Isabella Bird

She arrived on the steamer City of Tokio after eighteen days at sea. In her first letter she described seeing the snow cone of Fuji high above the haze from the deck that morning.

She stayed at the British Legation of Sir Harry Parkes while preparing for the journey. There she engaged Itō as servant and interpreter, and went to see the Kwan-non temple at Asakusa.

On 10 June she left the Legation at 11 a.m. and covered 23 miles by kuruma, arriving at 5 p.m. At the inn she complained of the lack of privacy and the noise all night.

She took rooms in the house of Kanaya Zenichirō. She went to look at the Yōmei gate of the Tōshōgū day after day, and wrote that her astonishment grew each time.

The spring was 130°F, and people crippled with rheumatism lay for hours on boards laid across it to take the steam. She noted that Yumoto was over 4000 feet high and very cold.

After crossing the Sanno pass she slept at a house that was at once a silk farm, post office, express office and daimyō's rest house, in a hamlet set in a valley among mountains.

It was the last of seventeen passes over 2000 feet that she had crossed since leaving Nikkō. She called the road westward from it the very worst road she had ever ridden over.

Here she took a cargo boat down the river to Niigata. She sat in her chair on top of the cargo through the stretch known as running the rapids of the Tsugawa.

She came in by boat along the canals, landed in the heart of the city and was welcomed by Mr and Mrs Fyson at the Church Mission House near the Government Buildings.

As she entered the town the first man she met ran back calling out that a foreigner had come, and a crowd had gathered by the time she reached the inn. Near here she called the Yonezawa plain an Asiatic Arcadia.

A prefectural capital of 21,000 people. She was surprised by the tall white new Government Offices at the top of the main street, and found the streets broad and clean.

A town in a basin ringed by pyramidal hills covered with cryptomeria. She arrived at noon but decided to stay a day or two because her room at the Transport Office was pleasant.

An outbreak of kakke in Upper and Lower Innai had killed 100 of about 1500 people in seven months, and two doctors had been sent from the medical school at Kubota.

At the hospital she was formally received by the Director and six physicians and toured it with fifty medical students. She also visited a silk-weaving factory employing 180 hands, half of them women.

The junk port of Kubota was keeping a matsuri. The police told her there were 22,000 visitors in the town, and that twenty-five policemen were enough for 32,000 holiday-makers.

On the morning of 30 July, in the middle of torrential rain, a heavy blackness came over everything, which she was told was a total eclipse.

She arrived over the Yadate pass, where an obelisk marked the boundary of Akita and Aomori. After six days and five nights of rain she was storm-staid here for two days by the floods.

She watched the Tanabata procession: three huge drums, thirty small ones, hundreds of paper lanterns on poles and a central lantern 20 feet high, passing through the streets from 7 to 10 p.m.

The 22½ miles from Kuroishi were a struggle through mud. She described a town of grey houses and grey roofs on a grey beach round a grey bay, and took the steamer to Hakodate from here.

She crossed in a gale, doing 60 miles in fourteen hours, and entered Hakodate harbour in driving rain. The town was her base in Yezo, and 14 September was her last day there.

The steam ferry from Mori took six hours for 25 miles and arrived at 8 p.m. She described the inn touts on the jetty waving large paper lanterns.

She arrived after dark at a village of eleven Japanese houses and fifty-one Ainu houses near the sea, where Itō, who had ridden ahead, had salmon broiling.

She stayed in the house of the Ainu chief Benri and recorded Ainu life. She was taken to a shrine on the edge of a cliff and watched libations of saké offered to a figure of Yoshitsune.

The track came down to Usu Bay, where a large upright stone inscribed with Sanskrit characters stood by the shore. She lodged in a large, decaying house occupied by a Japanese man and his son placed there by the government.

She reached it over the three steep passes of Lebungétōge. She noted that the Ainu here differed from those of the eastern villages in looks and in the sound of their speech.

Here she joined the old road from Mori to Sapporo and halted for a day to rest her spine. She wrote that the town looked dismal even in the sunshine.

She came from Yokohama on the Shanghai mail steamer Hiroshima Maru. Her letter of 20 October describes Kobe as a mission centre and its foreign settlement.

She visited the Kyoto college, owned by a Japanese company that employed foreign teachers. Her letter of 1 November records three hours at Nishi Hongan-ji, where the priest Akamatsu showed her the temples and explained the Shin sect.

On 5 November she left Kyoto with Mr and Mrs Gulick, stopped at the Inari shrine at Fushimi and reached Uji, where they lunched in the upper room of a tea-house over the river, looking on a garden of red maples.

In a drizzle she walked in the forest on the hill by the Kasuga shrine, where the sacred deer begged for cakes. She saw the wooden Shōsōin storehouse and marvelled that it and its eighth-century treasures had survived a thousand years.

A five-day journey from Kyoto brought her to the Ise shrines. On the 11th she went on to Futami and then to the Naikū, completing the round of Shinto pilgrimage.

She came from Ise by way of Tsu and the Tōkaidō to the shore of Lake Biwa. On 15 November the town was keeping its festival, and she saw three of the thirteen matsuri cars for which Ōtsu was famous dragged through the streets.