Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship.

The article focuses on Tomoe Kumojima’s *Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship*, which examines British women travelers’ writings about Japan during the Meiji era. Kumojima analyzes how these women navigated Japan’s ambiguous status between East and West, challenging male-authored orientalist fantasies by engaging in complex, relational encounters characterized by friendship and hospitality. The study centers on three travelers—Isabella Bird, Mary Crawford Fraser, and Marie Stopes—highlighting their nuanced interactions with Japanese people and cultures, and how these encounters reflected and complicated contemporary gender, colonial, and national dynamics. The work also critically engages with philosophical theories of friendship, proposing that Victorian women’s travel narratives offer a distinctive praxis that both embodies and challenges traditional, exclusionary models of relationality. [Extracted from the article]