IN THE NORMAL way of things, I would not have become a student of Japan. Reared on a small Indiana farm in the 1950s, I focused as a youth on the things immediately around me: attending church, going to school, grumbling during the hours of hoeing strawberries under the hot sun, feeling abused when Miss Wilma put me under her desk in first grade because I had interrupted her reading group with a question about how to write the letter “a.” Education mattered in my family; when Mother and Dad were not farming they were administering or teaching in local elementary schools. But the news we followed was largely local, and travel meant fishing in northern Wisconsin's Big Lake Chetak or visiting Grandma and Grandpa Huffman's Florida home. Except for one or two missionaries who spoke at our Wesleyan Methodist church, East Asia was not part of my consciousness – until a Sunday night when I was perhaps ten, and a visiting preacher invited people to “come to the altar and ask God's leadership for life.” My response laid the groundwork for this volume, for reasons I today make no effort to understand or explain. Kneeling at the front of the church, I thought I heard a one-word whisper: “Japan.” Nothing more. Only that single word. I regard myself as a rational person, a skeptic about things mystical, and the decades have made me an agnostic about what happened that evening, but that whisper was, in the theology of my childhood, a “call.” From that moment, “Japan” became the subject of school papers and the lens through which I saw the future, even when the original idea of being a missionary faded.

As a biographer, I am aware that people's views change across time, making the identification of an intellectual core a challenge, but I also know that central threads do exist and that they usually grow out of the subject's lived experiences. If that is true of the people I have studied, I know it to be true too of my own writing.

ALTHOUGH THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS have passed since my initial visit to Japan, the memories of my first twenty-four hours in Tokyo remain sharply etched in my memory. I still can see – and feel – it all: the dark rain of the first night, the customs officials’ rigidity, the hard bed at the Asia Center, the spaghetti lunch that came when I thought I had ordered a hot dog, the embarrassment of wearing my shoes into the living room of my new apartment, the lovely sour/sweet taste of the Calpis drink my landlord served, the musty aroma of the apartment, my 22-month-old son imitating the cab driver's sounds: ba-bi-ka-ka-do-ku, the surprising affluence of my Higashi-fushimi neighborhood, the ping-pinging of the train crossing signal.

I realize that some of the memories may be inaccurate, and that my interpretations of what things meant have changed through the years. But that does not rob the memories of their vividness; nor does it alter the fact that those first impressions created a powerful base for many of the understandings of Japan that I carry with me to this day.

That vividness, I suspect, explains why travel writings make such appealing classroom tools. The best of these accounts have a directness – and thus a powder – that scholarly, seasoned analyses often lack. They reveal the outsider's unvarnished responses to a place that is new and different. They catch the traveler when things still are surprising and interesting, when “a faint air of the exotic clings to the project.” And that makes them gripping. And fun. Whether it is the British globetrotter Isabella Bird telling us in 1878 that she has “now ridden, or rather sat, upon seventy-six horses, all horrible,” or the teacher Howard Swan proclaiming in 1902 that Japan's street vendors “are all artists, often unconsciously so,” the immediacy of the observations draws us in as readers and brings learning to life.

Before examining some of the best of the Meiji-era (1868–1912) travel accounts, a word is needed about the overall use of travel writings in the classroom. Vividness notwithstanding, these accounts are not perfect teaching tools.

BROWSING THROUGH MAGAZINES at a Japanese flea market late in the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn found a decades-old copy of Atlantic Monthly with an article entided ‘Japan,’ alongside pieces by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. Hearn plunked down half a yen, read the piece – by a Mr. House – and pronounced himself impressed by the writer's grasp of Japanese history.

Well he should have been. The 1860 article was one of America's earliest journalistic treatments of Japanese history, and its author, New York Tribune reporter Edward H. House, had helped to shape a generation of American attitudes toward the Asian archipelago, just as Hearn would do with his ghostiy tales and exotic narratives at the turn of the century.

When Hearn happened upon the Atlantic piece, House was in Tokyo, nearing the end of a thirty-year career as a pioneer of American journalism in East Asia, a career that had placed his writings in most of the New York newspapers, as well as in almost every significant American journal. At his death in 1901, the British journalist Frank Brinkley called him ‘the most brilliant writer ever connected with journalism in the Far East,’ while the private secretary of political giant Ōkuma Shigenobu said his writings had laid Japan ‘under a deep obligation.’

A key to House's influence – and a primary reason for his midcareer move to Tokyo in 1870 – lay in the diverse nature of his interests and ambitions. As a Boston teenager, he had been a musical prodigy, copying out Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser note-by-note and producing a symphony of his own. As a member of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune reportorial staff, he helped make John Brown and Mark Twain famous and gained note for his coverage of early Civil War battles. He also wrote endless essays, plays, and short stories, many of the latter featuring a forbidden romance between an aristocrat and a commoner, with the protagonist's inherent goodness trumping the pretensions of some high bred snob. Beyond all that, he tried his hand at theater management, climbed mountains, took balloon rides, and performed daredevil feats on three continents.

AMERICA'S FIRST REGULAR correspondent in Japan was Edward H. House (1836-1901), who went to Tokyo in the third year of Meiji for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. A native Bostonian, House had gained early prominence in two ways: through his devil-may-care lifestyle as a member of the New York Pfaff beer cellar's bohemian gang, which included the likes of Walt Whitman and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and through his graphic reports for the Tribune on John Brown's execution at Harper's Ferry in 1859. He also wrote a much-discussed series of articles for the Tribune in the spring of 1860 on the first Japanese embassy to the United States. In the next decade, House created a sensation with his coverage of the Civil War, helped to launch Mark Twain's eastern seaboard career, accompanied the humorist Artemus Ward on his British debut, and managed the London theater where the Shakespearean actor Henry Irving won some of his earliest enthusiastic notices. Not satisfied merely with journalistic prominence, the restless House sailed to Japan in 1870, as the Tribune's first regular Tokyo reporter, and within weeks he had begun to irritate many of the profit-seeking foreigners with his enthusiastic essays on Japanese customs and progress. By the end of that year, he had literally adopted the Pacific archipelago as a new homeland, and by the middle of the decade a Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shim-bunwriter would say, on hearing that he was about to launch his own newspaper: “Mr. House … neither sneers at Japan nor scorns the Japanese. That makes him unusual among foreigners.”

House's life merits scrutiny for many reasons. His articles and lobbying efforts with opinion leaders helped shaped early American attitudes and policies toward Japan; indeed, when the United States returned its share of the Shimonoseki indemnity to Japan in 1883, House was given the lion's share of the credit. His editorials in support of issues like treaty revision and better treatment of women provide a lucid summary of many key features of Japan's public discourse in the 1870s and 1880s. And his role in several diplomatic crises sheds a powerful light on the imperialist environment that shaped Meiji Japan's struggle toward modernity.