187

Toichiro Harada.

Nyuyoku, a memoir of a Japanese man's years in New York.

Tokyo: Seikyosha, 1914
46 plates, one in color. [2], 5, 1, 18, 498, [1] pages. 8vo, publisher's gilt pictorial cloth with title "New York" on front board, minor wear; intermittent foxing. 

A Japanese-language memoir of a man who lived in New York City in the early 1910s. We don't know what brought him to the States, but he was apparently a newspaper editor in Osaka in the 1920s. The book is illustrated with views of the Statue of Liberty, the Flatiron Building, Grand Central Station, the Washington Square Arch, Grant's Tomb, Central Park, and more. 

Karen Kelsky's 2001 book "Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams" discusses Harada's frustration with American women, noting that "Harada's memoirs treat women as the objects of a kind of sexual rage" (page 54). She translates some of his observations from his pages 282 to 286 into English: "Because their society has indiscriminately raised them up far too high, all American women are arrogant and full of themselves. . . . The greatest faults of New York's women are their rudeness and their bad manners. A woman came to New York who said she had previously acted as tutor to the British royal family, but I was so disgusted with her display of these faults that walking down the street with her, I lost my patience again and again, and wanted to grab her and give her a piece of my mind." He describes suffragists as "cheerful and intelligent, and quite astonishingly skillful in their ability to charm a man," and New York women generally as "geisha in training" who "view every man as either a manservant or a customer." He then quotes a journalist who concludes that New York women "are lacking in the display of all the unique essentially womanly qualities such as grace and poetics." What New York's women thought of Toichiro Harada is unrecorded.

6 in OCLC, and none traced at auction.

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