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This rare account by a foreigner working in Japan in the twentieth century provides a unique insight into this important period of Japan's history, complementing existing material. First, as a student interpreter, then an assistant in Korea, Vice-Consul in Yokohama and Osaka, Consul in Nagasaki and Dairen, and then Consul-General in Seoul, Osaka, Mukden and Tientsin. This is not a contemporary diary as such, but a write-up of notes made towards the end of White's career spanning thirty-eight years. Importantly, it includes reflective passages on the momentous developments of the later 1930s, as Japan moved onto a war-footing in China - and as Consul-General in the Chinese treaty port of Tianjin under Japanese occupation, White was in the middle of the growing tensions between Britain and Japan, and his post-war recollections are valuable. Like others who had lived and worked in Japan, he sought to come to terms with what had happened to the country in which he had spent so much of his adult life. Along the way he provides fascinating vignettes of his colleagues, some well-known, others less so, while his service in Seoul, Mukden (now Shenyang) and Tianjin provides fresh material on the Japanese colonial empire.
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