Some remarks on the texts by foreigners on Japan up to the end of the Nineteenth Century. How they changed the image of Japan abroad and the impact they had on the landscape sensibilities of the japanese

• Main Author: Keiichi Takeuchi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: CEG 1998-06-01
• Series: Finisterra - Revista Portuguesa de Geografia
• Subjects: Foreigners Japanise image; Western orientalist literature; Reclus; transformation of landscape Japanese sensibility; Shigetaka Shiga
• Online Access: http://www.ceg.ul.pt/finisterra/numeros/1998-65/65_11.pdf

In this paper, the author outlines the accounts, including pictures and photographs, of foreigners in Japan to point out some problems regarding the image of Japan as perceived by foreigners, especially westerners. During the isolationist policy of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, a certain amount of information on Japan trickled from time to time into the Western world through the Dutch, but these accounts did not present the orientalist and "masculine" image of the geisha, an image that came to the popularized in Western orientalist literature only in the second half of the nineteenth century. The volume on Japan by Élisée Reclus represents the highest achievement of the systematization of geographical knowledge in the 1880s. It was the texts penned by foreign residents in Japan that to some extent helped to transform the landscape sensibility of the Japanese people.