In the early 1880s, Kawada Ryokichi, a young samurai training at a shipyard on Clydeside, near Glasgow, met and fell in love with a Glaswegian girl shop-assistant called Jeanie Eadie and took the many letters she wrote to him (together with a lock of her hair) back to Japan where they remained undiscovered for almost a hundred years. This work presents a rare opportunity for a "micro" biographical study of the Meiji period to assume a "macro" relevance in various aspects, not least the fascinating cross-cultural insights from a love story archive of original letters published here in their entirety for the first time.