The vivid story of a tightly knit group of travelers--connoisseurs, collectors, scientists--who dedicated themselves to exploring and preserving what they referred to as Old Japan and Old Japan's lasting influence on the culture of Gilded Age America. After the Civil War, the United States--as cultural historian and critic Christopher Benfey argues--lost its philosophical moorings and looked eastward, to Old Japan and its seemingly untouched indigenous culture, for balance and perspective. Japan, meanwhile, was trying to reinvent itself as a more cosmopolitan, modern state, transforming in...