JAPAN THROUGH AMERICAN EYES: The Journal of Francis Hall -- 1859-1866. Edited, annotated and abridged by F.G. Notehelfer. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001, 466 pp., 33 plates. $30.

When Francis Hall arrived in Yokohama in 1859 he found that the place had "all of the newness of a Western town" and that is was just as dangerous. You started out for a walk "by putting a revolver in one pocket and copy of Tennyson in the other."

Even in the safer neighborhoods there was an off-putting curiosity. "One man, determined to know the whole mystery, examined closely my overshoes, then my laced garters minutely, then my pantaloons and, turning up the bottom of them, was passing his scientific investigation on my ankles and shin bones when I moved on, now knowing where his thirst for knowledge might lead him."

However, Hall, a businessman, was determined that Japan should be reformed. It was, after all, "a land which sat by itself far away -- absorbed in its own intolerant selfishness till America . . . came knocking at its gates and demanded admittance for herself and the wide world."