Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

Isabella Bird

4 ideas

1. A lone foreign woman crosses rural Japan

   In 1878 Isabella Bird, aged 46, travelled overland from Tokyo through the interior of northern Honshu to Hokkaido. She went by packhorse, rickshaw and on foot, with only an eighteen-year-old interpreter, Ito, and she wrote that she covered some 1,200 miles without meeting a single act of rudeness or extortion. Her experience is concrete evidence that a lone female traveller in a society closed to outsiders until recently could be safer than in contemporary Europe. It also shows that her hardships were fleas, mud, rain, poor food and sickly horses, not hostile people.

2. The interpreter as an invisible filter

   A traveller who has no shared language reaches a place only through the intermediary who translates, bargains and chooses routes and lodgings. That intermediary's biases, pride and self-interest shape what the traveller is allowed to see. Bird's interpreter Ito was capable and indispensable. He also skimmed small commissions, looked down on rural people and scorned the Ainu, so her record is partly his framing unless she actively corrects for it.

3. Modernization reaches the capital, not the interior

   Bird argues that the Meiji state's rapid Westernization was visible in Tokyo and the treaty ports but had barely touched the rural interior. A few days' travel away, villagers lived in cramped, smoky, flea-ridden houses with widespread skin and eye disease and little clothing. Official reform, then, is a thin layer over the centre, and you have to travel beyond the showcase to judge a country's real condition.

4. Living among the Ainu at Biratori

   In Hokkaido, Bird stayed in the Ainu village of Biratori as a guest in the household of the chief Benri. She recorded their gentleness and hospitality, their bear ceremonies and their heavy drinking of sake as a religious act. She also recorded their shrine honouring the Japanese hero Yoshitsune and their marginal position under Japanese rule. Her account is an early outsider's record of the Ainu, combining sympathetic detail with the racial hierarchies of her era, and it can be tested as a primary source on indigenous people under colonial pressure.

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