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In the early 1880s, Kawada Ryokichi, a young samurai training at a shipyard on Clydeside, near Glasgow, met and fell in love with a Glaswegian girl shop-assistant called Jeanie Eadie and took the many letters she wrote to him (together with a lock of her hair) back to Japan where they remained undiscovered for almost a hundred years. This work presents a rare opportunity for a "micro" biographical study of the Meiji period to assume a "macro" relevance in various aspects, not least the fascinating cross-cultural insights from a love story archive of original letters published here in their entirety for the first time.
About the author
Andrew Cobbing graduated in History from Bristol University, received his Masters degree in Japanese History from Kyushu University in 1993 and completed his PhD at SOAS (University of London) in 1997. After several years as Professor at Kyushu University he took up his current appointment as lecturer in history at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of
The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain and
The Satsuma Students in Britain; more recently, he translated one of the volumes of the official record of the Iwakura Embassy's Travels in the West.
Masataro Itami worked for many years as a producer for NHK, the largest television network in Japan. His documentaries on themes from education to gardening took him far afield on location work to countries including Britain, Ireland and China. He recently retired from NHK and he now lives in the coastal town of Zushi not far from Tokyo.
