We will explore the responses of the first Westerners to visit Japan, beginning with the Portuguese merchants of the mid-16th-century and continuing with the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries who were eventually expelled roughly a century later and the Dutch and British traders of the early 17th century. By the middle of that century, only the Dutch remained and Japan became closed to other Western visitors until the country was reopened by force by the United States in the mid-19th-century. Later in that century, many Westerners spent time in Japan and brought back their differing visions of the country. We will see what Westerners made of Japanese society, art and leisure, including gardens, theatre and the Tea ceremony. We will look at the literary and pictorial record and at the objects Westerners sent back home. A final session explores the reciprocal journeyings of the Japanese to the West.