In the summer of 1877 he came home; and, having no impulse toward a profession, he went into the office of his grandfather, John Amory Lowell, where he was engaged in helping to manage trust funds. In this,—in learning the ways of business, for a time as acting treasurer, that is the executive head, of a large cotton mill, and withal as a young man of fashion,—he spent the next six years. With money enough for his wants, never extravagant, and with the increase that came from shrewd investment, he felt free in the spring of 1883 to go to Japan to study the language and the people. Both of these he did with his habitual energy, learning to speak with great rapidity, meeting socially Japanese and foreign residents in Tokyo, and observing everything to be seen. His own view of the value of travel and study is given in a letter to a sister seven years his junior, written apparently in the preceding summer when she was in Europe.[1] “I am very glad,” he says, “that you are taking so much interest in studying what you come across in your journey and after all life itself is but one long journey which is not only misspent but an unhappy one if one does not interest one’s-self in whatever one encounters—Besides, from another standpoint, you are storing up for yourself riches above the reach of fickle fate,—what the moths and rust of this world cannot touch. You are making, as it were, a friend of yourself. One to whom you can go when time or place shall sever you from others, and the older you grow, sweet puss, the more you have to depend upon yourself. So, school your mind then, that it may come to the rescue of your feelings—and a great thing is to cultivate this love of study while yet you are happy. For if you wait until you need it to be happy, you will, with much more difficulty, persuade yourself to forget yourself in it—Now as to particulars, you need never worry yourself if you do not happen to like what it is orthodox to prefer. You had much better be honest with yourself even if wrong, than dishonest in forcing yourself to agree with the multitude. That is, the opinion one most commonly hears is not always the opinion of the best. And again, always be able to give a reason for what you think and, to a great extent, for what you like.”

At once he was fascinated by Japan, its people, their customs, their tea-houses, gardens and their art. Much of this was more novel to his friends at home when he wrote about it than it would be now; although even at that time he saw how much Tokyo had already been influenced by Western ideas and habits. He kept his attention alert, observing, studying, pondering everything that he saw or heard. In fact, within a fortnight he lit upon two things that later led to careful examination and the writing of books. In a letter to his mother on June 8, in dealing with differences that struck him between the people of Japan and occidentals, he writes: “Again, perhaps, a key to the Japanese is impersonalism. Forced upon one’s notice first in their speech, it may be but the expression of character. In the Japanese language there is no distinction of persons, no sex, no plural even. I speak of course of their inflected speech. They have pronouns, but these are used solely to prevent ambiguity. The same is true of their genders and plurals. To suppose them, however, destitute of feeling, as some have done, I am convinced would be an error. The impersonalism I speak of is a thing of the mind rather than the heart. I suggest rather than posit.” In a letter, three days later, he tells of a friend whose jin-riki-sha man’s wife had the fox disease, “a species of acute mania supposed by the people to be a bewitchment by the fox. As the person possessed so regards it and others assist in keeping up the delusion by interpreting favorably to their own views, it is no wonder that the superstition survives.” Some years later an unexpected sight of a religious trance on Mount Ontake gave rise to a careful study of these psychic phenomena. Well did Pasteur remark that in the fields of observation chance favors only the minds that are prepared.

He hired a house in Tokyo, set up his own establishment as if he had been born and bred there, and after three weeks on shore wrote: “I am beginning to talk Japanese like a native (of America), and I take to ye manners and customs of ye country like a duck to the water.” He stayed enjoying the life, and the many friends he made, until the middle of July, when, with Professor Terry of the University, he started on a trip across the mountains to the other side of the island. The journey was hard, and at times the food and lodging poor. “Think,” he writes, “of the means of subsistence in a land where there is no milk, no butter, no cheese, no bread, almost no meat, and not over many eggs. Rice is the staple article of food, then vegetables, eggs and fish; the last two being classed as the food of the richer, and most eaten in the greater centres. Some country people are so poor that they have not rice, and eat barley instead. It is considered a sign of poverty to be without this universal article of diet, but in travelling about in out-of-the-way corners one meets with such places. I have myself lit upon such at the noon-day halt but have never been obliged to spend the night there.” But the scenery was fine, and the people unchanged by contact with the foreigner. He noted archaic devices still in use for pumping and boiling water; yet, in visiting a ruined castle, he saw that while the interior of the country had as yet been little affected by the impact of the West its political condition had been transformed with amazing speed. “We mounted through some seven barnlike rooms, up Japanese ladders to the top story. Sitting by the window and looking at the old feudal remains below, the moat with its stagnant slime and the red dragon flies skimming its surface, the old walls, the overgrown ramparts where now the keeper tries to grow a crop of beans, all tended to carry my thoughts back to the middle ages, or was it only to my own boyhood when the name middle ages almost stood for fairy land? And yet all this had been a fact, even while I had been dreaming of it. My dreams of Western feudalism had been co-existent with Eastern feudalism itself. So it was only eleven years ago that the last Daimio of the place left the castle of his ancestors forever.”

From his journey across Japan he got back to Tokyo on August 13th, where a surprise and an opportunity awaited him. On the very evening of that day he was asked to accompany a Special Mission from Korea to the United States as its Foreign Secretary and Counsellor. About this Dr. W. Sturgis Bigelow wrote to Percival’s father:

“After two days of unconditional refusal and one of doubt Percy has finally yielded to the wishes of the U. S. Legation here and accepted the position of Foreign Secretary and General Counsellor to the Embassy sent from Korea to the U. S.

“The position practically amounts to his having complete charge and control of the most important legation from a new country that has visited the U. S. since the opening of Japan. The U. S. authorities here are greatly pleased at having secured so good a man, as is natural. There were many applicants for the place.”

He goes on to say the hesitation was mainly due to anxiety to what his father would say, and adds:

“He distrusts himself too much, he has great ability, he has learned Japanese faster than I ever saw any man learn a language—and he only needs to be assured that he is doing the right thing to make a success of anything he undertakes, whether science or diplomacy.”