In June of 1911, geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, novelist Fannie Caldwell Macaulay, and their friend Charlotte Smith embarked on an eighteen-month trip around the world. Over the course of their journey, the three companions would visit Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Java, Ceylon, India, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey before ending their trip in Europe and then returning to the United States. Japan, the first stop on their tour, was the focus of the trip; they spent three months there, and their itinerary included a two hundred-mile hike through the Central Mountain region of Honshu. This article analyzes the writing that Semple and Macaulay produced following the conclusion of their travels in Japan. While Semple produced well-received articles for geographical journals, Macaulay published The Lady and Sada San, a sequel to her best-selling 1906 novel The Lady of the Decoration. Although Semple and Macaulay wrote for different audiences and purposes, their work illustrates the ways in which a professed admiration for “the Orient” could coexist and be complicit with support for imperialism.

At a time when anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States was at a high point, Macaulay and Semple offered largely positive depictions of Japan. They generally resisted making assumptions about Japan based on racial stereotypes or the inferiority of non-Western cultures. Semple admired Japan's resourcefulness in dealing with the challenges of its natural environment, while Macaulay showed affection and sympathy toward her Japanese students and neighbors. At the same time, however, much of both authors' approval of Japan seemed to derive from Japan's openness to Western culture, and particularly the way the two authors saw the Japanese using Western models to pursue their own empire in East Asia. Thus, even as they challenged some of the racial beliefs that underlay U.S. imperialism, their overall message was one of support for imperialism. While most Americans in the early twentieth century would not have seen cultural and economic expansion as women's work, it is clear from the experiences of Macaulay and Semple that white women could provide ideological support for U.S. policies, thereby helping to create a culture in which imperialism seemed natural and even inevitable. Moreover, the fact that Semple and Macaulay wrote largely positively of Japan served to make those criticisms that they did offer even more powerful.

Ellen Semple and Fannie Macaulay were already established within their respective careers when they sailed from San Francisco in 1911. Both born in 1863 to well-to-do families in Louisville, Kentucky, they came of age during a period when white southern women were, to varying degrees, forced to rethink their roles. The Civil War began this process, and the generation of women born in the 1850s and 1860s were most willing to challenge traditional notions of femininity. The late nineteenth century saw elite white southern women taking on a variety of new roles that, though rooted in the domestic realm, nonetheless served to bring women into the public sphere. Teaching and writing—occupations that both Semple and Macaulay pursued—were two of the most common ways for white southern women to step outside the domestic sphere.Footnote ¹ It was also largely white women who took on the responsibility of memorializing and commemorating the Confederacy, a task that had its origins in women's emotional work as mourners but that also required them to raise funds, speak in public, and lobby government officials.Footnote ² White southern women also took up the task of writing histories of the Civil War and the Confederacy, believing that their personal experiences of the war allowed them to produce more accurate accounts than northern historians.Footnote ³ According to W. Fitzhugh Brundage, white southern women's efforts to shape public memory gave them a certain amount of power, as they “claimed for themselves the work of recording and narrating the progress of civilization, thereby laying claim to a new source of cultural authority.”Footnote ⁴ Being able to claim equal partnership with white men in bringing about progress was crucial to white women's efforts to take on public roles. Semple and Macaulay rarely addressed the Civil War in their work, and indeed they pushed the boundaries of white southern womanhood to an unusual degree. Still, these larger historical trends undoubtedly influenced them as they pursued careers and, in Semple's case, higher education.

Semple graduated from Vassar College in 1882 (she was one of about fifteen southerners at the school) and spent 1891–92 and 1895 studying with German geographer Friedrich Ratzel at the University of Leipzig. Ratzel, whom Semple called her “dear Master and friend,” was the originator of what he termed anthropogeography, or the study of the relationship between human beings and their geographical surroundings. After returning to the United States, Semple carried out her first original field research, studying the effect of geographic isolation on the Appalachian Mountain communities of Kentucky. She published her first book, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, in 1903. In 1906, Semple began teaching at the University of Chicago in the country's first department of geography and started work on her second book, Influences of Geographic Environment, an interpretation of Ratzel's ideas for American readers. Published in 1911, Influences was well received by the American geographical community. Semple undertook her trip around the world to celebrate the book's completion and success and to begin gathering material for new projects.

Like Semple, Fannie Macaulay was well educated; although she did not attend college, she was a student at the prestigious Science Hill Academy in Shelbyville, Kentucky. In the 1890s, Macaulay, Semple, and a number of other women began meeting weekly, calling themselves the Author's Club of Louisville. Here they critiqued each other's work and engaged in occasional hijinks they called “Inky Dinks.” However, by 1902, Macaulay's marriage to local businessman J. D. Macaulay had ended, and she had moved to Japan, where she became head of the kindergarten at a girls' school in Hiroshima. Her experiences there were the basis for her best-selling book, The Lady of the Decoration. The book was based upon letters Macaulay wrote to her niece, Alice Hegan Rice, a fellow member of the club and an author of popular fiction, who encouraged her to publish them. Macaulay returned to Louisville in 1907, and she and Semple renewed their friendship.Footnote ⁵ When they set out on their trip to Japan, they did so with the knowledge that they would be writing about their experiences for their fellow geographers, in Semple's case, and for the general American reading public, in Macaulay's. Both women had already established reputations as authorities in their fields.

Louise Newman argues in White Women's Rights that much of the authority claimed by white women like Semple and Macaulay derived from their position in the existing racial and gender hierarchy. “Civilization” was a gendered as well as racial concept; white women's physical, emotional, and moral qualities were believed to be “the evolutionary consequences of those patriarchal practices that characterized middle-class gender relations among (white) Christians.” White women were thus able to position themselves as the “epitome of social evolutionary development” and the racial equals of white men—and, paradoxically, no longer in need of the kind of patriarchal protection that had brought them to this elevated position. At the same time, however, white women claimed authority as “civilizers” over nonwhite women, who they believed were still in need of the strictures of domesticity in order to elevate them from their “primitive” state.Footnote ⁶

The fact that Semple and Macaulay were southern white women makes their relationship to the discourse of civilization more complex. While white women's activism in some ways challenged efforts to reestablish a patriarchal order in the postwar South, their position nonetheless relied upon the social elevation of whiteness and the acceptance of racial hierarchy. Macaulay and Semple grew up in an environment with a heightened awareness of racial differences. Women who, like Semple, went to college in the North often found that this reinforced their sense of southern identity, as they felt compelled to defend the South and the “lost cause” and “articulate what it meant to be southern in ways that those who never left the South” did not have to.Footnote ⁷ White southerners, too, frequently claimed a sort of natural expertise when it came to the “negro question,” an expertise that could potentially be transferred to dealings with nonwhite people outside the United States.Footnote ⁸ White women could claim this knowledge as well as white men. In Macaulay's writing about Japan, there is a definite hint of the southern lady's patronizing attitude toward “inferiors,” yet she and Semple both refrained from making judgments about Japanese people based on race. They might be different and even inferior in some ways, but these differences were rooted in culture, not biology. It does not seem that Macaulay and Semple deliberately set out to repudiate southern thinking on race, but that their experiences outside the United States caused them to reevaluate at least some aspects of racial thinking.

Travel and travel writing were one of the key ways in which white women manifested their authority. Japan was a promising realm in which to claim authority because it was relatively unknown to Westerners yet reasonably accessible; white women thus had the opportunity to establish themselves as experts before men had fully claimed that role. By the time Semple and Macaulay made their trip in 1911–12, there already existed a large body of travel literature by women. However, as Sara Mills notes in Discourses of Difference, there has been surprisingly little critical work done on women's travel writing. That which does exist tends to emphasize women travelers as “eccentric spinsters” who traveled to escape the constraints of Victorian life and positions them as exceptional individuals writing about their experiences. Critics rarely place them within the context of colonialism and indeed sometimes selectively read texts to position the authors as anti-colonialist. Moreover, women's accounts are more likely than men's to be “subject to accusations of exaggeration and falsehood” by both their contemporaries and modern critics.Footnote ⁹

Thus, though travel writing offered opportunities to women, it also contained pitfalls. Female authors had to walk a fine line between presenting their experiences as accurate and truthful while not posing too much of a challenge to male authorities. Macaulay took the more conventionally feminine approach to travel writing by presenting a personal narrative that focused on women and children, highlighting her concerns about the way she believed Japanese society failed to respect women and the domestic realm. Semple, on the other hand, because of her position within the field of geography, presented her travel experience as fieldwork and could speak authoritatively about subjects outside the domestic sphere, such as Japan's agricultural and imperial policies. But in both cases, the women's authority ultimately derived from their positions as representatives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, and their work helped reinforce U.S. power and the legitimacy of imperialism. The very fact that Semple and Macaulay were able to travel throughout Asia with relative ease and safety attested to the success of Western powers in bringing these areas under the umbrella of “civilization.” Then, by producing texts that criticized those aspects of non-Western societies that diverged from Western norms and praising those areas in which they conformed, they affirmed the superiority of Western, and specifically American, culture. As Cynthia Enloe points out, while colonization was a male-dominated enterprise, its success depended on the complicity of some women: “Without the willingness of ‘respectable’ women to see that colonization offered them an opportunity for adventure, or a new chance of financial security or moral commitment, colonization would have been even more problematic.”Footnote ¹⁰ In accepting the privileges granted to them by imperial structures and racial hierarchies, Semple and Macaulay were also complicit in the maintenance of the more oppressive manifestations of those structures.

As a nation both non-Western and thus quaint and exotic and a modernizing, imperialist power, Japan was a particularly popular site for American travelers and writers at the turn of the twentieth century. From the early seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, the Japanese government restricted the ability of its citizens to leave Japan and of non-Japanese to enter the country. Of the Western powers, only the Dutch East India Company was allowed to engage in commerce in Japan and only at one trading post in Nagasaki. This remained the case until 1854, when United States Navy Commodore Matthew Perry pressured the Japanese into signing the Treaty of Kanagawa, which opened two more ports to American ships and allowed the establishment of an American consul in Japan. Over the next few years, the United States (sometimes with the assistance of the French, British, and Dutch) obtained more concessions and the opening of more treaty ports.

When the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the Tokugawa shogunate, ushering in a period of modernization and openness to the West, it did not take European and American travelers long to discover Japan as a new and exciting destination. Travel agent Thomas Cook first offered a trip to Japan in 1872 as part of a round-the-world tour; in 1898, traveler Catherine Bond noted that her hotel in Yokohama was “full of Cook's excursionists from the States.”Footnote ¹¹ Japan's rapid modernization and adoption of Western technology in the 1870s and 1880s meant that by the time it became a popular tourist destination, the areas most frequently visited (generally the treaty ports) were already quite Westernized. This was, in fact part of its appeal: “It offered a taste of the ‘exotic East’ in a setting that shared enough cultural similarities with Western societies to make tourists feel comfortable.”Footnote ¹² Moreover, as Lorraine Sterry points out, Japan was seen as safe, “both physically and morally,” for women travelers, even those traveling alone. Japan seemed to offer an appealing combination of a picturesque, preindustrial society and the possibility of novel experiences and discoveries in a country that was relatively unknown yet comfortably accessible to Westerners.Footnote ¹³

Ellen Semple's first contact with Japanese people and culture probably came through Sutematsu Yamakawa, her classmate at Vassar College between 1878 and 1882. Yamakawa's presence in Poughkeepsie, New York, was a product of the same forces that opened Japan to Western visitors. In 1871, under the leadership of statesman Iwakura Tomomi, the Meiji government sent one hundred political leaders, ambassadors, and students on a two-year tour of nine American cities and twelve European countries. The Iwakura Mission “studied Western political, economic, military, industrial, and social institutions in order to determine what Japan needed to appropriate from the West in order to survive.” Also included in the mission were five girls, among them Yamakawa, who were to be left with host families in the United States to learn the “profession of ladies.” This was part of the Meiji government's effort to improve their image in the eyes of the West. Karen K. Seat notes that the first Westerners to enter Japan, “often assuming that women's status as wives and mothers reflected a country's level of progress and civility,” were shocked to find that women were not idealized as they were in the West. By sending a group of girls to be educated in the United States, the Japanese government hoped to “demonstrate to Western powers their interest in redefining gender roles in a way befitting a ‘civilized’ nation.”Footnote ¹⁴

Sutematsu Yamakawa (1860–1919) came from a samurai family in Aizu, the feudal domain of the daimyo Katamori Matsudaira, in what is now Fukushima Prefecture, north of Tokyo. Matsudaira was one of the last samurai to surrender to imperial forces during the civil war between the shogun and the emperor. Yamakawa and her family were involved in the 1868 siege of Wakamatsu. (Her future husband was part of the imperial forces, and he later liked to joke that she had made the bullet that hit him during the siege.) In 1870, when she was ten, the Iwakura Mission chose her as one of the “most promising girl-students in Japan, to be sent at government expense to America, there to be educated in Western languages and ways.” Yamakawa was sent to live in New Haven, Connecticut, with the family of Leonard Bacon, a Congregational minister. Like Semple, she arrived at Vassar in 1878. She graduated magna cum laude and was chosen to give an address, “British Policy towards Japan,” at commencement.

Yamakawa returned to New Haven for the summer to attend nursing school, as she intended to work for the Red Cross and find a job in education when she returned to Japan. However, like many of her fellow graduates, she found the lack of employment opportunities for women frustrating, and in 1883 she married Iwao Oyama (1842–1916), the minister of war. Yamakawa continued to work for the Red Cross and other charitable organizations and was a dedicated supporter of women's education in Japan. She was a trustee of the Peeresses' School and was instrumental in the establishment of the Women's Institute for English Studies (Joshi Eigaku Juku, now Tsuda College) in Tokyo, which was founded in 1900 by Umeko Tsuda, another member of the Iwakura Mission who had graduated from Bryn Mawr.Footnote ¹⁵

Though Yamakawa did not always keep in close contact with her Vassar classmates, she was happy to welcome American guests, knowing, as one recalled, “just what we would like to see.”Footnote ¹⁶ In The Lady and Sada San, Fannie Macaulay had her heroine meet with “Baroness Otani,” an encounter that may well have been based on her own visit to Yamakawa, Baroness Oyama. Her husband was also willing to use his influence to ease the way for American travelers in Japan. During the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, he led the capture of Port Arthur, a strategic port city on the Liaodong Peninsula and was the commander of Japanese forces in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). By the time of Semple's trip in 1911, he had been made a prince by Emperor Meiji and was in a position to provide the passes and guards she and her companions required for their two hundred-mile hike through the mountains of Honshu.Footnote ¹⁷ Semple's contacts with prominent members of the Japanese government and Macaulay's previous residence in and knowledge of Japan combined to ensure a successful visit. This was not simply a sightseeing expedition, but a field excursion during which Semple would make observations and gather information on Japanese agriculture. Japan would serve as a case study of the influence of geography—in this case, mountainous islands with limited arable land—upon agricultural methods. Semple presented the results of her expedition to the Royal Geographical Society in London during the last leg of her journey, in November 1912, and published her paper in the society's journal the following month.

Semple found in Japan proof of the general geographical principle that islands “supply the spur to agriculture” by giving it “an intensive, scientific character in order to feed an increasing population from a land area that cannot be increased.” She calculated that due to the mountainous terrain, infertile volcanic soil, and other factors, only some 14 percent of Japan's total land was arable. As a result, Japan “shows all the influences of a small, naturally defined area working themselves out to their logical conclusion. Its whole development, with the attendant economic and social results, has the definiteness and finish of a laboratory experiment.” The Japanese farmer had “succeeded in making a naturally infertile soil highly productive by intensive labour, by deep-down cultivation, constant weeding, abundant watering of crops either from rainfall or irrigation streams, and especially by repeated manuring during the development of the crop itself.” According to Semple, there were three distinctive characteristics of Japanese agriculture:

As she noted, Oyama, “who has turned Cincinnatus since the Russian war, has been trying to raise sheep and fodder grasses on his farm in the mountains of central Hondo; but he finds the experiment almost as expensive as the Manchurian campaign.” This led to a long discussion of how Japanese farmers had developed alternative methods of fertilizing in the absence of cattle and sheep.Footnote ¹⁸

Semple was also interested in the practice of interculture or “raising alternate rows of different crops in the same field, planting one earlier than the other, so that it matures and can be harvested first” in dry upland regions.Footnote ¹⁹ In her notes, she recorded her observations of “Gotemba at foot of Fuji (450 m elevation). In one field, alternate rows of maize & beans, or alternate rows of maize and sato imo (taro) or mulberry & maize, or mulberry & sato imo. Also in one row, alternating millet and daikon (white radish) and millet and bran, millet & daikon & millet & bran etc over the whole field. Also in one row alternating bran and carrot.” She saw “alternating rows of eggplant and sato imo near Kyoto, also tea and mulberry, and elsewhere, tea and sato imo in alternate rows.”Footnote ²⁰ Semple thought that though the practice of interculture was labor intensive (animals and machinery could not be used), it was nonetheless practical because it “permits a very intensive utilization of the soil and an even distribution of labour through a long period of the year. These are important considerations in a country where arable land is scarce and labour abundant.”Footnote ²¹ However, she concluded on a somewhat pessimistic note. Japanese farmers had done the best they could under difficult conditions, but after 1868 and the end of the seclusion policy, “the dwarf, hand-tilled rice and bean field of the Japanese farmer suddenly came into competition with the vast agricultural tracts in all parts of the world.” Farmers were suddenly being asked to support the “crushing burden” of Japan's “expensive career of a modern world-power.” The tax burden was causing small proprietors to disappear as “their farms are being mortgaged and absorbed into the larger estates.” Semple concluded, “The condition of the Japanese farmer to-day is therefore pitiable.”Footnote ²²

Semple's investigation of Japanese agriculture led directly to the second article to come out of her trip, “Japanese Colonial Methods,” published in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society in 1913. She argued here that the only proper response to the problems of competition and taxation was for farmers to “seek the larger fields of Japan's colonial lands, there to practice modern large-scale tillage.” Since 1895, Japan had acquired around 110,000 square miles of new territory, including Korea and Taiwan, but Semple believed that the Japanese government was “checking the natural and healthy colonizing instincts of the people.” For example, Korea seemed to offer an ideal outlet for Japan's surplus population. After Japan acquired Korea in the Sino-Japanese War, there was “an exodus from the home islands to the peninsula.” Yet fifteen years later, there were still only about 145,000 Japanese residents of Korea. Semple blamed this on the Japanese government's policy of leasing, rather than freely granting, public land to settlers. She reported that since 1907, only 83 of 925 Japanese applicants and 133 of 1,176 Korean applicants were approved and allowed to lease land. Semple argued that though the Japanese government “declares its intention to honor as many applications as possible, still the impression remains that we have here a policy of expansion cramped by precedent established in a small crowded territory where land has more value than men.” What was needed here was “the true colonial outlook,” where “land is useful primarily to attract men, and therefore should be given to them freely, coupled with additional inducements to settlers, like free transportation of family and effects.” Semple added that while a “spirit of initiative” and “untrammeled enterprise” was called “American,” it was really a universal “colonial” impulse that the Japanese government should embrace.Footnote ²³

Semple did, however, approve of Japan's “administration of Korean affairs and her efforts in behalf of her Korean subjects.” She believed that Japan had an easier task than the United States in the Philippines or Britain in India, “because Japan is dealing with a kindred people, living in a neighboring territory under familiar climatic conditions, having an allied civilization, and, what is more important, capable of being embodied in the body politic of Japan.” The goal of Japanese policy, as Semple put it, was to take a people who had been “brought to the verge of racial and political decay by centuries of misrule” and through “moral, physical, intellectual, and industrial regeneration” make them “a force in Japan's struggle for military and economic supremacy in the Far East.” Semple singled out Japan's educational policy for praise. Common schools for both boys and girls had been established; “for the first time, apart from what the mission schools could offer, the Korean girls have an equal chance with the boys.” Girls were given basic educational skills as well as industrial training, while boys also received “physical training to overcome Korean inertia. Military drill, football, baseball and tennis are pushed to the front, in order to arouse ambition and the corps spirit.” Semple reported that she had met the governor of Pyongyang Province, who told her that he believed the “incapacity” of the Koreans was due to “neglect” and that “with training they can attain the same technical efficiency as the Japanese, and under proper guidance their products can soon enter the world market.”Footnote ²⁴

While to some Europeans and Americans, Japanese dominance in Asia represented the imminence of the “yellow peril,” it caused some others to reevaluate their conflation of “civilization” and the West. Particularly after the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905, many Westerners gained a new respect for Japan. However, as Karen Seat points out, support for Japan “did not fully challenge the notion of racial hierarchy but merely placed Japanese at the top of the hierarchy along with Caucasians.”Footnote ²⁵ Semple placed the Japanese in the role of civilizers; though she criticized some of their methods, she clearly was not concerned about the prospect of Japanese control of Asia. Nor did she attribute Japan's problems to racial inferiority. Japan's divergence from Western modes stemmed from cultural differences rooted in geography, not race. If Japan could follow Western models more closely—and there was no reason to believe it could not if it chose to do so—it could do for Asia what white Westerners had done in other parts of the world.

Semple's talk on agriculture was well received by the Royal Geographical Society. In his concluding remarks, President John Scott Keltie complimented “the extremely keen and observant eye which Miss Semple must have directed to the objects of her inquiry.”Footnote ²⁶ While it would have been clear to the audience from Keltie's introduction that Semple's talk was based on her own experiences and observations, in the published paper she maintained a detached, scientific attitude and only once, toward the end of the paper, directly referred to her personal experiences. She bolstered her observations with plenty of statistics and included numerous photographs she had taken. A London newspaper reported that Semple “impressed the audience by her ready and confident replies to a learned professor who … challenged some of her statements.” Semple “quoted Blue-books and statistics in support of her contentions until the professor rose in almost trembling apology,” and the audience applauded.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, in her article on Japanese colonization, she supported personal observation with quantitative data. It was this way of transforming field observations into objective facts that allowed her to claim the status of an expert. Indeed, before Semple even returned to the United States, American newspapers were quoting her opinions on the Japanese system of education in Korea.Footnote ²⁸

Geographer Mona Domosh has argued that women travelers have largely been excluded from the history of geography because of the way in which the fieldwork procedures expected of “professional” geographers were “codified and regulated in order to advance scientific learning.” By the late nineteenth century, “fieldwork as geographic inquiry was limited to a few, elite, white males and was fostered in the male club atmosphere of the Royal Geographic Society in England and the American Geographical Society in the United States.” Women travelers hoped to prove that observations and insights gained from direct experience were just as valuable, if not more so, than information gained through formal channels of learning. But it was, Domosh argues, “this very claim to knowledge that eventually was used to deny women's experiences and exclude them from the status as professional geographers,” as subjective experience was “systematically taken out of the realm of scientific geography.”Footnote ²⁹ The club of male geographers, however, largely accepted Semple. For one, she was college educated and had studied with one of the preeminent authorities in the field of geography. This, along with her many publications and years of teaching experience, meant her work could not so easily be dismissed. Semple was also keenly aware of the need to present her work in a way that was suitable to her audience. In the case of her presentation to the Royal Geographical Society, she knew it was necessary to conform to scientific (i.e., male) standards of scholarship: objective, backed with official figures and statistics, and above all free from any evidence of personal interest in particular individuals.

It is useful, then, to compare Semple's work with her travel companion Fannie Macaulay's books The Lady of the Decoration and The Lady and Sada San, which were more typical of women's travel accounts. Published as the letters of one “Frances Little” to her cousin, The Lady of the Decoration recounts the experiences of a young woman teaching at a mission school in Japan between 1901 and 1905. Released in 1906 at the height of American interest in Japan, it became a best seller. Though elements of the book are fictionalized, there are many parallels between Macaulay and the unnamed “Lady.” Both were educated, well-to-do southern women who found themselves suddenly free from unhappy marriages (the Lady describes herself as a “widow who is not sorry”) and became kindergarten teachers, first in Louisville, then in Japan.Footnote ³⁰

Literary scholar Sara Mills argues that prevailing discourses of femininity largely shaped women's travel accounts. Many elements in Macaulay's books bear this out. According to Mills, while “men could describe their travel as individuals and as representatives of the colonial power, women could only travel and write as gendered individuals with clearly delineated roles.” Thus, women travel writers “constantly allude to femininity,” for example, in an “emphasis on the hazardous nature of travel for women.” Macaulay's Lady encounters such dangerous situations: she witnesses the effects of the Russo-Japanese War on Japan and then in the sequel finds herself in China during the revolution of 1911. Mills also argues that discourses of femininity are the reason “many of these women's accounts were written in the form of letters or diaries or a mixture of the two.” These forms could accommodate the kind of unstructured, personal, domestically oriented narratives women were expected to produce. Moreover, there is an emphasis on the “confessional mode” and self-revelation in women's accounts that rarely appears in men's texts. This is certainly true of The Lady of the Decoration, which is as much about the Lady's recovery from her disastrous marriage as it is about her experiences of Japan. The discourse of femininity also affects the way women address the colonial context of their travels. Mills believes that “women writers are more likely to describe their interactions with people rather than solely relating these accounts of the country to larger colonial issues or strategies.” This is not to say that it “escapes imperial ideology, but rather that elements of women's travel writing are more heterogeneous and that these elements may act as a critique of the colonialist enterprise since there is a stress on personal involvement and investment on the part of the narrator.”Footnote ³¹

Macaulay's and her protagonist's relationship to imperialism reflects this kind of ambiguity. To begin with, the very presence of mission schools in Japan was closely related to imperialism. Though missions have been portrayed as an “advance guard” for imperialism, the reverse was in fact often the case, with colonization paving the way for missionary efforts.Footnote ³² Historian Paul Harris argues that missionaries, even if they did not consciously promote Western imperialism, were nonetheless representatives of a culture that was “shaped by the experience of aggressive expansion and dominance.” They could thus serve as agents of cultural imperialism.Footnote ³³ Similarly, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo note that “even when American missionaries operated in environments in which overt American political power was absent, as was typically the case, missionary goals usually supported U.S. political goals.”Footnote ³⁴ Though Western powers never colonized Japan, it nonetheless held a special place in the plans of American Protestant missionaries. Japan voluntarily opened its doors to Christian missions and Western-style educational institutions, “fostering missionaries' hopes that it was to be the ‘gateway’ to Christianizing Asia.” And, since it was not formally colonized, “missionaries believed Japan held the potential to show the world what Christianity and Western civilization, voluntarily adopted by Japanese families, could do to transform a country into a free and successful land almost as good as the United States itself.” Missionaries often found themselves torn between their appreciation for Japanese culture and their personal relationships with converts and students, and their belief that (American, Protestant) Christianity was the only true path to success and happiness.Footnote ³⁵

The Lady's first impression on her arrival in Japan is that it is a “fairy-land, real true fairy-land.” The villages look like they “dropped right out of a picture book,” and “the streets are full of queer, small people who run about smiling, and bowing and saying pretty things to each other.” However, over time the “glamour” of Japan dims a bit, and she comes to feel that “the beauty and picturesqueness are largely on the surface.” As she says, “If ever I have to distribute tracts in another world, I am going to wrap a piece of soap in every one, for I am more and more convinced that the surest way to heaven for the heathen is the Soapy Way.” She quickly decides that there is no use in trying to learn Japanese but will concentrate on teaching her students English instead. The first thing she does upon taking over a class of older girls who are training to be kindergarten teachers is to teach them to skip. This leads to an “epidemic of skipping” among all the residents of Hiroshima, adults and children alike. At the end of her time in Japan, she is pleased to find the “timid, giggling, dependent little creatures” transformed into “capable, earnest young women” ready to start their own kindergartens throughout Japan.Footnote ³⁶ The Lady clearly feels great affection for her students—“I just long to take the whole lot of them to my heart and love them into an education!”—but she also seems to want to turn them into facsimiles of American children by teaching them American games and songs, giving them American toys, and so on. Moreover, she tends to refer to them as an undifferentiated mass, as her “yellow babies” or collectively as “Little Japan.” In some places she slips into dehumanizing language, as when she describes the peril of a moonlit night out on a sampan with a young man, with only “a pigtail who neither sees nor hears” for a chaperon. Here she reduces the boatman to a single physical attribute; she believes that, as a servant and a nonwhite person, he is incapable of observing her.Footnote ³⁷ Ultimately, what matters to the Lady is not so much her experience of Japan itself, but the way that being in Japan forces her to reevaluate her life:

Still, on the whole, a reader would probably come away from the book with a generally favorable, if somewhat patronizing, impression of Japan. Macaulay's feelings about Japan seem to have changed somewhat between the publication of The Lady of the Decoration and its sequel in 1912. In The Lady and Sada San, which she dedicated to Semple and Charlotte Smith, her “fellow wanderers through the Orient,” Macaulay focused on the position of women in Japanese society, about which she found nothing favorable. At the end of The Lady of the Decoration, the Lady marries her childhood sweetheart and returns to the United States. The Lady and Sada San picks up six years later when her husband, a doctor, is asked to join a medical research expedition investigating a plague in China. Lonely and bored at home in Louisville, the Lady decides to return to Japan for a visit and takes on the task of chaperoning Sada San, the daughter of an American father and Japanese mother who was adopted by a missionary and raised in the United States after her parents died. Now that her adoptive mother has also died, Sada San has been invited to live with an uncle in Japan, a situation that worries the Lady. She is certain that Sada will be shocked and disappointed by the “limited possibilities” available to Japanese women. She expects that the uncle will keep Sada a virtual prisoner until he can profitably marry her off, and she believes the Japanese to be much less tolerant of people of mixed race than Americans are.

Sada San's situation provided Macaulay with a platform for discussions throughout the book of the indignities faced by Japanese women: they were expected to show unquestioning obedience to their male relatives, who are free to “dispose of” them however they wish. The author also criticized divorce laws that allowed a husband, or even a mother-in-law, to send a wife away on a whim. The Lady's worst fears do come true, and the uncle arranges a marriage for Sada to a man who is “coarse” and drinks heavily. Fortunately the Lady is able to get Sada's wholesome Nebraskan sweetheart to rescue her by sneaking her out a window while the Lady distracts the uncle. In telling Sada's story, Macaulay criticized what she saw as the unbearably repressive aspects of Japan's patriarchal society but stopped short of questioning the American ideal of domesticity. Sada exchanges an arranged marriage for one based on love but still needs to be rescued by her suitor and protected within marriage. Moreover, the conclusion of the story suggests that Macaulay believed it was necessary for Sada to renounce her Japanese heritage and become fully American in order to attain happiness.

The Lady of the Decoration had been wildly successful, selling over 73,000 copies by December 1907, making it the best-selling book of that year. Contemporary critics found the book's popularity rather baffling; the Times Saturday Review of Books scathingly wrote, “Sugar and water with a dash of lemon are the recipe which the author has followed; even the local color which has been added is without seasoning. In short, while a very nice woman might have written such letters, they should have been reserved for the reading of her familiar admiring friends.” Forced to reevaluate its response in the wake of the book's success, the Times could do no better than say it was a “representative of that mystifying something in current literature which has struck the keynote of popular interest.”Footnote ³⁹ This “something” was perhaps Macaulay's combination of romance, missionary fervor, and gentle exoticism—but whatever it was, readers responded to it. The Lady and Sada San was not as popular as its predecessor, but it was successful enough to lead to a third book in the series, Jack and I in Lotus Land, in 1922. Macaulay also wrote two non-autobiographical novels set in Japan.

In contrast to the 73,000 copies sold of The Lady of the Decoration in its first year of release, the Geographical Journal containing Semple's article on Japan was distributed to just under 5,000 fellows of the Royal Geographical Society and around 375 libraries and other institutions.Footnote ⁴⁰ Sheer numbers do not necessarily translate to influence, but it seems safe to say that Macaulay's vision of Japan reached a far larger and broader audience than Semple's did during their lifetimes. In fact, Macaulay was known as enough of an expert on Japan to be asked to contribute to a volume called America to Japan: A Symposium of Papers by Representative Citizens of the United States on the Relations between Japan and America and on the Common Interests of the Two Countries. The book was published in 1915 and edited by Lindsay Russell, the president of the Japan Society, formed in 1905 for the “promotion of friendly relations between the United States and Japan and the diffusion among the American people of a more accurate knowledge of the Island Kingdom.” Macaulay was in good company; contributors included university presidents Nicholas Murray Butler, Harry Pratt Judson, and Charles W. Eliot, as well as other educators; authors and diplomats; politicians such as Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Jennings Bryan; and businessmen and bankers such as Elbert Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel. Macaulay addressed her essay to Japanese children and encouraged them to learn English, saying that peace and progress depended upon understanding based on a common language. While she believed that Japanese was “beautiful in form and expression,” it was too difficult to become universal.Footnote ⁴¹

Mari Yoshihara argues that white American women played an important role in both “complicating and replicating” Orientalist discourses. In Edward Said's original definition of Orientalism as “a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” it was largely men who were “making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” As Yoshihara notes, “Orientalism as a masculinist Western discourse marginalized white women in its public sphere and simultaneously used the status of white women and Western gender relations as a symbol of the superiority of Western civilizations over the rest of the world.” But at the same time, Western imperial enterprise provided white, middle-class women opportunities for “social and economic autonomy, independence, and status, and to exercise an agency and power” unavailable to them in the West. Using Asian objects, themes, and methods in their work provided white American women with new forms of expression, while participating in Orientalist discourse gave women “access to, and recognition in, the male-dominated world of arts and letters or institutions of scholarly and professional knowledge.” In addition, white women who traveled to Asia were to some extent freed from the conventions of Western gender and sexual relations, and gained “material power sustained by racial and class differences” over both Asian women and men.Footnote ⁴²

Participation in the culture of Orientalism provided concrete rewards for Macaulay and Semple. Macaulay gained the prestige associated with her position as principal of kindergartens in Hiroshima, financial independence provided by this job and her successful writing career, and a measure of recognition as an authority on Japan. While Semple was already well established within the geographical community before her articles on Japan appeared, by choosing to address the subject of Japanese colonization, she added her voice to one of the major conversations among Europeans and Americans who were following developments in Asia with interest. Semple demonstrated that she was not only an authority in the field of geography, but someone who had firsthand knowledge of Japan and could apply geographical analysis to current issues. Semple criticized some aspects of Japanese colonization but did not question colonization itself; Macaulay frequently expressed strongly pro-Japanese, as well as anti-Chinese and Russian sentiments. Since they saw Japan as following a Western model, in writing favorably of Japan in general, and Japanese expansion in particular, each of them tacitly lent her support to American and European imperialist projects. Western structures of imperialism and Japan's partial acceptance thereof gave Semple and Macaulay access to Japan. In turn, their experiences and knowledge of Japan helped support a culture of imperialism.