Just a few short years after the Meiji Restoration, American tourists began to arrive in Japan on steamer ships from San Francisco to Yokohama. Andrew Carnegie and his party were among them, arriving in Yokohama on November 16 and departing Nagasaki for China on December 3, 1878.

Hear more about his visit from JASP member Sam Kidder, editor of Our First Glimpse of Japan: Prominent American Visitors to Japan in the 1870s, and a local Carnegie expert at the first library he funded in the United States in Braddock, PA. 

Join the JASP for this free evening at Carnegie One Braddock on March 12, 2026. Light hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be provided. 

Samuel Kidder first arrived in East Asia as an undergraduate exchange student. After training and deployment in Korea as a U.S. Army linguist, he studied East Asian history at Harvard, the University of Washington, and as a Fulbright scholar at Yonsei University. After two years in New York City with Toyoda Tsusho Kaisha, he joined an Australian company, setting up their offices in Chicago and Seoul. He then entered the foreign service and was assigned tours in Seoul, Tokyo and New Delhi. The experience and knowledge he gained over a quarter of a century as a diplomat were invaluable preparation for his service as executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. Kidder’s first book, Of One Blood All Nations, examined the 12 years Ohio Congressman and Reconstruction leader John Bingham spent as America’s senior diplomat in Japan. Serving four presidents, Bingham’s tenure remains the longest of any American ambassador to Japan.