Aino Folk-tales

Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935), was a professor of Tokyo Imperial University and one of the foremost British Japanologists active in Japan during the late 19th century. He landed in Japan on 29 May 1873. He taught at the Imperial Naval School in Tokyo from 1874 to 1882. His most important position, however, was as professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University beginning in 1886. It was there that he gained his reputation as a student of Japanese language and literature. He was also a pioneering scholar of the Ainu and Ryukyuan languages. He wrote some of the earliest translations of haiku into English. Chamberlain is perhaps best remembered for his informal and popular one-volume encyclopedia Things Japanese, which first appeared in 1890 and which he revised several times thereafter. His works include: the first translation of the Kojiki into English (1882), A Handbook of Colloquial Japanese (1888) and A Practical Guide to the Study of Japanese Writing (1905).