The euphoria that marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union (USSR) has long since vanished. We now know that there was no “end to history”, and that the Cold War rhetoric of capitalism versus communism masked deeper, more long-lasting problems. The opening of once closed archives and the publication of memoirs allow us to examine the course of the Cold War in great detail and to reach a clearer picture of how the Cold War began and how it was waged. Professor Westad, Director of the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics, concentrates on how the conflict was played out in the Third World, that rapidly disappearing term once used to cover all countries that were not a) superpowers – the USSR and the USA; or b) developed countries, such as most of Western Europe and Japan. He argues that the Cold War was essentially a conflict between the two superpowers, and that their historical experiences had much to do with the way this developed. Both were slaveowning empires until the 1860s. They were each convinced of their own righteousness and their obligation to bring enlightenment to the lesser breeds on their respective peripheries. Despite establishing huge empires in the adjacent lands, they both distinguished their actions from what they regarded as the more reprehensible imperial actions of countries such as Britain and France, and later Japan. The Americans opposed central power, or the power of the collective, both of which reminded them of the European past that they had rejected. The Russians, on the other hand, embraced collectivism as a means of incorporating their new subject peoples. In the 20th century, these positions became even more entrenched. Both championed freedom, but their concepts of freedom were very different, and positions that favoured their respective state interests were soon seen as the “right” way towards freedom for colonial or semi-colonial peoples. After 1917, on one side there was fear of communism, on the other fear of imperialism. Until 1945, little more than rhetoric marked these two positions, both the USSR and the USA retreating into relative isolation which intensified the fear of the unknown on both sides.

World War II changed all that.

Just occasionally, a book comes along that changes one's whole perspective on a subject that seemed very clear and settled. Michael Auslin's study of Japanese diplomacy from the arrival of Commodore Perry in Tokyo (then Edo) Bay in 1853 until the successful renegotiation of the treaties in from 1894 onwards is just such a work. Auslin argues that, contrary to the general picture painted by others (including me), the Bakufu, the effective rulers of Japan when Perry arrived, were not passive actors in the face of this threat from outside. He also questions how far developments in China influenced the course of events in Japan, pointing out that the way the treaty system developed in Japan proved to be very different from what had happened in China. Admittedly, once or twice imperialism showed its iron fist, but on the whole Japan escaped the imposition of a regime of control that favoured foreigners. The round of treaty making that really began with Townsend Harris's treaty of 29 July 1858 – the earlier American and British naval treaties having been found wanting when their august negotiators got home – saw Japan emerge in a much better condition than China. Japan was not semi-independent, as China seemed to many. Foreigners remained under tight control, with limited access to the interior of the country. There was no Japanese Imperial Maritime Customs, under foreign control and largely staffed by foreigners as was the case in China. None of Japan's treaty ports were able to achieve the quasi-independence that marked Shanghai from the 1850s to 1941. In Japan's most important treaty port, Yokohama, the foreigners effectively abandoned any real attempt at self-government as early as 1867, were never able to claim it back. The British and the French maintained small garrisons at Yokohama into the 1870s, but there was nothing ever in Japan to compare to the Beijing Legation Quarter, which from 1900 until 1941 had permanent garrisons and where Chinese law effectively did not run. Other Chinese cities had foreign garrisons and a permanent foreign naval presence. Japan escaped all this, Auslin argues, because its negotiators had very clear ideas from the beginning. They were also adept at playing one foreign barbarian off against another, for they quickly realised that the Western powers were not united in their approach, however much they might appear so at first sight.

JAPAN'S TREATY-PORT PRESS

By the time of the Meiji restoration’ the foreign language press, the majority of whose journalists were British, was an established feature of Japanese treaty-port life. This was not surprising. From humble beginnings at Canton in 1827, newspapers had spread to most foreign settlements in East Asia. They were sometimes little more than advertising sheets but they met a local need and ‘mail editions’ gave the foreign communities an international voice. Their history is often obscure, though much can be gleaned from the publications themselves, especially from the editorial quarrels which enlivened their pages and from the court cases which sometimes resulted. John Reddie Black was the only journalist to write a book on local history.

The first foreign-language newspaper in Japan, the Nagasaki Shipping List and Advertiser, started at Nagasaki in 1861. Its founder was A.W. Hansard, an auctioneer and jobbing printer. The annual subscription was $20 Mexican, the accepted currency in the Japan ports, for four sides of news and advertisements four times a week. In subsequent years, over forty newspapers and some thirty magazines and periodicals were published in settlements whose foreign population, excluding the Chinese, was at its maximum about 5000. Most were produced in Yokohama where, by the mid-1890s, some 2500 Western residents lived. One contemporary noted, perhaps tongue in cheek, that this showed ‘a remarkable degree of journalistic activity’, indicating ‘a positive craving for news on the part of the public’. Other factors included international rivalries, personal ambitions and subsidies. A craving for news was probably low on the list.

Even successful papers seldom sold more than five hundred copies. The result was high subscription rates averaging $24 per year, with overseas or special editions extra. Advertisements were lucrative; Yokohama rates in 1882 were up to four times those of major London newspapers. Also important was job printing. One British official in 1885 claimed this was the chief source of profit for many papers, and another wrote in 1897 that it was ‘highly lucrative … far more so than the newspaper’, for one Nagasaki publisher. Capital equipment was cheap. The Japan Gazette was still printed on hand presses in 1891. In 1893 the presses of the Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express were valued at only $1000, although paper and binding materials were worth $7000. Salaries were a major cost.

Journalists who write about Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, often dwell on the supposedly “Stalinist” characteristics of its high-rise apartment blocks, and their reduction of human beings to ant-like creatures. To the writers, these blocks are clearly a bad thing. Yet some three hundred kilometers further down the Korean peninsula, in the South Korean capital of Seoul, tower blocks seem even more domineering. Clustered together in miniature cities within the greater conurbation, they have become the preferred dwelling place of the affluent and successful. South Koreans boast of their tower blocks and the urban infrastructure of elevated roadways, underpasses and bridges that go with them, comparing Seoul's Yŏŭ ido Island to Manhattan. There is nothing negative about this assessment of such buildings.

In this fascinating book, the French geographer Valérie Gelézeau examines how this came to be. Her work is party based on direct observation through living in Seoul, and interviewing urban residents. As well as examining how people live in the towers, she also includes much information about traditional Korean housing and explains how today's city dwellers manage to preserve some traditional practices in the very different spaces that they occupy today. She traces the origins of the modem dwelling complexes to the industrial complexes established in the Japanese colonial period, but argues that the real take-off for high-rise buildings was only practical with improvements in water pressure and the reliability of electricity supplies, for central heating and elevators, that had to wait until the economic transformation of South Korea under President Park Chung-hee began to take effect. It was thus only in the late 1970s that the widespread use of buildings over four-six stories became possible. Before then, the typical Seoul “high-rise” was about five stories, with no elevator and with a water tank on the roof. In a society where few people owned their own cars, there was little or no need for parking places. Some of these low highrises survive, now updated, with the water tank used only for emergencies, and where possible, with parking spaces for the explosion in car ownership since the mid-1980s. In general, however, the mighty blocks that now dominate so much of the city have replaced these early efforts.

Park and those around him then encouraged such buildings for a number of reasons.

Zen masters have had rather bad press of late, what with the series of sex scandals at American Zen centres and the shocking revelations in some recent histories about the fascism, militarism, and even rabid anti-Semitism of some of the leading Zen masters of twentieth-century Japan. Official apologies have been issued, public mea culpas have been uttered – it has all made Zen begin to look suspiciously like an ordinary run-of-the-mill religion and the claims of Zen masters to moral and spiritual superiority seem as spurious as those of any garden-variety cult guru.

This is especially significant because, as Steven Heine and Dale Wright point out in their preface, from the very beginning Zen made much of its masters: ‘In contrast to most other forms of Buddhism, sacred literature in Chan or Zen consists of religious biographies, or stories about the lives of Zen masters’ (p. v). These biographies, which emerged first in late Tang and early Song China, ‘valorised’ the masters to such an extent that they ‘created, in effect, a new kind of Buddhism, and a novel image of enlightenment that held inspirational power for centuries’ (p. v). Masters are so important to Zen because of its leading idea of the transmission of enlightenment ‘from mind to mind’, from master to student. Thus, the religious authority of any particular school of Zen, its ‘seal of authenticity’, depends to a very large degree on the authenticity of its masters’ ‘enlightenment’.

One issue that inevitably arises in any scholarly study of this sort is the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘the master of hagiographic legend’ and what might be called the ‘real-life person’ or perhaps ‘the master of historical reality’. Although it is obviously far more difficult to distinguish between the two when one is dealing with someone who lived, say, in the eighth rather than in the twentieth century, a number of the authors here in fact attempt this daunting task and do a very convincing job of it. Mario Poceski's chapter, for instance, is exemplary in this respect. Dealing with the major Chan Master Baizhang Huaihai (J. Hyakujō Ekai, 749–814), Poceski identifies ‘three key hagiographic transmutations of Baizhang's religious persona: paradigmatic Chan iconoclast, patron saint of Chan monasticism, and sophisticated teacher of Chan doctrine and contemplative practice’ (p. 4).

I was not a normal diplomat. I joined the British Diplomatic Service in September 1969 as a member of the Research Department, and remained formally a member of that cadre until I retired in January 2003. This Department was staffed by area specialists, as is its successor, Research Analysts. Their specializations might take them on overseas postings, but unlike mainstream officers, they would return to London to continue working in their area of expertise. My specialisation was East Asia and I completed my PhD just after joining the Diplomatic Service. I spent most of my time working on Chinese foreign policy. However, my grounding in diplomacy came from my doctoral thesis. Understanding and explaining the ways of the western powers in Japan in the 19th century, together with the mysteries of extraterritoriality and similar topics generated by their activities, provided the only theoretical training in the conduct of diplomacy that I ever received.

SEOUL: 1981–85

I was appointed Head of Chancery and Consul for Seoul, Republic of South Korea (ROK) in January 1981. Seoul's diplomatic community in the early 1980s was somewhat distorted. Until 1905, Korea had been an independent kingdom, which had been reluctantly forced to open its doors to foreigners from the 1870s onwards. The Japanese had led the way in 1876, to be followed by the United States in 1882 and then a number of European countries. Korea was less important than either China or Japan in terms of trade, and the western foreign community was always small. When Japan declared a protectorate over Korea in 1905, the western presence declined even further, and the legations closed. Some, including the British, reopened as consular posts, which continued after Korea became a Japanese colony in 1910. These posts remained small, and all were left vacant for long periods. The British consulate-general, in the heart of the city, occupied a position on a slight hill and was very much the centre of western social life until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 led to the internment and eventual repatriation of the staff.

Postwar Korea was very different. The peninsula was divided, and eventually two separate states emerged, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK – North Korea), backed by the Soviet Union, and the ROK, backed by the United States.

The ‘fascinating’ thing about fascism, to use Susan Sontag's famous word, is the way it supercharges politics with aesthetics and religion – to such an extent that politics itself becomes almost unrecognizably transformed into something approaching an aesthetic mood or a spiritual exaltation. As Sontag also pointed out, fascism has its gentler side: the cult of beauty, for instance – although the fascist ‘cult of beauty’ does have an inconvenient habit of transmogrifying into a cult of violence and death. Nonetheless, as Alan Tansman shows in the present study, its initial come-on can be gentle and pleasing indeed, particularly in Japanese fascism, which, in its cultural form, often assumes a fascinatingly seductive guise by clothing itself in the finest raiment of the native literary and artistic tradition. In stark contrast to the Nazi taste for Wagnerian ‘sublime grandeur’ (as in Leni Riefenstahl's Hitlerglorifying film, Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the will, 1934]), ‘the aesthetics of Japanese fascism manifest a melancholy tonality’ stamped by ‘popular Buddhist sensibility’ (p. 15). In other words, Japanese fascism, quite naturally, assumes its own national cultural style, which is often ‘the traditionally sanctioned aesthetics of the pathos of melancholy loss, revolving around the affective pull of a feminine figure – a figure that appears across culture, whether in a complex modernist essay or a sentimental popular movie’ (p. 15).

Needless to say, this makes the Japanese fascist aesthetic rather less obvious to us, rather less easily detectable in literary or art works, than its pompous, bombastic, and triumphalistic German and Italian equivalents. Although there have been more overtly political, more ‘European-style’ Japanese fascist writers – Mishima Yukio, for instance – in this study Tansman is uninterested in an over-obvious fascist such as Mishima, whom he dismisses as ‘more a figure of parody than a force of politics’ (p. 257). To prove his point about both the subtlety and the pervasiveness of the Japanese fascist aesthetic, he prefers to focus on those who seem more or less apolitical at first glance, putative ‘pure aesthetes’ such as Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Shiga Naoya, Kawabata Yasunari, and Kobayashi Hideo, because ‘it is precisely those creations of the imagination most resistant to political readings that best reveal the aesthetic strains of fascism … In these works we can see ideology refracted through beauty and discern its consequences for the quality of social life’ (p. 1).

Odd Arne Westad is a professor of history at Yale University and has a distinguished record of publication on East Asian history and politics and the Cold War. This new work is based on the Edwin O Reischauer Lectures that he gave at Harvard in 2017. Such lectures generally fall into two categories. They either present a piece of ground-breaking research in an accessible form or, as Westad does here, provide a valuable and wide-ranging assessment of a particular subject.

The China-Korea relationship has puzzled the West since at least the 18th century. While Korea seemed to be a separate political entity from China, those wishing to trade or have another form of involvement with the country soon came up against an obstacle. Koreans insisted that they could not do things without Chinese permission, while still maintaining that Korea was an independent country. Westerners, convinced that their system of fully independent states, developed after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, was the norm, failed to see in the Chinese approach characteristics that had once prevailed in Europe. Westad hints at this but does not explore it in detail. He also hints at, but again does not examine, the long-standing special relationship between China and Korea in the 1,300 years before the Ming dynasty came to power in the former in 1368 and the Chosun dynasty in the latter in 1392. During that time, Chinese dynasties had been closely, if spasmodically, involved with Korea as the disparate kingdoms on the peninsula slowly coalesced into one unified entity. Sometimes, the relationship had been a peaceful one. From China came a writing system that has faded from use only in the last seventy years. Korean government, architecture, city layout and religion all had their origins in China. In time, of course, they were modified and changed to become something recognisably different, but even today Chinese links can be discerned in both Koreas.

Not all interactions were peaceful. The Yuan dynasty that ruled China from 1271 to 1368 and its predecessor, the Mongol empire of Kublai Khan, treated Korea very harshly and effectively imposed subjugation on the country. The Koreans welcomed the overthrow of the Yuan and its replacement by the Ming. But the experience of the Mongol period also led them to seek ways to accommodate their large neighbour. This approach was known as sadae (‘looking up to the great’).

For their size, it is remarkable how the small foreign communities of the East Asian treaty ports produced so many newspapers. Titles such as the North China Herald or the Japan Mail are well known to scholars even if they are not always highly regarded as accurate sources of information. What is less well-known are the more light-hearted publications. Distant reflections of the London Punch or similar ‘comic papers’, they were usually short-lived and did not attract the subventions that kept many more conventional newspapers going. There are few library holdings and even those that do exist are now almost unusable, such was the poor quality of the paper used.

Two cartoonists are associated with Yokohama. Charles Wirgman from Britain was the first. He arrived in 1861 as a correspondent for the Illustrated London News for which he continued to work until the late 1870s. He was not a trained artist but was competent. A number of authors used his work as illustrations, including Sir Rutherford Alcock, Britain's first minister to Japan. And from 1862, he began to produce the Japan Punch. This was a pale imitation of the London original but it was clearly popular with the Yokohama community. Wirgman too was popular even with those who were mocked in his cartoons. The Japan Punch appeared spasmodically while Wirgman worked for the Illustrated London News. Then it became his main, if limited, source of income and appeared more regularly until he left Japan in April 1887. Although he soon returned, Punch was never restarted. Wirgman died in Yokohama in 1891.

Georges Bigot was a younger man, born in 1860. He trained at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, which he left at 16. He worked as an illustrator before arriving in Japan in 1882. There he worked as a teacher and a painter. He and Wirgman perhaps naturally came to know each other; there were not many resident artists in Yokohama. Wirgman included a cartoon of Bigot in the July 1882 issue of Punch, which carried a favourable review of an album of the new arrival's etchings in December the following year. And when Wirgman left Japan, Bigot's new publication, Tobae, carried on the tradition of comic journalism for a couple of years longer. There was even a formal handover in that the last issue of Punch showed Tobae taking over.

This is a remarkable document. Originally written in 1947 in English while the Lindsays were in Cambridge, Massachusetts – itself no mean accomplishment – it has been twice translated into Chinese and published, but this is its first appearance in published form in English. It tells a fascinating story.

Hsiao Li Lindsay was born Li Hsiao Li (Li Xiaoli in the current pinyin system of transliteration) in 1916, the youngest child of a wealthy landowner in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province in North China. Unlike many girls at the time, she received a good education, first locally and later in Beiping (Beijing). From 1937 to 1941, she studied at Yenching (Yanjing) University. One of her teachers was Michael Lindsay, who had arrived at Yenching in 1938 to teach Economics, Logic and Scientific Method. Lindsay was tall and very English – she had trouble following his Oxford accent, which led to extra classes and eventually to a proposal of marriage. They married soon after her graduation in the summer of 1941. It is not clear how much she knew of the full extent of his extracurricular activities, but she soon learned. North China had been occupied by the Japanese since the summer of 1937, but communist guerrilla forces operated in the hills nearby. Lindsay admired the stand that the guerrilla forces made against the Japanese, and, was in contact with them from 1938. As the struggle with the Japanese continued, Lindsay, an amateur radio engineer, smuggled radio parts to them at the weekends and in the vacations and generally helped with communications. This was dangerous but foreigners were still protected by extraterritoriality and the Japanese left Yenching alone, whatever they knew or suspected about the contacts of some of the foreigners. Others involved in supporting the guerrillas included the Canadian, Dr Norman Bethune. Marshal Nie Rongzhen, the commander of the communist forces and later the father of China's nuclear bomb, pays tribute to Bethune, Lindsay and others in his memoirs.

The attack on Pearl Harbor, which fell on 8 December 1941 in Beijing, changed all that. The Lindsays and some other foreigners fled just before the Japanese arrived to arrest them, and began what was to be four years with the guerrillas.

In its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, Cantopop defined the look, feel and – with its lush, ultra-refined production values – even the sound of Chinese cool.

The Making of a New Epoch

1984 was an important year in the history of Hong Kong, as I have argued elsewhere. A taxi strike, during which angry drivers ‘occupied’ main roads to protest against a proposed steep increase in registration and license fees, triggered a night of rioting in Mong Kok, the busiest district in Hong Kong, on 13 January. It was the first major riot since 1967 in the territory. In fact, the social unrests plaguing it had been brewing for years. The early 1980s was a time of uncertainty for the city and its people, as their future after 1997 was still under negotiation. The infamous tumble of Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, on the steps of the Great Hall of the People after her meeting with Deng Xiaoping, the then leader of the People's Republic of China, in Beijing on 24 September 1982 was seen as presaging the fall of British governance in Hong Kong. The people's confidence in the city's future hung by a thread, and subsequently the stock and property markets plummeted to rock bottom. The Sino-British Joint Declaration was formally signed by the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom on 19 December 1984, and Hong Kong people finally faced the reality that the then British colony's return to its motherland in 1997 was inevitable.

The spread of television represented the birth of an art form which introduced a new sensibility into Hong Kong society.

A New Kind of Collective Sensibility

While there have been studies that contested ‘the notion that television has a powerful identity-conferring ability’, Eric Kit-wai Ma has noted in his research on Hong Kong television that ‘in the light of the Hong Kong case, these studies can only reach the conclusion that television is not an effective agency for realizing cultural imperatives when imposed from above.’ Given the distinctive history of Hong Kong, those studies may not be totally applicable. As Ma further argued:

Although the history of Hong Kong television can be traced back to the 1950s, when Rediffusion Television (RTV) – operated by Rediffusion (Hong Kong) Limited, a subsidiary of Rediffusion in the UK – launched paytelevision service in 1957, Hong Kong audiences did not have free-to-air television until the Television Broadcasting Company (TVB) launched it in 1967. During its early years, TVB relied heavily on foreign-purchased dramas until the localization of its productions was gradually completed in the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, RTV turned free-to-air in April 1973, and Commercial Television (CTV), the third free-to-air television station in Hong Kong, was founded later in 1975. The Hong Kong television industry changed ‘from a monopoly to a tripartite dominion’.

The Peking Embassy is today, in staff terms, one of Britain's larger embassies. As well as a senior ambassador, there is a minister, three counsellors and a host of other officers. Yet the offices are cramped and overcrowded, contrasting poorly with Tokyo and Seoul, to say nothing of the grandeurs of Washington, Paris or Moscow. It was not always so, and how the present situation came about is one theme of this essay. Another is the curious manner in which the Chinese and British (and indeed most foreigners) wish to keep to their own ways has conspired to reduce mutual understanding and has led foreigners to accept a ghetto-like existence. This, while in theory designed for protection, has in practice left the foreigners exposed to the occasional outbreaks of anti-foreign feeling which mark China's recent history. Underneath all runs the tension in Sino-British relations. For the Chinese, the British were the imperialists. Until 1959, the British Embassy compound, in the heart of Peking, was a potent symbol of past humiliations. The Chinese were determined to eradicate this presence. They succeeded in 1959, although the old antagonism seems unlikely to disappear at least until the last symbol of British imperialism, Hong Kong, is restored to China in 1997.

This is not an essay in grand history or politics. Rather, it is an examination of the way in which relationships between states are affected by matters to which few normally give much consideration. Perhaps diplomatic relations are as much a matter of bluff as anything else. If so, it does matter whether the ambassador sweeps out to negotiations from a majestic compound in the heart of the city or slips away from an office well away from what matters. But Peking is changing, and China's diplomatic and economic successes in recent years may finally end the isolation of foreigners.

THE MOVING CENTRE

The British Embassy in Peking is nowadays mainly housed in two Chinese-built, western-style buildings on guanghualu in the Jianguomenwai district of Peking. one is the Ambassador's Residence, the other contains most sections of the embassy. (The cultural section – staffed from the British Council which is not formally permitted to operate in China – has moved to a new office block near the Sheraton great Wall Hotel, on the city's third ring road.)

I. A TALE OF TWO TERRORISTS

On November 25, 1970, the internationally famous writer Mishima Yukio, a frequent nominee for the Nobel Prize, shocked the world by committing an act of suicidal terrorism. With a half dozen members of his private army, the ‘Shield Society’, he entered the office of the commanding officer of a Tokyo military base and forcibly took him hostage – delivering sword blows to some other officers in the process. Then he coerced the commander to call an assembly of his troops on the parade ground outside. While helicopters hovered noisily overhead, almost drowning out his words (the media-savvy Mishima had summoned the Press that morning to record what he called his ‘little show’), he stood precariously perched on the balustrade of a balcony high above the assembled troops and harangued them at the top of his voice. If he had fallen off at that point, as seemed quite likely, his ‘attempted coup’ would have come to the abrupt and farcical ending that perhaps it deserved. But, luckily for Mishima, he kept his balance, and for ten minutes or so tried to incite the troops to rebel against a ‘corrupt’ government that had consigned them to the ‘shameful’ status of a mere ‘self-defense force’ – in such sad contrast to their proud erstwhile role as the ‘Imperial Army’, the shield of the divine emperor and the scourge of all his enemies. It was as if he were addressing a pathetic paper tiger that had been de-fanged and de-clawed, imploring it to recover its fighting spirit.

No doubt Mishima knew beforehand that it would be a hopeless attempt; in fact, he had already made meticulous plans for what he would do next.

May 1986 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the consecration of the Anglican pro-cathedral of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, the central church of the Anglican community in Korea. This great church is situated on the edge of Seoul's old foreign quarter, Chŏ ng-dong, and is an imposing brick and granite building. Once it stood out clear from its surroundings, but today it is in among the highrise hotels and the tall office blocks which are so characteristic of modern Seoul.

It is not a well-known landmark. Many of Seoul's citizens whether Christians or not are familiar with the Roman Catholic cathedral in Myŏng-dong, and also with the newer churches south of the Han River, but very few are even aware of the Anglican cathedral's existence and even fewer know how to find it. Crowds of people visit sights such as the National Museum or To˘ksu Palace every day, but in 1983, an official of the Anglican cathedral noted that only about fifteen visitors came to the cathedral each day. Yet on Sundays and festivals, several hundred Koreans come to worship. There is also a small but devoted group of foreign Anglicans (or Episcopalians as they are generally known in the United States) who attend the Sunday mass in the cathedral crypt.

The general lack of knowledge about the cathedral is reflected in guide-books and other tourist aids. Indeed, few guide-books mention the cathedral at all, and those that do are frequently not very informative or sometimes wrong. Even Seoul city authorities, who have designated the cathedral as “Local Tangible Property No. 35,” have erected an incorrect notice outside the building.

This neglect is a pity. The cathedral has long been regarded as one of the most attractive western-style buildings in East Asia. The story of how it came to be built, and its survival during the troubled times of the past sixty years is an interesting one both in itself and as part of the wider history of the Anglican church in Korea. Together with the nineteenth-century buildings of the nearby British Embassy compound and To˘ksu Palace, the cathedral forms part of an older Seoul that has almost vanished.

When some twenty-five years ago, the British historian Richard Pares observed, Good history cannot do so much service as money or science: but bad history can do almost as much harm as the most disasterous scientific discovery in the world.’ Professor Chang has identified some bad history and has set about correcting it; the result is good in parts only. The bad history is the account given by some Japanese historians of the way foreign courts established in Japan under the nineteenth-century ‘unequal treaties’ dispensed justice. Leaving aside the question of whether or not these treaties were inherently unjust, Chang shows that there has been a persistent tradition that Japanese could not expect justice in the foreign courts, which were invariably partial to foreign defendants.

The origins of this belief are to be found in Japanese nineteenthcentury polemics’ but it has survived intact in modern historical writing. Chang begins with an account of the establishment and organisational framework of the extraterritoriality system in Japan during the 1850s and 1860s. He claims that this is the first time this has been done. In fact, much of the same ground has been covered in the work of F. C. Jones, published as long ago as 1931 and cited by Chang, and in two studies not mentioned, Yokota Kisaburō, ‘Nihon ni okeru Chigaihōken’, in Kokkagakkai Goiusshanen-shi Kinen, 1952, and my article, ‘ Extraterritoriality in Japan, 1858–1899’, in TASJ, volume 18, July 1983, published too late for citation in Chang's book.

For some of his information about the structure and scope of consular courts in Japan, Chang has clearly relied on information supplied by archivists and other officials’ rather than his own researches. This, plus what I suspect is basic unfamiliarity with much of the material he is using, has led him to some errors. It is not correct to say that France established its first consulate in Japan at Edo in 1859 and in 1877 redesignated it the French consulate at Tokyo, nor that France founded a second consulate in Yokohama in 1870 and another one in Kobe in 1879. The French had a consulate at Yokohama from the earliest days. There were no consular, as distinct from diplomatic, establishments at Edo/Tokyo until that city was opened to foreign residence in 1869.

INTRODUCTION: CALLIGRAPHY AS THE ‘SEED ART’ OF EAST ASIA

The high cultural status and centrality of calligraphy in the Japanese visual-art tradition, as in that of East Asia generally, is perhaps the most obvious of the defining features of that tradition. Although from a Western viewpoint it may also seem a unique feature, such is not actually the case: calligraphy is also central to much Islamic art, for instance, though for very different reasons and with quite different aesthetic results. Calligraphy is not the ‘seed art’ of Japan and East Asia because of any religious taboo against depicting the human image, but rather because of the high aesthetic and spiritual value attached to the calligraphic art itself. There are a number of historical and cultural reasons for this, which I can only briefly adumbrate here.

Most obvious is the sheer visual complexity of the Sino-Japanese writing system, which still retains something of its primordial ‘pictographic’ nature. The thousands of characters that comprise that system present a variety and complexity of form that no mere alphabet could even remotely match. In addition, there is a wide variety of styles in which the characters can be written, from the archaic pictographic style to the conventional ‘block’ style to the most minimalist cursive style. With this degree of visual richness inherent in the writing system itself, it is easy to see why it readily lent itself, from an early stage, to high aesthetic development as an ‘abstract’ art in visual terms (although, until quite recently, it never abandoned its ‘representational’ character in lexical terms).

A related and equally important factor is the close alliance between calligraphy and painting in China, Japan and other East Asian countries which adopted Chinese characters as part of their writing system. Because in China writing did not stray so far from its pictorial origins as in Western cultures that adopted alphabetical writing systems, the separation of the arts of drawing and painting from the art of writing never became as extreme as in the West (as indicated by the Japanese word kaku, which means both ‘to write’ and ‘to draw or paint’).

I. SHINTŌ AND POLITICS

In May 2000, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mori Yoshirō, caused a storm of protest, both domestically and internationally, with his declaration before a meeting of lawmakers belonging to the Shintō Seiji Renmei (Shintō Political League), that: ‘We [have to make efforts to] make the public realize that Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor. It's been thirty years since we started our activities based on this thought’. Although some foreign observers may have been genuinely shocked by Mori's reactionary, ‘atavistic’ stance, no one who knew Japan or Japanese politics well was particularly surprised. Indeed, members of his own party generally did not challenge the validity of his remark; they merely regretted its indiscretion as a public pronouncement. As the unintentionally revealing excuse offered by the Secretary General of the party explained: ‘the comment was probably a platitude for the religious group’. In other words, in the circles in which Mori and his colleagues moved, the belief that ‘Japan is a divine nation centering on the Emperor’ was merely an accepted truism, so that nothing much should be read into the Prime Minister's remark – in the context in which it was given, it certainly did not represent any revolutionary departure from the norm. As Klaus Antoni points out, despite Emperor Hirohito's renunciation of his ‘divine status’ in 1946, ‘the Japanese emperorship receives its whole spiritual and religious authority, now as before, from the religious-political ideology of Shintō’.

Some analysts have presented Mori's ‘gaffe’ as yet another symptom of Japan's ‘move to the right’ in the late twentieth century – and, more specifically, as yet another challenge to the strict separation of church and state mandated by Japan's (American-imposed) postwar Constitution. There may be some truth in their contention that the economic doldrums of the 1990s made the Japanese public more receptive to open expressions of nationalistic sentiments and resentments. But, as Mori's own comment makes clear, throughout the postwar period such sentiments have never been far from the mainstream of Japanese political life. Indeed, the ‘thought’ on which Mori had based his political actions for thirty years is a good deal older than that: it has been at the heart of the Japanese polity since Japan first became a nation some sixteen centuries ago.