Abstract
Over a 200-year period from the 1630s, the Dutch were the only European nation with whom the Bakufu (Shogunate) maintained official foreign relations. This changed in the second half of the nineteenth century when Japan became an increasingly popular destination for Western travellers. The first of this new wave of visitors began to arrive in the Bakumatsu period (1853–68), mainly naval officers and crew on board the various missions sent by the American and European powers in the early 1850s. Then from 1858, after the signing of the first trade treaties and the opening of the treaty ports for commerce and residence, came diplomats and the earliest dedicated scientific, missionary and recreational travellers. In the Meiji era (1868–1912) the number of visitors increased substantially: the political stability brought about by the end of the Shogunate and the establishment of a new imperial government was an important factor in this rise; as was Meiji Japan’s involvement in a burgeoning global tourist network — with the completion of the American Transcontinental Railroad and the Suez Canal, as well as regular steam packets across the Pacific, Japan soon became a regular stopover on round-the-world tours, most famously (and pioneeringly) by Thomas Cook in 1872.1
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Notes
See Yokohama kaikō shiryōkan (ed) (1996) Sekai manyūka-tachi no Nippon (Yokohama: Benridō).
W. Griffis (1906) The Mikado’s Empire, 11th edn., vol. I (New York and London: Harper and Brothers), p. 339.
B. Chamberlain (1905, 2007) Things Japanese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan (Berkeley and Tokyo: Stone Bridge Press), p. 68.
I. Kiyoshi (1955) Jōyaku kaisei: Meiji no minzoku mondai (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten), p. 4.
See A. Iriye (1989) ‘Japan’s Drive to Great-Power Status’, in M. Jansen (ed.) The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
As far as can be ascertained, the earliest such work was an article written in rapid response to Edward Said’s groundbreaking text: R. Minear (1980) ‘Orientalism and the Study of Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 39:3, 507–17. Of more direct relation to recent travel-writing debates is S. Clark and P. Smethurst (2008) (eds.) Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan, and Southeast Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press).
P. Smethurst (2009) ‘Introduction’ in J. Kuehn and P. Smethurst (eds.) Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (Abingdon: Routledge), p. 4.
M. Hiroshi (1985) ‘Kindai tsūrizumu no reimei: “naichi ryokō” o megutte’, in Y. Mitsukuni (ed.) 19 seiki Nihon no jōhō to shakai hendō, (Kyoto: Kyoto daigaku jinbunkagaku kenkyūjo), p. 109. Throughout, Japanese names are given in traditional order: family name first and given name second.
Here, authenticity is used in two related ways. The first follows Richard Handler’s work, which argues that the problem of authenticity/inauthenticity emerges with the shift from medieval to modern, and the conceptual relocation of ultimate meaning to the individual. In that older notions of selfhood remain to do battle with those of the modern, a gap opens up between ‘one’s outer position, or the role one play[s]’ in public and a valorised ‘inner or true self’. This split between public and private selves results in the anxiety that one’s life is somehow unreal or untrue; see R. Handler (1986) ‘Authenticity’, Anthropology Today, 2:1, 2–4. Thus displaced outside the self, the authentic is endlessly differed to another place or time: the elsewhere central to exoticist travel and travel writing.
J. Buzard (1993) The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 176.
More detailed information regarding Rutherford Alcock and his time in Japan can be found in H. Cortazzi (ed.) (2004) British Envoys in Japan, 1859–1972 (Folkestone: Global Oriental).
Recent bibliographies include P. Barr (1985) A Curious Life for a Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird (Harmondsworth: Penguin); and E. Kaye (1999) Amazing Traveler, Isabella Bird: The Biography of a Victorian Adventurer (Boulder: Blue Panda).
See J. Cott (1961, 1991) Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Knopf); and E. Stephenson, Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Macmillan).
L. Oliphant (1859) Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan, in the Years 1857, ’58, ’59, vol. II (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood), p. 259.
F.L. Hawks (1856, 2005) Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan: Narrative of An American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, 1852–1854: the official report of the expedition to Japan, compiled by Francis L. Hawks (Stroud: Nonsuch), pp. 15, 385.
C.P. Hodgson (1861, 2002) A Residence at Nagasaki and Hakodate in 1859–1860 (London and Tokyo: Ganesha), p. 72.
A. D’Almeida (1863, 2003) A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan (London and Tokyo: Ganesha), p. 8.
R. Alcock (1863) The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of Three Years’ Residence in Japan, vol. I. (London: Longman), p. 22.
See S. Osborn (1859, 2002) A Cruise in Japanese Waters (London and Tokyo: Ganesha), p. 13.
M.R. Auslin (2006) Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press), pp. 3–10.
G. Smith (1861, 2002) Ten Weeks in Japan (London and Tokyo: Ganesha), pp. 324–5, 274; R. Fortune (1863) Yedo and Peking: A Narrative of a Journey to the Capitals of Japan and China (London: John Murray), p. 147.
See A. Behdad (1994) Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press), pp. 18–19.
For a thorough explanation of these negotiations, see H. Shizuko (1974) ‘Meiji shonen no tai Ōbei kankei to gaikokujin naichi ryokō mondai (1)’ Shigaku zasshi 83:11, 1–29; and (1974) ‘Meiji shonen no tai Ōbei kankei to gaikokujin naichi ryokō mondai (2)’ Shigaku zasshi 83:12, 40–61.
B.H. Chamberlain and W.B. Mason (1891) A Handbook for Travellers in Japan, 3rd edn. (London: John Murray), p. 4.
Charles Wirgman (1999) The Japan Punch 1875–1876 (Tokyo: Yūshōdo), p. 61.
J. Torpey (2000) The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 60, 88.
Although Unbeaten Tracks was her third full-length publication, the Japan trip was the first that was organised after the surprise success of The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875); and Unbeaten Tracks was the first book for which Bird had a contract before her departure.
I.L. Bird (1880) Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior, including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikkô and Isé, vol. I (London: John Murray), pp. 80–1.
Ibid., p. 8.
See O. Checkland (1996) Isabella Bird ‘and a Woman’s Right to Do What She Can Do Well’: A New Biography of the Intrepid Traveller (Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press).
For example, in the introduction to a modern edition of Unbeaten Tracks, Evelyn Kaye equates foreigner and traveller when she writes about rural Tōhoku that ‘because no foreigners had visited [Japan] for more than 200 years, there were few facilities for travellers’; E. Kaye (2011) Introduction, in I.L. Bird (ed.) Unbeaten Tracks (San Francisco: Travelers’ Tales), p. 20. Even leaving aside the movement of local people, this ignores the long history of metropolitan Japanese travel writing about the route that Bird took and many of the places that she visited.
See E. Bach (1995) ‘A Traveller in Skirts: Quest and Conquest in the Travel Narratives of Isabella Bird’, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 3–4, 587–600; and Eve-Marie Kröller (1990) ‘First Impressions: Rhetorical Strategies in Travel Writing by Victorian Women’, Ariel, 21, 87–99.
See T.W.K., ‘The Old and New Japan,’ New York Times, 10 September 1877.
See D. Kerr (2008) Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), Chapter 2.
R. Lewis (2006) ‘On Veiling, Vision and Voyage’, in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds.) The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd edn. (London and New York: Routledge), p. 316.
M.L. Pratt (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 201–4.
Ibid., pp. 204–5.
L. Hearn (1894, 2009) Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Tokyo and Rutland: Tuttle), pp. 18–19.
Ibid., p. 17.
Quoted in E. Tinker (1924) Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days (New York: Dodd, Mead), pp. 328–30.
See B. Lemoine (2006) ‘Lafcadio Hearn as an Ambassador of French Literature in the United States and Japan’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 80:3, 297–316.
See E. Bisland (ed) (1922) Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin), pp. 114–17.
L. Hearn (1896, 1972) Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (Rutland: Tuttle), pp. 143–4.
J.E. Hoare (1994) Japan’s Treaty Ports and Foreign Settlements: The Uninvited Guests (Folkestone: Japan Library), pp. 168–70.
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© 2013 Andrew Elliott
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Elliott, A. (2013). British Travel Writing and the Japanese Interior, 1854–99. In: Farr, M., Guégan, X. (eds) The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304155_11
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