INTRODUCTION TO THE
NEW EDITION

JAPAN is enigmatic and ponderable to this day. However, those who love her would not have her any other way. To the average Westerner, Japan has two stereotyped faces. One is the sentimental world of Madame Butterfly with its tea-houses, cherry blossoms, and quaint landscapes. The second face is sober and energetic. It represents the Japan of industry, politics, social problems, and gigantic tourism. When this book was written in 1878, modern Japan as we know it was in its infancy, still accustoming itself to the Meiji reforms of 1868.

Japan's back-country districts were in Miss Bird's day still semiprimitive and medieval. She plunged into a picturesque world where poverty and hardship were an accepted part of life. Visiting Europeans were as unfamiliar to country Japanese as people from another planet would be to us today. The peasantry expected the worst from visiting foreigners, no doubt after hard experience, but our Isabella Bird was a notable exception. She was not like the proverbial bull in a china shop when she entered a Japanese house. She was of small stature, an enormous advantage in Japan; also, she had a quiet voice. Most important, she studied local customs and observed them. Her hosts were delighted when she removed her muddy boots, a courtesy which, at that time, foreigners appear to have neglected.

Miss Bird's visit to Japan lasted about seven months. There was a sizeable European population in Tokyo and the other large cities in Meiji times, and wealthy tourists arrived in considerable numbers, but the unbeaten tracks and back country by-ways were rarely visited by Westerners. Isabella Bird, in her customary manner, set out for the little-known places. What she saw on her journey was both pleasant and unpleasant. She observed everything. Her aim was to sponsor missionary hospitals, since she believed there was a need for Western medicine and Christianity in the so-called barbaric countries, but one feels that Japan was a surprise to her as it has been to so many of us. In some respects, she learned more than she had come to teach.

A large part of the text of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan is in the form of letters. This style of writing, often used as a literary device by the Victorians, is based on real need in this instance, for Isabella Bird was earnestly writing to her sister Henrietta. It appears they were devoted to each other, and Henrietta followed the travels of her more adventurous sister through the written word. Henrietta died in 1880, the year of the publication of the book in London. In 1881 Isabella married Dr. John Bishop who for many years had shared her interest in work with medical missions. Her husband's death a few years after the marriage left her completely alone. From then on, she devoted herself exclusively to the humanistic mission work which had involved her so deeply with travel, her sister, and her husband. She died in Edinburgh in 1904.

Although Isabella Bird was a devout Christian, she was open minded in viewing other religions. In fact, her observations on Japanese religion are among the most interesting aspects of the book. Encounters with Buddhism evidently disturbed her. Its view of an endless cyclic time and organic life was unpalatable to the self-centered Victorians. Today Buddhism is viewed as having concepts akin to those of modern physics, but its ideas were generally rejected by the West of a century ago.

Isabella Bird is both poetic and objective. Her factual reporting gives Unbeaten Tracks in Japan a firm place as an ethnographical document, especially for the Ainu of Hokkaido (the "aborigines of Yezo"). The spellings of Japanese names for places, people, and things occasionally differ from the modern spellings, but there is no doubt as to meaning. What we must remember is that the Japan of today is not the Japan of Miss Bird. It is almost a century since she made her way over trails and stopped in villages among the hospitable country folk. The Japan she describes is a Japan in transition, and for this reason her book is valuable in helping us to understand modern changes.

How this sick, frail woman succeeded in dying peacefully in bed at the age of seventy-three after many hazardous travels surprises us today, as it did her contemporaries. But she was a skillful traveller who possessed natural luck and an ability to adapt to local conditions. Clad in "American mountan dress" and "Wellington boots," she remained undaunted in time of danger. Unperturbed by fleas, mosquitoes, vicious packhorses, strange diet, noisy dogs, and inclement weather, she represents a breed of intelligent traveler now virtually extinct.

TERENCE BARROW