Factbook

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    A group of post-war Japanese authors dubbed ‘The Decadents’ established a publishing genre called ‘Flesh Literature’[UPDATED: 8-8-2025]

    A group of Japanese eccentrics and misfits, all members of the so-called Buraiha literary group, The Decadents, including authors such as Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) sometimes dubbed the bad boy of Japanese literature, Jun Ishikawa (1899-1987), Sakunosuke Oda (1913-1947), and Ango Sakaguchi (1906-1955) – who still have a cult-like following today – helped create a unique Japanese literary genre known as Flesh Literature, Nikutai Bungaku.

    The term Flesh Literature, literature of the body, came into use in Japan after World War II, even though similar narrative themes were penned before the name for the genre was actually coined.

    Flesh Literature narratives focused on indulgences of mostly the physical human and carnal variety (spanning desires from the sexual to the gluttonous) that the authors  explored as literary acts to fully understand humanity’s true nature.

    Unconstrained individualism in response to cultural and other forms of subjugation – as well as the pursuit of liberty, which wasn’t limited to just sexual liberation, was the key theme of the genre.

    The genre, however, wasn’t limited to just male writers. Experts and historians also include female authors such as Akiko Hiroike (1919-2007) within its scope. Many of the genre’s authors were influenced by French literature. A classic example is Nikutai No Mon, The Gate of Flesh by Taijiro Tamura (1911-1983), which has been adapted for film several times.

    That said, perhaps due to the innate dysfunctional state of some of the authors and the looseness of the grouping itself, the genre under the umbrella term Nikutai Bungaku didn’t develop sustainable long-term momentum even if fascination in these types of narratives has not diminished in Japan.

    The Decadents, a literary badging which is probably more accurately translated as The Deplorables or The Unreliables, were famous for a myriad of things including their unusual narrative styles, heavy drinking, and drug dependency; as well as the aimless anti-heroes that featured in their works reflecting their rejection of post-war Japanese society during its occupation and much that had come before.

    The name was coined by literary critics, and not by the individual writers themselves, who saw the authors as self-indulgent rebellious misfits and were searching for a moniker to group them together, partly in an act of analytical contempt.

    Interestingly, Sakaguchi published an essay Darakuron, Discourse on Decadence, in 1946, which brought him notoriety within Japan’s world of letters and also significant public attention. The word, a loanword that arrived in Japan from France in 1905, before many of these authors were in fact born, is sometimes written as dekadensu in Japanese.

    After the Second World War many new publishing labels, genres and formats emerged and have continued to do so. Some have stuck such as Suiri Shoetsu (reasoning fiction) for detective fiction, and other new ones such as Boys Love, Iyashikei (healing or comfort literature) and Shinhonka Suiri Shoetsu, for the neo-classical or new orthodox school of detective locked-room style fiction, as well as terms like Mukku, a hybrid book and magazine format.

    While Nikutai Bungaku and Japan’s early post-war literature of the body and flesh has probably today morphed into new creative genres, it can still be found flourishing and fermenting in a multitude of forms of erotic carnal indulgence in film, manga and anime formats, which now have their very own new and unique terminology and labels for it.

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    A group of post-war Japanese authors dubbed ‘The Decadents’ established a publishing genre called ‘Flesh Literature’ Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Western Authors have been trying to decode and explain the mysteries of ‘Unfathomable Japan’ for over 100 years[UPDATED: 4-18-2025]

    The Nobel Prize committee cited Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) writing on the manners and customs of the Japanese when they awarded him his Nobel prize in 1907.

    Kipling, an English journalist and author of books including The Jungle Book, visited Japan in 1889 and 1892. No other leading English literary figure of his day is thought to have spent so long in Japan or to have written so fully about the country. Thomas Cook, the travel agency, helped Kipling plan his first trip to Japan and onwards to the United States.

    Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying that ‘the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people… The Japanese people are… simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art,’ which triggered the following response from Kipling, who was just 23 and still unknown, on his arrival in Nagasaki in 1889: ‘Mister Oscar Wilde of The Nineteenth Century is a long toothed liar!’

    And perhaps ever since this trend of decoding with wit, intelligence and unique insight, ‘the paradox of Japan’ and the nation’s so-called contradictions, and demand for such publications, has continued.

    “The impression made on our minds by the people in Japan is, that they are a paradoxical race. They bow down before and worship the most hideous idols, groveling in the lowest form of Paganism, or they rise to the contemplation of the sublimest truths of philosophy,” Lord Redesdale and The Geishas. August 11th 1909.

    “While Japan’s history declares them aggressive, cruel, and revengeful, experience proves them yielding, merciful, and gentle,” writes Eliza R. Scidmore (1856-1928) in The Most Paradoxical Race.

    The phrase Paradoxical Race was actually used earlier by Arthur Adams (1820-1878), for example, in 1870, in his book Travels of a Naturalist in Japan and Manchuria, as a chapter heading. Other chapters in this book were titled; Unbecoming Custom, and The Literature of Japan.

    “We are fully cognizant of the fact that of books on Japan there is no end – many that are truly scholarly, the result of painstaking research. But alas! Also many that are mere impressionistic nonsense, or else wholly biased and prejudiced, either describing the Japanese as new race of supermen or making of them a nation of knaves – dishonest, crafty, and untrustworthy”, write Harold and Alice Foght in the preface of their book Unfathomed Japan, published in 1928. The book also states that: “Japan is really no longer “mysterious” as it has been depicted by a host of writers.”

    Despite this, a quick Google search shows that articles such as: Travelling Around Japan: A Cultural Paradox, Japanese Paradox, The Paradox of Harmony, Japan Land of Contradictions, Japan’s Paradox of Wealth, The Paradoxical Japanese History, Paradoxical Japan’s Payday ‘Will Come”, Paradoxical Japaneseness: Cultural representation in 21st century Japanese cinema, are still being written and read.

    Western Authors have been trying to decode and explain the mysteries of ‘Unfathomable Japan’ for over 100 years Posted by Richard Nathan
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    The publication of ‘The Tokyo Zodiac Murders’ in 1981 helped rebrand whodunnits in Japan and launch a new genre known as Shin-Honkaku mysteries, neoclassical mysteries[UPDATED: 4-18-2025]

    The publication in 1981 of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, by Soji Shimada, generated a boom in whodunnits in Japan and a reappraisal of the somewhat out-of-favour and often derided genre, known locally as honkaku mysteries, classical, authentic  or orthodox mysteries, which had often been looked down on by Japan’s literati.

    So much so that The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which has now been translated into many different languages including Russian, Chinese and English, and is considered a modern classic and one of the best Locked-Room mysteries ever written, spawned a new genre or sub-genre known as shin-honkaku, neoclassical or post-modern mysteries.

    This helped rebrand and popularise the whodunnit in a new brilliantly creative form in Japan and encourage Japanese readers to revisit works by earlier generations of Japanese authors that also contain fiendishly complex puzzling murder mysteries.

    “At that time, social realism in the style of authors like Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992) dominated the Japanese literary scene and honkaku mysteries, based on logic and deduction, weren’t held in high regard, falling outside the interests of the critics,” according to Shimada.

    “Mystery writers were looked on with scorn and distain by Japan’s literary circles, and authors of so-called Jun-bungaku, pure literature,” Shimada points out.

    Shimada penned a manifesto, sengen, in 1989 on the scope of the new sub-genre he represented and published schema mapping out the definitions of the various crime fiction and mystery publishing labels and sub-genre.

    Crime fiction has a long history in Japan and early Western visitors to Japan at the end the 19th century, including the famous Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird (1831-1904), commented on the large number of crime fiction titles on sale in Japan in the 1870s.

    Despite this Japan’s first official detective story was published in 1889, Muzan, Cold Blood, by Ruiko Kuroiwa (1862-1913) after the arrival of highly influential Western-style detective fiction in Japan in translation.

    It was, however, Taro Hirai (1894-1965), writing under the pen name Edogawa Rampo, who established the modern genre in Japan.

    Other highly talented authors, like Shimada, who is now sometimes referred to as the Japanese master of the post-modern whodunnit, have also helped produce new interest in the broader category attracting both new readership and authorship.

    An interesting example is Miyuki Miyabe who won the Japan Mystery Writers Association Prize in 1987 putting her on the literary map and triggering a boom in female crime writing in Japan that continues today.

    Unlike authors of previous generations, including Shimada, she hasn’t felt constrained or defined by the various schools of Japanese crime fiction and has freely mixed styles and bent genres to great success generally avoiding outrageous puzzles.

    All this has created lasting momentum for crime related Japanese fiction in all its different creative forms.

    The publication of ‘The Tokyo Zodiac Murders’ in 1981 helped rebrand whodunnits in Japan and launch a new genre known as Shin-Honkaku mysteries, neoclassical mysteries Posted by Richard Nathan
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    In 1905 a Japanese aristocrat felt compelled to write a book in English explaining Japan to Westerners titled: ‘Fantasy of Far Japan’[UPDATED: 10-15-2024]

    In 1905, a Japanese aristocrat, Baron Suyematsu (1855-1920), who was educated at Cambridge University, felt compelled to write two books in English in an early form of ‘myth-busting’ and ‘fake news’ management.

    It was a time where books were being written about Japan by Western writers that didn’t always depict Japan in a manner that the nation’s leadership was comfortable with.

    It was a period when the West seemed fascinated with all things Japan. In 1907, for instance, The Nobel Prize committee cited Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) writing on the manners and customs of the Japanese when they awarded him his Nobel prize.

    One of Suyematsu books was titled Fantasy of Far Japan or Summer Dream Dialogues and was published by Archibald Constable in 1905. 

    In the book’s introduction he writes: “In publishing this volume, I am not in the least degree actuated by a desire to exalt my country unduly, – still less to boast about her achievements. My sole object has been to show Japan as she is, and to claim Occidental sympathy to such a degree as she may deserve”.

    He also writes: “In the following pages I have depicted certain Japanese ideas and notions, as well as some historical facts which seem likely to interest those of the sympathetic Western public who may be inclined to study the mental side of Japan.”

    Fantasy of Far Japan covers many topics: including, for example, Japanese Commercial Morality, The Code of Honour, Truthfulness, Bushikun, and more.

    In the book Suyematsu cites a letter from the Manager of the Publications Department of the Times, amongst other things, published in theTimes regarding the Encyclopedia Britannica sales in Japan to support the character of the Japanese people, their credit worthiness and trustworthiness.

    In the letter dated 7 October 1905 the Manager writes: “No one in the Times office, at any rate, can doubt that the standard of integrity among the Japanese is so high that when young men, who have bought the Encyclopedia, abandoned their employment to go to the front, their families promptly paid the installments due, under circumstances of the utmost difficulty.”

    Suyematsu second book, The Risen Sun, published in the same year also by Archibald Constable, in which he writes: “The Russo-Japanese war will remain a vital date in the history of the peoples. When it ended, in the victory of the Rising Sun, the contact of Japan with the Occident was established on terms of equality.”

    In The Risen Sun, he also explains the status of Japanese women in early 20th century Japan: “proportionally, the mental capacity of Japanese women to men seems to be pretty similar to that which their Western sisters are supposed to have to the men. We cannot, of course, predict what will be women’s place in the social sphere at large in the future; but one thing is certain: the educational system for women has been extended, together with that for men, to a proportion that Japan has never known before. Their emulation and aspiration increase year by year, so that the supply of educational institutions is always far behind demand”.

    Suyematsu’s name is also written as Kencho Suematsu. He was a leading Japanese politician of his era, as well as an author, holding various senior cabinet level positions including Communications Minister and Home Affairs Minister.

    In 1905 a Japanese aristocrat felt compelled to write a book in English explaining Japan to Westerners titled: ‘Fantasy of Far Japan’ Posted by Richard Nathan
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    A novel about Judo written by a prize winning Japanese author and judo master helped launch Akira Kurosawa’s career as a film director[UPDATED: 8-6-2024]

    The first film directed by Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998), Japan’s most famous film director, was Sanshiro Sugata (Judo Saga), an adaptation of a newly published novel by the judo master and Naoki Prize-winning author Tsuneo Tomita (1904-1967).

    The action film was set in the 1880s when judo was founded by Jigoro Kano (1860-1938) out of the traditional Japanese martial art Jujitsu with the help of the author’s father – one of the Four Guardians of Kodokan Judo – and other similar exceptionally proficient fighters. 

    The film established Kurosawa’s reputation in Japan as an exciting and important newcomer, and alongside the book, helped shape how Kurosawa portrayed fighting and fighters in his films.

    Kano, like Kurosawa himself, had a major lasting impact on how the world saw Japan as a nation as well as his chosen profession. He was, for instance, the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Kano helped shape many things besides his sport, which would many years later become a popular international and Olympic sport. He also influenced the Olympic movement in Japan, the nation’s so-called Olympic Literature, and indirectly Kurosawa’s career through his sparring partner’s son’s novel, Sanshiro Sugata, published in 1942, the year before Kurosawa’s first film with the same name went on general release.
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    A novel about Judo written by a prize winning Japanese author and judo master helped launch Akira Kurosawa’s career as a film director Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Writing about ‘The Lost’ or ‘Old and New’ or Japan ‘Off-The-Beaten-Track’ in English is an enduring publishing trend that goes back to at least 1878[UPDATED: 6-17-2024]

    Writing and publishing books about Japan is not a new phenomenon and some of the themes, such as the alleged paradox of and contradictions within Japanese society are not new either.

    Many such themes have endured for over one hundred years, or more. Authors have continued to attempt to decode Japan, with wit, insight and elegant prose, for readers for years, comparing the present to the past, and searching out new unique things in Japan never written about before in English or pockets of rural Japan never ‘explored’ before.

    The British explorer and travel writer Isabella L. Bird (1831-1904), for example, wrote Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An account of Travels on Horseback in the interior including visits to the aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Ise in 1881 after she visited Japan in 1878, with the aim of introducing new aspects of Japan to Western readers.

    She writes about visits to bookshops, colleges, missionaries, Japanese women and the moral codes they are bound by, a glimpse of domestic life, and even includes descriptions, that would not be publishable today, of Ainu people comparing some to The Missing Link.

    Another early example is Percival Lowell (1855-1916), an American intellectual and businessman, who lived in Japan for a few months and visited the country many times, who wrote a travelogue in 1891 titled: Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan, as well as others books on Japan and the Orient.

    In 1913, Lord Redesdale (1837-1916), a British diplomat who was based in Japan in the 1870s, comments in the introduction of A Tragedy in Stone and other Papers on this publishing trend:

    “Many books are being written about Japan old and new: every tourist writes his impressions or those of his native guide, mostly illiterate and uninformed; and so I felt the less hesitation in endeavouring to crystallise some particles of truth as a set-off to against all this Dolmetscherei – interpreter’s fribble”.

    “Even a trip among the fairy-haunted mountains of Hakone, in days when there were no railroads, no telegraphs, no hotels, and when we travelled with an armed escort – for there were not a few ronin about, desperadoes whose blades were a thirst to drink the blood of the hated foreigner – may be of some amusement to the myriad journeyers who now have at their command all the comforts and something more than the security of the West”.

    “But for these I must say that they pay a price in the sacrifice of much that was original, much that was picturesque, and the old-world, and unforeseen.”

    Many authors today, as in the past, are aware of the challenges of writing an original book about Japan, but still feel compelled to pick up the gauntlet by putting their thoughts and impression to paper.

    In fact so many books had been written about Japan by 1900 that one US-based Japanese journalist saw this in itself as a publishing opportunity and wrote a book titled Japan and the Japanese in 1904, summarising them.

    Harold and Alice Foght, two America educators, who despite all this and being fully aware of the risks, like so many others today, decided to take up the challenge and wrote in the preface of their book Unfathomed Japan, published in 1928:

    “We are fully cognizant of the fact that of books on Japan there is no end – many that are truly scholarly, the result of painstaking research. But alas! Also many that are mere impressionistic nonsense, or else wholly biased and prejudiced, either describing the Japanese as new race of supermen or making of them a nation of knaves – dishonest, crafty, and untrustworthy.”

    Their book includes chapters and headings on: Purveyors of Untruths, Low Degree of Adult Illiteracy, A Visit to an Ainu Village, The Geisha Suicide Rock, An Education Institution After My Own Heart, Helen Redell’s Leper Hospital, and Children Do Cry in Japan.

    Despite his views on books about Japan, Lord Redesdale was happy to share his own impressions and memories:

    “Already the Japanese themselves talk of the days previous to 1878 as mukashi, “the olden time,” and they speak dubiously of what took place then, much as we might talk of the events of the period of Heptarchy. It was strange indeed, when I returned to Japan six years ago with Prince Arthur’s Garter Mission, to be more than once cross-examined as to what did or did not take place mukashi. When the Mayor of Tokyo got up a representation of one of the old Daimyo processions for the Prince’s benefit, one of the Princesses turned around to me, a foreigner, and said: “You must often have seen such sights mukashi; is this all correct?” Many books are being written about Japan old and new….

    “When I left her in 1870 she was busy working out the problems of her own political salvation. I went back in 1873 – she was then learning and toiling, training herself assiduously for the great part she was to play in the world’s history. In 1909 I found a great and heroic nation emerging from a war in which she had shown not only those great qualities which gave success to her arms, but also the magnanimity and self-restraint in victory which are the greatest triumph of the conqueror.

    “In forty years Japan, from being an unknown country, a negligible quantity in the councils of the nations, has raised herself to the rank of a first-rate Power, and from this time forth it is impossible to conceive any Congress, meeting to settle the affairs of the world, at which she should not be represented, and which her statesmen should not have a powerful voice.

    “The Old Japan is dead, but its soul survives in a spirit of patriotism and chivalry as loft as the world has seen. Daimyos and Kuges have disappeared.  The feuds of the clans, the turbulent frettings of the Wave-men, have faded into the past. In the place of these elements of unrest we see the new birth of a novel people bound together by one great and glorious aspiration, following the guidance of an auspicious star leading them to the heights of which their fathers never dreamt”.

    Writing about ‘The Lost’ or ‘Old and New’ or Japan ‘Off-The-Beaten-Track’ in English is an enduring publishing trend that goes back to at least 1878 Posted by Richard Nathan
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    ‘The Life of an Amorous Man’ written by a 17th-century Japanese poet spawned the genre now known as ‘Floating World’ publishing[UPDATED: 1-16-2024]

    Even though the term is thought to have been used for the first time after his death in 1710, the Japanese poet Ihawa Saikaku (1642-1693) and his work written in 1682, The Life of an Amorous Man, Koshoku ichidai otoko, are said to have spawned the Japanese publishing genre known as Ukiyo-Zoshi tales of the floating world.

    This genre of popular Japanese fiction spans fiction written between the 1680s and 1770s during Japan’s peaceful but somewhat rigid Edo period (1603-1868) when the nation was run by Shoguns and mostly closed off from the rest of the world.

    It was, however, a time when many Japanese cultural pursuits flourished including the nation’s commercial publishing – an industry that the Shogun-run administrations mostly encouraged. The genre flourished just as commercial publishing, which had initially started in Kyoto in the early 17th century, was gaining significant momentum.

    The term was first used just for amorous erotic fiction but subsequently expanded to encompass a much broader range of works spanning the world of Japanese courtesans and life more generally in Edo Japan, including in its so-called pleasure quarters. It had fixed publishing formats and was known for its extreme realism and cynicism.

    Saikaku, who was one of the most popular authors of the period, the son of an Osaka-based merchant was from a young age a prolific composer of renga, linked verse; an understanding of which alongside other forms of Japanese poetry and short-form writing are (some argue) essential for decoding Japan’s intellectual and cultural DNA. Tales of the floating world, either written by Saikaka or inspired by him, are now undeniably part of Japan’s cultural DNA.

    Saikaku also wrote Five Women Who Loved Love, Koshoku gonin onna as well as The Life of an Amorous Women, Koshoku ichidai onna.

    Another Saikaku work Twenty Cases of Unfilial Children, Honcho niju fuko, published in 1686, a parody of a famous Chinese Confucian text inspired Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) many years later to pen a series of essays titled Lessons in Immorality,Fudotoku Kyoiku Koza, in 1958.

    In later life, Saikaku’s works became increasingly racy. He also wrote, for example, The Great Mirror of Male Love, Nanshoku okagami, published in 1687 a collection of homosexual stories, which are sometimes cited as an important milestone in Japan’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) related publishing.

    More than 300 years after the publication of The Life of an Amorous Man the Japan-born British author and future Nobel Prize in Literature winner Kazuo Ishiguru used the genre’s phrasing in translation in the title of his 1986 seminal novel An Artist of the Floating World.

    And just like Saikaku’s works in Edo period Japan, Ishiguru’s novel set in post-war Japan captured the interests and imaginations of readers but in Ishiguru’s case in at least 40 countries during his lifetime, including Japan where An Artist of the Floating World has been published in Japanese translation.

    Showing again that tales of floating worlds, no matter which age they are set in, can conjure up exceedingly compelling and enduring narratives.

     

    ‘The Life of an Amorous Man’ written by a 17th-century Japanese poet spawned the genre now known as ‘Floating World’ publishing Posted by Richard Nathan
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    Writing about the plight of women in Japan is not a new trend. In the 1870s visitors to Japan were already pontificating on the topic in print[UPDATED: 8-4-2023]

    Like many who preceded her, travel writer Isabella L. Bird (1831-1904) shares her thoughts and observations about Japanese women, following her first visit to Japan in 1878. She writes the following in her book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An account of Travels on Horseback in the interior including visits to the aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Ise:

    “She looked intelligent, restless, and unhappy, and, I thought, chafed under the restraints of custom, as she said that no Japanese women could start for foreign countries alone, and she envied foreigners their greater liberty”.

    Bird goes on:

    “A very pretty girl, with singular grade and charm of manner, came on and sat down besides her, equally well dressed in silk, but not a legal wife. The senior wife obtains great credit for her kind and sisterly treatment of her, which according to Japanese notions, is the path to true wisdom. There was an attendant in the shape of a detestable “Chin,” something like a King Charles’s spaniel with a broken nose: an artificially dwarfed creature, with glassy, prominent eye, very cross and delicate, and dressed in a warm coat. These objectionable lap-dogs are “ladies’ pets” all over Japan.

    “My impression is, that, according to our notions, the Japanese wife is happier in the poorer than in the richer classes. She works hard, but it is rather as a partner than the drudge of her husband. Nor, in the same class, are the unmarried girls secluded, but, within certain limits, they posses complete freedom. Women undoubtedly enjoy a more favourable position than in most other heathen countries, and wives are presumably virtuous. Infanticide is rare. The birth of a daughter is far from being an occasion of mourning, and girls receive the same affection and attention as boys, and for their sphere are equally carefully educated.

    “The women of the upper classes are much secluded, and always go out with attendants. In the middle ranks it is not proper for a wife to be seen abroad in her husband’s absence, and, to be above suspicion, many, under these circumstances, take an old women to keep them company.

    “There are many painful and evil customs to which I cannot refer, and which are not likely to be overthrown except by the reception of a true Christianity, some of them arising out of morbidly exaggerated notions of filial piety; but even in the past times women have not been “downtrodden,” but have occupied a high place in history. To say nothing of the fact that the greatest of national divinities is a goddess, nine empresses have ruled Japan by “divine right,” and in literature, especially poetry, women divide the foremost places with men.

    “Japanese women, who even at the worst, enjoy an amount of liberty, considerate care, and respect, which I am altogether surprised to find in a heathen country. It is even to be hoped that things may not go too far, and that the fear of the Meiroku Zasshi, that “ the power of women will grow gradually, and eventually become so overwhelming that it will be impossible to control it,” many not be realised!”

    Another British author, Sherard Vines (1890-1974), who spent longer in Japan and taught for five years at Keio University, a private university in Tokyo, has a very different spin on Japanese women writing in 1931, 50 years later, in his book Yofuku or Japan in Trousers:

    “Ugly Japanese women, like ugly French women, are generally able to cultivate some attraction of manner, whereas the English are inclined to submit to any physical shortcomings, and to take refuge in defiance, educational activities, or the writing of popular fiction.”

    He also writes: “The few “emancipated: and modernised Japanese women I have had the privilege of meeting were entirely devoid of the aggressiveness and self-conscious masculinity that, in the corresponding Nordic type, is sometimes so trying; and they where wholly delightful”.

    In between the publication of these two books, and even today, much is written, recorded, broadcast and published about Japanese women, some of it well researched that, in a similar manner to Bird, alludes to the fact that the reality is often far more complex than generally imagined and different across different sections of society. 

    An interesting example that highlights these complexities penned by a Japanese author, Toshiaki Tachibanaki, is The New Paradox for Japanese Women: Greater Choice, Greater Inequality, for instance, which looks at how contemporary women have been polarised into elite and non-elite in the name of diversity and freedom of choice, and the impact that employment and marriage status can also play on modern gender roles. But much is still flippant, superficial and headline grabbing.

    That said, Bird’s book, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, written when she was 47 and published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York in 1881, as well as the story of her travels in Japan in 1878, was launched as a Japanese manga in 2015, Isabella Bird in Wonderland: Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Fushigi no Kuni no Bādo, creating a new type of legacy for her and her observations of more than a century ago. A bilingual Japanese-English edition also exists.

    Writing about the plight of women in Japan is not a new trend. In the 1870s visitors to Japan were already pontificating on the topic in print Posted by Richard Nathan