CHARLES LE GENDRE, a crusty American adviser to Japan's foreign ministry, told the ministry's leading light, Ōkuma Shigenobu, in 1874 that Japan should create a news organ to amplify its voice abroad, a government-subsidized paper that ‘shall, by sufficient distribution in the capitals of Europe and the various political and intellectual centres, tend to create a new interest in, and a more complete comprehension of, the Japanese situation’. The need for such a publication, he said, sprang from the damage done by ‘the malicious efforts of the foreign newspapers of Yokohama,’ which had poisoned international images of Japan in order to promote British commercial interests. He made it clear that he had a specific man in mind to edit the paper: Edward H. House, a Bostonian who had come to Japan in 1870 as a reporter for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. House was a respected journalist; he had influential friends in Japan, Europe and the United States; he was also a known crusader for idealistic causes.

Indeed, House, who had been a celebrity in American reporting circles, had made his name as an advocate. For example, he publicized John Brown's abolitionism at the end of the 1850s and pushed the New York press to give a sympathetic ear to the little known Mark Twain at the beginning of the 1860s. After coming to Japan as one of America's first regular Tokyo correspondents, he had defended Japan vigorously in 1872 when it freed 130 Chinese workers from the Peruvian barque Maria Luz; he had excoriated British journalists in Yokohama for their condescending reports on Japanese affairs; and he had written an influential book praising Japan's handling of a military expedition to Taiwan in the spring and summer of 1874. When House accepted an offer from the government in 1876 to establish the Tokio Times as the country's first pro-government, English-language newspaper, his life pattern was set.