The Soul of the Far East

About this book

In a temple or a garden, Percival Lowell believed he could see something distinctive about the Japanese spiritual imagination. He widened that observation into a theory of the cultures of East Asia.

The Soul of the Far East mixes travel writing, social commentary and a nineteenth-century attempt to describe the mentality of entire peoples. Its broad generalisations are shaped by Orientalist assumptions and should be read critically. The detailed observations remain valuable as evidence of how a Western traveller encountered Japan and projected his own ideas onto what he saw.