Our First Glimpse of Japan: Prominent American Visitors to Japan in the 1870s

Less than 20 years after Herman Melville in Moby Dick called Japan “That double-bolted land,” American tourists were arriving at Yokohama from San Francisco on the first leg of a globe-circling adventure. Our First Glimpse of Japan collects original accounts from four prominent Americans of their visits. These accounts reached a broad readership, forming impressions and opinions of Japan that continue to influence American attitudes today.

The earliest of the visitors, in 1871, former Secretary of State to Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, William H. Seward experienced a Japan still uncertain of its political direction as the Meiji Restoration was just underway. By 1879, President Ulysses S. Grant spends ten weeks in a transformed Japan. Our First Glimpse of Japan reproduces the Japan portions, with spectacular lithotype illustrations of William H. Seward’s Travel’s Around the World (1873) and Around the World with General Grant (1879). These elegant period best sellers are introduced by Seward House and Museum’s Jeff Ludwig, PhD, and Edwina Campbell, PhD, author of Citizen of a Wider Commonwealth, Ulysses S. Grant’s Postpresidential Diplomacy.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s son, Charles, stayed in Japan from 1871 to 1873, spending his father’s money, seeking adventure and tasting Japan’s more sensuous pleasures. Charlie’s journals and letters in the possession of Longfellow House in Cambridge, MA and published in Charles Appleton Longfellow: Twenty Months in Japan, are excerpted here with introductory context by Professor Julie Nootbaar of Oita University in Japan. The final book, Andrew Carnegie’s Round the World, originally distributed to several hundred of his friends and contacts was published for the general public in 1884. This section is introduced by scholar of Japan’s early modern business development Professor John Sagers, PhD of Linfield University.

Our First Glimpse of Japan is compiled, introduced and edited by Sam Kidder, linguist, soldier, student, diplomat and executive. Kidder studied East Asian history at the graduate level at Harvard, the University of Washington in Seattle, and Yonsei University in Seoul. He enjoys reading history and strongly recommends others with that interest to take a look at original sources, many now online and many others in library collections.


William H. Seward, former secretary of state, arrived Yokohama from San Francisco September 25, 1870, departed Nagasaki for China, October 14, 1870.

Charles A. Longfellow, son of the famous poet, arrived Yokohama from San Francisco June 25, 1871, departed Nagasaki for China, March 13, 1873.

Ulysses S. Grant, arrived Nagasaki June 21, 1879, departed Yokohama for San Francisco September 3, 1879.

Andrew Carnegie, business leader, arrived Yokohama November 16, 1878, departed Nagasaki for China December 3, 1878.