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On February 11th, 1892, Major Yasumasa Fukushima, stationed at the Berlin Embassy, departs on a journey of 9,000 miles, alone and on horseback, across two continents and seven countries to arrive at Vladivostok 488 days later, with the objective of inspecting the situation of the Trans-Siberian Railway construction. His daily diary entries tell of his perilous journey.

This expertly edited collection of the letters of a Protestant missionary couple in Japan in the years 1876-1892 offers vivid insights into the forces at work in that country during the period of rapid modernization known as the Meiji era. Nova Scotia-born Belle Marsh served first with the U.S. Presbyterian mission in Yokohama before becoming the wife of Thomas Pratt Poate, a young Englishman who left a government teaching post in Tokyo to become an American Baptist missionary and spearhead a Baptist campaign in the northern part of Japan's main island. The adventurous life of the Poate couple and their five gifted children, here reconstructed in its wider context by their historian grandson, foreshadows some of the problems of cultural interaction in our own time.