The Japanese Discovery of America

This book focuses on the Japanese encounter with the Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, an episode that took place rather late in the "age of discovery," as the last "unknown" lands of Africa and Asia were being probed by Western merchants, explorers, and travelers. Most of the documents assembled here -- poems and political pamphlets, official memorials and private journals, newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts -- were written (or drawn) by the Japanese, for whom the encounter raised the question of national survival. Their contents reveal the ignorance and curiosity, the anxiety and confusion, the admiration and disillusion that attended the meeting of these two rather different cultures. - Preface.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.