As We Saw Them : The First Japanese Embassy to the United States

In 1860 the empire of Japan sent 170 officials -- samurai and bureaucrats, inspectors and spies, half a dozen teenagers and one Confucian physician -- to tour the United States, the first such visit to America and the first trip anywhere abroad in two hundred years. Politics and curiosity, on both sides, mixed to create an amazing journey. Using the travellers' own journals of the trip and American accounts of the group's progress, historian and critic Masao Miyoshi relates the fascinating tale of entrenched assumptions, startling impressions, and bewildering conclusions. Miyoshi finds in this unique encounter an entertaining adventure story of discovery and a paradigm of the attitudes and judgements that have ever since shaped American and Japanese perceptions of one another. This revealing account of 'otherness' is still relevant today as we strive to understand peoples whom we think of as foreign.

Masao Miyoshi is the Hajime Mori Professor of Japanese, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of California–San Diego, and the author of Off Center and Accomplices of Silence. He lives in Del Mar, California.