Henry Smith is Professor Emeritus of Japanese History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. in history from Yale University in 1962 and his PhD in modern Japanese history from Harvard University in 1970. He taught at Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Barbara before joining the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University in 1989. After writing his dissertation on the history of the prewar Japanese student movement, he turned to the study of the history of the city of Edo-Tokyo, co-curating with Peter Gluck and Taki Kōji the exhibition Shinjuku, Japan: The Phenomenal City at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1974-75. Over subsequent decades, his writing has explored the depiction of Edo-Tokyo in color woodblock prints (as well as techniques and colorants in this medium), and the history of the Akō Incident of 1702–03. His interest in the One-Mat Room of Matsuura Takeshirō began in 1987 when he was director of the study-abroad program of the University of California at International Christian University in Mitaka, Tokyo, where he first encountered the surviving One-Mat Room in in the Taizanzō villa, its current location, resulting in Taizansō and the One-Mat Room (in English and Japanese, Hachiro Yuasa Memorial Museum, International Christian University, 1994).