New Directions in Travel Writing Studies

Paul Smethurst, Julia Kuehn, Paul Smethurst, Julia Kuehn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137457257
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This collection focuses attention on theoretical approaches to travel writing, with the aim to advance the discourse. Internationally renowned, as well as emerging, scholars establish a critical milieu for travel writing studies, as well as offer a set of exemplars in the application of theory to travel writing.

Part I

Textuality

1

‘A Study rather than a Rapture’: Isabella Bird on Japan

Steve Clark

Isabella Bird is deservedly the most acclaimed female English-language travel writer of the nineteenth century, and possibly the most productive of all time in terms of words written and miles travelled. Her first book, The Englishwoman in America (1856) involves comparatively secure means of transportation (though Bird is at one point robbed on a train). From The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) and A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) onwards, she selected more arduous modes – horse, boat, even yak – for a succession of increasingly exotic locations: Australia, Persia, Kurdistan, Tibet, Sinai, Korea, Malaysia and China as well as Japan. Paradoxically, given that she was a lifelong invalid through the after-effects of an operation for her spinal curvature, she remained almost continually in motion across the globe.¹

The renewed interest in Victorian women travel writers in the 1970s and 1980s owed much not only to their colourful eccentricities but also to the assumption that the very act of travelling itself could be considered to represent a politically progressive transgression of the confined domestic sphere.² Bird’s status as a sickly dependent at home while an intrepid adventurer abroad gives some support to this. In reaction to this tendency to hagiography, subsequent critics have tended to focus on the degree of conscious or unconscious complicity of female travellers with the imperial project of their male contemporaries. Bird travelled across Persia and Kurdistan to provide a cover for her companion Major Sawyer’s ‘secret military assignment’; more generally, she sees no contradiction between an ardent promulgation of Christianity and hard-nosed opening of new markets for free trade. Furthermore, there are such occasional asides as ‘I wonder how many of the feelings which we call human exist in the lower order of Orientals.’³ So perhaps attention would be more productively focused not on Bird’s imperialist attitudes, but on what insights those views make possible.⁴

Unbeaten Tracks in Japan remains Bird’s most celebrated text. What is perhaps most remarkable is its continued prominence in Japan. It was translated early, frequently republished, and remains both a standard reference work and popular classic. Her biographer, Evelyn Kaye, when retracing the route over a century later, registers Bird’s continued presence in the photo adorning the Kanaya Hotel at Nikko where she had stayed 120 years previously: ‘Her face looked relaxed with that direct gaze I knew so well’.⁵ Such commemorative gestures might be attributed to the sense of neglect felt by the smaller communities of northern Japan in comparison to the more prosperous Kanto and Kansai regions, and also to the exigencies of mass tourism and the pressure on local districts to differentiate themselves. For a Japanese readership, Bird’s text perhaps also offers a pleasing contrast between the primitive conditions of late nineteenth-century Japan and its contemporary affluence. The text’s successive revisions also span a period of crucial transition in the country’s development. The original two-volume version of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, published in 1880, was abridged into one in 1885 (the basis for most subsequent editions); a later version appeared in 1900, containing reflections on Japan’s altered status after victory over China in 1895. Each edition may be seen as a product of its specific historical moment, as testimony prior and subsequent to Japan’s emergence as a global power.⁶

As the first woman fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Bird aspires to compose ‘a study rather than a rapture’ (6), concerned with accuracy of documentation, accountability for error, and offering ‘an attempt to add something to the present sum of knowledge of the country’ out of ‘materials novel enough to make the effort worth making’ (6). She is tough and competent and she knows it. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan even opens with a deft parody of the customary arrival scene: ‘For long I looked in vain for Fujisan, and failed to see it, though I heard ecstasies all over the deck’ from fellow passengers palpitating in anticipation: when the ‘huge, truncated cone of pure snow’ eventually appears, ‘It was a wonderful vision, and, shortly, as a vision, vanished’ (8).

Sir Harry Parkes, the British Ambassador, advises Bird that ‘You will have to get your information as you go along, and that will be all the more interesting’ (20), but her experience is never entirely new or original. It is based upon data, consultation and collaborative research: ‘I saw everything out of doors with Ito [her guide and translator] – the patient industry, the exquisitely situated valley, the evening avocations, the quiet dulness – and then contemplated it all from my balcony and read the sentence (from a paper in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society) which had led me to devise this journey’ (58). The traveller-narrator is seen perusing a sentence that prefigures and, as it were, pre-inscribes her own narrative: ‘There is a most exquisitely picturesque, but difficult, route up the course of the Kinugawa, which seems almost as unknown to Japanese as to foreigners’ (58). The emphasis falls less on ‘exquisitely picturesque’ than on ‘but difficult’; in the next sentence, ‘there was a pure lemon-coloured sky above, and slush a foot deep beneath’, an impersonal construction polarized between ethereal ‘sky’ and corporeal ‘slush’, almost positing a journeying without a traveller.

Bird ventures into outlying regions comparatively unfamiliar even to the Japanese themselves, but there finds constant evidence of modernity in the form of state surveillance and bureaucratic nation-building. After having her papers checked by ‘two mannikins in European uniforms’, she feels ‘immediate relief’: ‘I should have welcomed twenty of their species, for their presence assured me of the fact that I am known and registered, and that a Government which, for special reasons, is anxious to impress foreigners with its power and omniscience is responsible for my safety’ (33). In 1878, ‘omniscience’ is offset against ‘species’, but in later editions, the ubiquitous ‘power’ wielded by the Japanese government over its distant provinces is more unequivocally acknowledged.

For the journey to be possible, there must be sufficient infrastructure for the ‘route’ already to be established: hence the traveller’s route itself testifies to what has already gone. Bird largely escapes the predictable convention of lament for an archaic Japan already in the process of disappearing. Scholarly preservation is also a marker of erasure; much of what was most fascinating in the recent past has already been lost.⁷ From this perspective, Japan is wasted on the Japanese in the same way as youth is on the young.⁸ Bird repeatedly emphasizes that she is moving through ‘regions unaffected by European contact’: ‘From Nikko northwards my route was altogether off the beaten track, and had never been traversed in its entirety by any European’ (6). There is a continual doubling whereby the potential condescension of the Western perspective itself can become an object of a reciprocal gaze, and at times ridicule: ‘people come out to stare at a foreigner as if foreigners had not become common events since 1870’ (37). The arrival of a ‘foreigner’ attracts attention for its disruptive novelty, but it may also be linked to the broader history of ‘common events’ in late nineteenth-century Japan.

The Meiji reforms were imposed top-down upon an often suspicious and at times openly rebellious population, particularly the recently disenfranchised samurai caste.⁹ Any aura of timeless japonisme in Bird’s text is continually undercut by undertones of mob violence, civil war and assassinations: ‘I often wished to give up my project, but was ashamed of my cowardice when, on the best authority, I received assurances of my safety’ (26). It is claimed that ‘Yedo which lately swarmed with foreigner-hating two-sworded bravos, the retainers of the daimyo [feudal ruler], is now so safe that a foreign lady can drive through its loneliest or most crowded parts’ (1900 29), but even in northern Japan, rumours abound ‘that the Prime Minister had been assassinated and fifty policemen killed’ (113), and on her return Bird finds that ‘Tokyo is tranquil, that is disturbed only by fears for the rice crop and by the fall in satsu [value of paper currency]. The military mutineers have been tried, popular rumour says tortured, and 52 have been shot’ (198). These are the perhaps inevitable tensions within a culture in rapid transition prepared to erase its picturesque aspects in pursuit of an accelerated modernity.¹⁰ The Meiji elite were all too aware of the precedent of incursion undergone by China after the Opium Wars, whose subsequent dismemberment might be compared to the process of ‘dissection’ which, as Bird observes, is ‘unknown to native science’: ‘A strong prejudice against surgical operations, specially amputations, exists throughout Japan. With regard to the latter, people think they came into the world complete, so they are bound to go out of it, and in many places a surgeon would hardly be able to buy at any price the privilege of cutting off an arm’ (91). Western ‘aggressions’ are noted in ‘architectural styles’ (24) but not in diplomatic negotiations, although Bird’s own arrival in Japan retraces the route of Perry’s black ships past ‘a red lightship with the words “Treaty Point” in large letters upon her’ (8).

Eva-Marie Kroller comments that ‘it was essential to Bird’s sense of personal identity that the underlying imperialist ideology not be seriously undermined’.¹¹ Yet on such issues she displays not so much a latent political unconscious as the articulacy of a well-informed observer, whose views at times carried considerable influence on policy-making.¹² The relationship between imperialist ideology and the empirical testimony of the traveller-observer can easily be understood as complementary: abstract British imperatives underpinned by the ‘view from the ground’. Unbeaten Tracks explicitly records the early stages of ‘colonization settlement’ (143) in Hokkaido, expansionist policies which will be subsequently transferred to mainland Asia, where Japan sought to challenge Russia and China, with the flashpoint of competing spheres of influence in Korea. The text can thus be seen as reflecting fears of imminent conflict, an offshoot of the late nineteenth-century genre of invasion narratives, more usually focusing on Germany, and anticipating the ‘Yellow Peril’ narratives in the first decades of the twentieth century. There is continual tacit recognition of the potential threat offered by Japan’s all too successful imitation of the strategies of Western colonialism. Bird remarks, ‘It would be far better if the Government were to enrich the country by such a remunerative outlay as making passable roads for the transport of goods through the interior, than to impoverish it by buying ironclads in England, and indulging in expensive western vanities’ (67), though these ‘ironclads’ in 1905, a year after her own death, would enable Japan to defeat Russia, the first victory by an Asian country over a major European power in modern world history.

With regard to costume, Bird discerns both opposition and identity. She herself, after all, in her distinctive travelling ‘riding habit’ was frequently mistaken for a ‘foreign man’ (60).¹³ In terms of mimicry, anxiety is generated by too close a resemblance: ‘The Japanese look most diminutive in Western dress. Each garment is a misfit, and exaggerates the miserable physique and the national defects of concave chests and bow legs’ (14). Yet if the Japanese from Yokohama were encountered on a ‘decent respectable High Street … in England’, would their attire still exemplify ‘the ludicrousness of their appearance’ (11)? Bird goes on to disparage the ‘Japanese groom of the chambers in faultless English costume, who perfectly appals me by the elaborate politeness of his manner’ (11), but would ‘elaborate’ rudeness be preferable? Indeed, how capable is she of telling the difference?¹⁴

Bird is regularly impressed by standards of education and health-care in Japan’s rapidly modernizing society, though she occasionally finds the schools and hospitals ‘too much Europeanised’: ‘Obedience is the foundation of the Japanese social order and with children accustomed to unquestioning obedience at home the teacher has no difficulty in securing quietness, attention, and docility’ (47). In 1878, ‘unquestioning obedience’ implies dutiful respect for elders; in the 1900 reissue of the text, it suggests the military expertise displayed during colonial expansion. Similarly, what appears in 1880 to be implicit condescension to Ito as ‘intensely Japanese, his patriotism has all the weakness and strength of personal vanity, and he thinks everything inferior that is foreign’, can in 1900 convey latent apprehension of an ‘ill-concealed hatred’: ‘our manners, eyes, and modes of thought appear simply odious to him’ (59). ‘Patriotism’ must be discarded as one of the ‘innumerable and enslaving traditions’ of ‘old Japan’, which, though ‘no more’ (1900 8) still deserve to be celebrated as a ‘glowing and self-sacrificing’ product of the New Japanese Empire (1900 vii). Or perhaps more ominously, on both sides of the equation, ‘ “Japan for the Japanese” is the motto of Japanese patriotism; the barbarians are to be used and disposed of as soon as possible’ (1900 10).¹⁵

Bird’s journey coincides with the importation of Darwinian thought into Japan.¹⁶ Thomas Huxley’s Lectures on the Origin of Species appeared in 1879; Edward Morse’s 1877 lectures on Darwin at the University of Tokyo were published in 1881. Bird notes in later editions that the Origin of Species has the ‘largest sales’ in Japan of any foreign book (1900 153). As previously noted, an underlying racial taxonomy occasionally surfaces, yet the ‘mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Textuality
• Part II: Topology
• Part III: Mobility
• Part IV: Mapping
• Part V: Alterity
• Part VI: Globality
• Index