The Expanding Gulf

Abstract

It was in June 1874 that Alexander Innes Shand published his article, The Romance of Japanese Revolution’ in Blackwood’s Magazine. ¹ In this article, as was shown in the previous chapter, Shand generally emphasised the mysterious and romantic characteristics of the country. He had never been to Japan, and it was at the Vienna International Exhibition of 1873 that he had become deeply interested in things Japanese. He arrived in Vienna just in time for the opening of the exhibition on 1 May 1873, and stayed there for several weeks as a special correspondent of The Times, an arrangement he had made with Delane.² According to Shand’s letter to Blackwood of early March the following year, he had ‘already written a good many passing articles’ on Japan.³ He revealed in this letter, in which he proposed a paper on Japan for ‘Maga’, that his major concern was to obtain ‘the key to the mystery of the sudden revolution, & the self denying conduct of the great daimios’. For Shand, what had happened was a striking repetition of the ‘old romances of Mitford’s “Tales of Old Japan”’, Shand also disclosed the sources he would draw on:

I should draw for facts chiefly on Baron Hübner’s book, & the one that Mossman has just published, & on my own observations of the Japanese Collection at Vienna, with the letters I wrote about it to the Times.⁴