John Henry Dixon, Natsume Soseki's Highland Host

A 1902 Visit to Pitlochry, Scotland by Japan's Greatest Modern Novelist

In 1902 Natsume Soseki traveled from London to Pitlochry, Perthshire. He was invited there by John Henry Dixon, an ethnographer from Yorkshire who had settled Scotland after retiring from the law at thirty-three. In the nearly four decades since, Dixon, a dilettante of the highest order, had written books on local history and bought a massive Victorian pile called Dundarach. After the completion of the Highland Railway turned Pitlochry into a tourist destination, Dixon, the town’s scout leader and a close friend of Lord Baden-Powell, opened Dundarach as a Boy Scout lodge.