IN 2014, WHICH marked twenty-five years since I started researching Isabella Bird, two books of mine were published at round about the same time. These were In the Footsteps of Isabella Bird: Adventures in Twin Time Travel, a photographic collection, and this present book Isabella Bird and Japan: A Reassessment.

Over half a century Bird's journeys took her to every continent except South America and Antarctica, and for In the Footsteps of Isabella Bird I visited the places she had been to, taking copies of her books with me, and compared photographs I took there with what she had written. As far as possible I also matched up my photographs with the copperplate prints and photographs in her own books to create a photomontage of our two series of journeys more than a hundred years apart – hence the expression ‘twin time travel’. This to my mind has served to broaden interest in the collection.

My photograph album is the distillation of a number of successful exhibitions, fifteen in all, that I held from 2004, the centenary of her death, to 2014 in all the places connected with Bird; in terms of time elapsed, mounting these exhibitions accounted for more than two years of my life. It is, I think, unique in the sense that with its exhibits captioned both in English and Japanese it also appeals to Isabella Bird fans outside Japan and reflects my aim to acquaint a worldwide audience with the concept of Twin Time Travel.

Isabella Bird and Japan: A Reassessment, on the other hand, traces her life – she lived from 1831 to 1904 – mainly through the medium of her nearly fifty years of travel from 1856 to 1901 and looks in particular at her visit to Japan in 1878 which I regard as the pivotal point in her travel career. I examined her first visit to Japan in as much detail as possible in the limited space available to me, taking into account the circumstances of her visit and its legacy.

Isabella Bird is the most famous in her own right of that doughty band of women known as ‘lady travellers’ who exemplify the spirit of the Victorian era and her name persists to this day.