A New Urban Romance: The Cultural Experiences of Chinese People in Japan During the Late Qing and Early Republican Periods

Chinese people who traveled to Japan in the late Qing and early Republican periods witnessed firsthand the sweeping material changes in Japanese urban society after the Meiji Restoration. Against the backdrop of early globalization, we need to rethink the significance of travel to Japan as a form of cross-cultural exchange. We can also view these intellectual travelers as ordinary tourists and describe the lived experience of their everyday lives through the lenses of the body and emotions. This book argues that the "urban experience" shaped the spatial imagination of the world among Chinese travelers to Japan. In their literary accounts of city life, we can uncover the "extraordinary" hidden beneath the surface of the everyday. It was precisely these extraordinary cultural experiences that transformed their emotional worlds.