This article explores two early anthropological works on Japan that were produced in Britain during the nineteenth century. The first is James Cowles Prichard's chapter on Japanese culture from the third edition of his Researches into the physical history of mankind (1844). It represents the first formative study by a leading ethnologist to tackle the subject. The second is Edward Burnett Tylor's essay on Japanese belief for the Journal for the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1877). During the later decades of the nineteenth century, information about Japanese society still remained relatively incomplete. When Tylor wrote his important essay about Japan in the 1870s, he still drew on the same sources Prichard had used three decades earlier. Very little new ethnographic information had travelled back to England by the second half of the nineteenth century. As a result, researchers continued to struggle when writing about Japanese culture. What we get in these nineteenth-century writings is best described as anthropological ‘glimpses’ of Japan. By exploring these early sketches of Japan, a more textured disciplinary history emerges that helps to complexify and challenge the heroic and teleological narratives of British anthropology's supposed success story.