Victorians In Japan

Preface - Chronological Table - List of Illustrations - List of Abbreviations - Map of Japan - Introduction - This Singular Country: British Writers' Thoughts in the Early 1850s on the Future Anglo-Japanese Encounter - Japan and the Edinburgh Publishers, William Blackwood and Sons - Britain, the Happy Suitor of a Fairy Land: About 1860, Immediately after the Conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Commercial Treaty - Britain, the Suitor Disillusioned with Japan: In the Last Years of the Tokugawa Regime - In Quest of the Inner Life of the Japanese: The Era of Algernon Bertram Mitford, 1869-72 - The Strange History of this Strange Country: The 1870s, a Decade of Zealous Westernization - Young Japan versus Great Britain: The Reinforcement of the Idea of Britain's Remoteness from Japan - Victorian Travellers in the Elf-land Japan: Their Wish to Fall in Love with Old Japan, 1870-80 - Conclusion - Selected Bibliography - Index

An anthology of impressions, 'snapshots' and anecdotes, this collection of vignettes conveys vividly what it was like to be a foreigner in Japan in Victorian times. The focus is upon Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Nagasaki and the other Treaty ports and their vicinity. This amusing and evocative book throws a revealing light both upon the Victorian experience of Japan and upon Japan itself. First published in 1987, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.

How Japan captured the Victorian imagination and transformed Western aesthetics From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. Quaint, Exquisite explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, queer theory, textual criticism, and a wealth of in-depth archival research, Grace Lavery provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. She argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. The book features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Lavery also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats’s prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. Quaint, Exquisite provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.

Examining early Japanese visitors' experiences and perceptions of Victorian Britain the text reveals one of the most spectacular culture shocks ever recorded in world history, and their images still underpin Japanese understanding of the outside world.

The investigations undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge by the first overseas Japanese travellers during the 1860s and 70s have left a unique record of life in the then unknown west. Leaving behind a homeland culturally isolated for more than 200 years, these samurai travellers were especially fascinated by the extent of British political and commercial influence they observed during their travels, and therefore paid particularly close attention to the Victorian world and recorded all they saw in minute detail. Their diaries and 'travelogues' comprise the single largest body of material on Victorian society to be recorded in any non-European language. This book examines the nature of these travellers' experiences and their perceptions of Victorian Britain. A deeper understanding of this rich source material is important because, although entirely unknown to British readers, the documents reveal one of the most spectacular culture shocks ever recorded in World History. They are also important because the images of Victorian and other western societies that they portrayed to the Japanese reading public in the late nineteenth century still underpin Japanese understanding of the outside world more than a hundred years later.

Complementing other published works about travel by nineteenth-century women writers by locating and creating ‘space’ for Japan is missing within recent critical discourses on travel writing, it examines narratives of women writers who travelled to Japan from the mid-1850s onwards, and became a highly desirable travel destination thereafter.

An anthology of impressions, ''snapshots'' and anecdotes, this collection of vignettes conveys vividly what it was like to be a foreigner in Japan in Victorian times. The focus is upon Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, Nagasaki and the other Treaty ports and their vicinity. This amusing and evocative book throws a revealing light both upon the Victorian experience of Japan and upon Japan itself. First published in 1987, this title is part of the Bloomsbury Academic Collections series.