Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Japan Foreigners within the Samurai Class, c. 1550–1900

List of Contributors

Introduction

Otherness, Identity, and Experience within the Warrior Class in Early Modern Japan

            Samantha Perez

Part One: Redefining Service to the State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Chapter One

The Legacy of Korean-born Samurai in Early Edo Society

            David Nelson

Chapter Two

Christian and Non-Christian Samurai in the 16th Century: Takayama Ukon, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the Jesuit Missionaries

            Jonathan López-Vera

Chapter Three

A Fowle Mouthed Dutchman in the Shogun’s Court: Jan Joosten van Lodensteyn (1556-1623), Merchant and Samurai in Seventeenth Century Japan

            Gary Leupp

Chapter Four

A Very Foreign, Foreign Vassal: Williams Adams as Tokugawa Clansman

            Thomas Lockley and Lúcio de Sousa

Chapter Five

Apostasy and Identity: Giuseppe Chiara in Service to the Japanese State

            Samantha Perez

Chapter Six

Honorary Daimyo: The Yearly Court Journey to Edo and Dutch Attendance on the Shogun

            Michael Laver

Part Two: Constructing Images of Otherness in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter Seven

From Interpreter to Samurai: Henry Schnell’s Life Across the Meiji Revolution

            Mariko Fukuoka

Chapter Eight

Reading Georges Bigot as a Samurai

            Katsuya Izumi

Chapter Nine

Shadows Behind the Sliding Screen: Reinventing the Samurai in Mid-Nineteenth Century British Travel Accounts

            Annabel Storr

Chapter Ten

“What is Most Difficult to Understand?”: Lafcadio Hearn and Samurai Education

            Matthew Paul Smith

Index

Biography

Samantha Perez is an Associate Professor of History at Southeastern Louisiana University. Her research interests include diplomatic engagement and cultural communication in the early modern period, focusing on identity construction and performance in Italian encounters with England, Spain, and Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries. Recent publications include “Venetian Diplomacy under Mary I” in Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, and Fiction (2022), “Popular Participation in Renaissance Siena’s Romanitas Program” (Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 2023), and “Japanese Migration to Louisiana and the Localization of War, 1900-1945” (Louisiana History, 2025).

Matthew Paul Smith is an instructor in the English Department at Tulane University specializing in nineteenth century American literature, particularly Louisiana literature, literary regionalism, and the work of Lafcadio Hearn. His publications include a chapter on George Washington Cable in New Orleans: A Literary History (2019) and an article on the intersection between narrative, aesthetics, and plantation tourism in Southern Quarterly. He serves on the board of directors of the Japan Society of New Orleans and the editorial board of Southern Quarterly.

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