Basil Chamberlain was a professor at the Tokyo Imperial University. He wrote some of the earliest translations of haikus. His best known work is the encyclopedia Things Japanese. This was a popular one volume informal discussion of Japanese written in 1890. Chamberlain begins this pamphlet by saying, "Mikado-worship and Japan-worship--for that is the new Japanese religion--is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon. Every manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is made, every present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and...

Basil Chamberlain was a professor at the Tokyo Imperial University. He wrote some of the earliest translations of haikus. His best known work is the encyclopedia Things Japanese. This was a popular one volume informal discussion of Japanese written in 1890. Chamberlain begins this pamphlet by saying, "Mikado-worship and Japan-worship--for that is the new Japanese religion--is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon. Every manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is made, every present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and...

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Travelling in order to recover from a nervous breakdown, Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850 1935) arrived in Yokohama, Japan, in May 1873. He was immediately fascinated by traditional Japanese culture. At the same time, the national drive for modernisation in the wake of the Meiji Restoration had created a demand for teachers of English. Chamberlain was taken on as a tutor in the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, at the same time studying the Japanese language to such good effect that in 1886 he was made professor of Japanese and philology at the Imperial University (later Tokyo University). This...