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What was Perry’s crew doing while he was negotiating, and what was everybody, including Commodore Perry himself, doing when the ships visited Shimoda and Hakodate, Japan? They were shopping! They bought lacquerware, porcelain, fans and a host of other things, but they also bought books. And one of those books was reproduced using a new technology and published in Philadelphia in 1855. In this talk I will explore the background to the arrival of the first Japanese books in America, but of course the problem was that nobody could read them. There was just one exception, a naval physician who took part in Perry’s expedition, but why did nobody follow his lead?SPONSORED BY THE FACULTY WORKING GROUP IN PREMODERN JAPANESE TEXTS AND THE PENN FORUM ON JAPANPeter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese Studies at Cambridge University. Professor Kornicki was awarded the Japan Foundation Special Prize (with Hayashi Nozomu) in 1992. He is a fellow of The British Academy, and in 2012, he was elected a member of the Academia Europea. Among his many publications are Languages, scripts, and Chinese texts in East Asia: Chinese Writing and the Rise of the Vernacular in East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Umi o watatta Nihon shoseki (Heibonsha, 2018).