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Unsheathing the Katana. The Long Fortune of the First Two Japanese Embassies in Italy: Rediscovery and Rereading between Continuity and Discontinuity (1873–1905)

  • Alessandro Tripepi

At the end of the nineteenth century, Italy welcomed an official embassy sent by the government in Tokyo to make Japan more integrated into the new world scene it was entering. The cultural and political elites of the peninsula had the chance to discover, or rather rediscover, the charm of a world that had been lost over the centuries. This essay aims to reflect on the means and meanings of this late nineteenth-century encounter. Indeed, from this moment onwards, Japan increasingly became part of Italian mental horizons, in particular through the rereading and reuse of two precedents dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that saw the two countries dialogue and “discover” each other for the first time.

  • Keywords:
  • Italy,
  • Japan,
  • Iwakura,
  • Boncompagni,
  • mikado,
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Alessandro Tripepi

University of Milan, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-3221-7285

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  • Publication Year: 2022
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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Unsheathing the Katana. The Long Fortune of the First Two Japanese Embassies in Italy: Rediscovery and Rereading between Continuity and Discontinuity (1873–1905)

Authors

Alessandro Tripepi

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-579-0.06

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Rereading Travellers to the East

Book Subtitle

Shaping Identities and Building the Nation in Post-unification Italy

Editors

Beatrice Falcucci, Emanuele Giusti, Davide Trentacoste

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

232

Publication Year

2022

Copyright Information

© 2022 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-579-0

ISBN Print

978-88-5518-578-3

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-5518-579-0

eISBN (epub)

978-88-5518-580-6

Series Title

Connessioni. Studies in Transcultural History

Series ISSN

2975-0393

Series E-ISSN

2975-0261

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