William Elliot Griffis was an American minister, lecturer and prolific writer who taught in Japan in the early 1870s and became a leading Western authority on the country. His 1876 book The Mikado’s Empire collected Japanese history and folklore for English readers — including the “two graves” proverb that, generations later and heavily reworded, would be misattributed to Confucius. Griffis recorded the saying; he did not coin the revenge version, and neither did the Chinese sage.