Our careers are a mixture of necessity, happenstance, and design. Some have it easier than others, but our life experiences, be they trials and tribulations or the need to change direction as we take on family or other responsibilities, including those that come with our jobs, always offer potential for personal development. It is up to us whether we take advantage of the hand we are dealt, even if it takes us along paths that we do not expect. We are, indeed, fortunate that Jim followed the meander that he did. He would have been a very different scholar had he spent his career in academia, but, equally, he would have been a very different diplomat had he not written a PhD thesis on Japanese treaty ports during the Meiji era.

There have been few academic posts in East Asian subjects until recently, resulting in some of our best scholars having to traverse circuitous routes as they develop the expertise for which they come to be appreciated. Jim renders meaningless our custom of pigeonholing those who we rely on for bringing us knowledge of the East Asian region into a single category, as an academic, a diplomat, or an expert commentator. Indeed, he slots neatly into all three of these categories, and more. It comes as no surprise that he dislikes the ‘scholar-diplomat’ label, because that too readily dilutes one element at the expense of the other. We admire his writing, and his interventions at symposia and conferences, precisely because he refuses to slot neatly into our expectations of what such categories mean. And, since his retirement from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he has also enjoyed a late career as expert commentator, one that would have been likely to incur the wrath of government during his diplomatic career. Not that we should really consider him a normal diplomat, since his day job was as a member of the FCO Research Department (now Research Analysts), and from there he took postings to Seoul, Beijing and Pyongyang. In fact, in ‘Diplomacy in the East’ (2007), he remarks that his only training in diplomacy was his PhD training.