The Travel Journals of Mathilde, Contessa Sallier de La Tour into the Interior of Japan, 1867-1870, including Letters, Notes and Sketches

This two-volume book is a collection of previously unpublished primary sources about Japan in the years around the 1868 Meiji restoration from a rare female point of view. The author of the original manuscripts is Contessa Mathilde (1838-1911), the French spouse of the first Italian Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan, Conte Vittorio Sallier de La Tour (1827-1894).

Indeed, very little is known about the position of Italy in Japan during these crucial years, but Mathilde’s collection of private sources, such as letters, notes and travel journals casts a new light on different aspects of Italo-Japanese relations: diplomacy, commerce, religion and politics, while describing, with an uncommon enthusiasm and emotion, Japan and its people before they started to embrace modernity.

The first manuscript is a set of letters about the trip from Italy to Japan, introducing Mathilde, Vittorio and other members of the small Italian community of Yokohama. The second is an unpolished draft with roughly written notes about Mathilde’s life in Yokohama and Edo (Tokyo). The third is a set of letters addressed to a close friend, where Mathilde opens up her heart and talks about her joys and frustrations. The fourth manuscript is the earliest travel journal written by a woman who traveled in the inner regions of Japan (in 1869 - almost ten years before Isabella Bird’s famous Unbeaten Tracks in Japan), full of vivid descriptions and interesting insights about practical and political matters. The fifth manuscript is a travel journal about a trip by sea to Western Japan (Osaka, Kobe, Nagasaki) through the Inland Sea and to China (Shanghai, Amoy and Hong Kong).

The first volume of the set includes numerous colour and b/w images, a preface and an introduction in French, the transcriptions of the five sets of documents (written in French as they appear on the original manuscripts) and a collection of Mathilde’s sketches taken during the 1869 trip into the interior of Japan. The second volume includes an English translation of the transcribed documents, a bibliography and an index of names. Each volume includes about 950 explanatory footnotes in both languages. The book will be of great interest for students and scholars of the history of Japanese relations with foreign powers in the nineteenth century.