Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

Foreword: Reading between the Lines

Isabella L. Bird (1831-1904) was one of a number of renowned Western women who traveled the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the spread of Western influence, it became possible for women with the money, the time, and the gumption to undertake such expeditions.

Isabella, a British subject, made her first trip was to Canada and the United States in 1854 when in her mid-twenties; her last to Morocco, when she was seventy. In 1878, at the age of forty-six, she visited Japan for a period of seven months.

At the time of Isabella's arrival in Japan, ten years had passed since the Tokugawa shogunate (the ruling military regime) had fallen and been replaced by a constitutional monarchy, bringing an end to over 250 years of almost total isolation from the rest of the world. The new leaders were eager to industrialize and modernize Japan in order to put it on an equal footing with the West. Given recent British military involvement in China (the second Opium War of 1856-60) and in Japan (such as the bombardment of Kagoshima in 1863), not to mention American interest in Japan, Japanese leaders were fearful that, without the development of industrial and military power, Japan would fall prey to Western incursion.

With the official installation of the new government in 1868, prodigious efforts were made to bring Japan into the modern world as quickly as possible. Foreign teachers and technicians were hired and brought to Japan to lead the way in educating young Japanese. Ports that had been closed to foreign ships were now opened, and Yokohama, once a sleepy fishing village, blossomed into a boisterous city overflowing with foreign merchants and diplomats.

When Isabella arrived in 1878, a good many accounts of this still little-known country had already been written by Western travelers and correspondents. Most of them spoke highly of the country's education, social organization, and basic hygiene. For a backward nation, Japan was regarded as being at the head of its class.

Almost all of the accounts of Japan up to that time were written about the city of Tokyo or areas to the southwest of it (including Osaka and Kyoto), which constituted the most prosperous and advanced parts of the country. When Isabella heard that the northern regions of the country (the Tohoku region and the northernmost island of Hokkaido) were virtually unexplored by Westerners, she decided immediately that that was where she wished to go. The fact that Hokkaido was the home of the aboriginal Ainu (referred to as "Aino" in the book), who were said to be savages, further whetted her appetite.

From Tokyo to Hokkaido she went up the middle of the mostly mountainous, least traveled part of the island of Honshu -- sometimes by jinrikisha, most often on horse, once or twice by cow, occasionally by boat, and frequently on foot. This route was not suited to long trips; for that she should have taken the Oshu highroad. Her choice consisted of nothing more than a series of rough roads or paths connecting one village to another. If Isabella was looking for hardship (and she was), then she made the right decision.

This region -- the Tohoku region, which does not include her side trip to Niigata on the Sea of Japan -- was, for the most part, much less prosperous than the area from Tokyo southward because of the long winters, the comparative lack of summer rain for the cultivation of rice, and the unpredictable cold spells that were the bane of farmers. The mountainous areas that Isabella traversed were also without easy access to the seafood available in coastal regions. Thus the most mountainous stretches of Tohoku were much poorer than the areas described by other Westerners then visiting Japan. This, too, was precisely what Isabella was looking for -- something that would set her trip to Japan apart from the rest.

With Isabella as with all writers, her views are imbued with her own likes and dislikes, her biases and prejudices, her philosophy of life, and her background and upbringing. Therefore it is legitimate to ask what kind of person Isabella was. It is particularly important if we are to maintain any perspective as readers, if we are to read actively rather than passively -- that is, if we are going to read between the lines. With writers who are contemporaries of the reader and who share a common culture, it is much easier to spot the writer's biases. With a writer from a different era or culture, it is much more difficult.

Isabella was born in Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, in 1831 into a well-to-do family -- a family which had sufficient independent income to make do if necessary, and in which the mundane tasks of everyday life were administered by servants. The family also had highly placed relations, who proved useful to Isabella in providing introductions to conveniently placed people in the countries she visited; indeed, she took forty such letters with her to Japan. Her father, who had been a barrister in India, became a clergyman upon returning to England.

During Isabella's lifetime, women did not possess the right to vote, and schools open to girls were not available (and would remain so until she was past school age). Isabella was educated by her mother and taught to observe nature by her father. Her best writing is perhaps her description of natural scenery. She had a younger sister, to whom the letters in this book were directed, and to whom Isabella was apparently deeply attached, although she declined to live with her after their parents had passed away.

Isabella was a devout Christian, following in her father's footsteps in that regard perhaps. Her father was so committed to Sabbatarianism -- the doctrine that absolutely no work should be done on the Sabbath -- that he came into conflict with his parish and was twice forced to take up a new post. The second time, when Isabella was in her teens, he resorted to legal means to force local shops to close. As a result, he was stoned by his own parishioners.

Isabella apparently felt the pressure of living in such a middle-class environment, in which a woman's role was limited and where everything came under the close watch of other members of the same class. In fact, she seems to have suffered from psychosomatic illnesses to the extent that many of her trips were undertaken for health reasons at the suggestion of doctors. Abroad, away from the constraints of her own culture, Isabella was transformed from a frail creature into an intrepid adventurer. She could do things in foreign climes that she would never consider doing at home. It seems to be true that people tend to let loose, for better or for worse, when freed from the scrutiny of their peers or the confinements of the subculture in which they grew up.

In the rest of this Foreword, we will look at several instances in which Isabella has misled the reader, has misled herself, has failed to come to the conclusions that her own observations seem to call for, has not understood what she has seen, or has committed a very poor judgment.

The question as to why Isabella should mislead the reader or, in fact, mislead herself cannot be answered here; we can only speculate. First, Isabella was not bilingual or bicultural; that is, she had not gone through the experience, when young, of living abroad and struggling with the complexities of a foreign language, which experience, if she had had it, might have made her mind more flexible and open to other ways of thinking. By the time she had come to Japan, Isabella was forty-six years old, and had long formed her views on life and what was right and wrong. In fact, her views seem to have been so set that often she virtually ignored reality in order to maintain them. Further, as a journalist with a readership in mind, Isabella may have occasionally succumbed to the temptation to startle her audience, to remind them, by slight exaggeration, of the absolute strangeness or outrageousness of her experiences.

Given the plausible rigidity of her ideas, the reader will not be surprised to find in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan that Isabella has a tendency to be judgmental, sometimes with very little basis for her opinions. As an early example of this tendency, we may cite her trip to Canada and the United States undertaken in her mid-twenties, as recorded in The English Woman in America (John Murray, 1856). After spending a scant six weeks in the home of Captain Swabey ("one of the most influential inhabitants" of Prince Edward Island), she leaves with the following very decided opinion of the community there.

"When their trade and commerce shall have been extended, and when a more suitable plan has been adopted for the support of religion; when large portions of waste land have been brought under cultivation, and local resources have been farther developed, people will be too much occupied with their own affairs to busy themselves, as now, either with the affairs of others, or with the puerile politics of so small a community; and then the island will deserve the title which has been bestowed on it, 'The Garden of British America.'" (Chapter III)

Turning now to Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, we will begin with a minor incident that occurs early in the book (p. 23), concerning the physical appearance of Tsurukichi Ito (referred to simply as Ito in the book). When Isabella is interviewing Ito for the job of guide/interpreter, she writes, "He is the most stupidlooking Japanese that I have seen, but, from a rapid, furtive glance in his eyes now and then, I think that the stolidity is partly assumed." Later in the book (p. 90) she again refers to Ito's appearance, saying, " ... ugly as I think him, he has a large share of personal vanity." Given that Isabella is not a fan of the Japanese face ("the ugly Japanese face," p. 90), we might with reason expect Ito to be quite a grotesquerie. As chance would have it, a photograph of Ito has survived, taken when he was apparently in his forties or fifties, to be found on the Japan National Diet Library site (http://www.ndl.go.jp/portrait/datas/11.html?c=16). He does not appear to fit her description, even allowing for the subjectivity involved in such matters.

Further in regard to Ito, we find an example of Isabella's inclination to come to conclusions that belie her own observations. On page 185 she describes Ito's qualities as an individual and guide/interpreter. Here are some of the good things she has to say about him:

"He is never late, never dawdles, never goes out in the evening except on errands for me, never touches sake, is never disobedient, never requires to be told the same thing twice, is always within hearing, has a good deal of tact as to what he repeats, and all with an undisguised view to his own interest. He sends most of his wages to his mother, who is a widow -- 'It's the custom of the country' -- and seems to spend the remainder on sweetmeats, tobacco, and the luxury of frequent shampooing."

This seems to have the makings of a good character reference, but Isabella apparently thinks differently since she has prefaced this description by saying, "He has no moral sense, according to our notions." Near the end of this enumeration of Ito's virtues and vices -- which is largely laudatory -- Isabella again comes to a conclusion that seems to contradict her own observations. She writes, "The habits of many of the Yokohama foreigners have helped to obliterate any distinctions between right and wrong, if he [Ito] ever made any."

One of Isabella's complaints about Ito is that he is a believer in the Shinto religion, and she feels that this belief has not served him well. When she is speaking of Ito's "lie" (concerning which, you will note, she never asks for Ito's side of the story), she says that "except for this original lie, I have no fault to find with him, and his Shinto creed has not taught him any better" (p. 245). Isabella is mistaken in thinking that any morality that Ito possesses originated in Shintoism. In fact, though Shinto may arguably form the bedrock of the Japanese psyche, it is certainly Confucianism and Buddhism that form the basis for its ethical standards. Thus, in faulting Shinto for any perceived defects in Ito's morality, Isabella is barking up the wrong tree.

Another basic misconception on Isabella's part concerns again the nature of the Shinto religion. On page 101 she remarks, "Nominally, he [Ito] is a Shintoist, which means nothing." This was apparently in reference to the fact that Ito had just spoken of "our Buddha," even though he was not a Buddhist. Further, on page 285 she describes the occasion on which Ainu ask if she would like to pray at a shrine dedicated to the Japanese hero Yoshitsune, who was venerated for his legendary kindnesses to the Ainu. Isabella declines the offer, saying that, after she explained to them that she "could only worship my own God, the Lord of Earth and Heaven, of the dead and of the living, they were too courteous to press their request." To her disgust, however, Ito accepts: "As to Ito, it did not signify to him whether or not he added another god to his already crowded Pantheon, and he 'worshipped,' i.e. bowed down, most willingly before the great hero of his own, the conquering race."

The pivotal point is that Shinto is a polytheistic religion, perhaps with a touch of animism, not a monotheistic belief like Christianity. Therefore, it does not detract from Ito's credentials as a Shintoist if he gives credence to Buddha and Yoshitsune. Held up to the yardstick of Christianity, or any other monotheistic religion, Ito would be found sorely lacking, and Isabella thus finds him.

From such metaphysical issues, we might now take a look at what inaccuracies Isabella has committed in simpler matters, of which I offer two instances. On page 111 she writes, "Much of the food of the peasantry is raw or half-raw salt fish, and vegetables rendered indigestible by being coarsely pickled." As we now know, with the proliferation of Japanese cuisine and the popularity of sushi and sashimi, raw fish is not a hardship food but a luxury.

On this same level, Isabella writes on page 186 that Ito "despises the uneducated, as he can read and write both the syllabaries." The Japanese language is written with Chinese characters (kanji) and two syllabaries (kana). The syllabaries are comparable to the English alphabet in the ease with which they can be learned, except that they are, in fact, somewhat easier. The kanji are what causes the difficulty in reading and writing Japanese, and unless you have learned them, you cannot be considered literate. I am sure that Ito would be shocked to hear that Isabella characterized him as knowing only the syllabaries, not kanji, too.

What might be considered Isabella's greatest inaccuracy in the book is not, in fact, an inaccuracy but what some might consider a failure of character. It involves the Ainu and Isabella's overall favorable impression of their character and physical appearance. On page 255 she writes, "They were very kind, and so courteous, after a new fashion, that I quite forgot that I was alone among savages." And immediately after that: "The adult man was not a pure Aino. His dark hair was not very thick, and both it and his beard had an occasional auburn gleam. I think I never saw a face more completely beautiful in features and expression, with a lofty, sad, far-off, gentle, intellectual look, rather that of Sir Noel Paton's 'Christ' than of a savage. His manner was most graceful, and he spoke both Aino and Japanese in the low musical tone which I find is a characteristic of Aino speech." On page 271, she writes, "For three days they have kept up their graceful and kindly hospitality, going on with their ordinary life and occupations, and, though I have lived among them in this room by day and night, there has been nothing which in any way could offend the most fastidious sense of delicacy."

One of the disagreeable experiences she had among the Ainu she describes as follows (p. 272): "They said they would leave me to eat and rest, and all retired but the chief's mother, a weird, witch-like woman of eighty, with shocks of yellow-white hair, and a stern suspiciousness in her wrinkled face. I have come to feel as if she had the evil eye, as she sits there watching, watching always ... She alone is suspicious of strangers, and she thinks that my visit bodes no good to her tribe."

As if to confirm the old woman's suspicions, Isabella's final judgment of the Ainu is as follows (p. 320): "They are charming in many ways, but make one sad, too, by their stupidity, apathy, and hopelessness, and all the sadder that their numbers appear to be again increasing; and as their physique is very fine, there does not appear to be a prospect of the race dying out at present."

Ironically, in one of her final assessments of the Japanese people, Isabella makes use of the Ainu as a foil to serve up an appalling characterization of the Japanese (p. 288): "After the yellow skins, the stiff horse hair, the feeble eyelids, the elongated eyes, the sloping eyebrows, the flat noses, the sunken chests, the Mongolian features, the puny physique, the shaky walk of the men, the restricted totter of the women, and the general impression of degeneracy conveyed by the appearance of the Japanese, the Ainos make a very singular impression." It is sad that, in the end, Isabella reveals that she looks upon the Japanese not as individuals but as stereotypical beings that can be summed up in a few, well-chosen, defamatory words.

In conclusion, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is in many ways a delightful book, largely owing to Isabella's sprightly prose. However, the reader must read actively if he or she is to read intelligently. Thus read, the book reveals as much about Isabella and the society from which she emerged as it does about Japan.

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This book is based on the 1911 John Murray edition, which is an abridgment of the original work published in 1880 by the same publisher. For those who read Japanese, the Japanese publisher Yushodo has translated the missing sections from the original edition (Bado Nihon kiko, 2002). Those wishing to learn more about Isabella Bird and her life will enjoy Amazing Traveler: Isabella Bird (Evelyn Kaye, Blue Penguin Publications, 1994) and Isabella Bird and 'A Woman's Right to Do What She Can Do Well' (Olive Checkland, Scottish Cultural Press, 1996).

Roger Speares 2006