AMERICA'S FIRST REGULAR correspondent in Japan was Edward H. House (1836-1901), who went to Tokyo in the third year of Meiji for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. A native Bostonian, House had gained early prominence in two ways: through his devil-may-care lifestyle as a member of the New York Pfaff beer cellar's bohemian gang, which included the likes of Walt Whitman and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and through his graphic reports for the Tribune on John Brown's execution at Harper's Ferry in 1859. He also wrote a much-discussed series of articles for the Tribune in the spring of 1860 on the first Japanese embassy to the United States. In the next decade, House created a sensation with his coverage of the Civil War, helped to launch Mark Twain's eastern seaboard career, accompanied the humorist Artemus Ward on his British debut, and managed the London theater where the Shakespearean actor Henry Irving won some of his earliest enthusiastic notices. Not satisfied merely with journalistic prominence, the restless House sailed to Japan in 1870, as the Tribune's first regular Tokyo reporter, and within weeks he had begun to irritate many of the profit-seeking foreigners with his enthusiastic essays on Japanese customs and progress. By the end of that year, he had literally adopted the Pacific archipelago as a new homeland, and by the middle of the decade a Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shim-bunwriter would say, on hearing that he was about to launch his own newspaper: “Mr. House … neither sneers at Japan nor scorns the Japanese. That makes him unusual among foreigners.”

House's life merits scrutiny for many reasons. His articles and lobbying efforts with opinion leaders helped shaped early American attitudes and policies toward Japan; indeed, when the United States returned its share of the Shimonoseki indemnity to Japan in 1883, House was given the lion's share of the credit. His editorials in support of issues like treaty revision and better treatment of women provide a lucid summary of many key features of Japan's public discourse in the 1870s and 1880s. And his role in several diplomatic crises sheds a powerful light on the imperialist environment that shaped Meiji Japan's struggle toward modernity.