I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 3 l v i i Toyohiko Kagawa (see Kagawa 1920). The novel’s huge commercial success pro- vided the funding for inviting Einstein and other prominent intellectuals such as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Margaret Sanger to Japan. When asked to name the three greatest people in the world, Russell had told Yamamoto: “First Einstein, then Lenin. There is nobody else.” Yamamoto wrote that he had then consulted the philosopher Kitaro Nishida and Ishiwara about relativity, in consequence of which he decided to allocate some 20,000 US dollars for Einstein’s visit, and dispatched his European correspondent Koshin Murofuse to visit Einstein in Berlin to discuss the terms.[23] However, according to Ishiwara, Yamamoto had consulted with Nishida and himself some nine months prior to Russell’s visit to Japan.[24] In yet a third account, Aizo Yokozeki, a former executive director of Kaizo-Sha, claimed that when Ishiwara suggested that the publishing house invite Einstein, they “did not know what to do.” They consulted with Tokyo physicist Hantaro Nagaoka who, while recommending that they invite Einstein, noted that the Japanese universities themselves had no funding to send Japanese students abroad or to invite Einstein to Japan (Yokozeki 1956). The first indication that Einstein had reconsidered his earlier rejection of the in- vitation came in mid-March 1922, in a letter to Paul Ehrenfest. He had been “un- able to resist the sirens of East Asia” (Doc. 87), and shortly thereafter wrote to Ishiwara that his planned departure would have to be delayed by one month due to the Naturforscher meeting in Leipzig (Doc. 118). By August, the Imperial Acade- my of Japan passed a resolution to welcome Einstein, and the Japanese government was preparing “a friendly welcome” (Doc. 283). Uzumi Doi, one of Nagaoka’s own students, sent Einstein a letter critical of relativity, along with copies of his re- cent anti-relativity papers, expressing the wish that Einstein might “live enough to return to the orthodoxy, freeing from the destructive spell that you have been fallen under so long since you were a youth of 26 years of age” (Doi wrote this letter, Doc. 206, in English). Already months prior to the trip, Einstein informed Zangger that he “yearned for solitude,” and the voyage to the Far East would mean “twelve weeks of peace on the open sea” (Doc. 241). The Einsteins embarked on their tour on 3 October 1922. They traveled from Berlin to Zurich, where Einstein most likely met with his sons, and then to Bern and Geneva, where he met his friends Michele Besso and Lucien Chavan. On 6 Oc- tober, the Einsteins continued by train from Bern to Marseille, and two days later set sail on the SS Kitano Maru from Marseille to the Far East via the Suez Canal. To the best of our knowledge, the diary Einstein kept on this trip was the first he kept during an extended absence from home. It was most likely intended as reading matter for his two stepdaughters, Ilse and Margot Einstein.[25] He wrote daily, on