Travellers in search of the unexpected found it in Old Japan. Here was a strange land indeed, where women blackened their teeth, men wore tattoos in lieu of clothing, and the whole family bathed together “with as much freedom as a flock of ducks”. Visitors came in thousands and eagerly put pen to paper, commenting on everything Japanese, from curios to coolies, sake to samurai, etiquette to earthquakes. They left behind—in letters, diaries and memoirs—personal impressions of Old Japan, sometimes as revealing of the writers themselves as the country they came to visit. This book features 74 of these traveller’s tales—many of them funny, others serious, but all a pleasure to read

Tales of Old Japan (1871) is an anthology of short stories compiled by Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, writing under the better known name of A.B. Mitford. These stories focus on various aspects of Japanese life before the Meiji Restoration. The book, which was written in 1871, forms an introduction to Japanese literature and culture, both through the stories, all adapted from Japanese sources, and Mitford's supplementary notes. Also included are Mitford's eyewitness accounts of a selection of Japanese rituals, ranging from harakiri (seppuku) and marriage to a selection of sermons.

Tales of Old Japan is an anthology of short stories which focus on various aspects of Japanese life before the Meiji Restoration. The book, which was written in 1871, forms an introduction to Japanese literature and culture, both through the stories, all adapted from Japanese sources, and Mitford's supplementary notes. Also included are Mitford's eyewitness accounts of a selection of Japanese rituals, ranging from harakiri (seppuku) and marriage to a selection of sermons.

Grisly accounts of revenge and knightly exploits, a fascinating eyewitness account of a hara-kiri ceremony, tales of vampires and samurai, Buddhist sermons, and the plots of four Noh plays. 38 illustrations.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.

The omnipresence and popularity of American consumer products in Japan have triggered an avalanche of writing shedding light on different aspects of this cross-cultural relationship. Cultural interactions are often accompanied by the term cultural imperialism, a concept that on close scrutiny turns out to be a hasty oversimplification given the contemporary cultural interaction between the U.S. and Japan. »Embracing Differences« shows that this assumption of a one-sided transfer is no longer valid. Closely investigating Disney theme parks, sushi, as well as movies, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt reveals a dialogical exchange between these two nations that has changed the image of Japan in the United States.

Gary Leupp describes and analyzes intimate relationships between Western men and Japanese women throughout the entire early modern period and into the first few decades of the modern period, when Westerners came to reside in the Treaty Ports. This subject has been largely overlooked by Western scholars, until now.

This volume complements other published works about travel by nineteenth-century women writers by locating and creating ‘space’ for Japan which is missing within recent critical discourses on travel writing. It examines the narratives of women writers who travelled to Japan from the mid-1850s onwards, when Japan was first opened to the West, and became a highly desirable travel destination for decades thereafter. Many women travelled in this period, and although most left no record of their journeys, enough did to form a discrete body of literature spanning more than fifty years – from the end of the feudal Tokugawa era to the rise of Meiji Japan as a world power. Their narratives about Japan occupy a culturally significant place, not only in the genre of Victorian female travel writing, but in Victorian travel writing per se. The writers who are the subject of this book are divided into two groups: those who were ‘travellers-by-intent’, namely, Anna D’A, Alice Frere, Annie Brassey, Isabella Bird and Marie Stopes, and those who ‘travelled-by-default’ as the wives of diplomats, namely Mrs Pemberton Hodgson, Mrs Hugh Fraser and Baroness Albert d’Anethan.