In the history of the reception of ballet in Japan, it is generally accepted that Japanese audiences discovered this choreographic art at the beginning of the 20th century. If the Paris Opera Ballet, one of the most famous french troupes in the world, had only been known in Japan after the Second World War, we often ignored that, in 1862 and 1864, Japanese ambassadors visited the Paris Opera and attended opera and ballet performances. Although these two visits have attracted some interest among researchers, most of the details were unknown.
Thus, this article aims to show the situation surrounding two occasions of the visit to the Paris Opera by the Japanese ambassadors in the 1860s, so-called "Bunkyu-Keno-shisetsudan" and "Pari-yakujyo-shisetsudan," by analysing the documents held at the Archives Nationales in France. The research allows us to discover the event for receiving high personalities from "le pays du soleil levant."