The Far Lantern

Beyond the Familiar Roads: Isabella Bird's Journey Through Japan

In eighteen seventy-eight, Isabella Bird travelled through Japan with the young interpreter Itō, relying on the knowledge and hospitality of the people she met. From the port of Yokohama to northern roads, rivers and households, and onward to the southern places omitted from later editions of her book, this is a quiet journey through work, companionship and the limits of a visitor's understanding.


Episode 1 — A Stranger in a Changing Japan

In the Japan of 1878, an ambitious journey begins with a railway, official introductions, and an agreement with a young interpreter. Isabella Bird discovers how much of getting away depends on the people who help a stranger arrive.


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Sources & Further Reading


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Pull up a chair. The fire is warm, the lantern is lit, and there's time for one more story.

Isabella Bird arrived at Yokohama in May of eighteen seventy-eight, intending to see considerably more of Japan than a foreign visitor could ordinarily reach.

She was forty-six. She had crossed oceans before, travelled in North America, and ridden through country in which a comfortable bed was an ambition rather than an arrangement. An unfamiliar landing did not make her a beginner. Nor did experience make the landing, the luggage, and the business of finding somewhere to stay take care of themselves.

Those things required people. There were boatmen to bring passengers ashore, workers to handle their possessions, and residents who could explain how the port conducted its affairs. The first distance between a visitor and a country was often a very small one, crossed with somebody else's help.

Yokohama offered more help of a familiar sort than many places Isabella hoped to visit. Foreign merchants lived and worked there. Ships brought goods, passengers, information, and expectations from elsewhere. A newcomer might find English spoken and arrangements made with foreign habits in mind.

It was possible to come a very long way and remain, in certain respects, among one's own people.

That was useful at the beginning. It was also something Isabella intended to leave behind.

She wanted to go into the interior, through the northern districts of the main island and eventually across the sea to Hokkaidō. There would be inns that seldom received a foreign guest, roads used by people carrying goods between towns, and households whose arrangements had developed without considering what an Englishwoman might prefer for breakfast.

Now, this was not a matter of choosing a direction and setting off. A foreign traveller's movements were restricted. The country she wished to enter was governed, inhabited, and busy with its own concerns. Permission mattered. So did introductions and the willingness of people along the way to help her put an unfamiliar plan into practice.

We shall meet a good many of those people. Some will spend only a few minutes in her company. Others will change the course of a day. One young man will spend much of the northern journey explaining her to everyone else, and everyone else to her.

But at Yokohama, the immediate prospect was a train.

The railway to Tokyo had opened only a few years earlier, in eighteen seventy-two. It provided a surprisingly convenient beginning to a journey that would later involve so much mud. A ticket could settle a distance that, farther north, would require an interpreter, a transport office, an animal, and several conversations.

Isabella was entering Japan during the early Meiji years. The political changes of eighteen sixty-eight were still close enough to belong to living memory. New institutions and new means of travel were becoming part of daily life. They did not arrive everywhere at the same moment, or replace every older practice upon arrival.

The railway and the packhorse would both belong to her journey. Neither was a mistake in the other's century.

That is one of the pleasures of travelling with her. She lets us notice a country in the act of changing, though she does not always recognise change in the form in which it presents itself. She could be observant, impatient, admiring, unfair, and wonderfully interested, sometimes within the same afternoon.

She had purposes beyond the pleasure of movement. She wished to gather information and write about the country. Her Christian convictions shaped the questions she brought, particularly her interest in the possibilities for missionary work. The people assisting her had interests and purposes too. Her journey was connected to a larger world of diplomacy, religion, and official inquiry.

None of that prevented an ordinary difficulty from taking precedence. Before she could investigate the interior, she needed to reach the city, obtain advice, and find someone who could help her travel.

The great northern route was still, for the moment, a proposal.

The railway was an actual arrangement. There was something to be said for beginning with one of those.

The train carried Isabella Bird from Yokohama towards Tokyo through a country that would not remain conveniently beside the window.

A field appeared, a roof, a group of people at work. By the time she had decided what she wanted to ask about, the carriage had taken the question elsewhere. Railway travel offered a generous view and very little opportunity to interrupt it.

In Tokyo, movement became more personal. A man pulling a kuruma, the small wheeled carriage used to convey passengers, supplied both direction and exertion. Shops and streets passed at a pace governed by a body rather than an engine. Even the convenient portions of the journey had different kinds of work inside them.

The city had been known to Western visitors as Yedo. Tokyo was the name Isabella now had to learn. A new name could be written down quite quickly. Understanding the changes behind it required more than a fresh heading in a notebook.

At the British legation, Sir Harry Parkes helped turn her northern intentions into a journey that might actually be undertaken.

Parkes was an experienced diplomat. He knew that permission to travel was not the same as the ability to find a horse at the right place, and that a traveller who could not explain herself would depend upon people who could. He could assist with the official arrangements, make introductions, and bring the proposed route within the attention of people whose cooperation mattered.

The resulting passport was important. It would be taken out at inns and presented to officials along the road. It was a portable explanation of why this particular foreign woman was travelling through a particular place.

Without it, curiosity would have been a poor answer to an official question.

Even with it, the conversations would still have to happen. Someone must find the paper, wait while it was examined, explain the proposed destination, and understand the reply. There would be evenings when Isabella wished the whole country could simply have read the document once and remembered it.

Official arrangements seldom work that way.

Advice gathered around the preparations. People recommended provisions, equipment, assistance, precautions against discomfort. Each recommendation could be sensible. Collectively, they threatened to make her proposed light journey rather heavy.

One can understand the advisers. They knew difficulties she did not yet know. One can understand Isabella too. She did not wish to take so much of a familiar household with her that every encounter with an unfamiliar one became unnecessary.

Yet travelling lightly involved a bargain. Leave a convenience behind, and one might need to ask for something locally. Carry less food, and one would have to discover what could be bought. Bring fewer attendants, and more of the work would fall upon the people who did come.

The choice altered the journey for everyone involved.

There were maps to consider, routes to discuss, and the distant prospect of the northern sea. Nikkō offered a known first destination, with places and people accustomed to receiving visitors. Beyond it, the arrangements would become less familiar to her.

That did not mean there were no arrangements. Goods already crossed the mountains. People already travelled, sent messages, changed horses, and found rooms. Isabella would have to enter those systems instead of expecting them to resemble the ones she knew.

To do that, she needed an interpreter.

The word sounds rather narrower than the work. A person might translate a question accurately and still be unable to settle a dispute about a horse. He might speak English well but know little about the route, or know the route and decline the discomforts of the employment.

She needed somebody who could bargain, cook when necessary, manage luggage, communicate with officials, and discover whether an apparent refusal meant impossible, inconvenient, or merely that she had asked the wrong person.

Much of that work would take place while she waited elsewhere. She would see the result, sometimes without seeing the effort that produced it.

James Curtis Hepburn, the doctor and missionary at Yokohama, helped with the search. The next important part of the expedition would therefore happen in a room, in conversation with a young man.

The passport could establish that she was allowed to go. It could not supply the person who would make the going possible.

The young interpreter Isabella Bird engaged was called Itō. He was about eighteen, and the employment would ask rather more of him than the polite exchange of sentences.

He had worked with foreigners before. He had experience that could be useful on a journey involving plants, roads, provisions, and people who expected an answer in Japanese. Hepburn's assistance helped bring the arrangement about.

In Bird's account, the hiring is a lively business of applicants, qualifications, reservations, and the question of whether a person who seemed so ready for the work could really perform it. She was an exacting employer, inclined to have a view of how things ought to be done before discovering what doing them required.

Itō would have views of his own.

His wages were twelve dollars a month. The agreement acquired a written form, with his seal and her signature. That made the terms definite, though it could not make the daily interpretation of them effortless.

What, after all, did it mean to manage the journey? Isabella could decide that she wanted to take a certain road. Itō would have to ask whether a horse was available, discover what the road was like, and arrange the next night's lodging. If the answers displeased her, he would be the person delivering them.

An interpreter can find himself receiving the blame for news he has merely translated.

There was also the difference between being employed and being without interests of one's own. Itō wished to learn. He paid attention to English words and had reasons for valuing experience with foreign travellers. Isabella's curiosity was not the only curiosity entering the arrangement.

The following day, he asked for a month's wages in advance.

She paid him. Then she had time to think about having paid him.

Hepburn raised the possibility that the young man might not return. It was an awkward suggestion to leave with a person who had just handed over the money. There was no useful action Isabella could take in the interval. She could attend to the preparations, and wait to discover whether the appointment would be kept.

Itō returned at the appointed time.

That is a small event, but it is worth allowing its proper weight. The advance did not become an adventure. The person who had received it came back to do the work for which he had been hired.

The journey could proceed.

Soon he was arranging the early stages and moving easily through practical business that remained opaque to his employer. He knew whom to ask and how to frame a request. He could speak with a household in a way Isabella could not hear fully, because the English version was necessarily only part of the conversation.

She was dependent upon him. She was also paying him, which could make dependence harder to admit when they disagreed.

Their relationship will give our journey much of its human interest. They were neither an inseparable pair who understood one another immediately nor a heroic traveller with a silent attendant. They worked together, became accustomed to each other's habits, irritated one another, and sometimes found the other unexpectedly capable.

We needn't decide in advance that every disagreement improved them. Some disagreements were probably just tiring. Travel supplies a sufficient quantity of those without requiring each to become a lesson.

There were real decisions to settle. How much should they carry? What provisions might be obtained along the way? When could a horse be hired, and where should the first stage end? Isabella's wish to keep the undertaking small made the answers particularly important.

Itō had to organise his own belongings as well as hers. A person who prepares food, arranges transport, translates, and negotiates still has to eat and sleep. His day did not become shorter because several occupations had been collected beneath one title.

By the time they were ready to leave the established foreign community, the contract had begun to acquire its everyday meaning. They would find out which decisions required discussion and which could safely be left to the person who knew how to make them.

For now, there was a signature, a seal, and a young man who had returned when he said he would.

It was enough to begin packing.

Before Isabella Bird left Tokyo, there was a decision to be made about the sort of traveller she would be once the convenient arrangements ended.

She could carry more provisions, take additional help, and surround herself with a modest defence against unfamiliarity. Or she could travel with less, accepting that the road would oblige her to use what was available.

She chose a small undertaking. That was part of what made the journey interesting to her. It also meant that decisions made over the luggage would reappear later as questions about meals, beds, weather, and strength.

An object can seem indispensable while it lies on a floor. The difficulty begins when every indispensable object requires carrying.

There was bedding to consider, clothing, writing materials, and provisions. The passport and introductions were among the most useful things she possessed, though they could not be eaten and would offer poor shelter from rain. They had to remain both protected and available.

Itō could help arrange the load. He would also have to arrange the people and animals that moved it. A large basket was not simply a large basket. It was part of the weight somebody would have to balance, lift, secure, and deliver.

This was the practical country behind the view from the railway. Away from the convenient line, movement came in stages. The people who knew the road knew where the stages began and ended, what could be carried, and which arrangements would have to be made again at the next place.

A traveller could pay for the service. Payment did not remove the work inside it.

Isabella's own body also belonged in the calculations. She could be remarkably persistent, but persistence did not abolish fatigue. Riding might spare one kind of effort and create another. Walking could relieve the discomfort of a saddle while making the next hill more considerable.

There would be evenings when a room mattered more than anything she had come to see. She could not prepare for those evenings merely by resolving to be brave.

What she could do was take the things that genuinely served the journey and allow the rest to remain behind.

That sounds simpler than it is. An experienced traveller carries memories of previous inconveniences. Each can recommend a purchase. A wet night argues for one thing, an unsatisfactory meal for another, and a room without the expected furniture may make a third object seem very wise indeed.

By the time all these sensible witnesses have given evidence, one can require an additional horse.

Itō had the advantage of considering the proposed load as a load. Isabella considered it as a series of future needs. Both were looking at the same belongings, and neither view was entirely sufficient without the other.

The arrangements eventually became manageable. The route would lead out of Tokyo towards Nikkō, with Kasukabe among the early stops. The city could be left, and the official papers could begin their travelling life.

There is a particular change in a journey when planning ceases to be a conversation about what one might do and becomes the business of being somewhere else before dark.

For Isabella, that change brought relief as well as uncertainty. She had received a great deal of advice. At last she could discover which portions would prove useful.

The surroundings changed as they moved. The concentrated business of the city gave way to stretches of road, villages, fields, and houses in which she would have to ask for accommodation. She was leaving the places where a foreign visitor's requirements were easily anticipated.

Itō remained the person who could turn those requirements into requests. He also had to bring back the household's answer, which might require her to alter what she wanted.

That would be the work of the road for some time to come. It did not happen once, at the beginning, and remain settled. Every arrival began another small arrangement between the travellers and the people who were already there.

By the end of an early stage, the value of a successful arrangement was wonderfully clear. There was a roof. The bags could be put down. Someone knew where food might be found.

The luggage had ceased to be a collection of possibilities in Tokyo. It was now a group of actual possessions inside an actual inn.

And the inn, as Isabella was about to discover, had arrangements of its own.

At a road inn, Isabella Bird could pay for a room without acquiring the kind of privacy she associated with a closed English door.

Partitions divided the space. Voices and movements travelled through them. The work of receiving guests involved people appearing to discover what was required, returning with an answer, and appearing again when some further part of the evening needed attention.

After a long day's travel, it could feel like rather a lot of hospitality.

Then there was curiosity. A foreign woman travelling through the country was an unusual arrival. People wanted to see her. Isabella, who had come a considerable distance to look at other people, found the return of interest less restful than she might have wished.

The difficulty was not difficult to understand. It was difficult to sleep through.

Itō passed between her and the household. A request that seemed perfectly clear in English had to enter the life of an inn in Japanese. Food, bedding, luggage, and the visitor's wish to be left alone all required their own attention. Her interpreter could not attend to every one of them while remaining beside her chair.

This left intervals in which she could hear business without knowing what business it was.

There is an unfamiliar kind of helplessness in possessing the right document while being unable to follow the conversation about it. Isabella would experience that more than once. A passport could be correct, the officials courteous, and the whole transaction routine, while the person whose journey depended on it still felt unsettled.

On one such evening, a parcel from Tokyo arrived amid the questions and interruptions of the inn.

The passport needed inspection. Lights and officials became part of the room's already considerable company. Itō could explain matters. Isabella could produce the paper and wait for the explanation to do its work.

Meanwhile, the parcel contained a quite different kind of connection with the world she had left.

There was lemon sugar, a kindly note from Sir Harry Parkes, and letters from home.

Think of the distances inside that small arrival. The official introductions had helped her enter the country. Now an ordinary delivery had followed her out of the city and brought familiar words into an unfamiliar room.

She had chosen to leave the convenient places. She had not ceased to belong to the people who knew where she had gone.

It would be agreeable to say that the letters transformed the whole evening. They did not. She was tired, the inspection was inconvenient, and the conditions for enjoying a long-awaited pleasure were rather poor.

That seems to me a very recognisable part of the story. Something welcome arrives, and the person receiving it has used up the strength required to be pleased properly.

The documents were examined. The necessary explanations were completed. The light and the visitors eventually withdrew, leaving her with what she had wanted and insufficient rest to make the most of it.

Morning altered the proportions. The inn was occupied with its regular work. Guests needed food, possessions had to be gathered, and another day's journeys were beginning. The previous night's concerns no longer filled the room in quite the same way.

The parcel could be kept. The letters could be read again. Unlike the conversation over the passport, they did not require everyone to be present at the same time.

Isabella was beginning to discover the difference between discomfort and disaster. An evening might be thoroughly disagreeable without anything having gone seriously wrong. The papers could be in order, the luggage safe, the route available, and the traveller still very much in need of a better night.

Itō had helped bring that evening to an end. His usefulness was becoming a repeated fact, rather than a qualification offered during an interview.

Ahead lay Nikkō. There she would find a household whose welcome gave her room to recover, and a quieter place in which to open the letters.

For now, she gathered them with the other things that had to travel. The small parcel had found her. It could come the rest of the way.

At Nikkō, Isabella Bird stayed with Kanaya's household. After the inns along the road, the house offered something for which she had acquired a particularly good appreciation: the possibility of quiet.

There was water near the house, and trees and hillside beyond it. Inside were fine mats, polished wood, and rooms that did not need to be crowded with objects to feel carefully arranged.

Kanaya's sister helped her at the entrance. The boots that had carried the road indoors could be removed, and Isabella went upstairs in her stockings.

It was a modest alteration in a traveller's circumstances. It was also the beginning of feeling that she had arrived somewhere she might remain for a little while.

The room could be divided by moving screens. A large space became a smaller, more comfortable one without the addition of a permanent wall. After accommodation in which the distinctions between public and private seemed insufficiently firm, Isabella found this use of a partition much more satisfactory.

The difference lay partly in the household's attention to the person occupying the room.

Now, it is easy to speak about hospitality as though it were a quality floating pleasantly through a house. Here it meant work. Someone considered where the guest would sleep. Someone attended to the meal. The room had to be kept, objects placed, and the habits of an unfamiliar visitor accommodated.

The house belonged to people with a life beyond the reception of Isabella Bird. Her rest was made possible by a portion of their day.

She noticed flowers, and the way a small arrangement could command attention in a room where it did not have to compete with an abundance of furniture. The interest was not merely in the objects. It was in what people chose to do with the space around them.

A screen, a vessel, a few flowers, the view beyond an opening: the room allowed each to have its effect. She had come from a society in which a comfortable interior could be expected to contain rather more evidence of the owner's possessions.

Here there was enough to look at without so much being put in the way.

The household also made efforts to meet her particular requirements. Familiar table things and accommodations for a foreign guest could feel effortless to the person receiving them. Someone else had needed to decide what would help.

Isabella was capable of appreciating that care. Her account contains impatience and harsh judgments, but it also contains gratitude that attaches to very particular people and acts.

One of the most touching arrivals at Nikkō came from men who had helped convey her along the road. They brought branches of azaleas when they came to take leave.

They had already done the work for which they were employed. The flowers belonged to the farewell.

There are gifts that make a journey larger without taking up much space in the luggage. These branches changed the way an ordinary service could be remembered. The men were no longer only the people associated with a distance travelled. They had chosen to bring something beautiful to the person they had brought safely to the end of it.

Isabella had reason to remember their smaller attentions as well. Comfort on a difficult road often depended on actions too modest to become the principal event of a day's account. Taken together, they could alter how the whole day felt.

At Kanaya's house there was time for those impressions to settle.

Itō had arrangements to make, but not every question needed to be answered immediately. The bags could remain where they were. The letters from home could be opened in daylight. A pause in travelling need not be filled with preparations for the next departure.

Outside, the water supplied a sound that continued whether or not anyone attended to it.

Isabella rested. Rest did not extinguish her interest in the country. It made that interest less difficult to satisfy. Nearby were the wooded approaches and shrines of Nikkō, places that rewarded a person willing to stop and look.

For a while, she could do exactly that.

And when she returned, the room was still there. She would not have to negotiate another roof before she could set down the day.

Nikkō gave Isabella Bird good reasons to remain where she was.

She had a room at Kanaya's house, a household that received her kindly, and places nearby in which looking closely could occupy a whole outing. The wooded approaches to the shrines offered an abundance of carving, colour, gateways, and workmanship.

This was not an interval in the journey merely because the bags were stationary. Attention could travel quite far without requiring a horse.

Itō accompanied her. There were things he could explain, things she could recognise as skilled work without explanation, and meanings she could not acquire simply by admiring the surface.

The shrines were places of observance and care. Their life did not begin when a traveller arrived to describe them. People maintained what she saw, approached it for purposes of their own, and carried on the ordinary work that made the visitor's slow progress possible.

Isabella brought her Christian convictions with her. She did not leave them at the entrance in order to become an impartial pair of eyes. They influenced what she admired, what she questioned, and what she found difficult to understand.

Yet a person need not share another's beliefs to recognise patience in a carved surface or care in the keeping of a place. There was much here to interest her, and enough complexity to prevent a quick inspection from settling it all.

She could linger over a detail while Itō waited. By now he had had opportunities to discover that the duration of a visitor's interest was not always predictable.

Afterwards, they still had the question of the road beyond Nikkō.

The route would lead into the Kinugawa country and towards Aizu. It would take them away from a place where receiving outsiders had become an established part of some people's work. Arrangements would have to be made among people whose business did not depend upon a succession of foreign visitors.

Isabella wished to go. That did not mean she had ceased to appreciate where she was.

One of the difficulties of a worthwhile journey is that a comfortable stopping place can restore precisely the energy required to leave it. The welcome succeeds, the traveller recovers, and curiosity begins proposing another uncomfortable road.

There were practical questions about the route, transport, luggage, and the next place where they might sleep. The map could bring these into a comprehensible shape. It could not answer them on behalf of the people they would meet.

Itō would ask. Isabella would consider the answers. They would sometimes disagree about what those answers permitted.

For now, they had at least begun to understand the employment they had entered together. Twelve dollars a month had become a succession of actual days. The interpreter who had returned after receiving his advance had also returned with horses, explanations, meals, and useful arrangements.

Isabella had been carried beyond the reach of the railway and received into rooms she could not have found entirely by herself. Her intention remained her own, but it was becoming an intention shared with the people who enabled it.

There was no need to turn that discovery into a speech over the map. There was another day to prepare for. She could offer her thanks to Kanaya's household, put the letters in order, and allow Itō to finish the arrangements.

The azaleas belonged to the remembered welcome. The things needed on the road belonged in the bags. Some part of a stay always remained behind, however carefully one packed.

Beyond the house, the water continued down the hillside. The shrines and trees would remain after the travellers had left. There would be other guests, other meals, and work in the rooms she had occupied.

We can leave Isabella here for the evening, with the northern road still ahead of her.

The map can be folded. The last questions can wait.

Our journey has more country in it, but we needn't cross any more tonight.

There is a quiet room at Nikkō, and for now, that is where we can rest.