[Japan]:

$2,500 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

[No. 5.] 1889. THE Official Railway & Steamboat Traveller's Guide, with General Information for Tourists in Japan. An otherwise unrecorded, portable edition of this guide to Japanese travel, printed at the important Japan Gazette a year before the still-scarce expanded edition of 1890. The Japan Gazette was a very early and influential English-language newspaper founded by John Reddie Black in 1867. Through the Japan Gazette and its Japanese-language counterpart, Nisshin Shinjishi, Black is largely credited with establishing Western-style journalism in Japan, particularly by reporting on political issues and the activities of the government. Black left Japan when laws passed in 1874 restricted public criticism of the government and prohibited foreigners from editing Japanese-language papers, but his Gazette remained an important source of news and entertainment for foreigners living or interested in Japan, and its office continued printing books, directories, and travel guides such as the present work into the early 20th century.This guide, owned and clearly used by a young Massachusetts woman on an 1897 trip to East Asia, features a plethora of advice for the prospective visitor on nearly every subject. It includes tips on traveling from Kobe (where most steamers made landfall) to other major cities, denominations of Yen and the appropriate costs for typical transactions, gives the locations of banks and telegraph stations, lists clubhouses open to foreigners by location, an

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