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Article: The Allure Of the East
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- October 30, 1988
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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MIRROR IN THE SHRINE
American Encounters with
Meiji Japan
By Robert A. Rosenstone
Harvard University Press. 315 pp. $25
BY THE TIME the American educator and missionary William Elliot
Griffis arrived in Japan in 1870, for what was to be a four-year
stay, feudal rule under the Tokugawa regime had ended and a new
government under Emperor Meiji was frantically trying to catch up
with the West. There were already 1,500 Westerners-merchants,
adventurers, sailors, missionaries, French and British soldiers-in
Yokohama, the bustling port city where Griffis landed. Only 17 years
before, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry and his fleet entered a land
that had been almost totally isolated from the ...