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I won't lie, I agonized about using the word but it is the correct historical term and accuracy trumps sugar coating for me. At least in the footnotes I can denounce it for the racist, completely baseless crap it is.

When translating or making notes, I always look for primary sources, so my main source for the meaning of clematis was The Language of Flowers by Kate Greenway, a very popular artist at the time, published in 1884, 10 years before Bird's trip. http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/31591 It's well-known...

@NegiLol yeah that's probably for the best, they're pretty night and day. I usually tend to think of manga Bird as an idealized version, one who isn't so crotchety and casually racist...

@NegiLol All Isabella Bird's books are in public domain! You can read online or download the ebook for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2184

@Panino Katsu Kaishu is only a nickname, so it is very appropriate. His family name really was Katsu though. Clara's diary was very different from Bird's travel journals. She was much more focused on the social aspect of early Meiji Tokyo, in particular with the expats. She met quite a few...

@denzith Highly unlikely, she only met Miss Bird after her journey was over and she was waiting for a ship to take her back home. I picked up the book from the library since it looked interesting and it was only sheer coincidence that Miss Bird was mentioned in it. Incidentally Clara Whitney...

@dsid2814 Not really, since the first volume of Fushigi no Kuni no Bird came out a mere 4 months after the first volume of Golden Kamuy. If anything, they're both piggybacking off the announcement and subsequent construction of the National Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, Hokkaido.

@Knonderd While not as bad as Regency England, even around the early 1900s there was very strong prejudice against any woman with a child out of wedlock, and divorce was almost completely unheard of. It wasn't really until the post WWII generation there was a big change in mindset.

@DjAlexDubCheck thank you for mentioning it, somehow I managed to upload a pre-spell/grammar check version and didn't realize.

@chamllw "Product of their time" is too often used to excuse unpardonable acts. There's a difference between thinking bad thoughts and acting upon them. The real Miss Bird, for all her unflattering/occasionally racist descriptions, was essentially acting as an anthropologist. She never treated...

@chamllw There's not much info left about Maries besides his botanical work, but a contemporary biography lists an example where Marie's entire collection of dried plants of the region was destroyed by disgruntled Chinese locals because he was "difficult" with them. Read into that as you will...

@Panino Poor people definitely went around half-naked a lot of the time. When you only own the one set of clothes, there's not a lot of opportunity to wash it, so you'll try and keep it in decent condition by not wearing it while doing sweaty/smelly labor. That's a reason why tattooing was so...

@ROOKIE866 It's because of Miss Bird. No one's ever seen a foreigner before in that rural town so they're all gawping at her. But Isabella is so used to it anymore she doesn't even care.

@Tabitha Thank you for the comment! I'm very lucky that as a fan translator I have freedom to take time to do as much research into the book and any customs I don't know about.

@Tsuru1237 In the work this manga is based on, the author says "no foreign money except the Mexican dollar passes in Japan" (page 7). There's even a picture on wikipedia of a Mexican dollar coin with Japanese stamped onto it afterwards. It's definitely something that could be easily seen as a...

@Tsuru1237 Mexico uses the peso now but at the time of Miss Bird's journey it was frequently referred to as "the Spanish dollar" and widely used in the United States as well. Take a look at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1884074.pdf for more information

You can see some of the matoi designs used in Edo here: http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~komichan/matoi/matoiTop.html

@trimurti3 whoops, thank you for mentioning it, fixed!

@Nixnaw TB is spread by sneezing or coughing, the blood is a side effect of the virus destroying the lungs, so it's not contagious. She would have been in more danger of catching it by his coughing on her.

For more information about the Japanese giant hornet, I recommend: https://everywherewild.com/japanese-hornet/ To see the reaction to a hornet sting, watch: https://youtu.be/i7VMcMJBjD4