THE BOSTONIAN EDWARD H. House (1836–1901) was the first in a long, thin line of Western journalists who devoted much of their career to interpreting Japan sympathetically to foreign audiences. Like his successors in that line, Frank Brinkley of the Japan Mail (1841–1912) and John Russell Kennedy (1861–1928) of the Kokusai News Agency and the Japan Times, House edited his own newspaper and wrote countless essays to give Japan a ‘fair’ hearing in the West. Unlike them, however, he rarely modulated his voice. For three decades, beginning in 1870, House championed Japanese causes, arguing for treaty equality, better diplomats and Japanese progress with the gusto of a street fighter. His style, said the doyen of Meiji journalists Tokutomi Soho, was ‘to start fast, knock you down, and give you a thrashing’ (Tokutomi 1929: 117).

A prominent US Civil War reporter and drama critic for The New York Tribune, House came to Japan soon after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, as a correspondent and English teacher. In 1872, when the Japanese government freed 231 Chinese coolies from slaveship conditions on the Peruvian vessel Maria Luz, which had fled to Yokohama harbor after being damaged in a storm at sea, House defended the action in the American press, and decided to start writing about politics on a full-time basis. Until his death in Tokyo in 1901, House made Japan's international reputation a personal cause. He demanded tariff autonomy for Japan in America's leading journals and papers, and called for an end to extraterritoriality in his own newspaper, the Tokio Times. In 1874, he accompanied Saigō Tsugumichi to Taiwan on the era's first military campaign; in 1881, he made a secret diplomatic trip to Washington, London and Paris at the behest of his friend, the state councillor and finance minister Ōkuma Shigenobu; and, in 1894, he wrote articles for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, describing Japan's Sino-Japanese War victories. He also composed endless letters to opinion leaders on both sides of the Pacific, arguing that Japan merited better treatment.