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This is a new series which publishes for the first time the correspondences of Sir Harry Smith Parkes (1828 – 1885) the second British Minister of Japan, and includes the complete transcriptions of his ‘private’ letters to and from Edmund Hammond, permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who was the decision maker about major issues in the British relation to Asia, and his successors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chronologically arranged, the series covers all such letters during his 18 years in Japan and with the first volume for Bakumatsu, the end of the Shogunate era. Parkes arrived in Japan in 1865 as the second Minister Plenipotentiary and Consul General of the United Kingdom to Japan and stayed at the position till 1883. He was one of the few who observed Japan during its turbulent period of Westernization, and supported the reformers to establish the new government. His efforts and services, alongside his secretaries such as Ernest Satow, George Aston, and A. B. Freeman-Mitford, saw the modernization of Japan starting under the strong influence of Britain.Despite his leading role between Japan and the West in early years, his days and activities in Japan are less known and not widely studied due to the lack of primary source information as his experiences remained unpublished, unlike his predecessor Rutherford Alcock who authored The Capital of the Tycoon or Ernest Satow’s A Diplomat in Japan. Apart from two volumes in Parkes’ biography by F. V. Dickins, no contemporary sources of his life are available.This series of private correspondence of Sir Harry Parkes will fill such a gap, and will be of interest for scholars and student of Japan and Anglo-Japanese history. All correspondence included in the volumes are fully annotated. Also included are his letters with other members of the ministry and documents such as conference minutes, which will provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

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Harry Parkes was at the heart of Britain’s relations with the Far East from the start of his working life at fourteen, to his death at fifty-seven. Orphaned at the age of five, he went to China on his own as a child and worked his way to the top. God-fearing and fearless, he believed his mission was to bring trade and ‘civilisation’ to East Asia. In his day, he was seen as both a hero and a monster and is still bitterly resented in China for his part in the country’s humiliations at Western hands, but largely esteemed in Japan for helping it to industrialise. Morton’s new biography, the first in over thirty years, and benefiting in part from access to the Parkes’ family and archives, offers a more intimate and informed profile of the personal and professional life of a Victorian titan and one of Britain’s most undiplomatic diplomats in the history of the British Civil Service.

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PUBLISHED BY EUREKA PRESS, TOKYO, AND DISTRIBUTED BY ROUTLEDGE OUTSIDE JAPAN.The scholar and diplomat Sir Ernest Satow was the best-known Westerner who lived in Meiji Japan. Although he rose to become British Minister to Japan, the most interesting part of his career was the start of it, when he witnessed, and in a small way influenced, the fall of the bakufu and the Meiji Restoration. He wrote an account of this in a memoir called A Diplomat in Japan in 1921, which was based on the diaries transcribed in this volume. These diaries, hitherto unpublished, reveal the original material from which he crafted his memoir, as well as the material (about one-third of the diaries in total) he omitted. In various respects, the memoir is a sanitized account, written partly in Bangkok in the 1880s, and completed in retirement at the urging of younger relatives. In A Diplomat in Japan, Satow comes across as an assured young statesman, who, with his excellent Japanese and ability to make contact with the key players, was able to perceive the direction that the turbulent and confused events he witnessed was taking. In the diaries, he is a little less assured and not quite so percipient and interspersed with tales of meeting the likes of Saigō Takamori and Sakamoto Ryōma, are stories such as that of the paternity claim against him by a Japanese woman in Nagasaki. The part of the diaries relating to Satow’s stay in China (Shanghai and Peking from January to August 1862) has never before been transcribed or published, and is the most interesting part on a human level. It was an environment in which Satow, aged just 18, was forced to grow up fast, and we see him and his fellow student interpreters behaving badly on numerous occasions. Yet we also see the breadth of his intellect in the books he was reading and his informed interest in everything he saw around him. The editors have added extensive annotations and explanations to these diaries, making this book an indispensable reference work for students of bakumatsu Japan, and indeed anybody who wants to understand the story of how a very young, very clever, but rather awkward Englishman could have penetrated the very highest levels of the Japanese hierarchy to witness the transformation of the country from a feudal, inward-looking society to one that would become a major industrialized power to shock the world.

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This is a new series which publishes for the first time the correspondences of Sir Harry Smith Parkes (1828 – 1885) the second British Minister of Japan, and includes the complete transcriptions of his ‘private’ letters to and from Edmund Hammond, permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who was the decision maker about major issues in the British relation to Asia, and his successors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chronologically arranged, the series covers all such letters during his 18 years in Japan and with the first volume for Bakumatsu, the end of the Shogunate era. Parkes arrived in Japan in 1865 as the second Minister Plenipotentiary and Consul General of the United Kingdom to Japan and stayed at the position till 1883. He was one of the few who observed Japan during its turbulent period of Westernization, and supported the reformers to establish the new government. His efforts and services, alongside his secretaries such as Ernest Satow, George Aston, and A. B. Freeman-Mitford, saw the modernization of Japan starting under the strong influence of Britain.Despite his leading role between Japan and the West in early years, his days and activities in Japan are less known and not widely studied due to the lack of primary source information as his experiences remained unpublished, unlike his predecessor Rutherford Alcock who authored The Capital of the Tycoon or Ernest Satow’s A Diplomat in Japan. Apart from two volumes in Parkes’ biography by F. V. Dickins, no contemporary sources of his life are available.This series of private correspondence of Sir Harry Parkes will fill such a gap, and will be of interest for scholars and student of Japan and Anglo-Japanese history. All correspondence included in the volumes are fully annotated. Also included are his letters with other members of the ministry and documents such as conference minutes, which will provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

Read more less