This portrait details the sailing and surveying exports of Captain William Broughton in the Pacific and North East Asia.

This portrait considers the significance of two nineteenth-century plant collectors in Japan, Robert Fortune and John Gould Veitch.

This essay details the life and career of teacher, explorer, and missionary Edward Gauntlett (1868-1956) in Japan, and his contributions to English education in the country as a whole.

This essay considers the photographic career of 'camera artist' Henry George Ponting (1870-1935), arguably the best British photographer to have worked in Japan, especially as it relates to his photographs of Mt. Fuji and other places and people in Japan.

This portrait details traveller and writer Isabella Bird's (1831-1904) deep fondness for Japan.

This chapter covers the life of Walter Weston (1861-1940) an Anglican clergyman who is also responsible for pioneering mountain climbing as a popular leisure sport in Japan. 

Thomas Wright Blakiston (1832-91), explorer, engineer and ornithologist, is best known for his discovery of 'Blackiston's Line' a zoogeographical boundary along the Tsugaru Strait.

This biography offers an account of the life of Yamao Yōzō (1937-1917), one of the ChōshÅ« Five and a pioneer of engineering and education in the Meiji period.