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.