Japan through American eyes Book

In this journal, Francis Hall, America's leading business Pioneer in nineteenth-century Japan, offers a remarkable view of the period leading to the Meiji Restoration. Privately preserved for more than a hundred years, this previously unpublished document shows Hall to have been an astute observer of Japanese life, as well as an influential opinion-maker on Japan in the United States during the crucial decade of the American Civil War and the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. While contemporary American and British diplomatic accounts have focused on the official record, Hall reveals to us the private side of life in the treaty port. Although his instinctive reactions were frequently to approve the strong-arm tactics of the gunboat diplomats with whom he associated, his second thoughts were far more nuanced and sympathetic than the official line. The publication of Hall's journal, as well as many articles he wrote for the American press, therefore furnishes us with an insightful and sensitive portrayal of Japan on the eve of modernity. The biography included in this volume provides a context for the journal. An upstate New York book dealer, Hall went to Japan in 1859 to collect material for a book and to serve as correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Seeing the opportunities for commerce in Yokohama, he helped found Walsh, Hall and Co., which became the leading American trading house in Japan. Hall was a shrewd businessman, but more important for us, he was a perceptive recorder of life around him. Ethnographer, demographer, sportswriter, social observer, economist, diplomat, and participant in the turbulent affairs of the treaty port, he left an unmatched portrait of Japan in a time of rapid change.