The chronicle of Disenchantment in the Book Sensaciones de Japón y China, by Arturo Ambrogi

Abstract

When Arturo Ambrogi visited Japan in the early twentieth century, he did not go as a diplomat, a journalist, or a writer. He went as a chronicler, an adventurer, and an observer. Hence, Ambrogi could perceive and narrate elements that other Latin American writers, who also shared their stories of Japan, could not. The chronicles of Ambrogi is not another vision of Japan as an “exotic” country that match a typical collective imagination of the time, but they are about a country that shows progressive transformations towards becoming an industrial empire and a tourist destination. The chronicles also set down the roots of an empire which culture is westernized through fashion and vulgarity.