page_title: Francis Hall (Japan)
section_title: Travel to Japan
hierarchical_section_title: Francis Hall (Japan) / Travel to Japan
caption_attribution_description: English: The Kanagawa Temple in which Francis Hall first resided when he came to Japan in 1859. Only known Hall Japan Photograph.
context_page_description: Francis Hall was an upstate New York book dealer who went to Japan in 1859 and became the founder of Walsh, Hall and Co, America's leading Trading House in 19th Century Japan. Hall served as Japan correspondent for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune during the final years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, publishing nearly 70 articles in the Tribune. While in Japan he kept a detailed journal that has become a major source on life in Japan during the middle of the 19th century. Having made a fortune in trade between Japan and the United States he returned home in 1866 and became a philanthropist and world traveler.
context_section_description: In 1859, after selling his business to his two brothers Frederic and Charles C., Hall decided to join Samuel Robbins Brown, Guido Verbeck, and Duane B. Simmons, three Dutch Reformed Board Missionaries, on a trip to Japan.  Hall had worked with Brown in the creation of Elmira College, one of the nation's first female institutions of higher learning.  Hall had also been close to Bayard Taylor, America's premier travel writer, who had visited Elmira at Hall's invitation on the Lyceum Circuit.  Taylor had gone to Japan with the Perry expedition in 1854 and had covered the expedition for Horace Greeley's Tribune.  It seems that Taylor served as an intermediary to Greeley who decided to hire Hall as the Tribune’s Japan correspondent.
  Hall took up residence in Kanagawa on Nov. 1, 1859, among a mere handful of Westerners then residing in the new Treaty Port  (Kanagawa-Yokohama).  His seven years in Japan covered the most momentous period, during which the old feudal regime gave way to the forces that made the Meiji Restoration.  Constantly surrounded by violence and the threat of violence, Hall remained remarkably calm and collected.  His journal records the life of the treaty port in great detail.  Hall quickly learned Japanese with some of the best students of the age, J.C. Hepburn, the great missionary scholar being one of the men with whom he studied.  Consequently what Hall recorded was not only the daily life of Westerners, but much of the daily life of the Japanese around him. Ethnographer, demographer, sports writer, social observer, economist, agronomist, diplomat, personal participant in momentous events, Hall left a remarkable portrait of Japan and the Japanese in his daily observations.  In addition Hall was interested in photography and a serious student of Japanese plants.  He was a friend of George R. Hall,  Robert Fortune and Phillipp Franz Von Siebold all major “plant hunters.”   Hall sent some of the first Japanese lilies to the U.S. which were sold at his brothers’ bookstore in Elmira.
  In 1862 Hall's business instincts convinced him to bring some of his capital from the United States and to start a new line of enterprise in Japan.  That year he joined John Greer and Thomas Walsh to found Walsh, Hall, & Co., a commission trading house that quickly expanded into the tea and silk trade. Under Hall's leadership Walsh, Hall, & Co's business flourished and the company came to be known in Japan as “Ame-ichi,” the “No. 1 American firm.”   Its position ranked with the greatest British houses such as Jardine-Matheson & Co. and Dent & Co.  Although Hall terminated his partnership with the Walsh Brothers and returned to the United States in 1866, the firm continued to use the Hall name because of the reputation for integrity he had created.  Walsh, Hall, & Co. was active in Japan until 1897 when John Greer Walsh died in Yokohama and the firm's remaining interests were sold to the Mitsubishi Corporation.
caption: The temple in which Hall resided in Kanagawa. Only known Japan photo made by Hall. Hall lived with J.C. Hepburn and his wife in this temple.
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