing of the Yalu on May 1, 1904, where a flanking march past Tiger Hill and the Ai River breaks General Sassulitch’s line at Chiu-lien-cheng. Chapters on “Cutting off Port Arthur” and “The Assault that Failed” bring General Oku’s Second Army down the Liaotung Peninsula to the entrenched heights of Nanshan and Kinchau, carried on May 26 after Oku, his artillery ammunition nearly spent, orders a second infantry assault rather than wait for resupply; Dalny falls four days later. Interwoven with this advance are the loss of the battleship Hatsuse and cruiser Yoshino to a mine and a collision off Port Arthur in mid-May, and the raids of the Vladivostok cruiser squadron on Japanese shipping, including the sinking of the transport Kinshiu Maru, whose soldiers, the book reports, went down with cries of “Banzai” after their officers had committed suicide below decks rather than surrender.

Liaoyang receives extended treatment — twelve days of fighting at the end of August 1904 in which Kuroki’s attempt to encircle Kuropatkin’s army across the flooded Taitse River fails to close before the Russians withdraw in good order, leaving the battle costly but indecisive. This is followed by Admiral Witoff’s August 10 sortie from Port Arthur, broken up by Togo’s fleet in the Yellow Sea, and Admiral Kamimura’s destruction four days later of the Vladivostok squadron, in which the cruiser Rurik is sunk after a running fight of nearly four hours. The Battle of the Sha-ho in October, opened on Kuropatkin’s own initiative to relieve Port Arthur, ends in stalemate, as does General Gripenberg’s attack at Sandepu that January. A separate chapter, “The North Sea Outrage,” recounts the Baltic Fleet’s firing on the Gamecock fishing fleet’s trawlers out of Hull, sinking the Crane, at Dogger Bank on its way to the Far East. Several chapters trace the siege of Port Arthur fort by fort — the mining and storming of Sungshushan and the Urlungshan forts among them — to General Stoessel’s capitulation on January 2, 1905; the book sets his dispatch to the Czar (“Great Sovereign! Forgive! We have done all that was humanly possible”) against later, contradictory reports, including Dr. Morrison’s, that the garrison surrendered with food, ammunition, and fit men still on hand.

“The Battle of Mukden” and “Retreat towards Harbin” describe Marshal Oyama’s culminating land victory of February–March 1905, built on General Nogi’s Port Arthur veterans marching in a wide circuit to strike the Russian rear near Mukden while the Japanese center presses a costly attack the book calls essentially a feint and Kuroki’s army fights a genuine, stubborn engagement on the right flank against Linevitch and Rennenkampf; the resulting collapse drives Kuropatkin’s army north past Tie Pass. The naval war closes with “The Battle of the Japan Sea,” an account of Togo’s destruction of Admiral Rozhdestvensky’s fleet in the Tsushima Strait on May 27–28, 1905, told largely through Togo’s own dispatches and Japanese officers’ narratives: the sinking of the Borodino, Alexander III, and Osliabya, the surrender of Admiral Nebogatoff’s remaining battleships off the Liancourt Rocks, and the capture of the wounded Rozhdestvensky aboard the destroyer Bedovi.

The closing chapter follows the peace negotiations at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from President Roosevelt’s reception of the envoys aboard the Mayflower through Sergius Witte’s refusal — “Not a kopeck for indemnity” — of Japan’s demand for a war indemnity, to the treaty signed on September 5, 1905, by Witte and Baron Rosen for Russia and Komura and Takahira for Japan; the book reprints the treaty’s fifteen articles and two sub-articles in full, down to the fiftieth-parallel line fixed for the divided island of Saghalin. Beyond the chapter narrative, the volume is marked at roughly monthly intervals by full-page summary panels — “After Three Months,” “After Six Months,” and so on — keyed to campaign maps of the advance from the Yalu to Port Arthur, and its front matter consists of a table of contents and a list of illustrations rather than an index.

James A. B. Scherer’s Young Japan: The Story of the Japanese People, and Especially of Their Educational Development (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1905) is a synthetic popular history that runs from Japan’s mythological beginnings to the Russo-Japanese War, cast throughout as the record of a nation’s “childhood,” “adolescence,” and present “school-days.” Scherer, president of Newberry College and already the author of Japan To-Day and Four Princes, tells readers in his preface that “throughout five years the writer was closely associated with Japanese youth, on Japanese soil, and during four of these years was teacher in a government school,” and that this experience “supplied the chief material for this book,” alongside acknowledged debts to B. H. Chamberlain, W. E. Griffis, David Murray, F. L. Hawks, J. J. Rein, A. B. Mitford, Lafcadio Hearn, and Robert E. Lewis, plus information from the Japanese Legation in Washington and the files of the Japan Weekly Mail. He presents the volume as a companion to the more impressionistic Japan To-Day and lays out its plan explicitly: three “Books” — Early Culture, Adolescence, and Modern School-Days — each divided into a Part First and Part Second, the first tracing “the bare outline story of the people of Japan” and the second giving “a somewhat more detailed account of their remarkable educational development.” A prefatory note on pronunciation — syllable division, macrons for prolonged vowels, the values of a, e, i, o, u — teaches readers to say names such as Iyeyasu and Manyoshu.

Book I opens with Japan’s geology, climate, and peoples — the aboriginal Ainu, the Mongolian settlers who became the Japanese — then moves through the cosmogony of Izanagi and Izanami, the legendary founding by Jimmu, and the exploits of the hero Yamato-dake, who, in Scherer’s retelling, danced disguised as a woman before two outlaw brothers before drawing a hidden sword and, in the book’s words, “ripped open the outlaw as it were a ripe melon.” Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism follow as “the three chapters in the religious primer of young Japan,” with Buddhism credited as the first patron of schooling — monasteries as the earliest schools, the monk Kobo Daishi’s invention of the kana syllabary, Tenjin (Michizane) as patron saint of letters. Book II, “Adolescence,” carries the story through the Fujiwara regency and its classical literature (the Manyoshu anthology, the Tale of Genji, the Pillow Book), the Taira–Minamoto wars and Yoshitsune’s naval victory at Shimonoseki, the Kamakura shogunate and its great bronze Buddha, the Mongol invasion turned back by typhoon, the Ashikaga years of civil war and artistic flowering (Sesshu, later Hokusai), and the unifying triumvirate of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Iyeyasu — including Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, the ear-mound built from the ears of Korean and Chinese dead, and his escape from assassins by hiding among bathing monks. Francis Xavier’s mission is followed at length by the persecution of Japanese Christians under Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu — mass executions, the “trampling on the cross” ceremony performed with a crucifix Scherer says “the writer has examined,” the Shimabara massacre of 1637–38 — and by nearly three centuries of national seclusion, which the book credits with quietly perfecting five traits: bravery, loyalty, thoroughness, alertness, and self-control.

Book III, “Modern School-Days,” turns to Commodore Perry’s expedition (quoting President Fillmore’s letter on coal, whaling, and California gold as America’s stated aims), the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Meiji Restoration, the missionary-educator Guido Verbeck’s role as, in Scherer’s phrase, “schoolmaster to the Emperor’s advisers,” the 1889 constitution — reproduced article by article — and the wars with China and Russia. Because Scherer was writing in 1905, the Russo-Japanese war appears as unfolding history rather than retrospect: he traces Russian expansion into Manchuria and the Trans-Siberian and Manchurian railways, quotes the imperial rescript surrendering the Liaotung peninsula after the Triple Intervention, and closes the political narrative with tables of Japan’s revenue, trade, and shipping tonnage between 1893 and 1903 as evidence of the “sinews of war” behind her victories.

It is in Book III’s second part that the promised “educational development” gets its fullest, most statistical treatment. Scherer credits Fukuzawa as the era’s chief educator, quoting Chamberlain’s judgment that Fukuzawa was “the intellectual father of half the young men who now fill the middle and lower posts in the government of Japan,” then walks through the university at Tokyo (six colleges, astronomical and seismological observatories, a 330,000-volume library), the eight higher schools, 258 middle schools, and some 27,000 elementary schools, setting Japan’s 91.75 percent school attendance against Russia’s 1.5 percent as a partial explanation of the war’s outcome. Women’s education gets its own short section, tracing the rise from eight government girls’ schools in 1890 to forty-four a decade later. But the book does not end on triumph: Scherer devotes several pages to what he calls “the radical defect” of the system — its near-total exclusion of moral and religious instruction — quoting Marquis Ito’s creed that “science, knowledge, culture” are “a sufficient religion,” and setting beside it the 1903 bribery scandal, commercial dishonesty, and licensed prostitution as evidence that, in Count Okuma’s words, “development has been intellectual and not moral.”

The book closes on that unresolved argument, its final lines asking, “Shall Okuma’s advice prevail, or Ito’s? Upon the answer to this question depends the future manhood of Japan.” A sixteen-page index follows the text. The volume carries a frontispiece captioned “Temple of the God of Education” — the Kameido shrine to Michizane that Scherer had described earlier as sacred to Japanese scholarship — together with twenty further plates keyed to specific pages, among them “An Ancient Japanese Amazon,” “A Temple Garden in Kyoto,” “Iyeyasu’s Tomb at Nikko,” “The Great Castle at Nagoya,” “Ear Mound of Hideyoshi,” and “A Primary School for Girls.”

A Woman Alone in the Heart of Japan is a first-person travel narrative of a single long season in Japan, issued in London by Sisley’s Ltd. and announced on its title page only as “Illustrated,” with no year printed anywhere on it; a list of illustrations promises a frontispiece and thirty-two further plates, all photographs, and a double-column index closes the volume. Fisher writes as an American tourist rather than a resident: pressed again and again to say whether she is a Christian, she reports startling her questioners sometimes with “No, I am an American,” and she dedicates the book to her parents, “who gave me the love of travel,” as “their nomadic daughter.” Thirteen chapters carry her from the customs shed at Yokohama to a closing argument about women’s education, and the turn comes at the ninth: the last five chapters give up scenery for schools, a mission, a hospital, a judo hall and the tea and stock trades, in Kioto and Yokohama as well as Tokio. The solitude the title promises is real but intermittent: a “chum” travels at her elbow in the early chapters, a chance-met insurance man chaperons the night train back from Sendai, the ride inland to Kusatsu is made with a hired guide and “companions none,” and in the later chapters an old Irish-Australian lady, “my respected mentor and advisory board,” reads the Welcome Society the riot act over its fees and sends her up the hill to the Russian mission.

Her route runs from Yokohama to Kioto for the cherry blossoms, back overland by Nagoya and the Hakone hills, north to Nikko, Sendai and Matsushima, and inland from Ikao — “a jaunt of seventy-five miles by riksha to the interior” — to the sulphur baths of Kusatsu. Yokohama fills the first chapter at eye level. A customs officer bows over her typewriter and her crated bicycle while the kodak lies “snuggled among innocent wares” and escapes notice; the riksha is “this cross between chariot and coffin,” and she wonders “how far this human mite … could carry me”; earthquakes bring “that ominous thrill, which I learned to know and to fear”; bath-houses stand open to the street, divided by a bamboo rod. She wanders Theatre Street past flower venders, a candy man with a carpenter’s plane and an auctioneer, and is cajoled into the Nectarine, the port’s brothel quarter, where, before she guesses her whereabouts, she is charmed and appalled by a girl of sixteen. Chapter II follows the blossom to Ueno and the banks of the Sumida, waits for the emperor’s garden party, and takes a boat to Kobe and the train to Kioto for the Miyako Odori and for the annual procession of courtesans on April 21st. She calls it “the most unique pageant in the land” and “an unblushing, walking advertisement of the prostitutes’ quarter,” and reckons that “nine, if not ten, in every ten” of the foreign spectators, herself included, came out of curiosity.

Sightseeing occupies the third chapter — the bell Benkei is said to have carried off, a propped and cemented pine reckoned more than a thousand years old, a passage by open scow through the tunnels of the Lake Biwa Canal, an hour shooting the Arashiyama rapids in flood, and four hours at a Kioto wrestling tournament ending in the apron procession. With the fourth chapter the plural drops away, the chum disappears, and the book turns emphatically singular. Rather than ride with “exclusive Americans,” Fisher abjures the first-class wagon and books third — “I was in Japan to see and not shirk” — foils a pickpocket at her watch-chain, climbs the keep at Nagoya, and lands after dark at a village where no one has a word of English, orders supper by pantomime until “omelet” finally lands, and sleeps with her letter of credit and a bought dirk beneath the pillow, ashamed of herself by morning. At Nikko she watches the two-day June rite in which the spirits of Ieyasu, Hideyoshi and Iemitsu are borne between temples by staggering, shrieking priests, behind lion-masked men, armored spearmen, falconers and thirty boys dressed as monkeys. Chapter VI then makes the title literal: “it was my fortune to linger alone six weeks” in Nikko, until “every home and shop were mine,” through thirty days of rain and the hourly boom of the temple bell.

Those weeks are given to the village street: a wood-carver who drops a hen and her brood into Fisher’s lap, a curio dealer pouring sake for the Crown Prince’s baby, and the shopkeeper she calls the “wooden lady,” who pegs away at “the blind phrases of a ridiculous primer” while Fisher, exploding at its botanical rubbish, hears her out to the end of the lesson. She buys an iron-bound chest at Sendai, reaches Matsushima between downpours, and sits upright all night with the insurance man in the train’s single first-class car; at Ikao, “the Saratoga of Japan,” Madame Kindayu keeps the hotel and a sorceress tells fortunes from a box of sticks at a shrine approached through fifty red torii. Two days by riksha over gullied roads with the guide Kaidzu Heihachee bring her to Kusatsu, where a trumpet calls fifty naked men to churn the scalding sulphur water with planks, pour two hundred and fifty dippers over their heads, and sink to the neck for five timed minutes; half a mile downstream lies the leper village, where a woman who says she was cured burns moxa into her patients. Formal visits begin, by permit and “name-card”: a Kioto asylum for deaf, dumb and blind children, where fifteen deaf-mutes learn articulation before a mirror, an hour of massage in her room for fifty sen, and a geisha school where she watches pupils drilled in dancing and music, then chokes on the green flakes of the tea bowl handed to her.

Several of the remaining chapters open and close without a first-person pronoun. At a Buddhist university outside Tokio she watches a fencing bout and hears Swami Rah Tirth lecture, and at Professor Kano’s judo school, run without fees and without wages for its teachers, nobleman and coolie are distinguished only by a purple or a white sash. She calls on Bishop Nicolai, forty-three years in the country, tours the Red Cross hospital, its wards graded in five classes, its nurses left three yen a month after board, and attends an autopsy. Trade follows: the tea exporter Kahei Otani, whose Yokohama firing house churns green dye in urns — “People want green tea, must haf, must make,” says the man she asks — silk drawn off in cottages, a bargain sale at Mitsui’s where she is seized as a shoplifter, and the rice and stock exchanges. The longest chapter comes last, running from the Girls’ Industrial School through the Girls’ High School whose cicada has been “drawn and quartered, labelled and analyzed in advance,” the lesson “conscientious copy rather than original research,” to President Naruse’s Woman’s University and its named benefactors, and finally eleven pages on the Ueno academy of music, traced to a Boston teacher, drilled by Professor Yunker, whose orchestra plays Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and whose chorus sings in clean-cut English. The book ends not on that concert but on a wish: that women’s higher education teach women to “put aside all pettiness,” failing which “woman’s education has failed of success.”

A Guide-Book for Tourists in Japan is a travel manual compiled and issued by the Welcome Society of Tokyo, a body that describes its own purpose, on the pages following its title leaf, as welcoming foreign visitors to Japan and rendering them every assistance during their stay; established in 1893, it states that the Imperial Household has patronized its work with a substantial contribution, and it insists that it is “in no sense a money-making corporation” but exists to bring tourists into contact with the country’s scenery, art, and people. This copy is the second, revised edition, dated Tokyo, 1906, and its preface calls the book a supplement to the Society’s separately published Map of Japan, meant to help the tourist plan his journeys and use his time to advantage; the compiler recommends pairing it with Murray’s Handbook for Japan, by B. H. Chamberlain and W. B. Mason, for fuller detail. The book divides into an eleven-section prefatory Introduction of practical information, followed by a body organized geographically into three numbered divisions — North-Eastern Japan, Central Japan, and South-Western Japan — each broken further into consecutively numbered Routes radiating from the treaty ports of Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki.

The Introduction opens with a Plan of Tour laying out sample itineraries of a fortnight, four weeks, five weeks, and seven weeks, naming the towns, hot springs, and scenic detours a traveler with that much time might string together — a fortnight’s circuit from Yokohama, for instance, running through Tokyo, Nikko, Miyanoshita, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Nara before departing at Kobe. Later sections tabulate 1903 temperature highs, lows, and averages for Sapporo, Aomori, Nikko, Tokyo, Kyoto, Shimonoseki, Matsuyama, Kochi, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima; set out hotel and inn charges and the wages of licensed guides, including the Society’s own; give jinrikisha, carriage, and kago (chair) rates; note that passports for travel within Japan had been abolished since 1899 and list the year’s national holidays; specify the game animals and birds open to licensed shooting and the fortified districts where sketching or photography require official permission; and give postal and telegraph rates, currency denominations, and the ri, cho, tsubo, and Kakeme system of distance, land measure, and weight. Further sections cover fares and rules for the special express, dining-car, and sleeping-car service on the Tokaido, Sanyo, and Nippon railway lines and the passenger tax introduced in January 1905, and the Introduction closes with a short list of Books of Reference — Murray’s Handbook for Japan, Chamberlain’s Things Japanese, the Department of Agriculture and Commerce’s Japan in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, the Japan Year Book, Griffis’s The Mikado’s Empire, Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Morse’s Japanese Homes, Bacon’s Japanese Girls and Women, and the art journal The Kokka.

The body proper begins at Yokohama and works outward: a town along a route is normally introduced with a short list of its foreign-style hotels and Japanese inns, then a paragraph or two of historical and descriptive notice — the founding of a shrine, the age of a temple, the dimensions of a noted statue — interleaved with the mileage, rail fares by class, and jinrikisha or steamer connections needed to reach it, with occasional half-tone photographic plates, captioned in italic type, inset on the page alongside the text — a large plate of the Daibutsu at Kamakura, for one. Route 2 gives the run from Yokohama to Kamakura and its fares before turning to the Hachiman shrine and the Great Buddha at Hase, down to the statue’s height, circumference, length of face, and width from ear to ear; Route 4 tabulates every intermediate station between Tokyo and Nikko; Route 15 carries the tourist from Tokyo through Shizuoka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe; Route 33 runs from Nagasaki through Kumamoto and Yatsushiro to Kagoshima, taking in the descent of the rapids of the Kumagawa. Tokyo and the other major cities receive extended treatment of their own, sights grouped by district, with a calendar of monthly flower and festival attractions and lists of principal shops by trade — silk, porcelain, cloisonné, curios, and the like. Beyond the three main divisions, later routes carry the guide to steamer trips among the Kuriles, the Bonin Islands, and Loochoo (Okinawa), to Formosa under its Japanese administration, and — new to this edition, per the preface — from Shimonoseki across to Fusan and on to Seoul, with station tables for the Fusan-Seoul railway set out on the same pattern as those for the home islands.

After the Korea route the guide appends a table of the kana syllabaries and a phrase-and-vocabulary section headed “Language,” arranged by topic — traveling, hotel and inn, shopping, miscellaneous — with romanized Japanese equivalents, numerals, and clock time, followed by an alphabetical index of place names keyed to the route pages. The volume closes with a long run of paid advertisements bound in after the index — hotels in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Karuizawa, Miyanoshita, Atami, Osaka, Nagasaki, and Seoul; banks such as the Dai-Ichi Ginko, the Yokohama Specie Bank, and the Mitsui Ginko; the Sanyo, Kiushu, and Hankaku railway companies; and dealers in cloisonné, lacquer, curios, and pottery, ending on its last leaf with a full-page notice for the Kinkozan pottery works of Awata, Kyoto.

An English Girl in Japan is a personal travel memoir, drawn, its preface explains, from a diary Ella M. Hart Bennett kept during her travels. She writes as an Englishwoman who reached Japan at eighteen, an only child accompanying her widowed father on a trip made necessary by his business there; the visit lengthens into an extended residence, long enough for the two of them to keep a household in Tokio with its own staff of servants and to see a full cycle of the year’s festivals, from the March Hina Matsuri to the Emperor’s November chrysanthemum party. Bennett says at the outset that she means to skip the diary-plod of dates and daily doings and set down only what most impressed her, and the book follows that plan: two chapters of outward journey by liner and rail, an extended stay in Japan that occupies most of the volume, and a final chapter that leaves Japan altogether.

The outward voyage, told in “On the Way” and “In the Rockies,” carries almost as much incident as any stretch of the book. Bennett and her father sail from Southampton on the American liner Paris, sharing the crossing with Andrew Carnegie, the late Dr. Barnardo, and Annie Besant, who lectures the assembled passengers on Theosophy and evolution while her two Indian companions recline nearby in deck-chairs. Three days in New York — the Hotel Waldorf, Delmonico’s, a rooftop “Cafe Chantant” — are followed by Niagara Falls, a walk beneath the Horseshoe Falls in oilskins, and a rail crossing of Canada that takes in Banff, the loop-line near Field, and the salmon camps of the Fraser River, before the Empress of India carries them from Vancouver to Yokohama with three hundred Chinese passengers in steerage, the dropping of a day at the 180th meridian, and a shipboard mock trial staged after a practical joke in which a dessert is made of beaten soap.

In Japan the book settles into set-piece chapters on the society Bennett moves through. She makes a close friend, Pauline, with whom she dines at a Japanese restaurant entertained by dancing geisha, tours the Shinto and Buddhist temples around Yokohama, lives through an earthquake and a fire that destroys some four hundred houses, and takes a ten days’ tour with a guide named Idaka to the sulphur baths at Kusatzu — “a Japanese Harrogate” — by way of Karuizawa and the Shibu Pass. Once settled in Tokio she is invited to the Emperor and Empress’s chrysanthemum garden-party, is presented at court, and later describes the Imperial Silver Wedding reception, a ball at the Chinese Legation given by the Minister and Lady Yii, and the Shinto funeral of Prince Arizugawa, the Emperor’s uncle. Separate chapters take up “Japanese Ladies,” “Japanese Children” — including a visit to a friend’s small daughter’s Hina Matsuri doll display and an account of the Bon Matsuri, the lantern festival for dead children, at Nagasaki — and “Servants in Japan,” built around her houseboy Yami and the Legation charwoman Mrs. Peter Potts, a Cockney widow of a former Legation pensioner. Bennett’s affection for the people she describes runs alongside a steady diminutive framing: she calls the Japanese “the plucky little people” and, closing her chapter on Japanese women, “our little cousins in the Far East,” and consistently presents Japanese women, children, and servants as charming, obedient, and childlike.

Two chapters belong to Chang, the chow dog sent her from Hong Kong, whose exploits include being dragged out of the pulpit by a choir-boy after following her into church, nearly drowning after seizing a lobster on a visit to a Buddhist monastery on a tidal island, and waking her moments before an earthquake brings plaster down onto her bed. The homeward voyage — by way of Kobe, Nagasaki, and Hong Kong, where Bennett runs down the quay after Chang and is carried out by the captain of another steamer after their own ship, the Kaiser, sails without them — gives way, in the closing chapter, “Paul and Virginia,” to an entirely different setting: her father’s tea-estate in Assam, where she keeps two orphaned bear cubs, a thieving monkey named Brutus who takes to riding and milking the goats, and a macaw that once frightens off a nighttime intruder, until wild bears drawn by the cubs force her father to have Paul and Virginia shot. The book ends there, with Chang — reformed after disgracing himself on parade at Aldershot and worrying pheasants and sheep in Norfolk — stretched on the hearthrug at her feet. The volume is illustrated throughout with photographic plates keyed to a printed list of illustrations, opening with a frontispiece captioned “A little Nasan appeared” and running to views of the Rockies, Japanese temples and streets, a “Japanese Lady of the Upper Class,” and group photographs such as “Three Friends,” showing Bennett with Chang and one of her Japanese chins.

Alfred Stead’s Great Japan is advocacy rather than travel or narrative history: twenty topical chapters, each holding one department of Japanese life up to British readers as an object-lesson. Rosebery’s seven-page foreword, cast as a letter, declares that “Japan is indeed the object-lesson of national efficiency, and happy is the country that learns it,” then from its third page largely leaves Japan aside to attack the British party system. Stead’s preface, signed at 63 Cheyne Walk on August 16, 1905, disclaims any wish “to compare the national efficiency of Japan with that of other nations,” and confesses “an intense admiration and a feeling almost of awe.” Efficiency is a moral term here, not a technical one: patriotism makes efficiency possible, and efficiency proves patriotism. The West is the standing counter-example, and Britain most often of all. The book is also as much anthology as argument: a thesis stated in a page or two of Stead’s prose, then the page handed to a document, official, or foreign observer. In five of the twelve opening chapters — patriotism, Bushido, religious freedom, the simple life, socialism — quoted matter outweighs his own. Much is printed entire: the Emperor’s speech on education, Hideyoshi’s anti-Christian proclamation of 1587, prisoner-of-war regulations with four tabulated schedules, field-clearing regulations in twenty-four clauses, Fukuzawa’s five pages of moral codes. But not everything: the two shipping laws he summarizes for five and a half pages in his own hand. Tables of schools, shipping and subsidies are set into the text.

The first two chapters lay the political foundation. Japan is uniquely a “national” nation, the Emperor the point on which nationality turns, the constitution a gift of the throne rather than a concession wrung from it — argued documentarily, by printing the Five Articles of the Imperial Oath of 1868, the 1874 address convening an assembly of local authorities, the 1875 proclamation founding the Genro-in and Daisin-in, the 1881 promise of a parliament in Meiji’s twenty-third year, and the promulgation of February 11, 1889, then four pages of Marquis Ito on the sovereign’s powers — “not even the most arrogant monarch, the most exigent Tsar, could ask for greater,” Stead adds — and the subject’s guaranteed liberties: efficiency and liberty, he means, are compatible. It ends at Port Arthur, where the German Emperor, decorating Nogi equally with Stoessel, “proclaimed to the world that he now acknowledged the equality of the nations”; Stead’s verdict follows: “No longer can the white races of Europe sit above the salt while the nations of Asia sit below.” Patriotism follows, largely quoted testimony — soldiers’ letters, two verses by Commander Hirose, a mother pawning her clothes to reach her reservist son — and answers Rosebery: an opposition party declaring itself “with the Government on all matters of national importance,” Ito insisting officials be recruited “irrespective of whether they belong to a political party or not,” the Seiyukai shelving its case against the Cabinet once war came. “Matters of vital importance are never made the sport of party politics.”

Bushido is expounded largely through Nitobe’s book; ancestor-worship is the layer beneath it and patriotism both — the kamidana and butsudan in every house, the taima distributed yearly from Ise, Matsurigoto, the word for government, meaning affairs of worship. That chapter closes on Admiral Togo reporting the Russian fleet’s destruction to the spirits of the dead — “I have been called by the Emperor to report our successes to the spirits of those who sacrificed their earthly existence” — what Stead calls “this formal order of the day to the army of the dead.” The longest chapter here, religious freedom, is the most polemical: he defends the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century suppression of Christianity as self-defense provoked by missionary misconduct, quotes Buddhist priests, argues that no church will take hold until it is Japanese-run and Japanese-paid — a hostility that also closes the Bushido chapter and reappears among the schools. “The Simple Life” gives roughly eight of its fifteen pages to gardens, five an unbroken garden-making manual by Mr. Karasawa. Education climbs from kindergarten through primary and middle schools and the eight higher schools “exclusively peculiar to the education system of Japan” to the two Imperial universities and a women’s university; Professor Jinzo Naruse argues for moral teaching without dogma; examinations are largely discarded; nearly four thousand doctors served seven thousand schools. Then about five and a half of its twenty-four pages go to prisons, whose workshops, medals and reading lessons are offered as education by other means.

A definition made early licenses the long middle. National defence in Japan, Stead writes, “is taken to include the preservation to the country of everything that might be threatened by foreign influences,” so that a consular service or a navigation bounty is defence as much as repelling invasion; five chapters accordingly treat industry, shipping, trade, farming and labor as branches of national security. Industry was built “To supplement, not to supplant” agriculture, England’s decayed fields being the warning. The mercantile-marine chapter turns on the Navigation and Shipbuilding Encouragement Laws of 1896; Stead does not ask Britain to copy them, but notes that resistance to subsidies is loudest in the British Empire while “all the time subsidies are being given under another name,” the difference being that Japanese subsidies buy “certain very definite privileges.” Trade was manufactured deliberately, by about forty commercial samples museums, student agents posted abroad year by year, and a college of commerce teaching commercial ethics; the treaty ports’ foreign middlemen are named “Japan’s worst enemies.” Agriculture is preserved by experiment stations, a land-readjustment law and the Hypothec Bank. The socialism chapter prints the Social Democratic Party’s programme entire, follows Mr. Katayama’s movement, describes three standing communities — the prefecture of Okinawa, “formerly the kingdom of Riukiu”; the island of Hatsushima, capped at forty-one houses; and a village — then a Home Office notice headed “The Three Model Villages.” Nine passages rank commerce and farming above arms; Japan “seeks the substance, not the shadow of empire.”

The three war chapters run to a hundred and five pages, a shade less than the economic middle. Conscription, Stead claims, is in practice “the highest form of voluntary service,” shame falling only on the rejected; the five articles of a soldier’s duty drawn up by the Emperor are printed as an Imperial Rescript filling some five pages; officer training runs through the Military College in Tokyo and the Naval College at Yetajima. Two chapters of thirty-seven pages each then argue that Japan is teaching the world humane warfare and that her Red Cross Society is the model of its kind. The first documents a Bureau of Information for Prisoners of War opened within a week of the outbreak, the regulations and diet under which Russian captives were held, a refused offer to evacuate non-combatants from Port Arthur, and Nogi’s reply to Stoessel’s request that the Red Cross hospitals not be shelled, denying intent and conceding only that “the shells do not always hit the points aimed at.” The second describes a society of a million members — one Japanese in forty-five — with its ladies’ committees, two hospital ships, and a written vow binding its whole reserve personnel, physicians and clerks and stretcher-bearers alike, for the keeping of which chief nurses and nurses alone are paid nothing. Then comes a defense of the position of Japanese women, resting partly on the First Imperial Ancestor: Japan is “the only country where an entire people daily venerate a woman, even a goddess.”

Nine of Japan’s hundred and twenty-four sovereigns were empresses; a Kamakura temple sheltered ill-used wives for over six hundred years beyond the reach even of Government officials; and the Salic law, which now bars an empress from the throne, was itself imported from the West as an improvement. The chapter on morality is a counter-attack rather than a survey: Nitobe’s retort that the charge of Japanese immorality is “a sad confession of the moral and intellectual tone of the tourists themselves”; Pierre Loti named as chief libeller, for describing “his life with a Japanese courtesan as an existence typically Japanese”; the question what would be thought of a visitor judging English morality “solely upon Piccadilly and Regent Street at night”; then the same weapon turned on American “high finance” and on “bad horses and bad stores supplied during the South African war.” Its one real concession is Baron Shibusawa’s four peculiarities of the Japanese character, and his admission that “In spite of myself, I hesitate to say that Japan has as high morality in commerce as England, America, and Germany.” Formosa means sanitation and schooling before profit — “the drainpipe and the schoolhouse are essential elements of progress,” and, pointedly for this readership, “Missionary endeavour formed no part of the Japanese plan” — with State monopolies of salt, sulphur, camphor and opium, and registered opium smokers falling from 170,000 in 1900 to 153,000 in 1902, which proves administrative morality precisely because every smoker stopped costs the revenue.

The last two chapters widen out. Stead credits Japan with an international sense Europe lacks, and reproves Britain for keeping the Shimonoseki indemnity America returned; but the core is a charge of European bad faith in the war. The French Ambassador to Russia was “discussing and rejoicing openly” over Russian purchases of French war material. Professor Holland’s letter to the Times held selling contraband legitimate unless the ship was caught — as though, Stead answers, “we could commit murders and not be doing wrong unless we were found out” ; Stead would have the law “make them liable to be shot if captured”: “What are the blockade-runners but belligerents in civilian clothes?” “Quo Vadis?” states the conclusions. Japan has entered the first rank: “The blood spilt on the glacis of the Port Arthur forts has for ever wiped out the colour-line in national achievement.” She will assert a tacit Monroe doctrine — “‘Hands off’ for the future is the notice-board erected in the Far East” — while keeping “the open door and equal opportunity,” the truer parallel being America, not Britain. The “Yellow Peril” he traces to the German Emperor, letting Okuma, Shimada, Soyeda, Suyematsu and Kaneko answer across nine pages with a “White Peril” of their own; and he urges a triple alliance of the United States, Japan and Great Britain. The closing words are an unnamed Japanese writer’s, on a work “to battle for the right and uphold the good.” A seven-page index ends the unillustrated volume.

The Garter Mission to Japan announces itself on its title page as the work of “LORD REDESDALE, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., AUTHOR OF ‘TALES OF OLD JAPAN,’” and the earlier book is very much present in this one: Redesdale had served in Japan from 1866 and repeatedly measures the country of 1906 against the “Old Japan” he remembered from decades before. The volume is not a general travel book but the record of one specific errand: the mission King Edward VII sent to invest the Emperor of Japan with the Order of the Garter, headed by Prince Arthur of Connaught, K.G., and completed by Redesdale himself, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edward Seymour, General Sir Thomas Kelly-Kenny, Colonel Arthur Davidson, Captain Wyndham (equerry to the Prince), and Miles Lampson of the Foreign Office as secretary. The preface dates the mission’s departure from Marseilles to 12 January 1906 and explains the book’s form directly: it “consists of journal Letters written primarily for home consumption,” which is offered as the reason for “the use here and there of the pronoun ‘you’” — a habit of address that in fact recurs throughout the narrative, in asides like “Judge whether he was welcome” or “You remember how gracious they were to everybody in London.” Redesdale dedicates the volume “to my wife, for whom my journal was kept.”

The mission reached Yokohama aboard H.M.S. Diadem on the morning of 19 February 1906, with Fuji visible and eleven warships firing a royal salute; at Shimbashi station in Tokyo the Emperor came in person to greet Prince Arthur, a compliment Redesdale calls unprecedented “since the first creation of Japan.” The investiture followed the next day inside the palace: Redesdale carried the ribbon and George in the procession, behind Sir Edward Seymour and Sir Thomas Kelly-Kenny bearing the garter and collar, while a hidden band struck up “God Save the King” at the moment the Prince buckled the garter below the Emperor’s knee. Prince Arthur’s address explained that the Order had been “instituted nearly six hundred years ago” by Edward III, and the Emperor’s reply accepted it as “a new and signal proof of the friendship and good-will of His Majesty King Edward.” The Emperor then personally hung the ribbon and pinned the star of the Order of the Chrysanthemum on the Prince — “never before, not even in the case of the Crown Prince,” Redesdale notes, had the Emperor deigned to invest a recipient with his own hands. That evening’s state banquet included a rare performance of the ancient Bugaku dance, and the following day Prince Arthur invested Marshals Yamagata and Oyama and Admiral Togo with the King’s Order of Merit, an honor Redesdale notes was conferred for the first time on “anybody not a subject of our King.”

Between 19 February and 17 March the mission’s sightseeing, arranged down to small details by the Emperor’s own orders, ranged well beyond the court. In and around Tokyo there was duck-netting at Shinhama, a jujutsu exhibition staged as two short plays, a Kabukiza performance built around the story of Will Adams (“Anjin”), and a visit to the graves of the Forty-Seven Ronin at Sengakuji. The party inspected the naval arsenals at Yokosuka, Sasébo, and Kure and the training college at Etajima, going aboard the captured Russian prize Peresviet at Yokosuka, seeing the captured Orel in harbor at Kure, and viewing the wreck of Togo’s own flagship Mikasa, sunk at her moorings after the war. At Kyoto, with two days largely free of official engagements, Redesdale revisited the Gosho and the Nijo Palace and the Silver Pavilion (Ginkakuji), and made a side trip to Nara for the great Buddha and the park’s tame deer; at Kagoshima, in old Satsuma territory, he visited the tomb of Saigo Takamori, joined Admiral Togo and General Kuroki in planting a tree at Saigo’s birthplace, and — with Sir Thomas Kelly-Kenny — each planted a further tree at Togo’s own birthplace. At a dinner given by the Mayor of Kyoto the Englishmen wore borrowed Japanese dress while their Japanese hosts, having brought no kimonos on the road, sat in European coats instead. Nagoya brought the castle’s great gilt Shachihoko and a country-theater program; Nikko, which the Prince and part of the party visited on 14 March, was one place Redesdale had never managed to see: Sir Harry Parkes had once secured him permission to go, decades before, but sent him to Osaka instead — “a chance which never came again” — and in 1906 he still did not go. The mission sailed from Yokohama on 17 March aboard the Empress of Japan.

Redesdale reads 1906 constantly against his own service under Sir Harry Parkes in the 1860s, folding into the itinerary his account of helping subdue one of two swordsmen who wounded thirteen men in a Kyoto street in 1868, and his memories of the Shogun’s fall and the young Emperor’s restoration, which he says he witnessed firsthand. He writes repeatedly of the “absence of all bragging” among Japan’s war heroes, singling out Togo and Kuroki, and devotes several pages to Bushido, which he calls “the soul of a nation. … You cannot kill the soul,” tying it to the death of Hirose at Port Arthur. His view of the Emperor is frankly reverential — “this august Sovereign, whom his subjects revere as something, if not actually divine, at any rate far removed above the rest of mankind” — and he treats the mission’s reception, with crowds he describes as running “literally in millions,” as proof of a friendship traced to the Emperor’s own “consistent and honest” disposition toward foreigners ever since his accession to the throne, thirty-nine years before.

The narrative itself ends with the ships steaming out of Yokohama harbor escorted by Japanese torpedo boats and Fuji lit by the sunset. What follows is the appendix flagged earlier in the book, when a dakyu (Japanese polo) match at Prince Fushimi’s had prompted a footnote promising that “an appendix will be found” containing “a Japanese explanatory treatise” on the game: it is exactly that, a short, itemized rulebook covering the ground and goal, the two kinds of balls (“Hiramari” and “Agemari”), and the duties of the umpire, equerry, ball-man, and signal-men. An index follows, running from “Adams, Will” to “Yoshimitsu,” and the volume closes with “THE END” and the printer’s line, “Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.”

“Japan” is David Murray’s entry in the Story of the Nations series, a continuous narrative history of the Japanese islands running from the mythical age to the settlement that closed the war with Russia in 1905. Murray wrote as a former participant in the country’s modernization: the title page identifies him as “Superintendent of Education in the Empire of Japan, and Adviser to the Imperial Minister of Education, from 1873 to 1879,” and his preface places “a residence of several years in Japan” first among his sources, ahead of the printed authorities he goes on to credit — the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and scholars such as Satow, Aston, Chamberlain, and Wigmore, along with Chamberlain’s Things Japanese, Rein’s Japan and the Industries of Japan, Griffis’ Mikado’s Empire, Mounsey’s Satsuma Rebellion, Dening’s Life of Hideyoshi, the published papers of Professor E. S. Morse, and the travel handbooks of Satow and Chamberlain. He also notes that he Romanized Japanese words chiefly according to the system of the Roman Alphabet Association. Murray died in March 1905 before he could carry his narrative down to the present; a publisher’s note explains that Albert White Vorse completed the chapters covering the final fifteen years, including the Russo-Japanese War, and that Baron Kentaro Kaneko, LL.D., in acknowledgment of Murray’s earlier service to Japanese education, contributed two further chapters of his own. The volume as a whole thus runs to seventeen chapters of narrative history, Kaneko’s two supplementary essays, a five-part appendix, and an index.

Murray opens with geography rather than travel — a chapter on the Japanese archipelago that begins from Marco Polo’s account of “Chipangu” — before turning to the Ainos and the vanished pit-dwellers, and then to an extended retelling of the Shinto creation myths out of the Kojiki and Nihongi: the shaping of the islands from the brine on Izanagi and Izanami’s jewelled spear, the Sun Goddess’s retirement into her rock cave, the slaying of the eight-headed serpent in Izumo. He is careful to mark these off as tradition rather than fact, noting that writing did not reach Japan until A.D. 284 and that the reigns of the early emperors — Jimmu is given as dying at 127, Koan at 137 — drop abruptly to plausible lengths only once written records begin. He nonetheless narrates Prince Jimmu’s expedition from Kyushu to Yamato and his founding of a palace at Kashiwara, the romantic exploits of Yamato-dake against the Kumaso and the Ainos, and Empress Jingo’s invasion of Korea in A.D. 202, an act Murray calls indefensible in itself but of lasting value to Japan for the continental culture it subsequently brought in. The chapters on the founding of the empire and on native culture carry the story through the arrival of Chinese writing, the introduction of Buddhism under the Emperor Kimmei in 552, and the reforms of Shotoku Taishi, closing with the compilation of the Kojiki and Nihongi themselves as the twin foundations of Japanese literature.

The chapters that follow, “The Middle Ages of Japan” and “Emperor and Shogun,” trace the long Fujiwara regency and Japan’s recurring habit of imperial abdication — Murray tabulates emperors enthroned at two, four, and five years old — through the rise of the rival Taira and Minamoto houses, Taira-no-Kiyomori’s tyranny, and the destruction of the Taira fleet at Dan-no-ura. Yoritomo’s founding of the Kamakura shogunate, and the cruelty of his later treatment of his brother Yoshitsune, give way to the corrupt Hojo regency, the repulse of the Mongol invasion of 1281, Go-Daigo’s brief restoration, and the two-century Ashikaga shogunate, with its patron-shoguns Yoshimitsu and Yoshimasa (credited here with the tea ceremony), its reunion of the rival northern and southern courts in 1392, and its long decline into provincial civil war and coastal piracy — a decline that carries the narrative down to the Portuguese landfall of the 1540s.

Unification and its cost occupy the next several chapters. The Portuguese gift of a matchlock at Tanegashima, Francis Xavier’s mission from Kagoshima to Kyoto, Oda Nobunaga’s burning of the Hiei-zan monastery and his death by his own hand at Honnoji, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s rise from obscure birth to the office of Kwambaku and his two ruinous invasions of Korea — a war Murray says her best friends can look back on with neither pride nor satisfaction — lead into Ieyasu’s victory at Sekigahara in 1600 and his founding of the Tokugawa shogunate at Yedo. “Feudalism in Japan” sets out the resulting order at length: the classes of daimyo, the two swords and rigid training of the samurai, and Ieyasu’s own testamentary code, the Legacy of Ieyasu, which Murray quotes repeatedly (“The people are the foundation of the empire”). The same stretch of chapters follows Christianity from Xavier’s early success through Ieyasu’s and Iemitsu’s edicts of suppression to the massacre that ended the Shimabara rebellion in 1638, and into the two centuries of seclusion at Nagasaki’s Deshima that followed, broken chiefly by the Dutch trade and by the English pilot William Adams, who became a trusted adviser to Ieyasu.

Commodore Perry’s mission of 1853–54, the treaties negotiated afterward by Townsend Harris, the killing of the Englishman Richardson on the Tokaido and the British bombardment of Kagoshima, the allied bombardment of Shimonoseki, the resignation of the last shogun in 1867, the Boshin War, the Charter Oath, the daimyos’ voluntary surrender of their fiefs in 1869, the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 and Saigo Takamori’s death on Shiroyama, and the promulgation of the Constitution in 1889 fill the chapters “Commodore Perry and What Followed,” “Revolutionary Preludes,” and “The Restored Empire.” The chapters that follow, apparently completing the record of the fifteen years Murray did not live to narrate, carry the story through the war with China and the Triple Intervention into the war with Russia, narrated in close operational detail: Chemulpo, the siege of Port Arthur, the battles of the Yalu and Mukden, Togo’s victory in the Tsushima Strait, and the peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905. Their prose is noticeably plainer and less thickly footnoted than Murray’s own chapters, which lean constantly on the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan and on the author’s personal recollections of his years in the country.

Baron Kaneko’s two supplementary chapters, “The Russo-Japanese War and the Resources of Japan” and “Japan’s Policy and Ideals: Domestic and Foreign,” shift both voice and purpose, moving into the first person (“Let me cite from a report…”) to defend Japan’s war finances with government budget figures, recount the drafting of the Constitution under Marquis Ito, and answer talk of a “yellow peril” by tracing the phrase to what he calls “a German treacherous diplomat.” The book then closes with a five-part appendix — a list of emperors, a list of year-periods, a list of shoguns, the Laws of Shotoku Taishi, and the diplomatic correspondence between Japan and Russia in 1903–04 — followed by an index and a separate index to Kaneko’s chapters. Its illustrations run from a frontispiece of the bell at Kyoto through a statue of Yoritomo and portrait plates of Michizane, St. Francis Xavier, Hideyoshi, Ieyasu, Commodore Perry, Kido Takeyoshi, Iwakura Tomomi, the reigning emperor, Mori Arinori, Okubo Toshimichi, Ito Hirobumi, Admiral Togo, and General Kuroki, several of the earlier plates credited to Regamey’s Japan in Art and Industry, Chamberlain’s translation of the Kojiki, Henry von Siebold’s Japanese Archaeology, and Charlevoix’s Histoire et Description du Japon; a large folding map of Japan, with inset maps of Yezo, the Kurile Islands, and the Bonin Islands, faces page 552.

Makers of Japan is a collective biography, twenty-two chapters long, each built around one prominent figure in Japan’s nineteenth-century transformation, and illustrated throughout by twenty-four photographic plates keyed to a printed List of Illustrations. Its author, J. Morris, a member of the Japan Society who had already published What Will Japan Do? and Advance, Japan!, writes from London for an English-speaking public he hopes to inform about “our allies” in the years just after the Russo-Japanese War, and states plainly in his preface that his purpose is “to supply History through the medium of Biography.” He says he drew on Japanese official publications and on help from Viscount Hayashi and the Japanese Embassy in London, and singles out Baron Suyematsu for having revised the chapter on Marquis Ito, his father-in-law. Morris writes as an unembarrassed partisan of the Anglo-Japanese alliance and of Japan’s own expansion: in his own narration, not only in words he quotes from others, he likens the 1874 punitive expedition against Formosa’s “savages” to “Britain’s ‘little wars,’” and treats Japan’s reach into Korea and Manchuria as the counterpart of Britain’s own reach abroad. The book opens with the reigning Emperor and proceeds, chapter by chapter, through the last Shogun, three martyred reformers of the early nineteenth century, and then the statesmen, soldiers, financiers, and businessmen Morris credits with building the “New Japan.”

Chapter I, the book’s longest, belongs to the Emperor Mutsuhito himself, shown publishing his own “Imperial Compositions” on the war in Manchuria, his wardrobe and table kept deliberately meager, and at his desk by eight each morning for a full day of state business; Chapter II turns to Prince Tokugawa Keiki, “the last of the Shoguns,” who resigned an office his family had held for 264 years and withdrew to fish quietly at Shidzuoka rather than prolong civil war, later restored to princely rank by the very Emperor he had once opposed. The next three chapters recover, in the preface’s own words, three patriots who “shone during the first half of the nineteenth century” and paid for their boldness with their lives: Fujita Toko, the Mito scholar of Chinese literature who mentored the young Saigo Takamori and died in the great Yedo earthquake of 1855; Sakuma Shuri, better known as Shozan, whose 1842 memorandum urging coast forts, cast cannon, a modern navy, and new schools was shelved as dangerously radical, and who was cut down by ronin in 1864 for insisting Japan’s ports stay open; and his pupil Yoshida Torajiro, or Shoin, who tried to stow away on one of Commodore Perry’s ships to see the West for himself, later took over the small school at Matsushima that his uncles had opened and that trained several future Restoration leaders, and was beheaded in 1859 at twenty-nine.

Marquis Ito Hirobumi, smuggled out of Japan to England in 1863 with Inouye Kaoru, later principal drafter of the 1889 Constitution, four times Minister-President, negotiator of the Shimonoseki treaty with China in 1895, and, by the time Morris was writing, Resident-General of a newly protected Korea, gets one of the book’s longer chapters. Around him cluster the other architects of the Restoration government: Prince Iwakura Tomomi, the court noble who led the 1871–73 embassy to America and Europe — the same embassy Tenniel had cartooned in Punch, with “Ito, Kido, Okubo, and others” in Iwakura’s train — and who survived an 1874 assassination attempt by tumbling into the palace moat; Prince Sanjo Sanetomi, first head of the restored government’s Council of State, who held that post from 1868 until the Council’s dissolution in 1886; Count Inouye Kaoru, the Choshiu swordsman turned Finance and Foreign Minister, who carried a scar from a near-fatal sword-cut dealt him by his own clansmen and spent years vainly negotiating away the foreign powers’ extraterritorial privileges; Viscount Okubo Toshimichi, credited with urging the young Emperor to appear in public and with the 1874 mission that settled Japan’s dispute with China over Formosa, cut down in the wake of the 1877 rebellion by Satsuma men who accused him of betraying his own clan (he had never held the title of Viscount in life, the book notes, but it was conferred posthumously for his family’s benefit); and Count Goto Shojiro of Tosa, remembered above all for beheading one of the swordsmen who attacked the British Minister, Sir Harry Parkes, in the streets of Kioto in 1868.

Marshal Saigo Takamori, idolized as a founder of Japan’s modern army, dominates the middle chapters even in death: he later led the 1877 Satsuma rebellion against the government he had helped build, dying by his own sword on Shiroyama, a rebellion the Emperor eventually erased by pardoning his memory and granting his son a marquisate. Field-Marshal Marquis Yamagata Aritomo, organizer of that same conscript army and commander of the First Army into Manchuria in 1894, follows in a chapter heavy with troop tables and his own recorded words on the war. Count Okuma Shigenobu, maimed for life by a bomb thrown at his carriage in 1889, is credited chiefly as founder of Waseda University and leader of the Progressive party; Field-Marshal Marquis Oyama, Saigo’s nephew, who took Port Arthur from China in 1894 and led the Manchurian armies against Russia a decade later, gets the next chapter; Fukusawa Yukichi, who refused both office and a peerage, is remembered as founder of the Keio Gijuku school and the Jiji Shimpo newspaper and for enjoining on his pupils the study of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Mill’s Representative Government; Kido Koin, later created Marquis posthumously, talked his own daimio, Mori of Choshiu, into surrendering his fief to the crown — a step the book treats as decisive in ending feudalism — and died of consumption in 1875 at thirty-seven; Count Itagaki Taisuke, founder of the Jiyuto, or Liberal Party, survived an 1882 assassination attempt with the cry “I may die, but freedom never!”; and Count Matsukata Masayoshi, twice Prime Minister, is credited with founding the Bank of Japan in 1882 and steering Japan onto the gold standard in 1897.

The last three chapters turn to the sea and to business. Admiral Viscount Enomoto, the Tokugawa loyalist who sailed the Shogun’s fleet north from Yedo in 1868 and, reaching Hakodate, proclaimed a “Republic of Yeso,” fought on until the imperial forces’ campaign overran the rebel positions in 1869, then surrendered and went on, under the very government he had fought, to serve as cabinet minister and envoy to Russia and China. Admiral Togo Heihachi, trained aboard H.M.S. Worcester and at Greenwich, commanded the fleet that struck at Russian warships off Port Arthur and destroyed the Baltic Fleet in the battle of the Sea of Japan in 1905; the book quotes in full his graveside address to his dead sailors at Aoyama Cemetery. The volume closes with Baron Eichi Shibusawa, founder of the Dai-Ichi Ginko and, by Morris’s own count, president or director of “upwards of thirty companies,” whose 1902 speech to the London Chamber of Commerce on Anglo-Japanese commercial cooperation supplies the book’s actual final words. True to its title page, the book carries twenty-four photographic plates, nearly one to a chapter subject — beginning with a frontispiece portrait of the Emperor — along with a handful of others: the Geku Shrine at Ise, the Arms Museum at Tokio, the interior of Shiba Temple, and a Japanese school at Seoul.

The Land of the Tatami collects light travel sketches by George T. Murray, a Shanghai-based writer, reprinting columns that first ran in the North-China Daily News; the book opens with a dedication of “these travels to those young men of Shanghai who have not yet ‘been there.’” It recounts a loop journey through Japan, beginning in the spring of 1904 and running past the New Year holidays that opened 1905 into the following spring, a period the book itself notes had made Japan expensive and short of the usual tourist crowd because of the Russo-Japanese War. Murray’s voice throughout is wry, informal, and given to grumbling even amid his enthusiasms: he calls the Kobe hotels’ wartime rates a match for “Shanghai landlords” who are “sucking doves” by comparison, complains that a Nagoya-to-Yokohama night express left him “in a very dilapidated state,” and calls the retail curio-monger “the greatest nuisance in Japan,” “a vampire who tries to suck your purse.” He writes in the first person throughout, addressing the reader directly and mixing in comic verse, invented dialogue, and quotations from Shakespeare and Goethe alongside romanized Japanese phrases.

The itinerary opens at Takeo, where Murray takes the mineral baths and tours the porcelain kilns at Arita, then follows the Inland Sea to Kobe and its satellite resorts of Shioya, Suma, and Maiko, with a chapter on Osaka that takes in a sumo tournament (the champion Wakashima throws his man in twenty seconds) and a visit to the Asahi Beer Brewing Company at Suita. At the hot-spring town of Arima he spends two months among convalescing soldiers before settling into Kioto — “the place I love” — where he describes the temples, the Miyako Odori cherry dance, and, in a chapter called “A Gotzo,” the elaborate farewell banquet his Kioto friends give him, with its ceremonial bath, sake-cup games, and dancing geisha. A moonlit evening of Shakespeare and geisha song on the Inland Sea at Maiko supplies “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” From there he goes to Nara, with its tame deer and its Daibutsu, and out to the shrines of Ise, then to Nagoya (notable for its castle and its golden dolphins), to Yokohama, which he finds “the finest place in all the world to get away from,” and to Tokio, touring the Imperial Palace grounds, Ueno Park, Asakusa, and the Yoshiwara. A trip to Nikko and Lake Chiuzenji, a side excursion to Miyanoshita, the Fujiya Hotel, and the geyser of Atami in the Hakone district, and a return to Kioto in October to inspect the Gosho and Nijo Castle under special permits obtained through the Legation, close out this stretch of the book.

A long chapter of general reflection follows — on Japanese family life, on the difference between the “Japanese smile” and the “Japanese grin” (quoting Lafcadio Hearn at length), on schools, railways, the theater, scarecrows, and comic English shop signs — before Murray travels to Himeji to see its castle and the Russian prisoners of war held there, and on to the gold and silver mines at Ikuno. A chapter on Lake Biwa covers Otsu, the temple of Miidera and its legends of the bell stolen by the monk Benkei and the dragon-god of Seta, and the castle and gardens of Hikone; a New Year (Ganjitzu) chapter describes the treasure ship of the seven gods of luck and the exchange of New Year’s cards, set against news, arriving on New Year’s Day itself, of the fall of Port Arthur. Along the way he also devotes a page to attacking Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème as “artificial from beginning to end.” The closing chapters carry him down the Sanyo and Kyushu railway lines through Shimonoseki and Moji to Okayama, Hiroshima, and the sacred island of Miyajima, then to Kumamoto, where he tours Suizenji Park, surveys the active volcano Aso San from its foot, and admires the women of Hakata, before doubling back through Takeo to Nagasaki and a ship bound for Shanghai. Eleven photographic plates illustrate the book: a young woman named O Taro San; a Mrs. Morgan alongside the Kioto geisha Ne O Yuki San; the Ikuno mines; Kumamoto Castle; two views of Aso San in eruption; Suizenji Park, captioned “most beautiful spot on earth”; the Hommyoji temple in Kumamoto; a farewell gathering captioned “Sayonara Gotizo”; a street in the Yoshiwara; and a portrait of the author.

Vacation Days in Hawaii and Japan is a travel journal cast as the day-by-day record of a tourist’s extended holiday, “supplemented by camera and sketch book,” as the author puts it in his preface — a book whose photographs (the title page promises “over one hundred illustrations”) are worked into the text far more often as small in-page views paired with their captions than as separate full-page plates, though a handful of the latter also appear. The preface frames the whole excursion as the outline of “a three months’ tour in the Hawaiian Islands and Japan,” and the author says he means to lead the reader past the main cities and “far into the heart of the country,” to districts “hitherto untraveled by English-speaking people,” relying in part on “my little red-backed guide book (Murray’s Handbook of Japan)” for the history and legends attached to the temples and palaces he describes. The book itself is considerably broader than its title suggests: it opens with a cross-country American railway journey, spends several chapters in the Hawaiian Islands, and only then turns to Japan, which occupies the great bulk of the book — roughly two-thirds of its length — before the narrative returns through Hawaii to the American mainland.

The journey begins on May 25th with a train trip from Philadelphia to Los Angeles by way of New Orleans and Texas, taking in the Pecos River Bridge, a mirage near Stein’s Pass, and the legend of Chochise Mountain; along the way the author describes the Black field hands and cabin-dwellers he sees from the train in the stereotyped, condescending terms typical of his era, and notes in passing the segregated waiting room marked “For Negroes” at the Southern stations. A stretch in Northern California follows — San Francisco’s Chinatown (a Joss House, an opium den, a Chinese theatre visited by the back door), a prize fight between James Corbett and Thomas Sharkey that the referee has to call in police to separate, the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton, the “Big Trees” at Santa Cruz, and Monterey’s semicentennial celebrations, capped by a grand hop at the Del Monte Hotel. From San Francisco the author sails on the “Australia” to Honolulu, where chapters on native customs (poi, surf-boating, the “Hula” dance, a shipboard glimpse of the Molokai leper settlement), a second-class rail excursion to the sugar and pineapple plantations of Pearl River and Waianae, and a side trip by the steamer “Kinau” to the island of Hawaii to see the active crater of Halemaumau — “The House of Everlasting Fire” — round out the Hawaiian portion of the book.

Japan opens with the steamship “China” reaching Yokohama harbor on August 9th, and from there the book settles into its longest and most detailed stretch. In Yokohama the author is besieged by tailors and shoemakers at the Grand Hotel, hires a licensed guide (Mr. Y. F. Shimidzu), visits the tattooer Hori Chiyo, tours the licensed quarter called the Maganechio, and experiences his first Japanese earthquake; side trips take him to Kamakura and the Great Buddha, and to Enoshima, where he pays a diver five sen — a fee he doubles once the man safely resurfaces — to bring up shells from the sea floor. An imperial passport obtained through the American minister opens the country to him, and he goes on to Tokyo and to Nikko, where he spends two days among the mausolea of Iyeyasu and Iyemitsu, the carving of the “Sleeping Cat,” and the Red Bridge, then climbs on foot past Lake Chuzenji before riding by jinrikisha to the Kegon-no-taki waterfall. From Nikko he sets out on a long inland circuit — by rail, jinrikisha, and on foot — through Karuizawa, Nagano (where he visits the temple of Zenkoji and is entertained at a private feast by local artists and silk merchants), and on toward Naoetsu and Niigata, recording jinrikisha fares, inn customs, and the blackened-teeth custom of unmarried women past marrying age. This interior leg turns into an account of an unusually wet season: the author fords washed-out bridges on foot, crosses a river on a bridge of lashed sampans at night, and is repeatedly stalled by jinrikisha men demanding higher fares over ruined roads. Reaching Sendai, he learns that the floods have cut both the northern and southern rail lines, abandons his planned trip to Aomori and Yezo, and works his way back toward Nikko on foot and by boat over submerged tracks and collapsed bridges, at one point crossing the Kinugawa River by sampan through rapids.

Once back in Tokyo the tour becomes a circular one: Asakusa Park, the Shiba temples, a private exhibition of fencing in which a man armed with a “pick and sling” defeats a swordsman, and a crowd scrambling over a portable shrine in the street, before the author follows the old Tokaido highway toward Nagoya, past Fuji-yama seen “in all the glory of its majestic height” from the train, through the earthquake-damaged district around Gifu, by sampan through the flooded streets of a Lake Biwa town, and by steamer across the lake itself to Kyoto. In Kyoto — “the capital of former days” — he visits the Daibutsu and its great bronze bell, watches a doctor who practices therapeutic body-burning demonstrate it on his own arm, tours cloisonné and metal-inlay workshops where boys as young as eight do intricate work — it is still the custom, he is told, for parents to sell their children to the tradesmen, receiving an annual income for their services, and to sell not only children already born but frequently children yet unborn — and is shown through the Enclosure’s most fashionable inn, home to the demi-monde of the highest class, where three women of “the highest rank” dance for him; he also sees Kiyomizu-dera, Kinkakuji, Chion-in, the temple of the thirty-three thousand images of Kwannon, and the Inari shrine with its long avenues of red torii. Before leaving Kyoto he attends a first-class Geisha dance at a tea house, then continues to Kobe (the Nunobiki waterfalls, the bamboo-carver Iwamoto), Osaka (a Satsuma-ware workshop, a public wrestling match), and Nara, where tame deer bow on command and the largest Daibutsu in Japan sits fifty-three feet high, before a return to Kyoto for a girls’ dancing-and-music school and permit-only visits to the castle and the Imperial Palace.

The book closes with a rainy stay at Miyanoshita’s Fujiya Hotel, where the author takes daily massage and admits that the bamboo canes he had bought from Iwamoto in Osaka mostly split apart once they reached Philadelphia’s drier climate, and then a return to Yokohama for the departure on the steamer “Coptic” on October 10th. The homeward voyage carries eight hundred contract laborers bound for Honolulu in steerage, regains the day dropped on the outbound crossing at the 180th meridian, and is marked by the death and burial at sea of the ship’s chief steward; after a call at Honolulu, where the author is again garlanded with leis by island friends, the party reaches Chicago on November 3rd, “having traveled more than two thousand three hundred miles without changing cars,” and a snowbound crossing of the Rockies gives way to the final leg into Philadelphia, where the journey ends on November 4th.

Miyakawa’s title page identifies the book plainly as Life of Japan, “by Masuji Miyakawa, Author of ‘Powers of the American People, Etc.,’” published in 1907 by the Baker & Taylor Company under an epigraph from Theodore Roosevelt praising “the Mighty Island Empire of Japan” for showing “the West” that it “had so much, so very much, to teach the West in return.” Miyakawa dedicates the volume “to the Honorable Perry Belmont, a grandson of Commodore Mathew Calbraith Perry, the National Redeemer of Japan,” and opens with an “Introductory” essay, dated from Washington, D.C. on July 4, 1907, that states his purpose against two existing kinds of book on Japan he dislikes: one that peddles “quaint tea houses, weird temples” and exploits “outcast Japanese immoral women” as photographs of “typical Japanese ladies,” and another, “quite harmless” but shallow, devoted only to “exquisite views, picturesque coloring, scenery and landscape.” His own book, he says, belongs to a third kind, meant “to lay bare the life and soul of the people and nation.” That Introductory sets out a three-part design that the book’s own internal divider pages confirm: Part I, on Japanese environment and character (religion, ethics, women, customs, geography, feudalism); Part II, on “the great possibilities of the future of American-Japanese Intercourse,” built around Commodore Perry’s expedition and the wars with China and Russia; and Part III, on the constitution, the courts, journalism, and “Shall it be war or shall it be peace?” between Japan and the United States. Miyakawa writes as a Japanese author addressing American readers, identifying his own family as “of the military nobility, or Samurai caste,” recalling his service as “an official interpreter” attached to the imperial army during the war with China, and drawing on lecture appearances before American audiences from Bloomington, Indiana, to San Francisco. Through the book he refers to himself mostly in the third person as “the author,” but slips without warning into a collective “we” arguing Japan’s case (“We admit that 50 per cent of the population of Japan belong to the farming class”) and occasionally into a first-person “I” in more personal asides (“I cannot say of my native country, as Tennyson said of his mother country”).

Part I moves chapter by chapter through what Miyakawa treats as the forces shaping Japanese character, opening with “New Japan as Old as Ever,” which credits Japan’s rapid modernization to what he calls a national principle of “adopting what is best from every country.” “Religions in Japan” traces Christianity’s sixteenth-century arrival under Xavier, its interdiction by the Tokugawa shoguns — Miyakawa reproduces the standing reward proclamation offering “500 pieces of silver” for information “against a father or worker of the Christian religion” — and its underground survival, illustrated by his own encounter, while serving near Tsushima during the war with China, with a family that had secretly kept “a Bible and a little crucifix” for generations. “The Japanese Moral Ethics” expounds Bushido through the deaths of the forty-seven ronin of Lord Asano and other hara-kiri episodes, and proposes that “the exact equivalent for the Japanese word ‘Bushi’” is “Gentleman.” “The Japanese Woman” surveys the “Onna Daigaku,” or “Great Learning for Women,” and Fukuzawa’s revised version of it, and passes into Miyakawa’s own advice to “the young ladies of his native country” on exercise, schooling, and marriage arranged by parental introduction. “Japanese Customs and Habits” catalogues dozens of contrasts with American practice: Japanese family names “precede individual names,” white rather than black is “the color for mourning,” pedestrians keep to the left, and “the Japanese do not kiss.” A chapter on topography describes Lake Biwa and an ascent of Mount Fuji that Miyakawa narrates from his own experience, followed by chapters on the rise of feudalism from Emperor Jimmu through Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu, the causes of feudalism’s overthrow — reproducing Prince Mito’s ten arguments for resisting the American demand to open the country and recounting the assassination of the reformer Ii Kamon — and a chapter on Japan’s medieval contacts with the West, including Marco Polo’s account of golden “Chipangu” and the claim that Japanese seafarers “were among the earliest discoverers of America.”

Part II turns to what Miyakawa calls the book’s main object, the historical partnership of Japan and the United States. “Romantic Relation to the United States” reprints Millard Fillmore’s 1852 letter to the Emperor in full, narrates Perry’s 1853 landing at Uraga and the panic it caused (“mothers with their children in their arms… flying aimlessly in every direction”), and describes the 1901 unveiling of Perry’s monument at Kurihama, reproducing congratulatory letters sent to Miyakawa by William Jennings Bryan and San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan. “Triumphs of American Diplomacy” credits Townsend Harris’s patience through the assassination of legation secretary Heusken and the burning of the American legation, and notes the United States’ remission of its $750,000 share of the Shimonoseki indemnity to Japanese education. Successive chapters recount the causes and battles of the wars with China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–05) — the sinking of the Kowshing, the battles of Mukden and the Sea of Japan — closing with praise for Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation at the Portsmouth peace conference. A chapter on the Meiji Emperor’s accession reprints the Charter Oath’s five articles; one on financial reform retells the folk story of the martyred farmers’ advocate Sakura Sogoro; one on industrial development claims that the battleship Satsuma, “according to American expert opinion,” is superior in fighting strength to Britain’s Dreadnought; a chapter on the army and navy quotes Theodore Roosevelt and General Chaffee praising Japanese soldiers and traces the 1877 founding of Japan’s Red Cross Society; and Part II closes with a chapter on education reprinting the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education in full and crediting American missionaries and the student embassies of the 1860s and 1870s with building Japan’s modern schools.

Part III examines Japan’s constitution, laws, and press. “Japanese Constitutional Government” contrasts the 1889 constitution, “not like the Magna Charta, wrung by rebellious subjects from an unwilling king” but “an imperial gift,” with the American and English systems, working through the doctrine that “the King can do no wrong” and the ministerial responsibility fixed by Article 55. “Japan under the Reign of Law” traces the codification of civil and commercial law from French models between 1870 and 1898, the “triple obedience” that once bound a Japanese wife “to a father,” then “to a husband,” then, widowed, “to a son,” and the legal position of foreigners, which Miyakawa traces through four historical stages to what present Japanese law calls “the principle of equality… irrespective of race or nationality.” “Journalism in Japan” describes the mechanical obstacles facing Japanese newspapers — tens of thousands of Chinese characters requiring type cases that “extend from 25 to 30 feet” along a composing-room wall — and remarks that Japanese women have “not to any great extent invaded the great field of journalism.” The closing chapter, “American-Japanese War,” surveys the history of international arbitration from the Amphictyonic League to The Hague, then argues that the “civilized world” recognized Japan’s “legal autonomy” only after Japan “killed more men in her war with China in 1894-5 than were killed in the American civil war and the Napoleonic war of Waterloo put together,” and again only after her war with Russia proved she could sink “more ships and seamen in one naval battle” than Trafalgar and Manila Bay combined — a cowardice, Miyakawa insists, “the world must answer and not Japan.” The chapter then addresses the 1906–07 San Francisco school-segregation and boycott controversy directly and lays out “ten reasons” why war between Japan and the United States is impossible, citing commercial interdependence, the Anglo-Japanese alliance, and “Giri,” “the great reverence that the Japanese feel for their teachers.”

Life of Japan ends on this note of alliance, forecasting a day when “we may be fortunate enough to establish a Congress of the United States of Japan and America” and hoping that “the Stars and Stripes and the Banners of the Rising Sun” might “float side by side in mutual endearment.” Miyakawa’s own text stops there, on the volume’s page 301; what follows in this printed copy is not an appendix to Life of Japan but some twenty-five pages of newspaper notices for his earlier book, Powers of the American People, and the front matter likewise opens with a single prefatory letter, printed first in Japanese and then in English translation, from Teiichi Sugita, Speaker of Japan’s House of Representatives, congratulating Miyakawa on that same earlier book, bound in ahead of the Life of Japan title page itself. That title page carries a faint decorative vignette of a woman seated with a paper or book beside a vase of flowers and a latticed screen, and the copyright page credits “embellishments by S. Morita, Japanese artist, sent abroad by the Japanese government, and R. S. Hayata, Japanese artist.” Those embellishments include unsigned pen-and-ink chapter dividers — a warship steaming into a sunlit harbor above two small sketched figures tumbling, on the leaf introducing Part I — and a full-page captioned plate facing the opening of Part II: a coastal view of cliffs and fishing boats signed with the monogram “S·H,” captioned with the Shogunate’s warning to Perry to “consult your own safety by departing from our shores and not to again appear on our coast.”

Old and New Japan presents itself as a topical survey of Japanese civilization rather than a record of travel, moving chapter by chapter through myth, religion, domestic life, and commerce instead of following an itinerary of places visited. Holland never steps forward to describe an arrival in Japan or a personal journey through it; the prevailing voice is the impersonal third person of the essayist, built on the generic “one” (“one finds,” “one is struck”), broken now and again by an editorial “we” that cites written authorities—Basil Hall Chamberlain’s translation of the Ko-ji-ki is invoked in the opening chapter—or drops in a specific, seemingly firsthand anecdote, such as a wager between “two Englishmen in Yokohama” over a matched pair of bronze candlesticks, or a remembered friend who “used always to keep a register” of his tradesmen’s bills. That mixture, sustained across the whole book, gives the prose the cast of a compiler drawing on both published scholarship and some acquaintance with Japan’s foreign community, though nothing in the text amounts to a stated claim of residence or travel there. The book’s thirteen chapters run from the legendary origin of the Japanese race through religion, temples, domestic and family life, festivals, city and country life, language, gardens, art, folklore, and finally the treaty ports and Japan’s commercial future, illustrated throughout by fifty full-page color plates.

The book opens with no preface, moving from the contents list, through the front matter’s printed list of illustrations, into “The Legendary Genesis of Japan,” which retells the creation myths of Izanagi and Izanami, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu’s retreat into her cave, and the descent of Ninigi-no-Mikoto, drawn from the Ko-ji-ki, or “Records of Ancient Matters,” commissioned by the Emperor Temmu and finished under the Empress Gemmyo, and from the Nihonji, the first of which Holland credits to Chamberlain’s English translation. He places the accepted boundary between myth and history at the accession of Jimmu Tenno in 660 B.C., and argues that Japan’s twenty-five centuries under one dynasty, its freedom from invasion, and its Yamato Damashii, or “Soul of Japan,” together account for a patriotism he calls without parallel among modern nations. Chapter II turns to the “conflict of faiths,” contending that Shinto—without dogma, priesthood, or scripture—remains the true religion of Japan beneath a nominal Buddhism and Confucianism, and recounts the failure of a government commission that reportedly recommended against adopting Christianity as a state religion. Chapter III tours specific shrines and temples: the ancient pagoda at Kyoto; the sacred red bridge and the cream-and-gold Yomei-mon gate at Nikko, leading up two hundred stone steps to the tomb of Iyeyasu; the Hongwanji at Kyoto, built partly with ropes twisted from women’s donated hair; the fifty-foot bronze Daibutsu at Kamakura; and the shrine of the Sun Goddess at Ise, rebuilt every twenty years and never directly viewed even by pilgrims, where, Holland notes, Viscount Mori, a Cabinet Minister, was stabbed to death by a young government clerk after pushing aside its sacred curtain with his stick.

Turning from temples to domestic life, Chapter IV corrects the idea of the Japanese house as flimsy, describing its earthquake-resistant pillars set loose on stones rather than driven into the ground, its heavy curved roof, the decorative economy concentrated on a single tokonoma alcove, and the nightly ritual of summoning the rolled futon with the command “Futon motte koi.” Chapter V, “Concerning Japanese Babies, Girls and Women,” follows a girl from birth and her miya mairi temple visit through training in cooking, sewing, and household duties, judging bluntly that “the happiest and brightest period” of an average Japanese woman’s life closes with childhood, once obedience to her father gives way to obedience to her husband. Chapter VI works through the festival calendar in similar detail: the New Year’s kadomatsu of pine, bamboo, and plum, and the symbolic straw shimenawa rope; Bommatsuri, the Festival of the Dead, with its Bon-ichi market of lanterns and hemp torches and its tiny straw boats of food, launched at the festival’s close to carry the returning ghosts back over the water; the girls’ O Hina Matsuri, or Feast of Dolls, on the third day of the third month; and the boys’ Feast of Flags on the fifth of the fifth, with its paper carp banners and shelves of miniature warrior-heroes such as Benkei and Kintaro.

The next chapters shift from home to social type. Chapter VII surveys city life—the traditionally low standing of shopkeepers, the theater, and the professional story-teller or hanashika—before turning at length to the geisha, “of course, a dancing girl,” trained from childhood in dance, samisen, and the etiquette of serving guests, of whom Holland writes plainly that “though the geisha is not necessarily bad… many fall and pass beyond the pale of respectability altogether.” Chapter VIII moves to the countryside, distinguishing the Heimin class of peasants, artisans, and merchants from the formerly outcast Hinin and Eta, praising peasant self-sacrifice through the story of a village headman crucified for petitioning the Shogun on his neighbors’ behalf, and describing women who plant rice “up to their knees in mud” and the unusually strong women of Yase, near Kyoto, who supply nurses to the Imperial family. Chapter IX, “Upon Greetings, Language, and Some Things Which Are Different in Japan,” works through the double vocabulary of polite and common speech (miru against the honorific goran nasai and haiken suru), the shifting numeral system (ichi, itcho, ikkiaku, all meaning “one”), and a running catalogue of reversals—Japanese carpenters draw the plane toward themselves rather than pushing it away, books open at what a Westerner would call the back, the best rooms sit at the rear of the house—offered as evidence that Japanese custom must be judged on its own terms.

The closing chapters range wider still. Chapter X praises the Japanese garden’s use of natural stone, its miniature toko-niwa landscapes built in a bowl no larger than a pie dish, and the symbolism of pine, cherry, and plum, and catalogues the garden’s insect life, from the iridescent Tenshitombo, or “Emperor dragon-fly,” to the singing semi, or cicadas. Chapter XI argues that Japanese art belongs to the people as a whole rather than to a handful of masters, tracing it into the curved walls of rice fields, the printed wrapping-paper of shops, and flower arrangements built on schemes of three, five, seven, or nine lines, the five-line scheme divided into a principal, sub-principal, support, secondary, and tertiary line. Chapter XII gathers superstition and folklore: legends of jealous women whose hair turns to snakes at night, the fox god Inari and the victims believed possessed by kitsune, and dolls said to gain souls through generations of a family’s love, whose broken remains are at last dedicated to the god Kojin in a sacred enoki tree. The final chapter follows the treaty ports from an era of foreign “bargain money” and browbeaten native traders to the point, in 1895, when a Japanese trade guild could threaten a boycott and force a British firm to compromise a winning lawsuit, and closes on Holland’s forecast that Japan may become either “a formidable and unmerciful rival” to the West or fulfill “a great and even beneficent” mission in the Far East under peaceful rulers. Throughout, fifty full-page color plates by Montagu Smyth—coastal views, temple approaches, festival crowds, gardens, and scenes of rural labor—illustrate the text; a few of their captions quote Holland’s own prose verbatim, but most stand as independent descriptive captions.

A tipped-in, ornately engraved title leaf announces this as a privately printed keepsake: Our Journey to Japan, by Jacob H. Schiff, “printed as a surprise to the author, Jan. 10, MCMVII,” with a Library of Congress copyright-deposit notice dated 1906 to the New York Co-operative Society in the book’s front matter. The narrative itself is Schiff’s own first-person record of a trip he and his wife made in the spring of 1906, together with several old friends and his nephew and traveling companion, Ernst H. Schiff — dictated, by Schiff’s own account of his days at sea, “about 11.30 o’clock I settle down with Ernst Schiff to dictate these leaves.” It opens as continuous narrative covering the send-off from New York and the private-car crossing of the American continent, then settles, once the party reaches Japan, into dated entries — “Monday, March 26th,” “Tuesday, May 1st,” and so on — that carry the book through Korea and the homeward voyage to its close. Despite the title, the journey it records is not confined to Japan: it runs outbound by private railroad car to San Francisco and by the steamer “Manchuria” through Honolulu, some eight weeks in Japan itself, a shorter side trip into Korea, and a return crossing on the “Empress of Japan” followed by another transcontinental rail journey home.

The hospitality the party receives is tied throughout to Schiff’s own role, as senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., in underwriting Japan’s war loans during its recently concluded conflict with Russia, and the book records the resulting honors in detail: an Imperial audience at which Schiff is invested with the Order of the Rising Sun and then lunches privately with the Emperor — “the first time,” he is told, “that the Emperor has invited a foreign private citizen to a repast at the palace” — followed by dinners and toasts from Finance Minister Sakatani, from the directors of the Bank of Japan under Takahashi and Matsuo, and from Baron Mitsui, and by luncheons and toasts from Baron Shibusawa and Count Okuma, with further calls on Baron Iwasaki and Count Inouye. Sightseeing is folded in around these engagements: the Tokugawa shrines at Nikko, an excursion from Miyanoshita to Lake Hakone for a first view of Fujiyama, the Imperial cherry-blossom party at which Mrs. Schiff is unexpectedly presented to the Empress, and a steamer chartered from the Bank of Japan for a cruise through the Inland Sea to the shrine island of Miyajima, where Mrs. Schiff plants a commemorative tree, and on to the naval arsenal at Kure, still full of captured Russian ships. From Kobe the party crosses to Korea, landing at Chemulpo and going on to Seoul, where the Korean Emperor sends gifts and regrets — Japan’s resident-general, Marquis Ito, has restricted his audiences with foreigners — and where Mrs. Schiff alone is received by “Lady Om,” described as Princess Consort since the murder of the Empress in 1895, and by the Emperor’s young son, Prince Yung. The return route runs back through Nara’s deer park and wisteria and Nagoya before a farewell dinner in Tokyo for seventy-two guests, closed by a toast in which Schiff bids the room “Sayanora.”

Leaving Yokohama on the “Empress of Japan” on May 18th, the Schiffs recross the Pacific, land at Victoria and Vancouver, and travel home by private car over the Canadian Pacific Railway, stopping at Banff before reaching Montreal and, on June 8th, Grand Central Station and the family’s country home at Seabright — “thus is ended our journey to the ‘Far East,’ covering 20,000 miles during an absence of fourteen weeks.” The volume carries a small illustration program suited to its purpose as a personal keepsake: bound in after the engraved title leaf is a series of full-page photographic portrait plates of the Japanese hosts named in the text, each reproduced with a facsimile autograph — Korekiyo Takahashi in Japanese dress; Bank of Japan governor Matsuo Shigeyoshi in decorated court uniform, inscribed “To his friends Mr & Mrs Schiff, Tokio, May 1906”; Marshal Oyama in military dress, signed “I. Oyama”; Count Kaoru Inouye in like uniform; and Marchioness Oyama, a Vassar graduate the text describes calling on Mrs. Schiff in Tokyo, seated in kimono and signing her plate “Stematz Oyama.” Schiff closes the account itself by hoping the “record of the enjoyable journey of the parents and grandparents may stimulate the interest of children and grandchildren in a civilization which is now so rapidly changing.”

Shinto: The Ancient Religion of Japan is a short expository treatise on comparative religion, published in 1907 by Archibald Constable & Co. as a volume in the series “Religions Ancient and Modern,” alongside companion volumes on Animism, Pantheism, the religions of ancient China, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism. Its title page credits the author as “W. G. Aston, C.M.G., D.Lit.”; the series’ own advertisement of forthcoming titles, bound into the volume’s front matter, further identifies him as “Author of A History of Japanese Literature.” Aston organizes the book as a topical survey rather than a narrative, in nine chapters — Introductory, General Character of Shinto, Myth, The Gods, The Priesthood, Worship, Morality and Purity, Divination and Inspiration, and Later History — closing with an annotated reading list, “Selected Works Bearing on Shinto.” Most of the text is impersonal exposition cataloging beliefs and practices, but Aston breaks into the first person whenever he stakes out a contested position — disputing the scholar M. Revon’s claim that a Shinto purification rite echoes the Ten Commandments (“I am unable to find in the Ohoharahi the smallest trace of any of the seven commandments which it covers”), or flagging his own etymological guesses as guesses (“I offer as a mere conjecture that he is a personification of the durable character of the earth”). These first-person interjections recur across several chapters rather than sitting in one place, though the bulk of the book remains third-person description.

The opening chapter traces the Japanese to a “continental race” out of Northern Asia by way of Korea, weighing and mostly dismissing claimed affinities with Chinese state religion (which differs, Aston notes, over the sex of the sun and the ranking of Heaven and Earth), with Ainu religion, and with Malay or Polynesian traits, and concluding that “the old Shinto owes little to any outside source.” He names the Kojiki (712) and Nihongi (720) as the primary textual sources, along with the commentaries on both by Motoori and Hirata and the Yengishiki, a tenth-century compilation preserving the norito, or liturgies. Chapter II works through the meaning of Kami, quoting at length Motoori’s own definition — that it covers anything “which deserve[s] to be dreaded and revered for the extraordinary and pre-eminent powers which they possess” — and distinguishes Nature-gods from Man-gods, describes the mitama (soul) and the Shintai or “god-body” (a mirror, sword, tablet, or plain round stone) that stands for a deity in its shrine, and states flatly that “with a few unimportant exceptions, Shinto has no idols.” Chapter III retells the myth cycle in sequence: Izanagi and Izanami’s generation of the islands and the elemental deities, Izanami’s death and Izanagi’s flight from the land of Yomi, the quarrel between Amaterasu and her brother Susa no wo that drives the Sun-goddess into the Rock-cave of Heaven, Ohonamochi’s adventures and eventual cession of the land to Ninigi, and the descent of Ninigi’s great-grandson Jimmu Tenno, whose traditional accession date of 660 B.C. Aston calls “a colossal fraud,” the surrounding narrative being “no better than legend when it is not absolute fiction.” Chapter IV catalogs individual deities by class — Amaterasu with her sacred crow Yatagarasu and mirror Yatakagami, the moon-god Tsuki-yomi, Susa no wo identified (following the American scholar Dr. Buckley of Chicago) as a personification of the rain-storm, the earth-god Ohonamochi, assorted sea-, fire-, and wind-gods, the food-goddess Ukemochi and her later merging with the grain-deity Inari, deified men such as Hachiman and the banished scholar-official Sugahara Michizane worshipped as Temmangu, and the phallic Sahe no Kami. Chapter V describes the priestly clans — the Nakatomi, the Imbe who prepared offerings, the diviners called Urabe, and the ordinary, non-celibate Kannushi — along with the virgin priestesses once attached to the shrine at Ise. Chapter VI turns to the outward forms of worship: offerings of food, drink, and cloth; the torii gateway; the norito liturgies; and state ceremonies including the Ohonihe, described as the equivalent of a coronation, whose central act was the Mikado’s personal offering of new rice and sake to the Sun-goddess, and pilgrimages to Ise — noting along the way that most of Japan’s roughly 150,000 to 200,000 shrines are tiny structures “easily transportable in a cart or even a wheelbarrow.”

The later chapters grow more argumentative. In “Morality and Purity,” Aston maintains, against M. Revon, that Shinto’s great absolution rite, the Ohoharahi, contains nothing corresponding to the Decalogue’s commandments, and distinguishes ritual pollution — incurred through wounds, disease, childbirth, or contact with the dead — from Western moral guilt, adding that Shinto funerals “were unknown in ancient Japan” and “date from 1868.” “Divination and Inspiration” surveys shoulder-blade and tortoise-shell divination, the cross-roads method called Tsuji-ura, and trance oracles, citing Percival Lowell’s Occult Japan for a contemporary account of a mediumistic séance. The closing chapter, “Later History,” traces the centuries of Buddhist absorption into Ryobu Shinto under Kobo Daishi, the Confucian-inflected scholarship of the Tokugawa period, and the eighteenth-century “Revival of Pure Shinto” led by Motoori and his pupil Hirata — a movement Aston credits with helping restore the Mikado’s position in 1868 but ultimately calls “retrograde,” closing the book with his judgment that Shinto, lacking a moral code, an ecclesiastical organization, or a developed sacred literature, “is doomed to extinction,” being “meat for babes” unsuited to a nation that “has reached a full and vigorous manhood.” The volume ends with a seventeen-item annotated bibliography, “Selected Works Bearing on Shinto,” in which Aston rates the competing literature — dismissing Kaempfer’s History of Japan as “worthless for Shinto,” calling Chamberlain’s translation of the Kojiki “accurate, indispensable for myth,” faulting Lafcadio Hearn’s work for its “blind acceptance of H. Spencer’s philosophy,” and noting his own earlier and larger volume, also titled Shinto, published in 1905.

W. Petrie Watson’s The Future of Japan is not a travel book but a work of argument — a “psychological and philosophical account,” as the Preface calls it, or “a broadly planned synthetic account” of Japan meant to trace the “degree of correlation” between Japanese and European history. The title page identifies Watson as “Author of” Japan: Aspects and Destinies, and the Preface grounds his authority in “a residence of some years in the country,” supplemented by the historical scholarship of Satow, Chamberlain, Aston, Brinkley, Griffis, and Mason, with a closing tribute to Lafcadio Hearn. Watson explicitly sets aside two other “Japans” he might have written about — the picturesque “Japan which is all colour and iridescence,” and the “mystical, semi-esoteric Japan” of Bushi-do and folklore — in favor of a Japan “explicable on general principles.” After the Preface comes an unnumbered introductory essay, “Japan and Europe,” which frames Japan’s rise as a test of whether the East can offer the West any new religion, philosophy, or political principle to relieve what Watson calls Europe’s own “era of confusion and exhaustion” of belief; the book then divides into Part I, “Conditions of the Time” (nineteen chapters surveying present-day Japan), and Part II, “The Future and Its Problems” (eleven chapters of forward-looking argument), closing with an index. Watson writes chiefly as an essayist arguing in the first person — “I” for his own conclusions, “we” for the collective judgment of “Europe” — though his opening chapter, “The Unique Japan,” briefly drops into a sustained second-person account of arrival (“Landing at Yokohama you do not think of your having dropped upon the stage of one of the greatest experiments in history”); the same device recurs once more, in “The Japanese ‘Atmosphere,’” (“The vista, as you see it from the street, closes in a glimpse of green”), though the remaining chapters otherwise keep to the argumentative “I”/“we” voice. The volume carries no illustrations.

Part I opens with a historical sketch running from the mythical accession of Jimmu Tenno and the “effeminate” Nara-Kyoto court, through the Taira-Minamoto wars and Yoritomo’s founding of the Shogunate in 1190, to the despotism erected after 1600 by Tokugawa Iyeyasu, whose “Legacy” of a hundred articles fixed the Samurai, farmer, artisan, trader, and outcast eta into law. Watson treats the Meiji restoration as the accidental outcome of an anti-Shogunate nationalist movement that began, under the banner “Expulsion of Foreigners,” by wanting to close the country further, and ended, after 1868, by adopting the very Western civilization it had set out to resist. Subsequent chapters describe the machinery of the new state: an “abyss” separating a small governing group of Elder Statesmen — Ito, Yamagata, and Matsukata recur by name — from a patriotic but politically untutored people; a Constitution of 1889 that vests sovereignty in the Emperor on paper while power in practice rests with the informal council of Elder Statesmen operating through the Privy Council; and a paternal bureaucracy that owns the trunk railways, subsidizes shipping, runs the tobacco and salt monopolies, and sends promising students abroad on state scholarships. Numbers accumulate throughout — a population of 48,000,000, a national wealth reckoned at “somewhat over £25 per head,” an army and navy of European efficiency set against an agriculture still served by “ox-ploughs with wooden coulters” and hand-flail threshing.

Later chapters of Part I turn to physique and vital statistics (comparative brain weights, birth and death rates set against England, France, and Germany), the industrial economy (raw silk, cotton yarn, matches, coal and copper mining, a mercantile marine of nearly 2,000 steamers), and “Sociological Aspects” — arranged marriage, the licensed prostitution system, and a low incidence of drunkenness. “Individuality and the Family” describes the inkyo custom of early retirement and quotes Count Okuma telling women students that “the husband and wife are the social unit” in the West but “father and son” in Japan; “The Japanese ‘Atmosphere’” portrays a national simplicity and cheerfulness summed up in the resigned phrase shigatakanai, “what does it matter?” Watson insists Japan possesses no true religious “dogma” comparable to Christianity’s — only ancestor-worship and the doctrine of the Emperor’s divine descent function as quasi-dogma — and treats the “eight hundred myriads” of Shinto and Buddhist gods as popular superstition tolerated by an increasingly rationalist governing class; Bushi-do and Confucian ethics are presented as spent moral systems, Bushi-do declared “already a moral curiosity.” “A Moral Chaos” documents the resulting drift with a 1901 magazine symposium in which Japanese officials confess to “the corruption of the times,” and with the 1902–03 school-textbook bribery scandal that reached into the Diet. Watson’s own attitudes surface plainly here: he calls the Japanese “both brave and, according to Western standards, dishonest,” writes that “the Japanese merchant of to-day is very often a trickster and frequently a cheat,” and devotes a chapter, “The Japanese Mind,” to arguing that Japanese and European minds are logically identical yet suffer, in his introductory essay’s phrase, from “the indisputable deficiency of the Japanese mind in range of imagination” — a claim the chapter itself restates as a “failure or deficiency of imagination” and defends by quoting John Stuart Mill’s warning against precisely this kind of racial explanation, only to conclude that Mill’s authority is “hardly sufficient to dispose of” it.

Part II opens by asking, chapter by chapter, whether Japan can supply the “new interpretation” Europe needs, and answers no. “The Japanese Tendency” draws the book’s historical argument into a formula: Japan’s leaders have made the State itself, embodied in a quasi-divine Emperor, into the only religion its people know. “Modern Philosophical Position” gives several pages to the life of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834–1901), tracing his self-taught study of Dutch and then English, his embassies to America in 1860 and Europe in 1862, and his founding of a newspaper and university, as the exemplar of Japan’s materialist, dogma-free habit of mind. “Industrial and Commercial Aims” itemizes the campaign to displace imported cotton yarn, matches, clocks, and glass with home manufacture, while noting continuing dependence on foreign capital, an inadequate apprenticeship system, and — quoting a 1903 letter from Baron Iwasaki — “a lack of an adequate sense of responsibility” among Japanese managers; a pending Factory Bill covering some 7,000 mills and 400,000–500,000 workers is described. “The Constitution and Its Difficulties” narrates the political history from the Diet’s opening in 1890 through Ito’s resignations, his brief 1900–01 party ministry, and his 1903 withdrawal to the Privy Council, concluding with Montesquieu’s axiom that “in the infancy of States it is the leaders who make the institutions.”

“Japan and Christianity” argues that the faith’s meager following there — “140,000 or 150,000” professing Christians among 48,000,000 people — reflects not missionary failure but the historical absence of any “dogmatic sense,” quoting the demand of Japanese Christians themselves that Christianity “will first have to become ‘Japanised’ before Japan can be Christianised.” “Progress and Individualism” contends that Japanese individualism, never checked by a Reformation-style doctrine of the soul’s direct responsibility to God, was instead alternately seized by despotic rulers and crushed in ordinary subjects. “The Issue of Constitutionalism” predicts that the constitutional rights Japan has adopted must eventually strip the Emperor of the sacrosanctity that alone has made the modern era possible, forcing a religious crisis Europe never had to face because its own authority was always transcendental. “The Christ-Personality” proposes that Japan might still be won not by Christian dogma but by the person of Christ, as Goethe, Dante, Cromwell, and Napoleon are said to have been; “Japan and Empire” concludes that Japan, having no religion of “universal” appeal to offer subject peoples, can aspire only to the moral and intellectual “hegemony” Greece once held over the Mediterranean, not to a lasting territorial empire — a chapter whose long closing footnote weighs Japan’s stake in Chinese territorial integrity against Russian, German, French, and British ambitions in Manchuria, Shantung, and the Yangtze valley.

The book’s final chapter, “The Final Question,” answers its own recurring question directly: Japan represents no “new beginning” of history, because every such beginning — Buddha’s, Homer’s, Mahomet’s, Christ’s — has sprung from a new religion, and Japan, having none to offer, is “too like the West to be to Europe a new idea” and “too like the East to be a new hope.” Watson allows the country one genuinely “original” type, the Samurai-descended soldier-leader who unites the discipline of Sparta with something of the art of Athens, but insists that “only in the originality of their relation to the Universal are men or nations truly original,” and that on this test Japan has nothing new to show; “the strength and the potency of the world remain with Europe.” The volume ends with a nine-page index and the printer’s line, “Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh,” with no bibliography, glossary, or other apparatus beyond that index.

Frederic Courtland Penfield’s Wanderings East of Suez is a globe-trotting travel narrative that carries the reader from the Suez Canal across Ceylon, India, and China before ending, in its final chapter, in Japan. Penfield identifies himself in the introductory note as the author of a previous book, Present-Day Egypt, and frames the whole enterprise as a commercial corrective: in an introduction dated from the Authors’ Club in New York in January 1907, he complains how little of what American readers see “East of Suez” was made in the United States, an argument he opens with in Chapter I, on the Suez Canal, and returns to at length only in the closing chapters on Germany’s China trade and Japan’s commercial prospects. Between these bookends, the bulk of the narrative — his passage through the Gulf of Manaar pearl fisheries, Ceylon’s hill country, and on through Bombay, Jeypore, Agra, Benares, and Calcutta to Hong Kong, Canton, and Macao — is conventional descriptive travel writing, more taken up with temples, festivals, and street life than with trade statistics.

The bulk of the book is devoted to this India-and-China itinerary. In Ceylon, Penfield lingers over the Gulf of Manaar pearl fishery and the improvised town of Marichchikkaddi that springs up around it, the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, and the tea estates above Kandy; in India he covers the pearl-buying maharajahs, the “vicarious” hospitality of the Maharajah of Jeypore, Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal at Agra, the burning ghats and Monkey Temple of Benares, and the official world of Calcutta under the Curzon viceroyalty. A chapter on “Island Links in Britain’s Chain of Empire” carries him through Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and separate chapters treat Canton (with its guide Ah Cum John and its examination halls and floating population) and Macao, which Penfield calls “the Monte Carlo of the Far East” for its licensed fan-tan houses and lotteries. A chapter titled “The Kaiser’s Play for Chinese Trade” steps back from travelogue altogether to analyze, in essayistic terms, how Kaiser Wilhelm II used German sympathy for Russia during the Russo-Japanese War to position Germany for postwar trade advantages in China, including the leasehold at Kiau-chau and the port of Tsing-tau, on the Yellow Sea.

Japan enters the book only in its closing chapter, “Japan’s Commercial Future,” roughly the last tenth of a text of some three hundred and forty-four numbered pages before the index begins. Unlike the preceding chapters, this one is not travel narrative but a compressed economic and political essay written in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War. Penfield surveys Japan’s national debt at the close of the war, which he puts at roughly $870,000,000, or $18.71 per capita among 47,000,000 subjects, though he reckons only about $600,000,000 of that sum properly chargeable to the war itself, and he compares the per-capita figure to that of France, Britain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Australia, and the United States. He argues that Japan’s scant natural resources — only sixteen percent of its soil arable, its coal, iron, and copper deposits modest — make silk, tea, and above all industrious, English-hungry human capital its real assets. He traces the rapid growth of Japan’s merchant marine and shipbuilding industry, including the 1906 launch of the battleship Satsuma, built entirely by Japanese labor, and the Mitsubishi yards at Nagasaki, and predicts that Japan will become the commercial “Yankee of the East,” supplying textiles and manufactures to China, Manchuria, and Korea while depending on American raw cotton to do it. The chapter includes a personal anecdote about a Yokohama merchant Penfield says he knows, who studies English, German, and French in his spare hours before and after the workday, offered as typical of the Japanese hunger for foreign learning; Penfield also mentions, approvingly, a meeting of the local Yale Alumni Association in Tokyo and the spread of baseball among Japanese schoolboys returned from study abroad.

Two photographs credited to Penfield himself — of the bronze Daibutsu at Kamakura and of a garden view of the American Embassy in Tokyo — along with an uncredited image of a Japanese cargo junk, appear among the book’s illustrations for this chapter, indicating that Penfield did visit Kamakura and Tokyo even though his prose here stays almost entirely at the level of trade figures and geopolitical argument rather than description of place. The chapter, and the book, close without any return to travel narrative: Penfield’s last lines argue that Japan can only ever fabricate American raw materials rather than compete with the United States outright, a final turn of the trade argument that has run through the book’s opening and closing chapters. The book itself ends immediately afterward with an alphabetical index beginning on page 345, covering the people, places, and topics of the whole volume from Agra and Ceylon through Germany’s China policy; Japan receives a single consolidated entry there, structured like the index entries for the book’s other countries, running from its national debt and resources to its shipbuilding and its being “no real ‘menace’ to American trade.”

Henry B. Schwartz, M.A., presents In Togo’s Country (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham; New York: Eaton and Mains, 1908) as a gathering of essays written over the course of a long residence in Japan rather than a single continuous narrative. His preface dates his time in the country from 1893 and states his qualification plainly: “For the most of these fourteen years my lot has been cast in places which no tourist’s eye hath seen, and in paths where no globe trotter’s foot hath passed,” and it is this familiarity with out-of-the-way Japan, “and especially the interest which attaches to Satsuma,” that he offers as his reason for adding to the shelf of books on the country. The chapters, he explains, were “thought out while traveling on foot or in jinrikisha” and written down in the evenings at country inns, then gathered for publication with little revision, so that occasional discrepancies of date remain. He thanks Mr. T. Komatsu for the cover design, Mr. K. Suzuki for the use of original photographs, and Prof. James Main Dixon for reading proof and seeing the volume through the press, and dates the preface from Kagoshima, May 6, 1907. The title comes from the opening chapter’s observation that Togo, Oyama, and Kuroki, the three men who had “taken the strongest hold on the popular thought of the Western world,” were all natives of Satsuma, making that province the natural place to study the conditions that produced them.

The long opening chapter, also called “In Togo’s Country,” is a discursive regional history and ethnography of Satsuma: the Shimadzu family’s traced descent from Yoritomo and the forty-eight moral poems composed by the lord Tadayoshi, the sweet potato brought from Loo Choo in 1698, the Korean potters settled at Naeshirogawa when Shimadzu Yoshihiro returned from the invasion of Korea in 1596, Hideyoshi’s campaign against the province and the Shimadzu submission at the temple of Taiheiji, the British bombardment of Kagoshima on August 15, 1863, following the murder of the Englishman Richardson, and the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, traced from Saigo Takamori’s private schools (shigakko) through the march on Kumamoto to the final stand at Shiroyama. The same chapter takes up Satsuma’s climate and its camphor and bamboo forests, its distinct dialect, the samurai student clubs (sha) and their annual observances, the tug-of-war and Ta-no-kami rice-god festivals, the centuries-long persecution of the Shin sect of Buddhism, and Francis Xavier’s landing at Kagoshima on August 15, 1549, with his convert Paul Anjiro. Four shorter chapters follow: “A Pilgrimage to Zenkoji” recounts a walking trip from Karuizawa around Mt. Asama to the hot springs of Kusatsu and the crater lake of Shirane-san, on to the Zenkoji temple at Nagano; “In a Japanese Inn” walks through the routines of lodging, bathing, and dining; “Writing With Bird Tracks” traces the history of Chinese characters and the kana syllabaries; and “A Visit to the Scene of an Earthquake” follows the author from Hirosaki into the towns wrecked by the Akita earthquake of August 31, 1895, including an encounter with the landowner I. Ikeda.

“Loo Choo — A Forgotten Kingdom” is the book’s other extended set piece, covering the thirty-six islands’ geography and products (sugar, sago starch, awamori, cloth, and the newly introduced Panama-style hats), the legendary Tenson dynasty and the islands’ long tributary relationship with China, the Satsuma invasion of 1609, the 1871 killing of shipwrecked Loo Chooan sailors on Formosa and Japan’s resulting annexation of the kingdom as Okinawa prefecture in 1879, the tattooing and burial customs of the islanders, and the history of Christian missionary work there, from Lieutenant Herbert J. Clifford’s 1843 appeal through Dr. J. B. Bettelheim’s mission at Naha in the 1840s and early 1850s to the Baptist, Episcopalian, and Methodist missions opened in 1892. “A Tramp Through Snow-clad Japan” describes a winter walk from Hirosaki to Akita, including a stop at Odate, where a local fish-hook manufacturer shows the author his correspondence about an award from an American exposition. “The First Consulate in Japan” visits Shimoda and the temple at Kakisaki where Townsend Harris raised the first American consular flag on September 4, 1856, and lived for over eighteen months with his secretary Heusken, and locates the graves of five American sailors from Perry’s squadron. “Nagasaki — The City by the Jeweled Shore” traces the port’s history from the first Portuguese ships of 1539 through the Dutch confinement at Deshima and the fumiye ceremony to the modern Kunchi and Bon Matsuri festivals, the coaling of Pacific liners by lines of women passing baskets up a scaffold, and the Mitsu Bishi dockyards.

The book closes with “After the War,” reprinted from the Methodist Review, in which Schwartz turns from travel writing to argument, crediting Japan’s conduct in the Russo-Japanese War — including the disciplined, silent reception he witnessed of Russian prisoners marched through Fukuoka and the care he saw given wounded Russians at the military hospital in Kokura — to Japanese national character rather than to borrowed Western technique, and citing his “three years in Kagoshima, the capital of the Satsuma Province,” as the vantage from which he makes that judgment. The chapter goes on to distinguish Russian expansion, traced through episodes at Khiva, Batoum, and the German seizure of Kiaochow, from what he calls the legitimate advance of American settlement across the continent, and argues that the “yellow peril” is best understood as the “correlate” of a prior “white peril” of European and American arrogance in Asia. The volume ends with an “Alphabetical Index of Contents” and a “Glossary of Japanese Terms” running from andon to zabuton, and it is illustrated throughout with photographs, opening with a frontispiece portrait of Admiral Heihachiro Togo and continuing through full-page and in-text views of Satsuma and Loo Choo life — among them the garden of the Prince of Satsuma, the graves of American sailors at Naha, and a market scene in Naha — drawn in part from the photographs of Mr. K. Suzuki acknowledged in the preface.

Summer Greetings from Japan is a privately printed collection of personal letters that Walter L. Sheldon, dedicated in the book to “his many warm friends in the St. Louis Ethical Society” and identified in a Tokyo newspaper account reprinted within it as “of the Ethical Society of America,” wrote home during a visit to Japan in the summer of 1906. The volume opens with a dedicatory letter to Sheldon’s wife, Anna H. Sheldon, from Anna C. Hartshorne, an American friend living in Tokyo who explains that she and her housemate, Miss Tsuda, had put Sheldon in touch with a circle of University of Tokyo professors — among them Dr. Yamakawa and Dr. Anesaki — so that in only a few weeks he came to see, in her words, “far more than is revealed to the ordinary tourist.” Hartshorne’s foreword speaks of Sheldon in the language of personal loss and calls the printed letters the only way now to give his friends the “interpretation of Japan” he had hoped to write, which suggests the book appeared after his death, though it never says so outright. The body of the book is arranged as sixteen numbered, dated Letters — First through Sixteenth — several of them written across a string of separate days within a single letter, plus an Appendix to the Sixth Letter reprinting a Japan Mail newspaper account of a lecture Sheldon gave in Tokyo.

The First Letter covers the Pacific crossing aboard the R. M. S. Empress of India, out of a Canadian port with calls at Victoria and Vancouver, through cold weather, shipboard whist and quoits, and Chinese stewards called “boy,” to a landing at Yokohama on a Monday morning in early June. From the Second through Tenth Letters, based at the Hotel Metropole in Tokyo (with a side trip to Kamakura recounted in the Eighth), Sheldon describes rikshas, wooden shoes, daytime walks along the Ginza, and an evening “weekly shopping night” on which he watches street vendors selling crickets and fireflies in tiny cages; also the Shogun tombs at Shiba Park, Ueno Park and its zoo, the Botanical Garden, the tombs of the Forty-seven Ronins, and a temple inscribed with the names of sixty thousand war dead. Sheldon already knew the M. P. and editor Mr. Yokoi and Dr. Mitsukuri before his arrival, and further introductions from Hartshorne and Miss Tsuda bring him a garden reception with University of Tokyo professors and a day at the Imperial University with Prof. Mitsukuri, including the Seismological Building’s record of the San Francisco earthquake; Yokoi arranges an interview with the Minister of Education, and Sheldon separately meets Count Okuma, the Mayor of Tokyo, and eventually the Prime Minister, Marquis Saionji, while a Tokyo police official arranges a midnight riksha tour of the city’s police stations and Mr. Tomeoka guides him through the Sugamo prison. In this stretch he also gives three public talks: “Our Hopes for the Human Race,” reported in the Japan Mail and reproduced in the Appendix to the Sixth Letter; a lecture at a university whose name he jokes he cannot pronounce (“it begins with a ‘K’ and ends with a ‘u,’ with six syllables between, and suggests ‘Diogenes’”); and “The Meaning of Self-culture,” delivered to the students of the Women’s University under Dr. Naruse.

The Eighth Letter takes him briefly to Kamakura, where Hartshorne kept a summer cottage, to see the great bronze Daibutsu and the island of Enoshima. The Eleventh through Fourteenth Letters cover Kyoto, where he tours the palaces of the Mikados and the Shoguns, watches artisans at cloisonné, embroidery, bronze, and pottery-wheel work, takes a rapids trip down a mountain river with Dr. Nitobe’s adopted son, Yoshio, joins a group of hotel guests for an evening Geisha dance at a tea-house, attends a reconstructed old imperial “court dinner” to which the Nitobes invite him, and questions the Zen high priest Takada and a priest of Dr. Nanjio’s sect about transmigration, Amita Buddha, and Nirvana, which he is told the Japanese call Nehan. The Fifteenth Letter carries him north to Sendai, where the missionary Dr. DeForest takes him to a famine-stricken village to see relief work and question its mayor, and on to Nikko.

The Sixteenth Letter, written at Nikko, opens with days of “Deluge”-like rain among the temple groves before the village breakwater gives way, tearing away roads and bridges, destroying houses, and killing at least one villager, all watched by Sheldon before he returns to Tokyo, spends a last day with Hartshorne at Kamakura, and sails for home. Throughout, the book is illustrated with the author’s own snapshot photographs, captioned in the informal style of enclosures mailed home with the letters — among them a frontispiece portrait taken in St. Louis before his departure, a street photograph labeled “First Snap-shot in Japan — Masts of Vessels in Rear...Note the Wooden Shoes” that he mentions sending with the Second Letter, and a photograph of “Kyoto Children Playing ‘Store’” enclosed with the Fourteenth Letter.

The Far East Revisited is a working China-based journalist’s report on a return tour of the region he covered professionally. A. Gorton Angier, editor of the London and China Telegraph and the London and China Express, republishes in book form, with photographic plates added, a series of letters he wrote while traveling through Malaya, China, Korea, and Japan the previous year. Sir Robert Hart, Inspector-General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, supplies a preface vouching for Angier’s judgment and situating the book within what Hart calls a “record-making epoch” in the Far East, recommending it to the growing class of readers interested in the region’s affairs. Angier’s own vantage is that of a newspaperman with decades of prior acquaintance with the places he revisits — he recalls first seeing Kwala Lumpur in 1885 and Japan in 1878 — and the book divides into four unequal parts: six chapters on Malaya, eight on China, two on Korea, and four on Japan, moving in that order from Singapore to Tokyo and Hokkaido.

Part I, on Malaya, opens in Singapore, where Angier weighs the Tanjong Pagar dock works and a fixed 2s. 4d. exchange rate against foreign critics’ claims that the port is “a dying port,” then moves to Penang, the tin-mining and rubber-planting prosperity of the Federated Malay States (dredger mining at Tanjong Rambutan, the Sultan of Perak’s circular urging Malays into rubber-estate labor), and North Borneo, reached by rail up the Penotal Gorge to the tobacco and rubber estates at Sapong, where runaway coolies are recaptured by the Muruts for a bounty. A chapter of “Glimpses of Netherlands India” follows a breakdown-plagued launch cruise to the oil derricks of Tarakan and Balik Papan; another covers Siam under its energetic king, the Dusit Park fair, and pending treaty revision; and the part closes in Manila under nearly a decade of American rule, where Angier argues for an Indian-style permanent civil service and states plainly that the Filipino is “utterly unsuited, either by training or tradition, to have jurisdiction over the white man.”

Part II, the book’s longest section, carries the China material through eight chapters — Hong Kong and Canton, Shanghai and the Yangtsze, Tsingtau and Tientsin, Peking politics, opium and revolutionary sentiment, railway construction, foreign mining concessions, and Southern Manchuria down to Port Arthur. Angier defends the Imperial Maritime Customs’ “clean-handed” administration under Hart against Chinese ambitions to run it themselves, walks through Peking politics under the aging Empress Dowager and the ailing Emperor, and, in the Tientsin chapter, profiles the ex-Viceroy Yuan Shih-kai, and dismisses any comparison of China’s reform prospects to Japan’s Meiji transformation as “entirely false.” At Mukden he credits a Japanese firm with macadamizing the roads and sinking wells for drinking water, but elsewhere in Manchuria records, without softening, that the lower orders of Japanese settlers have earned local hatred through unchecked land-grabbing and some eight thousand prostitutes plying their trade in the country. Part III’s two chapters on Korea trace the peninsula’s passage through Chinese, then Russo-Japanese, and now outright Japanese control under the Residency-General of Prince Ito — the disbandment of the Korean army, the topknot and early-marriage decrees, and a Japanese-run reorganization of taxation and currency — with Angier, quoting a Bishop Turner, judging Japan’s course “absolutely necessary for them as a matter of self-preservation.”

Japan occupies only the last four of the book’s twenty chapters, running from page 313 to the close, but Angier gives it proportionally close attention. Chapter XVII surveys Japanese state finance after the war with Russia — railway nationalization, the contested value of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance as heard “east of Suez,” the settlement of Japanese emigration to Canada and California, and a borrowed complaint from the Bishop of South Tokyo that the Japanese businessman “fails miserably in the matter of keeping their word in contracts.” Chapter XVIII, “Through Japan,” is an itinerary: the Mitsubishi dockyard at Nagasaki, the Imperial Steel Works at Wakamatsu, Kobe’s harbor scheme, Osaka’s nearly twelve hundred factories and cotton mills as the self-styled “Manchester of Japan,” Yokohama’s shipping trade, and Tokyo, where Angier walks the remade Ginza and the new Hibiya Park and, drawing on visits stretching back to 1878, concludes that Japan’s “mental, moral, and social” growth still lags its industrial and military achievement, and that patriotism there functions as “a cult when it is not a religion.” Chapter XIX turns north to Hokkaido — still called Yezo in places — covering coal output from the Hokkaido Tanku company’s mines, agricultural and fishery wealth, the ports of Hakodate and Otaru, and the island’s capital, Sapporo, described down to its Agricultural College and its Hoheikan guesthouse, where Angier notes that Ainu residents are barely visible, “outwardly Japanned”; the chapter closes at the port of Muroran and its projected iron and steel works.

The book closes with a single chapter on the Kamaishi iron mine and steel works on Japan’s northeast coast, an enterprise built and run, Angier stresses, without foreign engineering help, under the self-taught manager K. Yokoyama; it ends mid-description of the plant’s foundry work — rice-boiler castings, kettle molds — under the words “THE END,” followed by an index. The volume carries a printed List of Illustrations of some three dozen photographic plates, weighted toward Malaya and China: the Esplanade at Singapore, the harbor at Hong Kong, the Bund at Shanghai, a portrait of Sir Robert Hart, Baron Oshima as governor-general of Port Arthur. Only two plates depict Japan, both taken at Sapporo — the Hoheikan and the lake in Recreation Park — and the frontispiece itself, captioned “Jungle Scene near Balik Papan,” is a photograph from Malaya.

The Social Evil in Japan and Allied Subjects: With Statistics, Social Evil Test Cases, and Progress of the Antibrothel Movement, issued in a third, revised edition in 1908, is a documentary and statistical exposé of Japan’s licensed-prostitution system by U. G. Murphy, a Methodist missionary and reformer working out of Nagoya, published for the author by the Methodist Publishing House. Murphy’s preface, dated Nagoya, September 1906, presents the book as a compilation of investigated fact meant to replace two smaller pamphlets he had issued seven years earlier, and he expresses the hope that a Japanese writer will eventually take up the subject so that, as he puts it, “it will not be necessary for a ‘foreigner’ to take a prominent part in this work much longer.” The book falls into two large movements: roughly its first third lays out, in an impersonal register supported by tables of statistics, the origin and mechanics of the licensing system and its social consequences, while most of the remainder — above all a long section titled “The Free Cessation Movement” — shifts into sustained first-person narrative as Murphy recounts his own part, beginning in 1899, in bringing test lawsuits on behalf of individual licensed women seeking to leave the trade. An appendix of translated court judgments, a letter from an Osaka prostitute, statistical tables, and the text of the 1900 Home Department prostitute regulations closes the volume; its only confirmed illustration is a frontispiece photograph captioned “Rear Wall of Segregated Hospital for Prostitutes — Nagoya.”

Murphy traces the present license system to an 1872 order emancipating women held under contract for prostitution, prompted by a British warship’s intervention against a slave ship in Yokohama harbor; brothels were thereafter licensed as kashizashiki (“parlor renting”), with registered prostitutes termed shogi and unlicensed ones imbaifu or mitsubaifu. He describes in detail how prefectural governors, the Home Department, and brothel guilds administered registration, taxation, and weekly medical inspection, and argues at length that the so-called contracts by which parents received “loan” money for a daughter’s service functioned as disguised sale: he cites cases such as a father near Nagoya who sold his daughter for 80 yen and saw her “debt” rise to 130, and a girl sold for 400 yen who, after twelve years of service, still owed 500. He documents the trade in procurers licensed to supply brothels, geisha houses, and hotels alike, and devotes a chapter to the export of women abroad, quoting a Seattle letter from one trafficker’s brother instructing him to “send poor girls from the country” and describing a Nagoya man’s arrest for using recycled passports to send scores of women to America. Further chapters address the license system’s asserted but, in Murphy’s statistical analysis, unproven relation to reduced illicit prostitution and to venereal disease among conscripts and prostitutes, the geisha and hotel-maid trades as sources of illicit prostitution, and concubinage and unregistered “secret wives” as adjacent institutions the new Civil Code left largely untouched.

The book’s longest section narrates the “Free Cessation” (jiyu haigyo) campaign Murphy says grew out of his puzzlement at seeing runaway prostitutes hunted down and returned to keepers by police. Finding that prefectural brothel regulations could not be challenged directly in court, he built a legal strategy on sections 3 and 90 of the new Civil Code — the first fixing adult age at twenty, the second voiding contracts “contrary to the public welfare and good customs” — and in 1899 brought the first test suit in the Nagoya Local Court, securing a temporary injunction that police first honored, then defied by arresting the girl herself as she tried to leave under its protection; the court granted the plaintiff’s plea in full at trial, but the case was ultimately lost on appeal after the keeper’s side produced a statement, extracted from the girl, that she wished the case dropped. Murphy narrates a succession of further cases in similar terms: a Nara girl he personally chased down on bicycle after she was seized by a gang of hired men; the Oita Geisha Case, in which a girl sold into geisha training in Kyushu was compelled to receive guests and could not be freed even after her father appealed to police; the Ejiri case, brought by the girl later identified as Matsumoto Gen, whose appeal (sogan) to the Home Department precipitated its September 1900 ruling that a keeper’s signature was not required on a prostitute’s report of cessation; the case of Fujiwara Sato against the keeper Kondo Tei, won in the Nagoya Local Court after the girl ran away directly to Murphy’s house; and the Ohashi Hisa case, in which the plaintiff was illegally detained in a gambler’s house for twenty-two days before being freed under threat of criminal charges. He also recounts the Kambe case, in which police re-arrested a freed girl as a “peace measure,” and the Okazaki case, in which a consumptive girl secured freedom only by outlasting her permit’s three-month expiration; alongside these, Murphy describes the Salvation Army’s entry into rescue work and street preaching in the licensed quarters, mob attacks on rescue workers and a partially destroyed Tokyo newspaper office, and his own arrest and conviction, with four pastors, for violating the Press Law over a mimeographed account of the first case.

The campaign culminated in the Home Department’s October 1900 regulations, which formalized the procedure for filing a report of cessation without a keeper’s consent after officials found their own September notification of the right alone was “making matters worse,” and in a Supreme Court ruling that split the brothel contract in two, voiding the clause binding a woman to prostitution while leaving her financial debt enforceable — a division Murphy calls inadequate and continues to contest in a later chapter, “Debts Tested Again,” recounting a 1905 Osaka geisha-debt case that reached the Supreme Court before being narrowed to uselessness as precedent. Murphy reports that licensed women fell from roughly 52,400 in 1899 to about 38,600 by 1902 before beginning, by his 1907 writing, to climb again, and he closes with a “Present Status” survey of Salvation Army and W.C.T.U. rescue homes and a “Closing Remarks” chapter arguing plainly, in his own voice, that “the only way to settle the brothel question is to have no brothel, either licensed or secret.” The volume ends with an appendix reproducing English translations of the Supreme Court and Nagoya Local Court judgments in several of the cases described, a letter from an anonymous Osaka prostitute thanking a Tokyo newspaper for its advocacy, prefecture-by-prefecture statistical tables of prostitutes, geisha, arrests, and venereal-disease cases compiled from Murphy’s own survey of prefectural offices, and the text of the Home Department’s regulations for the control of prostitutes.

Japanese Life in Town and Country is a topical rather than a narrative account, organized by subject instead of by journey, and published as part of a series called Our Asiatic Neighbours — itself the counterpart, its front matter shows, to a shelf of companion volumes under the heading Our European Neighbours, on French, German, Russian, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, Belgian, and Swedish life. George William Knox dedicates the book to his wife “with memories of fifteen happy years in Dai Nippon” and later, in passing, calls himself a missionary “for fifteen years,” so the book speaks throughout with the authority of a long Western resident writing for Western readers rather than that of a passing traveler. Its opening chapter, “Introductory — The Point of View,” sorts through the standard ways foreigners judge Japan — the tourist’s uncritical delight, the disillusioned old resident’s contempt, the convert’s uncritical praise — and proposes instead to study the country “as a part of our common humanity,” arguing against Occidental assumptions of Asian inscrutability with lines such as “we have assumed our own superiority. It has seemed a fact… that the East lacks the power of organisation… Japan upsets our deduction.” That argumentative “we,” addressed to a general Western audience, runs through the book’s expository chapters, but it does not stay purely rhetorical: in later chapters, first-person “I” and “me” recur as early as the chapter on the Meiji-era missionaries and become sustained in the account of a stay among the samurai of Tosa, where the same “we” becomes the plainer “we” of personal recollection, and the author drops into the first person singular for specific remembered conversations, journeys, and interviews.

The first third of the book supplies historical background rather than a travelogue. “The Tradition” summarizes the mythological record set down in 712 in the Records of Ancient Matters — the Sun-goddess, the reign of Jimmu Tenno traditionally dated to 660 B.C., the subjugation of the Ainu — leaning on Basil Hall Chamberlain’s reconstruction of a crude, unheroic primitive society. “Asiatic Civilisation” traces the importation of Buddhism from Korea in A.D. 552 and the wholesale adoption of Chinese government, law, and Nara-period temple architecture, and singles out the eleventh-century court novel of an unnamed court lady as evidence of a refined but “effeminate” aristocratic culture ripe for collapse. “The Feudal Wars” carries the story through four centuries of civil strife, the rise of the samurai class, the sixteenth-century “episode” of Portuguese and Spanish contact — Xavier’s mission of 1549, the eventual extermination of Japanese Christianity, and its underground survival, which resurfaced when “four thousand Roman Catholics hailed” the return of missionaries centuries later — and the consolidation of peace under Tokugawa Ieyasu, whose forced residence of the feudal barons in Yedo the author compares to Napoleon’s unrealized ambitions for Paris. “The Awakening” then covers Perry’s 1853 arrival, Townsend Harris’s 1858 treaty, the bombardments of Satsuma and Choshu, the Sat-Cho-To alliance that overthrew the shogunate, the abolition of feudalism by 1871, and the short-term foreign advisers and missionaries — Verbeck, Hepburn, S. R. Brown among them — who assisted a modernization that Knox insists was chiefly the Japanese people’s own achievement.

Religion and popular ethics occupy the next four chapters, and here the book leans heavily on set-piece scenes and on Knox’s own translations. “Buddhism: The Religion of the Common People” surveys the Northern-School sects dominant in Japan, including an unnamed sect centered on Amida, “Buddha of boundless light,” frames its account at one point with an extended, near-verbatim echo of Ecclesiastes, and stages an extended visit to a temple at Nikko that closes with a dialogue in which a priest baits the narrator over the divinity of Christ before declaring all reasoning “self-destructive.” A companion section traces Shinto’s separate, doctrine-less worship of “the marvellous.” “Confucianism: The Religion of Educated Men” is built substantially around Knox’s translation of a seventeenth-century treatise by Kyuso Muro expounding Neo-Confucian metaphysics of an eternal, unchanging “Way” set against Buddhist impermanence, echoing Ecclesiastes a second time with its own quotation — “a time to be born and a time to die… a time of war and a time of peace.” “Philosophy for the People” reproduces an 1838 popular sermon on the Analects text “Is it not a pleasure to practise what we learn?”, complete with the parable of the foolish servant Chokichi, sent to market and coming home having spent his mistress’s money on cakes and beer. “The Way of the Samurai” gathers further Kyuso Muro translations illustrating righteousness and duty through named episodes — the retainer Andozaimon Shoshu’s suicide rather than desert his lord, the self-inflicted death of Nagaoka Tadaoki’s wife as her defenders set fire to the mansion around her, the fifteen-year-old Kujuro’s composed hara-kiri, offered as an instance of self-sacrifice carried to excess — and closes by linking this same self-sacrificing spirit, transposed from clan to nation, to the modern cult of the Emperor amid the war then being fought against Russia.

Four further chapters move from ideals to lived social detail. “The Life of the Samurai in Old Japan” retells the 1716 autobiography of the statesman-scholar Arai Hakuseki — his father’s austere daily routine, his own harsh classical education, a period as a masterless ronin, his rise to lecture the Shogun more than 1,299 times over nineteen years, his attempted reforms, and his 1715 interviews with the imprisoned Italian Jesuit Father Sidotti, whom Arai judged too admirable to execute. “The Life of the Samurai, in New Japan” shifts into first-person narrative, recounting a stay among the samurai of the Tosa clan at Kochi: the household’s tea ceremony, a polo match, a No drama followed by a comic farce, a private demonstration of swordsmanship, the seclusion and arranged marriages of samurai wives, and contemporary politics, including Count Itagaki’s Liberal party, the imprisonment of Mr. Kataoka, who declared that if he had to choose between the Church and Parliament he would take the Church, and the assassination of Viscount Mori and the attempt on Count Okuma’s life. “The Common People: Farmers, Artisans and Artists” describes near-feudal tenant farming (with one farmer’s itemized annual income of eighteen dollars), pilgrimage savings clubs, jinrikisha pullers recruited from the countryside, an artisan’s leisurely work habits, and the manufacture of “antique” bronzes to order. “Merchants, Women, and Servants” covers the low social standing of trade, rank-based pricing and tipping documented through an extended account of a night at a country inn and at a hot-spring resort, sumo wrestling, moderate drinking and tobacco use but little gambling or opium, and — described by Knox as “the great blot on the social structure of Japan” — the legal subordination of wives to husbands, arranged marriage through a go-between, and licensed prostitution in the Yoshiwara, alongside servant guilds, Tosa’s communal whale hunts, and an incorruptible police force.

The book closes with two chapters on language and place. “Language, Literature, and Education” explains how Japanese substitutes graded honorific vocabulary for pronouns, describes the Chinese ideograph’s grip on scholarship, judges native histories to have been written for moral instruction rather than accuracy — illustrated by the plate showing “The Prince of Mito Corrects a Statement in the History” — surveys the thirty-one-syllable and seventeen-syllable verse forms, and traces the new state school system up through the universities at Tokyo and Kyoto, Fukuzawa’s school, and the Doshisha founded by Niijima, noting that girls’ schooling lagged well behind boys’. “Tokyo” contrasts Kyoto, “beautiful but finished,” with a Tokyo the author calls “confused and raw,” traces the city’s founding as Ieyasu’s castle town in 1590, and ends with Knox’s own reflections, written as news arrived “from Manchuria,” on whether Japan can absorb Western science and ethics while keeping a civilization of its own. The volume is illustrated throughout with nineteen captioned photographic plates, from the frontispiece, “The Entrance to the Imperial Gardens, Tokyo,” through scenes of temples, farmers, wrestlers, and palaces to “The Palace in Kyoto,” and closes with a folding map of Japan.

The Newest Way Round the World is Celeste J. Miller’s account of a circumnavigation she began at Chicago on June 16, 1902, and completed, by her own reckoning, after ten months of travel. Calkins and Company published the book in New York in April 1908, and the publishers’ foreword presents it as the record of “one of the most unusual journeys ever undertaken by any one,” crediting Miller as the first woman to travel the Trans-Siberian Railway alone; it also states plainly that the book is not “a dry analytical treatise on the countries visited, their ethnology, economics and politics,” but “an entertaining and instructive narrative of what this distinguished traveler saw and experienced.” The text delivers exactly that: twenty-nine chapters of first-person anecdote and description strung along one continuous itinerary, illustrated throughout with photographs the author gathered en route — the printed Illustrations list alone runs to several pages, cataloguing dozens of captioned plates from every leg of the journey. The route, as the foreword lays it out, ran from Chicago through New York, Bremen, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow, across Siberia to Vladivostok, on to Korea, China, Siam, Singapore, Java, French Indochina, back along the Chinese coast, then Japan, Honolulu, San Francisco and home again to Chicago — the “newest way round the world” of the title, since through service on the new Trans-Siberian line had only recently made such a route possible.

The opening chapters carry Miller through Bremen and Berlin to Moscow, where she tours the Kremlin, the Cathedral of the Assumption, the jeweled ikons and the “Thieves’ Market” of unemployed poor, before boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway at Moscow’s station. Much of this stretch is carried by an English travel companion she calls simply “the English lady” (married to a Russian customs official, and traveling with two pampered dogs), whose commentary on Russian marriage and divorce law, on Count Tolstoi, and on Siberian manners fills long stretches of the narrative; the train itself carries Miller through Irkutsk, across Lake Baikal by ice-breaker, and down the Amoor by riverboat to Vladivostok, which she finds cholera-ridden, damp and full of drunken soldiers. Korea, “the Hermit Country,” follows: Gensen, where she describes the white gauze dress of Korean gentlemen, then Fusan and Chemulpo, then Seoul, where she describes the Emperor’s palace, the mourner’s costume, Catholic and Methodist missions, and the recent assassination of the Empress. Crossing to China she visits Chefoo (and its pony races, the occasion for a long comic sketch of an English aunt matchmaking her niece), Shanghai’s Bund and old Chinatown with its opium dens, a Yangtze River excursion to Nankin, Kiukiang and Hankow with its tea-brick factories, and finally Hongkong, where a chapter “On the China Sea” takes up the subject of Chinese foot-binding at length before the ship turns south for Siam.

From there the book moves through the tropics in quick succession. Bangkok, “a modernized city” in her telling, offers the King’s Thot Krathin procession to the wats and the sacred white elephant; Singapore’s founding by Sir Stamford Raffles and its Malay runners and rikshas get a shorter chapter; and Java, “the land of pajamas and sarongs,” occupies four chapters running from Batavia and the Botanical Gardens at Buitenzorg to the volcanic crater of Papandajan near Garoet and, at greatest length, the “great Hindu temple” of Boro-Boedor — she quotes a local guidebook calling it “an epic in stone, immortal in its decadence” — and the neighboring ruins of Brambanan. French Indochina follows: Saigon, which she calls “a little Paris” for its boulevards and cafés despite its heat and dirty hotels; Haiphong; and Hanoi, “the Paris of the Orient,” where she tours a colonial exposition with pavilions for China, Japan, Siam and Annam. The itinerary then doubles back along the China coast through Swatow, Amoy and Foochow, whose harbor she leaves, in one of the book’s more harrowing passages, by scrambling across five junks spaced widely apart and crossed on improvised planks, before she rejoins a large ocean liner, the Empress of China, at Shanghai for the crossing to Japan.

Japan occupies the book’s next five chapters (XXI through XXV, pages 247 to 313 — closer to a fifth of the volume by page count) and gets the fullest, most admiring treatment in the book. Miller lands at Nagasaki, whose camphor-covered hills and porcelain bazaars she praises, then moves through Kobe and Hiogo (where she watches a Buddhist merchant’s funeral procession) to Osaka, “the Chicago of Japan,” with its sixteenth-century castle, Imperial Mint and the Satsuma-ware decorator Mioksen. Her guide for this trip, Fujisawa, threads through the following chapters explaining bowing etiquette, the “go-between” system of arranged marriage, and the legend of the golden dragons at Futami’s tied “Wife and Husband” rocks; a full chapter, “Japanese Customs and Art,” is given over to Japanese babies, marriage and divorce customs, and the country’s “topsy-turvy way of doing things.” In Kioto she visits the old Imperial palace and Nijo castle, sits through a twelve-course geisha dinner and describes the training and appearance of geisha in some detail, and is disappointed by the plainness of the actor Danjuro’s theater. “The Interior of Japan” carries her to Nara’s deer park and its Great Buddha, and on to Yamada for the old Chinese New Year, still observed at the Ise shrines though abolished elsewhere in Japan decades earlier; “Some Sacred Spots of Japan” describes the Naiku and Geku shrines at Ise — rebuilt every twenty years in strict simplicity — the killing of Viscount Mori for lifting Geku’s forbidden curtain, Nagoya’s potteries and castle, and a Red Cross Society reception at Shidzuoka attended by Princess Komatsu, with snow-capped Fujiyama seen from the train. “Farewell to Japan” closes the sequence at the hot-spring resort of Atami (reached by a curious man-powered narrow-gauge “Jinsha Railroad”), Miyanoshita, and finally Tokio and Yokohama, where she describes the Imperial Museum, the mortuary temples of Shiba and Uyeno, the Asakusa Kwannon temple, and the Emperor Mutsu-Hito and Empress Haru-Ko. Miller’s own verdict, given to a ship’s captain later in the book, is that Japan is her favorite of all the Oriental nations she visited; her praise for Japanese art, industry, courtesy and landscape gardening runs throughout these chapters, alongside blunter passages — on the homeliness of Japanese men in Western dress, the subordinate legal status of Japanese wives, and a secondhand anecdote about the “national odor” of Japanese travelers abroad — reported without apparent embarrassment.

The book’s final movement carries Miller out of Japan and back to America. From Yokohama she crosses the Pacific to Honolulu, where “Hawaii and Honolulu” recounts an earlier visit’s occasion, the death and elaborate state funeral of Princess Kaiulani, along with an excursion to the volcano of Kilauea; “California — and the Home of the Mormons” takes up San Francisco’s hotels and Salt Lake City’s Mormon landmarks, and “The Land of Fruit and Flowers” turns into an extended flashback to an earlier California trip of Miller’s own — Sacramento, San Jose, Watsonville, Santa Cruz — built around a long comic sketch of a snoring fellow-traveler, John Alexander Day. The volume’s final chapter, “The Circle Complete,” continues that same backward-looking California survey (Monterey, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and a passing mention of the Big Trees, though Miller notes she never saw the Yosemite Valley itself) before closing, in its last pages, with her return east by the Overland train to Chicago and to her home in Hyde Park, closing the circuit she had opened ten months earlier — a homecoming she measures, characteristically, against how much railroad travel, and the cities at either end of it, had changed since her first trip west twenty-seven years before.

Every-day Japan is a resident’s survey of Japanese life at the end of the Meiji era, arranged by subject rather than as a journey. Arthur Lloyd’s title page describes him as lecturer in the Imperial University, Higher Naval College and Higher Commercial School, Tokyo, and formerly fellow of Peterhouse; the body of the book adds that he is a clergyman, who served two years as priest-in-charge of a mission in Asakusa. His preface promises “a simple, straightforward account of Japan as I have seen it in the course of a busy life,” written at intervals during two or three years. “I have not seen the country with holiday-making eyes,” he writes, and for that very reason claims “a real knowledge of the people amongst whom I have lived,” with whom, “whilst remaining a loyal Briton,” he has almost completely identified himself. Count Hayashi’s introduction sets the book against the hundreds of works published since Japan’s two great wars, most of them from “the pens of tourists whose observation of the country has been limited by the shortness of their sojourn.” Sixty-four short chapters follow, then three appendixes and an index. Subject-by-subject exposition carries the book, but Lloyd’s own first person enters it constantly: of the sixty-four chapters exactly one, “The Japanese Stage,” contains no I, me or my, and even that one speaks throughout as we, while the excursion chapters slip into a guide’s second person.

The opening chapter argues down the word “little”: Japan proper is larger than the British Isles, and laid across Europe would cover Germany minus Bavaria and the Thuringian States. Lloyd runs through the two ocean currents that make Tokyo mild and Niigata deep in snow, the fisheries that occupy nine hundred thousand families, and the difference in taste that sends Europeans up to Hakone’s lake and Karuizawa while Japanese crowd the hot water below. Three chapters on the throne follow: the Emperor’s working day and his clemency to Keiki, Enomoto and Saigo; the Palace and its New Year reception, where the reader, “as a foreign employé of the Government,” is made to advance a few steps and make three low bows; and “Empress and Princes,” where the Empress Haruko is presented almost wholly through her own verses while the Imperial princes take the longer half. Tokyo comes next, ward by ward — “in describing Tokyo, I am practically describing the whole of Japan” — with a companion chapter on the streets, trade guilds and fires of ancient Yedo. Military and naval Japan takes ten pages, including the hour-by-hour course at Yetajima’s naval college and Lloyd’s own twenty-three years teaching in those colleges. Two chapters pair painting with poetry and treat ceramics and the dying trade of the sword-smith; a tenth turns to commerce and endorses the “defective integrity” that “permeates the whole nation”: “there would not be so much smoke unless there were a good deal of fire to cause it.”

Public men and public institutions fill the next stretch. Prince Ito is drawn twice over, as the drafter of the Constitution and as a citizen of Tokyo who has stayed comparatively poor; in his chapter Lloyd also declines to judge Japan’s conduct in Korea — “It would be extremely ungracious in me, who have so long eaten the bread of Japan, to play the part of a hostile critic” — while adding that a state without a religion is “practically a State without a conscience.” A companion chapter on the Genro tells how Ito and Inouye were smuggled out of the country in 1864, and how Ito once escaped assassins in a tea-house dust-hole, hidden by the girl who became Princess Ito. The Patriots’ Shrine at Kudan, with its wrestling and funeral games, is followed by the peerage created in 1884 and by a chapter on the samurai, in which the forty-seven Ronin are admired and also judged to have thrown themselves away. The Imperial Diet meets in “by far the meanest of our public buildings in Tokyo,” has no party government and a franchise so narrow that the Lower House “cannot yet be said to represent the people of Japan”; “the Diet is but a safety-valve,” the driving power lying in the Government Bureaux. The courts, built on the Code Napoléon and then on German models, have no jury, no habeas corpus, and judges paid so little that they once went on strike. Markets, fairs and shops close the sequence.

The book then moves out to the provinces: Mito as an old samurai town, with the bureau that took from 1675 to 1907 to compile its history of Japan; the tea, silk, sake and shoyu districts, where women’s work is indispensable and in a silk country a man is reckoned happy in daughters; and the rice villages round Urawa, where the pawnbroker “is the real man that keeps Urawa going.” “Village Life,” at fourteen pages the second-longest chapter, sets out tenants, peasant proprietors and capitalists, quotes the land tax from an official report, prices a carpenter’s day at fifty-five sen and a woman’s field labor at ten to twenty, and describes New Year in a student’s own words, O Bon, the village matsuri, and belief in fox possession. Short chapters on trades and characters follow: the police and their three-man boxes, the doctor and his private hospital, the story-teller with two of his tales retold, and the street cries of Tokyo hour by hour. Translating a five-line poem twice and being corrected by its author teaches Lloyd that “sweeping generalisations are always unfair” and that “the old resident hesitates to speak about a people whom it is very difficult to know.” At Haneda the reader is walked past thousands of votive torii to a fox-shrine consulted about marriages and speculations. Kamakura, Karuizawa, Nikko and Hakone are handled as excursions, and “Tokyo’s Four Great Parks” — Shiba, Asakusa, Hibiya and Uyeno — is the longest chapter in the book, at eighteen pages.

A socialist sweetmeat-seller in Uyeno Park is quoted from a translated novel; socialism is growing, Lloyd writes, “a protest made by bushido against the unscrupulous sordidness of certain classes of money-makers,” and in the spread of state-socialist measures “lies their ominousness.” “No. 324” visits a prisoner in Urawa gaol, a samurai ruined by trade and made a text on commercial honesty. “A Palace of Vice” treats the Yoshiwara — the 1872 ordinance renaming the houses and the women and setting conditions on entry, the trousseau debt that enslaves them — opening “I have never seen the places and the people whom this chapter describes.” Money-lenders and landlords get a chapter: Lloyd has never read a Japanese novel “in which the villain has not been a money-lender,” and watches peasant proprietors give way to absentee landlords. Inkyo, retirement from household headship at sixty, is “a very beautiful custom” now decaying. Five chapters cover education: the Japanese school as “a model of the principles of secular education, fearlessly and logically applied,” an experiment that “has succeeded wonderfully well” but lacks “a recognised moral code”; the student transformed over Lloyd’s twenty-five years of teaching; and the Koreans shipped over after the war with China, whom he calls “stupid, lazy, thriftless.” A day in a Japanese house, given as a picture and then with “a few grains of salt,” women’s work from hairdressing to clog-thong making, a Japanese writer on the cost of living, proverbs about children, and Buddhist and Shinto funerals carry the domestic chapters.

“Japanese Characteristics” derives national character from wood, earthquake and scarce arable land — hence thrift and “an elegant simplicity in furnishing” — and ends on solidarity: so long as Japan remembers “the immense value of combination against outsiders” she will be “practically invincible and certainly inviolable.” Its sequel turns to an association for reforming the stage and closes on Chaucer: “Japan has not yet achieved her true greatness, but the promise is there.” Then “Old Wine in New Bottles”: having tasted other countries’ wines, Japan says “Our old wine is better”; but the old bottles needed replacing, so “organisations, machinery, institutions, systems, have been renewed or changed, but the essence has been left untouched as far as possible.” Lloyd thinks the attempt half successful, and predicts that Japan will find the change “even more complete and radical than she dreams it has been,” before closing on “a new and better wine stored in new and better bottles.” Three appendixes follow: an outline of Japanese history laying the proscription of Christianity to “Iyeyasu’s worldly policy” rather than to the missionaries; five causes of the Restoration; and a survey of religions that allows Shinto “no moral teaching at all, except the inculcation of patriotism.” A nine-page double-column index closes the volume, followed only by the printer’s imprint. The title page’s eight color plates reproduce paintings, its ninety-six half-tones up to four to a page; the plates fill forty-eight inserted leaves, a few credited to T. B. Blow, J. J. Berington and Miss G. Palmer.

The Arts of Japan is a compact survey by Edward Dillon, M.A., published by Methuen & Co. in its pocket-format “Little Books on Art” series (general editor Cyril Davenport), first issued in October 1906 and reissued, in the printing summarized here, as a Second Edition in June 1909, “with forty-one illustrations.” Dillon frames the book in a short preface as an attempt “to summarise the vast amount of information upon the Art of Japan that has lately become available, much of it from native sources,” naming his chief debts — Captain Brinkley’s book on Japan, Arthur Morrison’s studies in the Monthly Review, Ernest Satow’s guide-book, the plates and notices in Tajima’s Selected Relics of Japanese Art and in the Kokkwa, and the proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Japan and the Japan Society of London — while adding that he has “supplemented” this reading “with some recollections of a former residence in the country.” His vantage, then, is that of a compiler and connoisseur rather than a travel-narrator: someone who has lived in Japan (he recalls, for instance, visiting the shrine of Itsukushima “some years ago” in winter, and standing on a hillside near Nara and Kioto) but who builds the book chiefly from published scholarship and museum and auction catalogues, above all the 1902 Paris sale catalogue of the Hayashi collection, for permission to reproduce photographs from which he thanks a Mr. Bing in the preface. The book is organized in two parts: Part I, six chapters tracing painting and sculpture through a running sketch of Japanese political history from the prehistoric dolmen tombs to Hokusai, and Part II, six chapters on “the minor or applied arts” — woodblock printing, sword furniture and other worked metal, cast bronze and enamels, netsuke, lacquer, and ceramics — closing with a “Selected Bibliography of Works on Japanese Art” and an index.

Part I opens with the dolmen tombs of Yamato, Idzumo, and Kiushiu, read through Professor Gowland’s excavations and his 1897 paper, and the British Museum’s collection of grave-goods — iron swords, gilt-copper horse furniture, wheel-thrown funerary pottery, and bronze mirrors — before turning to the introduction of Buddhism and the Nara and Fujiwara periods: the temple of Horiuji, the Shoso-in treasury behind Todaiji at Nara with its Sassanian-influenced textiles and metalwork, Kobo Daishi and the Shingon sect at Koya San, and the Kose, Takuma, and Kasuga schools of painting. The Kamakura and Ashikaga chapter follows the wars of the Taira and Minamoto and the rise of Yoritomo’s shogunate through the sculptor Unkei, the painter Meicho (Cho Densu) at Tofukuji, and the Zen-inspired landscape painting that culminates, under the patronage of the cha-jin shogun Yoshimasa at the Silver Pavilion, in Sesshiu. A chapter on Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa shoguns covers the Portuguese and Jesuit episode, Hideyoshi’s palace-building at Ozaka and Momoyama, the carved ramma and Hidari Jingoro’s work at Nikko, and the Kano school from Masanobu and Motonobu through the brothers Tanyu, Naonobu, and Yasunobu. The fifth chapter follows “the Ukiyo or Popular School” from Genroku-period decorative painting (Koyetsu, Sotatsu, Korin, and Korin’s later reviver Hoitsu) through Itcho, Moronobu, and the seventeenth-century Matahei and his later Otsu namesake, tying the school’s rise to the growing social weight of the theatre and the Yoshiwara; the sixth traces the naturalistic Shijo school founded by Maruyama Okio, the animal painter Mori Sosen, Ganku’s tiger painting, and finally Hokusai — his training under Katsugawa Shuncho, his exposure to Dutch prints at Nagasaki, the Mangwa and the “Thirty-Six Views of Fuji” — closing Part I with Hiroshige and the late Bohemian Kawanabe Kiosai.

Part II turns to process and craft. The seventh chapter, on wood-block color printing and illustrated books, describes the mounting of the kakemono and makimono, the materials of the Japanese painter, and the mechanics of block-cutting and multi-block printing, before tracing the print designers from Torii Kiyonobu and Suzuki Harunobu through Katsugawa Shunsho, Toshiusai Sharaku, Kitagawa Utamaro — discussed at length, with his break from his Kano-trained father and his eventual imprisonment for a lampoon on the shogun — and the prolific Utagawa Toyokuni and his followers Kunisada and Kuniyoshi. Two chapters on metal work cover, first, the forging and chasing of iron and the furniture of the sword — the tsuba, fuchi-kashira, kodzuka, and menuki — through the Umetada, Kinai, Goto, and Miochin families and the alloys shakudo and shibu-ichi, and then the casting of bronze and iron, from the great Nara Daibutsu and the temple bells of Nara and Kioto to the okimono of Seimin and his pupils and the nineteenth-century enameling industry at Nagoya and the later work of the two families of Namikawa. A chapter on the netsuke covers the sagemono worn from the obi, its materials — wood, ivory, “fossil ivory,” even insect-bearing amber — the manju form, and carvers such as Shuzan, the Miwa family, and specialists like Tomotade, known for oxen, and Masanao, known for frogs. The lacquer chapter runs from the urushi tree and the stages of grounding, coating, and gold application through Koyetsu, Korin, Ritsuo’s pottery-plaque inlays, the Koma and Kajikawa lacquering families, and Shibata Zeshin, who died in 1891. The closing chapter on ceramic art moves from the dolmen pottery and the Cha-no-yu–driven taste for rough Korean and Raku ware, through Toshiro’s stoneware at Seto, the Korean potters brought back after Hideyoshi’s invasion, Kakiyemon and Imari porcelain, the Kioto kilns of Ninsei, Kenzan, and the Zengoro family, and the Kutani kilns of Kaga, to Owari porcelain.

Dillon states his critical position openly and returns to it often. He opens by insisting on “the gulf that divides our western mind from that of the Japanese,” and warns that “we must not take the popular verdict of the West as to what is good and what is bad in this art as in any way a final one.” He argues that European collectors, by discarding whatever looked “obviously of Chinese origin,” have left an entire department of Japanese art “almost unrepresented in our western collections,” and he is blunt about British institutions, calling the general impression left by the Japanese art at South Kensington “deplorable” next to the “admirably arranged” Persian and Arab galleries there, and faulting the British Museum’s own Japanese material as poorly accessible to the public. Repeatedly he tries to explain Japanese connoisseurship on its own terms rather than judge by Western taste — glossing the native mastery of the brush and the trained hand’s “subliminal consciousness” as the real measure of a master — yet he does not always defer to it: of the Goto family of metal-chasers, so revered in Japan, he writes plainly, “I confess that I await conversion.” He treats the late, commercial color-prints and mass-produced netsuke and enamel as a real falling-off in “the delicacy of the colour,” while still defending Hokusai’s “breath of genius” against Dillon’s own strictures on the “ill-drawn animals” and “the poverty of the brush-work,” at one point comparing him to Dickens. He also reports, without fully endorsing it, a native critical judgment — shared, he says, by the old court party at Kioto and by reform-minded supporters of the shogunate alike — that the popular Ukiyo art tied to the theatre and the Yoshiwara carried “a certain taint” and was “the outcome of a decadent tendency opposed to the true spirit of the bushido,” a verdict he notes tends to surprise the very European “lovers of Japanese art” whose collections are built almost exclusively from that school.

The book ends its topical survey by naming what it has had to leave out for lack of space — flower arrangement, landscape gardening, and above all the weaving and embroidery of silk, which Dillon calls “an almost unexplored department of art history” and recommends to future students. A three-page “Selected Bibliography of Works on Japanese Art” follows, listing English, French, and German sources from Anderson’s Pictorial Arts of Japan and his British Museum catalogue of Japanese paintings to Brinkley, the Goncourts on Outamaro and Hokusai, Gonse’s L’Art Japonais, Gowland’s paper on the dolmens, Hearn, Morrison’s Monthly Review articles, Morse, Satow’s Handbook to Japan, Strange’s Japanese Colour Prints, and Tajima’s Selected Relics of Japanese Art, and the book closes with an index. Of the volume’s forty-one plates, the frontispiece — captioned “Cutting Wood-blocks for Colour-Prints by Utamaro” — shows craftsmen at work on a print block; the plates that follow reproduce paintings, sculpture, sword-furniture, bronzes, lacquer boxes, and porcelain drawn chiefly from the 1902 Hayashi sale and from private collections, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, each captioned with the subject, material, and, where known, artist, period, and collection.

H. B. Montgomery’s The Empire of the East is a popular, topically organized survey of Japan rather than a chronological travel narrative, written by an author who states in his preface that he has just returned “from another visit to Japan a few months ago” and who claims to have “read nearly every work on Japan that has appeared in recent years.” He tells readers plainly what the book is not: not “technical, historical, abstruse or recondite,” not concerned with party politics (“Japanese politics find no place in this work”), and only lightly touched by statistics, which he calls “caviare to the great mass of the public.” Twenty-five chapters move outward from a historical sketch through the country’s geography, race and language, religions, constitution, daily life, trade, finance, education, army and navy, two chapters on the fine arts, architecture, communications, law, literature and drama, the newspaper press, morality, relations with China, the position of resident Europeans, a first-person account of visiting Buddhist temples in Kyoto, the Ainu of Yesso, “Japan As It Is To-day,” and finally two chapters forecasting Japan’s future — the shape promised by the subtitle’s “was, is, and will be.” The title page itself carries an epigraph from St. Francis Xavier (“This nation is the delight of my soul”), while the color frontispiece, “A Star of the East,” faces it; nothing in the preface frames the book as a missionary or mission-board production, and Montgomery instead presents himself as an independent-minded lay observer determined, as he puts it, “to depict Japan as it really is, not the Japan seen through glasses of various colours.”

The opening chapter, “A Glimpse at the Past,” surveys how Europe came to know Japan rather than narrating Japanese history proper, which Montgomery dismisses as “almost altogether legendary.” He traces contact from the 1542 wreck of three Portuguese sailors on the coast under “the authority of the Prince of Bungo,” through Francis Xavier’s mission and forty years of flourishing Catholic conversion, to the 1587 banishment edict and the ensuing two-and-a-half centuries of seclusion, broken only by the Dutch trading post at Decima, near Nagasaki. He then strings together outside testimony across three centuries to argue that pre-contact Japan was already “highly civilised” rather than barbaric: Kaemfer’s 1727 account, whose description of the Emperor’s untouchable hair and nails Montgomery quotes and dismisses, the Swedish physician Thunberg’s admiring description of Japanese agriculture and law, an anonymous eighteenth-century American commentator’s account of the “government of espionage” under the Tycoon, and a young naval officer’s private 1877 letter describing Japan’s rapid “metamorphosis.” The same skeptical, source-quoting method carries into the chapters on the country’s geography — the four main islands together with later acquisitions the book itemizes one by one, the Kurile Islands (1875), the Loo-Choo group (1876), Formosa (ceded after the war with China in 1895), and the southern half of Sakhalin (regained after the war with Russia) — and on race and language, where Montgomery works through and rejects several theories of Japanese origin, Kaemfer’s theory of Babylonian descent, an Aino-ancestry theory, and an elaborate “Turano-African” migration theory, concluding that the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans “quite evidently all come from the same stock,” with the Ainu a genuinely separate people.

A run of chapters lays out Japan’s institutions and social fabric. On religion, Montgomery treats Shinto and Buddhism as having shaped and reshaped each other since Buddhism’s sixth-century introduction, traces the Meiji-era disestablishment of Buddhism in favor of state Shinto, and defends both faiths against being dismissed as “paganism,” while explaining Christianity’s limited success — from roughly a million converts around 1600 to perhaps a hundred thousand in his own day — as a consequence of denominational rivalry rather than Japanese hostility. The constitution chapter walks through the 1889 charter article by article: the House of Peers and House of Representatives, the property and speech rights guaranteed to “Japanese subjects,” and the position of the Emperor, whom Montgomery treats as a genuinely constitutional sovereign even as he notes that official language about the throne’s divine descent visibly softened between the 1889 promulgation and the 1894 war rescript against China; he goes so far as to concede that Japan’s government, run in practice by “six or seven great men,” is “in effect, though not in name, an oligarchy.” The chapter on “The People — Their Life and Habits” moves through paper-walled houses, floor-sleeping and the wooden pillow, the daily hot bath, and a calendar of festivals — the Feast of Flags for boys, the Feast of Dolls for girls, the three-day Bon Matsuri for the dead, the chrysanthemum festival — and closes by comparing Japanese cemeteries, kept with fresh flowers year-round, favorably against London graveyards where funeral wreaths are left “to rot on top of the grave.”

The book gives substantial space to material and economic life and to the arts. Trade and industry are covered through concrete figures and anecdotes: silk as the leading export, a rice crop insufficient for domestic needs, a government tea-inspection system built to satisfy an 1897 United States import law, state monopolies on tobacco and salt, and a quoted remark by Marquis Ito to Mr. McKinley that Japan would rather train its own returning soldiers as manufacturers than send cheap labor abroad — alongside chapters on national finance, universal compulsory education (some five million children in school, crowned by the Imperial Universities of Tokio and Kyoto), the army and navy, railways and the post office, and the courts. Two full chapters on Japanese art cover lacquer manufacture from the sap of the rhus vernicifera tree and the twenty-eight lacquer masters “deemed to be the immortals” of that craft, the Korean and Chinese origins of pottery and porcelain and the tea ceremony’s role in refining it, and then sculpture, metalwork, and painting; a further chapter covers temple and domestic architecture. The literature and drama chapter surveys eighth-century court poetry, Heian-period fiction written largely by women, the puppet origins of some dramatic texts, and the aristocratic “No” drama, while conceding that Japan “has produced no Dante, or Shakespeare, or Milton” but arguing that judging Japanese letters by European standards “must create a totally false impression.” A chapter on newspapers traces the press back, on the authority of the Japan Times editor Zumoto, to hand-printed seventeenth-century news-sheets called Yomuri.

Several chapters carry the book’s most pointed opinions. “Japanese Morality” directly rebuts Miss Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan and the popular impression left by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysantheme, argues that the regulated Yoshiwara quarter — whose medical supervision Montgomery credits to the work of the Royal Navy’s Dr. G. Birnie Hill — compares favorably with unregulated prostitution in London, and concludes that “the ordinary Japanese man is not, in my opinion, nearly so immoral as the average European.” “Japan and China” dismisses contemporary talk of a “yellow peril” as the work of people who are “merely the victims of an exuberant imagination,” predicts that China will modernize on its own terms rather than under Japanese tutelage, and turns the charge of aggression back on the Western powers, citing the Opium War and Germany’s seizure of Kiaochao. “Europeans in Japan” recounts the treaty-port system, foreign courts, and extraterritorial post offices that lasted until their negotiated abolition roughly a decade before the book was written. “A Visit to Some Buddhist Temples” breaks from the book’s essayistic register into a first-person, present-scene narrative of one morning and one seven-day festival among Kyoto’s temples — lying awake at the Myako Hotel, following the “Namu Amida Butsu” prayers of an old woman at a shrine, describing a bronze temple bell at Kiomidyu roomy enough to hold over a dozen men, and watching a week-long service at Nishi Hong Wangi — the one sustained passage of personal travel narrative in an otherwise topical book. A short chapter on the Ainu of Yesso covers their disputed origins, fishing-and-hunting economy, funeral customs, and resistance to both Japanese assimilation and missionary conversion.

The closing chapters make good on the subtitle’s promise of a forecast. “Japan As It Is To-day” rebuts a “well-known writer on racial psychology” whose claims about Japanese heredity Montgomery calls “inaccurate to a degree,” reproduces — and then moves past — an English-language Japan newspaper’s dismissal of Sir Edwin Arnold and Lafcadio Hearn as beautiful but unreliable interpreters of the country, a verdict Montgomery does not share elsewhere in the book, where he credits Hearn’s writing with giving “a more vivid insight into the life of the Japanese people than the works of any other writer,” and quotes Sir Rutherford Alcock’s failed 1863 forecast before taking its own stock of Japan at the time of writing; the two chapters on “The Future of Japan” then predict, in turn, a physical improvement in the Japanese race as meat gradually replaces a historically vegetarian diet, a rising standard of commercial and public morality, and an “intellectual ferment” fed by translations of Spencer, Mill, and Huxley, and, nationally and politically, a continued rise to world influence. Montgomery singles out and rebuts another writer’s satirical forecast of a Japan degraded by shallow imitation — swallow-tailed coats handed out to three hundred employees to mark a family anniversary, a merchant’s New Year gift-box left on his doorstep, a tobacconist’s advertisement invoking a Yoshiwara beauty — as the kind of joke at Japan’s expense that the country has “too often” had to endure. The book ends not with a summary verdict but with a peroration imagining a future of international brotherhood, closing on the image of Japan as “the land of the Rising, aye, now the Risen Sun.” Its apparatus includes nineteen illustrations printed across seventeen plates: a color frontispiece, “A Star of the East,” after a print by Toshikata showing a woman among pine and iris; a run of sepia-toned plates after prints by Hiroshige and Toshikata bearing titles such as “The Sweet Scent of the Cherry Blossom” and “Rice Planting, Province of Hoki”; and three plates credited to Edward Dillon’s The Arts of Japan — one pairing Kutani and Awata ceramics, one of a bronze incense-burner and flower-vase, and one pairing two kakemono paintings; the volume closes with an index.

Evelyn Adam’s book is a set of topical impressions rather than a travel narrative: fourteen chapters, each a self-contained essay on one department of Japanese life, with no itinerary, no chronology, no arrival or departure to carry the reader along. The volume carries three titles: the title leaf reads Behind the Screens: An English Woman’s Impressions of Japan, the versos of the text are headed “Behind the Shoji,” the copyright page records entry for ad interim copyright under the title Behind the Shoji in November 1910, and the cloth cover is stamped Behind the Screens in Japan. An analytic table of contents summarizes each chapter; nothing illustrates the text, and four pages of publisher’s advertisements close the volume. A prefatory “NOTE” states the program. A few years ago, Adam writes, Japan announced “her engagement to Mr. John Bull” and now belongs “to our family circle,” so the English want to know her temper, not merely her smile. Travelers bring back two extreme impressions — enthusiasts “of the beaten track,” who see only “the stylish and dainty outside,” and “incurable pessimists who stay too long.” The way to a real impression, she holds, is to avoid the obvious and “look behind the Shoji instead. It is inside the house, not outside in the street, that people are most natural.” Her own papers are “simply the record of the observations of six years,” claiming a novel viewpoint: Japan seen “from the inside outwards.” Every chapter is narrated in her own person.

The opening chapter takes the newcomer ashore at Nagasaki or Yokohama and then to Tokio, where Adam finds “a curious incongruity” — very wide streets bordered by one-storied houses, medieval palace moats fringed with telegraph poles and tram lines — relieved for her only at Asakasa, “the playground of the poor.” She reports that Lafcadio Hearn called the capital “a hopeless blot of ugliness on the land” and had his salary reduced soon after, and she doubts the reason the government gave. Railways occupy the rest: the overland express from Kobe running at “the fearsome rate of twenty miles an hour,” and carriage regulations forbidding passengers to be “annoying other passengers.” “In Pursuit of Pleasure” comes next: newspaper bulletins on the state of the cherry buds, a Prime Minister who travels to Kioto to hang a sonnet on a famous weeping cherry in Maruyama Park, geisha dances that pall, the actor Danjuro, a Cha No Yu at a peeresses’ seminary where Adam knelt on the mats and drank “the bitter spinach-like mixture” in three gurgling sips, and the sociable hot springs. Inns and hotels follow: the chaya with its shutters closed against thieves and air alike, its cakes that “taste like blotting-paper”; then the “foreign style” hotel with its meek manager and a drunken cook who cannot be silenced because he is a shareholder. A maidservant abandons the plates to marry a pawnbroker; two hotel guides, Kosaku and Tomora, settle a quarrel over tips in a murder and a suicide.

A chapter on the “student of English” collects the signboards his labors produce — “Dealer in Sack Doods,” “Beef and Hen Met” — and letters written to Adam during the war with Russia by nine correspondents, four of them printed: her former cook; a jinricksha coolie, on post-cards announcing each victory; her landlady’s son, briefly; and a former police inspector, at length. Marriage follows: the Nakadachi, the professional matchmaker; the Miai or “mutual seeing”; the wife who greets her husband at the gate and gets a grunt; secondary wives; and fifteen “Don’ts” issued for schoolgirls. “A Nation of Mimics” runs through fads — giant picnics, waltzing lessons by correspondence, a police station built to the plan of a Paris hospital — and then through imitation in manufactures and art: silverware hollow where it should be solid, forged British labels, a whiskey maker asked from the bench whether a copied label was not “really a delicate compliment,” and nudes at the Osaka Exhibition. Shopkeepers, Adam writes, belong to a despised caste, discouraging sales (“Yes, if you are sure you want to buy!”) and losing their skill to a wasting complaint she calls “Deterioration.” Government offices supply the red tape: an applicant for a foreign parcel spends a whole day being passed from wicket to wicket; a householder must report his rats and deliver the dead ones at two sen apiece; a Russian attaché, before the war, was called on every morning by a policeman who asked his name and nation afresh.

Crime supplies the Dorobo, the armed robber before whom neighbors will not stir, a missionary lady who declined to be robbed in the wrong garment, and a policeman who takes down victims’ ages while the burglar escapes. Present-giving is filed under “Bribery and Corruption, or Giving and Receiving”: among the well-to-do, Adam writes, “there is a masked highwayman at every corner shouting, ‘Your present or your reputation.’” The duty is discharged by exacting rules of wrapping and the inscription “Sokoshi bakari” — “Only a trifle” — and she marks an egg to see how far her standing sends it round the neighborhood. Another chapter anatomizes the Iiwake, the excuse, from a housekeeper who blames damp weather for slashed shoji to a landlord who invents a crippled aunt. “Certain Curious Characteristics” collects the topsy-turvy: carpenters who put the roof on before the walls, boats pushed into the water stern first, horses tied head outwards, the fan used for a dustpan, kimono crossed right to left, black worn by brides. Curiosity is named the chief national trait — in Pekin a Japanese with a note-book edges up to Adam to ask where she is going — and irresponsibility the next: a captain sees no need to sound his siren oftener in a fog because “this is a lucky ship. She has been through the war.” The chapter closes on “not the laugh humorous but the laugh nervous,” with which a Japanese lady told an American globe-trotter of her eldest son’s death.

“The Awkward Age” calls Young Japan a spoiled child whose vanity was fed by praise after the war with Russia; it reports an old couple who begged that their only son be excused service and were handed his body from a handcart with “He shall remain at home with you,” and cites Britain’s suppression of The Mikado and a pamphlet on The Decline and Fall of the British Empire used as a school text. Against these she sets “some old-fashioned virtues and customs,” two proofs of “tragic depths of unselfishness” being killings: a reserve officer who, rather than leave his small daughter among strangers, “plunged a knife into her little breast” and set out “a free man and single-hearted,” and the Samurai of the old plays who gives his only son to save his lord’s heir, “supremely noble” in her account. Gentler exhibits follow — an old woman who will go out and “worship” the Crown Prince, the old man of Ikao who walked three days across the mountains with eggs for her, a story she tells an old priest of a student who spent his last free day wheeling his crippled landlord through Hibiya Park — and the surviving festivals: Tanabata, the Boy’s festival carp, and Binzeru, the disgraced image the sick rub. The closing chapter reports an English professor’s account of the two spirits, Ara-mi-tama and Nigimi-tama, prints in full a Kanagawa proclamation on behavior toward foreigners, and ends predicting that the Gentle Spirit will efface itself.

A Journal from Japan is the day-by-day diary of a scientist’s eighteen months in Japan, published in 1910 over the name Marie C. Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D., F.L.S. Its dated entries — more than three hundred — run from August 6, 1907, when the writer is “up at five” to see the morning sun lighting the mists over the Inland Sea, to January 24, 1909, when she sails from Yokohama. A preface explains that it was begun so that “the swiftly passing incidents and impressions” would not blur in memory, then went home to friends in place of letters; she publishes it “just because it was not written with a view to publication,” which “gives it any claim to attention, and guarantees its veracity.” Dinners, dances, and personalities have been deleted — though balls and banquets still crowd the book. An introduction states the errand — “A purely scientific interest in coal mines and the fossils they often contain,” made possible by the Royal Society — and promises “there is no technical science in this journal.” She calls herself “the first woman scientist from the West to work in the University with the Japanese men of science.” A note before the first entry sets its oddest rule: “Initials in italics refer to Japanese people, and in ordinary capitals to Westerners.” Almost everyone is accordingly a letter — Professor S——, Baron K——, Mrs. P—— — and it never stops being a letter home: “Clothes, you will say, fill a large part of this journal.”

The Tokio entries open in surprise — “I am much surprised to find how like Venice Tokio is, with its numerous waterways” — and with calls at the Botanical Gardens and Institute, the University, and the Embassy. Within days she has taken rooms in a Japanese house, mastered chop-sticks, and given reporters her “honourable views,” protesting against the hideous red brick going up in “this sweet city.” After the first month she learns enough spoken Japanese to travel alone. On August 17 she leaves for Hokkaido, where the Governor at Sapporo insists on an interpreter, an official from the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, several coolies, and a policeman — an escort that keeps growing and is soon “now raised to 10.” The policeman lends his sword to cut chop-sticks and supplies the dynamite that blows trout from the river. She hammers fossil-bearing nodules out of the river beds and is carried across the deep crossings by one of the escort, work that is “really a coolie’s.” She goes down the mines at Oyubari, Poronai — printed also as Horonai, “as no Japanese name begins with P” — and Ikushimbets, and spends a day of coal-mining at Itashinai. At Sapporo she is obliged to lecture to the women’s Aikoku-fujin-kai; at Shiroi she describes the Aino; at Noboribetsu she sleeps in a crater; at Matsushima she calls the hamlet “the Japan I have dreamed of.” She is back in Tokyon September 16, and feels her first earthquake six days later.

A second tour, begun on October 8, carries her west and south: Okayama and the Koraku-en garden; hours in a kuruma up the Takahashi valley after Triassic coal that officials in Tokio had assured her did not exist, which she finds at Jito and nearby with no fossils in it; a refusal to lecture at a big “middle school,” which her introduction, calling the place a College, returns to with shame; the Navy’s smokeless-coal mine at Omine; a tiny pit at Habu where women work underground naked to the waist; Namazuta in Kiushiu; Amakusa, whose dialect other Japanese cannot follow; and Nagasaki and Takashima, a mine that “goes miles under the sea,” where “last year 300 men were killed.” From her return on October 24 the book becomes a resident’s, and that settled life is most of it by volume: a botanical excursion to Nikko and Chuzenji, the Emperor’s chrysanthemum garden party, a call on Count Okuma, a sight of Admiral Togo, weekly lunches with the Science Faculty at the Goten, her own At Home day, and a night in November when a robber is driven from her window with the core of a quince, which “presumably hit the robber, for he decamped suddenly.” Domestic Tokio is recorded to the farthing — what a pile of four cucumbers costs, the tram official who will not carry her azaleas unless the roots are hidden, the Government-ordered spring cleaning that the police inspect before pasting a yellow paper tab on the door.

December belongs to the fossil cutting-machine built for her at the Institute; by late March she has cut 221 slides. Between come New Year customs and, on March 3, the inaugural dinner of the London University Union in Japan, whose idea she says she started. At the end of March she walks the Boshu peninsula with friends, then goes on alone to the hill temple of Kasamori; two days later “nearly a foot of snow” breaks Tokio’s cherry boughs and telegraph wires. On April 11 she moves into a rented house and garden of her own in Azabu, where her maid equips the kitchen for a “sum total under ten shillings,” and which it will “break my heart to leave.” In May she buys a bicycle from the missionaries, teaches herself to ride, and founds a debating society whose subjects include chaperons, lying, marriage, and whether Lafcadio Hearn’s picture of Japan is fallacious; she gives the casting vote for Hearn. Her feeling swings, and the introduction warns that it must: “Japan makes one love her and hate her from day to day, from hour to hour.” So there is delay, a landlord, tradespeople, a printer who lies about proofs — “Why do the Japanese lie so circumstantially, and then not even blush when they are found out?” — a priest who wrote that there were no cones, and lepers, some begging in the street with “the fingers eaten away,” one sitting down beside her in a crowded tram.

The complaint that Japan is spoiling itself begins in the dedicatory poem, which mourns a land casting off “beauties unsurpassed” for “mere useful ugliness,” and never lets up: brick “abominations” in a “low-built, grey wooden town”; factory chimneys “rising up to curse and kill the beauty of the town”; a daimio garden whose tallest cryptomerias stand “as dead skeletons, killed by the smoky chimneys on the other side of the boundary wall”; the rule that “when they touch anything ‘foreign’ they must outdo the foreigners.” Its sharpest scene has her denouncing the red-brick Government buildings by the palace moat to a stranger who answers that he chaired the Building Committee — the Ambassador Tsuzuki. The science runs underneath everything: Ginkgo spermatozoids swimming out under her microscope, a stone heated in molten zinc that explodes and spatters the room, sun-heat that bubbles the Canada Balsam of nearly every slide, cycad cones at Yejiri got by tying two ladders together, Hakone in the clouds, fossil insects at Shiobara, ant galleries of rolled leaves at Hayama that she fancies “new to science,” preserved in sake for want of spirit, and a course of her own University lectures through the autumn of 1908, a season of floods, a fever of 104 degrees, the American Fleet, and Sven Hedin. Then the leave-taking begins: a farewell dinner from the University at the Maple Club, with butterfly dances — “and they all know quite well that I do not sail till January!”

“Blue-grey silver cloisonné vases” arrive from the University in “recognition of the stimulus I have been to botany in Japan!”, with three gold lacquer boxes from the Union. A December afternoon at Hearn’s house ends in his study, at the table “made specially for him, for his extremely short sight,” by the box of “long tiny-bowled Japanese pipes.” The journal closes on January 24, 1909, friends crowding the platform and Fuji — the cone above the coast hills she says she never saw from the sea in eighteen months — cloudless as the ship sails. “So, as I left Japan, her greatest beauty showed herself to me.” A Conclusion answers the drawing-room question she evaded: little that England calls Japanese is so; “the Japanese are no longer a nation of artists,” though old formulae, undisturbed, “still make of the common workman an artist,” and a wise Japanese man hopes it may “reappear in another generation.” Individuals manage less mental activity in a day than the English; a Japanese mine employs nearly half as many workers again as an English one of like output, the climate having “a subtle lethargic effect”; but the nation is brilliantly led, organized, and deeply religious whatever missionaries report. Friendship between East and West is possible: Hearn “has shown us more truly and more beautifully than any other writer the inner life of Japan,” yet seems to have had “a perfect genius for destroying individual friendships.” Eight plates, two pen-and-ink sketches, five footnotes, and an index complete it.

Rare Days in Japan is a first-person memoir of travel and lecturing, not a diary kept from day to day: its twelve chapters are each keyed to one excursion or occasion, taken up in the order the author experienced them across three separate visits to Japan. The title page identifies the author, George Trumbull Ladd, LL.D., as also the author of In Korea with Marquis Ito, Knowledge, Life, and Reality, and Philosophy of Conduct, and his preface explains why he had until then declined the many requests of friends that he write such a book: partly because so many volumes on “the Land of the Rising Sun” already existed, and partly because the experiences he most wanted to tell were “so intimate and personal” that recounting them risked “a breach of courtesy” toward hosts who had received him generously. What he offers instead, he says, are some of the “rare and notably happy, and, I hope, useful days” of his three visits — the narrative itself dates the first to his landing at Yokohama in May 1892, when he traveled on to Kyoto, after a day’s detour to visit the Imperial Diet, to lecture at the missionary college of Doshisha, and it later distinguishes a second visit in 1899 from a long third stay in 1906–07, during which he lectured across the country under the Imperial Educational Association and was several times received by the Emperor and Empress.

The first four chapters stay closest to that first visit. Chapter I recounts a call at the Imperial Diet in May 1892 — a soshi’s cane confiscated at the door of the House of Representatives, a debate in which the Diet voted funds to rebuild earthquake-damaged schools but balked at financing naval ironworks, and a tour of the House of Peers arranged by Mr. Kojiro Matsukata, son of Marquis Matsukata — set beside a far more ceremonial visit in December 1906 to watch the Emperor open the Diet in person. Chapter II describes shooting the rapids of the Katsura-gawa from Hozu to Arashi-yama with Doshisha students in 1892, and a second run of the same river in 1907 that was interrupted, to Ladd’s mixed pleasure, by a village mayor’s request that he address the primary school at Kameoka and plant a tree there. Chapter III turns to the ascent of the volcano Asama-yama in July 1892 with his friend T. Yokoi — a night spent waiting for pack-horses that finally arrived only after his companion threatened to report the delay as bad for “treaty revision,” a jolting ride on wooden saddles led by indifferent bettos, and a climb to a sulphurous, fire-lit crater under cloud. Chapter IV covers the Summer School for missionaries and students at Hakone, reached by sedan-chair along the old Tokaido through the decayed post-town of Hata, an excursion to the boiling gorge of Ojigoku, or “Big Hell,” and a rain-soaked departure escorted on foot by a hundred members of the school; it closes at Nikko, with a privileged viewing, arranged through Prince Tokugawa, of relics normally closed to visitors in the shrine of Ieyasu.

Chapters V through VIII turn from narrative to essayistic description of Japanese audiences and arts, still anchored in named occasions. Chapter V draws on Ladd’s experience lecturing — sometimes through an interpreter, sometimes in English alone — to audiences of teachers, students, and officials in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Sendai, arguing that Japanese listeners combine extraordinary patience with a “secretiveness” bred by Samurai training in self-control, and recounting a Sendai army general’s explanation that it was the schoolteachers, more than his drill instructors, who supplied the recruits’ “spiritual training.” Chapter VI, on gardens and garden parties, quotes Baron Kuki’s account of the three qualities of Japanese art and describes the Korakuen and the Katsura-no-Rikyu, an Imperial chrysanthemum party at Aoyama in November 1906 (one plant, Ladd reports, bore 985 blooms), and the private gardens of Count Okuma and Marquis Nabeshima. Chapter VII traces the theater from the courtly No and its comic Kyogen interludes down to the popular Kabuki, citing Baron Suyematsu’s account of their history, and describes performances Ladd attended: a native entertainment at Doshisha in 1892, a Kabuki drama of a servant’s unflinching loyalty to his samurai master at a Tokyo theater, the acting of Ichikawa Danjuro in 1899, a Japanese staging of Sardou’s La Patrie in October 1906, and a fortnight-long memorial “Actor’s Benefit” for Kan-ya Morita that same November. Chapter VIII is given wholly to the No, reconstructed from two all-day programs Ladd attended with an interpreter that autumn — among them “Taira-no-Michimori,” in which the ghosts of a drowned general and his wife are released from torment by a priest’s prayers, and “Hana-ga-Tami,” or “The Flower Token,” in which a peasant girl’s “mad dance” wins her recognition by the newly enthroned Emperor she loves.

The next three chapters each center on one place and its associations. Chapter IX opens with the life of Nichiren and describes two visits to the monastery of Ikegami in the autumn of 1906: an all-night festival on October 12th spent forcing a way through crowded, lantern-lit streets, and a later luncheon with the abbot — whose fondness for turtles, Ladd learns, traces to his own name, Hikame — followed by a night among the students of the Nichiren college at Osaki founded by Ladd’s former pupil, Shibata. Chapter X tells the story of Baron Ii Naosuke of Hikone, the Tairo who signed the 1858 treaty with Townsend Harris over the opposition of most of the other feudal lords and was assassinated by Mito ronin outside the Shogun’s castle in March 1860; it closes with Ladd’s own visit to Hikone in February 1907, lodged in the lakeside villa of Raku-raku-tei and lecturing to five hundred citizens in a snow-covered primary school. Chapter XI, on Hiro-mura, sets out to correct what Ladd considers the errors of Lafcadio Hearn’s story “A Living God”: the real Hamaguchi Goryo, he explains, saved his village from the 1855 tidal wave by igniting his own grain stacks — and whatever other stores of grain he could reach in the village — as beacons for the fleeing villagers, later built the great dyke that still protects the shore, and died not a century ago but in New York City in 1889. The chapter follows the jinrikisha journey through the lacquer-making village of Kuroe to Hiro-mura, a lecture at the school Hamaguchi’s family endowed, and a small earthquake felt in the schoolroom itself during the visit.

The closing chapter, on court functions and imperial audiences, explains the system of court rank and describes the Emperor’s birthday Court Ball of November 3, 1906, at the residence of Viscount Hayashi, where Admiral Shimamura — credited with sinking thirteen Russian ships — proposed the toast “Let us drink to peace,” and the New Year’s Audience, at which the Imperial party bows three times to guests ranged along a cord of red silk. Ladd sets beside these his own four private audiences with the Emperor, granted in 1899, twice in 1906–07, and once more just before his departure in September 1907, each rendered as remembered dialogue; the book ends not with an audience scene but with Ladd’s reflection on the character of the reigning Emperor, Mutsu-hito, whom he judges, after weighing the nation’s wars and reforms since 1868, the most “patient, wise, and benevolent” ruler of the age. Photographs illustrate the volume throughout: a frontispiece titled “Country Scenes and Country Customs” and, by the printed list of illustrations, twenty-three further full-page plates keyed to specific pages, each captioned with a phrase drawn from the surrounding text — “The Picturesque Moat and Ancient Wall,” “In One Corner of the Stage Sits the Chorus,” “All Covered with Fresh-Fallen Snow” among them.

A Journal of the Perry Expedition to Japan (1853–1854) is the day-by-day diary kept by Samuel Wells Williams, a longtime Canton missionary-printer and sinologist who signed on as “First Interpreter of the Expedition” at Commodore Perry’s personal request. Published in 1910 and edited by Williams’s son, F. W. Williams, it appeared as part of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, prefaced by an account of the Tokyo meeting at which the manuscript was first placed at the Society’s disposal and read aloud, and by the son’s own biographical and critical introduction, dated New Haven, Connecticut, April 1909. The diary proper is written entirely in the first person and dated entry by entry (“On the 9th of April, 1853, I received a request from Commodore Perry to accompany him to Japan as interpreter…”), and it runs continuously from Williams’s recruitment in Canton in April 1853 to his return to that city in August 1854, covering both of Perry’s visits to Japan together with the intervening cruises to Lewchew, the Bonin Islands, and back to China.

The opening weeks follow the squadron’s passage from Macao to Lewchew aboard the Saratoga, and May and June of 1853 are given over almost entirely to Napa and Shui: haggling with the mayor of Napa and a succession of Regents over housing, provisions, and the seizure of a schoolhouse for the expedition’s use, ceremonial visits to the palace at Shui, and repeated, often exasperated encounters with the eccentric resident missionary Dr. Bettelheim. Williams records his own qualms about what he calls “a struggle between weakness and right and power and wrong” in these dealings and pities “these poor, defenseless islanders who could only say no,” even as he argues elsewhere that Lewchew’s own gentry oppress the common people worse than any foreigner could. A digression to the Bonin Islands (Port Lloyd, Peel Island) fills mid-June with naturalist observations of coral, shells, crabs, and the small mixed colony of American, English, and Hawaiian settlers there, before the squadron turns to Japan. Off Uraga in early July, Williams narrates the standoff over receiving President Fillmore’s letter almost hour by hour, culminating in the formal landing at Kurihama on July 14, 1853, where the letter was delivered to the envoys Toda, prince of Idzu, and Ido, prince of Iwame, under armed escort; a survey of the upper bay follows before the ships withdraw to Lewchew and China.

After a stretch back in Hongkong, Macao, and Canton, Williams rejoins the squadron for its second approach to Japan by way of Lewchew in January 1854, then a stormy passage in February that drives part of the fleet aground near Simoda before the ships work up Yedo Bay toward Kanagawa. Weeks of maneuvering over where the Americans may anchor and land, and of formal conferences with the Japanese commissioners headed by Hayashi, Dai-gaku no kami, occupy the entries through March, interspersed with a sailor’s funeral near Yedo and Williams’s own naturalist rambles. The negotiations close with the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, and Williams copies its twelve articles into the journal in full, opening the ports of “Simoda in the principality of Idzu” and “Hakodade in the principality of Matsmai” to American ships.

The entries after the treaty turn to life ashore at Simoda and, from mid-May, at Hakodade. At Simoda Williams describes local schools, temples, and a sailor’s burial, and records at length the letters of two young Japanese scholars, writing under assumed names, who begged to be smuggled aboard for passage to America and were turned away by Perry as a breach of the new treaty. At Hakodade, in the territory of the prince of Matsmai, he negotiates with the bunyo Kudoo Mogoro and the prince’s deputy Matsmai Kageyu over trading limits and the treatment of American officers ashore, and tours the town’s Buddhist and Shinto temples. By early June the ships have returned to Simoda Bay.

A further round of formal conferences at Simoda in June 1854, with the commissioner Kurokawa and others, settles supplementary regulations — harbor limits at Hakodade, the exchange rate between the ichibu and the dollar, and rules of pilotage — before the squadron sails a last time for Lewchew. There, at Napa in July, Williams sits in on the Regent’s examination of a bound prisoner over the murder of the sailor William Board, watching jailers question witnesses in the open air, and describes a large bazaar and a shipboard Fourth of July celebration; he looks on as the Regent and two Treasurers have their daguerreotypes taken, and records the squadron’s farewell to Dr. Bettelheim before it turns finally for China.

The homeward voyage carries Williams down the China coast to Ningpo, where he finds the town in an uproar after a Portuguese corvette has shelled Chinese boats and killed several townspeople, and where he lodges with the American missionary community while a landing party of marines is sent to protect it; a sailor dies of sunstroke during the stopover. The journal proper closes on August 11, 1854, with Williams’s arrival in Canton and reunion with his family in Macao: “Thus ends my expedition to Japan, for which praise be to God!” — though the volume continues a few pages further with the resumed minutes of the Asiatic Society meeting, including an anecdote about a would-be assassin at Uraga disarmed by Perry’s kindness and the detail that the Japanese nicknamed him “Tadashi San” for his frequent use of the word tadashi. The son’s prefatory note at the front of the volume surveys Williams’s earlier 1837 voyage to Japan aboard the Morrison, his uneasy but ultimately respectful relationship with Perry, his part in securing the treaty’s most-favored-nation clause and in talking Perry out of an extraterritoriality clause, and a rebuttal of Inazo Nitobe’s claim that Perry’s treaty drew on an earlier Dutch draft. Footnotes throughout identify officers and cross-reference Perry’s official Narrative and other travel accounts, and the text is accompanied by two full-page plates: a portrait of Perry inscribed with the autographs of Sanjo Nai-daijin and Shozan Sakuma, and, facing the start of the diary itself, a portrait captioned “Dr. S. Wells Williams. (From a Japanese print of the period.)”

Highways and Homes of Japan is a photographically illustrated travel narrative by Lady Lawson, a member of the Japan Society and of the Red Cross Society of Japan, built from notes taken during “two long delightful visits” to Japan that followed a two-year posting as a correspondent in India. The preface, signed “Kate Lawson” at London in September 1910, frames the book as a contribution to British understanding of Japan given “the future of the British Empire, with its great Asiatic possessions”; it thanks Professor James Main Dixon of the University of Southern California (formerly thirteen years a professor at the Imperial University in Tōkyō) for statistical help, and friends in the War Office, Navy Department, and Foreign Office at Tōkyō. Lawson describes taking over three hundred photographs herself with a small Kodak, many of which illustrate the book. The thirty chapters open as a first-person travel narrative of her arrival and journeys, then widen into a long run of topical chapters — on the arts, festivals, language, women, music, drama, animals, superstition, earthquakes, the army and navy, journalism, commerce, and Meiji statesmen — that stay in her own voice and keep returning to personal anecdote even as they turn expository.

The opening chapters follow her route and early impressions: landing at Nagasaki, where she watches coal loaded onto liners entirely by women working a human chain of baskets; the run through the Inland Sea to Kobe, with its golf links and cherry blossom; being photographed by suspicious police at the hot-spring resort of Arima; and the rail journey to Kyōto, “the heart of Japan.” A chapter on Tōkyō covers its bathing habits, fire look-out towers, story-tellers’ halls, street signs, and the Shiba temples. A chapter on Japanese hospitality describes a four-hour dinner at the Koyokwan (Maple Club), garden parties, a visit to Madame Tōgō and to Field-Marshal Ōyama, an audience with the poet-laureate Baron Takazaki, and a luncheon aboard the battleship Asahi. She then recounts weeks spent living in a mountain yadoya (native inn) among people with no English, and a chapter of “country rambles” taking in Nara’s tame deer, the rapids of the Katsura-gawa, Lake Biwa, the Hakone district and the geysers of Atami, the old fort at Konodai, an ascent of Fuji, Nikkō and Chūzenji, Ikao, and an ascent of the active volcano Asama-yama from Karuizawa.

A long topical middle section follows, still narrated through her own visits and acquaintances. Chapters cover landscape gardens and the tea ceremony; art industries such as cloisonné, lacquer, sword-making, and ukiyo-e printing; a chapter on jujutsu built around her own lessons under Professor Kanō; sports and games; language and education; women’s dress and family customs; marriage and funeral etiquette; the festival calendar, including the Aoi Festival procession at Kyōto and a Shōkonsai service at Yokohama; a Shintō “spirit festival” at Aoyama cemetery, which she attended as the only foreign woman present, and a naval memorial ceremony at Ueno Park addressed by Admiral Tōgō; music and the drama, with an extended retelling of the “Forty-Seven Rōnin”; animal life; pearl-fishing off the Ise coast and cormorant fishing by torchlight on the Kiso-gawa at Gifu; superstitions about foxes, badgers, and cats; the guild and history of Japan’s blind; and a chapter of “disagreeables” — smells, mud, damp, insects, poor food, and bad ventilation — followed by a chapter on earthquakes drawing on conversations with the seismologist Professor Ōmori and her own experience of a shock in Yamagata Prefecture.

The closing chapters turn more explicitly to contemporary affairs: the expansion of the army and navy since the war with Russia; the organization of the Red Cross Society of Japan, of which she gives a detailed institutional history; the Japanese press and its treatment of war correspondents; banking and industry, including a visit to an Osaka match factory; Japan’s cultural debt to China; its debt to Britain, opening with the story of the pilot Will Adams; a chapter of biographical sketches of the “Makers of New Japan” — Itō Hirobumi, Inouye, Matsukata, Yamagata, Ōkuma, Itagaki, Fukuzawa, Ōyama, and Tōgō, several drawn from her own meetings with them; and a final chapter, “The Future of Japan,” arguing for an Anglo-Japanese alliance while criticizing Japan’s “harshness as a ruler” in Korea, the commercial exploitation of Manchuria by disreputable Japanese businessmen, and the country’s “defective commercial integrity.” Lawson’s admiration for Japanese aesthetics, cleanliness, patriotism, and self-control runs throughout the book alongside blunt complaint about sanitation and diet, and alongside period racial and imperial framing that treats Japan’s progress as a model for, and a junior partner to, the British Empire. The book closes on the exclamation “Dai Nippon Banzai! Sayonara!,” followed by an alphabetical index. It carries a frontispiece portrait of Princess Kitashirakawa in ceremonial court dress, reproduced “by permission,” and fifty-nine further half-tone plates from Lawson’s own photographs, each with a descriptive caption, on subjects ranging from Princess Ōyama in her own home and the gardens of the Imperial Palace at Kyōto to military reviews, earthquake damage, and an ascent of the Yamada Kikyu dirigible balloon near Tokyo.

Papinot’s Historical and Geographical Dictionary of Japan is an alphabetical reference work in two volumes, A to N and O to Z, paginated continuously from the preface through page 842; the first volume stops at page 462 in the middle of the N’s, at the entry Nyūgyū-in. The title page gives the author only as E. Papinot and adds the line “With Illustrations and Appendixes”; facing it is a frontispiece headed “THE THREE CHIEF SIGHTS (SAN-KEI) OF JAPAN,” with vignettes of Ama no Hashidate, Miyajima and Matsushima. A six-page preface states the plan and its limits: “This book does not intend to give more than a summary account of the principal events and names that occur in the History and Geography of Japan,” and “It contains but little discussion of dates and facts, as it is not meant to be a critical history.” It keeps the official chronology that puts the accession of Jimmu-tennō at 660 B.C. while noting that critical study “seems to place this event some 600 years later,” and it declines to sift the record: the compiler means “to place mythology, legend and history on the same footing, and usually leave the discernment of truth from error to the judgment of the reader.” The historical introduction that follows the preface is dated “Yokohama, January, 1909.” at the left margin, with the initials “E. P.” beside it at the right.

Four of the fourteen preliminary pages, the last four of the preface, are a key to reading the rest. Page VII is given over entirely to transliteration: the spellings follow “the rules laid down by Dr. Hepburn, the pioneer-author of English-Japanese Dictionaries,” the horizontal mark over o and u is explained as marking only that the sound is prolonged, and g is said to have “the sound of ng” in the Tokyō dialect but the hard sound “in Kyōto, Nagasaki, and the southern provinces.” The preface warns as well that familiar names have been deliberately respelled — “instead of Yamatodake we say Yamatotakeru; Takeshiuchi instead of Takenouchi; Ishida Kazushige instead of Ishida Mitsunari” — because “a painstaking and deep study of ancient documents by some learned professors of the University has brought to light the real pronunciation of these names and we have adopted it.” Pages VIII to X then give a ruled table of the elements that recur in Japanese names, with the character, the kan-on and go-on readings and an English gloss: the words for country, department, district, city, town and village, then forest, mountain, bridge and valley, the compass points, sea, harbor, lake and river, colors, seasons, religious terms and ranks, animals, and last the numerals from one to ten thousand.

The introduction itself, eight pages long (pp. XI–XVIII), narrates the whole span continuously: “We shall here give the whole of this history in a succinct form. It is narrated in detail in the pages of the book.” It divides the subject into three numbered periods — “I. — Period of Autocracy (660 B.C. — 1192 A.D.)”, about two and a quarter pages; “II. — Feudal Period (1192-1868).”, about four; and “III. — Imperial Restoration.”, one page, and the only one of the three given no date span. The feudal section opens not with events but with a thesis about a rivalry inside Japan between an invading West carrying Chinese civilization and an East that “represented the aboriginal race, backward no doubt, but animated by its native and somewhat fierce energy” — a rivalry “the study of which has been more or less neglected by historians.” Tokugawa rule is compressed into a list of repressions, “atrocious persecution of the Christians” among them. The third period covers 1868 to the writer’s own day in that single page; the war with China is given as motive and never dated, the war with Russia is not named, and the section closes by asking what Japan will do next — “It is God’s secret” — and then with two untranslated Latin clauses from the psalms.

The entries fill pages 1 to 765. Each begins with the headword in bold roman, followed by the Chinese characters and then a definition in which Japanese names are italicized; the shortest run to a single line, and the median entry is about three printed lines. The weight falls on a few large articles, and those are family articles rather than thematic ones: measured by the run of type rather than by the pages they touch, Tokugawa fills some twenty-two pages, Fujiwara eighteen, Minamoto thirteen and a half. This follows a rule the preface states: biographical notices are grouped in chronological order under the family name, so that “the biographical sketch of Nobunaga will be found under the title of Oda, that of Hideyoshi, under that of Toyotomi; that of Ieyasu, under that of Tokugawa,” each man set as an indented sub-entry beneath the surname. Emperors are entered under their posthumous titles with a serial number — “Hanazono-tennō, 95th Emperor of Japan” — empresses with the number in parentheses, and the prefix go- “answers to the title ‘Second,’” so that Go-Murakami is Murakami II. Illustration is set into the letterpress rather than gathered into plates: captioned portraits with the text run around them, uncaptioned family crests in the outer margin beside a house’s article, seals, coins, full-measure genre scenes, and wood engravings at the foot of several pages of the appendixes, some captioned in small capitals, most of them unrelated to what stands above.

Coverage reaches well beyond persons and places. Alongside provinces, castles, rivers and daimyō houses stand entries on offices and dignities, taxes, court feasts, dress, sports, coins, legal codes, schools of painting, poetry anthologies, Buddhist sects, the calendar, the orders of knighthood and the national anthem, printed in romanized Japanese with an English rendering. The preface sets a geographical threshold with an escape clause: “With the exception of historical places, only such cities are mentioned in this Dictionary as possess at least 10,000 inhabitants, rivers of more than 100 kilometers or mountains over 1,000 meters in height.” The exception does a great deal of work — Obama, in Wakasa, is entered at 8,800 inhabitants because three families of daimyō resided there in turn. Modern Japan is handled statistically: prefectures with population, capital and chief towns; sects with their temples and adherents, Jōdo-shinshū credited with “19,608 temples and 12,656,800 followers”; an article on the empire itself carrying a table of figures taken from the official statistics of 1904. How far forward the work comes is not one answer: the Meiji article says that “The year 1906, is its 39th year” and its chronicle stops there, the Mutsuhito article makes 1909 the forty-second year, and volume II records facts of 1908. Battles are entered under the places where they were fought — Okehazama, Shimonoseki and Sekigahara, which the book calls “the most important event of Japanese history” — and the peace with China under Shimonoseki, where it was negotiated.

The standpoint of the entries is Catholic, and it shows less in argument than in what gets recorded. Xavier lands in the geography of Kagoshima simply as “Saint Francis-Xavier”; the epithet belongs to the article on the Christian religion, where he is “St. Francis-Xavier … the first Apostle of Japan.” Converts are given their baptismal names in ordinary genealogical notices — Peter, Simeon, Damian, John, Augustine — with their constancy or their lapse noted, and that same article names the missionaries imprisoned at Koishikawa and follows the faith down to the believers found near Nagasaki in 1865. Set into it is a photograph of a weathered notice board, with a translation: “The practice of the perverse Christian religion is severely prohibited.” The verdicts are not predictable, though. Shimabara, the book insists, was not a religious rising: “although a great number of the insurgents were indeed Christians, religion itself was in no way connected with the affair.” Buddhism is treated coolly and at times with irony — the followers of Nichiren “have always been the most turbulent and fanatic Buddhists in Japan” — and of Shintoism: “Properly speaking, Shintoism is not a religion : it has no dogma, no moral code nor sacred book…” The entries also attack the chronology the preface preserved: the mythological part of the Koji-ki is “nothing but a tissue of vulgar fables,” and the article on the Nihon-ki concludes that “it is only from the 7th century, that we begin to tread on solid ground.”

The preface says the Dictionary “contains only Japanese names,” which is nearly true: Sidotti, born at Palermo, stands among the S’s with no characters after his name, and the Supplement points back to him. That Supplement runs twenty-three pages under “SUPPLEMENT.” and “PRINCIPAL FOREIGNERS CONNECTED WITH JAPAN BEFORE THE RESTORATION. (1542-1868).” — a second alphabetical dictionary of Westerners, filed under the name in the form the book uses, so that Xavier appears under F, and in large part a martyrology: “Melchior de S. Augustin (1599-1632). Spanish Augustinian. He came to Japan in 1632, was arrested soon after, imprisoned at Nagasaki and burned alive.” Deshima factory directors, navigators and treaty-era diplomats follow the same pattern. Eighteen numbered appendixes come after, pages 789 to 841: indexes of English terms and of forenames, tables of provinces, departments and districts (“Total = 638 Districts”), then the seven generations of celestial spirits and the five of terrestrial, numbered, ending in Kamu-Yamato-Iwarehiko, who is No. 1, Jimmu, in the chronological list of emperors that follows and runs to No. 122, Mutsuhito, his death column blank — mythology, legend and history in one sequence, as promised. The shōgun, the eras, the sects, the fiefs of the daimyō in 1867, the ministries since 1885, Korea, China, the old reckoning of time — misnumbered XIII in its own heading — and a table of measures follow. The work ends on page 842 with the index of the appendixes and a vignette of a woman dressing her hair.

In Lotus-Land Japan presents itself, in its own preface, as a photographer’s book: Herbert G. Ponting, F.R.G.S., explains that his original object in going to Japan was simply to photograph the country, and that the volume grew out of the “copious notes” he kept during three years of travel there, spread across several return visits whose dated episodes run from 1903 to 1906. He thanks Professor B. H. Chamberlain and Mr. B. W. Mason, joint authors of Murray’s Handbook to Japan, for their guidance, acknowledges Underwood and Underwood and the H. C. White Co. for the use of several photographs whose copyright they held, and credits the Century Magazine, The World’s Work, and Country Life for letting him reprint earlier accounts of his ascent of Asama-yama, his visit to the cloisonné maker Namikawa, and his study of old swordsmiths. The book’s title and epigraph come from eleven lines of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters.” Its twenty chapters proceed by place and by topic — temples, craftsmen, volcanoes, mountain lakes, a whole chapter on climbing Fuji, Tokyo’s flower festivals, Japanese women, the house and children, and a run of regional chapters — rather than as one continuous itinerary, and the prose throughout carries the accumulated familiarity of a repeat visitor rather than a single passage through the country.

The narrative opens with the ship’s approach to Yokohama and a sunrise view of Fuji from Tokyo Bay, then settles into two long Kyoto chapters. Ponting describes the Chio-in temple and its seventy-four-ton bell, weighing it against the great bells of Moscow, Osaka’s Tennoji, Kyoto’s own Daibutsu Temple, Nara, Mingoon in Burma, and Peking; a moonlit visit to Kiyomizu-dera with a Japanese friend and his small daughter, frightened by the temple’s creaking floors; the thousand-and-one Kwannon images of San-ju-san-gen-do; Kinkakuji’s garden and carp; and the fox lore and fortune-tellers of the Inari shrine, illustrated with anecdotes of diviners consulted by an English friend and by Ponting’s own servant. A separate chapter, “The Artist-Craftsmen of Kyoto,” follows named workmen through their workshops — the bronze-inlayer Kuroda, the coppersmith Jomi, the damascener Komei, the ivory-carver Kaneda, the embroiderer Nagara — and gives the fullest space to repeated visits to the cloisonné maker Namikawa, describing his garden, his tame carp, and the enamel process from wiring through firing to grinding. Later chapters take up the tea district of Uji and the ritual “Firefly Battle” on the Uji river, quoting Lafcadio Hearn; the temples and deer park of Nara; and a boat trip, both down and up, through the rapids of the Katsura-gawa with his favorite boatman, Naojiro.

Two chapters on the volcanoes Aso-san and Asama-yama carry Ponting across Kyushu and to Karuizawa; at Asama he is nearly struck by ejected rock during a live eruption and has a near-comic confrontation with coolies who bolt with his cameras. Miyanoshita and Lake Hakone bring an affectionate account of the Fujiya Hotel and its proprietor, Yamaguchi, and a long quotation from an English guidebook to Hakone written by a Japanese author, C. J. Tsuchiya. The chapter on Shoji and the base of Fuji centers on his friendship with the English-born hotelkeeper Hoshino, who showed him the lakes Kawaguchi, Nishi-no-umi, Shoji, and Motosu in every season. A full chapter, “An Ascent of Fuji-San,” shifts partway through into dated diary entries describing a storm-bound stay at the summit rest-house, a night lost near the crater’s rim in fog, and, on an earlier ascent, a reckless attempt to strike cross-country toward Lake Yamanaka that leaves him with a sprained ankle after ten hours in brush and thunderstorm. The book then turns to Tokyo’s successive flower festivals — plum and cherry blossom, wisteria at Kameido, iris at Hori-kiri, chrysanthemum at Count Okuma’s garden and the Dango-zaka show, maple, and finally the lotus, which Ponting treats as a Buddhist emblem of death rather than of festivity.

“Concerning Japanese Women” draws heavily on Ponting’s work as a war correspondent during the war with Russia: weeks spent in the Reserve Hospital at Hiroshima watching Japanese nurses treat Japanese wounded, a further week at the Russian prisoners’ hospitals at Matsuyama, a schoolgirls’ visit to the wards, and interviews with General Baron Kodama and General Kuroki, the latter crediting Japanese mothers for their sons’ courage. “The House and the Children” catalogs tatami, the hibachi and its accessories, futon and pillows, and child-rearing customs, closing with the girls’ doll festival and the boys’ carp-banner day. The Nikko chapter follows the legend of the Red Bridge, the mausoleum of Ieyasu and the Yomei-mon gate, and the 1902 landslide and flood that killed a family at a wayside tea-house, before continuing to Lake Chuzenji, the Kegon waterfall, and Lake Yumoto. Kamakura and Enoshima recount the rivalry of Yoritomo and his half-brother Yoshitsune, measure and photograph the Daibutsu (correcting what Ponting calls exaggerated figures reprinted in Murray’s guidebook), mention an American visitor’s offer to buy the bronze image for scrap, and retell the Enoshima legends of the Dragon’s Cave and the goddess Benten. A further chapter, “The Old Swordsmiths of Kamakura,” treats Masamune and his rivals and works through several sword-guards reproduced in the book, each identified by maker, subject, and the metals used.

A northern excursion carries Ponting to the pine islands of Matsushima and on to Yezo, where he describes Hakodate, the solfataras of Naboribets, and two days among the Ainu at Shikyu and Shiraoi — their houses, tattooing, drinking customs, and the bear-hunter Happu Konno — in terms that shift between sympathy and open contempt for what he calls their “degradation.” A chapter on the Bay of Enoura follows the fisher-folk of Shizu-ura and Mito and their sea-god superstitions. “Hikone and Its Castle” centers on a hotel garden built as a miniature of Lake Biwa and the feudal castle spared from demolition by the reigning Emperor’s personal order, together with an account of Ponting’s own arrest for photographing Osaka castle without the right permit. The book closes with the Inland Sea and Miyajima, a steamer passage through the strait’s currents and whirlpools past wartime naval activity at Kure and Ujina, ending at Miyajima’s torii at sunset, which Ponting says he still longs to see again. Despite the title page’s claim that all ninety-six monochrome and eight color plates come “from photographs by the author,” a number of the individual plates carry separate copyright lines for Underwood and Underwood or the H. C. White Co.; the plates examined directly — the color plate “Greetings in the Temple Grounds” and the monochrome workshop study “The Potter at His Wheel” — are captioned in small capitals beneath or beside the image, without further explanatory text.

Japan & the Japanese records roughly a year that the English watercolor painter Walter Tyndale spent in Japan, landing by steamer at Moji from Shanghai on the fifth of May and remaining until the following February, when he sailed on toward Hong Kong. Tyndale frames the book in his preface as a painter’s account rather than a scholar’s: “The outward appearance of things is what, of necessity, concerns the painter most,” he writes, while crediting the writings of the late Lafcadio Hearn, of A. B. Mitford (Lord Redesdale), and of Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain with having “first awoke my interest in ‘Things Japanese’” and with supplying much of the information he leans on throughout. The thirty-two color plates named on the title page as being “by the author” are Tyndale’s own watercolors, tipped into the volume opposite blank guard leaves — a physical pattern confirmed by inspection of the plates themselves, not merely inferred — depicting the flowers, gardens, temple approaches, and festival crowds he painted as he traveled; a companion volume on Japanese gardens, to illustrate which several of the same expeditions were undertaken, is announced as forthcoming, its author named in the body of the book as Mrs. Basil Taylor though the preface calls the same writer “Mr. Basil Taylor.” The twenty-one chapters proceed chronologically, several named for a flower in season — the oleander, the Judas-tree and pomegranate, the lotus — rather than for a place.

Landing at Moji and Shimonoseki, Tyndale takes the steamer Somali through the Inland Sea to Kobe, then hurries to the hill-station of Arima to catch the last of the cherry blossom before returning to Kobe to paint the wistaria at Ikuta temple and settling into Kyoto for two and a half months. There, lodged at a half-Japanese hotel above Maruyama Park, he paints the irises at Kitano and a lotus pond he visits daily until the July heat drives him into the hills, while building a circle of Japanese acquaintances: the painter Kanocogni, a professor at Kyoto University, who takes him to a Japanese dinner with its chopstick mishaps and inquisitive young nesan; and the youth Kiyoshi Masuda, who raises, in a Kyoto graveyard, the fusion of Shinto ancestor-worship with Buddhist practice, a subject Tyndale says he only begins to grasp with the help of Chamberlain’s and Hearn’s writings. Tyndale devotes pages to Kyoto’s marriage customs, the nakodo match-maker system, and the training of geisha from purchased peasant children through the meiko school — a subject he treats candidly and defends against the ready condemnation of “anyone professing or calling himself a Christian.” He attends the historical procession and kagura dance at Shimogamo, the Gion Matsuri’s nocturnal rush of the god Susa-no-o’s palanquin across Shijo Bridge, and a Kyoto theater performance, repeatedly working through crowds of onlookers whose curiosity, quoting Chamberlain, he calls “a kindly interest.”

From Kyoto, Tyndale crosses by primitive mountain tramway to the lake district on Fuji’s northern flank, tramping and boating between Yoshida, Funatsu, and Shoji, where he lodges at the Higuchi Hotel and experiences his first earthquakes — the occasion for a digression, citing Professor Milne’s seismological research, on why Japanese builders rest their wooden frames on isolated stone plinths rather than sinking them into the ground. A day’s tramp over the Ubaguchi pass brings him to Kofu to paint the lotus-choked moat of the ruined castle, where a scene in the inn’s communal bath prompts an extended defense of Japanese modesty against likely Western assumptions. At Hakone and Moto Hakone he paints the colossal rock-cut Rokudo-no-Jizo attributed to Kobo Daishi and the roadside tombs of the Soga brethren and Tora Gozen on the old Tokaido road, while conversations with fellow hotel guests — over a counterfeited “Black and White” whisky label and a pirated Winsor and Newton paint tube — lead him to defend Japanese commercial honesty against “the wholesale abuse often heard in the European settlements,” reserving sharper criticism for the extortionate double pricing he and a French friend meet at a Kyoto theater.

At Nikko, Tyndale gives a chapter and a half to the mausolea of the Shoguns Ieyasu and Iemitsu — the red Sacred Bridge and its legend of Shodo Shonin, the Yomei-mon gate with its deliberately flawed “Evil-Averting Pillar,” Jingoro’s carved Sleeping Cat, and Ieyasu’s plain bronze tomb — while grumbling over the fees charged for every fresh day’s sketching; his stay coincides with the arrival of a guard of honor for Lord Kitchener, in Japan for the autumn maneuvers. A side trip to Lake Chuzenji and the Kegon Falls supplies his maple studies of late October. In Tokyo, lodged at a Japanese inn overlooking the bay, he paints chrysanthemums in Mukojima’s tea-gardens and the crowded precincts of the Kwannon temple at Asakusa, visits the licensed Yoshiwara quarter — recording the “sad sight” of some two thousand indentured women and the Salvation Army campaign that, around 1900, helped make it easier for them to buy their freedom — and visits the tombs of the Forty-Seven Ronin at Sengakuji, retelling their vendetta from Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan. An evening at a charity theater performance with his landlady’s household staff, and a chrysanthemum tableau built entirely of wired blossoms, round out his account of the capital.

Driven south by the cold, Tyndale winters at Atami, painting orange-groves and, from mid-December, the blossoming plum orchard of Bai-en, and records with some relish a Christmas dinner at which a boorish English guest orders the landlady’s carefully arranged flowers taken off his table. After finally seeing Atami’s geyser erupt, he returns north by way of Kamakura and a rained-out stop at Nagoya to Kyoto, parts from Hirosue Tsuda, his guide of five months, sees for the first time the Nishi Hongwanji’s Kano-school apartments and the popular Inari shrine, and closes with recommendations for a visitor with only a week to spare. The book ends with his own departure for the milder climate of Hong Kong, bidding “Sayonara” to “the numerous Japanese with whom I had come in friendly contact” and a farewell, in English, to “the patient reader.” Its apparatus beyond the text is a table of contents, a list of the thirty-two color plates — from the frontispiece, “The Kwannon at Asakusa,” to the closing “A Plum Orchard” — and an index running to page 317.

Kotaro Mochizuki’s Japan To-Day is a souvenir volume made for the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition held in London in 1910, and its title leaf issues it as a special number of the Japan Financial and Economic Monthly, published by “The Liberal News Agency” of Kyobashi, Tokyo, whose president Mochizuki was, under the further descriptions “Ex-M.P.” and “Barrister-at-Law.” His signed preface opens, “‘Japan To-day’ is perhaps a Sphinx-like riddle to the peoples of the world,” dates the world’s new curiosity about Japan from “the late gigantic struggle in which Japan was engaged in 1904-1905,” and records that he was “educated in England for the space of eight years beginning with 1890” and founded his agency in 1906. It also states how the book was made: “The first page of the work was written last December which was printed off as it was written, and the entire work was completed in May of the present year” — begun, that is, in December 1909 and set in type as it was composed, while the same agency was translating and printing official exhibition literature for the Bureau of Mines, the Bureau of Agriculture and other departments. Mochizuki apologizes for Japan’s shortage of English-language printers and proofreaders, and asks indulgence for “a hiatus in the selection of representative firms and undertakings of Japanese productive and technical industries.” The result runs to 772 pages, with a separately paginated supplement and a long run of advertisements after it.

An apparatus of patronage comes first. The printed contents lists three groups of portraits: five of sovereigns and princes, fourteen of ambassadors under “Portraits and Autographs,” and thirty-two under “Letters, Autographs and Commendations (with portraits)” — the exhibition’s commissioners, then statesmen and financiers including Prince Yamagata, Marquis Katsura, Count Okuma and Baron Shibusawa — more than fifty people in all. The Emperor and Empress of Japan share one plate and the King and Queen of Great Britain a second, each set in the same green Art Nouveau border of thorned roses and chrysanthemums; the Crown Prince of Japan and the Prince of Wales share a third and Prince Fushimi and Prince Arthur of Connaught a fourth, both unbordered. Autographs are reproduced photographically: Sir Claude MacDonald’s holograph letter of April 28, 1910, which calls the endeavor “worthy of all praise & much to be commended” while admitting that he had “only had time to glance at” the book; a Russian ambassador’s note on embassy letterhead; a photograph of a stamped, postmarked envelope addressed to the agency. Baron Oura calls the volume “an indispensable vade mecum to those foreigners who would know Japan and things Japanese”; Masanao Matsudaira writes that “Mr. Mochizuki has become engaged in the compilation of the present book.” A folding map in color, “Japan and her neighbours in Asia,” with an inset panel headed “TŌKYO AND ITS VICINITY,” prints Korea and Karafuto in the same pink as Japan.

Chapter I, “Outlines of the History of Japanese Civilization,” occupies pages 4 to 68, though only its first thirty-odd pages are history. Period by period — primitive age, Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi, Momoyama, Edo, Meiji — the narrative is accompanied by marginal dates and, under six of its headings, by a bold parenthetical line of European synchronisms, the Muromachi section glossed with the Avignon exile, the Hundred Years and Roses wars, the discovery of America and the Armada. Its judgments are blunt. The seventh-century reforms were “nothing more than a mere slavish imitation of things Chinese”; Nara was “nothing more nor less than an exhibition of civilizations of various countries”; the Heian period “was the period of luxury, effeminacy and indolence”; of Hideyoshi’s seven years in Korea, “the prolonged invasion gained nothing” beyond “movable types and the habit of smoking tobacco.” The Meiji section insists that “It is a mistake to think that Japan has attained the present degree of civilization during the last fifty years.” A concluding section numbers seven national characteristics, the second being that “The Japanese are patriotic and brave, but lovers of peace.” The chapter’s remaining half is exhibition business: eleven pages on diplomatic and commercial relations with Britain, seven on Japan’s appearances at foreign exhibitions from Vienna in 1873 onward, and fourteen of exhibit lists and exhibitors’ organization, promising that “A miniature Japan both past and present will be built up in London.”

Chapter II, “Japan and Her Natural Beauty” (pages 69 to 104), is a guidebook organized by railway line rather than by landscape. It argues from geology that a volcanic country must be a beautiful one, declines elaborately to dispute Dr. Lubbock’s claim for the scenery of the English isles before trumping it with volcanoes, and states its office plainly: “Visitors from Europe and America flock to this country for sight-seeing. We presume to become a guide to these guests in terra incognito.” A long passage of scene-painting is quoted, with attribution, from the Imperial Railway Department, and readers wanting more on the capital are referred to a guidebook the author’s own agency publishes monthly. Tokyo takes about three pages, its parks, temples and theaters catalogued down to the names of leading actors, with the verdict that “Ueno park is poetical and that of Asakusa is prosaic.” The route then follows the government lines north from Ueno to Nikko, Sendai, Matsushima — over which the book pauses for “rather a lengthy description” — and Hokkaido; down the Tokaido to Yokohama, Kamakura, Hakone and Fuji; through the Kwansai to Ise, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka and Kobe; then Sanyo, Sanin, Kyushu, and finally Okinawa and Formosa. Sixteen private railways, the electric lines and the coasting steamship services follow entry by entry, so that the chapter ends not in scenery but in mileages and sailing schedules. Korea and Manchuria are not on the itinerary.

Chapter III, “The Political Organization and National Life in Japan” (pages 105 to 317), is the administration’s account of itself. It opens with fifteen pages of directory: the Imperial Household’s twenty-five offices, the Privy Council, the Cabinet, each ministry’s bureaus glossed in a sentence apiece. Topical essays follow on education, agriculture, mining, earthquakes (one signed “By F. Omori”), iron, the national debt, the monopolies, harbor works, the army and the Diet. Nine sections headed “Exhibits of the —,” eight in the printed contents, are catalogues rather than prose. The essays admit failure freely, at least fifteen times in fifty pages: Kamaishi abandoned in 1882, a Diet refusing to fund iron works, Yawata’s “heavy losses,” Kobe harbor’s “no great progress,” banknotes printed in Germany, rarely letting one stand. The national loans section balances the war’s cost — the per-head debt risen from 10.835 yen in 1902 to 44.155 in 1905 — against territory: Korea, “our protectorate,” Karafuto and leased Manchuria, 462,765 square miles against Japan’s 162,600, before conceding that peace came “without any cash indemnity.” The fighting is dated constantly and narrated nowhere: both declarations of war are printed entire but left unexplained, “since they are fresh in the minds of the readers,” and the army’s display is four battle tableaux, the latest 1894. Then the chapter dissolves: the Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto municipalities, the Red Cross, then twelve pages of prefectural and civic promotion in which “The City of Nagasaki” carries a merchant’s captioned portrait and closes on his contracting firm.

Chapter IV, “Japanese Industrial and Economic Activities,” is the largest part of the book, pages 318 to 770. It announces its rule at the outset: “we include all branches of industry, even if they have not any connection with the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition,” and calls the attention of “foreigners who are interested in our business and industry.” Several hundred entries on firms and men follow, under trade headings — banks, insurance, exchanges, communications, dockyards, gas works, hotels, book stores, department stores, matches, crucibles, pearl merchant, newspapers, lawyers, temples — two of them holding a single firm. The standard entry gives a foundation date and founder, capital, officers, exhibition medals and captioned photographs; many are headed by a man’s name with his trade in parentheses beneath, and close in personal encomium. Nobody profiled is criticized in the book’s own voice; one liniment maker’s entry quotes journals attacking him for “deceiving the public with exaggerated advertisements” and records his summons to the Tokyo and Kyoto courts, only to report the case dropped. The largest houses get real reporting — Mitsu Bishi seven pages, Sumitomo six, Kanegafuchi four — with dock dimensions and mine-by-mine data, while the mining and colliery sections carry miners’ daily wages by kind of labor and creches and pit hospitals. Others break off into sightseeing, eleven pages of hotels, or into open advertisement: a gas company “being promoted in Tokyo at present” gets its promoters, its capital table and a forecast dividend over ten percent; a hotel notice ends “(Vide Adv. Col).”

The chapter also profiles its own publisher. Three pages headed “The Liberal News Agency,” with a studio portrait of Mochizuki, sit between “Geisha Girls of Japan” and “Lawyers” in the same format as every commercial entry, and reprint six press notices of his previous special number, among them the Japan Gazette’s remark that it comprised, “with the liberal meed of advertising, over 300 pages” and “should prove a financial success.” The last sixty-odd pages turn to the empire — Formosa thirty-four pages, Korea fourteen, South Manchuria fourteen, Karafuto three — more than half of them company profiles again. Here the writing is official in tone and unembarrassed: Formosa’s monopolies are set out, of which “The camphor monopoly may well be said to be the first step in the practice of the system of commercial imperialism adopted by Japan,” while the opium monopoly is defended, in the same paragraph, as the expedient way to put down “by degrees” a deep-rooted habit; of the aboriginal people, “The Aiyu is also a kind of the police whose function is to keep the savages within their own limits”; of schooling in the island, “in educating the natives, it is necessary to make them change not only their manners and customs, but also their entire characters.” Korea is a protectorate under its Residency-General throughout, and the annexation is nowhere mentioned in the volume. A closing note defers four further chapters to be “delivered later on to those who subscribe to the present issue.”

Those chapters became the Supplementary Chapters, separately paginated 1 to 108, prefaced by Mochizuki on the eve of his departure for the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition on June 20, 1910, with the note that “during my absence, Mr. Yoshitaro Negishi, Vice-President of the Liberal News Agency, took the entire charge.” Forty-four pages of essays on religion, literature and the arts, bushido and the position of women are followed by sixty-four pages of “Notes” — some seventy more temples, banks, firms and businessmen that “should properly speaking have been included” and were added “in order to complete the regular copy.” The printed “LIST OF ILLUSTRATION” names only nine inserted sheets: the map, a plate of early foreign correspondence, a print of a Netherlandish peasants’ fair, views of Matsushima, two goldfish plates, Admiral Togo’s portrait and autograph, Prince Ito’s autograph with Count Itagaki’s portrait, a tapestry piece by Jimbei Kawashima, who designed the volume’s two bindings and died during its production, and a plan for the new building of Sojo-ji. Hundreds of half-tones printed on the letterpress pages are listed nowhere. Behind the main text stands a long table of errata; behind the supplement, an incomplete printed list of some ninety advertisers, at least a fifth of whom also have entries, and some sixty pages of display advertising. A Japanese colophon closes the volume, dating its first part to May 3, 1910 and its second to August 28, and pricing the two, bound together, at fifteen yen.

A Vagabond Journey Around the World (1910) is Harry A. Franck’s first-person account of a self-imposed test: whether, as he puts it in “A Foreword of Explanation,” “a man with a bit of energy and good health could start without money and make a journey around the globe.” A recent University of Michigan graduate and language teacher, Franck set out on June 18, 1904, “without money, without weapons, and without carrying baggage or supplies,” financing only his photography (he carried a kodak, spending an initial $104 stake early in the trip and, by his own accounting, $113 more “in photography, from my earnings” before the journey ended) by working as a cattle hand, sailor, beggar, streetcar spy, and common laborer. He insists in the foreword that he “made no attempt during the journey to rise above the estate of the common laborer,” a program he underscores with an epigraph from Rousseau on needing to descend among ordinary people to know a country’s real character. The book’s twenty-two chapters follow the route in strict order — cattle boat to Glasgow, tramping through Britain, Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, beachcombing in Marseilles, a berth on a Bibby liner to Port Said, the Arab world, Palestine, and Egypt, a stowaway’s run to Ceylon, then India, Burma, an overland tramp across the Malay Peninsula and the jungles of Siam to Hong Kong and Shanghai — and it is only in the last of these twenty-two chapters, and the first half of the one after it, roughly thirty pages out of more than five hundred, that the itinerary finally reaches Japan.

The European chapters set the book’s method: Franck crosses the Atlantic as a “cattle stiff” on the cattle boat Sardinian, tramps Scotland (a rain-drenched ascent of Ben Lomond followed by a lost, bog-slogging descent) and Ireland, rides Dutch canal-barges and German fourth-class trains, and falls in with two French miners who “play the merchant,” peddling shoelaces and thread to dodge France’s vagrancy laws, before wintering into Italy, where a Siena innkeeper’s household is dumbfounded to learn that American soldiers are volunteers rather than conscripts. Marseilles supplies an extended set piece on destitution — days without food, the monastery-run Asile de Nuit with its nightly sermon and its “dress-suit vagabonds,” German beggars whose polish fools sentimental tourists — before Franck signs onto the liner Warwickshire as a jack-of-all-work bound for Port Said.

From Port Said the book moves through Damascus, where Franck’s kodak nearly gets him mobbed by a band concert audience convinced he means them harm, and through Palestine’s mission stations and Bedouin country to Cairo, where a German “union” of professional beggars — led by the letter-writer Otto Pia and the blustering “Heinrich” — schools him in “the graft” of touring the Nile as a mendicant. He stows away on the Worcestershire, sister ship to the Warwickshire, to reach Ceylon, where the Colombo waterfront yields the book’s most developed characters: John Askins, M.A., an asthma-exiled Irish engineer; Marten, a Tacoma pearl diver who taunts sharks; and “Dick Haywood,” a self-described Sing Sing escapee who tags along, uninvited, through India. In Madras, Franck is paid to ride streetcars incognito, checking conductors for graft; in Calcutta and up-country he freight-hops, dines with a district commissioner on the Hoogly, and eventually sheds Haywood. Burma brings the Shwe Dagon pagoda and a Rangoon monastery emptied by rumors of plague doctors; from there Franck and an Australian companion, Gerald James, tramp on foot across the Malay Peninsula and through the jungles of Siam — fording leech-infested streams, dodging a firing squad of unwilling Siamese soldiers, and being feasted by the man known locally as the “jungle king” of Kung Chow — before a bloody deck riot with Chinese crewmen aboard the steamer Paklat and a passage through Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Japan enters the book at the very end of “The Jungles of Siam,” when Franck takes third-class deck passage from Shanghai to Nagasaki on the Nippon Yusen Kaisha steamer Chenan, sharing rice-and-fish box lunches with Japanese students who insist, not unreasonably in his account, that he has reached “the most beautiful spot on the globe.” The chapter that follows, headed on its own pages “Wandering in Japan,” covers a third-class-rail-and-foot tramp from Nagasaki through Hiroshima, Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, and Numadzu to Yokohama and Tokyo. Its through-line is surveillance: because Japan and Russia are at war, Franck’s secondhand khaki uniform — bought from a Nagasaki pawnshop that stocks gear from returning Philippines veterans — repeatedly gets him taken for a Russian, and relays of police spies dog him for days at a stretch, one so doggedly that he walks the man forty-six miles into physical collapse. He is mobbed by curious crowds in the hamlet of Hongo after lighting an unfamiliar “bulldog” pipe, refused privacy for a bath by a Numadzu innkeeper who calls him “damn selfish American,” and lectured in elaborate pantomime by a wounded Nagoya sergeant who refuses to believe his nationality even as he passes Russian prisoners of war en route (at Maibara on the platform, and quartered in Nagoya’s castle). Franck’s judgments of the country pull in different directions within the same chapter: he writes that walking Japanese cities at night poses less risk than “any metropolis of our own country,” that rural Japan, once more dangerous to walk than China, now poses “no more risk than in England,” and that the police spy-tailing system is “something of a farce” more than a menace — yet he introduces one incident, in which a would-be benefactor humiliates him over a single copper sen, by noting that he had already judged the Japanese “the least lovable and by far the most selfish” people on the globe. Along the way he turns down a Nagasaki innkeeper’s offer to “get married” to one of her lodging-house’s six girls, lodges with an American hotelkeeper’s bilingual Japanese-American children, and is tucked into a mosquito-net canopy bed in Hiroshima by an imperturbable hostess.

Reaching Yokohama near-penniless, Franck opens “Homeward Bound” still very much in Japan: he and a Chilean beachcomber sleep for weeks in the unoccupied Russian consulate — Russian territory the Japanese police cannot touch, emptied by the war — vaulting its gate nightly and living on soba from street carts and scraps from a departing shipmate’s laundry bundle. The American vice-consul eventually maneuvers him aboard the square-rigged British ship Glenalvon as a nominal “stowaway,” a fiction that lets her captain, Andrews, sidestep formally signing on crew; once at sea Franck is duly entered in the log as an able seaman at a pound a month. Getting the Glenalvon out of Tokyo Bay proves its own ordeal — twelve days of tacking against a dead headwind, a morning spent drifting toward a moored Japanese mine before a parted tow-cable is remade just in time — before a tug finally clears her on August 11.

The Pacific crossing that follows is the book’s roughest stretch: six weeks of gales and freezing rain in which the crew “lived in the rigging, like apes in their tree tops,” twenty-seven sails are blown out, an apprentice falls to his death from the royal yard, a hundred and sixty feet up, after a quarrel with the mate, boils and frostbite lay up most of the hands, the tobacco runs out, and a worm-eaten biscuit cask turns out to be stamped 1878. Franck lays this litany to a supposed shipboard “Jonah,” debated without resolution among three rival factions of the crew. Landfall comes off Puget Sound on September 21; paid off near Victoria rather than continuing to Tacoma, Franck completes the circuit overland and by freight — Seattle, a week laying sidewalks in Spokane, a cattle train out of Havre, Montana — reaching “the portals of my paternal home” in Chicago on the morning of October fourteenth, the sentence on which the narrative ends.

Throughout, the book is carried by more than a hundred captioned photographs that the title page advertises and the foreword confirms Franck took himself along the way, framed by a frontispiece portrait of the author and a detailed analytical table of contents cataloguing the book’s people and places by subject. The plates keep the same wry, specific captioning style everywhere they appear, Japan included — “A swimming-school of Japan, teachers on the bank, novices near the shore,” “Women do most of the work in the rice-fields of Japan,” “A Japanese lady,” “Japanese canal-boats and coolies of Kioto,” “The castle of Nagoya, in which many Russian prisoners were kept” — alongside equivalent images from every other leg of the circuit, from Walkerville cattle barns to Cairo beggars to Ceylon rickshaw men. The foreword closes by acknowledging Harper’s Weekly, Outing, and The Century Magazine for earlier publishing some of the chapters.

Picturesque Japan, or Land of the Mikado’s title page announces “graphic accounts” of Japanese history, religion, government, and customs, “embellished with a great number of superb illustrations,” and bylines Chester R. Stratton as “the well-known author and traveller” — though the book never actually claims he made the voyage to Japan himself. Its preface, which calls the volume “this great work,” speaks throughout in the third person about what “the reader” will find — a “delightful view of the ancient city of Kioto,” a tour of “the crowded streets of the great city of Tokio,” a look behind “the curtain” of the Mikado’s court. The book bears this out: built as seventeen numbered chapters running from a legendary founding of the empire to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and a closing survey of the constitutional “New Japan,” it turns out to be less a single author’s composition than a compilation, in which long blocks of other writers’ first-person prose — most of them explicitly credited — are stitched together with Stratton’s own connective third-person narration and short subheadings such as “A Bloody Conflict” or “Blind Shampooers” dropped in every page or two.

The opening chapter, told in Stratton’s own compiling voice, retells the legendary founding of the empire by the conqueror Zinmou, his fleet of war-junks and seven-year campaign up through Kiousiou and Niphon, and the eventual withdrawal of the secluded Mikado’s court from Osaka to Kioto, with digressions on the Kami priesthood, the great bell of Kioto, and the annual matsuri processions. A later chapter, “The Residence of the Shoguns,” follows the same historical thread through Yoritomo’s investiture and the founding of Kamakura, a Mongol ultimatum from Koublai-Khan, the arrival of Portuguese missionaries and the conversions credited to “the apostolic zeal and persuasive power of Saint Francis Xavier,” and their suppression — “more than 20,500 victims” by the chapter’s count — under the Shogun Fide-Yosi and his lieutenant Iyeyas: it was Fide-Yosi who built the Tokaido highway between the two courts, and Iyeyas who later moved the capital to Yeddo.

The greater part of the book’s descriptive matter, though — well over half, nearly two-thirds, of its length in chapters II through X — is not Stratton’s own writing but an extended quotation introduced as the work of “M. Aimé Humbert, Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan from the Swiss Republic,” whose first-person account runs, under Stratton’s inserted subheadings, from a coasting voyage up the Inland Sea and into the Bay of Yeddo through a residence at Yokohama. Humbert’s narrative supplies the book’s most concrete reporting: a visit from the wives of the Yakounine guard, who marvel at European furniture and beg for his Swiss uniform buttons; the canals, bridges, and pleasure quarters of Tokio; weddings sealed by a two-spouted saki vase and funerals at which “the mother of the family remains to the last beside the corpse”; the Doll Festival, which he says he “witnessed... at Nagasaki on the 20th of April, 1863”; and a long account of Shinto and Buddhist practice, from the annual purification of a temple’s holy place at Foutchiou to the great Sannoo procession with its cardboard white elephant and its parade of named courtesans.

Later chapters shift to other voices. The New Year’s chapter follows an unattributed first-person narrator through a Ginza fair with “an artist friend — Henry Savage Landor,” haggling over lacquer and netsuke in pidgin Japanese, watching a pickpocket nearly mobbed by the crowd, and pausing, mid-fair, to note that he will spend “the witching hour” at year’s turn “thinking of home folks across the seas”; the chapter on Japanese women, in a similarly unattributed voice, quotes Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème by name on the tea-house habits of Tokio’s geishas. “Striking Features of Japanese Life” is explicitly credited to “Sir Edwin Arnold, the distinguished journalist, author and traveller,” and opens with his arrival in Yokohama’s “Mississippi Bay,” reproducing at length the Elizabethan spelling of Will Adams’s own account of landing at “Nangasaque” three centuries before.

The book’s final movement turns from ethnography to current events. One chapter surveys the politics behind the 1894–95 war between Japan and China — the tax-farming misrule of Corea’s King Li Houi, the rival ambitions of China, Japan, and Russia, and the Shanghai assassination of the pro-Japanese exile Kim-Ok-Kiun; the next, credited to “a well-informed Japanese, Julius Kampei Matumato, a graduate of one of our colleges,” gives a partisan account of the battles of Asan, Ping-Yang, and the Yalu River, naming individual officers and quoting a Chinese general’s defiance (“Retire, never! Give me your brevet, and then go if you like!”), and ending with the prediction that “the banner of the rising sun” would soon fly over Pekin.

The volume closes with “The New Japan,” a survey of the country’s geography, population, agriculture, and silk and porcelain industries, and of the Meiji constitutional government — Cabinet, Privy Council, and two-house Diet — credited to “Mr. Stevens” of the Japanese Legation at Washington and prefaced by a note of endorsement signed by the Minister, Shinichiro Kurino; it ends on the hope that Americans will always take pride that Commodore Perry’s treaty had “first brought her into touch with the world.” No index, glossary, or appendix follows; the printed text ends at page 256, followed by a few blank leaves and a decorative endpaper. Throughout, the “superb illustrations” promised on the title page appear as full-page engravings worked directly into the numbered chapters and captioned in block capitals — the Emperor and Empress, views of Kioto and Yokohama, a bronze Buddha at Kamakura, types of Japanese soldiers, and, in the war chapters, a Corean porter — rather than gathered on separate plates.

Sights and Scenes in Fair Japan is a picture album rather than a book: forty-eight captioned photographs issued by the Imperial Government Railways of Tokyo, laid out in oblong landscape format, with no preface, no essay, no list of plates, no index and no colophon. Apart from the title page, the map at the front and a photographer’s stamp at the back, the captions are the only text in it. Each leaf carries one unnumbered image above one to three lines of small type; the plates are printed in monochrome and most of them then colored by hand. The captions are pitched squarely at an English-reading visitor: Fuji’s height is given in feet, Japanese terms are glossed inside the caption itself — “The Cha-no-yu, or Tea-Ceremony, One of the Esoteric Arts of Japan,” “The Ikebana, or Flower Arrangement,” “Playing the ‘Koto,’ a Japanese Musical Instrument” — and Tokyo on a holiday is “en fête.” Little is argued and nothing is attributed; the captions name, date and now and then gloss — a shrine “of the Highest Sanctity,” the tea ceremony as “One of the Esoteric Arts of Japan,” the Kinkakuji as “A Villa of an Early Shōgun” — and one of them drops in an unattributed line of verse.

The first thirteen plates keep to Tokyo: the main entrance to the Imperial Palace with a carriage crossing the gravel, cherry blossom in Uyeno Park, a street on the modern plan lined with brick blocks and telegraph poles, the palace moat with the government departments behind it, the mausolea of the Tokugawa Shōguns, a canal walled with warehouses, an iris garden, a department store with glass cases and clerks in kimono, a lotus lake. Four of those thirteen name no place at all, and that placeless interleaving continues to the end. The album then runs southwest — the Daibutsu at Kamakura, Miyanoshita in the Hakone Mountains, Mt. Fuji, the Pacific coast from the Tōkaidō Line, the Grand Shrine of Ise, Kiyomidzu and the Kinkakuji and an evening on the Kamogawa and the Higashi Honganji at Kyōto, the Kasuga Shrine at Nara and Hōryūji nearby, Dotombori in Osaka, Ama-no-hashidate, the castle at Himeji, the Inland Sea near Onomichi, Miyajima, Kintai-bashi, Chiyo-no-matsubara and Mt. Aso in Kyūshū — before doubling back northeast to Nikko and Matsushima. Two habits run through the album. One is the round of the seasons — cherry, wistaria, iris, lotus, peony, plum, autumn maple, chrysanthemum — half of them pinned to Tokyo and half floating free. The other is performance and interior: five plates — the Odori, the Cha-no-yu, the koto, flower arrangement and a closing dance — appear to be worked by the same small cast of costumed women, and beside them stand an empty reception room, a display of festival dolls with nobody in the picture, and a Nō performance before an audience on an open-air stage. The railway barely appears: one plate shows a train, and it is the one whose caption announces it; another caption sets the viewer on a passing train that is nowhere in the picture, and a third names Shimbashi Station.

Physically the album is more elaborate than its contents. Both covers are woven textile rather than printed board: the front shows Fuji behind a stand of pines, with a small procession in old-time costume moving across the foreground — a mounted figure, attendants on foot, bearers with a load — and the title woven into the sky in orange capitals; the back continues the same design in waves, hills and pines, with no lettering at all. Plum-colored braided cords pass through the inner edge of the boards. Inside, front and back, are decorated endpapers: gold flecking scattered in horizontal bands, with a drawn stream, reeds and waterfowl along the lower margin. The title page gives the English title above two lines of Japanese characters and the imprint “IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT RAILWAYS / TOKYO, JAPAN.” It is followed by a map headed “GENERAL MAP OF THE GOVERNMENT RAILWAYS IN JAPAN.” and drawn to a scale of 1 : 5000000, whose legend distinguishes government railway lines open, those under construction, government connecting steamer routes, and private companies’ railway lines and steamer routes; dotted lines leave the sheet for Vladivostock, America, Shanghai and Dairen. The “(1910)” printed beside the lines under construction is the only date the album gives. At the back, in the lower corner of an otherwise blank leaf, a small red stamp reads “PHOTOGRAPHS BY” and a blotted initial, then “OGAWA. F.R.P.S.,” overlapping a Japanese seal.

The Shinto Cult presents itself, in its prefatory Note, as “the substance of a course of lectures on the old Shinto cult” that Terry had been giving for years to his classes in Comparative Religion, “condensed and adapted to the purpose of a little manual” meant to interest general readers and to “suggest some valuable hints to the Christian missionary who is to come face to face with the Japanese people.” The book unfolds as twenty-six short numbered chapters, moving from Japan’s geography and the age and origins of its people, through the textual sources of Shinto belief and its mythology, to its sanctuaries, rituals, and historical mixture with other faiths, and closing with an explicitly Christian assessment of the cult’s “defects” and possible “fulfillment.” Terry draws his material entirely from published scholarship and translated primary texts — the Ko-ji-ki, the Nihongi, Ernest Satow’s and Karl Florenz’s translations of ancient rituals in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and books by Basil Hall Chamberlain, W. G. Aston, Lafcadio Hearn, Percival Lowell, and Sidney Gulick — rather than from any claimed encounter of his own with Japan.

Opening chapters sketch Japan as “the longest and the narrowest country in the world,” stretching some twenty-five hundred miles from Kamchatka to Formosa, and take up the disputed question of whether Shinto counts as a religion at all, which Terry answers affirmatively against writers who call it mere national sentiment. He traces the people’s origin to a migration “from the northern central part of Asia” through Korea, glosses the word Shinto as “the Way of the gods” (Kami no michi), and devotes a chapter to sources — the Ko-ji-ki (“Record of Ancient Matters,” written about A.D. 712), the more Chinese-styled Nihongi (A.D. 720), the Yengishiki ritual code, the Norito prayers, and the Manyoshu poetry collection. From the Ko-ji-ki’s opening he retells the cosmogony at length: Izanagi and Izanami stirring the sea with a jeweled spear to create the first island, the death of Izanami in childbirth to the fire-god and Izanagi’s descent to find her decaying body in the underworld (which Terry compares to Orpheus and Eurydice), and the birth of the sun-goddess Amaterasu and Susa-no-Wo, the “Impetuous-Male-Deity,” as Izanagi washes himself clean afterward, ending in the descent of Amaterasu’s “Sovran Grandchild” as ancestor of the Mikados.

Terry locates the “essence of the Shinto cult” in ancestor worship joined to recognition of the Mikado’s divinity as “the incarnation and earthly representation” of the celestial gods, and describes the cult’s principal sites and objects: the “Two Great Divine Palaces” at Ise, rebuilt every twenty years in unpainted cryptomeria, the rival shrine at Kitzuki in Idzumo, the torii gateway, the go-hei wand, offerings of rice and cloth (he notes there are “no bloody sacrificial rites”), and the sacred mirror kept wrapped in successive layers of silk, which he likens to the ark and its “tables of testimony.” Following Lafcadio Hearn’s threefold scheme, he treats the cult as domestic worship at the household “Shelf of the August Spirits,” communal worship of the local Ujigami, and national worship at the great state shrines, illustrating the last with quoted extracts from the annual Harvest ritual and from the ritual of the twice-yearly Great Purification (Oho-harahe), which distinguishes “heavenly offenses” from “earthly offenses” and which he discusses as evidence of “a moral and religious basis for the Japanese love of cleanliness.”

Later chapters trace Shinto’s mixture with Chinese thought and, more decisively, with Buddhism — introduced, Terry writes, “about A.D. 652” and eventually absorbing Shinto under Kukai’s “Ryobu Shinto,” which taught that the native deities were avatars of Buddha, a fusion he says dominated Japanese religious life for roughly a thousand years. He describes an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “Revival of Pure Shinto” led by the scholars Mabuchi, Motowori, and Hirata, culminating in the 1871 disestablishment of Buddhism as state religion; a chapter on “Esoteric Shinto,” mountain pilgrimages that Terry says “induce mystic divine possession”; and one on “Roman Catholicism in Japan,” recounting Francis Xavier’s 1549 landing at Kagoshima, the “bitter reaction and bloody persecutions” that followed — which Terry attributes partly to Jesuit “meddling with affairs of State” — and the country’s subsequent closing until the anti-Christian edicts were withdrawn in 1873. Weighing claims of Japanese “religious indifference,” including Marquis Ito’s remark that “I regard religion itself as quite unnecessary for a nation’s life,” Terry counters that the household shrines found in nearly every home make the Japanese “exceedingly religious.” His concluding chapter names four “defects” in Shinto — its lack of “any clear or helpful concept of one God and Father of all,” its lack of “a clear concept of sin,” its “low estimate of womanhood,” and its “low estimate of human life” — and then argues, invoking Jesus’s language of fulfilling rather than destroying the law, that Shinto’s purification rites, its animism, and its ancestor and Mikado worship can each be “fulfilled” by Christian teaching rather than simply abolished, comparing the hoped-for supersession of Shinto to the New Testament’s supersession of Mosaic Judaism. The book closes with a two-page “Select Bibliography” of the English-language works — by Aston, Brinkley, Chamberlain, Griffis, Gulick, Hearn, Lowell, and others, together with the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan — that Terry names as the “principal authorities relied on in the preparation of this essay.”

Longford presents this book as a popular one-volume history of Japan “from the creation to the accession of the present Emperor,” written, as his preface puts it, for “the lay reader” rather than “the serious student,” in a style meant to make its perusal “no greater task than that of an ordinary novel.” The title page gives his standing to attempt this: he was “late H.M.’s Consul at Nagasaki,” Professor of Japanese at King’s College, London, and a barrister of the Middle Temple. His preface names the scholarship he leans on — Chamberlain’s and Aston’s translations of the Kojiki and Nihongi, Satow’s translations of fragments of the Nihon Guaishi, the Jesuit History of the Church in Japan, Kaempfer’s History of Japan, and the printed diaries of Cocks and Saris — and adds to it “thirty-three years’ official residence in Japan,” beginning before the abolition of feudalism and ending shortly before the war with Russia, during which, he says, he visited or resided in almost every part of the Empire and trod every historic spot the book mentions. The narrative that follows runs seventeen chapters and five appendices, opening with a chapter on the country and its people before turning to the story proper.

That opening chapter is blunt in its judgments: the Ainu, reduced by Longford’s day to “a few thousand souls” in the northern island, are described as “still a race of savages, ignorant, dirty in their habits, drunken,” while the Japanese national character is credited with courtesy, courage, and personal cleanliness and just as flatly denied truthfulness, chastity in men, or scruple about cruelty to draught animals. From there the book moves into mythology proper — the primordial chaos, Izanagi and Izanami churning the islands into being from the “floating bridge of Heaven,” the birth and cave-seclusion of the Sun Goddess, and Susa-no-o’s slaying of the eight-headed serpent — retold at length in translated quotation from the Kojiki and Nihongi, which Longford calls “the Bibles of Japan.” The “Dark Ages” chapter carries the line from Jimmu Tenno’s traditional founding of the empire in 660 B.C. through a procession of legendary emperors, the exploits of the warrior-prince Yamato Dake, and the Empress Jingo’s invasion of Korea, before the introduction of writing in the fifth century and of Buddhism in the sixth bring the narrative onto what Longford treats as solid historical ground.

The chapters on “The Dawn of History” and on Nara, Heian, and the Fujiwara trace Buddhism’s conquest of the court under Prince Mumayado (Shotoku Daishi) and the long usurpation of Imperial authority by the Fujiwara regents, who, Longford writes, reduced successive Emperors to “mere faineants.” Their decline gives way to the rise of the warrior houses of Taira and Minamoto, and the book devotes two long chapters — “The Rise of the Taira” and “Yoritomo and the Gem-Pei War” — to Kiyomori’s dictatorship, the destruction of the Taira fleet at Dan no Ura, and the careers of Yoritomo and his brother Yoshitsune, rendered mostly through the received legends (Yoshitsune and the giant Benkei, the faithful mistress Tokiwa, the tragic Atsumori) rather than as dry chronicle. Subsequent chapters follow the Hojo regents, including their repulse of a small Mongol raid on Tsushima in 1274 and then of Kublai Khan’s full invasion armada, destroyed by a typhoon off Kiushiu, and the Ashikaga Shoguns, under whom, despite two centuries of civil war, Longford locates “the golden age of Japanese art” — the tea ceremony, the No drama, and the great school of painters — before Japan’s first contact with Europeans.

Three linked chapters carry the story through the unification of the country: Nobunaga’s rise and his massacre of the armed Buddhist monks of Mount Hiyei; Hideyoshi, whom Longford presents as the son of a peasant woodcutter and, in his words, “the one and only self-made man” of Japanese history “in the sense of Lincoln,” whose unification of the empire, patronage of Osaka, and two invasions of Korea are described in detail, closing with his gruesome purge of his own nephew Hidetsugu’s household; and Iyeyasu, whose victory at Seki ga Hara and reduction of Hideyoshi’s heir at Osaka Castle founded the Tokugawa Shogunate. This last chapter closes with a summary of the “Yuigon,” or Legacy of Iyeyasu, the hundred-chapter code of maxims by which Longford says the Shogun meant to guide his successors, and which is reproduced in full as an appendix.

Two chapters trace Europe’s intrusion into this settled order. “Christianity to the First Persecution” and “Christianity to the Second Persecution” follow Francis Xavier’s landing at Kagoshima in 1549 through the Church’s rapid growth, its favor under Nobunaga, Hideyoshi’s sudden reversal and crucifixion of twenty-four martyrs at Nagasaki, and the escalating tortures under Iyeyasu and his successors that culminate in the Shimabara revolt of 1637–38, put down with the help of Dutch naval gunfire from a ship sent, at Japanese request, to bombard the rebels’ stronghold — a service Longford calls an act of “eternal infamy” on the Dutch commander’s part. A separate chapter, “European Trade and Intercourse,” tells the parallel story of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English merchants: the 1637 edict that expelled the Portuguese and closed the country for over two centuries; the degrading confinement of the surviving Dutch factory at Desima; Will Adams, the English pilot who became Iyeyasu’s adviser and shipbuilder; and, at the chapter’s end, the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853 and the diplomacy of Townsend Harris, who won Japanese trust “by his own personal efforts” and secured the treaty of trade and shipping only after warning that British and French fleets, fresh from victories in China, would soon arrive to demand harsher terms.

The book’s final two chapters cover the two and a half centuries of Tokugawa peace — punctuated, Longford notes, by repeated earthquakes and eruptions and, in its last century and a half, by no fewer than twenty-one recorded famines — and its collapse: the revival of native scholarship at Mito, the assassination of the chief minister Ii Naosuke, the British and allied bombardments of Satsuma and Choshiu, the resignation of the last Shogun, Yoshinobu, in 1867, the decisive battle of Fushimi, and the surrender of the Daimios’ feudal rights that Longford takes as the true end of Old Japan. The volume closes with five appendices — a chronological list of the Emperors, a list of the dynasties of the Shoguns, a list of the provinces, a translation of the seventeen “Laws” of Shotoku Daishi, and the full text of the Legacy of Iyeyasu — followed by a list of the historical authorities Longford drew on and an index.

Winter Wanderings collects four consecutive winter journeys made by Abraham Per Lee Pease, M.D., of Cherry Hill, Massillon, Ohio, most of it — as he explains in his preface — first written for and published in the Sunday editions of The Pittsburgh Dispatch. Pease dedicates the book to his wife, “congenial companion of journeys other than the great one of life,” and lays out the four trips in turn: a journey to Abyssinia, never before published, undertaken after he found himself, “much against my will,” serving as unofficial surgeon to an American diplomatic commission; a round-the-world journey with his wife and nephew, on which his newspaper dispatches began; a third trip, with two friends, through the Hawaiian and Samoan islands, New Zealand, and Australia; and a fourth, made alone, to South America. The book keeps this shape throughout — its chapters are really a run of dated travel letters, headed “Yokohama, November 16, 1904,” “Cairo, March, 1905,” and so on, spanning the middle years of the decade — and the narration stays in a first-person plural “we” even in the letters from the solo South American trip.

The Abyssinian journey unfolds first, and it is the most tightly plotted of the four. Pease sails from Naples aboard the U.S.S. Machias with the American commissioner Mr. Skinner, is put ashore at Djibouti in French Somaliland, and joins a caravan of roughly a hundred men, forty-four camels, and some fifty mules, escorted by U.S. Marines under Captain George Thorpe. The caravan makes for Harar — where Pease calls on the huntress Madame Michel and her caged lion, and is shown a servant’s hand and foot, amputated under Abyssinian law for killing a man — and on to Addis Ababa, where the party is received by Emperor Menelik II, “greatest and most powerful black potentate in the world” as Pease describes him, dines at a thirteen-course royal banquet attended by thousands of the emperor’s soldiers, and eventually signs a commercial treaty; Menelik sends President Roosevelt two elephant tusks and two young lions in return, and decorates Pease with the Golden Star of Ethiopia, third class. Along the way Pease records elephants and monkeys glimpsed from the trail, a crossing of the crocodile-infested Ouash River, his own shopping for ivory and leopard skins in the market at Addis Ababa, and a roadside exchange of whips with a hadji he meets on the trail.

Within the second, round-the-world journey, Japan gets four chapters to itself. Pease, his wife, and his nephew cross first to Honolulu, then land at Yokohama in November 1904, in the middle of the Russo-Japanese War; arriving by train in Tokyo shortly after, they find stretcher-bearers and Red Cross nurses staged at the station for a trainload of wounded due in minutes from the front, though the party opts for lunch rather than wait to see them arrive; a chrysanthemum show there features battle scenes worked entirely in living flowers, and at the hot-spring resort of Atami the inns are filled with fifteen hundred convalescing soldiers in Red Cross white. Guided for much of the trip by T. K. Ito, “of Yokohama,” whom Pease calls the first name on the official list of guides in Murray’s Handbook of Japan, the party rides jinrikshas and bamboo mountain-chairs to Enoshima and Kamakura, crosses the Ten Province Pass for a view of Fuji-Yama, watches cloisonné being worked by hand at Nagoya, and tours Nagoya Castle with its solid-gold dolphins. In Tokyo, Pease describes a kabuki performance of a hari-kari scene so realistic that one of his party had to leave the box, and in Kyoto a sumo tournament move by move, down to the salt thrown to “propitiate the gods,” and, more uneasily, a geisha banquet and dance. The Japan chapters close at Nara, before the great bronze Buddha and its deer park, and at Nagasaki, watching women coal-heavers empty forty-six baskets a minute into the ship’s bunkers before the party sails on to Manila.

From Japan the same journey carries the family on to Manila, where Pease describes the old Spanish city’s canals and open sewage, a botched escape attempt at Bilibid prison put down by gatling-gun fire, and the evening promenade at the Lunetta; to Canton, where he watches river-dwellers living on sampans and stilted huts, tours a temple depicting the torments of the God of Punishment, and records his guide’s tally of public beheadings; and to Java, by way of Singapore, where he climbs the Buddhist temple of Boro-Bodoer, reckoned nine or ten centuries old, sees the earthquake-damaged temple group at Prambanan, and visits the Sultan of Surakarta’s zoological garden, though not the Sultan himself. In Rangoon he watches elephants stack teak logs at a lumber yard and climbs the great gilded Shwe Dagon pagoda; in India he visits the Calcutta burning ghats, is robbed of his watch and its gold-eagle fob on his first afternoon in that city, rides an elephant to the palace at Amber, and calls the Maharajah of Jeypore, with his hundred and four wives and one horse for every day of the year, “a veritable Croesus.” After a Parsi wedding in Bombay, a stop at Aden, and a bout of plague quarantine near Suez, the party reaches Cairo, where Pease lingers over the museum’s mummy of Rameses II and the pyramids of Giza, and finally Italy, where an account of the excavations at Pompeii — the houses left standing with their household goods in place, the surgeon’s bronze instruments, ovens still holding loaves of carbonized bread — closes out the second journey before the family sails home.

The book’s third journey, made with two unnamed friends, retraces some of the same Pacific ground: from Honolulu’s Bishop Museum of Polynesian ethnology to Pago-Pago in American Samoa, where two girls said by the guide to be the chief’s daughters, though visibly unrelated, perform a dance for the visitors, to Rotorua on New Zealand’s North Island, where a voluble guide leads the party past boiling mud pools and the ruins of Maori villages buried in the volcanic eruption of June 1886, and on to Sydney and the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, where shark fins cut the harbor and beggars, unlike in New Zealand, are common. The fourth and final journey, made alone, starts instead from Europe — Lisbon and the Madeiras — and crosses to Rio de Janeiro, whose harbor, botanical garden, and Corcovado rack railway Pease singles out for praise, then to Buenos Aires and its vast wheat-and-cattle estancias, over the Andes past a bronze statue of the Saviour at the summit of the pass, down through Santiago and Valparaiso, along the Peruvian coast for cargoes of sugar and a supply of Panama hats, into Guayaquil, Ecuador, to visit a cocoa plantation, and past the Panama Canal works, which Pease’s preface calls “simply absorbing on account of the colossal dimensions of the work going on there.” The last dateline is Kingston, Jamaica, which Pease finds still largely in ruins from an earthquake that had struck not long before, its Institute of Jamaica and other public buildings destroyed and its citizens and soldiers camped in tents at the edge of the city.

Winter Wanderings ends on the road, not at home: its final chapter, “In Conclusion,” is a retrospective addressed to the Pittsburgh readers who had followed the dispatches, urging them to see South America for themselves and singling out Rio de Janeiro as worth the trip alone — a place, Pease writes, that lets a traveler “truthfully say that he has seen Paradise.” He notes a new direct steamship line from New York to the east coast of South America, and closes with a short, general reflection on what travel does for a person: it widens one’s “geographical horizon,” Pease writes, and makes one “more optimistic,” “more tolerant of the shortcomings of others,” and more given to “the love for human kind.”

An Army Officer on Leave in Japan is a travel narrative built around a journey that its preface describes in the author’s own voice as made “while on duty in the Philippine Islands, during my last tour of service, in company with an army officer” — a trip that, once the writing was underway, proved too large for one volume, so that an account of Korea, Manchuria, and China was set aside for “future publication” and only Japan, with a substantial Philippine and Formosan preamble, fills these pages. The narrative itself is carried by a first-person traveler whom his two companions address as “Mr. Rhodes”: an army officer known only as “the Major” and a member of the Insular Judiciary known as “the Judge,” both met in Manila. A great deal of the book’s touristic and historical information arrives not as direct narration but as extended spoken lectures the Major and the Judge deliver to their companion along the way. Roughly the first quarter of the book (chapters I through IX, about ninety of nearly four hundred pages of text) covers Manila, the Philippine Insurrection, and a side excursion to Formosa; the remaining, far larger portion follows the party through Kyushu, the Inland Sea, Yokohama, Tokyo, Nikko, Kyoto, Nara, and Kobe, interspersed with freestanding chapters on Japanese mythology, history, Shinto, Buddhism, and the Russo-Japanese War. The volume is heavily illustrated, with some seventy photographic plates listed by page number in the front matter, opening with a frontispiece of “Fujiyama, from the sea-shore near Dzushi, Japan” and running through Philippine, Japanese, and Manchurian battlefield subjects alike.

The Manila chapters take the form of a running tour in which the Major, delegated as “official guide,” walks Rhodes and the Judge through the walled city — the Augustinian church built in 1590, the dungeons of Fort Santiago, the Luneta where José Rizal was executed, and the house of Andres Bonifacio where the Katipunan was formed — while narrating the Insurrection of 1896–7, the treaty of Biac-na-bató, and the fates of Governors-General Blanco, Polavieja, and Primo de Rivera. A separate chapter recounts Dewey’s battle in Manila Bay ship by ship, and “Farewell to Manila” describes the departure of an army transport, complete with the veterans’ Military Order of the Carabao and its comic ode to the water-buffalo. Before Nagasaki, the party makes a detour to Formosa (chapter IX): the island’s centuries of contested ownership — Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch settlement, the pirate-king Koxinga, Chinese rule, and its 1895 cession to Japan under the treaty of Shimonoseki — together with its camphor and Oolong-tea trade, are covered in the Major’s own reminiscence of an earlier visit to Kelung and Takow.

Arrival in Japan opens on a comic note, with the transport held in Nagasaki harbor under a four-day cholera quarantine and an Irish-brogued fellow officer, “Captain J.,” pleading in vain with the port inspectors to be let ashore to his waiting sweetheart. Once landed, the book turns to Nagasaki’s history — the Dutch trading post on the island of Deshima, the burning of the last Portuguese ship in 1638 — and to a long chapter on Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu tracing the arrival and violent suppression of the Roman missions, the edicts of 1587, 1607, and 1614, the crucifixions at Nagasaki, and the Shimabara rebellion. Traveling north through Kyushu by rail, the party visits the porcelain town of Arita and hears the history of the Satsuma Rebellion and Saigo Takamori’s death by hara-kiri, then reaches Shimonoseki, where a chapter recounts both the 1860s bombardment of the strait by an allied fleet and the twelfth-century naval battle of Dan-no-ura, before the narrative follows the party through the Inland Sea toward Kobe.

A chapter on the mythological origin of the Japanese people — the Kojiki and the Nihongi, Izanagi and Izanami, and the sun-goddess Amaterasu — precedes the party’s arrival in Yokohama, where the book recalls the killing of the English merchant Richardson and the indemnity it brought. From Yokohama the travelers visit Kamakura’s great Dai-butsu and the island of Enoshima, then proceed by ricksha along the old Tokaido into Tokyo for its parks, the Imperial Palace, and Ueno’s museum, with a full chapter retelling the story of the Forty-Seven Ronin and their graves at what the book calls Spring Hill Cemetery. The visit to Nikko is described at length in the first person — the avenue of cryptomerias, the Sacred Bridge, the gate of Yomei-mon, the carved monkeys and sleeping cat, and the tomb of Ieyasu itself — followed by an excursion to Lake Chuzenji and the Kegon Falls among bands of white-robed pilgrims. Two further chapters give a “Brief Sketch of Japanese History” running from the mythological Jimmu Tenno and Empress Jingo through the Fujiwara, Taira, and Minamoto houses, the Ashikaga and Tokugawa shogunates, the arrival of Commodore Perry, and the Meiji Restoration.

A chapter on the “Three Classic Beauties of Japan” takes the party to Matsushima’s deer-covered sacred island, to Miyajima, and to a pine-clad strand the book calls Amo-no-Hashidate, before an extended detour through the Hakone district and an ascent of Fuji itself. Kyoto — spelled “Kioto” throughout the book — receives a full chapter of temples, the Nijo Castle, and a geisha dance, and Nara another for its sacred deer park and the ancient Horyuji, with Osaka described by day and by gaslight. Two chapters then set the travel narrative aside almost entirely for a historical account of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5: the Boxer disturbance that preceded it, Togo’s night torpedo attack and blockade of Port Arthur, the sinking of the Koreyetz and the Variag at Chemulpo, and the destruction of Rodjestvensky’s fleet in the Sea of Japan, followed by the land campaigns of Generals Kuroki, Oku, Nogi, and Nodzu from the Yalu through Nan Shan and Liaoyang to Mukden and the Portsmouth peace conference. Like the Manila history early in the book, these chapters are delivered as an unbroken lecture by the Major and draw, as the preface acknowledges, on published authorities rather than the author’s own observation, since he reserved his own passage through Manchuria for the projected companion volume.

From Kobe, the Judge takes over the narration for a pair of chapters on Japan’s two religions: Shinto’s nature-gods, fetichism, and ancestor worship, illustrated with a full quotation of Admiral Togo’s address to the spirits of his dead sailors at the Kudan shrine in Tokyo (“the clouds of war have disappeared from sea and shore... we here perform this rite of worship to your spirits”), followed by the arrival of Roman and then Protestant Christianity and admiring sketches of the missionaries Hepburn, S. R. Brown, and Verbeck; and a following chapter tracing Buddhism from the life of its founder through its transplantation to Japan and its blending with Shinto into what the book calls “Riyobu” Buddhism. A further chapter returns to Kobe’s own surroundings — the Ikuta shrine’s sacred dice-box, the Nunobiki waterfalls — before closing with a set of generalizations on “Traits of Japanese Women,” their homes, and their character.

The closing chapter tours the naval arsenal at Kure and the army garrison at Hiroshima, where the Major sets out Japan’s army and navy organization in statistical detail and compares it, division for division and ship for ship, with the smaller American forces of the day; the party also visits a Methodist mission college for Japanese women there, run by an American teacher, Miss Gaines. The book ends at the “Sacred Island” of Miyajima, with its torii standing in the sea and its Hall of a Thousand Mats, where the party’s host at the Iwaso inn — a survivor of the assault on 203 Metre Hill — tells of his brother’s death at Port Arthur while the young widow, Fuchia, stands silently at a window facing north; the Japan narrative closes on the Major’s line, “Ring down the curtain, the play is over,” as the party departs by steamer from Shimonoseki. An appendix follows with practical routes and the cost of travel from the United States to the Orient, along with notes on climate, hotels, and licensed guides, addressed directly to “the prospective traveller.”

This book is a bishop’s diary of an eight-month, round-the-world inspection tour undertaken in 1909–10 by the Right Rev. E. Graham Ingham, D.D., “sometime Bishop of Sierra Leone” and, at the time of writing, Home Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.), as the title page describes him. Sent out by the Society’s Committee to visit its missions in the Far and Near East, Ingham travels throughout with his wife, addressed in the text as Mrs. Ingham, and the book is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. C. L. Burrows, who had first planned the journey before her death in 1909; her widower and his nephew, Mr. Sheldon, join the Inghams partway through and stay with them from Ceylon onward. Composed as a dated journal, city by city, the narrative follows the party from London across Europe and Siberia by rail, then by sea to Japan, on through China, Ceylon and India, and finally to Palestine and Egypt — the itinerary that gives the volume its title, since the tour opens in Japan and closes in Jerusalem. The introductory chapter frames the whole as a report from “the frontiers of Christendom” and states its purposes as drawing sympathy for missionary work too easily overlooked at home and abroad, showing that decades of effort have produced real indigenous growth deserving continued support rather than complacency, illustrating how much easier modern travel has made such a survey, and noting the accelerating contact between Eastern peoples and the West.

Japan occupies the opening fifth of the book and receives the fullest, most anecdotal treatment of any single country. Landing at Tsuruga and reaching Osaka in September 1909, Ingham is met by the Rev. C. T. Warren and spends his first weeks touring C.M.S. institutions there — the Bishop Poole Memorial School for girls, the Momoyama Boys’ School under Mr. Asano, and a round of “welcome” receptions (kangei-kwai) from Japanese clergy and congregations. He lectures at the C.M.S. Summer School at Nara, tours Kyoto’s temples and the Doshisha University founded by the Christian patriot Neesima, and travels north through the Hokkaido — Hakodate, Otaru, Sapporo — where he hears much of the pioneering Ainu missionary Rev. J. Batchelor, away in England at the time, and addresses students at the Agricultural University. In Tokyo he attends the Semi-Centennial Conference marking fifty years of Protestant missions in Japan, hears addresses from Bishop Honda, Count Okuma and Bishop Harris, and visits the Whidborne Memorial Hall, a C.M.S. evangelistic center on the Ginza. The Japan chapters close with a swing through Hiroshima, Kure and the Inland Sea to Kiu-Shiu — Kokura, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Sasebo and Nagasaki — before the party sails for China, “with prayers for my missionary fellow-workers from Hokkaido to Kiu-Shiu.”

China occupies the book’s next section. From Shanghai, with its cosmopolitan foreign Settlement and St. John’s University, Ingham moves through Hang-chow, where Dr. Duncan Main’s mission hospital and Bishop Moule (then in his eightieth year) are described at length, to Ningpo’s Trinity College and up the coast to T’ai-chow-fu. A long chair-and-boat journey through the mountains of Fuh-Kien province brings him to Fuh-chow, where Archdeacon J. R. Wolfe presides over an extensive network of schools, hospitals and a girls’ school under Miss C. J. Lambert, and on to the remoter station of Fuh-ning, headquarters of the Dublin University Mission. In the south he tours Canton with Pastor Mok, witnessing the dedication of three village ancestral halls newly given over to Christian worship, and spends nearly two weeks in Hong Kong as the guest of the Bishop of Victoria, attending the opening of a new wing of St. Stephen’s College and a Chinese banquet at which a Christian layman, Mr. Mow Fung, delivers a long, quoted tribute to the C.M.S. Throughout the China chapters Ingham records conversations with missionaries and Chinese Christians about self-support, persecution of converts, and the sweeping educational changes then underway, including the first sitting of the Fuh-Kien Provincial Parliament.

From Hong Kong the party sails to Colombo, and Part IV covers Ceylon and India together. In Ceylon, Ingham sits in on the C.M.S. missionary conference at Kandy and visits the ruined Buddhist capital of Anuradhapura before crossing to Jaffna. India is entered at Tuticorin and covered in a rapid sequence of C.M.S. and other mission centers: Tinnevelly and Palamcotta, with the Sarah Tucker College and Miss Askwith’s school for the blind; Madras and Calcutta, where he visits the “Old Church,” where the idea that led to the Society’s own founding first took shape; the Nadiya district villages of Krishnagar and Chupra; Benares, with its excavated Buddhist ruins at Sarnath and its bathing ghats on the Ganges; Allahabad, Lucknow, Cawnpore, Agra (including the Taj Mahal) and Delhi, all described partly through the lens of the Mutiny of 1857; Peshawar, where Dr. Arthur Lankester’s medical mission serves Pathan tribesmen from beyond the frontier; and Lahore, Amritsar and Batala before a final push through Meerut and Nasik to Bombay — with a side excursion to Poona — from which the ship departs for the Red Sea and Suez.

The book’s fifth and final part carries the party into the Near East for Holy Week and Easter. Landing at Jaffa, Ingham reaches Jerusalem in time for Good Friday, and the chapters that follow describe, in close and often critical detail, the Jewish Wailing Place, Gordon’s Calvary and the Garden Tomb, the Temple area and Dome of the Rock, and the rival Roman, Greek and Armenian claims within the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He rides out to Nazareth, confirms a small congregation at Christ Church there, and rows on the Sea of Galilee before returning by way of Port Said to Cairo, where a week is spent with Canon MacInnes and the Rev. W. H. T. Gairdner among C.M.S. hospitals, schools and the antiquities of Old Cairo, the Citadel, the Museum and the Pyramids, closing with an ordination Ingham performs at All Saints’ Church on his last Sunday abroad. The book ends with a short Conclusion, written after the author’s return, reflecting on the death of King Edward VII and on the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in June 1910, and with a closing wish that the book might help send new messengers “from Jerusalem” back out to India, China and Japan — the same three fields with which the journey, and the volume, began.

Japan for a Week (Britain For Ever!) is an illustrated travel narrative that begins as a hurried comic diary and ends as a tract on Anglo-German rivalry and the duties of imperial patriotism. Its preface, “An Apology,” explains the occasion: A. M. Thompson and his friend and “sometime collaborator” Robert Courtneidge raced through Germany, Russia, Siberia, and Japan in search of “local colour” for a Japanese-themed play meant to follow The Arcadians at the Shaftesbury Theatre, and their time in Japan itself, Thompson says, was “even less” than the fortnight a fellow globe-trotter had told him was needed to “see Japan thoroughly.” Thompson travels throughout with a companion he calls “the Cornish lady,” to whom the book is dedicated and who supplies much of its running comic dialogue with rickshaw men, shopkeepers, and a truculent Russian fellow-passenger. The book’s twenty-six chapters move from Berlin through Russia and the Trans-Siberian Railway to Japan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Colombo, then home by way of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, before closing with three free-standing essays on the English language, German ambitions, and patriotism. Japan occupies the book’s longest single block, roughly two-fifths of its length, but it remains one stage among several in a journey whose real destination, on the author’s own account, turned out to be a changed opinion about the British Empire’s need to arm itself against Germany.

The opening chapters set the pattern of amused, opinionated reporting that runs through the whole book. In Berlin, Thompson and Courtneidge marvel at a city that appears to have no slums, no beggars, and no drunkenness, and are lectured by their guide on German thoroughness, education, and naval ambition until, Thompson writes, they became “very limp and thoughtful” Britishers. Crossing into Russia at Alexandrowa, the tone turns to indignant farce: customs officials paw through the party’s luggage at half-past one in the morning, and on an earlier visit Thompson was nearly prevented from sailing home from a Russian port for want of a police exit permit, a crisis he later learned two roubles would have “squared.” The chapter on “The Empire of the Tsar” supplies figures on the Tsar’s hundred palaces and their 32,000 servants; Moscow itself brings an extended description of the Kremlin and the cathedral of Basil the Blessed — “an artistic nightmare,” in Thompson’s phrase — read as a monument to fear rather than piety, set against workers in the streets outside whom he calls “ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed.” The rail journey across Siberia that follows brings glimpses of convict gangs bound for the mines and a platform exercise ritual at every station stop led, Thompson notes, by Sir Claude MacDonald, the British ambassador returning to his post in Tokyo.

Japan, reached by steamer from Vladivostock to Tsuruga, receives by far the fullest treatment in the book, running from the party’s deflating first encounter with a boatload of seasick Japanese racing touts to a reluctant farewell at Nagasaki. Kyoto supplies the first extended stop: its seven hundred Buddhist temples and cloisonné workshops delight the travelers, but Thompson also registers the exhaustion of craftsmen still at work past ten at night, a disappointing dinner with geisha at a restaurant “whose gaiety the Western mind is incompetent to grasp,” and the factory chimneys already visible behind the old shrines. In Tokyo, which strikes him as an “Oriental Manchester” beside Kyoto’s old-world charm, he attends a Salvation Army street meeting, takes tea at a tea-house served by giggling mousmes, and visits the walled Yoshiwara, calling the sight of women “caged behind bars like wild beasts at the Zoo” more awful than Piccadilly Circus at midnight. Nikko draws the book’s most sustained descriptive writing — the twenty-mile avenue of cryptomeria, the vermilion lacquer bridge kept for the exclusive use of the Emperor, the carved gate-towers, and the tomb of the shogun Iyeyasu at the mountain’s summit, reached by a steep stair of plain granite — set beside a running argument with the idea, which Thompson says he had carried into the country, that the Japanese were a largely irreligious people; the pilgrims he watches buying prayers and rubbing the noses of stone temple dogs persuade him otherwise. Later chapters weigh Japanese labor conditions (long hours and near-starvation wages among Tokyo’s muslin-mill girls, quoting Kiyoshi Kawakami, and, from Marie Stopes’s A Journal from Japan, an account of women laboring half-naked in the mines), arranged marriage and the legal subjection of wives (with a long quotation from the manual called The Greater Learning for Women), the disputed question of Japanese commercial honesty (British traders’ complaints set against a long 1862 passage by the official Edward Barrington De Fonblanque blaming European merchants for corrupting Japanese trade), Japanese politeness (illustrated through a haggling match between the Cornish lady and a smiling tradesman, and through the opinions of an Englishman named Gordon Smith who lives near Kobe as “a Japanese gentleman”), a chapter arguing, half seriously, that the Japanese may descend from the ancient Greeks by way of a Tokyo scholar’s etymological theories, and a chapter of “Japanese-English” curiosities — mangled shop notices, a schoolboy essay on “the Character of an Englishman,” and an official government edict instructing the public not to throw stones or crockery at foreign visitors. A final Japan chapter follows the ship down the Inland Sea, past the naval college at Etajima and the gun works at Kure, to Nagasaki, from which the party sails for China.

China receives a shorter but still substantial block, opening as the sea itself turns the color of clay from the silt carried down by the Hoangho and the Yangtse. Shanghai furnishes the sharpest contrast in the book, between the “solid and orderly” foreign settlements and the walled native city, where Thompson describes the stench and crowding of the streets and, at length, the binding of girls’ feet, alongside long stretches of the pidgin English used by shipboard traders. Two chapters, “Chinese Social Conditions” and “Barbarism and Civilisation,” catalogue Chinese judicial punishments — the neck-board called the cangue, a torture that slowly hangs the condemned by lowering the stone slabs beneath his feet, and executions by up to a hundred and twenty cuts — before turning the accusation back on the West: the correspondent George Lynch’s account of missionaries profiting from the looting that followed the Pekin rising, and a quotation from a “Dr. Dillon” on the treatment of Chinese women during the same suppression, are offered as evidence that “our methods of conversion have been almost as damnable as the evils they pretended to attack.” “China’s Awakening” follows more hopeful signs — a government cement factory and waterworks at Canton, students sent abroad, a shipboard acquaintance with the traveling Chinese Prince Tsu-Huen and the “slim, sleek, sly” Admiral Sah, both bound for Europe to study naval methods — and closes on a group of pigtail-less Chinese naval cadets the ship is carrying to England for training. A typhoon delays the party’s arrival at Hong Kong, whose colonial extent under lease and cession (some four hundred square miles) surprises Thompson as much as its shipping tonnage, reported to exceed London’s. The closing travel chapter, “Singapore, Colombo, and Home,” covers the ten-thousand-mile, five-week voyage remaining after Hong Kong: the Straits of Malacca, the Singhalese of Colombo, whom Thompson compares to medieval paintings of Christ, the “ignifluous” heat of the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, and a run through the Mediterranean past Sicily, Naples, Genoa, and Gibraltar.

The book’s last three chapters drop the travelogue for direct argument. “The English-Speaking Bond” argues, from the ubiquity of English aboard a German ship and among Chinese and Japanese fellow-passengers, that the spread of the language is a stronger unifying force than the British Empire itself, and that maintaining that empire — the “Pax Britannica” — is “the nucleus of the millennial World Peace.” “The German Menace” reports the confident talk, heard from German merchants and officers throughout the voyage home, of an eventual German absorption of Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden, and concludes that Britain must arm itself in response, a position Thompson traces to what he observed of German and Japanese efficiency along the way. The closing essay, “A Plea for Patriotism,” distinguishes a “blatant, blusterous, screeching” jingoism from what Thompson calls a healthier patriotism, one that ties continued empire to a reciprocal guarantee of every citizen’s “Right to Live,” and the chapter closes with a printed letter from Lord Roberts, who writes that he is “not surprised” that the author’s travels had convinced him “that the maintenance of the British Empire is a primary condition of human progress.” The volume is illustrated throughout with photographic plates: a frontispiece of the author at Nikko, set within what the preface calls a “decorative frontispiece” credited to “the Lady of the Dedication,” and sixteen further full-page plates “to face” specific pages, credited in part to Mr. and Mrs. Courtneidge, ranging from Japanese costumes, temple steps at Nikko, and fishermen at Kobe to a Chinese village group, a mandarin’s house at Shanghai, and a Chinese joss house near Hong Kong; an index closes the book.

Surface Japan announces its own modesty in its subtitle, “Short Notes of a Swift Survey,” and the text matches the label: it is a loosely strung run of short, undated observations and anecdotes, most a paragraph or two long, without chapter titles, numbered sections, or a table of contents — every page is headed simply “Surface Japan.” Its author, Don C. Seitz, credited on the title page with earlier books on James Abbott McNeill Whistler and on European travel, approaches the country as a visiting outsider who crosses the North Pacific by steamer and finds, once inside Japan, that Japanese friends meet him “at a five-in-the-morning departure” and guide him through changes of route “without couriers or interpreters.” The notes open in mid-ocean, tracking the ship past the Aleutians and Mount Cleveland, a lone sampan appearing “as if set purposely into the foreground,” the low headland of Chosi, and landfall at Yokohama at dawn. From there the book moves quickly into Tokyo — its “seven sen” trolley fares, the temple grounds of Asakusa with their spit-ball wishing custom at the Gods of Thunder and Wind, and the Yoshiwara, a quarter Seitz says Tokyo “is not proud of” but cannot easily be rid of.

Beyond the capital the notes follow a loose itinerary of side trips and set pieces rather than a straight travel narrative. An hour from Yokohama, on the way to the naval station at Yokosuka and the island of Enoshima, the great bronze Daibutsu at Kamakura draws a visit. At Kodzu, Seitz visits Count Okuma’s seaside house and retells, as established local lore, the story of the bomb that cost the Count a leg and drove his attacker to hari-kari on the spot. The road to Miyanoshita and Hakone is covered by mountain chair, borne by four men over “forty-five-degree trails”; Nikko gets sustained attention, from the twenty-seven-mile avenue of cryptomeria said to have been planted by a poor retainer, to Ieyasu’s tomb under its bronze cope, to a set-piece account of a young prince’s arrival by train past silent ranks of schoolchildren. A boat cruise through the Inland Sea from Kobe toward Miyajima takes in the scenery at Tomo and the naval works at Kure; Kyoto appears mainly through its silk-bleaching on the Kamogawa and a run down the Hodzu rapids. Recurring anecdotes fill out the gaps: a Japanese-language Much Ado About Nothing quoted at length from a review in the Japan Advertiser, a page of Japanese insults supplied from a Kelly and Walsh phrase book, a folk parable about racial assimilation told by the chemist Dr. Jokichi Takamine, and the story of how the banker Shibusawa first noticed the frugal merchant Asano by his unbroken run of bank deposits.

A long middle stretch sets travel notes aside for a running argument about Japan’s economic and political footing. Seitz reviews the country’s dependence on shipping subsidies, government ownership of railways and telegraphs, and a newly raised protective tariff, arguing that such “ready-made methods” create an “endless chain” of effort that returns to its starting point rather than building wealth, and noting that Japan is “the highest-taxed country in the world to-day.” He totals the Imperial Family’s landholdings, the fortunes of the Mitsui and Iwazaki houses, the cost in lives and debt of the war with Russia, and Japan’s new dependencies — Formosa, half of Saghalien, and the freshly completed annexation of Korea — as burdens rather than assets, set against a China he treats as the more serious long-term rival. The same section turns to the international color line, citing Australia’s exclusion of Asian settlement and predicting friction with the United States over immigration policy, and closes by posing what Seitz calls the only fair test of the country: not whether it is “a good France, a good England, or a good United States,” but whether “it is a pretty good Japan.”

The closing pages return to travel description, following the mountain road from Yumoto up to Miyanoshita and dwelling on Mount Fuji, glimpsed or withheld “according to its fickle will,” before ending with Seitz’s departure from Yokohama and a last sunset view of the peak from shipboard as the coast fades into “the blackness of the sea.” The book closes by returning to its own title: “So end these glimpses of Surface Japan, lightly skimmed,” followed by Seitz’s one first-person summary of what he found — “a smiling country, full of amiable, orderly people” wishing “to stand foursquare to all the winds that blow.” True to the title page’s promise of illustration “in color by photogravure and marginal sketches after Hokusai,” the book carries a small number of full-page color plates reproducing tinted photographs — among them a Japanese sailing craft under full sail and a farmer working an irrigation water-wheel — each set inside a printed floral mat, while every page of running text is framed in a bamboo-lattice border carrying one or two small pen-and-ink marginal sketches, most often a kimono-clad figure, tucked into its corners.

The Far East, China, Korea, & Japan is a topical survey of eastern Asia written for young readers, published in 1911 by Adam and Charles Black as a volume in their “Peeps at Many Lands” series and containing, per its own title page, thirty-two full-page color illustrations “by various artists.” Frank Elias’s short prefatory note, signed “F. E.,” names the books he drew on in writing it — Dr. Gray’s China, Lady S. Townley’s My Chinese Note-book, Miss Tayler’s Koreans at Home, Mrs. Bishop’s books on Korea and Japan, and Mr. Menpes’s volume on Japan — and the text is candid about its author’s own vantage: early in the China section Elias writes that “neither the present writer nor probably most of his readers has ever been in China,” and the book proceeds throughout as a compilation of other travelers’ and missionaries’ observations rather than a personal travel account. At the same time, Elias frames the material as a kind of shared imagined journey, repeatedly addressing his readers as fellow travelers (“If we were to visit…,” “Let us suppose…”) and marking the transitions between countries in the same voice (“And now China falls behind us. Our faces are towards the North-East”). The book’s own contents page divides it into three successive parts matching its title: thirteen chapters on China (pages 3–84), twelve on Korea (pages 85–140), and nineteen on Japan (beginning at page 141) — Japan is the most heavily chaptered of the three sections and, by page count, comparable in length to China’s, with Korea’s section markedly the shortest.

The China chapters open with a fireside-tale framing device — an English sailor’s stories of far-off “Cathay” — and then move topically through the oddities of “Pidgin” English and Chinese writing, the position of women and girls (foot-binding, the “three obediences,” the Dowager Empress), the civil-service examination system and marriage customs, the treatment of infants and the veneration of old age, schools and the rote memorization of the “Tri-metrical Classic,” the Boxer Rising and the killing of Christian converts and missionaries, superstition and the Ming tombs, city life in Peking and Shanghai, festivals and games, the Great Wall, river traffic and the Grand Canal, and a closing chapter of contemporary reform — the suppression of opium and foot-binding (the text dates itself explicitly here, noting “This year (1911) another inspection will be made”), new railways, and a National Assembly — illustrated by the example of Dr. Yamei Kin, a Chinese woman physician then visiting England. The Korea section, introduced as the “Hermit Kingdom,” follows the same topical pattern at smaller scale: the country’s history and geography; the etiquette of paying calls; the palaces, great bell, and street life of Seoul; children’s games and the top-knot ceremony marking a Korean boy’s coming of age; schools being reorganized under Japanese administration; the unrelenting domestic labor expected of Korean wives; house construction; wedding and funeral customs; and a closing chapter on the rapid spread of Christianity, which Elias predicts will become the country’s dominant faith, closing the section with the line “Not the religion of the Japanese, but of Jesus Christ, will be the religion of Korea.”

The Japan section, which closes the book, opens not with a survey of the present but with two legendary figures: the missionary Francis Xavier’s journey to Kyoto, and the story of Will Adams, the English pilot who reached Japan half-dead after a disastrous voyage, became a lord under the Shogun, and died there without seeing his family again. From this, Elias sketches two centuries of national seclusion and its end — Queen Victoria’s 1858 gift of a yacht to the Mikado and the resulting Treaty of Yedo, the young Emperor’s 1867 decision to rule in person and adopt Western administration, and the establishment of a Parliament in 1890. Later chapters cover the country’s natural beauty (Fujisan, flower gardens, pilgrimages, the jinricksha); the changing position of women, from the literary prominence of court women a thousand years earlier, credited with producing the poetry gathered as The Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, through a later religious eclipse to the post-1867 opening of girls’ schools and a women’s university; the raising of children, with its stress on silence, self-control, and adoption to preserve ancestor worship; children’s play, kite-flying, dress (kimono, obi, tabi), and festivals; schooling, including the awkwardness of writing in mixed Chinese-Japanese characters and calls to romanize the alphabet; and, at length, the Japanese art of “placing” — flower arrangement and garden design — illustrated with anecdotes from the artist Mortimer Menpes, including a boy-servant who quietly outperforms his English employer at arranging fan-holders and a flower-master who walks out of a house forever after an English visitor hangs his hat on an arranged pine bough. Further chapters describe tea-houses and food; the wooden, earthquake-resistant Japanese house and its household shrines; shopping streets specialized by trade and the low social standing given to merchants; and the range of work open to a Japanese boy — rice and tea farming, forestry, the silk industry (traced from egg and mulberry leaf to the unwinding of the thread), carpentry, porcelain-making, dentistry (an apprentice first learns by pulling nails from a board), ricksha-pulling, and domestic service — before a final chapter on Shinto, the Bushido code of self-control, and the three forms of ancestor worship.

The book ends, in a chapter titled “Good-bye to the East,” by walking back over all three countries in the same first-person-plural voice used throughout — China’s “ancient streets,” Korea’s muddy ditches and the tap-tapping of women beating white coats clean, Japan’s tea-houses and gardens — before closing on the claim that outward change does not alter “the mind of a race,” and that “it takes many boys and girls, men and women — English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans — to make a world.” Its thirty-two full-page color plates are distributed across the three sections — thirteen facing pages in the China chapters, seven in the Korea chapters, and twelve in the Japan chapters, though one of those seven, Ella Du Cane’s Kyoto wistaria-garden view, is Japan-themed despite its facing-page number falling inside Korea’s page range — and are individually signed, among them T. Hodgson Liddell’s frontispiece of a Chinese street scene and Ella Du Cane’s picture of two Japanese girls beneath a flowering plum tree, alongside subjects such as the Great Wall, a gateway of Seoul, a Korean girl in winter dress, an iris garden, and a Japanese tea-house decked for the cherry-blossom festival. The volume closes physically with a folding sketch map, “The Far East (China, Japan and Korea),” credited to Elias himself and dated 1911, laying out provinces, rivers, and coastal place-names across the whole region from Mongolia and Manchuria down through the Chinese coast, Korea, and the Japanese islands.

Things Seen in Japan, issued by Seeley & Co. in a second edition dated 1911 as part of their “Things Seen” series of illustrated guides, is organized topically rather than as a travel itinerary. Clive Holland, already the author of My Japanese Wife and A Japanese Romance, lays the book out in six chapters — “The Glamour of Japan,” “On Many Subjects,” “Home Life in Japan,” “Country Life in Japan,” “Town Life in Japan,” and “The Future of Japan” — each moving through a cluster of related subjects rather than a sequence of places visited. The prose speaks throughout in an impersonal register: “one” observes a custom or is startled by it, and an editorial “we” occasionally intervenes, as when the author writes, “We have left a consideration of the Japanese girl until the last, for though less important than her brothers in the social scale, she is a being upon whom the memories of those who know her love to linger.” No autobiographical passage in the book states when Holland was in Japan or by what route; the vantage throughout is that of a well-informed commentator rather than a diarist.

The opening chapter is built around Japan’s flowers and the calendar of their blooming — plum, cherry, wistaria, iris, lotus, and finally chrysanthemum — together with the skill of Japanese gardeners, who can, Holland says, make beautiful “the most unpromising materials,” whether scanty roadside plots or hillsides “almost destitute of soil.” He recounts a soldier at Port Arthur pausing under shellfire to pluck a wildflower for his knapsack, offered as proof of “the ineradicable love of flowers which distinguishes the Japanese race,” and remarks that Japan can no longer be dismissed, as “a humourist once called” it, as merely “the kingdom of the two G’s — the land of gardens and geishas.” Chapter II turns to the “vagaries” of everyday life: a language with no alphabet, thousands of ideographs, and no true pronouns — so that “I” becomes watakooshi, literally “selfishness” — followed by the etiquette of the interminable social call, the strange dishes of a Japanese dinner (tiny live fish, sweet potatoes, shrimps, watermelon, figs), a communal bath Holland says some Japanese take at 125 to 130 degrees, the futon and wooden makura pillow that make up the “honourable bed,” and the creaking woodwork, mice, and cicadas that unsettle a first night in a paper-walled house.

“Home Life in Japan” moves indoors, describing the kakemono hung in an alcove in place of European wall pictures, flower arrangement taught to children almost from infancy, and the reception of guests, at which the wife typically withdraws while hired geishas sing and dance. Holland dwells on the moral code of Onna Daigaku, or “The Whole Duty of Women,” attributed to the sage Kaibara, quoting its instruction that “the qualities which best befit a woman are gentle obedience, chastity, mercy, and quietness,” and goes on to arranged marriage, divorce for offenses as small as “too much talking,” a demanding mother-in-law, a schooling system in which a boy’s education might not be considered complete until he was twenty-eight, and the poetry, novels, and games — hopscotch, battledore and shuttlecock, the fox-and-noose game kitsune — that fill a Japanese girl’s life. “Country Life in Japan” then surveys the working population: potters and porcelain painters at Awata in Kioto and at the four hamlets of Seto near Nagoya, ivory and wood carvers who count themselves well paid at £80 to £100 a year, and lacquer and metal workers following what Holland calls two of the most ancient and beautiful native crafts; pedlars crying their wares through the streets, women planting rice in June and picking tea at Uji in April and May, hairdressers (kamiyui) and their apprentices who spend hours dressing a coiffure meant to last three or four days, and tattooed jinriksha pullers and kago bearers, women who coal steamships, and street fortune-tellers.

“Town Life in Japan” takes up religion, arguing that Shinto — which Holland compares to Judaism as one of only two faiths inseparable from national identity — survives as a diffuse but powerful force even though its shrines are “almost deserted” and its theology “hopelessly and quite openly discredited”; he describes the torii gateway, Shinto’s coexistence, sometimes under the same priests, with Buddhism and Confucianism, and the earthquake-resisting construction of temples such as the Yasuka pagoda in Kioto, closing with the bronze Buddha at Kamakura, nearly fifty feet high and the sole relic of a temple and city once swept away by a tidal wave. The final chapter moves through the festival calendar — cherry-blossom viewing at Mukojima, a New Year’s Eve market at which debts are settled before the year turns and which Holland says almost deserves to be called a “Hag Fair,” the symbolic pine, bamboo, and paper decorations of New Year’s Day, and the Hina Matsuri, or Festival of the Little Folk, on March 3, which he traces back some 1,400 years to the reign of the Emperor Bidatsu — before describing a Japanese funeral feast and cremation and closing with a brief prediction that patriotism, “the life-blood and very heart of hearts of Japan,” will give the country a leading voice in the future of the East. The book carries fifty illustrations, opening with the frontispiece “Wayfarers Resting on Old High Road from Tokyoo Kioto”; nearly all are full-page photographic plates credited to “Underwood & U.” of London and New York, though two reproduce other media — a woodcut “after Kano Tsunenobu” and “An Engraving by Sensai Yeitaku.”

Where Half the World Is Waking Up collects the dispatches Clarence Poe wrote, place by place, during a year-long tour of Asia while he was editor of the North Carolina farm paper The Progressive Farmer and secretary of the North Carolina Historical Association. Its subtitle promises “the old and the new in Japan, China, the Philippines, and India, reported with especial reference to American conditions,” and Poe’s preface, dated December 1, 1911, at Raleigh, states his aim as showing the old and new forces “in due proportion,” since he has written “not of where half the world has waked up, but only of where it is waking up.” He traveled, he says, “either entirely across or well into the interior of each country visited,” helped by letters of introduction that Ambassador James Bryce (to whom the book is dedicated) arranged among British officials, by Theodore Roosevelt’s friendship, and by letters from William Jennings Bryan and the State Department, which won him interviews with figures such as Count Okuma and Baron Shibusawa in Japan, Tang Shao-yi and Wu Ting Fang in China, and Krishnaswami Iyer in India. Because most chapters were “originally prepared” for his own farm paper, he warns that they are “often more elementary” than if written for book buyers, and the book keeps that dispatch structure: nearly every one of its twenty-six chapters closes with the city and country it was written from, and the itinerary actually runs from Japan through Korea and Manchuria, then China, the Philippines, the Straits Settlements and Burma, and India — stops the four-country subtitle does not name — before closing with a general essay on what “the Orient” has to teach Americans.

Japan opens the book and fills six of its twenty-six chapters, the first titled “The Land of Upside Down” for Poe’s running conceit of reversals: sentences with the subject last, women who carry babies on their backs, a nation that marks a man’s death-day rather than his birthday, a government in which only two percent of the people can vote. He walks through a Japanese city’s dress, shops, and rickshaws, and dwells on the patriarchal family, the rice set daily before ancestral tablets, and the frequency of adoption — Count Okuma among the adopters — comparing this “old Japan” repeatedly to the “Old South,” down to quoting Lafcadio Hearn on a social order that ranked farmers above merchants. “Japanese Farming and Farmer Folk” carries Poe’s real enthusiasm as a farm editor: at the Imperial University’s agricultural college at Komaba he learns that Japanese farm children get ten months of school a year against the five or six then typical at home, that ninety-eight percent of school-age children attend, and that army conscripts show no illiteracy at all; he tours fields worked by hand on plots as small as one and a quarter acres and praises the “cooperative credit societies” that keep farmers out of moneylenders’ hands. A visit to the Kanegafuchi Cotton Spinning Company’s mill near Tokyo, with its pension fund and hospital, anchors a chapter on factory “welfare work,” followed by “Does Japanese Competition Menace the White Man’s Trade,” in which wage tables and testimony from Japanese and foreign manufacturers lead Poe to conclude that cheap Japanese labor is inefficient labor and no threat to American industry. A chapter on “Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity in Japan” quotes Hearn on Japanese craftsmanship, contrasts Shinto ancestor-worship with a practical Buddhism Poe calls “a shameless mockery” of the idealized religion of Sir Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia, recounts the old persecution of Japanese Christians, and ends with Poe’s own declared change of mind: he came to Japan doubting the value of missionary work there and leaves believing the country “needs nothing more than Christian missionaries.”

A chapter on Korea, “The Land of the Morning Calm,” presents it as untouched antiquity beside Japan’s hybrid modernity, its farming and dress compared to Old Testament Judea; Poe blames the old Yang-ban nobility and a tax-farming monarchy for Korean poverty, then describes the Japanese annexation completed the day before he sailed from San Francisco, recording that Japanese troops killed 12,916 Koreans called “insurgents” in 1907–08 against 160 of their own dead — a toll he calls “more like butchery than war” — and recalling the royal dwelling where “the Japanese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895.” Two chapters on Manchuria compare its soil to Iowa and Illinois, call the soybean “the pride and glory of Manchuria,” and then argue, in “Where Japan Is Absorbing an Empire,” that Japan is closing the treaty-guaranteed “Open Door” there by railway monopoly, freight rebates, and customs evasion exactly as it had already closed Korea — a point Poe drives home by quoting a Chinese gentleman of rank who tells him Japan fought Russia only to “out-Russia Russia.” Six chapters on China follow: a Peking chapter recounting the city’s history and street life, the Boxer Rising’s toll of some 15,000 Chinese Christians killed, and Poe’s friendship with a descendant of Confucius who copies out a scroll for him; the country’s campaign against opium, which Poe treats as one of the great moral achievements of the age; the coming national parliament and the Tzucheng Yuan’s open defiance of the Prince Regent; a donkey-and-camel excursion up the Nankou Pass to the Great Wall; a chapter of “sidelights” on foot-binding, household slavery, multiple wives, and the officials’ “squeeze” system of graft, together with a three-day, six-hundred-mile Yangtze River steamer trip from Hankow to Shanghai; and a farewell at Canton, with its coffin mortuaries, geomancers, cruel legal punishments, and a Chinese folktale about a magic multiplying jar that Poe retells at length as a specimen of Chinese humor.

Two Philippine chapters follow: a tour through five Luzon provinces of bamboo-and-thatch houses on stilts, carabao, and cockfighting, and then an account of the American administration in which Poe defends the literacy-and-property suffrage restriction set for the Philippine Assembly by likening it to the disenfranchisement laws “which the South has since adopted,” praises the Torrens land-title system and the new postal savings banks, and concludes that Filipinos are “probably hardly better fitted for self-government than the negroes of the South would be to-day if all the whites should move away” — while still urging eventual American withdrawal. A general essay, “Asia’s Greatest Lesson for America,” interrupts the itinerary with a comparative wage table running from ten-cent Chinese farm labor to fifty-cent Filipino labor to argue that Asian poverty comes from a refusal to use machinery, not from overpopulation. A single chapter on the Straits Settlements and Burma covers Singapore’s sixty languages and Chinese majority, a recent rubber-share speculation “bubble,” and the elephants Poe watches stacking teak logs at a Rangoon lumberyard, offering Buddhist Burma’s “greater cheerfulness and hopefulness” as a foil to what follows. Six more chapters, matching Japan and China in length, turn to India by naming Hinduism, not scenery, as “the first thing to be considered”: Poe describes goat sacrifices to Kali at Calcutta’s Kalighat temple and the cremation ghats of Benares, the caste system’s 2,378 castes and its daily enforcement (a servant who lost his place rather than help a Dom carry the far end of a forty-foot carpet), the famine of 1901–02 that killed 1,236,855 people and the sixty- to eighty-percent interest charged Hindu farmers, and child marriage and the old practice of widow-burning, closing his chapter on Hindu women with the Taj Mahal as, in his words, a “morning star” of hope for them.

The book ends with a single essay, “What the Orient May Teach Us,” gathering the whole tour under one word, conservation: Poe blames deforestation for the silted river valleys he crossed near the Nankou Pass, contrasts Japan’s active reforesting with a Korean river now half filled with sand, quotes Baron Shibusawa’s judgment that an ornate American railroad station “seems...uneconomic” beside Japanese frugality, repeats an acquaintance’s proposal for an armed world court to enforce arbitration, and closes by comparing Asian and Western birth rates before restating that “it is universal education and modern machinery, far more than virgin resources, that have made America rich and powerful” and that “knowledge and tools must go hand in hand.” The volume itself is illustrated rather than bare of apparatus: a gilt-stamped cloth cover and title page (crediting Poe as author also of A Southerner in Europe and Cotton: Its Cultivation and Manufacture) precede a frontispiece photograph of “Count Shige-Nobu Okuma of Japan,” his name lettered in Japanese characters beside an English caption noting it was “from a photograph and autograph given the author,” and further plates recur through the text, including the cryptomeria avenue at Nikko, Japanese farm and school scenes, the Great Buddha at Kamakura, the Great Wall, a scroll of Confucius copied out for Poe by a descendant of the sage, a Filipino house on stilts, and the Taj Mahal, per the book’s own list of illustrations; the preface separately thanks two fellow travelers, G. D. Adams of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Arthur Mez of Mannheim, Germany, for the use of many of their photographs.

Fourteen Years of Diplomatic Life in Japan presents itself, on its own title page, as “Leaves from the Diary of Baroness Albert d’Anethan”: the day-by-day diary of an Englishwoman married to the Belgian Minister — later Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary — accredited to the Court of Tokyo. In his introduction, Baron Kato, the Japanese Ambassador to the Court of St. James, writes that Baron Albert d’Anethan represented Belgium in Tokyo “for the long space of sixteen and a half years,” dying there, still in office, in 1910 — a span longer than, and different from, the title’s own “Fourteen Years,” which covers only the Baroness’s own residence — and describes the Baroness as an Englishwoman by birth who ably assisted her husband throughout. The diary itself opens on October 2, 1893, with the couple’s arrival at Yokohama, and closes with her own departure from Japan on March 3, 1906, followed by a brief final entry recording her husband’s own farewell audience with the Emperor that June. In an Author’s Foreword dated April 1912, she explains that she has left the manuscript “in the simple form in which they were originally inscribed,” making only “certain necessary corrections” and “considerable elimination” rather than reworking a private record into “a literary production.” The result is eighteen chapters, each headed by a year or span of years from 1893 to 1906, built from dated entries in the first person — “We (my husband, Baron Albert d’Anethan, Belgian Minister to the Court of Japan, my friend Miss Tuck, myself, and three Belgian servants) disembarked from the Empress of China and arrived at Yokohama about 8 a.m.” — with her husband referred to throughout simply as “A.” and a companion as “E.”

The early chapters move through the couple’s first exposure to court and diplomatic Tokyo: presentation to the Emperor and Empress on October 10, 1893, an excursion to Kamakura to see the bronze Daibutsu, and settling into the Belgian Legation itself, a house built by the Restoration statesman Okubo, to which his body was brought after his assassination nearby and laid out in what is now the drawing-room. The Imperial Chrysanthemum Garden Party, dinners with Count Ito — of whom she is told how he once escaped assassins by hiding in a tea-house’s dust-hold, sheltered by the girl he later married — and a long round of legation balls and audiences fill 1893 and early 1894, interrupted by a fire that burns some five thousand Tokyo houses and by a run of earthquakes, including one on June 20, 1894, that she calls the worst since 1854. War with China breaks out that August; she transcribes the Emperor’s proclamation, visits wounded Chinese prisoners at the Red Cross Hospital, and helps raise money for the Red Cross through amateur theatricals. A trip to Kyoto in April 1895 — after news, already received in Tokyo, of the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the attempted assassination of the Chinese plenipotentiary Li Hung-Chang during the peace talks — takes in the annual procession of Yoshiwara courtesans, which she calls “a painful sight,” begging the escorting police for “mercy for the poor inoffensive beings”; a separate autumn excursion that October brings the temples of Nikko in their autumn tints.

Through 1896 and 1897 the diary follows the sensational Yokohama trial of Mrs. Carew, convicted of poisoning her husband with arsenic (her sentence is later commuted to imprisonment), alongside more routine business: amateur dramatics that once end in a magnesium-flash explosion that badly injures a Japanese stage assistant, and the illness and death of the Empress Dowager. The couple leaves Tokyo in 1897 for a journey home by way of Shanghai, Hongkong, and Saigon, returning to Japan in 1898 in time to receive Prince Henry of Prussia and to attend the banquets marking Treaty Revision, at one of which her husband makes a speech to the Emperor. Two years later the diary follows the Boxer Uprising in close detail through telegrams and rumor — the advance and encirclement of Admiral Seymour’s relief force, the murder of the German Minister Baron von Ketteler, and the anxious wait for word of the besieged legations in Peking, where her friend Miss Condit Smith is trapped with the American Legation staff. She publishes, at first anonymously, a poem, “An Appeal from Pekin,” built around Sir Robert Hart’s telegraphed words “the situation is desperate: make haste,” which the Japan Times prints with a leading article; a second poem, “Rescue,” follows soon after, and the newspaper’s leading article introducing it recalls “the singular coincidence” that the government’s decision to dispatch its full relief division had been announced the day after “An Appeal from Pekin” itself appeared.

During an extended stay in Europe in 1901 she is received in private audience by Pope Leo XIII at the Vatican, accompanied by her brother-in-law Marquis Maurizio Cavalletti — he lays his fingers on her hair, gives her his ring, and sends a special blessing to the missionaries of Tokyo — and afterward hears Mass at St. Peter’s for Corpus Christi. Back in Japan, the Corps Diplomatique travels en masse to Osaka in April 1903 for the Emperor’s opening of the Osaka Exhibition, an event she describes down to the new rickshaws laid on for the visiting ministers, each fitted with a white fur foot-mat and a Japanese flag. The war with Russia that both she and her husband have long anticipated breaks out in February 1904: Japan recalls its Minister from St. Petersburg, and Baron Rosen and the Russian Legation staff, close friends of the d’Anethans, are given days to leave the country — she writes of her distress for “the poor Rosens” and for the First Secretary Prince Koudacheff and his sister, though it is Baroness Rosen and Princess Koudacheff who keep themselves under control at a painful send-off. She records the sinking of Russian ships at Chemulpo and off Port Arthur and, again anonymously, her own war poem “Alas!,” printed in the Japan Times.

The book follows the war through 1904 and 1905 largely as it reached the Tokyo home front: Miss Ozaki’s departure as interpreter to a Times war correspondent, the Baroness’s own work among the wounded at the Red Cross Hospital, the visit of Prince Carl Anton Hohenzollern, and news of the battles of the Yalu and Nan-shan and the blockade of Port Arthur, including the loss of Admiral Makaroff when the Petropavlovsk went down. That November the Emperor delivers a carefully worded birthday address to the Corps Diplomatique, to which her husband replies in French as its doyen. The death of her old friend Baron Sannomiya, Grand Master of Ceremonies, in August 1905 is recorded at length, down to the state funeral procession through Shiba Park. She describes Admiral Togo’s victory in the Battle of the Sea of Japan and his triumphal return to the capital, then the domestic backlash to the peace terms concluded that September — mass meetings in Hibiya Park, burned police boxes and churches, several days of martial law — a reaction she and her husband regard, against the prevailing mood, as an overreaction to what was in fact a sound settlement for Japan. The chapter closes with the British Fleet’s visit to Tokyo and the naval review celebrating the new Anglo-Japanese alliance.

By early 1906, when she notes that seventy copies of her own novel It Happened in Japan sold in Yokohama in four days over Christmas, and records that her husband has been doyen of the Corps Diplomatique for seven years to her nine as doyenne, the final chapters turn toward departure: Prince Arthur of Connaught’s mission to present the Emperor with the Order of the Garter, a false earthquake warning that empties a crowded Uyeno concert hall mid-performance, and a string of farewell audiences and gifts — a signed photograph and a pair of silver vases from the Empress, a silver bowl from Princess Higashi Fushimi, a send-off attended by more than a hundred and fifty people at Yokohama station. She sails for home on March 3, 1906; a short closing entry records that her husband was received in his own farewell audience by the Emperor that June, given a massive silver bowl bearing the Imperial chrysanthemum, and left Japan to rejoin her in Europe, after which the diary ends, “FINIS.” The volume carries Baron Kato’s introduction, a table of contents mapping its eighteen chapters onto pages 19 to 471, and, as its title page states, “a photogravure frontispiece and 116 other illustrations in half-tone” — the frontispiece a formal portrait of Baron d’Anethan in full ministerial dress and sash, the half-tones a mix of court and legation photographs, some credited to professional studios, many taken by the Baroness herself, others lent by Baroness Sannomiya, Mrs. Ozaki, and Colonel Hume, and eight reproduced from Professor Conder’s The Floral Art of Japan.

A Gentle Jehu in Japan is a private-press travel diary, printed, by its own front matter, “from type by Douglas C. McMurtrie” in a numbered edition of one thousand copies “on Ozaka linen paper,” and dedicated “affectionately dedicated to My Mother.” The title page names Dodd, Mead and Company of New York and reads 1911, but the leaf facing it carries its own notice, “Copyright, 1912, by Ethel L. McLean.” The book is built from dated entries — “February ninth,” “March sixth,” and on through the spring — that read as a running letter to someone left at home; the narrator breaks in directly more than once, writing “How I wish you could have been with us this morning!” and wishing that “you, who like sea voyages could have enjoyed this one.” For most of the book she writes as one of a pair of women traveling together, favoring “we” over “I”; her companion is named only once, as “Alice,” and otherwise appears simply as “M.” during the American crossing and, near the end, as “A.” Fourteen chapters carry the pair from a transcontinental train journey (“Across the Continent”) and a Pacific crossing (“The Pacific”) through a stop in Honolulu — called, in the book’s own chapter title, “An American Territory” — before turning the remaining eleven chapters over to the passage on to Japan and the visit itself, from Yokohama to a closing “Farewell to Nippon.”

The American opening is brisk: a badly timed connection at Montreal, a hot-box outside New York, days of snowbound scenery through the Canadian Rockies, and rain-soaked stops at Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, and Portland before a run down the California coast to San Francisco. Nine days on the Pacific aboard the S.S. Korea bring a shipboard glimpse of Chinese “celebrities” educated at Yale and Harvard and a small party of missionaries bound for Korea who hold their own Sunday service rather than endure the purser’s; a week in Honolulu and around Oahu follows — Waikiki, the cliff at Pali with its Kamehameha legend, water buffalo working the rice fields, and the Bishop Museum’s poi-pounders and tapa cloth — and closes with parting leis before the party sails on for Japan aboard the S.S. Shinyo Maru. Landing at Yokohama by riksha at night, the travelers move on by rail to Kobe and Hiogo, visiting the Shinkoji Temple’s colossal bronze Buddha and Numobiki Falls before a night at a Japanese inn in Onomichi and a rough crossing of the Inland Sea by mail steamer to Miyajima, with its floating torii, tame sacred deer, and lantern-lit shoreline. At Kyoto — toured partly on the advice of Miss Scidmore’s Jinrikisha Days — they take in Higashi-Otani, Yasakajiusha, and Chionin, the Mikado’s Palace, Nijo Palace, and the Golden and Silver Temples, Kinkakuji and Ginkakuji, the first visit undone by an agonizing lapse in tea-ceremony etiquette; the principal of the Doshisha Girls’ School opens private gardens to them and arranges an evening at a Christian mission house where young Japanese men perform the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice in Japanese translation, a visit to a jiu-jitsu school rounds out the stay, and, also in Kyoto, they meet a descendant of one of the Forty-Seven Ronin, who displays her ancestor’s sword and other relics.

The Cherry Dance chapter opens on a performance that brings another close call with ceremonial tea, this time served by child geisha apprentices “ranging from six to twelve years of age,” and continues with a night visit to the ancient cherry tree in Maruyama Park, ringed with rope and posts hung with blazing kindling, amid a crowd carrying paper lanterns; a tour of Kyoto’s curio trade follows, from Matsobia’s kimonos and Yamanaka’s general “museum” of a shop to Namikawa the cloisonné maker, Seifu the potter, and Kinkozan’s Satsuma ware, with a digression on the care lavished even on straw sandals and thatch roofing. Human Tandems takes the pair by two-man riksha to Lake Biwa and Otsu for a Japanese-style lunch of raw fish and egg, back to Kyoto by canal boat through two long tunnels, and by river boat “shooting the rapids” down the Oigawa at Arashiyama; a short aside dismisses Osaka — “a noisy, smoky, grimy city” — in favor of Nara, with its stone lanterns, Cryptomeria trees, and hand-fed deer, and notes Nagoya and Ise only as possible stops on the line to Tokyo. In the capital, “Europeanized” enough at first sight to disappoint, the itinerary runs through the Imperial Palace grounds, the Tokugawa shogun tombs at Shiba, the graves of the Forty-Seven Ronin at Sengakuji, the cherry blossoms of Ueno Park, the curio street of the Nacodori, and a No performance whose masked, gliding actors and “throaty” singing are followed with an interpreter’s help.

Easter finds the travelers first shut out of a midnight vigil at the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Kanda, reached too early and then rejoined at twelve for a candlelit procession, and afterward comparing it, deliberately, to the “eleven o’clock Morning Prayer” at the American Cathedral; the same days bring a visit to Asakusa Park and its Kwanon temple, a table-cooked “Gunobi party,” and a session of the Presbyterian Sunday School Convention. Hospitality and Ceremonial pairs an afternoon call on a Japanese gentleman, Mr. Hidyoshi, and his shy wife and baby, with an account of a fire-walking ceremony at which priests march barefoot over a bed of coals and a father carries his “shrieking child” across it in his arms. In Fujiyama, the last full day in Tokyo goes to Mr. Okura’s private art museum, and a hired automobile carries the pair to Kamakura’s Daibutsu (great Buddha), the island of Enoshima, and the hotel at Miyanoshita, before Fuji itself, seen from the departing ship, turns from white to “molten gold” in the sunset. Farewell to Nippon covers the return crossing on the S.S. Korea — sketches of an “Irish Lady—not born, created,” two young men bound to volunteer in the “Mexican Army,” and an English father and son — a stop in Honolulu, and the news, picked up by wireless as the ship nears California, of “the appalling disaster to the S.S. Titanic.” Full-page color-tinted photographic plates, each set in a ruled decorative border and captioned in capitals beneath a small chrysanthemum-crest tailpiece, recur through the book — among them views of Numobiki Falls at Kobe, a hillside opposite Arashiyama, and a Tokyo park on a Sunday in cherry-blossom season — alongside facsimile reproductions of travel ephemera the party kept, including a bilingual Mikado Hotel dining-car menu and a Japanese-language hotel bill from Onomichi.

Japan and Japanese-American Relations collects twenty-two addresses delivered under the title “Clark University Addresses,” edited by George H. Blakeslee, professor of history at Clark University. Blakeslee’s introduction explains that the papers were presented at Clark’s annual conference on international problems, that year devoted to Japan, where “twenty-eight experts, twenty-one Americans and seven Japanese, gave addresses or papers on almost every aspect of Japan’s national life and of the relations between Japan and the United States.” Most of the essays had already appeared in Clark’s Journal of Race Development, and the university republished them as a book, Blakeslee writes, “in response to an urgent request.” His stated aim is to counter a postwar “spirit of suspicion and even hostility” between the two countries, which he attributes to sensational newspapers, the immigration controversy, and American resentment of Japan’s policy in Manchuria and Korea, by letting American and Japanese authorities lay out the facts of Japan’s national life for themselves. Because each chapter is an independently authored lecture, the book has no single narrating voice or argument; university presidents, professors, missionaries, a congressman, a bank manager, and a journalist each speak in their own register, and the collection is best read as a set of separate testimonies bound by a common occasion rather than as one continuous account.

Several addresses take up Japan’s history, national character, and standing among nations. David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford, opens the volume with an account of Japanese-American relations that walks through the immigration question — Hawaii’s early recruitment of Japanese plantation labor, the Gentlemen’s Agreement restricting laborers, and the San Francisco school controversy — arguing that the friction has been economic and political rather than a matter of real enmity between the peoples. Jokichi Takamine, president of New York’s Nippon Club, follows with a portrait of the Japanese in America as, above all, students, citing Prince Ito, who reached England, and Jo Niisima, who worked his passage to America, as young men who evaded the exit ban to seek study abroad, and detailing Japanese newspapers, clubs, Buddhist temples, and agricultural labor in California, where he quotes a state labor report crediting Japanese pickers with the bulk of the strawberry, beet, and grape harvests. Thomas C. Mendenhall, who had taught at the Imperial University thirty years earlier, catalogues the changes he found on a return visit: the vanished topknot, the spread of Western hats and dress, electric tramways displacing the jinrikisha, and what he calls a puzzling revival of temple-building among Buddhists. George Grafton Wilson, Harvard’s professor of international law, traces the historical idea of a “family of nations” from Henry IV’s Grand Design through the Peace of Westphalia to Japan’s full admission to that family with the treaty revisions of 1899. Ellsworth Huntington of Yale advances a climatic theory of Japanese character, arguing that the country’s insularity, mountainous terrain, and stormy weather selected for a mental alertness that sets the Japanese apart from other Asian peoples. K. Asakawa of Yale surveys feudal Japan’s legacy to the new nation, tracing bushido to a fusion of Zen discipline, Confucian loyalty, and samurai codes of honor, and finding in the historic “political impersonality” of the emperor a principle the 1889 constitution reinforces institutionally, though never states outright.

A shorter run of addresses turns to industry, trade, and medicine. Garrett Droppers, professor of political economy at Williams College and formerly a professor at the Imperial University, locates “the secret of Japanese success” in the family, rather than the individual, as the basic unit of society, arguing that the disciplined patriarchal household explains both the order of the Tokugawa regime and the speed of the Meiji transformation. Hon. William C. Redfield, a manufacturer and member of Congress, reports on his own tour of Japanese industry, contrasting the porcelain and damascene workshops of Kyoto with the cotton mills of Osaka and the shipyards of Nagasaki, and noting Japanese managers trained at Yale, M.I.T., and Harvard. R. Ichinomiya, manager of the Yokohama Specie Bank’s New York branch, traces Japan’s foreign trade from 1880 to 1910 through a run of statistical tables, crediting the 1897 adoption of the gold standard and the decline of foreign and Chinese middlemen for the growth of direct Japanese participation in import and export houses. John C. Berry, formerly medical director of Doshisha University Hospital, gives a history of Japanese medicine running from a legendary age of testing herbal remedies on monkeys, through centuries of Chinese medical theory, to the Dutch-taught anatomists of Nagasaki and the introduction of vaccination.

A cluster of addresses considers Christianity, print culture, and municipal government. Arthur Judson Brown, secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, describes a “New Japan” that is at once more commercial and no less militant than before, rehearsing foreign traders’ complaints about Japanese rebates and customs evasion in Manchuria before arguing that Japan still needs a “spiritual vision” to complete its modernization. George M. Rowland, twenty-five years a missionary of the American Board, narrates the postwar drive toward an independent, self-supporting Japanese church, describing how the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Methodist bodies each negotiated financial independence from their American and European missions and installed Yoitsu Honda as the first Japanese bishop of any church. Charles M. Warren, another American Board missionary, credits Christian influence with changed Japanese ideals about women, business honesty, and the value of human life, citing an American medical missionary’s reform of Japanese prisons and a Christian-led campaign that closed a red-light district in Osaka. William Elliot Griffis attacks the “literary legend” of a generic, exoticized “Oriental,” which he calls a commercial fiction manufactured by poets, playwrights, and newspapers from Tom Moore’s day to his own. Hon. Harvey N. Shepard describes the French- and Prussian-derived structure of Japanese city government — mayors, councils, and elected assemblies in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka — alongside school-enrollment figures showing near-universal primary education by 1908.

The remaining addresses turn to diplomacy and colonial administration. Masujiro Honda, editor of the Oriental Review, traces the “evolution of Japanese diplomacy” from the closed-door Tokugawa policy through the wars with China and Russia and the Triple Intervention to the Portsmouth settlement and the immigration and treaty-revision disputes, arguing that Japan is entering an “industrial,” commercially grounded stage of diplomacy. Inazo Nitobe, president of Tokyo’s First National College and a former Formosan colonial official, gives a firsthand account of Japanese rule in Formosa — the suppression of brigandage and headhunting, a government opium monopoly designed to phase out addiction, and an electrified wire fence built to confine the aboriginal tribes — and holds the island up as the model for the later administration of Korea. T. Iyenaga of the University of Chicago contributes two papers, one on the Kwantung leased territory and the South Manchurian Railway Company’s mines, harbors, and townsites — including the American Knox proposal to neutralize the Manchurian railways, which he argues ignored the realities of the region’s history — the other defending the 1910 annexation of Korea as the outcome of a failed “buffer state” policy and cataloguing the residency-general’s reforms in Korean court finance, justice, education, and railway building under Ito and his successors. Theodore Richards, managing editor of Honolulu’s Friend, surveys the Japanese plantation labor force in Hawaii and its growing native-born, Buddhist-affiliated second generation, contrasting the near-absence of race feeling there with conditions on the American mainland. Edwin Maxey of the University of Nebraska argues that American and Japanese trade are complementary rather than competitive and that neither nation has anything to gain from a war for control of the Pacific. Frederick McCormick, a correspondent in Peking, closes the collection by tracing the influence of Chinese students returned from Japan on the revolution of 1911 and recounting the diplomatic maneuvering between Japan’s Komura and Russia that produced the Manchurian entente of 1910, itself a response to the failure of the same Knox neutralization scheme.

The book ends with McCormick’s essay, its final page observing that the United States and Japan “actually occupy a common platform and position in eastern Asia respecting China’s struggle to restore order and unity,” so long as Japan’s own need for peace holds. No index, table, or other apparatus follows the twenty-second address; a few blank leaves separate it from the volume’s binding.

Japan As I Saw It is a traveler’s book about Japan published in New York by Frederick A. Stokes Co., its title page announcing that it is “illustrated with special illustrations in collotype, engravings and pictures drawn by various special artists.” Nine chapters of letterpress run from page 13 to 259, and the volume carries no preface, index or map; sixty-five plates, set out in three lists whose columns are headed FACING PAGE, are inserted rather than printed with the text, and the frontispiece is a collotype pasted to a card mount. The book opens not with the journey but with a sixty-nine-page history of the country, so that the author’s arrival is reached only on page 82. A. H. Exner crosses from Shanghai to Nagasaki and moves eastward through Kobe, Hiogo and Osaka to Kioto; the later chapters take up Lake Biwa, Yokohama, Tokio, Shintoism and Buddhism, Nikko and Ise. The first person of the title is real but intermittent. Sentences in which Exner writes “I” number twenty-five in the whole book, twelve of them in the Kioto chapter; the chapters on Lake Biwa, on Tokio, and on Nikko and Ise contain none at all and describe instead what “one,” “we,” or “the foreigner” sees; he surfaces once each in the Yokohama and the Shintoism chapters, both times in the same formula, “I will give here.” Long stretches are topical survey or popular history rather than narrative, and China is the standing measure against which Japan is set.

“The History of Nippon” runs from legend to the reigning emperor. It begins with the gods Isanagi and Isanami and the sun-goddess Ama-terasu, from whom the Mikado is said to descend in a straight line, and moves through Jimmu Tenno, Jingu Kogo’s conquest of Korea, the Shoguns and the regency of the House of Hojo, and the storms that twice wrecked Kublai-Khan’s fleets. Under the three dictators Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu the Europeans arrive: Fernao Mendez Pinto driven ashore at Tanegashima, where his companion Zaimoto astonishes the islanders by shooting ducks with a gun; Francisco Xavier and the Jesuits; the decrees of banishment; the crucifixions and the massacre of Shimabara; and the Dutch penned on Deshima, whose humiliations Exner documents with long quotations from Kaempfer. He sets out the caste order from Mikado and Kuge down to the Eta, judging that Iyeyasu’s seclusion “made his country lose two and a-half centuries.” Perry at Kanagawa, the killing of the Englishman Richardson, Keiki’s resignation, Saigo’s Satsuma rebellion, the constitution of 1889, the wars with China and Russia, the formal annexation of Korea in 1910 and the death of Mutsu Hito in 1912 carry the chapter down to its own day. Only in the last sentence does the author appear, quoting a Japanese prayer for the monarch.

The journey begins in chapter two: “After a somewhat stormy crossing from Shanghai I arrived at daybreak before Nagasaki.” Exner sketches the landlocked harbor, the coal trade, and the vanished Dutch factory at Deshima, then leaves the town for pages that could stand anywhere in Japan — the hairdresser’s papier-mâché rolls and pomade, the kimono and obi defended against the charge of indecency and mourned as the Court order of 1887 puts ladies at Court into European dress, the go-between and mi-ai, the seven Confucian grounds on which a husband may divorce, the wood-and-paper house that burns down once in seven years, the scalding bath taken in order of rank, the dwarf firs in its garden. Kobe brings the Shinto temple at Ikuta, the waterfall Nuno-biki no Taki, the blind amma masseurs sounding a small whistle through the streets after dark, and moxa cones burned on the shanks of riksha-coolies; Osaka, the ruined castle Hideyoshi built and Keiki abandoned in flames in 1868, the canals of “the Venice of Japan,” and sericulture. Kioto is the most personal chapter: Exner puts up at the Yaami Hotel, takes the proprietor’s son as guide, and visits Nishi Hon-gwan-ji, Kiyomizu-dera with its bibbed Jizo images, the old Mikado palace, a theater performance of eight or ten hours with its flower ways and black-hooded kurombos, a wrestling match, and a tea-house evening of geishas and samisen players; the chapter turns aside to an Othello Japanned for the Kawakami company, its Moor the governor of Formosa.

Chapter five proposes an excursion instead of reporting one: “All who visit Kioto must not forget also to make an excursion to Lake Biwa,” and at the rapids “we embark on a flat-bottomed boat.” Besides Mii-dera’s bell and the Biwa canal it fits Fuji-no Yama, named in its title, five pages on food, five on farming, and the floral kingdom. Yokohama yields the granite Bund and the household of “the better-class European resident”: the betto who runs shouting before his master’s horse, his tattooing now forbidden along with tattooing generally, and the kuruyama between the jinrikisha shafts. Tea, paper-making and Chinese ideographs follow, with specimens drawn in the text and the Romaji Kai’s scheme for Latin letters. At Tokio come Nippon Bashi, the castle walls and their twenty-seven gates, the fireproof kuras, a catalogue of conflagrations and earthquakes, Uyeno Park and the flower fêtes, the Shogun tombs at Shiba, the Forty-seven Ronins’ graves at Sen-gaku-ji, and an account of hara-wo-kiri. Shinto, a hero-cult with “no dogma, no code of morals, and no doctrine about the next life,” is explained through the tori-i and the gohei, Buddhism through a life of Buddha epitomized from the Shaka Jitsu-roku, the Daibutsu of Kamakura and Benten’s five hundred eggs, the chapter closing on Confucianism dying out and Christians increasing. The last chapter climbs the cryptomeria avenue to Nikko and 240 steps to Iyeyasu’s bronze urn, ending at Ise with the holy mirror’s legend and the Mikado’s crests and titles.

Japan of the Japanese is a comprehensive topical survey by Joseph H. Longford, identified on the title page as “late H.M. Consul at Nagasaki: Professor of Japanese, King’s College, London: Barrister-at-Law, Middle Temple,” and already the author of The Story of Old Japan and The Story of Korea. It was published in 1912 by Charles Scribner’s Sons as a volume in the “Countries and Peoples” series, shelved alongside companion books such as Italy of the Italians and France of the French. Longford’s preface, dated from King’s College in November 1911, states his vantage directly: he writes as “one who has spent the greater part of his life among the people and who has made them a subject of painstaking study,” a claim the text itself repeats when he recalls “thirty years’ residence in all parts of Japan, from Hokkaido to Formosa.” He frames the book as a corrective to a British ignorance he illustrates with anecdotes — a learned professional man twice asking him “Where is Korea?”, an official confusing Sir Harry Parkes with the Australian statesman of the same surname, a prominent Englishman who believed “Manchus and Japanese are synonymous terms.” He calls the result “far from exhaustive” and admits that chapters on religion, on foreign and domestic politics, and on colonial administration were dropped for want of space in favor of subjects “more likely to appeal to popular taste and requirements.” What remains is arranged as sixteen numbered chapters moving from the physical country and national character, through dynastic history and the institutions of court, nobility and samurai, to language, literature and the stage, to law, policing and the armed forces, and finally to railways, shipping, posts, trade and banking, closed by an index.

The opening chapters lay out Japan island by island — the Kuriles, Yezo (Hokkaido), the Main Island under its official name Nippon, Shikoku, Kiushiu, the Loochoo chain and newly acquired Formosa and Korea — with figures on coastline, mountains, the fifty-one active volcanoes, the earthquake of 1891 and the tidal wave of 1896, population growth from 33 million in 1871 toward 51 million by 1910, and the small foreign community at the open ports. Longford then sets out what he takes to be Japanese national character at length, praising loyalty, patriotism, courtesy and a “laughter-loving” disposition while naming, just as plainly, vanity, a capacity for revenge, and cruelty to animals. A chapter of outlines of history runs from the mythical Jimmu Tenno through the Nara and Heian courts, the Fujiwara regency, the Taira–Minamoto wars, the Kamakura, Ashikaga and Tokugawa shogunates, Commodore Perry’s arrival and the Meiji Restoration, to the wars against China and Russia and the 1910 annexation of Korea. Separate chapters follow on the Imperial family — Emperor Mutsuhito, his titles, the 1889 House Law of succession, the Empress, and a genealogical table of the cadet princely houses — on the nobility created in 1884 out of the old Kuge and Buke, and on the samurai, whose Bushido code, sword privileges, and abrupt post-Restoration abolition (with commuted stipends and the loss of the right to bear arms) Longford traces in detail, quoting Lord Redesdale’s eyewitness account of a formal seppuku.

A run of chapters then turns to social life. One surveys the legal and customary position of women across the Nara, Heian and feudal periods, the Empress’s patronage of female education and the Tokio women’s university, and figures on female teachers, together with a general account of their spread into factory work. Another, “Some Social Institutions,” walks through arranged marriage and its go-between, the san-san-no-ku-do wine ceremony, grounds and mechanics of divorce, Buddhist and Shinto funeral rites, ancestor worship and the August festival of the returning dead, the twin customs of adoption and “abdication” (in-kiyo) by which household headship passes at a fixed age, and the family registration system that ties every subject to a district office. A chapter on language and literature covers the Turanian affinities of spoken Japanese, the kana syllabaries and Chinese ideographs, the Nara and Heian “Golden Age” dominated by women writers such as Murasaki no Shikibu and Sei Shonagon, Tokugawa-era fiction that Longford says is disfigured throughout by “pornography,” and the post-Restoration vogue for translated English, German and Russian authors. A companion chapter on poetry and the drama describes the tanka and hokku verse forms with translated specimens, the No and Kyogen of the aristocracy, and the popular Kabuki stage, naming plays such as the Chushingura and dramatists such as Chikamatsu.

The book then moves to public order and defense. A chapter on the press traces newspapers from hand-copied yomiuri newsletters through the first dailies of the 1870s, the restrictive Press Law of 1875 and journalists’ evasions of it by dummy editors, to circulation figures approaching two hundred thousand copies by 1911. Chapters on criminal and civil law contrast Tokugawa-era torture and mutilating punishments with the French- and German-modeled codes of 1880–1899, describe the court hierarchy and the procurator’s dominant role at trial, note that the standard of commercial morality among treaty-port traders was, in Longford’s judgment, “very low,” and give annual figures for executions and convictions; a following chapter on police and prisons credits the British minister Sir Harry Parkes with pressing for prison reform and describes convict labor by trade. The longest of these, on the navy and the army, credits English officers exclusively for building the fleet and gives its order of battle down to named dreadnoughts (the Aki and Satsuma), describes the introduction of conscription in 1872, the army’s performance in the Satsuma Rebellion and the wars against China and Russia, and projects a fully trained field strength of 1.5 million men within fifteen years, rising to over two million, including partially trained reserves, after a further decade.

The closing chapters turn to infrastructure and the economy, each dense with statistical tables. One traces railways from the British-financed Tokio–Yokohama line of 1872 through falling per-mile construction costs to the 1906 nationalization law, the mercantile marine from the Tokugawa ban on ships over fifty tons through its repeal and the rise of the Mitsu Bishi and Nippon Yusen Kaisha lines, and the post and telegraph services from a single 1870 mail route to figures for 1909. A chapter on trade and industry runs from the sixteenth-century Portuguese arrival at Tanegashima and the Dutch factory at Nagasaki through the 1859 opening of the treaty ports, the 1897 shift to a gold standard, and tables of exports, factories, spindles and wages. A final chapter on banking, insurance and revenue describes the founding of the Bank of Japan and the Yokohama Specie Bank, the 1900 Insurance Business Law, the conversion of feudal land dues into a land tax, and the newer income, business, customs and liquor taxes, closing on a note of caution about a national debt of 265 million pounds sterling and Japan’s capacity to sustain another war.

The volume is heavily illustrated: its own List of Illustrations enumerates a frontispiece portrait of the Emperor and some twenty-eight further full-page plates, keyed to specific pages throughout the text. Most of those inspected are photographic half-tones, many explicitly credited “From Stereograph, Copyright by Underwood and Underwood, London and New York,” reproducing landscapes such as Fujiyama reflected in Lake Shoji and the pine islands of Matsushima, gardens, temple gates at Kamakura, and posed groups including Princess Oyama’s family and a hostess greeting a visitor at her door; a smaller number are unsigned pen-and-ink costume drawings, such as a samurai in ceremonial dress and a lady in outdoor dress, and one plate reproduces a photograph of an actual sword execution, captioned “An Execution in 1869.” The list also names plates captioned simply “A Court Invitation” and “An Official Letter.” A genealogical table of the Imperial princely houses appears in the chapter on the nobility, and the later chapters on communications, trade and banking carry dozens of numerical tables of freight, currency, factory and revenue figures. The book closes with a topical index running from “Abatsu” to “Zodiacal signs” across some ten pages.