WHAT WAS JAPAN and who were the Japanese? In 1870, when the thirty-three-year-old Algernon Bertram Mitford (1837–1916) returned to England after three and a half years as a diplomat there, this question was being asked across the Western world. Japan had taken it by storm. There has never been another time in history when a distant culture so invaded the drawing rooms of Western Europe and North America in such a sustained way. A British journal commented:

Everybody was familiar with the country's arts and crafts, but were in ‘profound ignorance’ of the nation itself, as a newspaper of the time put it. A trickle of Westerners had visited since the 1850s and had created the impression of a strange, unknowable place. They would stress how different it was to the West and how contradictory it seemed. Japan was portrayed as a land of toy people and toy houses but at the same time its people were perceived to be brutal and bloodthirsty, with a casual indifference to life and death. The Japanese were seen to have plenty of beliefs and customs, but no proper religion and therefore no basis for their morality. There was no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in Japan – only what was acceptable in their labyrinthine code of behaviour and what was not. Above all, its people were different: singular – unknowable – inscrutable.

Mitford would come to reject this view out of hand. While at first he was bewildered by the country and indeed felt contempt for it, with remarkable speed he learned the language and started to embrace Japanese traditions. He came to feel that the Japanese were, in many respects, superior to Westerners, particularly in their views of honour and duty. The beliefs underpinning their culture were entirely different to those in the West, but once they were understood, Mitford believed, their behaviour was completely reasonable.