Japan has a long history of travel literature. From the 10th-century "Tosa Diary," and even before, journals were built around the pleasures and tribulations of travel. These formed a recognized literary genre (kikobungaku), which, like all such, was heavily codified.
The domestic traveler was expected to see what had already been seen, to add a bit of patina to the famous site (meisho), to repeat not only the required feelings of "being on a journey" (ryoji) but also to include that poignant ingredient so necessary to Japanese travel literature, an indication of the loneliness caused by separation from one's home (ryoshu).
When Japanese began to travel outside their archipelago and tried to write about this experience, however, they discovered that not only were there no familiar sights to cope with but also that their conventional ways of regarding what they saw were no longer applicable. Their difficulties and solutions form the narrative of Susanna Fessler's very interesting account of Japanese Meiji Era travel literature.