ERNEST PICKERING was one in a short and uneven but extremely absorbing line of Western writers, intellectuals and publicists who wrote or spoke up for Japanese interests at a time when to do so was seldom fashionable, sometimes worth their while, but often to no obvious personal advantage. In an earlier volume in this series Carmen Blacker discussed both Sir Francis T. Piggott and his son Major General Francis S.G. Piggott; in a subsequent volume Antony Best analysed the attitudes of the Japanophile Major General Piggott. Close on the heels of Piggott, one could also include John William Robertson-Scott, whose initially bilingual magazine The New East, financed at a discreet distance from Whitehall by an arrangement with Sale and Frazar of Yokohama, and thereby the proceeds from their corner of the Chilean bird-dropping market, in 1916–18 attempted to distil all that was most positive between East and West, but foundered on the rocks of expatriate hostility and Scott's financial ineptitude. John Pardoe has written about Malcolm Kennedy. Anthony Best has followed the fascinating and erratic life and times of Arthur Edwardes. J.E. Hoare has written about the flexible Captain Frances Brinkley. The late Bill Snell wrote a gentle portrait of R.V.C. Bodley (‘Bodley of Arabia’), whose Japanese Omelette was prepared to a recipe devised more in Tokyo than Paris. Deborah MacFarlane provided a rounded picture of George Gorman, sometime editor of the North China Standard and the Manchuria Daily News. I have written about John Russell Kennedy, master builder of Japan's global propaganda schemes from about 1906 to 1923, and in an article on the Japan Chronicle, about the suborning by creeping subsidy of this once-noble bastion of feisty polemic and Kobe socialism.

Pickering's life and work overlap with many of the characteristics and attitudes of these personalities. First, he seems to have been touched with a mild dose of the condition associated with the first of these admirers, ‘Piggottry’: that is, the uncritical admiration of Japan and almost wholesale acceptance of her political economy and its extension to the case for Japanese policies, particularly in East Asia, and in Pickering's case, a consistent and arguable acceptance of Japan's growing economic clout, especially in the cotton industry.