When you go to a Japanese inn, which is a kind of Japanese Hotel, you are received by such bowings and the maids in waiting sit kneeling before you while they wait upon you … we are reminded of what we read in Herodotus about the methods of courtesy of the Iranians of Achaemenian times. — J.J. Modi (1922)Footnote 1
During its modernizing Meiji period (1868–1912), Japan hosted a pageant of grand tourists, from politicians and princes to celebrated authors and art collectors. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Japan also accommodated travelling elites and merchants from both India and the Middle East who came to learn the secrets of Japan’s swift modernization.Footnote 2 Rather than exploring sites of traditional Japanese culture, most of these Asian visitors restricted their itineraries to the port cities of Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki, or the capital, Tokyo. Not only were these cities easily accessible via the steamship route from Bombay and the Yokohama–Tokyo railway, but they were also the venues of Japan’s most intense modernization.
Insofar as the primary motivations of Indian and Middle Eastern visitors were geared towards engaging with Japanese modernity—whether as a model for imitation or as a commercial trading partner—such restricted itineraries made sense.Footnote 3 This produced a certain irony in that the places these visitors encountered were the least traditionally Japanese. In the wake of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, the Japanophilia voiced in the flurry of articles and books that appeared in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish was primarily focused on the country’s successful modernization.Footnote 4 The Japanophilia that spread across much of Asia—especially after the defeat of Russia—was thus the exact opposite of European Japonisme: whereas the former admired ‘modern Japan’, the latter admired ‘traditional Japan’.
This broad pattern of Indian and Middle Eastern interest in Japan’s military and industrial modernization makes direct encounters with more traditional aspects Japanese culture all the more important, particularly encounters that took place prior to the defeat of imperial Russia. The aesthetic Japanophilia associated with Indian Pan-Asianists such as Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and the Indian artists based in Calcutta, who were influenced by Tagore and the art historian Okakura Kakuzō (1863–1913), have already been the focus of scholarly attention.Footnote 5 However, not only were these interactions conducted through English, but this Bengali aesthetic Japanophilia also initially developed at a distance: Tagore did not make his first visit to Japan until 1916.Footnote 6 This article by contrast focuses on a series of earlier visits made between 1896 and 1904 by elite Indian and Iranian tourists who encountered Japanese cultural forms directly, then published Urdu and Persian accounts of their experiences for readers back home. As we will see through a study of their tours of the old pilgrimage town of Nikko, what made these journeys possible was the integration of Meiji Japan into what by around 1900 had become a truly global tourist system.
In view of the underlying tourist infrastructure that enabled their visits, it would be a mistake to construct a dichotomy between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘modernist’ visitors. Just as the development of European aesthetic Japanophilia depended on steamship ports, Imari factories, and universities established in the Meiji era, so Indian and Middle Eastern exposure to traditional Japan was enabled by the modern transport infrastructures of the period that functioned as part of a larger international tourist system.Footnote 7 Japan’s emergent tourist system included not only steam ports and railway lines, but also crucially hotels. By focusing on two parties of Indian and Iranian elite tourists who stayed at Nikko’s Kanaya Hotel, we will see how such modern hotels functioned as mechanisms of learning about traditional Japanese culture for tourists from Asia no less than America and Europe.
Hotels have increasingly become a subject of historical enquiry, though so far scholarship has mainly focused on European and American hotels, or else on what Kevin J. James and Maurizio Peleggi have framed as ‘colonial hotels’.Footnote 8 Since Japanese hotels emerged through the expansion of an international tourist system, they echoed slightly earlier or contemporaneous developments in the United States, Europe, and its colonies. Indeed, the two main groups of Indian and Iranian tourists on whom we will focus visited Japan as part of larger world tours in which they stayed in a series of European, American, and ‘colonial’ hotels. This infrastructure should be seen as part of a global rather than a dichotomized colonial/non-colonial system, a point perhaps best illustrated by the Hotel Gabrielli, a hotel built in 1856 in Habsburg-ruled Venice that allowed Germanophone visitors to taste the cultural riches of Venice. Hence, the visits to Nikko—and its Kanaya Hotel—by the Indian prince Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan in 1896 and the Iranian ministers Mehdi Qoli Hedayat and Mirza Ali Asghar Khan in 1904 reveal that hotels in Asia similarly functioned as infrastructures for cross-cultural learning.Footnote 9
In a recent edited volume, Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and Efterpi Mitsi have argued that early twentieth-century hotels in Europe and America functioned as venues for transnational and transcultural activities.Footnote 10 This was no less the case for Japan, as tourist hotels began to appear beyond the treaty ports and Tokyo, with the earliest such hotel being the Kanaya Hotel at Nikko. Consequently, Nikko—and the Kanaya Hotel in particular—functioned as the venue for an early sequence of Indian and Middle Eastern encounters with traditional Japanese culture. Away from Yokohama, Kobe, and Tokyo—the spaces of the taraqqi (‘progress’ in Urdu and Persian) that was a leitmotif for Indian and Middle Eastern modernist Japanophiles alike—Nikko offered a glimpse of the older Japan of the Tokugawa Shogunate, whose founders had established its shrine-temples.Footnote 11 These pilgrimage sites and their associated cultural practices allowed Nikko to serve as a locus for what, in his classic study of modern tourism, Dean MacCannell theorized as ‘staged authenticity’.Footnote 12 As Amy Miller has noted, new kinds of hotels rendered such sites of ‘authenticity’ accessible to Western visitors.Footnote 13 The ‘authentic’ Japan experienced by our transnational sample of Indian and Iranian globetrotters was similarly viewed from a transcultural European-style hotel whose manager learned to speak English and whose chef learned to cook Indian curry.
However, before delving into the details, we should clarify what kind of cross-cultural learning such hotels made possible for their Indian and Iranian guests. It is important not to overstate the case. No one from the Indian and Iranian parties published formal works of Japanology, whether studies of Japanese artworks or translations of Japanese literature; nor apparently did any of them learn to speak more than a few phrases of Japanese. Instead, the cross-cultural learning they acquired—and passed on to their readers—was more informal, based on a combination of their personal observations, their local informants, and the cultural comparisons and interpretations they made in turn. This was, then, a distinctly touristic and amateur mode of knowledge.Footnote 14 As Miller has written in her account of British tourists in Meiji Japan, ‘authentic spaces’ like Nikko were sites ‘for observation rather than engagement’ whose shrine and temple rituals ‘were treated as a type of theatre, where local populations were watched while making meaningful connections with those sites’.Footnote 15 Yet given the paucity of information about Japanese culture—indeed, about Japan in general—available in either Urdu or Persian at the time of their visits, what these Indian and Iranian elite tourists learned represented a significant advance. Even after the Japanese defeat of Russia, the focus for the Urdu and Persian reading public remained on military and industrial modernization. Moreover, most of those post-war accounts were vicarious, drawing on European sources.Footnote 16
The role of hotels in enabling this informal and amateur mode of cross-cultural learning came through their positions as local node points within the wider tourist infrastructure. Through the tourist hotel as a specific type of accommodation, the visitor could access local guides, who might gather or advertise services in the lobby; purchase local postcards and guidebooks; find local transport through rickshaw drivers who loitered outside; rely on staff who spoke English or another international language; meet fellow tourists from other countries; eat local food (or more familiar cuisine); and most importantly, retreat to a space where the tourist could be assured of their physical and cultural security. Unlike the authentic spaces outside its doors, the hotel was a space where foreigners were expected to be foreign: unfamiliar with local taboos, dress codes, and cuisine no less than the local language. The hotel, then, was the sine qua non for informal and amateur modes of cross-cultural learning that could nonetheless be significant in the absence of more formal modes of knowledge about a particular place or people. In the apposite phrasing of Maurizio Peleggi, the tourist hotels that emerged either side of 1900 comprised ‘comfort zones as contact zones’.Footnote 17
The tourist system in Meiji Japan
Cédric Humair and Jan Chiarelli have explained that,
For a tourism system to work, many dimensions have to be mastered: financing, legal procedures, technical modernisation, marketing, political support, etc. All this requires a wide range of skills as well as capital. Hoteliers, transport operators and entertainment providers must therefore be seen as essential cogs in the machinery, but in order to function, [a tourism system] also needs financiers, political intermediaries, lawyers, engineers and architects, as well as artists, journalists, publicists and printers. A tourism system is thus composed of a multiplicity of individual and collective actors who form complex social networks.Footnote 18
The development of the modern hotel was part of these larger systemic developments. Whether for such major British colonial hotels as the Taj Mahal in Bombay, the Strand in Rangoon, the Galle Face in Colombo, and the Raffles in Singapore, or for their early Japanese counterparts—the Oriental Hotel in Kobe (1870), the Grand Hotel in Yokohama (1873), the Kanaya Hotel in Nikko (1873), and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (1890)—their location on either steamship or train networks was crucial.Footnote 19
Beginning in the treaty ports of Kobe and Yokohama before quickly expanding to cities solely under Japanese jurisdiction such as Nikko and Tokyo, the distribution of Japan’s first tourist hotels shows they were neither a wholly colonial nor indigenous development. Their position on transport nodes was one aspect of their incorporation into a tourist system that also comprised other material factors and human actors, such as ‘political intermediaries … and architects’. Thus, when in 1883 the powerful Japanese minister of foreign affairs Count Inoue Kaoru (1835–1915), oversaw the construction of the Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Pavilion), a state guesthouse for visiting foreign officials in Tokyo, he commissioned the British architect Josiah Conder (1852–1920) to design it.Footnote 20 After being severely damaged by the 1894 Tokyo earthquake, the Rokumeikan was superseded by the adjacent Imperial Hotel, designed in French Beaux-Arts style by Yuzuru Watanabe (1855–1930), who had travelled extensively in Europe.
Both the Rokumeikan, with its European-inspired design, and the Imperial Hotel, in whose planning Count Inoue was also involved, were intended to showcase Japan’s modernization to foreign tourists and other visitors. The same was true of the modern hotels built in ports like Yokohama and Kobe. By contrast, the Kanaya Hotel that opened in Nikko in 1873 afforded tourists access to a very different Japan of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, of pretty lacquered bridges and traditional handicrafts. Yet like the entanglement of tradition and modernity in the emergence of European Japonisme, the development of Nikko into a destination for European—then Indian and Middle Eastern—tourists to experience traditional Japan was similarly bound up with Japan’s incorporation into the same international tourist system that enabled other self-styled ‘globetrotters’ to follow similar itineraries.Footnote 21 Hence, what enabled Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan, Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, Mirza Ali Asghar Khan, and other Asian tourists to make Nikko part of their larger world tours was in part the opening in 1890 of Nikko’s train station, linking the town to Tokyo, and the construction of the Kanaya Hotel, but also a wider system of actors—including ‘artists, journalists, publicists’—to whom we will turn below.Footnote 22 Despite a few authentic flourishes by way of decoration, the Kanaya Hotel was effectively a Western-style hotel that offered familiar comforts to its globetrotting guests.
Nikko: From Shogunate shrine town to global tourist site
Located amid mountains approximately 140 kilometres north of Tokyo, the town of Nikko originally developed around the Rinnō-ji Buddhist temple founded in 766. However, the temple and town at large owed their importance to the early Tokugawa attempt to create a dynastic ritual centre after their establishment of the Shogunate based in Edo (renamed Tokyo in 1868). The great Tōshō-gu shrine, completed in 1617, was constructed around the mausoleum of the first Tokugawa shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), with woodcarvers and painters brought from all over Japan. From 1652 to 1653, the Taiyuin shrine complex was constructed around the mausoleum of the third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651) (see Figure 1). In the meantime, the beauty of Nikko was further augmented by the red lacquered Shinkyō bridge in 1636.
Gateway to Nikko’s Taiyuin Temple on pre-1907 hand-tinted Japanese postcard (Collection of Nile Green).
Following the 1868 Meiji Restoration and the accompanying influx of foreigners with the end of the Tokugawa sakoku (‘closed country’), the mobility of foreigners was initially limited to the half-dozen treaty ports.Footnote 23 Over the following decades these travel restrictions were gradually reduced and dropped entirely in 1899. Footnote 24 During the interim decades of the 1870s and 1880s, Nikko began to acquire new functions, becoming a highland summer resort for foreign elites and the imperial household alike. The key figure was Sir Ernest Satow (1843–1929), a prominent British diplomat and scholar of Japan, who began the transformation of Nikko into a Japanese counterpart to the ‘hill stations’ of India and Malaya, where Western diplomats and missionaries could escape the summer heat of the treaty ports and Tokyo.Footnote 25 However, in contrast to most of the colonial hill stations, Nikko had an older history manifested in its architecture, rituals, and handicrafts, allowing it to function as an ‘authentic space’ where tourists could find the ‘real Japan’ they felt was disappearing from the modernizing port cities.Footnote 26
As Nikko’s primary international publicist, Satow made his first visit to the town in 1872, making repeated sojourns until 1880 (when he was transferred to Siam) and frequently returning during his years as Minister to Tokyo (1885–1900), when he visited no fewer than thirty-one times.Footnote 27 Satow published enthusiastic articles, beginning with a piece in the Japan Weekly Mail penned immediately after his first visit. In another article, he wrote:
If the traveler is learned in the old history and mythology of Japan, he can spend days in examining the temples, shrines, and other objects of interest in the sacred grounds already described. If he prefers nature, he can be equally interested in exploring the neighbourhood, and whichever way his steps lead him, he will find points of attraction.Footnote 28
As we will see, a few decades later the Urdu and Persian accounts of Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan and Mehdi Qoli Hedayat would echo these sentiments. In the meantime, in 1875, Satow wrote an entire guidebook on Nikko, which was published in Yokohama, and in 1896 had a villa built above the town beside Lake Chuzenji, where he hosted diplomatic guests from Britain, America, Russia, France, Germany, Holland, and Belgium.Footnote 29 The villa was designed by Josiah Conder, architect of the Rokumeikan state guest house, reflecting again the internationalism of Meiji Japan’s tourist system.Footnote 30
These decades also saw Nikko become a summer resort for the Japanese imperial elite. In 1872—the same year as Satow’s first visit—an old Edo period property outside the town was presented to the imperial family. After Crown Prince Yoshihito visited in 1896, the property became the site of the Tamozawa Imperial Villa, which was completed in 1899 as the largest wooden imperial villa constructed in Japan during the Meiji and Taisho eras. Built in traditional style and with traditional skills during a period of Westernizing architecture in Japan, the imperial villa was the architectural counterpart to the woodblock prints of Nikko’s Urami waterfall and Shinkyō bridge made by such artists as Kuniaki, Ginkō, Tankei, and Hiroshige III, whose depictions of the bridge included the top-hatted European tourists who were increasingly part of the local scenery.
Before the railway reached Nikko, such early tourists used the rickshaws invented around 1869 after the lifting of the earlier Tokugawa ban on wheeled transport. Signalling the rapid touristic take-up of the rickshaw, by 1874 the Japanese term jin-riki-sha (literally ‘human-powered vehicle’) had entered written English usage as ‘jinrikisha’, with the simplified version ‘rickshaw’ emerging five years later.Footnote 31 In his 1881 Handbook for Travellers, Satow was able to advise travellers to simply take a jin-riki-sha to Nikko from what was then the railhead at Utsunomiya.Footnote 32 As James has aptly observed, ‘transport technology became bound with the opening up of new places to new constituencies of travellers, and with efforts to produce new infrastructures to facilitate movement within tourist destinations’.Footnote 33
This brings us to the Kanaya Hotel. As Maurizio Peleggi has written of colonial British hotels—in several of which our Indian and Iranian parties stayed on their world tours—‘racial dynamics were however complex, and often intertwined to class’.Footnote 34 This was all the more true in Meiji Japan: its main tourist hotels hosted a truly international clientele whose chief commonality was their elevated class status. In previous centuries, Japanese pilgrims to Nikko had stayed at the town’s great shrine-temples. It was there that Satow initially sought accommodation during his first visit. But Satow’s enthusiasms enticed other visitors who would contribute to the development of the town’s first tourist hotel. In 1873, his American friend, the medical missionary Dr James C. Hepburn (1815–1911), visited Nikko, where following Satow’s advice, he too sought accommodation at the Tōshō-gu shrine. But there Hepburn met Kanaya Zenichiro, a master musician and hereditary samurai, who offered to host the American at his ancestral wooden house, which apparently dated back to the 1600s. After returning to Yokohama, Hepburn recommended Kanaya Zenichiro to the port’s other foreign residents who soon followed Satow and Hepburn to this enchanting epitome of authentic Japan.
The ensuing stream of visitors encouraged Kanaya to remodel his house, which reopened in 1873 as the Kanaya Cottage Inn. Five years later, the trailblazing American scholar of Japanese art, Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), came to stay on an early journey that initiated his lifelong engagement with traditional Japanese culture (and with Nikko especially).Footnote 35 The former American President General Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) soon followed.Footnote 36 Both Nikko and the Kanaya Cottage Inn received another publicity boost when the famous British travel writer Isabella Bird (1831–1904) lodged there for twelve days. In Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), Bird included a charming drawing and description of the Inn: ‘The shrines’, she declared, ‘are the most wonderful work of their kind in Japan.’Footnote 37 Nine years after Bird’s account was published, she was followed to Nikko by British artist Sir Alfred East (1849–1913), whose impressions were exhibited on his return to London.Footnote 38 Bird’s and East’s drawings and descriptions provided for Nikko the ‘textual and visual orientations’ that James has shown to be so important to the rise of modern tourism.Footnote 39
East described the Kanaya Hotel as a place ‘where crowds of globe trotters always make their headquarters’.Footnote 40 By then, Japan’s nascent tourist system was beginning to offer not only accommodation but also food for foreigners: the European-style bread Kanaya Zenichiro’s cook learned to bake remains famous today. Japan’s links to the international tourist system ensured that guidebooks followed: in addition to Satow’s 1875 Guide Book to Nikko, he expanded it with A. G. S. Hawes into their larger Handbook for Travellers in Central and Northern Japan (1881), which combined practical advice with historical information based on Satow’s reading of old Japanese texts, including guidebooks printed in the Edo period.Footnote 41 In 1884, the famous Murray’s Handbooks series issued a guidebook to Japan by Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935), a distinguished ‘hired foreigner’ and professor of Japanese at the Imperial University.Footnote 42 Chamberlain’s Things Japanese was an encyclopaedic vade mecum ‘for the use of travellers and others’, with topics arranged in alphabetical order from abacus to zoology.Footnote 43 Aptly, Chamberlain spent his twenty-year retirement residing with his large Japanese library in the Fujiya Hotel, founded in 1878 in the highlands at Hakone, which he likewise helped popularize.Footnote 44
Beyond travel books, a new cadre of human guides and translators developed for foreign tourists. The most influential of these early tourist guides was Itō Tsurukichi (1858–1913). Born in Kanagawa, Itō learned English as a youth in Yokohama. At eighteen, Isabella Bird hired him as her interpreter for her 1878 journey from Tokyo to Hokkaido, during which she stayed in Nikko.Footnote 45 Itō appears repeatedly in Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks, which along with word-of-mouth recommendations helped him become the best known of the new cadre of tour guides.Footnote 46 Itō subsequently founded Japan’s first interpreter-guide organization, the Kaiyusha, based in Yokohama and Kobe, with later branches in Tokyo and Kyoto. Full-page advertisements appeared in Murray’s Handbook.Footnote 47 Itō’s organization was also able to supply French- and German-speaking Japanese guides, and, as demand grew, in 1893 the more ambitious Kihinkai (Welcome Society) was founded by Eiichi Shibusawa (1840–1931), the renowned ‘father of Japanese capitalism’, with its main office in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.Footnote 48 Through Shibusawa’s political contacts, the Kihinkai soon became a vehicle for cultural diplomacy that hosted high-level and official visitors to Japan before being replaced in 1912 by the Japan Tourist Bureau.Footnote 49 Here again, Japanese developments were intertwined with those in the larger international domain: as James notes, ‘Developments in the structures of governance have included expansive, sometimes aggressive interventions by national and sub-national units of government to direct tourism development.’Footnote 50
By 1890, the railway reached Nikko with the inauguration of Frank Lloyd Wright and Akashi Torao’s attractive station building.Footnote 51 Three years later, Kanaya Zenichiro took out a loan to reconstruct his hotel; despite a few local flourishes by way of traditional Nikkō-bori woodcarving, the redesigned hotel was effectively Western in design (see Figure 2). It was remodelled again in 1901, adding a dining room with a ceiling of rondelles painted with human figures, beneath which guests were served classic French cuisine (including the hotel’s famous croquettes) on Limoges tableware. A full page advertisement appeared in Chamberlain’s 1904 edition of Murray’s Handbook, promising that tourists ‘will now for the first time find at Nikko every comfort of a first-class European hotel, with an excellent cuisine’.Footnote 52 Asataro Watabe, the hotel’s chef in the 1890s and 1900s, learned recipes from the cooks who accompanied wealthy guests.Footnote 53
Postcard of Kanaya Hotel printed in Yokohama by Ueda Yoshizō, c.1901 (Collection of Nile Green).
During the 1890s and 1900s, a sequence of illustrious guests stayed at the Kanaya Hotel, including the Comte and Comtesse Gustave de Bodin de Galembert in November 1891 and Frank Lloyd Wright in April 1905. Surviving guest registers from the period also reveal an association with India from as soon as the new hotel opened its doors. Indeed, the very first entry in the oldest guest register, from 16 June 1891, was that of ‘J. O’Callaghan—India’, who travelled with a party of four from Yokohama.Footnote 54 The following year, visitors from India included civilians, such as I. M. Shields of Bombay, and military officers on leave, such as Major P. M. King of the 21st Horse, the Honourable S. Jervois of the 60th Rifles, Colonel W. I. Bay, and Lieutenant-Colonel G. C. Hale.Footnote 55 Such guest registers not only show that the Kanaya Hotel was incorporated into the international tourist system of which such registers were a part; their contents also show the Kanaya Hotel was at the very least ‘officer class’.Footnote 56 (For military tourists, the main attraction of Nikko may have been hiking and hunting in the surrounding mountains.)
These early encounters paved the way for a trio of elite Indian tourists: Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan of Rampur in 1896; Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala in 1903; and Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda in 1904.Footnote 57 For them—as well as for the Iranian ministers Mehdi Qoli Hedayat and Mirza Ali Asghar Khan—Nikko was a place where they could encounter traditional Japan rather than the modern Asian nation they had set out to find. Yet, what enabled this experience of ‘authentic Japan’ was the new tourist system built on steamships, railways, modern hotels, multilingual tour guides, and purveyors of fine souvenirs. It was in this context that the Kanaya Hotel served as a space of cross-cultural learning. By turning now to the Urdu and Persian travelogues written during the visits of Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan in 1896 and Mehdi Qoli Hedayat and Mirza Ali Asghar Khan in 1904, along with the Maharaja of Kapurthala’s English account of his visit to Japan, we will see how these factors played out in practice.
An Indian nawwab in Nikko
Hamid Ali Khan was born in 1875 as the heir to the princely state of Rampur in northern India.Footnote 58 By the time of his birth, Rampur was subject to the suzerainty or ‘paramountcy’ of the British. Hamid Ali was only thirteen when he ascended the throne, so from 1889 to 1896, a Regency period was declared under a council headed by the British Colonel H. A. Vincent.Footnote 59 When Hamid Ali came of age in 1896 and ascended the throne of Rampur, concerns that the young prince might quickly succumb to the pleasures and corruptions of the court prompted Vincent and the Regency Council to decide he should undertake an educational tour of the world. His itinerary began in Bombay and took in Ceylon, Singapore, coastal China, and Japan before continuing across the Pacific to the United States, which his party crossed by train (impossible a quarter-century earlier) then sailed to Britain, before beginning the European leg of their tour and finally returning to India via the still-newish Suez Canal. Like other Indian royal tourists, Hamid Ali was as much a globetrotter as his better-known European and American counterparts of the late Victorian era who followed the ‘round the world’ tourist circuit pioneered by the SS Ceylon in 1881.Footnote 60 The nawwab visited Nikko from 7 to 11 May 1896, which he recorded in the travel diary he wrote in Urdu.Footnote 61
Written in colonial India’s most widely understood language, Hamid Ali’s two-volume account of his globetrotting educational tour was published immediately after his return.Footnote 62 It is impossible to chart its readership with any degree of accuracy: the study of the reception of Indian-language texts is barely in its infancy. However, the readers of the travelogue likely comprised, first, his own subjects in the princely state of Rampur (where Urdu was the main language and where the ruling nawwabs were widely revered); and second, readers across northern India (where the travelogue, or safarnama, was a popular Urdu genre).Footnote 63 While Hamid Ali’s book may well have been read for pleasure—it remains a sprightly and enjoyable read a century later—its origins in an educational tour meant that it had a didactic function of describing the wider world to readers who lacked the resources of a princely grand tourist. With regard to the extensive Japan section specifically, the nawwab’s travelogue filled a particularly large informational lacuna. It was perhaps the most detailed first-hand Indian account of the country published in Urdu by this time.
To achieve these educational goals for himself and his subjects-cum-readers, Hamid Ali was aided by his Muslim teacher, Mawlvi Farrukhi, and his British tutor, H. O. Budden of the Indian Educational Service, who accompanied the nawwab as part of a substantial entourage.Footnote 64 Overseeing the tour was a Mr Howes (or Hughes) of the celebrated British travel agents Thomas Cook & Son.Footnote 65 Howes served as the human link between Nikko, the nawwab’s party, and the international tourist system. Indeed, Hamid Ali’s entire round-the-world tour was enabled by this system and Cook’s central role therein. In the years preceding the nawwab’s departure from Bombay, Cook’s Oriental Travellers’ Gazette—issued monthly by its Bombay office—advertised a very similar circuit from ‘India to England via China, Japan, America, and Canada’, and the company also issued brochures for ‘Tours Round the World’ that included Hamid Ali’s stopovers in Colombo and Singapore.Footnote 66
Howes would have been able to rely on Thomas Cook’s prior experience, contacts, infrastructure, and information on Japan. Hamid Ali certainly was not the first Indian elite tourist to have made use of Cook’s services. Five years earlier, Raja Rampal Singh (1849–1909), ruler of the tiny state of Kalakankar, made a grand tour of Europe. In the travelogue he published on his return, he declared, ‘I can confidently recommend the Agency of Messrs. Cook and Sons to would-be travelers. The assistance we received from their employés [sic] en route saved us a great deal of trouble and inconvenience.’Footnote 67 More recently, Thomas Cook had introduced tours of Japan in the form of the ‘Personally Conducted Party’.Footnote 68 These tours included Yokohama, Tokyo, Nikko, Kamakura, Kobe, Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki, where visitors stayed in new tourist hotels like the Yaami, right next to the great Chion-in temple.Footnote 69 Whether in Cook’s Oriental Travellers’ Gazette or in smaller brochures, Cook also provided basic cultural information about the sites on its Japanese itinerary. An 1891 brochure explained of Nikko, ‘Here is the burial place of Tye-mitsu, the 3rd Shogun of the Taku-gawa line; also the magnificent mausoleum of Tye-yasu Sambutsudo of the Hall of the Three Buddhas and near it the graceful five-storied pagoda.’Footnote 70
Guidebooks provided further cultural and practical information. By the 1890s, guidebooks were already familiar in India, including in Indian languages.Footnote 71 Although Cook had not yet added Japan to its ‘handbook’ series of guidebooks at the time of the nawwab’s tour, Cook’s Gazette regularly recommended Keeling’s Guide to Japan, which also covered Nikko.Footnote 72 Since the late 1880s, Keeling’s Guide had been published from Yokohama, and Cook’s Bombay office sold copies for 5 rupees in the years before the nawwab’s departure. Whether Keeling’s or Satow and Hawes’s, it seems likely that one or more such guidebooks were used by Howes as the party’s escort, by Budden in his role as tutor, and perhaps by Hamid Ali himself. Such guidebooks helped fulfil the educational function of the young ruler’s tour, for, as Cook’s brochure aptly noted, ‘One of the most interesting studies in Nikko is the legacy of Iyeyas [sic], handed down from that great lawgiver, who flourished about the time of William III of England.’Footnote 73
The nawwab’s party reached Japan aboard the SS Sutlej of the famous P&O line. Disembarking in Kobe on 22 April 1896, Hamid Ali and his companions checked into the Oriental Hotel, open since 1870.Footnote 74 In Kobe, the party employed the services of a registered English-speaking guide called Itō Sokusada, who would accompany them during their month in Japan (and whose name suggests he may have been a relative of Itō Tsurukichi, though Itō is a fairly common surname). They reached Nikko by train from Yokohama, necessitating a couple of changes. Hamid Ali enthusiastically described the beautiful views along the way of forested hills; pink, red, and yellow flowers; and cherry blossoms.Footnote 75 Arriving near dusk at Wright and Torao’s train station, the party took a rickshaw to the Kanaya Hotel. (Like the rickshaw itself, which had spread to India via Calcutta, the Japanese word had likewise been adopted, allowing Hamid Ali to use the term in Urdu—spelled riksha—without further explanation.)Footnote 76 On reaching the hotel, he noted it was ‘in English style’ (see Figure 3).Footnote 77 In front of the building, he added approvingly, there flowed a stream, while to the rear high mountains could be seen, and in the courtyard was a pool with yellow, red, and mottled fish. Nearby was what he called the ‘sacred bridge’—an evident reference to the Shinkyō bridge, which Sir Alfred East had painted a few years earlier.Footnote 78
Urdu description of Nikko from Nawwab Hamid Ali Khan’s Ma’sir-e Hamidi.
After breakfast the next morning, the nawwab’s party set off by a combination of rickshaw then horseback to enjoy the surrounding countryside on the route up to Lake Chuzenji. This echoed the itinerary in the Thomas Cook brochure, which reassured clients that ‘members of the Party will be furnished with sedan chairs or saddle horses, whichever they prefer’.Footnote 79 Pausing to rest at a teahouse, the party eventually reached the lake, where Hamid Ali admiringly recorded one fellow catching a 2-lb fish.Footnote 80 Effectively, Hamid Ali, like Satow, treated Nikko as a Japanese equivalent to an Indian hill station. When the Maharaja of Kapurthala visited Nikko in November 1903, and likewise went up to Lake Chuzenji, he called it ‘the Simla of Japan’ in comparison to the most famous of all Indian hill stations (and summer capital of the British Raj).Footnote 81
The following day, the nawwab and his entourage visited the famous temple-shrines of Nikko. The notion of Nikko as representing the authentic traditional Japan was evident through its position on Cook’s and thereby the nawwab’s itinerary:
Here you will observe a change in the aspect of the people. It is pure Japanese. The natives dress as their ancestors did five hundred years ago. No superfluous clothing is worn, and among the lower classes the garments affected by a half-dozen could be put in a cigar box.Footnote 82
In fact, Nikko’s temple-shrines had been fairly recently changed in response to the 1868 Shinto and Buddhism Separation Order (Shinbutsu Hanzenrei), though this distinction seems not to have been apparent to Hamid Ali, who simply used the word ‘temple’ (mandir). But then, as Miller has noted, ‘in seeking authenticity, globetrotters did not necessarily appreciate or understand the meanings inherent in these changes in Japan’.Footnote 83
The Kanaya Hotel was positioned so as to provide easy access to these sites. ‘Behind the hotel in Nikko’, wrote Hamid Ali, ‘on top of the hills are two very beautiful temples.’Footnote 84 While this statement makes it initially unclear whether he was referring to the Rinnō-ji Buddhist temple or the Tōshō-gu and Taiyuin shrines, this too was a reflection of Nikko becoming part of an international tourist circuit whose participants had little detailed sense of the specific meaning or significance of such sites of authenticity. Hamid Ali evoked this touristic ambience by remarking next that in the compound of one of these temples there were shops and teahouses.
After pausing for refreshments—and perhaps some princely souvenir shopping—the party made their way to what Hamid Ali called the ‘golden temple’ (sone ka mandir). He was referring to the Tōshō-gu shrine, which was decorated with hundreds of kilograms of gold leaf, particularly its Yomeimon Gate. ‘Golden temple’ was presumably easier to remember than Tōshō-gu, being a familiar term in India used for the famous Sikh holy site in Amritsar and the Kanak Bhawan in Ayodhya. If lacking in precise understanding, this still represented a form of appreciation of Japanese culture—though, like other Muslim visitors to Meiji Japan, Hamid Ali seems to have been more ambivalent about what he called ‘statues of giants’.Footnote 85 Several of them, painted red and black, were simply ‘terrifying’ (haybatnak), though of course that was precisely the point of such guardian statues (niō). Nevertheless, for these statues he used the more respectful Hindu term murti rather than the more pejorative but (idol), adding that this suggested there were similarities between the beliefs of Japanese and Indians.Footnote 86 Hamid Ali seems to have been unaware of the art historical links between Buddhist India and Japan, however, which only came up for discussion later for Pan-Asianist authors for whom art history was important to their claims. Okakura’s famous The Ideals of the East would not be published until 1903, seven years after Hamid Ali was writing his travelogue.Footnote 87
Even if the young nawwab was unable to recall the correct name for the Tōshō-gu shrine when writing his travel diary, it made a tremendous impression on him. He noted the woodwork decorated with the most intricate and delicate engravings, the temple’s covering of the finest goldleaf, its exquisite paintings.Footnote 88 Together with his praise for the natural beauty of the surroundings, Hamid Ali’s response to Nikko echoes the slightly later words of Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala: ‘Nikko is a double glory of nature and of art.’Footnote 89
Returning to the Kanaya Hotel, Hamid Ali encountered a group of Indian Parsis whom he had earlier met on his steamship from India.Footnote 90 Since wealthy Gujarati-speaking Parsis lived predominantly in Bombay—on the other side of the subcontinent from Rampur—the meeting hints at the role of hotels in cultural encounters of varying degrees of alterity. Finally, the next morning, the nawwab’s party departed Nikko, taking the train via Amichi to Tokyo, where that evening they checked into the Imperial Hotel.Footnote 91
Although Hamid Ali’s account of Nikko is quite short, further clues emerge from outside of the immediate text regarding the Kanaya Hotel as a cross-cultural space. Since the nawwab and his tutor Mawlvi Farrukhi were practicing Shi‘i Muslims (mawlvi being a title given to religious leaders), we may assume that the hotel served as place of Muslim worship during their stay there. There were also diverse culinary encounters. We know that wealthy Indian tourists usually brought along their own cooks: the Persian travelogue of Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, to which we will turn shortly, mentions that the Maharaja of Kapurthala (whom the Iranians met in a hotel in Kyoto) travelled with his own secretary, physician, and chef, who cooked them an Indian meal at the hotel.Footnote 92 Hamid Ali’s travelogue also mentions a chef (bawarchi) accompanying him on his tour.Footnote 93
The archives of the Kanaya Hotel contain several recipes from around this time for chicken and beef Indian curries, so it seems highly likely that the chef Watabe Asataro (who wrote down the recipes) learned them from an Indian cook in the same way that he had learned to prepare French dishes from the chefs accompanying wealthy European guests.Footnote 94 Since Hindus ate neither beef nor chicken, the recipes imply a Muslim source—perhaps even the nawwab’s cook. As for the other direction of culinary exchange, we may turn to the Maharaja of Kapurthala’s travelogue from 1903. Describing his dinner at the Kanaya Hotel, the maharaja wrote that it was ‘well cooked, and served by charmingly dainty Japanese maidens … [who] are distinctly polite and their national costumes lend them an air of picturesque charm’.Footnote 95 These were the same modes of etiquette that Dr Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (1854–1933), quoted at the start of this article, compared to ancient Iranian forms of politeness. In such ways, whether with regard to manners, food, religion, or architecture, the Kanaya Hotel enabled incremental acts of cross-cultural learning during the first decades of modern interaction between India and Japan.
The tour of two Iranian ex-ministers
The next tour of Nikko we will examine was that of Mehdi Qoli Hedayat (1863–1955, also known as Mokhbar al-Saltana) and Mirza Ali Asghar Khan (1858–1907, also known as Amin al-Soltan and Atabek). Their visit came as part of a nearly two-month tour of Japan between December 1903 and January 1904. Like that of Hamid Ali Khan, the Iranians’ visit was part of a larger world tour that used the international tourist infrastructure of steamships, trains, hotels, and guides to travel, in their case, across imperial Russia via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the port cities of China and Japan, thence to Hawaii (where they stayed at Honolulu’s newly opened Alexander Young Hotel); across the United States by train; from New York to Cherbourg; then south by train and steamer to tour Egypt before finally making a pilgrimage to Mecca and returning home to Iran.Footnote 96
It was Hedayat who orchestrated the journey, apparently with the intention of exposing Atabek to alternative ways of governance so as to encourage him to make political reforms in future (prior to their journey, Atabek had served two terms as prime minister of Iran).Footnote 97 Before turning to Hedayat’s account of Nikko, it is worth mentioning a few details of his background. The son of the pioneer of Iranian telegraphy, as a fourteen-year-old Hedayat had been sent to study in Germany, where he learned the German language that would inform much of his later career as a politician and writer. (He also learned French.) In 1885, he had taken up his first employment in Iran, teaching at the Dar al-Fonun polytechnic in Tehran and working as an interpreter for visiting German consultants.Footnote 98 In 1901, he was appointed to accompany Mozaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896–1907) during the latter’s second tour of Europe.Footnote 99 Five years later, after returning from his own world tour, Hedayat helped convince the shah to sign the 1906 Constitutional Edict. Yet Hedayat remained a conservative who regarded democracy with scepticism: he viewed parliamentary rule with particular suspicion, believing an excess of political freedom leads to chaos and immorality.Footnote 100 Since Japan had a constitution but also a powerful emperor, his experiences there played a significant part in his later ideas, both during the Constitutional Revolution and during his term as prime minister of Iran, 1928–34. His conservatism was already evident in his travelogue through his admiration for Japan’s preservation of its cultural identity amid modernization.Footnote 101 ‘Japan is not in need of technology from abroad’, he wrote. ‘None of the fads and fashions of the European boulevards have found their way into Japan and the Japanese life. They know no fashions except their own traditions.’Footnote 102 This was part of the larger distinction Hedayat made between ‘true civilization’ and ‘boulevard civilization’, with the latter leading to collective moral degeneration, especially when elites followed Western customs rather than their own.Footnote 103 Learned as he was in European ways, Hedayat remained a lifelong committed Shi‘i Muslim, albeit one whose religiosity was also informed by the Sufi traditions of Iran.
The Japan section of Hedayat’s travelogue falls around midway through the Persian text as a whole, which he published several decades later based on diaries he had kept along the way.Footnote 104 As much a public intellectual as public servant, Hedayat seems to have intended the travelogue to perform an educational function, describing places and cultures that were unfamiliar to Iranian readers, particularly regions such as Siberia, China, and Japan. As in India, the paucity of earlier Persian studies of Japanese society and culture as distinct from Japanese militarization and modernization meant that in practice Hedayat had to supplement his personal observations with information derived from European works on Japanese history and culture. For example, he recorded in his travelogue that he initially found Japanese people strange looking, before gradually realizing that ‘the Japanese are the diamond edition of humanity’.Footnote 105 Here he was quoting from a travelogue by Elizabeth Anna Gordon (1851–1925), a former student of Oxford Orientalist F. Max Muller (1823–1900), who wrote extensively and appreciatively on Mahayana Buddhism (which she believed shared a common ancestry with Christianity).Footnote 106 Hedayat’s reference to Gordon’s book hints at a wider entanglement between his own experiences of Japanese culture and those of European tourists, an entanglement based on shared use of the same global tourist system.
Before reaching Nikko, Hedayat and Atabek had mainly experienced Japan’s modernizing port cities and capital via an itinerary that, like Cook’s tours, took in Nagasaki, Kobe, Kyoto, Tokyo, and Yokohama. The Iranians made full use of the new infrastructure of tourist hotels: in Nagasaki they stayed in a hotel whose name Hedayat recorded in Persian as Mahal (Palace); in Kobe, like Hamid Ali, they stayed at the Oriental Hotel; in Kyoto, they stayed at the Yaami Hotel, the first Western-style hotel in the city, opened in 1879, where they dined as guests of the Maharaja of Kapurthala, who was also staying there; in Tokyo they stayed at the Imperial Hotel, which Hedayat described as being ‘built in the European style’; and in Yokohama, they went souvenir shopping just outside their hotel.Footnote 107 They employed a tour guide too, whose name Hedayat transcribed in Arabic script as Tagata.Footnote 108 Since the latter could not speak Persian, Hedayat described himself communicating with him and other Japanese he met in German and French. Given that Hedayat and Atabek were introduced to several government ministers—they even had an audience with the Meiji emperor—it seems likely that the ‘twenty-day programme’ Hedayat described (which included Nikko) was arranged by the Kihinkai.Footnote 109
The Iranian party arrived in Nikko at the beginning of January 1904. In his travelogue, Hedayat explained this took a five-hour train journey from Tokyo.Footnote 110 The weather, Hedayat continued, was much colder than in Tokyo, so he was relieved the Kanaya Hotel—‘which was built in the European style’—had cast-iron heaters.Footnote 111 The following morning, they set out to see the adjacent sights. Echoing the words of the Indian visitors, he noted that Nikko had two points of interest: its natural and man-made features by way of mountains with numerous waterfalls and the shrine of the ‘great ones (bozorgan) of Shinto’.Footnote 112 Here, he clarified for his Iranian readership that ‘Shinto was the ancient religion of Japan and Buddhism (buda’i) arrived later.’Footnote 113 For a long time, he went on, people had venerated Nikko, with ‘the pilgrimage place of the Shogun Ieyasu’ being most respected, since ‘he was the head of the Tokugawa dynasty in the seventeenth century of the Christian era’.Footnote 114 Here Hedayat brought together the Arabic term mazar (pilgrimage place) used for the shrines of Muslim saints and the Christian (rather than Islamic or Japanese) calendar. Even such a simple explanation involved cross-cultural comparison and borrowing.
Hedayat admired the shrines’ spectacular decoration with lacquer, adornments, paintings, woodcarving, and niches. Beyond a gateway was what he referred to as a throne room (shahnashini), in which lay a table of ritual objects, including a candleholder and vase. Presumably he was describing the main sanctuary (honden) at the Tōshō-gu shrine. Since the religions of Japan were so little known in Iran, Hedayat made further interpretive comparisons, explaining to his readers that they should not imagine such Japanese places of worship as being like mosques or churches, with domes and minarets, since they were by contrast very simple buildings, albeit with highly decorated interiors.Footnote 115 It was in one such building (another reference to the Tōshō-gu) that Ieyasu, ‘the Caesar of Japan’, requested he be buried. Hedayat then described a building he called ‘the house of peace of the spirits’, which had three golden openings to a surrounding platform, but no doorway as such.Footnote 116 A Japanese companion explained that no one was allowed to enter the inner hall, so the Iranian party remained outside looking in. He also described the ritual behaviour of a group of pilgrims, who wrote on a piece of paper in ‘Chinese calligraphy (khatt-e chini)’.
Linking these historic sites to the infrastructure of tourism, he noted the shrines formed a row in a well-adorned park just adjacent to the hotel. He quoted the famous adage that every visitor to Nikko is still told to this day: ‘Never say “satisfied (kekkō)” till you’ve seen Nikkō.’ What is particularly noteworthy is that he transliterated the Japanese phrase into Arabic script, which he had presumably written down phonetically as he heard it from his interpreter-guide, Tagata. The same phrase would later be recorded—this time transliterated into Roman script—by Jivanji Modi, who used his short stay to observe a Shinto ceremony at the Futarasan shrine (next to the Tōshō-gu), which he compared to ancient Indian and Iranian rituals in a more formal exercise in cross-cultural learning written for the Anthropological Society of Bombay.Footnote 117
Hedayat’s travelogue featured several other aspects of the new tourist infrastructure. The first is his use of postcards, which throughout his world trip he posted back to friends in Iran. This familiarity with the infrastructure of global mail established via the General Postal Union of 1874 makes perfect sense: his first job had been with the Iranian telegraph service (of which his father was director), after which he briefly served as director of the office of post, customs, and telegraphy in the city of Tabriz.Footnote 118 Postcards were first introduced by the Japanese government in 1873, so by the time the Iranians visited thirty years later, picture postcards had become an important part of Japan’s self-presentation to the world, using indigenous woodblock printing then imported lithographic and collotype technology.Footnote 119 By the turn of the century, echoing the practice of the Imperial Hotel among others, the Kanaya Hotel was selling hand-coloured collotype postcards of both the main sights of Nikko and of the hotel building itself (see Figure 2).Footnote 120 By the late Meiji period, bright-red British-inspired iron post boxes were placed outside many hotels, including the Kanaya.Footnote 121
Just as countless Japanese postcards were sent by European and American tourists, so Hedayat too made use of them, publishing several as illustrations of Japan in his travelogue.Footnote 122 The postcards included one depicting a traditional gate (torii) to a Shinto shrine with a group of Japanese women beneath it; one of a geisha dancing between two female musicians; and another showing three young women in traditional costume making the ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ pose (a popular image which featured on several different late Meiji postcards). Yet another featured a romanticized image of a bearded and near-naked member of the indigenous Ainu of Hokkaido.Footnote 123 While we cannot be sure whether Hedayat bought his postcards in the hotels in which he stayed in Japan, it seems a reasonable supposition. Be that as it may, his posting of picture cards back to Iran, and his subsequent inclusion of them in his travelogue, shows how these most quotidian of tourist souvenirs served as a visual form of cross-cultural learning, albeit one shaped equally by stereotypical Euro-American images of ‘old Japan’ and scenes which had previously featured on Edo and Meiji era block prints.
Hedayat’s account of Japan also made use of another new technology: photography.Footnote 124 From the 1870s, Yokohama became a centre for selling photographs to tourists of ‘authentic’ scenes.Footnote 125 Some Yokohama photographers also issued collotype picture postcards, including Ueda Yoshizō (1865–?), who founded his Yokohama Photographic Printing Co. (横浜写真版印刷所) in 1897; Ueda issued one of the earliest postcards of the Kanaya Hotel (Figure 2).Footnote 126 In addition to collecting postcards, Hedayat recorded himself buying souvenir photographs in Kobe.Footnote 127 As camera technology improved, some Japanese commercial photographers began operating at inland tourist sites. This seems to have been the source of the photograph Hedayat included at the end of the section on Nikko’s ‘House of Peace of the Spirits’ (see Figure 4).Footnote 128 It shows the Iranian party standing alongside two shaven-headed Buddhist monks (bonzō) dressed in traditional clothes, along with another Japanese companion (perhaps their guide, Tagata) in formal Western dress and holding a book (perhaps a guidebook). While it is unclear exactly which building they stood outside, the placing in the text and the caption’s reference to ‘the first courtyard of the house of peace of the spirits’ suggest it was somewhere in the Tōshō-gu complex.Footnote 129
Photograph of Hedayat and Atabak at the ‘House of Peace of the Spirits’ in Nikko.
Finally, Hedayat and his companion Atabek also participated in the craft souvenir industry that was an important aspect of European and American engagement with Japanese culture during the Meiji period. He describes how the custodian of Nikko’s ‘house of peace of the spirits’ sent the Iranian party a gift of three boxes of sweets.Footnote 130 The boxes were so pretty, Hedayat added, that he brought his back to Tehran at the end of his world tour. The boxes were in the shape of a flowering tree (darakht-e gol), so it seems likely they were examples of Nikkō-bori, the carved wooden items that were (and still are) Nikko’s most famous craft goods. This craft industry had emerged in 1634, when the third shogun Iemitsu (r. 1623–51) rebuilt the Tōshō-gu with the service of hundreds of horimono-daiku (carpenter-engravers), some of whom remained in Nikko to maintain the shrine and sell carved wooden trinkets to pilgrims. With the arrival of European and American tourists, examples of Nikkō-bori were increasingly produced as souvenirs, usually with cinnabar red lacquer and decorated with peony or cherry blossoms. Among the items produced were cake boxes (kashibako), which included drawers. Since Hedayat described the boxes of sweets using the Persian word ja‘ba (meaning a drawer or chest of drawers), this seems to have been the type of object in question.
These carved cake boxes were not their only encounter with Japanese crafts. While staying at the Yaami Hotel in Kyoto, the Iranians made a tour of several workshops for making porcelain, Fuji silk, and enamelware. As part of this itinerary, Hedayat mentioned the celebrated Kyoto-jippō (cloisonné) workshop of Takahara Komajiro (1868–1912), and the Iranians may also have encountered Namikawa Yasuyuki (1845–1927), who regularly escorted tourists around his Kyoto cloisonné workshop.Footnote 131 Hedayat also recorded visiting an antique shop owned by a certain ‘Hayashi’—presumably a reference to Hayashi Shinsuke, a well-known dealer among elite tourists, outside whose shop hung a kanban sign announcing (in English) that he traded in ‘Lacquers, Bronzes, and Crockeries of the Ancient and Modern Japan’.Footnote 132
Hedayat was by no means alone. Sir Ernest Satow bought many antique souvenirs from Hayashi.Footnote 133 In 1889, Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty (1843–1917, founder of the famous arts and crafts emporium Liberty & Co.) and Charles Holme (1848–1923, founding editor of art journal The Studio) indulged in the ‘curio shops’ of Kyoto.Footnote 134 The 1900s likewise saw Henry Marsham (1845–1908), the third son of the Earl of Romney, purchase numerous fine Japanese craft items from Hayashi during his stays at Kyoto’s Miyako Hotel (the city’s third modern hotel after the Yaami and Tokiwa).Footnote 135 As art historian Ai Fukunaga has shown in her study of Marsham’s activities, ‘Japanese objects were exhibited and sold, and information on objects was brought in by Japanese local agents. The hotel worked as a satellite marketplace for dealers.’Footnote 136
Such sales became an important part of the Meiji economy: to give just one sample statistic, in March and April 1903, foreign visitors spent over 900,000 yen on souvenirs.Footnote 137 While Hedayat did not mention whether he bought any souvenirs in Kyoto, he noted that Atabek bought a detailed model of a Buddhist temple made from rice, which he acquired from a shop just outside their hotel in Yokohama.Footnote 138 Twenty years earlier, British globetrotter Sir Merton Russell-Cotes (1835–1921) had purchased a model of Ieyasu’s mausoleum in Nikko during his Cook’s round-the-world tour.Footnote 139 For his part, Hedayat built on his experiences in such curio shops to educate the Iranian public by adding to his travelogue a section on lacquer, enamel, and marquetry, introducing his readership to the arts of Japan, which had not featured in earlier Persian publications on the country.Footnote 140
Indian globetrotters similarly participated in this aspect of tourism. Two months before the Iranians inspected the workshops of Kyoto, Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala visited an exhibition of traditional Japanese crafts and recorded in his travelogue, ‘I indulged my taste for art by making a few purchases.’Footnote 141 In such ways, encounters with the craft sector of the Meiji tourist economy contributed to nascent Indian and Middle Eastern appreciation of Japanese culture. Building on these developments, a 1904 guidebook to the arts and crafts of Japan was translated into Urdu.Footnote 142 Linking this Urdu translation to the Europeans who made use of the same infrastructures as Indian and Iranian tourists, its original author was Félix Régamey (1844–1907), who in 1876 had toured Japan (including Nikko), before becoming a major promoter of Japonisme as a writer, artist, and teacher.Footnote 143 Régamey’s text in turn inspired at least one Indian to experience Japan directly: in 1911 the book’s translator Shiv Brat Lal Verman (1860–1939) boarded a steamer bound for Yokohama.Footnote 144
Conclusions
The incorporation of Meiji Japan into the infrastructures of international tourism allowed elite Indian and Middle Eastern tourists no less than their European and American counterparts to travel beyond the modernizing treaty ports and reach ‘authentic spaces’ regarded as epitomes of traditional Japanese culture. Just as the linking of Kyoto to the Osaka–Kobe railway in 1876 enabled foreigners to access the palaces and temples of the ancient capital, so too from 1890 did the railway place Nikko on the nascent international tourist circuit. As Japanese businessmen and politicians realized the benefits of showcasing their architectural and artistic heritage, hotels—together with tour agencies and guides—were no less important than transportation in introducing elite foreign tourists to the Japan that lay beyond the cosmopolitan modern ports. Europeans like Ernest Satow and Isabella Bird were similarly important in boosting Nikko as a destination for encountering ‘old Japan’.
Whether through their Japanese guides, Itō Tsurukichi and Tagata, or the representative of Thomas Cook who also accompanied Hamid Ali, Indian and Iranian tourists made use of the Euro-Japanese partnerships that nurtured Meiji Japan’s tourist infrastructure, including the Kanaya Hotel. The travelogues of Hamid Ali, Hedayat, Jagatjit Singh, Jivanji Modi, and others that emerged from this system have thus allowed us to reconstruct a microhistory of cultural encounters that occurred in Nikko which, together with Kyoto, formed the authentic space par excellence for international tourists of the later Meiji period. For our sample of Indian and Iranian globetrotters and their respective readers alike, such tours—and crucially hotels—cultivated an informal Japanophilia that fostered positive impressions of Japan in the absence of a formal Japanology.Footnote 145
The Kanaya Hotel served as a crucial enabler of such cross-cultural learning. In making this claim, we should not overstate the amount of learning involved, since what the Indians and Iranians acquired and in turn passed on to their readers was a touristic, informal, and amateur mode of knowledge. However, the significance of this knowledge was magnified by the fact that at the time these travelogues were published, almost no information on Japanese culture was available in the Urdu or Persian public spheres. Such learning was possible because the new institution of the tourist hotel acted as the local hub of a larger system, mediating between international travel agents and national transport infrastructures, on the one hand, and local sites, rickshaw pullers, guides, souvenirs, postcards, and cuisine on the other. Such hotels also inadvertently served as ‘contact zones’ for encountering other international tourists from similar class backgrounds. If the Kanaya Hotel or some equivalent had not existed, Indian and Iranian globetrotters would not have visited Nikko. As the remainder of their travelogues reveal, Hamid Ali et al. stayed only in modern high-standard hotels, which meant they only visited places that possessed such hotels.
This underlying infrastructure, then, in turn led Indian and Iranian tourists to enter a field of intercultural learning shared by Europeans and Americans—but Japanese too. This can be captured by a closing vignette. In November 1908, Nitobe Inazo (1862–1933), the Japanese Christian author of the influential Bushido: The Soul of Japan, checked into the Kanaya Hotel.Footnote 146 Nitobe had written the book in English in California, and at the time of his visit to Nikko, it was finally being published in Japanese. Melding the samurai past with the heroic ethos of Homer and medieval Christian knights, his cross-cultural vision of Bushido shaped perceptions of Japan on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 147 Likewise in India, Nitobe was cited as an authority on traditional Japan by authors such as Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950) and Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949).Footnote 148 Even Hedayat closed his account of the authentic old Japan of the shoguns with a section on Bushido, a term he defined for Iranian readers as equivalent to the Persian pahlavan (warrior, wrestler, valiant hero) and French chevalier (knight).Footnote 149 Hedayat then translated sections from Nitobe’s book in his diary, before following Nitobe’s travels by crossing the Pacific to California. More hotels, and cultural lessons, lay ahead.
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to Nobuo Misawa, Kenji Kuroda, Kei Takahashi, Daisuke Maruyama, and Takumi Yamaguchi—my Japanese friends, hosts, and colleagues in Middle Eastern Studies—for advice and encouragement while researching this article in Tokyo and Nikko. Thanks also to Jun Kurasawa at the Kanaya Hotel Archives in Nikko and Elliot Fountain at the Thomas Cook Archives in Leicester. I would also like to express my appreciation of the extremely constructive peer reviews and the adept editing of Elisabeth Leake.
Financial support
None to declare.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Nile Green is Professor of History and Near Eastern Languages & Cultures at UCLA, where he holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History. He has BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Kings College London, Cambridge University, and SOAS. His ten monographs include Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (Norton, 2024); How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale, 2022), which won the Bentley Prize in World History from the World History Association and was a Foreign Affairs Book of the Year; The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Princeton, 2015); Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 2012), which won the Albert Hourani Prize from the Middle East Studies Association and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association for Asian Studies; and Global Islam: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020). Green has edited or co-edited eight books and five journal special issues, including (as sole editor) The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (University of California Press, 2019); Afghan History through Afghan Eyes (Oxford University Press, 2016); Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka and the Islamic Indian Ocean (University of Texas Press, 2026); and ‘Big Asia’: Rethinking a Region, guest edited section of American Historical Review (June 2025). He has also published around a hundred peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Green has been awarded numerous fellowships and visiting positions, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. His writing is informed by more than thirty years of travel and research in India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Japan, Uzbekistan, Xinjiang, Syria, Yemen, and many other regions of Asia and Africa. To improve public understanding of the Muslim world, he hosts the podcast Akbar’s Chamber: Experts Talk Islam.
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