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Introduction: Amédée Baillot de Guerville and Au Japon

“Nowadays our countrymen are exploring every quarter of the globe; we find them not only on established routes of travel and in familiar Old-World haunts, but in out-of-the-way nooks and corners where tourists of other countries seldom if ever penetrate. They make pilgrimages to the farthest East; they scour all seas; they throng the sites of buried empires and dig for relics of civilizations which perished in the dawn of time; they study the monuments on which is writ the history of the primeval man and his struggles; there is no obstacle that can arrest, and no peril that can appall them, in their search for new fields of conquest. 1

—“The American as a Tourist,” Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly

I am of the opinion that the civilized nations ought to organize an academy whose mission it would be to regulate books of travel impressions, and in general all publications that deal with the customs, politics, and laws of nations . . . there should be an index to indicate whether such and such a book is sincere or specious. . . . Why not establish a cordon sanitaire against contumely? 2

—Colonel Tcheng Ki-Tong (Chen Jitong), Les Chinois Peints par Eux-Mêmes [The Chinese painted by themselves], ghost-written by Adalbert-Henri Foucault de Mondion

I. Amédée Baillot de Guerville (1869—?)

Beginnings

It has been a century since A. B. de Guerville’s Au Japon first rolled off the Paris presses of Alphonse Lemerre. Written a decade after the last of the book’s events takes place, it details the author’s travels and experiences in Japan, Korea, and China (but primarily Japan, as the title indicates), first as an Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition and later as a newspaper correspondent covering the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). Though the book has long since been relegated to the purgatorio of used booksellers, it had its day in the sun. Au Japon went through seven printings, indicative of respectable sales.

Even more so than Au Japon itself, its author has since retreated into anonymity, his experiences and observations largely forgotten.3 Who was A. B. de Guerville, this obscure French-American journalist and travel writer? And perhaps more importantly, why should we care about him today? The second, and more easily answered, question shall be addressed later. Tracing the life of de Guerville himself poses more of a challenge. On this question, secondary sources are of practically no use, for there are hardly any to speak of. The biography of de Guerville has never been written, even in the most abbreviated sense. What can be woven together of de Guerville’s life today must remain an insufficient patchwork, one stitched together solely from primary sources, often from the pen of the man himself. Yet it reveals a man and a voice worth hearing again, if for the first time.

We know from his own writings and a surviving New York marriage certificate that Amédée Baillot de Guerville was born in Paris in 1869, son of another Amédée Baillot de Guerville and Antoinette Luce. Though the de Guerville name boasted a prominent pedigree going back to its ennoblement in the fifteenth century, by all appearances Amédée’s upbringing was on a more modest scale than that of his forebears. His namesake (Amadeus in English, a popular name of the period and a reflection of more middle-class taste in Mozart) suggests this, as do the circumstances of his young life, as we shall see. Though his teaching, writing and editing income must have often been rather modest, A. B. de Guerville never seemed to lack funds, whether for establishing a small French newspaper in Milwaukee or for his extensive travels. Indeed, he later gained entrance into the highly exclusive and expensive Nordach Clinic for consumptives, all of which seem to indicate the possession of at least a modest personal fortune.

A. B. de Guerville, who was always reticent concerning his own background, rarely mentioned his family, though on a few occasions he wrote of his mother and a younger brother with fondness. An obscure notice in an 1853 London Times reveals that a man who was likely de Guerville’s father (though certainly a relation), Paul Louis Amédée Baillot de Guerville, was in dire straits, in the courts for bankruptcy after stinting several students of the French lessons he had been paid to teach.4 It’s conceivable that the elder de Guerville was one of a contingent of continental exiles following the upheavals of 1848. In any case, though this was still nearly fifteen years before our A. B. de Guerville’s birth, it gives us the first indication that A. B. de Guerville had cosmopolitan roots, and based on his later career probably grew up speaking English and French fluently. London is where we first hear the Baillot de Guerville name; it is the last place as well.

We have no specific information regarding A. B. de Guerville’s childhood or early adolescence but it would have no doubt been infused with that sense of fatalism that pervaded the lives of so many Frenchmen in the years following the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). It was this war that put a dramatic and humiliating end to almost a century of French material grandeur and empire. Though the flame of imperial glory and national honor would be kept kindling with its mission civilisatrice in far-off Cochinchina and Panama, and the closer shores of North Africa, names that became intimately familiar to a whole generation of Frenchman of de Guerville’s time, French prestige and amour-propre never fully recovered from the debacle (as Émile Zola properly termed it) of Sedan and the 1871 declaration of a German Empire in the Palace of Versailles.

To a man of de Guerville’s background and temperament—educated, ambitious, adventuresome, young—it was the American frontier that beckoned rather than the tired old lands of Europe with their perennial rivalries. And it was to America that the young Amédée fled when he was barely out of childhood. The exact circumstances that would inspire such a young man to abandon home and hearth remain concealed, but whatever the causes, the act itself certainly reveals a strong-headedness and precocious independence, even for a time when children grew up faster to the world.

Perhaps one may look at de Guerville’s flight to America in the same way one regards the flight to Greece and Italy of an earlier generation of youth. The young Louis Napoleon, who went on to rule France as Napoleon III, had nearly gotten himself killed in the Italian Wars, where he had fled seeking the vanished glory of his uncle’s day. A later generation of young idealists—if the expression is not redundant—sought meaning in the Spanish Civil War and the struggle against fascism. In short, it was a quest more than a voyage, and it is likely that America held for the young de Guerville all the hope and potential his homeland seemed to lack.

There was another factor. As de Guerville would relate later, from an early age he suffered from that great killer of the age, tuberculosis. The typical nineteenth century remedy for the consumptive (as with de Guerville’s compatriot and exact contemporary André Gide), besides generous portions of cod liver oil and open windows, was a change of scenery, specifically to a drier, more arid locale away from the vapors of wetter or lower altitudes that were thought to congest the lungs. In his own irreverent fashion, Mark Twain had recommended a stint in the American West as a palliative for diseased lungs. Robert Louis Stevenson (also a consumptive) found great relief during several months’ residence in Napa Valley, California. De Guerville’s tuberculosis may also have played a role in his solitary flight from his homeland for the America West in 1887.

Figure 1. Milwaukee Women’s College at the time of de Guerville’s employment there (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.

The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw a virtual flood of European immigrants to the United States, primarily from Ireland and the states of southern Europe. It was among these boatloads, though probably traveling in a bit more comfort, that de Guerville arrived in the United States in 1887, at the age of eighteen. He numbered among the very first immigrants to witness the Statue of Liberty—a gift from his native France—welcoming the huddled masses into New York Harbor. The statue was placed on its new granite pedestal in 1886, thanks greatly to the fundraising efforts of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

Of his first years in the United States little at all is known, save that he first sought his fortune in the American West. We know this only because de Guerville reminisced years later, writing about anti-Semitism in France, “I shall never forget that years ago, when a boy of eighteen, struggling for a living in the far West, and suddenly taken ill, a German Jew extended his hand to me, and in those dark days proved the truest, most devoted, most generous of friends.”5

A period photograph shows de Guerville sitting for a group portrait with his students at Milwaukee College. He is not an especially handsome man. His face is long, eyes close set, and ears small but notable by their protrusion. His glance is focused and intelligent, and he seems most like a gentle and resigned figure, like someone who had already suffered much despite the gangliness that still betrays his youth.

Figure 2. A. B. de Guerville and his students at Milwaukee Women’s College (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.

Though he claims in 1892 to be an American—both in heart and on paper—de Guerville’s trail is frustratingly difficult to trace in these early years. Unfortunately, data from the 1890 census (the only one de Guerville would have participated in) was destroyed through fire and neglect. Nor does de Guerville’s name appear among the lists of naturalized citizens of New York City. In fact, de Guerville seems to have left hardly a trace in the bureaucratic records of the United States.

But from 1889 the outlines of de Guerville’s life take on greater clarity. That year found him in Milwaukee, where he was able to secure a position teaching French at the small and nondescript Milwaukee Women’s College, one of dozens of small private colleges beginning to train middle class women in the sciences and modern languages. There he taught French during the day while spending many a Milwaukee evening directing the city’s French club, le Cercle Français, in public performances. He was an able teacher and manager, and local papers lauded both his pedagogical and dramatic skills.

Figure 3. A flyer announcing a public performance by de Guerville’s “Cercle Français” in Milwaukee (1890). Milwaukee-Downer College. Records, 1852-1964. Milwaukee Manuscript Collection L. Wisconsin Historical Society. Milwaukee Area Research Center. Golda Meir Library. University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee. Used by permission.

Though barely twenty-one, in Milwaukee de Guerville became a central figure in the city’s Francophone community. In 1890 he founded the city’s Courrier Français, a small French weekly much like the other Courrier Français papers in other American cities. He would continue to edit and manage the modest weekly until leaving Milwaukee in 1892. If the small college atmosphere (Milwaukee Women’s College enrolled 120 students in 1890) was intimate it was also likely stifling, judging by how quickly de Guerville departed once the opportunity arose. One tends to forget, picturing de Guerville lecturing in French, that he had only just entered his twenties, and was likely younger than many of his students. In this respect, his restlessness may be easily understood.

By all indications, de Guerville’s background and tastes were not such as could be long restrained in Milwaukee. Even in 1890, while living and working in that city, he was moving back and forth between the United States and his native France. In the summer of 1890 he passed through Washington, D.C. en route to Paris, staying in the luxurious Willard Hotel, and “highly recommended to General McCook, visited the Capitol, and before departing . . . shook hands with President Harrison.”6

Even considering de Guerville’s rather worldly air, in 1892 he took what is by any account quite a momentous step—from lecturer in French and editor of a minor paper to Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition, planned as the world’s largest fair and then in its formative stages just down the lakefront at Chicago. It was a move that would thrust him into the larger world of politics, travel, and writing that would prove his ultimate calling.

“A Stupendous Thing!”—The World’s Columbian Exposition

President Grover Cleveland’s exclamatory opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition, held at Chicago in the spring and summer of 1893, still qualifies as understatement. The fair, held to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World (it was held a year later than originally planned), was perhaps the most successful and talked about of all the world’s fairs and expositions—which by de Guerville’s time were enjoying their golden age. It put Chicago on the map and to many Americans it marked a great turning point in American destinies, the end of the frontier period, and the beginning of a more organized, industrial, mechanized and bureaucratized future that would soon make of the United States a global imperial power. To a young Henry Adams the world shifted on its axis at Chicago.

It was certainly a turning point in the fortunes of de Guerville as well. It launched him from the obscurity of a small town lecturer and newspaper editor to a “globe-trotter,” even if he was never to lose his love of the audience. It provided access to persons of fame and influence, both in the United States and abroad, and paved the way for the direction his life would take once the fair’s turnstiles had stopped. If one may point to a single hinge of fate in a person’s life, then for Amédée Baillot de Guerville it was beyond doubt his designation in 1892 as Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

It is not clear today just how de Guerville managed to secure this position, or even with any great precision when. By all evidence, de Guerville had absolutely no background in or familiarity with the Far East. Though Au Japon treats in part of de Guerville’s activities there as Honorary Commissioner, the author gives us no indication of how he procured that nomination. However, an editor’s notation to de Guerville’s first article in Leslie’s Weekly (a publication for which he would come to write widely) claims he was “selected by Mrs. Potter Palmer [chief of the Board of Lady Managers for the Chicago World’s Fair] to visit Japan with a view of enlisting the women of that country in the World’s Fair Exposition.”7 A small notice later appearing in the Japan Weekly Mail seems to confirm this, remarking that de Guerville arrived in Japan carrying “an invitation from Mrs. Potter Palmer and the Ladies Committee to the Empress.”8 The pages of Au Japon also clearly indicate that de Guerville’s World’s Fair business in Japan concerned primarily the women’s exhibit.

Yet de Guerville’s name goes unmentioned in the otherwise exhaustive official directory to the fair, which details with meticulous precision every officer and official representative of the Chicago World’s Fair, whose organization rivaled in size and scope the governments of many small states.9 One possibility is that Mrs. Palmer, a strong advocate of women’s education, paid a visit to Milwaukee Women’s College, and perhaps was a spectator at one of the fêtes thrown by le Cercle Français. Charmed by de Guerville’s manner, perhaps she made him an impromptu offer he could not refuse. Another possibility is that de Guerville, as editor of a small French language publication in Milwaukee, had become acquainted with the press leaders of nearby Chicago and was commissioned privately by city leaders to head to the Far East, as both roving correspondent and quasi-official promoter of the World’s Fair, perhaps promoting the women’s exhibit in particular.

De Guerville never mentioned that his mission to the Far East concerned primarily, if not solely, the women’s exhibit, either in his own writings or, in light of diplomatic correspondence, to political authorities in the Far East. In fact, in Japan there was some confusion concerning just who or what he represented. But in the end that hardly mattered. In the final analysis, the fact that in 1892 the twenty-three year old de Guerville appeared bearing official credentials in the courts and homes of influence (one as important as the other) of the Far East must say something about the young commissioner’s charm and facility, personal qualities that would be emphasized again and again in the press in the few years to come.

It is largely the events intimate and peripheral to A. B. de Guerville’s mission as Honorary Commissioner that comprise the first half of Au Japon, and so there is little point in reviewing them in any detail here. It is worth emphasizing that as the title of the work implies, it was Japan—rather than Korea or China—that left the deepest and most positive impression on the young and impressionable commissioner. One might even say that it was Japan that inspired him to dedicate his life to writing.

New credentials in hand, de Guerville first reached Japan from the direction Rudyard Kipling recommended, from America and the Pacific—from “the barbarians and the deep sea.”10 In fact de Guerville arrived in Yokohama from San Francisco on April 13, 1892, only a week before Kipling made his more celebrated, or at least more remembered, voyage there.

A. B. de Guerville also arrived with the latest technology in hand—a McIntosh Magic Lantern, a device later to play such a prominent role in his public and private lectures from the Vatican to New York City. It seems that during his journey to the Far East de Guerville made the acquaintance of Count Harry Kessler (1868–1938)—Count Harry K- in Au Japon—then returning by circuitous route to Germany from New York. Of Kessler, one of the preeminent social critics and cultural figures of his epoch, it has been written, “He attracted magnetically the best and brightest, and, wherever he went, they formed his company.”11 Again, this tells us something about de Guerville’s personal qualities. Kessler, who himself became highly intrigued with Japanese aesthetics, would show up at de Guerville’s lectures a few years later in New York (and in fact would financially sponsor some).

De Guerville and Kessler had only a few weeks to enjoy one another’s company. At the end of April the young Count proceeded via Indochina and India to Germany, while de Guerville lingered in the Far East until the stultifying heat of the Japanese July sent him and his fragile lungs off to summer in Vancouver. He returned to Japan, again on World’s Fair business, in October, this time visiting Korea and China to elicit support there.

As is so often the case with new visitors to the Far East, de Guerville’s experiences in 1892 comprised an almost overwhelming flood of original sensations that proved personally transforming. Though his initial sojourn in Japan, Korea, and China was rather brief, the events that filled it provided sufficient grist for de Guerville’s writings and other activities for years to come. What’s more, it made of him an ardent admirer and friend of Japan, willing to support and defend it in word and print.

Nevertheless, it is fair to ask just how successful de Guerville’s mission was on behalf of the Chicago Fair. The answer depends greatly on the exact nature of the Honorary Commissioner’s charge, specifically in the case of de Guerville. At first it would seem his role was in the same vein as that of previous fair commissioners mentioned in the semi-official Book of the Fair, who “visited all the northern countries of Europe . . .and making it a point everywhere to approach the highest authorities, the Prime Ministers or Ministers of Foreign Affairs . . .” in order to obtain assurances of participation.12 Yet Horace Allen, the chargé of the American legation in Seoul at the time of de Guerville’s visit, remarked that despite the appeal of his magic lantern display, he seemed remarkably ignorant on the particulars of the fair itself.13 The American delegation in Japan was actually under the impression that de Guerville, rather than a representative of the Chicago World’s Fair, represented a consortium of Chicago newspapers, while the Japan Weekly Mail, the primary English newspaper in Japan, described de Guerville’s mission as being “uniquely to spread information.”14

The Japan Weekly Mail’s assessment seems most accurate. From the standpoint of securing foreign participation, de Guerville’s success was minimal, as it would have to be. Though the Japanese emperor pronounced the presentation at the palace, “one of the most enjoyable evenings he had ever passed,” and de Guerville’s magic lantern show with a view of the planned Women’s Building briefly inspired Korea’s Queen Min to put together a Korean women’s contribution for that display (which in the end did not materialize), the fact is both Japan and Korea were already committed, light and picture show or not.15 Elements of what would be the Japanese delegation to the World’s Fair had arrived in Chicago months before de Guerville first arrived in Japan. Indeed, as is revealed in the opening chapter of Au Japon, de Guerville’s first voyage to Japan was shared with Teshima Seiichi, the Commissioner General of the Imperial Japanese Government to the World’s Columbian Exposition, then returning home from Chicago on World’s Fair business. The most that can be said is that de Guerville’s visit kept the momentum going, which in the case of Korea and its vacillating King Kojong may have proved one crucial factor in that country’s participation.

One of de Guerville’s greatest successes in Japan had little in fact to do with the fair. Following his laudatory presentation at the imperial residence, the Japanese Red Cross Society requested that de Guerville repeat his magic lantern show for a public, paying audience, to raise funds for that organization. It seems that like his other performances on behalf of Japanese charities, this one met with great success. It was also a service that would not be forgotten by Japanese officials when de Guerville returned two years later as a war correspondent.

As for China, which de Guerville visited soon after his brief sojourn in Korea, the Honorary Commissioner’s presentation before Li Hongzhang (Li Hung-chang) and his colorful guests in Tianjin (Tientsin) entertained but did not convince. In Au Japon de Guerville briefly discusses his presentation at Tianjin, though he seems concerned in his recollection more with comic effect than concrete results. But de Guerville would describe in more serious tones elsewhere his experience in China before Li Hongzhang. The fact was that in 1892 China was still smarting from the American passage of the Geary Act, which extended curbs on Chinese immigration, as well as by stories of escalating anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States.16

As a final note, regarding de Guerville’s mission as Honorary Commissioner, not everyone commended the young American’s visit. The Japan Gazette—one of the three English papers serving the foreign enclave at Yokohama—was disparaging of de Guerville’s efforts. It was this same paper that would attack de Guerville even more vituperatively during his tenure in Japan covering the Sino-Japanese War, and was no doubt related to the fact that not all foreign papers in Japan, indeed the majority, looked kindly on those that emphasized Japan’s capabilities and potential. Regarding his efforts on behalf of the fair, the Japan Gazette openly rejected the notion de Guerville ever called upon the imperial household while belittling his role in general:

We distinctly remember Mr. de Guerville being on one of the Yokohama Hotel lists, but to our knowledge he never did anything more than other “World’s Fair” Commissioners have done, who have drifted this way under the influences of an all round trip, paid for by someone else. He did not even preach a sermon, as some have done as a sort of conscience vent, and we need hardly say that no one has given any illustrated lectures before their Imperial Majesties.17

It was not the last time de Guerville’s prominent praise of Japan would bring him into conflict with the English press of Japan. In the Japan Weekly Mail, however—whose owner Frank Brinkley was also a fervent admirer of Japan—de Guerville found a welcome ally. That paper defended de Guerville’s reputation in 1892, as it would again in 1895 when de Guerville’s denial of a massacre by Japanese troops at Port Arthur stirred up controversy over matters more serious than palace soirees.

War Correspondent

There is no direct evidence one way or the other concerning assertions by the American legation in Japan as well as the Japan Weekly Mail that de Guerville represented a “consortium of Chicago newspapers” during his visit to the Far East on behalf of the World’s Fair. However, one thing is clear: de Guerville’s journeys in Northeast Asia during the spring and summer of 1892 launched his all too brief career as a foreign correspondent and travel writer.

Besides his more provincial writing for his Courrier Français in Milwaukee, de Guerville’s first known publication is a story concerning his experiences as Honorary Commissioner. “Japan at the World’s Fair” appeared in Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly in September 1892 and was followed soon thereafter, and in the same publication, by “Humor in Japanese Politics” in October 1892. From this time de Guerville would continue to write for Leslie’s—either the Weekly or the more lavishly illustrated Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly—through 1897, when he became managing editor of The Illustrated American.After his brief stint as an Honorary Commissioner, de Guerville also found a niche for himself as a lecturer, perhaps a calling he had developed a taste for as a university instructor and during his evenings treading the boards for le Cercle Français, but certainly strengthened by his experiences lecturing to audiences—royal and otherwise—in Asia.

Using the same magic lantern he had employed with such effectiveness during his presentations in the Far East, de Guerville began to give public lectures in New York City on a variety of topics, from “Interesting and Amusing Experiences of an American World’s Fair Commissioner” to “Noted Women of France” and “Josephine, Wife of Napoleon.” He was by all accounts a gifted, captivating, and humorous speaker. One newspaper compared him to George Grossmith, a period actor and impersonator famed for his satirical monologues done to piano accompaniment.18 Leslie’s Weekly gloated like a proud parent over its random reporter:

Mr. de Guerville is able to speak of people and things never before made public in a lecture—but they are also extremely amusing and full of wit and sparkle. Ready in delivery, Mr. de Guerville is easily seen to be possessed of the enthusiasm of his subjects; and his clear and penetrating voice, which is both magnetic and pleasing, and the slight foreign accent which pervades his speech, serve to lend piquancy to his witty descriptions.19

From this time as well, travel writing became a staple of de Guerville’s pen, with his numerous publications appearing in Leslie’s Weekly as well as Munsey’s and Pearson’s Popular Weekly. Even when he was later deskbound by duties at The Illustrated American, he continued to travel in his mind, reminiscing of far-off destinations visited months or even years before as if he had been there only yesterday.

One of his favorite destinations was Spain, where on a May afternoon in 1894 he witnessed the great matador Manuel Garcia “Espartero” gored to death by a bull. Besides his travels in the Far East, de Guerville wrote of his voyages in Italy, Morocco, Turkey, Colombo (Sri Lanka), and Cuba, usually mixing descriptions of scenery and customs with a discussion of current affairs—government reforms in Turkey, the rising tide of rebellion in Cuba, or an independence struggle in Morocco.

The spring of 1894 found de Guerville wandering the courts and capitals of Europe contributing stories to Leslie’s Weekly on an irregular basis and on eclectic topics. He wrote a nostalgic piece concerning his 1892 visit with Li Hongzhang in Tianjin, along with a series dealing with “Socialism and Anarchism in Europe” (this during the heyday of anarchist tentatives in a year that witnessed the assassination of French president Sadi Carnot).

De Guerville seems to have had a remarkable ability for gaining access to political leaders, including a call on Pope Leo XIII (even giving his Holiness a private magic lantern show) and high political figures in Spain (such as the former president of the failed republic) and Italy in the spring of 1894.20 His linguistic aptitudes and journalism contacts allowed him to publish in both France (le Figaro) and Italy (La Tribuna Illustrata and Le Moniteur de Rome).

In late summer 1894, with the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan over Korea—the Sino-Japanese War as it is now known, but at the time generally referred to as the China-Japan War—de Guerville was picked up as a “special correspondent” for Leslie’s Weekly, which dispatched him immediately to the Far East—via New York and San Francisco—with instructions to “proceed as rapidly as possible to the theatre of action and supply us with correspondence and sketches of passing events.”21

The editor of Leslie’s Weekly took care in one issue to explain the qualifications of his man in the Far East:

Mr. de Guerville has already represented us on important missions: he had visited China, where he interviewed Li Hung Chang; had represented the World’s Fair Commission as a special envoy in enlisting the interest of the Empress of Japan in the great Chicago exhibition [ . . . ] and had been, moreover, a close student of Oriental affairs. His standing with the two governments was such that, as it seemed to us, he would be accorded the largest privileges allowed by either to correspondents from abroad.22

The editor’s confidence was not misplaced.

But it was not only Leslie’s Weekly that de Guerville represented in the Far East. He set out for Japan as special correspondent for the New York Herald as well. This was the same paper from which the journalist James Creelman had resigned in 1893, chaffing under the strict editorial policies of its chief editor, James Gordon Bennett Jr., who prohibited him (as any reporter) from putting his byline to his stories. Bennett’s New York Herald, it should be noted, was in fierce competition with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World (to which Creelman transferred in 1894, and for which he also served as a special correspondent for the Sino-Japanese War). Apparently de Guerville offered his freelance services to the editors at the New York Herald, who agreed to buy his copy at space rates.23

Perhaps to whet the appetite of its readers, even as de Guerville was heading from New York to the Far East, the New York Herald published a lengthy exposé by de Guerville detailing his recent experiences in Japan, Korea, and China as Honorary Commissioner. In what must have sincerely vexed Creelman (it certainly did Creelman’s wife), Bennett prominently displayed de Guerville’s name at the foot of the full-page article.24

De Guerville’s final sojourn in the Far East, now as a war correspondent, was shorter but more eventful than his first. Here is de Guerville at the top of his game: dispatched to the theater of war as a special correspondent for one of the best-known dailies in the world. Indeed, he seemed, much as Leslie’s Weekly had recently surmised—on the cusp of great things.25 A surviving illustration of de Guerville during his coverage of the conflict has him tall and strapping, and dressed in the de rigueur outfit of the heroic adventurer of the day: high boots, pantaloons, cape and hat.

Figure 4. A. B. de Guerville Covering the Sino-Japanese War in China (1894). Munsey’s Magazine (1895).

De Guerville arrived in Yokohama, Japan, on a rainy September morning in 1894. Soon his social and political connections in Japan, cultivated during his initial trip to that country two years previous, had secured him transport on Japanese troop carriers and access to the frontlines in Korea and later Manchuria. His dispatches and subsequent writings on what he witnessed—and perhaps more importantly, did not witness—played a central role in the debate that raged in America, Europe, and even Japan itself regarding Japanese behavior during that war and attitudes towards Japan in general at a time when that nation was quickly rising to the status of world power.

De Guerville’s writings on the Sino-Japanese War, perceived by many as excessively pro-Japan, also gave rise to controversy and a public clash of personalities between himself and other correspondents and newspapers, most notably James Creelman of the New York World.

Magazine Publisher

Despite the praise his accounts of the war in the Far East received, de Guerville’s employment with the New York Herald did not result in the professional windfall one might have expected and for reasons that will be dealt with later in this introduction. De Guerville spent the next several years following his return to America from the Far East writing, lecturing, and traveling, but he was never to be picked up as a regular correspondent. By late 1895 he was in Europe and North Africa, the year after that stomping from Cuba to Constantinople. His relationship with the New York Herald had ended along with the Sino-Japanese War, but he continued to write for Leslie’s Weekly and other American and European newspapers and periodicals on a sporadic basis. He developed an interest in the “Cuba question,” which was increasingly dominating American papers and public opinion, as the United States under William McKinley (and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt) moved ever closer to war and empire. Somewhat sympathetic to Spain, de Guerville’s coverage of the Cuban insurrection—including a trip there in the spring of 1896—is characterized by a reflective moderation rather than the belligerence then dominating so much of the period press, especially out of New York City. Had not personal illness intervened, perhaps de Guerville might have gone on to join the host of well-known American reporters covering the war in Cuba in the years ahead.

As a result of his experiences as Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition, in early 1896 de Guerville was also appointed United States General Commissioner for the American program at the International Exposition planned for Innsbruck, Austria, from May to October 1896, an exposition dedicated to physical education, hygiene, sport and associated trades and industries.26 Meanwhile he continued to maintain a busy schedule of lecturing and writing.

Between his frequent travels and social and professional engagements, de Guerville also found time to marry. In December, 1896, he wed Laura Belle Spraker in New York City. De Guerville was twenty-seven, the bride twenty-four. He had married well. Laura Spraker came from a respected, well-to-do New York family, American to the core. Her great-great grandfather had advised George Washington.

Within a month of his marriage de Guerville and his new bride departed New York for what can only be described as a five month working honeymoon through Europe. In February they were in Spain, where his comments in front of the Madrid Geographical Society stirred up some controversy in both Spain and the United States when he intimated Japan would support America in the case of a Spanish-American conflict, if only in hopes of gaining the Philippines as a result.27 From Spain the de Guervilles set off on a four-month jaunt through North Africa, Italy (where he had a final dramatic encounter with Creelman), Greece, and Turkey, only returning to New York in the late summer of 1897. In November 1897 de Guerville’s wanderings—and his tenure with Leslie’s Weekly—came to an end when he became President and General Manager of The Illustrated American, taking over from Lorillard Spencer, the magazine’s founder. One commentator wrote of the new proprietor, “Mr. de Guerville will enlarge the paper and make it even more progressive than it has been.”28 Oddly enough, de Guerville’s Sino-Japanese War rival James Creelman had briefly managed the same publication in 1892. De Guerville’s tenure was to be brief as well.

By late 1897, with a new marriage and the partial acquisition of The Illustrated American, de Guerville seems to have recovered from the disappointments of his Sino-Japanese War experience and reached another professional peak. He had an excellent marriage, was editor of a reputable New York magazine, and was a well-known and respected reporter in the intensely competitive New York City scene. As Leslie’s Weekly had once remarked, he was well situated to “make a mark upon his time,” and he was not yet thirty.

Collapse

Reading the range of de Guerville’s work, one receives the distinct impression that he was happiest not behind a desk but independent and on the road. There is always a certain restlessness to de Guerville that he seems unable to elude. Even in his hours of sickness he is constantly on the move, as if it was the search for a cure, not the cure itself, which inspired. His description of himself during these years says much, “Burning with a desire to see, to know, to sense, to comprehend, I dispensed a limitless energy and vitality.”29

But at the offices of The Illustrated American de Guerville was forced into a more routine, if more harried, existence. By his own characterization, 1897 and 1898 saw him in a swirl of social events and editorial responsibilities—tasks that left him exhausted and often not in bed until nearly morning. His writings during this period seem to effuse a sense of ennui. He revisited old topics or explored uninspiring new ones—“The Plain People of Spain,” “Santa Clause around the World,” “The Women of Japan,” or “Li Hung Chang in Pekin.” His last publication for The Illustrated American, “Woman’s Love in China,” was actually only a translation from a decade old work by Colonel Tchen-Ki-Tong, whom he had once met at a magic lantern show in Tianjin. The only topic that seems to have inspired de Guerville was the growing climate of belligerence towards Spain. Here de Guerville refused to pander to the period taste for sensationalism and jingoism, often using the pages of his periodical to criticize what he saw as a reckless drive towards war, notably on the part of the nation’s press. It was a lofty stand, but it didn’t help sales.

Despite outward appearances of contented success, beneath the surface things were troubled. The hardships of travel were one thing, but de Guerville was less suited to the exertions of the editorial desk and social circuit. In January, 1898, a fire ravaged the offices of The Illustrated American, also destroying de Guerville’s “private collections”—including an assortment of personal photographs that was described as “probably unsurpassed by any collection in the city”—bringing further stress upon the young manager and editor.30 When de Guerville acquired The Illustrated American, the magazine was already on financially shaky ground, with subscription rates down and competition intense. The fire only compounded the publication’s financial difficulties—and indeed it would not survive the century. Based upon subsequent events, there is also reason to believe that de Guerville’s marriage was not finding its way to a storybook ending.

With such accumulated stresses, the resurgence of de Guerville’s long dormant tuberculosis is not surprising. According to an obscure later publication by de Guerville, in the spring of 1898 he was revisited by the sickness that for so many years during his active, globe-trotting life had remained in check. As a result he gave up the The Illustrated American in March, 1898, when it was sold in public auction for $5,000, and for several months afterward he sought relief from his ailment in North America, from New York’s Finger Lakes to Florida, but all to no avail. By summer his six-foot frame, sturdy and vigorous in a photo from 1894, had withered to a mere 114 pounds. His left lung was completely eaten away, with the disease also making short work of the right one; his life, in his own words, “hung by a thread.”

In August 1898, living under his doctor’s prognosis that he would not survive the year, de Guerville opted to quit America altogether for France, wishing to see his mother and his motherland a final time before dying.31

We must take de Guerville’s own word on these particulars regarding his health, as such intimate details are not found elsewhere. The condition of his lungs aside, that by 1898 his marriage was ailing we can be certain. In late summer of 1898, when de Guerville quit New York City to seek relief from his tuberculosis, he apparently left his young wife behind. Partially as a result of this, in 1900 Laura Spraker de Guerville made a public suit for divorce on the grounds that her husband had abandoned her saddled with his debts. To these accusations she added elliptically and for good measure that she had “learned enough of his life abroad to justify her in bringing suit for an absolute divorce.”32

Final Wanderings and Writings

Like many who are sick, I no doubt repressed my illness a long time before it violently manifested itself. From the age of fifteen my life was very difficult and painful. Numerous exhausting trips to Korea, Cochin China, India, Egypt, Morocco, Cuba and all about the world, in all climates and seasons greatly improved my constitution. But feverish with a desire to see, to know, to sense, to comprehend, I expended immense energy and vitality, increasingly undermining my health as I threw myself into unending adventures.33

One wonders if de Guerville read André Gide. They were both Frenchmen, born the same year. Both were consumptive as well. In 1897, when de Guerville was beginning to struggle with the renewed and vigorous assault on his lungs, Gide published his Les Nourritures Terrestres, a call of affirmation that emerged from Gide’s own battle with the killer disease (“Fevers of bygone days, you consumed my flesh with a mortal consumption . . . O loving beauty of the earth, the flowering of your surface is marvelous! Scenes into which my desire plunges . . . ”).34 Though ostensibly a paean to life on behalf of a young man afflicted, bedridden, and lacking in a life aesthetic, the book came to represent to a whole generation of youth the primacy of lived experience and personal freedom over formal education and the social constrictions of the times. The vocabulary of Gide seems to resonate in de Guerville’s short account of his own struggle with “the white death,” written in 1904, after he too had reclaimed life.

In August 1898 de Guerville boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in Manhattan harbor and bid good-bye to the America that had nurtured and molded him over the previous decade. He would never return. He was going back to a Europe and a France he had never completely left behind. His younger brother had joined the invalid in New York to accompany him on a voyage he might very well not survive. By order of the Kaiser, hanging aboard Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, as with all passenger liners of the Hamburg Amerika Line, was a painting ostensibly designed by the Kaiser himself: Die gelbe Gefahr—“The Yellow Peril.” It depicted the Archangel Michael and an allegorical Germany leading the other European powers against an Asiatic (read Japanese) threat rising in the East represented by a golden Buddha.35

If anything could get the ailing de Guerville across the ocean in speed and comfort it was the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. Launched in 1897, she was the pride of the German commercial fleet, rivaling any ocean liner on the seas. Her massive engines could carry 1,700 passengers across the Atlantic in six days, and to de Guerville in the late summer of 1898 each day was precious. As it was, he was in no condition to enjoy the luxuries the Kaiser Wilhelm offered its coddled passengers. He was delirious from a high fever, unable even to feed himself.

But despite doctors’ gravest predictions, de Guerville did survive the journey, and the year. He even survived the century. However, what followed were nearly three years of hellish recovery, during which de Guerville often wished himself dead. From Paris de Guerville was dragged and pushed across Europe and the Mediterranean on the advice of various physicians. Normandy, Archachon in Burgundy, Mentor, Nice, Ospedaletti near San Remo, Palermo, Pallanza on Lago de Maggiore, Pégli, Abondance in French Savoy, and the list goes on. He tried every known remedy, including the experimental igazola, developed by an Italian physician in Palermo, in which a powder was heated to a gas and inhaled.

It is at Pallanza, however, that de Guerville learned of the remarkable successes being made at a place called Nordach near Baden in the Black Forest by a Dr. Otto Walther. So intense was the demand to get into the limited space of the Nordach Clinic that even for a man who had no trouble obtaining an audience with the Pope, a yearlong wait was required. The personalized treatment of Nordach was also extremely expensive, with the first hundred days having to be paid in advance.36

In September, 1900, de Guerville finally gained his coveted entrée to Dr. Walther’s clinic, and from that time until May of the following year ascribed to the strict regimen that made Nordach so famous, and perhaps so effective: plenty of rest, high caloric intake, open windows, and most importantly, no medicines. This “abode of Spartans” was situated so as to be exposed to every wind. The sanatorium’s Liegehallen received the cool, often as not freezing, blasts day and night and in all seasons in order to dissipate impure air and facilitate the recovery of the lungs. It had a proven track record. By the early twentieth century the clinic’s fame had spread throughout Europe and America, spawning the rise of “little Nordachs” from Wales to Canada.37

It certainly seemed to work wonders for de Guerville, who upon his discharge in May, 1901, felt “totally renewed.” He even climbed Mt. Righi and Mt. Pilate near Lucerne, both well over two thousand meters. But the greatest testament to de Guerville’s newfound health was his pen. He felt well enough to write frankly about his experience with tuberculosis in a small tract entitled La lutte contre la tuberculose, which was later published in English and German editions.38 In 1904 de Guerville was inspired to revisit his experiences in Japan, Korea, and China with the publication of a little volume of reminiscences entitled—‘in Japan.’ Though its publication in 1904, just as another war threatened to erupt in the Far East, smells suspiciously of profit motives, it should also be seen as sign of de Guerville’s return to health. That his mind should turn again to far off Japan is indicative of the place that country continued to hold in his heart and imagination.

Au Japon enjoyed a respectable success, something that seems to have convinced de Guerville to direct his future energies to the writing of travel books. Book writing, rather than the deadline-driven writing demanded by weekly or monthly publications, accommodated de Guerville’s convalescence as well. With tuberculosis in the nineteenth century one doesn’t get that close to death and simply recover. Despite de Guerville’s optimistic accounts of his own “return” to life, his health certainly remained forever fragile.

That de Guerville chose as his next subject after Au Japon the arid lands of North Africa also suggests a still-ailing consumptive. The dry Mediterranean climes of such locales as Algeria and Tunisia were attracting hordes of European consumptives, a reality best illustrated by André Gide’s novel L’Immoralist. Along with an article on the Sudan for a French travel journal, in 1905 de Guerville published a travelogue of Egypt, La Nouvelle Egypt, a journalist-cum-tourist’s account of British Egypt. It enjoyed even greater success than Au Japon, and was soon translated into English and German, two nations that along with France were grabbing up colonial holdings in Africa faster than they knew what to do with them. Cheaper editions continued to appear through 1915.

We hear virtually nothing more of de Guerville after his book on Egypt. Save for an article on the “situation in Egypt,” he writes no more, at least under that name.39 After five years of silence a tantalizing notice in The Times in the summer of 1911 remarked simply that de Guerville had been seriously ill in London for six weeks.40 But after this the silence is total. In all likelihood he died of the disease that had so long plagued him, though probably not in London, for his obituary never appears. Perhaps it was in some corner of North Africa, but more likely he was back on the continent,near his mother one hopes and not in the Spartan halls of the Nordach Clinic.

II. The Sino-Japanese War and the Port Arthur Controversy

It must always be foul to tell what is false and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Art of Writing

It will be remembered that A. B. de Guerville’s second voyage to the Far East was undertaken to cover the Sino-Japanese War as special correspondent for Leslie’s Weekly and as a freelance contributor to the New York Herald. As such, he was in the company of a select handful of other foreign correspondents equally eager to get to the frontlines and make headlines. Most notable among these were James Creelman (New York World), Frederic Villiers (The Black and White), Thomas Cowen (The Times of London), a certain Laguerre (Le Temps), and Richard Harding Davis (who arrived too late to see any action).

Late nineteenth century America and Europe were witnessing the emergence of what was then termed “the new journalism”—a more dynamic and more ruthless sort of journalism spurred on by larger urban audiences, faster and more efficient communications, improved technologies, all fed by the development of vast capitalist economies and the concomitant fortunes waiting to be made in advertisement space. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of American dailies increased six fold, from 387 to 2,326 (though it was by no means a uniquely American phenomenon).41 What this naturally meant was a fierce competition among journals and newspapers to increase circulation numbers by entertaining, shocking, thrilling, and titillating their readers in both words and pictures.

It was perhaps inevitable that the foreign correspondent—and by extension the war correspondent—would be a byproduct of this new industry. The new journalism of the late nineteenth century cannot be fully understood without considering the fact that its emergence paralleled what historians often term the “new imperialism,” a second wave of Euro-American colonial expansion that brought with it a period of “dirty little wars” from Venezuela to Cuba, from the Sudan to Korea. In the late nineteenth century the figure of the journalist—particularly the war correspondent—rose to that of public icon, in what one writer later described as “the time of the Great Reporter.”42 Stephen Crane, Jack London, Lincoln Steffens, and even Winston Churchill became household names through their work as journalists, to say nothing of Henry Morton Stanley in Africa or Nellie Bly’s very well publicized 1889 journey around the world in seventy-two days. Never before or since have the newspaper and the journalist held such central places in the public consciousness as they did in those brief decades between the emergence of the telegraph and the radio.

Background: The Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895

Historians still debate the causes and significance of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. In its most general sense it was a struggle between late imperial China and modernizing Japan over hegemony in Northeast Asia, which came to a head in a contest over Korea. On a more symbolic level, it has been characterized as the final showdown between the traditional political order of East Asia, represented by China, and the modern, Western-oriented international order that Japan was earnestly embracing. Or, to put it in the preferred Western terms of the period, a battle between barbarism and civilization.43

For over a millennium China had viewed Korea as a “vassal state.” In the traditional geopolitics of China-centered East Asia, this was not as imperialistic as it might ring in modern ears. Rather, it was a relationship both symbiotic and symbolic: Korea, as did other smaller peripheral states to the “Middle Kingdom,” acquiesced to China’s political and cultural “superiority” in the form of semi-annual tribute missions. In exchange, China was assured of docile and friendly states on its borders. In Korea’s case, China not only allowed that state full political autonomy in the domestic realm but even sent armies to its aid when it was threatened by foreign invaders, such as the Japanese in the late sixteenth century.

The arrival of industrialized Western merchants and missionaries in the early nineteenth century, soon backed by the technological and military wizardry of the age, precipitated the rapid collapse of the China-centered traditional international order of East Asia. Western powers were soon dictating at the point of gunboats the terms by which China was to open its doors to a whole range of Western activities—commercial, political, religious, and scientific. It was a reality that soon led by the mid-nineteenth century to China’s de facto entrance onto the modern geopolitical and diplomatic stage.

The same reality was forced upon Japan with the arrival of the American “black ships” of the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in Tokyo Bay in 1858. In stark contrast to China, however, Japan soon recognized the need to embrace the brave new world that was greeting them. Soon doing away with the thousand-year-old social and political system of the samurai, Japan began to outwardly remold its society and institutions along more Western lines. The result was that, by 1890, the year of the country’s Western-inspired Meiji Constitution, Japan could boast the highest industrial output in Asia, a modern army and respectable navy, a working political system, and a largely independent and thriving press.

From as early as 1874 Japan had even begun to acquire colonies, first Okinawa and then Taiwan, which Japan seized from a virtually helpless China in 1895, in the flush of victory from the Sino-Japanese War. Thus the Sino-Japanese War was also the result of a Japanese desire to ensure the continuation of its own national development by acquiring sources of raw material beyond its own borders. From early in its drive towards national modernization Japan had begun to take an increasing commercial and political interest in Korea.

Even by the 1890s Korea remained an anomaly, neither fully integrated into the new international order (few Western powers were interested in her), nor completely absolving its traditional tributary relationship with China, a relationship that had ceased to have any meaning outside the ceremonial. As Japan began to industrialize and China seemed only to grow weaker, and as Russia with its Trans-Siberian Railway began to dream bigger dreams of a Russian Far East, in international eyes Korea increasingly seemed less a nation than a geopolitical conundrum: “the Korean question” or “the Korean problem” took hold of policymakers, military strategists, and pundits everywhere. The question was this: could Korea modernize on its own? If not, then in the Social Darwinian international order, where survival was a privilege of the fittest, who would ultimately control Korea?

By the end of the nineteenth century Japan had succeeded remarkably well in modernizing itself within the context of its traditional culture. The singular will that the Japanese applied to simply doing away with outmoded institutions still astounds the modern observer. To Japan’s senior policymakers, who through the late nineteenth century watched as Western powers came to control an ever larger share of the world, it became clear that Korea’s integrity (to mean its independence from Western control) must be maintained, and that doing so would mean that country’s modernization, by whatever means necessary. But China, which itself had set off on a belated attempt at industrialization and modernization as the nineteenth century closed, was no longer willing to sit aside and watch another of its former vassals be taken away. One could say that China attempted to transfer into the power-driven reality of the new international order notions of vassalship that only properly worked in the more symbolic and ceremonial traditional order. Through the late nineteenth century, China stubbornly resisted, and at times openly obstructed, any attempts to give Korea an independent international political identity.

A series of Chinese-Japanese squabbles over Korean politics in the 1880s led to a tense truce over Korea, by the terms of which China and Japan both pledged not to interfere in Korea’s internal affairs and agreed to quotas on their respective troop numbers there. Japan, however, was merely biding its time. It was still too weak to confront China over hegemony in Korea. But not for long.

In 1894, an armed peasant uprising called the Tonghak Revolt upset again the delicate domestic tranquility of Korea, and even threatened the dynasty. Some rumors circulated that Japan was behind the revolt, just as they had been behind an aborted coup attempt in 1884. Though such rumors proved false, China reacted by sending in its troops. Now better prepared for its long anticipated confrontation with China, Japan recognized the opportunity and immediately dispatched troops of its own. The momentum towards war had begun.

Most historians agree that Japan made only token attempts to stop the coming conflict at a time when China would have done virtually anything to avoid open war. China even agreed to a joint and temporary troop presence until order could be restored. But Japan had moved beyond compromise. The reasons are simple enough. Japan would only be satisfied with the full independence of Korea. More cynical reasons may be inferred from this desire, such as a Japanese design, once Korea was unleashed, to snatch the now-isolated country up for herself (certainly, once the war began Japan was had no interest in seeing it stop until it had carved itself a comfortable sphere of control in Korea and Northeast China). Here is not the place, however, to renew those debates. The facts are simply that no agreement was reached and on August 1, 1894, war was declared on China by Japan’s Meiji emperor speaking before a solemn gathering of the new National Diet. Here was Japan’s first modern war.44

It must be said that Au Japon provides us somewhat snapshot and scattered images of de Guerville’s Sino-Japanese War experience. Rather than Au Japon, it is de Guerville’s period writings—for Leslie’s Weekly, Munsey’s, the New York Herald, and the Japan Weekly Mail—that best preserve his impressions of and reactions to the war he covered. This need not be surprising, even if it is a little disappointing. De Guerville was writing in 1904, and there was little need to rehash to his reading public the details of a war that had practically been forgotten, to the extent that it was ever even familiar to a European audience.45 It is also likely that writing from France, with little documentary residue of his time in the Far East at hand (much, if not most, had been destroyed in the fire at de Guerville’s Illustrated American in 1898), de Guerville was forced to rely upon a mixture of memory and sentiment.

Secondly, Au Japon is meant first and foremost as the author’s reflections on a country, people, and culture he greatly admired and the memory of which he cherished, and not primarily as a war memoir. In this respect Au Japon is perhaps best seen as a series of anecdotal essays from his time traveling in the Far East. Each chapter is more or less self-contained and self-revealing, rather than forming part of a larger unfurling storyline.

However, as the Japan Weekly Mail noted soon upon Au Japon’s publication, Port Arthur was one of the few incidents of the war that de Guerville felt it essential, even after a decade, to revisit. It is worthwhile asking why this was so.

De Guerville’s Sino-Japanese War Experience

Within weeks of the formal outbreak of hostilities, foreign correspondents were arriving in Yokohama, much as foreign naval vessels crowded into Japanese and Korean ports eager for a view of this historical inter-Asian conflict. Yet even before he had departed Europe for America and then Japan, de Guerville was already penning editorials on the looming conflict, which had yet to break into open fighting. It is fair to say that at this early date most observers in the West anticipated a Chinese victory, despite the fact that Japan had clearly done more in terms of modernization. China’s sheer size and numbers seemed enough to ensure it would prevail. De Guerville, however, placed his bets on Japan, with its superior navy and better organized and better equipped army, realities he had witnessed on his trip there in 1892. He also strikes a moral tone that was generally echoed in the Western press and popular opinion of the time: “Japan is fighting in Asia the battle of civilization and it is sincerely to be hoped that she will be victorious, though she will undoubtedly remain in Corea [sic], as the English in Egypt, should she be allowed to gain there a foothold.”46 Indeed, though it does not survive, de Guerville authored a small pamphlet published in Japan in the aftermath of Port Arthur entitled Civilization and Barbarism that no doubt dealt with this same theme on a larger scale.47

In late August, 1894, de Guerville departed New York City for San Francisco, where he caught passage to Japan aboard the sail-assisted steamer City of Peking. From Chicago he shared his journey with his rival correspondent James Creelman of the New York World. Though de Guerville may not have realized it, Creelman already harbored a grudge against him, describing the young French-American as “a tall, thin hawk eyed young man with courtly manners and a stupendous faculty for lying.”48 Creelman’s obvious animosity is at first glance enigmatic, particularly when one considers that Creelman confesses that in his conversations with de Guerville on the train to San Francisco de Guerville had no idea who Creelman was.49

On closer consideration, however, Creelman’s feelings can perhaps be better gauged. Creelman had written for Bennett’s New York Herald before de Guerville had been picked up by that publication, and had in fact left primarily due to Bennett’s refusal to put Creelman’s name to his stories. That de Guerville was now heading to the Far East as reporter for the New York Herald was perhaps an understandable source of resentment.50 At the very least, the fact that de Guerville was the only other American correspondent to be covering the Sino-Japanese War made for intense competition between the two men.

However, combined with these factors were Creelman’s own intimate fears of failure, which come across strongly in his letters to his wife. That de Guerville had the advantage of previous contact with the Far East only compounded such anxieties regarding Creelman’s coming tour in Japan and Korea, his first as a war correspondent (almost as if to emphasize this advantage, in San Francisco de Guerville gave Creelman a Korean half-cent piece as a souvenir of his experiences; Creelman promptly sent it to his wife).

Further, Creelman had a reputation as a dandy, one who cultivated an aura of refinement and sophistication in his dress and person. And here was de Guerville, a younger man to whom Creelman himself attributes “courtly manners,” a clear talent in the art of conversation (as accounts of his New York lectures testify), and with his intimidating worldly experiences and important contacts in the Far East. De Guerville also stood at six foot compared to Creelman’s short and stocky figure, a superficial but not insignificant point. For a man like Creelman, who lamented to his wife his inability to form easy friendships, such a man as de Guerville could naturally be perceived as a rival, both personal and professional, whether de Guerville immediately perceived it or not. As their relationship progressed in Japan and China, de Guerville became increasingly aware of Creelman’s very personal hostility towards him.

The City of Peking arrived in Yokohama harbor on a stormy evening in early September. A Japanese naval vessel guided it to safe anchorage through two miles of defensive submarine torpedo mines. Arriving at the Grand Hotel in Yokohama, Creelman was greeted with a letter from his wife Alice. “I am so entertained by de Guerville being on the same steamer,” she wrote. “I know you will spike his guns nicely if you can possibly do it.”51

No sooner had de Guerville made landfall in Japan than he was attending formal diplomatic dinners at the French and Russian legations, and if one is to believe his own account, enjoying tête à têtes with the highest ranking officials in the Japanese Army and government—including Counts Mutsu and Oyama, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and War respectively—to the jealousy of the other foreign correspondents gathered in Japan eager to proceed to the front. At first foreign correspondents were not allowed permission to proceed to the front, and frustrated reporters circulated among the Yokohama and Tokyo hotels. However, perhaps seeing the advantage to be got from positive reportage of Japanese victories, the Japanese government soon determined to allow access to properly accredited war correspondents.

In mid-September, and a few days before Creelman, de Guerville received permission to accompany a Japanese troop transport to the battlefront, which was then approaching the Korean city of P’yŏngyang (Pen-Yang). Thus on his return to the Far East as war correspondent, de Guerville served as what we might call today an “embedded reporter.” Reasonable charges could be made—and they were—to the objectivity of any reporter whose coverage of the war was limited to the sanction of one of the belligerents. But all journalists covering the Sino-Japanese conflict reached the front only through the permission and assistance of the warring powers, whether that be Japan or China. Further, in the opening weeks of the war the Japanese government issued regulations regarding the dispatch of war reports from the battlefront. They would all have to be cleared by the Japanese government.52 But further, de Guerville did take the opportunity to strike out on his own initiative once in the field.

And so, while many foreign correspondents found themselves distressfully stranded in Japan during the course of hostilities, de Guerville—thanks in great part to his connections nurtured as Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Fair—had an eventful wartime experience. De Guerville was afforded the “privilege” of accompanying the Japanese First Army to P’yŏngyang aboard the troop transport Nagato Maru, “the oldest, slowest, dirtiest” of them all.53 Slow as it may have been, Creelman, who also received permission to accompany Japanese troops to P’yŏngyang, was only allowed to depart after de Gueville and on a later troop transport, as a result arriving there several days after his rival from the New York Herald. De Guerville’s head start would later give rise to serious accusations on the part of Creelman.

The massive walled city of P’yŏngyang, one of Korea’s most important cities, was the primary Chinese stronghold in Korea and its capture was critical to the success of Japanese war plans. At P’yŏngyang, which de Guerville reached following a soggy night’s journey up the Taedong River aboard a Korean sampan, the New York Herald correspondent encountered death and destruction such as he had never witnessed. Approaching the already fallen city by sampan, his senses were assaulted, and overwhelmed, by the stench of rotting corpses, mostly of the city’s fallen Chinese defenders. De Guerville prided himself as the only foreigner to have reported first hand on the fall of P’yŏngyang and took the time to heap almost preternatural praise on the Japanese for the mercy and moderation shown their defeated Chinese counterparts. He also praised the work of the Japanese Red Cross, enthusiastically writing, “If these facts do not call forth the admiration of the world, I am at a loss to know what will do so. I do not see how Japan can be refused the place she rightly claims among the civilized nations of the world.” At the same time de Guerville condemned the brutality and ingratitude of the Chinese, who not only left P’yŏngyang a scorched and ravaged shell but were wholly ungrateful to the Japanese for the kind, even pampered, treatment they received as their prisoners.54

Following a few days in the city of P’yŏngyang de Guerville turned south, curious to visit the Korean capital of Seoul to see if he might secure an interview with the Korean king, as Creelman had done some weeks previous.55 In Chemulpo—which the indefatigable travel writer Isabella Bishop Bird had left only weeks earlier, fleeing the approaching war—de Guerville the journalist found himself the object of an interview by a Japan Weekly Mail correspondent, likely the result of de Guerville’s friendship with that journal’s owner Captain Frank Brinkley (something he reveals in Au Japon). A few days later, de Guerville related his P’yŏngyang experience in fuller detail in a personal article for the Japan Weekly Mail.56

Figure 5. An artist’s rendition of the fall of P’yŏngyang that accompanied de Guerville’s newspaper account. San Francisco Chronicle (19 December 1894).

The Japan Weekly Mail was the most respectable of the English papers in Japan. Founded by the Irishman Frank Brinkley—who at times also served as The Times (London) correspondent in Japan—it was largely pro-government and its war coverage echoed official policy and accounts. Circulation wars were no less intense in Japan than in America of the period, and the Japan Weekly Mail certainly had its rivals and detractors. Prime among these were the Japan Gazette and the Japan Herald (which actually predated the Japan Weekly Mail), whose articles tended to be more sensational and more critical of Japan and its policymakers. Both the Japan Gazette and Japan Herald were unabashed in their disdain for the Japanese and their support for the maintenance of the unequal treaties between Japan and the Western powers. (56) The wife of one diplomat wrote of the Gazette and Herald, “I have stopped reading these rags, which always attack us, or the Home Government, or the Emperor, when news is scarce. I can stand intelligent abuse, or good-natured ignorance, but the two nouns in unqualified conjunction make me tired.”58

Throughout the Sino-Japanese War the Japan Weekly Mail’s writers and editors assailed critics of Japan’s wartime policy, all the while praising the Japanese armies’ successes in China and Korea and disparaging the barbarity and backwardness of the Chinese troops (on this point at least a view and vocabulary it shared with Western writers). Though de Guerville was never formally employed by the Japan Weekly Mail, that his account of the fall of P’yŏngyang was published by that paper effectively demonstrates that his opinions of the Japanese army and its conduct of the war were quite in line with official outlooks, which Brinkley (the paper’s owner and editor) was at pains to portray.59 De Guerville himself admitted that he sent a copy of his first New York Herald dispatch to Viscount Mutsu, the Japanese foreign minister, so praising was it of Japanese conduct.60

De Guerville was well aware of the danger of a perceived pro-Japanese bias, especially since he was being accommodated on Japanese troop transports to and from the battlefront, while other foreign correspondents ate their hearts out in Tokyo or Nagasaki, so near yet so far from the action. At one point de Guerville is compelled to emphasize that all he relates about the war in his dispatches is “fact, pure and simple, and without the least colouring.”61 Such coziness with quasi-official Japanese press organs would prove harmful to de Guerville’s reputation later, when de Guerville’s detractors would insinuate he had received bribes from Japanese officials in exchange for his relatively glowing praise of the Japanese war effort.62 As we shall see, Creelman would accuse de Guerville of still worse.

If de Guerville was slightly “colored” by his preferential treatment—and a sincere love for Japan and its own mission civilisatrice in Asia—we should not consider him a mere pawn of the Japanese. Only days after the fall of P’yŏngyang—and by his account suffering from malaria and dysentery—de Guerville opted to head south to Seoul, the Korean capital, to gauge affairs among the political leaders in Korea. From P’yŏngyang he caught passage to Chemulpo aboard a transport carrying wounded soldiers, and from there by palanquin to Seoul, some thirty miles up the Han River. It was de Guerville’s second trip to Seoul (his first trip in 1892 is recounted in rather comic terms in Au Japon). As the Korean king was apparently ailing, de Guerville instead met with the Taewŏngun, father of the king and perhaps the most powerful—certainly the most forceful, with the possible exception of Korea’s Queen Min—figure in Korean politics, the king himself notwithstanding. With de Guerville, the Taewŏngun exhibited his natural perspicacity. Over cigars the royal patriarch posed many probing questions on the recent military action at P’yŏngyang, not trusting in the reports supplied by the Japanese.63

Following the fall of P’yŏngyang and the brief trip to Seoul, de Guerville returned to Japan, again courtesy of a Japanese troop ship. Back in Hiroshima, de Guerville toured a Red Cross hospital (which he recounts in Chapter 18 of Au Japon). In early November, de Guerville departed Japan with elements of the Japanese Second Army under the command of General Oyama for the second major offensive of the war: the drive into Chinese Manchuria and the seizure of its crown jewel, Port Arthur.

James Creelman and the Port Arthur Controversy

Port Arthur—modern day Lushun—sits at the very tip of China’s Liaodong Peninsula, a triangle of land that juts south from Manchuria into the northern Yellow Sea. Considering its strategic location commanding the sea lanes between China and Korea (a position made more valuable by its linkage to the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway in 1903), its conquest was viewed as essential by Japanese war planners if Chinese—and Russian—influence in Korea was to be decisively checked. In fact, so strategic was the Liaodong Peninsula in the geopolitics of the region that Russian, French, and German pressure after the war would force victorious Japan to retrocede it to China, a check the Japanese would not soon forget nor forgive. Not surprisingly, Port Arthur and the Liaodong Peninsula would play pivotal roles in the Russo-Japanese War a decade later.

In late November. 1894, much of the world was stunned to receive news that the heavily fortified Port Arthur, the “Gibraltar of the East,” had fallen within twenty-four hours of its siege and bombardment by the Japanese Second Army under General Oyama. However, word of a massacre of Port Arthur’s defenders and inhabitants at the hands of Japanese troops did not follow immediately upon the city’s fall on November 21. The dispatches of Creelman first broke this story when they reached the offices of his employer the New York World on December 21. The accounts of other correspondents such as Frederic Villiers of the London Black and White and Thomas Cowen of The Times soon found their own way into Western living rooms.

The reports of Creelman proved the most sensational in their details, and not surprisingly garnered the widest attention. The New York World broke the news in alarming headlines: “Massacre at Port Arthur. At Least Two Thousand Helpless People Butchered by Japanese Soldiers. Streets Chocked with Mutilated Bodies of Men, Women, and Children While the Soldiers Laughed.”64 As Creelman described it, “Unarmed men, kneeling in the streets and begging for life, were shot, bayoneted, or beheaded. The town was sacked from end to end, and the inhabitants were butchered in their own houses.”65

Such accounts were on the whole backed up by Villiers and Cowen, and to a much lesser extent by a few American and British military attachés who also witnessed the fall of the city. Villiers reemphasized the massacre by publishing a long account of it entitled “The Truth about Port Arthur” in an American periodical of March 1895, largely in response to the massacre’s detractors, epitomized by de Guerville.66 The most prominent accounts of a Port Arthur “massacre” are those surviving in Creelman’s book of memoirs, On the Great Highway, and in the reminiscences (almost certainly specious) of James Allan in his slender tome, Under the Dragon Flag. Almost totally forgotten in the debate surrounding the Port Arthur massacre has been the voice of de Guerville, though he was certainly far from silent at the time.

As Au Japon tells us, and period records confirm, de Guerville, like Creelman and Villiers, was on the scene at the fall of Port Arthur and its subsequent occupation by Japanese troops. Like Stephen and Cora Crane in Greece in 1897, de Guerville even rescued a dog on the battlefield, a puppy that he duly named “Faithful”—Chiu-ji. A period photograph captured de Guerville comforting the pup on the Chinese front. The dog would go on to play a starring role in de Guerville’s New York lectures regarding his Sino-Japanese War experiences.

In sharp contrast to his fellow correspondents, de Guerville steadfastly denied that any massacre had occurred at Port Arthur. De Guerville’s defense of Japan did not wait until 1904 and the publication of Au Japon. His vocal challenge of the sensationalist accounts of other Western journalists was deferred only by his return passage to America from the now-Japanese Port Arthur in December, 1894.

As soon as he arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia, de Guerville began to hear the stories circulating of Japanese atrocities at Port Arthur, namely those from the pen of Creelman, Hearst’s man in the Far East. De Guerville immediately wired off his own firsthand account of the city’s fall to the San Francisco Chronicle, which gave it top headline.

Figure 6. De Guerville’s headlining account of the fall of Port Arthur in the San Francisco Chronicle. 1894.

De Guerville continued his journalistic riposte as soon as he reached New York City: “Great was my surprise when, upon my arrival in New York . . . I read the sensational stories published in some newspapers about the awful atrocities and frightful massacres committed by the Japanese at the capture of the Chinese stronghold [Port Arthur].”67 De Guerville then proceeded to defend the behavior of the Japanese troops, boldly and emphatically denying that the Japanese “mutilated a single body,” much less that “junks loaded with people were sunk.” In fact, most Chinese commoners de Guerville witnessed “were so happy, so pleased with the Japanese that they would beg of them to remain and to defend them against the awful oppression of their officials, mandarins, officers, and soldiers.” It was a contrast indeed to such accounts as those of Creelman, or even of Villiers, who wrote in March, 1895, of the gratuitous slaughter of innocent civilians, so that all that remained after the Japanese bloodletting were thirty-six Chinese, to be used “in burying their dead comrades or as water-carriers for the [Japanese] troops. Their lives were protected by a slip of white paper stuck in their caps bearing the following inscription in Japanese characters: ‘This man is not to be killed.’”68

For his part, Creelman later expounded on his account in his book On the Great Highway, published in 1901. As a self-professed “witness for civilization,” Creelman, whom one contemporary described as a man “made of the clay from which spring crusaders, reformers and martyrs”69 , damned Japan for its gratuitous cruelty at Port Arthur, although qualifying it as “the only lapse of the Japanese from the usages of humane warfare.”70

Japan denied that any “massacre” had occurred, though it admitted some regrettable transgressions on the part of some lower-class soldiers and coolies. Accounts of the massacre were taken by many in the West as evidence of an atavistic and lingering barbarism beneath Japan’s civilized patina, while Japan’s denials were interpreted by some as evidence of a collective Japanese puerility. The Japanese, wrote Villiers, “like most young children . . . are very sensitive on being found out, and will tell the most deliberate and unblushing falsehoods to shield themselves.”71

De Guerville would have none of this. The details of the debate regarding the putative Japanese massacre, which raged intensely in the world press for the six months or so following the fall of Port Arthur, are too numerous to detail here. As a preliminary, suffice it to say that most studies have concluded that excesses did occur, mainly in the killing of Chinese men in the fallen city. However, the extreme accounts manifested best by Creelman were later revealed to be highly exaggerated.72

It is important to point out that the major points de Guerville made in his attack against the detractors of Japan is largely repeated in the final chapter of Au Japon. One point is worth making, however. In bold words printed in Leslie’s Weekly (words not repeated in Au Japon), de Guerville takes Western critics to task, posing the difficult question of how atrocities by British troops in India during the Sepoy Revolt of 1858, or American atrocities against Native Americans, differed from the alleged atrocities at Port Arthur, even supposing they had occurred. De Guerville even dared pose the question: “Can the Japanese be expected to be more civilized than the French, English, or—than ourselves?”73

De Guerville also took aim at Creelman’s integrity as a reporter.74 He criticized Creelman’s earlier account of P’yŏngyang, in which he had intimated he was an eyewitness to the battle when he was not, as well as his various misrepresentations of the size of the Japanese army and the dates of certain engagements.75 In one article, de Guerville recalled an episode with Creelman in Japan in the weeks before Port Arthur, and suggested that Creelman had arrived at Port Arthur with visions of a sensational story already half-written in his head:

One day I went to Yokohama with Mr. Creelman. He spent his time there calling on the heads of some banks and newspapers. While in the train returning to Tokyo he told me:

“I have found out why they won’t allow us to go the front. The first reason is . . . that the Japanese are being frightfully licked by the Chinese, and the other is that these people, not being yet quite civilized, must act in the battlefield like wild beasts. They must carve each other, prisoners and wounded, into pieces, and we would see the most disgusting sights in the world. On account of the treaty revision the government is anxious that we should not see such sights.”76

Such attacks against Creelman’s integrity and professionalism must have stung the New York World reporter to the quick, but perhaps especially so as they came from de Guerville.

De Guerville soon had more damaging, and personal, allegations to deal with. Not long after his return to New York, stories began to circulate, apparently originating with Creelman, that de Guerville had supplied Creelman’s name to the Japanese authorities as a spy for the Chinese. Such stories found especially wide coverage in the Japan Gazette but were published as well in Creelman’s New York World. The Japan Gazette also made damaging accusations that de Guerville had in fact been bribed by Japanese officials. Naturally, de Guerville denied the charges, and chose the Japan Weekly Mail to refute them. Though there was no evidence ever presented to corroborate such serious assertions, the damage was done. Though he would go on to briefly run The Illustrated American during 1897–1898, de Guerville never found work as a regular correspondent. According to a surviving letter by Creelman, de Guerville attributed his failures in this regard to the specious allegations of the New York World reporter. In 1897, Creelman encountered de Guerville in a Bologna train station while both were on their way to cover the Greek-Turkish War, de Guerville with his new red-haired bride in tow and still laboring as a freelancer. By Creelman’s account, not long into the train journey from Bologna to the port of Brindisi in southern Italy, de Guerville came knocking on his compartment door.

His voice was broken and his eyes were filled with tears as he told me that the story that he had sought to contrive my death by treachery had ruined him; it had damned his reputation and shut all avenues of journalistic employment.. . . He [de Guerville] told me that he had never insinuated that I was a Chinese spy in the Japanese army but admitted that he had made a remark which if badly translated . . . might have caused some suspicion.77

The precise truth behind such high jinx has been lost to history; in the end one is simply left with the distinct impression that Creelman had succeeded in spiking his competitor’s guns after all.

III. Au Japon Then and Now

The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.77

—Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”

Au Japon defies easy categorization. It is part comic portrait, part nostalgic memoir, part apology, and part earnest analysis of political developments in the Far East. All of it is a product of A. B. de Guerville—the man and his environment.

For the first half of the book de Guerville’s role as Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Columbian Exposition is nearly superfluous, serving only to explain what he was doing in Japan to begin with. This portion of the book is taken up mostly with humorous portraits of people and events in Japan (though some of these should be taken with a grain of salt). Only in the second half does the work change tone as the author discusses his experiences in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. Then, Au Japon becomes more journalistic and analytical, examining such things as the Japanese Red Cross, the character of the Genro [elder statesman] Yamagata Aritomo, and the Japanese army’s conduct in the Sino-Japanese War, all the while refusing to forsake its sense of irony and somewhat salacious humor.

But if one were to indulge in the dubious exercise of placing Au Japon, then perhaps it belongs halfway between two genres: it is in small part a journalistic autobiography along the lines of Frederic Villiers’ Port Arthur: Three Months with the Besiegers, or James Allan’s Under the Dragon Flag. More than anything, Au Japon seems to echo that work by de Guerville’s fellow journalist, and erstwhile rival, Creelman, whose book of reminiscences On the Great Highway appeared in 1901. Indeed the lives of these two men seem to parallel one another to an uncanny degree. Creelman was ten years de Guerville’s senior, but their two lives were remarkably similar in their particulars: both men were naturalized Americans and self-made journalists; both wrote for a series of New York publications, including the New York Herald, and both at one point managed the The Illustrated American; both became foreign correspondents and then war correspondents during the Sino-Japanese War. Both men were also fond of boasting of their mutual successes, including interviews with Pope Leo XIII (Creelman beat de Guerville by three years) and kings (they interviewed Korea’s King Kojong weeks apart). In the pair’s contradictory assertions over the alleged “Port Arthur massacre” their lives at last collide and a thus far unspoken rivalry is made manifest. Though the two men certainly knew one another (and not on pleasant terms), their surviving published writings never mention the other by name.

Au Japon is very much a sentimental and subjective account of travels and impressions of life in the Far East, in the spirit of Sir Edwin Arnold (whom de Guerville admired and with whom he once shared a jinrikisha) and Lafcadio Hearn (who first arrived in Japan a year before de Guerville). Au Japon echoes both Arnold’s Japonica (1891) and Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894). Although de Guerville certainly indulges in some of the sentimental exocitizing of Japan—best manifested by Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemum—de Guerville’s is also a sympathetic and progressive pen. Though he may poke fun at aspects of the Japanese and life in Japan, he does so in a spirit of good-naturedness and not out of condescension or a sense of superiority, moral or otherwise. De Guerville is as interested in the nation’s modern transformation as he is in its traditions. He sees value in Japan’s modernization, in the education of women, and in the rise of Japan to equality with the industrialized nations of the west—rather than simply its perpetual relegation to “enchanted bamboo land” of geishas and tea houses. He also takes issue with the then prevalent idea that Japan was, through industrialization and Western influence, only then emerging out of barbarity into civilization.

One should not lose sight of the fact, and indeed it is hard to, that Au Japon is foremost a comical look at Japan from a Westerner’s perspective. With its risqué and irreverent outlook, Au Japon is very much a French book of travel writing. Au Japon simply does not take itself too seriously, and this in itself is endearing. To be sure, de Guerville records several dialogs that he certainly did not witness, and quite likely never took place. The confusion over the meaning of “Teikoku,” for instance, would only be plausible if the Japanese in question had been conversing with de Guerville in French, not something very likely to have occurred. But even these “imaginary” conversations serve not to mislead so much as to entertain. In the end we are to trust in the Japan Weekly Mail’s assertion that, delightful as Au Japon may be, “to take it seriously from cover to cover would be imbecile.”79

Au Japon is also simply a humorous account of a foreigner’s misadventures in Japan. De Guerville’s obvious delight in recounting the creaking of western ladies’ corsets as they sat down to an uncomfortable tea à la Japonaise, or the flatulence of his Korean “coolies”; his racy account of foreign scandal in the pleasure district of Tokyo, or humorous take on everything from Japanese bathing to firefighting; all these reveal the book’s comic quality. One might be reminded of Thomas Raucat’s L’Honorable partie de campagne (1924), or, even racier still, that same author’s De Shanghai à Canton (1927).80 But whereas Raucat’s humor is delivered in more of a deadpanned manner, one can almost hear de Guerville laughing out loud, or regaling an audience at New York’s Lotus Club, as he recounts his experiences. Indeed, it would come as little surprise for a reader to learn that before his success as a writer de Guerville was an accomplished and popular lecturer during a time when public speaking was a much lauded talent.

Au Japon should also be viewed in the context of the period trend towards travel books in general and Japan in particular. At the time, writing about Japan sold well. Besides de Guerville, there were legions of aspiring authors ready to feed a seemingly insatiable Western curiosity for this intriguing and modernizing island nation. “True it is, ‘and pity ’tis ’tis true,’ with reference to Japan, that ‘of making many books there is no end,’” intoned one period editorial.81 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century travel books on Japan had become a virtual cottage industry. Between 1875 and 1900 no fewer than two hundred books of travel impressions on Japan appeared in Western languages. Many were the products of journalists like de Guerville, but their authorship ran the gamut from diplomats to adventurers, educators to engineers, and from missionaries to sailors, doctors, general misfits, and the odd man or woman of leisure. In regards to their treatment of Japan, certain trends can be discerned in such works.