San Francisco Meiji-era Imprint

Nichi-Bei tsushinbun, ichimei, Beikoku jijo [Communications Between Japan and America, or, The American Situation]

Kobayashi, Hikojiro

Publication: San Francisco: Nichi-Bei Insatsu Kaisha [Japan-American Printing Co.], 1902 (Meiji 35). First Edition.

Notes: A rare, very early, Japanese American imprint from San Francisco during the Meiji era. This book came off the presses of the Japanese-American newspaper in San Francisco on June 30, 1902. It offers an unprecedentedly detailed look at the Japanese in California and the US at the turn of the 20th century.

The book has a somewhat eccentric premise. In the preface it argues against proposals circulating at the time to romanize written Japanese and instead offers a defense of sorobun, a Japanese epistolary style characterized by formal grammar and the use of 候 (soro) at the end of each sentence. The book is structured as a series of formal essays on Japanese life in America, organized by topic, beginning with a history of the United States, the beginnings of Japanese immigration, and followed by reports on the Japanese communities throughout the country. There are separate sections on San Francisco; Florin (a settlement near Sacramento); Fresno; Seattle; Vancouver; British Columbia; Alaska; Hawaii; and New York.

Much of the business section focuses on agriculture, with some discussion of the import business and shops in cities. There is even a short chapter on prostitution (p. 105).

The final section of the book is devoted to sample letters on a wide variety of topics, many of which give details about the Japanese immigrant experience, like the example of what to write when one's labor contractor absconds with the payroll (p. 234) or how to explain the Thanksgiving holiday to people back in Japan (p. 235).

The author (1875–1926) appears to have come to the US as a teenager in 1891. He apparently lied about his age and attended high school in San Francisco, graduating in 1896. He must have been a well-regarded young man because the Japanese Consul in San Francisco, Ueno Kisaburo, wrote an introduction as did Merriman Colbert Harris, a prominent Methodist missionary in the Japanese community. In 1907, he turned up in Texas and Oklahoma screening moving pictures of the Russo-Japanese War. One article describes Kobayashi as the son of a prominent military officer in Japan. When he died at age 51, he was working for a fertilizer company.

[patterned glassine leaf], [title leaf], [pink glassine leaf], [calligraphy title by Ueno Kisaburo], [folding leaf with two halftone views of San Francisco on recto], [4 halftone plates of buildings], [12], 8, 276, [colophon], [11:ads] pages. Text in kanji with a furigana gloss using hiragana to clarify potentially ambiguous readings and katakana to phonetically transcribe kanji used for American placenames.

OCLC: 48959908 (University of Chicago). Bunsei Shoin reprinted the book in 2007.

Edition + Condition: First edition (with no indication of later printings). Small area of loss to spine, else very good in printed gray wrappers.

Item No: #366178

Price: $4,000