Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: Isabella Bird, 1878

After eighteen days of rolling over “desolate rainy seas”, the City of Tokio reached Cape King early on 20 May 1878. Isabella Bird, then 46, wrote her first letter to her sister the next day from the Oriental Hotel in Yokohama. The whole book takes the form of letters like this one, each headed with the place and date.

Location precision: The pin marks the centre of Yokohama; the book names the Oriental Hotel but this route does not locate it.

On Monday 10 June she left the Legation in Yedo (Tokyo) at 11 a.m. and, carried by kuruma runners at an easy trot, reached Kasukabe at 5 p.m. after twenty-three miles. Her letter admits the nerves: Ito, her interpreter, was her sole reliance, and he might prove a “broken reed”. She calls Kasukabe a good-sized but miserable-looking town.

Location precision: The pin marks the centre of present-day Kasukabe; the inn she stayed in is not identified here.

Bird made Nikkō a long halt in June, lodging in Kanaya's house, which she called a Japanese idyll. She went back to the Yōmeimon gate of the Tōshō-gū shrine day after day, contemplating its splendour “with increasing astonishment”, and tells how Hidetada brought the body of his father, Ieyasu, here in 1617. The shrine is now part of the Shrines and Temples of Nikkō UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the richly carved gate is said to be one you could look at until sundown.

Visitor guidance: The Yōmeimon gate stands inside the Tōshō-gū shrine precinct; her lodging was a private house and is not marked.

Her river packet was a stoutly built boat forty-five feet long and six broad, sculled by one man. She wrote from Niigata on 4 July and again on 9 July, having spent over a week in the town. Her verdict on the place was grim: she never experienced a week of more abominable weather.

Location precision: The pin marks central Niigata; the Mission House and the landing are not located here.

She came down the Omono river to Kubota on 23 July: nine hours by water instead of two long days by land. Kubota was then the capital of Akita prefecture, a purely Japanese town of 36,000 people. On the whole, she wrote, she liked it better than any other Japanese town.

Location precision: The book names the town of Kubota; the pin marks the centre of Akita city, not a building from the book.

In Yezo, now Hokkaido, she wrote from Hakodate on 13 August 1878 that she found the climate more invigorating than that of the main island. The waters of the land-locked bay were, she says, as blue as the Adriatic. The port had been fully open to foreign trade since 2 June 1859.

Location precision: The pin marks the centre of Hakodate; her lodgings are not located here.

Bird calls Biratori the largest of the Ainu settlements in the region (she writes “Aino”). She spent three days and two nights in an Ainu hut and, through an interpreter, asked about religion and customs. Her host Benri was the chief of Biratori. Today Biratori is home to the Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum. Her account is a nineteenth-century outsider's view.

Location precision: The pin marks the town of Biratori; the exact site of the chief's hut is not recorded here.

Visitor guidance: The Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum is in the Biratori area; the pin marks the town, not her host's hut.