Acknowledgments
This volume came to fruition thanks to the wonderful work and support of many people. The editors are deeply grateful to all the contributors for their patience and cooperation over the two and a half years that were necessary for the project to reach completion. Warmest thanks go to Susan Bowring for her masterful copyediting of what has proven to be a very demanding manuscript. Heartfelt gratitude goes to Prof. Richard Bowring for his invaluable help in honing the English of many chapters as well as for his moral support and wise advice throughout the whole project. We extend our indebtedness to the translators of the chapters that were originally written in Japanese: they are dutifully credited at the end of specific chapters. A special thanks go to Joseph Bills and Frederick Feilden for consistently going well beyond the call of duty, helping with several tasks that were outside their remit. Joseph Bills has also helped in creating the index, for which we are most grateful. A big thank you also to Sandra Karakas for creating wonderful free-standing images for the cover and the frontispieces of the three parts of the book.
We would like to thank Inge Klompmakers, who believed in this project since we first brought it to Brill in 2021. Her passion for making quality books will always be inspirational. We would like to extend our appreciation to Uri Tadmor and Patricia Radder for their support in getting the book published with Brill. We are especially indebted to Prof. Joshua S. Mostow and the editorial board of Brill’s Japanese Studies Library for their support in including this volume in their series. It is a great honor to be part of it.
The editors join the authors in thanking the many institutions, archives, and private collectors who have allowed us to reproduce a generous number of images. They are all acknowledged in the list of illustrations and the captions.
We would like to thank the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and Emmanuel College for the financial help received in offsetting the production costs of this book. Some of the translations were financially supported by the Cambridge Humanities Research Grants Scheme. We are very grateful.
Laura and Yukiko
Cambridge and Tokyo, 11 September 2023