ABSTRACT
When jews began to return to Palestine in the nineteenth century, the Japanese, distant and preoccupied with their own affairs, paid little attention. The first Japanese to visit Palestine after Kibe's pilgrimage in the seventeenth century was the journalist Fukuchi Gen'ichiro (1841–1906). Fukuchi was a member of the government's Iwakura mission, which toured the United States and Europe in 1872–73. In February 1873, while the mission was in Europe, he was sent to Egypt to study the legal aspects of extraterritoriality that Western nations demanded for their own citizens residing in both Egypt and Japan. On his way to Egypt, Fukuchi visited Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine. He was in Palestine at the very beginning of the Jewish return to the working of the land, three years after the first Jewish agricultural school, Mikveh Israel, was established, and five years before the first Jewish colony, Petah Tikvah, was founded.
