a conference in Banff, Alberta, of the Institute of Pacific Relations, where the background and research papers from the Japanese delegation largely defended Japanese expansionist policies.<ref>Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: 193-94.</ref> On his way home from the conference, Nitobe's pneumonia took a turn for the worse and was rushed to the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Following an operation he died on October 15, 1933. Morioka, Nitobe's birthplace, and Victoria have been sister cities since 1985. Mary Elkinton Nitobe lived in Japan until her death in 1938. Mary compiled and edited many of Nitobe's unpublished manuscripts, including his memoirs of early childhood, and contributed greatly to the preservation of his writings. Legacy Nitobe was a prolific writer. He published many scholarly books as well as books for general readers (see below). He also contributed hundreds of articles to popular magazines and newspapers. Nitobe, however, is perhaps most famous in the west for his work Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), which was one of the first major works on samurai ethics and Japanese culture written originally in English for Western readers (The book was subsequently translated into Japanese and many other languages). The reception and impact of Bushido: The Soul of Japan were quite different in Japan and the West, however, with Japanese scholars such as Inoue Tetsujirō and Tsuda Sokichi criticizing or dismissing the book. It was not until the 1980s that Bushido: The Soul of Japan reached the height of its popularity in Japan, and is now the most widely available work on the subject of bushido. In the West, Bushido: The Soul of Japan has been a best-seller since the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, and many influential foreigners read the book, among them President Theodore Roosevelt, President John F. Kennedy and Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. It suggested to H. G. Wells a way to "solve the problem of combining progress with political stability".Introduction by Mark R. Hillegas to new ed. of H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 271 (Ch. 9, §3). The book has been criticized as portraying the samurai in terms of Western chivalry which had different interpretations compared to the pre-Meiji period bushido as a system of warrior values that were focused on valor rather than morals. This book nonetheless was a pioneering work of its kind. Nitobe's writings are