Victorian Travellers in the Japanese ‘Elf-land’

Abstract

In 1880, Rutherford Alcock observed that it was important to ‘be in a position to understand’ what Japan had been ‘in the old time’ in order to ‘rightly understand the New Japan’.1 He seems to have felt that sufficient time had elapsed since the revolution to enable him to approach Japan’s past objectively. The idea that Britain had obtained fairly solid knowledge of Tokugawa Japan was advanced by British writers who had a keen interest in Japan. Not only institutional, political and economic aspects but also the spiritual and cultural life of traditional Japan were steadily revealed to the British reading public, as has already been discussed in Chapter 6. However, the idea of ‘Old Japan’ which became dominant in British magazine and review articles during the 1870s was not produced by such writers as Alcock or Chamberlain, but rather by those who came for brief visits to Japan from either Shanghai or Hong Kong or on round-the-world tours and provided highly coloured accounts of their experiences.