There are two parts to this blog. First is what Isabella Bird saw in Japan in her travels in the 1870s from Yokohama through the mountains to Niigata on the Japan Sea and on to Hokkaido. The second part is a reflection on what Ms. Bird tells us about the England of her time.
What Ms. Bird saw, she saw through the lenses of an English woman of her time. An upper middle class educated religious, unmarried woman in her 40s. What she saw was very clean and appealing in areas in well-established central urban areas. She commented on the cleanliness and the incredible proper manners displayed by everyone. She was very impressed everywhere with the extraordinary attention paid to children. Mothers and daughters never let a child out of their reach. Fathers played with the children immediately upon coming home. The children at all ages were behaving to Ms. Bird's highest English standards of kind gentle and well behaved.
Ms. Bird was always surprised by acts of kindness and honesty. The Japanese were very industrious, the hardest working people she had ever seen in her global travels. When she tried to pay for hot water or any other kindness, the Japanese refused the money. She always expected to be cheated. Since she didn't know the language nor anything about commerce she never learned how unbelievably honest the Japanese actually are.
She complained about their filthy habits of the farmworkers and rural people as well as their nakedness. She commented on how much better off they would be if they bathed at least once a week like English people.
Since Ms. Bird retired to her bedroom accommodations, really just tatami floors and shoji walls, shortly after 6 PM, she had no idea that the Japanese bathed every evening. They got dirty during the day from working but they bathed every evening. Moreover, the women were naked above the waist on hot days working in their private kitchens. The men always wore a loincloth tied around their waist and between their legs. To Ms. Bird they were naked, even in the hot summer, running with a rickshaw behind them.
Ms. Bird considered Japanese horses to be incompetent, poorly trained and feeble. They probably were since horses were never important, nor carriages, to the Japanese.
Ms. Bird, was an excellent reporter on flora and fauna. She saw many beautiful sites and spent many happy days in-between her weeks of rain, bugs and misery.
She went to Japan to study the Ainu who live in Hokkaido the Northern island. She found them to be kind, gentle, lazy, drunken, European looking, hairy "savages". They were also naked, never bathed, ate and worshipped bears.