William Elliot Griffis

Born in Philadelphia in 1843, William Elliot Griffis served briefly in the Civil War, studied at Rutgers, and later became a Congregational minister, lecturer, and prolific author. He is especially remembered for his lifelong interest in Japan and East Asia, which grew out of personal contact with Japanese students and educators in the early Meiji era.

In 1870 he went to Japan to help organize modern schools in Fukui, and he later taught in Tokyo as the country was reshaping its educational system. Those experiences gave him material for some of his best-known books, including The Mikado’s Empire, which became an influential early English-language introduction to Japanese history and culture for American readers.

Griffis went on to write widely on Japan, Korea, religion, history, and travel, producing dozens of books over the course of his career. Today he is often valued not only as a popular interpreter of Japan for Western audiences, but also as a figure whose work captures the curiosity, limits, and ambitions of cross-cultural writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.