Part I: Overview -- 1. Introduction -- 2. A Brief Survey of Meiji Kabuki -- Part II: The 1860s -- 3. From Japan through American Eyes (1859; 1860) / by Francis Hall -- 4. From Ten Weeks in Japan: “Japanese Drama” (1860) / by Rev. George Smith -- 5. From Japan through American Eyes (1861; 1862) / by Francis Hall -- 6. From the Capital of the Tycoon: “Osaca” (1862) / by Si Rutherford Alcock -- 7. From A Lady’s Visit to Manila and Japan (1862) / by Anna D’Almeida -- 8. “Japanese Theaters” (1864) / by Humbert Aimé -- 9. From A Diplomat in Japan (1866?) / by Sir Ernest Satow -- 10. More from the 1860s / by Jacob Mortimer Silver, R. Mountenney Jephson, and Edward Pennell Elmhirst -- Part III: 1870s -- 11. From Japanese Episodes: “A Day in a Japanese Theatre” (1872) / by Edward H. House --12. From Clara’s Diary: “Kabuki – the Japanese Theater” (1876) / by Clara A.N. Whitney -- 13. From Japan Day by Day: “The Theatre” (1877, 1878) / Edward S. Morse -- 14. “Theatricals” (1878) / by Isabella L. Bird -- 15. From Clara’s Diary: Part I: “Chūshingura” (1878) / by Clara A.N. Whitney -- 16. From Awakening Japan (1879) / by Erwin Baelz -- 17. From Clara’s Diary (1879): “Entertaining General Grant”; “A Western Style Drama” / by Clara A.N. Whitney -- 18. More from the 1870s / by William Elliot Griffis, Christopher Dresser, Arthur Collins Maclay, William Gray Dixon, Charles H. Eden, and Mrs. Julia D. Carrothers -- Part IV: The 1880s -- 19. From Japan Day by Day: “The Theatre” (1882) / by Edward S. Morse -- 20. From Jinrikisha Days in Japan: “Japanese Theatre” (1889) / by Eliza Rumaha Scidmore -- 21. From A Japanese Interior (1889) / by Alice Mabel Bacon -- 22. More from the 1880s / by Thomas W. Knox, Arthur H. Crow, Andrew Carnegie, William Henry Lucy, Henry Knollys, Henry Fauld -- Part V: The 1890s -- 23. From A Diplomatist’s Wife in Japan: “Danjuro, a Great Actor” (1890) / by Mary Crawford Fraser -- 24. From The Japs at Home (1892) / by Douglas Sladen -- 25. From Lotos-Time in Japan (1894) / by Henry T. Finck -- 26. From Japan: A Record in Colour (1896): “Art and the Drama” / by Mortimer Menpes -- 27: “Japan’s Stage and Greatest Actor” (1896) / by Robert P. Porter -- 28. From Japanese Plays and Playfellows (1898): “Popular Plays”; “Afternoon Calls” / by Osman Edwards -- 29. More from the 1890s / by Adolfo Farsari, M.B. Cook, G.J. Younghusband, Mae St. John Bramhall, Katherine Schuyler Baxter, William Eleroy Curtis, S.C.F. Jackson, Stafford Ransome -- Part VI: The 1900s -- 30. From Tales from Tokio: “Shibaya to Yakusha” (1900) / by Clarence Ludlow Brownell -- 31: From Awakening Japan (1903), by Erwin Baelz -- 32. From Present-Day Japan: “The Drama” (1904) / by Augusta M. Campbell Davidson -- 33. From Things Japanese: “Theatre” (1904) / by Basil Hall Chamberlain -- 34. From Rare Days in Japan: “At the Theatre” (1906) / by George Trumbull Ladd -- 35. From Smiling ‘Round the World: “Visit to a Japanese Theatre, Tokyo” (1908) / by Marshall P. Wilder -- 36. From Every-Day Japan: “The Japanese Stage” (1909) / by Arthur Lloyd -- 37. From Japan and the Japanese (1910) / by Walter Tyndale -- 38. From The Full Recognition of Japan (1911) / by Robert P. Porter -- 39. From Japan of the Japanese / by Joseph H. Longford -- 40. More from the 1900s (and Beyond) / by Anna C. Hartshorne, Fred Gaisberg, Douglas Sladen, Walter Del Mar, George H. Rittner, Ernest W. Clement, W. Petrie Watson, Eleanora Mary D’Anethan, Clive Holland, Anonymous, Evelyn Adam, and A.H. Exner

"This book is an annotated collection of English-language documents by foreigners writing about Japan’s kabuki theatre in the half-century after the country was opened to the West in 1853. Using memoirs, travelogues, diaries, letters, and reference books, it contains all significant writing about kabuki by foreigners—resident or transient—during the Meiji period (1868–1912), well before the first substantial non-Japanese book on the subject was published. Its chronologically organized chapters contain detailed introductions. Twenty-seven authors, represented by edited versions of their essays, are supplemented by detailed summaries of thirty-five others. The author provides insights into how Western visitors—missionaries, scholars, diplomats, military officers, adventurers, globetrotters, and even a precocious teenage girl—responded to a world-class theatre that, apart from a tiny number of pre-Meiji encounters, had been hidden from the world at large for over two centuries. It reveals prejudices and misunderstandings, but also demonstrates the power of great theatre to bring together people of differing cultural backgrounds despite the barriers of language, artistic convention, and the very practice of theatergoing. And, in Ichikawa Danjuro IX, it presents an actor knowledgeable foreigners considered one of the finest in the world." -- Utgivarens hemsida.