Having spent his childhood in Europe (notably Greece, France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom), he moved to the United States at age nineteen, where he became a journalist and reported on several local cultures such as the Creole culture. Lafcadio Hearn was one of the main contributors to the dissemination of knowledge about Japanese culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This changed with the beginning of the Meiji Era and the reopening of its trade barriers with the Western world, which had only been exclusive to Dutch market before 1853. For nearly two centuries, however, Engelbert Kaempfer’s writings were the main source of scientific information for Westerners about the country.

The Jesuit arrived in Japan during the 16th century. This edition contains only twelve chapters.

However, a following edition was published in one volume in 1907 by Bernard Tauchnitz. The original version book is divided in two volumes, containing seven and eight chapters respectively (fifteen in total). Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan were originally published in English, but was later translated into several other languages such as Japanese and Polish. After that, he released one book every year until The Romance of the Milky Way and other studies and stories (1905), published one year after his death in Tokyo, 1904. It is also the first works on Japanese culture Hearn published. It is a collection of impressionistic travel sketches, reporting on Hearn's first travels in Japan between years 18.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (first series) is a book written by Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, also known as Koizumi Yakomo, in 1894.

Glimpses of unfamiliar japan