As Katō Shūichi, with his usual frankness, points out in an essay included in this collection: ‘The France-Japan ratio of influence is anything but symmetrical. That is to say, the impact that French writing and thinking has had on Japan is much greater than that of Japan on France’ (p. 62). Although Doug Slaymaker entitles the collection ‘Confluences’ (which, admittedly, sounds a lot better than ‘Influences’), eight of the ten essays deal almost exclusively with unidirectional influence from France. Actually, I think a better case could have been made for creative influence in the opposite direction, but I will reserve a brief comment on that until the end.

The first two essays, by Matt Matsuda and Jean-Philippe Mathy, make a brave attempt to puff up the occasional writings on or references to Japan of French critical theorists such as Barthes, Kojeve, and Lacan into some sort of serious body of work in cross-cultural interpretation. I find this less than convincing and, anyway, would not regard it as a genuine case of Japanese ‘influence’. Rather than learn anything from the present and actual Japan, the French theorists generally used their own cliché images of the country, culled from a century of Orientalist stereotyping, to lend a kind of illusory substance to their fanciful theories. This was a literary tradition that began with Pierre Loti, and should not be confused with japonisme, which remains the one great example of a widespread Japanese cultural influence in France, and was confined mainly to the visual arts, with perhaps the one exception of a haiku influence on French poetry. The crucial difference is between a positive creative use of foreign artistic practices, as in not only japonisme but in many of the Japanese borrowings from French literature documented in this book, and a narrow-minded tendency to exoticize, dehumanize, or negatively stereotype the foreigners themselves – a tendency unfortunately not uncommon in either France or Japan. Japonisme differed radically from Orientalism of this latter type; the French artists involved made an honest and even humble attempt to learn from their Japanese models (for instance, by making painstaking copies of ukiyo-e). Matt Matsuda's attempt to associate the critical theorists’ views with japonisme is thus, in my view, fundamentally mistaken.

‘Modernity and Tradition in Japanese Literature, Art, Politics and Religion’: the very subtitle of this volume hints at the breadth of scholarship that Roy Starrs has brought to the table. For the majority of us who devote ourselves to the field of Japanese Studies, the trajectory is clear: years spent honing methodological, theoretical and analytical skills on a narrowly defined topic at the PhD level and the pressure to produce that first monograph lead, in so many cases, to the first book born of extensive revisions to the dissertation. Thereafter, the directions may vary: some will find themselves drawn to a position at a Liberal Arts college where the emphasis may be on developing genuine interdisciplinary breadth; others will move on to a post-doctoral post where the emphasis may well be on delving ever deeper into the subject explored in the original dissertation. And, between these, there exists a plethora of other career trajectories.

Each to his or her own. And far be it for any of us to attempt to draw a template of the ideal pathway through an academic career. The most cursory glance at the Table of Contents of this majestic volume, however, offers testimony to both the breadth and depth of Roy's academic expertise. On the one hand, the list of publications incorporated at the end of this volume is testament to the author's ongoing – and lifelong – fascination with developments in the field of Japanese literature, especially works of the twentieth century. And it should be noted that he did begin by publishing a (doubtless somewhat revamped) version of his UBC dissertation which focused on nihilism in the novels of Mishima Yukio; and, for all the other, arguably more popular studies that had already appeared following the latter's sensational suicide in the early 1970s, Roy's Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Mishima Yukio was widely praised as the first such study to treat this material through an indisputably academic lens. I well remember first encountering this work: the content was gripping and answered many of the questions I had about this controversial author. What remains with me more than the content, however, was a throw-away line on the dust jacket of the volume announcing that ‘Roy Starrs is currently working on book-length studies of two other titans of twentieth-century Japanese literature, Shiga Naoya and Kawabata Yasunari’.

It has been twenty years since Britain and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) agreed to establish diplomatic relations. Both sides had very different expectations from the outset – Britain thought it might influence the DPRK toward becoming a better member of the world community. The DPRK, for its part, thought that the British move indicated a growing importance of their country internationally, a willingness to provide training and assistance, and, perhaps, a counterbalance to the United States. However, none of this has come to pass, and as of now, there are few indications that will change.

IN THE BEGINNING

On December 12, 2000, the most senior official of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, FCDO), Sir John Kerr, and the head of the European Department of the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), Kim Chun Guk, signed a document in London establishing diplomatic relations. Britain had established diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea (ROK) in 1949, but it refused to even formally recognize the DPRK until it voted for the admission of both Koreas to the United Nations (UN) in September 1991.

Even then, Britain kept North Korea at arms’ length, in deference to what it believed were the wishes of the ROK and United States. There were occasional low-level political talks that were probably unsatisfactory on both sides. In essence, the British side would criticize the North over nuclear issues and human rights, which the latter rejected. As late as the summer of 2000, British ministers turned down a proposal from the DPRK foreign minister to establish diplomatic relations.

But the ground was shifting at that time. Inter-Korean relations were rapidly improving, with a first-ever summit between the two leaders, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong Il, in June 2000. Like most countries, Britain welcomed this, but paid little attention at first to the parallel suggestion from the ROK that its friends should bolster this development by establishing diplomatic relations with the DPRK.

British ministers remained reluctant on this front until that autumn. On their way to Seoul for the Asia-Europe meeting, Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook decided to establish formal relations with the DPRK to boost South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's policy aimed at building peace on the peninsula.

In December 1875, the Tokyo press was full of rumours that there would soon be a new Japanese-language newspaper on sale. At the end of the month, there came the not-unexpected announcement that the Nisshin Shinjishi (Reliable Daily News), founded some years previously by a Yokohama journalist, J. R. Black, would cease publication on 31 December. On 6 January 1876, as expected, a new paper, the Bankoku Shimbun (News of the World) went on sale. It was owned, edited and published by the same J. R. Black. Within a month, not only had Black's new venture ceased publication, but it had become an offence for British subjects to publish any Japanese-language newspapers in Japan. The ‘Bankoku Shimbun affair’, as the incident became known, not only marked the end of any significant direct foreign involvement in the press of Japan, but perhaps more important, it was to be a singularly important step forward for the Japanese Government in its campaign to end extraterritoriality in Japan.

The Japanese-language press, a thriving industry by 1876, was of very recent growth. Soon after the opening of the country to foreign residence in 1859, the first foreign newspaper made its appearance. This was the Nagasaki Shipping List and Advertiser, which began publication in the summer of 1861. By November 1861, the owner, editor and publisher, A. W. Hansard, decided that Nagasaki was too much of a backwater, and moved to Yokohama. There he began to publish a new paper, the Japan Herald. It was not long before Hansard had competition, and by 1868, the foreign-language press in Japan had become a well-established part of treaty port life, as it had done earlier in China.

The Shogunate displayed an interest in this new phenomenon from the very beginning. Its officials were set to work compiling translations from all available foreign newspapers, including those published in Japan, and these compilations were usually known as ‘shimbun’ or ‘newspapers’, although they were not newspapers as the West knew them.

The first Japanese-language newspaper proper, according to its founder, Joseph Heco (Hamada Hikozo), was the Kaigai Shimbun (Overseas News), which appeared in 1864. Heco had been a Japanese sailor who was shipwrecked and taken to the United States. There he received a Western education and became an American citizen.

When captain Francis (Frank) Brinkley died aged 73 in Tokyo in October 1912, the anonymous commentator in the Annual Registrar wrote that he had been the ‘chief interpreter of Japanese ideas and views to the Western world’, through his journalism and scholarship. Brinkley's long residence in Japan, spanning over forty years, his varied interests, reflected in his published works, his links with some of the great leaders of the Meiji period, and his journalism, all seemed to qualify him as one who would rank with Satow, Aston and Chamberlain as one of the giants of Britain's involvement in Japan.

Today, however, Brinkley's name, while occasionally remembered in Japan, especially as a journalist – he features in the Kodansha Encyclopaedia of Japan, for example – is hardly known outside a very small circle in the West. His books on art and history have never been reprinted. Only his Dictionary, which in 1896 replaced the earlier dictionary by J. C. Hepburn as a prime tool for foreigners learning Japanese, remains in somewhat limited use as a guide to Meiji usage.

THE SOLDIER AND YATOI

Brinkley was born in Ireland, and went to school in Dublin. There are no available details of his family background, although at his death there were references to his coming from a ‘good Irish family’. Although the editor of the Japan Punch, in 1883 lumped him in with Parnell as a ‘self boiled lost potato’, suggesting that he return to join other potatoes, evidence from editorial writing in the Japan Mail, the newspaper which he owned from 1881 until his death, indicates that Brinkley came from a Unionist rather than a Nationalist background; the Mail regularly attacked Irish revolutionaries and Irish ingratitude at British rule, and was particularly scathing about the activities of Irish-American groups. It was also generally unsympathetic to Roman Catholic missionaries, which perhaps points to Brinkley coming from a Protestant background.

Brinkley joined the army, passed out from the artillery school at Woolwich in south London, and joined the Royal Artillery as a second lieutenant. In 1867, he went to Hong Kong as private secretary and ADC to the Governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell, who was almost certainly a relative. He appears to have held this post for only one year, for all records agree that he was in Japan by late 1867.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Fashioning the City

Fashion and lifestyle are effective benchmarks against which the image of a metropolitan city is measured. Fred Davis cited the above as the epigraph of the first chapter of his Fashion, Culture, and Identity, in which he begins with this statement: ‘That the clothes we wear make a statement is a statement that in this age of heightened self-consciousness has virtually become a cliché.’ While Davis was referring to the relationship between fashion and the cultural identity of individuals, his statement perfectly fits that of cities as well. Usually New York, Paris, London, Milan, and Tokyo top the familiar list of cities that conjure up the image of high fashion, and a ‘big city look’ is deemed as revealing a certain distinctive type of metropolitan chic. Hong Kong has taken pride in being compared with these global cities. For example, when the January 2008 issue of TIME magazine (Asia Edition) coined the term ‘Nylonkong’ to tell the stories of the three connected cites that ‘drive the global economy’, Donald Tsang, the then Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), considered Hong Kong as playing a similar role in Asia as New York in North America and London in Europe, echoing the term ‘Nylonkong’. As Richard Florida argued in his Who's Your City?, however, ‘personal’ characteristics are pertinent factors that make a city attractive in the age of the global economy. Whether Hong Kong could develop its own distinctive characteristics was much more important than the term itself.

The concept and structure of this book were partially inspired by Leo Ou-fan Lee's City between Worlds: My Hong Kong, in which the author walked in the city, trying to ‘find out what indeed is (or was) there, in Hong Kong's past, that may still shed light on its culture today’. According to Lee, a long-time Hong Kong resident, the city means quite different things to different groups of people: the natives who grew up there and experienced it as the context for everyday life, the expatriates who came to work in its robust finance centre, the British who created the colonial face of the city, and the urban and global residents whose emerging consciousness encompassed and transcended that of the previous groups. Lee had chosen to look at his Hong Kong from this perspective: ‘voicing opinions, wherever possible, on behalf of a Chinese community whose members have not chosen to write about their city in English’. ‘Each chapter presents a slice of the city's history and culture,’ in addition, ‘called up by the streets, sites, and artifacts themselves, and by association with literature and film.’ Taking this as the critical backdrop, the chapters in this book – structured around walking tours – were conceived to touch on different ‘slices’ of Hong Kong pop culture in the 1980s:

Captain William Robert Broughton, Royal Navy, was one of a group of British naval officers sent on a series of survey expeditions to the Pacific and Northeast Asia during the latter part of the eighteenth century. The group included such well-known figures as Captains James Cook and George Vancouver. Broughton, who sailed with Vancouver, though less remembered, was in many ways equally distinguished, with a good record of patient survey work, as well as a moderately successful naval career. His name, once prominent on maps, has now disappeared as the fashion for ‘cartographic imperialism’ has faded. Yet he made a major contribution to surveying knowledge at the time, and his work contributed to much nineteenth-century cartography of East Asia.

Born in 1762, by 1774 he was a midshipman in the Royal Navy. He served in the American War of Independence, when he was taken prisoner during an action in Boston harbour, and later in the East Indies, where he was promoted to lieutenant. In 1790, he became commander of the brig HMS Chatham to accompany Vancouver in HMS Discovery on the latter's voyage to the northwest of America, which they reached in April 1792 via Cape Town, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii. The two ships engaged in a systematic survey of the area around Puget Sound, with Broughton responsible for work exploring the Columbia River. In 1793, Vancouver sent him back to Britain with despatches designed to encourage the government to authorise further survey work.

HMS PROVIDENCE

On return to Britain, Broughton became commander of HMS Providence in October 1793, with instructions to rejoin Vancouver to continue the work of exploration and surveying. The Providence was a small ship, a sloop of some 420 tons with 16 guns. According to Broughton's own account, she had been intended for the West Indian trade, but had been purchased by the government “for the express purpose of bringing the bread-fruit trees from the South Seas”. It was thought that the breadfruit, discovered in Tahiti some years earlier by Cook, might prove a cheap way of feeding West Indian slaves. To this end, she had sailed for Tahiti in 1791, under the command of William Bligh. Bligh had four years previously been commander of HMS Bounty when a number of his crew had mutinied and set him and the remainder of the crew adrift in an open boat.

Those who nowadays visit the British Embassy in Peking or the recently re-opened Consulate-General in Shanghai can have little idea of the splendour which once marked the British official presence in China. Few now remember that until the 1930s, Britain dominated the China trade, only gradually giving way to the Japanese. British finance was a major factor in the beginnings of China's modernisation. British gunboats patrolled China's rivers and British troops guarded the foreign settlements established along the coast and in the interior of China. Not surprisingly, therefore, throughout China, from the coastal provinces to far up the rivers, in distant cities such as Kashgar and Kunming, and even in remote outposts of the Qing Emperor's domains such as Taiwan and Korea, the Union Jack flew over well-appointed (if all somewhat similar) consular premises, while Her (or His) Majesty's Consuls-General were men of stature and influence in both the Chinese and foreign communities. They sat on councils, conducted courts and helped organise and run clubs, gardens and cemeteries.

Coates tells the story of the British Consular Service in China from its haphazard beginnings in the wake of the first Opium War until its gradual disappearance as China changed under the twin pressures of modernisation and war. By 1943, when Britain and the United States signed treaties which ended a hundred years of extraterritoriality in China, the special status of the China Consular Service, like its counterparts in Japan, Siam and the Levant had already come to an end. Though for a few years longer there were still British consuls in China, they were no longer the specialised cadre they once had been. After 1950, when Britain recognised the new People's Republic of China, the Chinese refused to recognise British consular titles until the 1970s. No doubt memories of the old position of foreign consuls played a part in that decision.

Reading this account of the China consuls, there is a strong temptation to paraphrase Shakespeare, for the tale Coates tells is often a sad one of the death of consuls. How some of syphilis died, some of fever and some – an alarming number – of drink. They were indeed an odd lot. On the whole, they came from lower middle class backgrounds, and were respectable but not grand. Ireland and Scotland were good sources for the China service as they were of the Japanese. They were poorly paid.

Nothing was impossible in the 1980s, but at the same time many other future possibilities were buried.

The Golden Decade: Gone for Good?

At the beginning of this book, I argued that it was necessary to articulate one's personal belonging. Personally, I do not have anything fascinating to write about, but the city where I was born and grew up does. What I watched, listened to, and read, and where I (window) shopped and saw people dancing are very well worth recording. As previously mentioned, my recordings in this book were partially inspired by Leo Ou-fan Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong. I cannot agree more with Didi Kirsten Tatlow on what she said in her review of this book: ‘Anecdotes and vignettes pepper Lee's book. Yet this is no elegiac history of a colony-that-was; rather, his gentle, personal musings read more like a declaration of love for a city full of contradictions.’ Unlike Leo Lee's stance of ‘the fl.neur chronicling the life of a beloved city’, though, I looked back at the 1980s as a time when the economy as well as the pop culture of my Hong Kong flourished on an unprecedented scale. In a special feature on the 1980s published by Ming Pao Weekly in November 2016, the editor made the remark quoted in the epigraph, which perfectly summed up the gains and losses of the decade in which Hong Kong cultural industries had ‘the magical Midas Touch’.

Although Britain's contacts with Japan stretched back to the last years of Elizabeth I's reign, they had made little impact on either government or commercial thinking until the nineteenth century. Memories of the relative poorness of early trade did not incline either merchants or governments to push very hard for its resumption, even though the steady growth of the China trade in the eighteenth century brought Britain ever closer to Japan. Japan was seen as an even more remote and even more difficult market than China, and while for Americans it seemed a logical stepping stone to China, for the British, it was on the road to nowhere.

Two developments were to modify that position. As Britain's relationship with China changed following the end of the East India Company's monopoly over the China trade in 1834 and even more as a consequence of the first Opium War (1839–42), to many it seemed that the ‘opening of Japan’ was a logical next step. There were also those who believed that, as more and more British ships plied East Asian waters, it would be helpful to British merchant and naval shipping to have unhindered access to at least some Japanese ports. The second development was the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, and subsequent attempts to prevent Russian vessels seeking refuge in Japanese ports. A third factor, though perhaps of lesser importance, was not to be left behind as the United States pressed in on Japan.

Two treaties were concluded, in 1854 and 1858. The first, like the American treaty of the same year, was negotiated by a naval officer, Admiral Stirling, and found little favour among British merchants either in China or at home. The second treaty, concluded in haste in the summer of 1858 by the Earl of Elgin, largely derived its language from the second American treaty, and its contents from the British experience in China. British subjects could not be left to the mercy of Japanese laws (though there was to be no question about Japanese being subjected to British laws), the Japanese right to tariff control would be restricted, and trade more generally protected by a most favoured nation clause – this last was the main difference from Harris's treaty, and one which was to have important repercussions in the future.

I thought I knew about the First World War and the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). We go regularly to St-Omer in France, the RFC headquarters from 1914 and where the Royal Air Force (RAF) began in 1918. Yet, until I read this account by a former FCO colleague, I had no idea of the 1915–1918 Imperial aircraft campaign. The campaign sometimes had local official support but, in the main, it was voluntary efforts, often supported by the local press, that provided some 550 aircraft. Some donors wished to prove their patriotism. Others hoped for honours or advancement. For many it was a form of memorial for relatives lost in the conflict. Hall traces the impetus to the pre-war tradition of funding ‘Dreadnoughts’ for the Royal Navy. Australia, New Zealand and the Federated Malay States did so, although Canada rejected the idea. Warships were expensive; the cheapest was £150,000 in 1914. Aircraft were relatively inexpensive by comparison. One without guns – not unknown in 1914 when the main use was reconnaissance work – could be had for £1500. One with guns cost £2250, while a seaplane was £3500. Dominica in the Caribbean was first off the mark, donating one aircraft each to the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service in the early days of the war. This led in 1915 to a campaign by the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas and the Overseas Club. Amounts donated were small at first but sufficient: ‘Overseas No. 1’ was handed over in May 1915. The response grew, with a cheque for £4500 arriving from Hong Kong, which had a long tradition of donations for Empire causes; the funds came from both Chinese and Britons. In total, Hong Kong would give £1,000,000 to the war effort. Malaya was also generous. The Malayan Air Fleet Fund was launched in March 1915 by the New Zealander Charles Alma Baker. Chinese donors were prominent, and the small Armenian and Tamil communities also contributed. Malay donations were channelled through the Sultans. By May 1916, the Federated Malay States had donated over £25,000, while the Sultan of Johor had equipped a squadron of fighters with a £31,000 donation. Expatriates in Siam (Thailand) provided five aircraft. From Shanghai and the Chinese ports came 20. All this was overshadowed by the contributions from the subcontinent.

1. THE JAPANESE SOUL – AND OTHER IMPONDERABLES

I landed in Japan for the first time in the early spring of 1972, just as the cherry blossoms were beginning to bloom along the Fukuoka canals. Fukuoka (of all places) became my initial experience of a Japanese city, simply because of the exigencies of air travel half a century ago. There were few nonstop long-distance flights anywhere – one had to leapfrog from one city to another, often spending a night or two at hotels along the way. Between Sydney, Australia, my starting point, and Hiroshima, my ultimate destination (where I’d been hired to teach English), I had to make four ‘fuelling stops’: at Darwin, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Fukuoka. Fukuoka then was not the hyper-active industrial port it is nowadays. It resembled more a quiet backwater with a relaxed small-town atmosphere, and its canals gave it extra charm. So, after settling in at my hotel, I enjoyed an evening stroll along a nearby canal under freshly budding blossoms that shone faintly pink in the moonlight. I began to feel I had already entered the enchanted realm of haiku poetry.

Before long, however, my aesthetic reverie was interrupted when I was approached by a Japanese man a few years older than me (I was then a tender twenty-six) who stood directly in my path with the obvious intention of engaging me in unwanted conversation. Since I already had plenty of experience being approached this way in places like Tijuana, Kowloon, or the seedier areas of many North American cities, I immediately put my defences up, suspecting that he wanted to sell me something illegal, con me in some way, or perhaps get up to something even more nefarious. But, much to my relief, it turned out that all he wanted was to ask a question. And such an unexpected, innocent question it was that half a century later I still remember it clearly. In painfully well-articulated English, he asked: ‘What do you think of the Japanese soul?’

My answer was obviously not so memorable, because I no longer remember it, but I imagine I excused myself by saying that I had only just arrived in Japan, so it was a little early for me to make any pronouncements on a matter so profound. Whatever my answer, it was certainly not intended to poke fun at his question.