Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- List of Plates
- 1 Yokohama: October – December 1866
- 2 Edo: October 1866 – May 1867
- 3 The Shogun: January – April 1867
- 4 An Adventurous Journey: July – August 1867
- 5 The Birth of the New Japan: October 1867 – March 1868
- 6 Kyoto: February – March 1868
- 7 Osaka: March – July 1868
- 8 Tokyo: August 1868 – January 1870
- 9 After Japan: 1870 – 1906
- 10 The Return: February – March 1906
- 11 The Legacy: 1906 –
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- List of Plates
- 1 Yokohama: October – December 1866
- 2 Edo: October 1866 – May 1867
- 3 The Shogun: January – April 1867
- 4 An Adventurous Journey: July – August 1867
- 5 The Birth of the New Japan: October 1867 – March 1868
- 6 Kyoto: February – March 1868
- 7 Osaka: March – July 1868
- 8 Tokyo: August 1868 – January 1870
- 9 After Japan: 1870 – 1906
- 10 The Return: February – March 1906
- 11 The Legacy: 1906 –
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
WHAT WAS JAPAN and who were the Japanese? In 1870, when the thirty-three-year-old Algernon Bertram Mitford (1837–1916) returned to England after three and a half years as a diplomat there, this question was being asked across the Western world. Japan had taken it by storm. There has never been another time in history when a distant culture so invaded the drawing rooms of Western Europe and North America in such a sustained way. A British journal commented:
Our women are Japanese in costume; the Japanese top-spinners and posture-masters are an institution; Japanese umbrellas, fans, trays, silks, and jewelleries have occupied the old bric-à-brac market … In a word taste … just now adopts all Japanese things.
Everybody was familiar with the country's arts and crafts, but were in ‘profound ignorance’ of the nation itself, as a newspaper of the time put it. A trickle of Westerners had visited since the 1850s and had created the impression of a strange, unknowable place. They would stress how different it was to the West and how contradictory it seemed. Japan was portrayed as a land of toy people and toy houses but at the same time its people were perceived to be brutal and bloodthirsty, with a casual indifference to life and death. The Japanese were seen to have plenty of beliefs and customs, but no proper religion and therefore no basis for their morality. There was no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in Japan – only what was acceptable in their labyrinthine code of behaviour and what was not. Above all, its people were different: singular – unknowable – inscrutable.
Mitford would come to reject this view out of hand. While at first he was bewildered by the country and indeed felt contempt for it, with remarkable speed he learned the language and started to embrace Japanese traditions. He came to feel that the Japanese were, in many respects, superior to Westerners, particularly in their views of honour and duty. The beliefs underpinning their culture were entirely different to those in the West, but once they were understood, Mitford believed, their behaviour was completely reasonable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A. B. Mitford and the Birth of Japan as a Modern StateLetters Home, pp. xi - xivPublisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017