Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49.2 (December 1989), 575–602
■ Source: “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49.2 (December 1989), 575–602. Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China Like the epic, like history, like the novel, the literature of travel has evolved through the centuries. Like them it has existed since the beginnings of oral and written literature. As with them some of its authors have been bad, others have delighted and informed their readers, and many, from the earliest times, have been popular, influential, even brilliant. As with other forms of literature its quantity and nature have varied because of political, religious, economic, and other social and human factors. And like them it includes countless subtypes that continually approach each other, separate, join, overlap, and consistently defy neat classification.1 Travel accounts form an immense literary genre of international propor- tions, hundreds, even thousands of years old. The global thirst for knowledge of how other peoples live has known no bounds since the reporting of travel tales first began. The reasons for this curiosity abound, from voyeurism to schol- arly interest to concerns for military planning. And, the growth of information about the inhabitants of every corner of the globe has in no way diminished contemporary man’s desire to learn more from places and peoples still little known on earth and elsewhere in the universe. Indeed, an entire sub-genre of science fiction, the imaginary voyage, aims at satisfying this curiosity in the realm of the fantastic.2 Japanese travel to China recommenced in 1862 following the lifting of the ban on travel by the Tokugawa bakufu, and travel accounts began to appear immediately.
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