Writer Lafcadio Hearn sailed to Japan from New Orleans in April of 1890, beguiled in advance by a vision of "Fujiyama's white witchery," of a beatific Japan "with its magical trees and luminous atmosphere....and forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe."
--Christopher Benfrey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 222.
