Richard Gordon Smith was an English naturalist who traveled the Far East. Throughout his long traveling journey he devoted himself to collecting and cataloging samples of animals and plants to send to the British Museum while he wrote a series of newspapers collecting observations and impressions of his travels.

He arrived in Japan in 1897 and was fascinated by the richness and exoticism of its folklore. Three years later he had to return to England but fell seriously ill in Fiji and was forced to return to Japan. In 1905 he traveled for the last time to his native England but decided to return to Japan, where he settled definitively.

In 1908 he published Traditional Tales of Japan. After his death, the Japanese government granted him the Order of the Rising Sun of the Fourth Degree for his work as a popularizer of Japanese culture.