“Frockcoats Walking in Line”: Noguchi Yonejirō’s Perception of Edwardian London

Abstract

This article is devoted to the construction of the image of London and Londoners in the early 20th century in the works of a Japanese writer and poet Noguchi Yonejirō (1875–1947) on his first trip to Britain in late 1902. The study utilizes the writer’s autobiography in English and the collection 13 Years of Britain and the United States in Bungo with extracts from his diary entries. The author examines the key characteristics of the city and its inhabitants in Edwardian times, according to Noguchi Yonejirō. It was discovered that the images of London of this period had a common origin – a “pre-image” of an idealized city which formed on the basis of memoirs of 1860–1870s Japanese travelers.
As a result, two contrasting images of London can be seen in Noguchi Yonejirōʼs writings. The first image of London is characterized by the predominance of negative characteristics in the texts of the Japanese writer. The reasons for this were that, in addition to the “pre-image,” Noguchi had been influenced by an earlier trip to the United States of America in 1893–1902 and the subsequent comparison of the British Empire’s capital with the American cities where the writer had previously lived. Later, the gloominess of city was replaced by a romanticized view of it as a graceful lady. The author suggests two reasons for the abrupt transformation of the image of London: the successful publication of the poem collection From the Eastern Sea, which was the purpose of Noguchi’s trip, and the writer’s gradual adaptation to the city, his acquiring ties with the locals, imitating Londoners and copying the habits, traditions, and foundations of the early 20^th century British society.