Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: The
Firsthand Experiences of a British
Woman in Outback Japan in 1878 by
Isabella L Bird
Brilliant
Isabella L. Bird was one of the most famous British travelers of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her destinations included
Canada, the United States (the Rocky Mountains), Hawaii, Japan, Korea,
Persia, Kurdistan, China, and Morocco. She is particularly known for her
intrepidness and lively writing style. Written in the form of letters to her
sister, her account of her trip to Japan in 1878 is viewed as a classic of
travel writing and a valuable account of little documented areas of Japan in
that era. Rather than stay in the Tokyo region or travel south to Kyoto, the
mecca of Japanese civilization, she chose to travel north through the most
arduously mountainous areas and eventually visit the island of Hokkaido,
where lived the indigenous Ainu. With the Ainu, Isabella took an

ambiguous stance: she admired them tremendously on the one hand but
could not, on the other, find it in her heart to remove them from the
category of savages. The Foreword, Reading between the Lines, calls
into question the accuracy of Isabellas observations of the Japanese and
Ainu and casts doubt on the judgments she formed. Readers are urged to
read the book actively, rather than passively, if they are not to be led
astray by Isabellas biases and eccentricities.
Personal Review: Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: The Firsthand
Experiences of a British Woman in Outback Japan in 1878 by
Isabella L Bird
Just stunning. Letters from Isabella Bird's travels through the interior of
Japan accompanied only by her translator (an intriguingly brilliant and (by
her standards) amoral individual) and a series of increasingly ill-natured
horses. As well as the adventures of the trip, the viewpoints it records are
remarkable: Not modern Japan, nor the Japan of the 1800s seen by most
European travelers, but the interior of Japan shortly after it first opened to
the West, a country which was in the process of transforming itself but
which, in the areas through which Bird traveled, was still in many ways
unchanged. It is Japan seen by an outsider, but not by a modern outsider,
and by a traveler who was also a single, highly educated, highly
opinionated and fiercely independent Victorian woman, whose views are
sometimes familiar, sometimes very modern, sometimes so distant from
what seems now expected or acceptable. It's a brilliant and fascinating
book - as a historical record, travel journal, adventure story, and vivid
example of the vicissitudes and difficulties of travelling through pre-
industrial landscapes on horseback (and therefore an excellent reference
for writers of historical fiction and fantasy).
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