CC. The Larger Context

4. Lehmann, Jean-Pierre. The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850-1905. London: Allen & Unwin, 1978.

Lehmann’s study remains the most satisfying available of the profound shift in popular images of Japan in the United States and particularly Britain from the years immediately preceding Perry’s arrival at Uraga through the Russo-Japanese War. The aim is to determine the attitudes toward Japan of the ‘educated general reader’ of the period in Europe and America, and the conceptions and misconceptions Lehmann identifies provide useful contextualisation for the work under study here. Materials surveyed include accounts of Japan that appeared in publications such as Edinburgh Review, Blackwood’s Magazine, MacMillan’s, and Revue des Deux Mondes, and Lehmann makes particularly frequent and perceptive use of the London Times. Includes reference throughout to writers of interest here, including Kipling (see CA1) and Edwin Arnold (CA1), Chamberlain (D5), Percival Lowell (D6), Hearn (D9), and Aston (D13). The work is usefully supplemented but not superseded by Yokoyama (7) and Littlewood (10). See also 12.