JUST TEN YEARS ago our Society celebrated its 90th Jubilee with a dinner at the Yokohama Grand Hotel which was then thought to be the site of our very first meeting. Since then, in fact within the last three months, I have unearthed evidence that, ten years ago, we were commemorating the wrong place and the wrong date. As we are talking about events of only a hundred years ago, you may be surprised that we did not know more about our Society's first year. After all, we are, as a body, concerned with the history of things Japanese—but we had not bothered to verify our own beginnings.

Of course, the Society has published quite a lot about our activities. As you all know, our Transactions have been issued for almost a hundred years, but some of the details of the first meetings were rather taken for granted by the editors and omitted from the first copy of the Transactions, which came out early in 1874. This first volume had been delayed because a fire at the printers consumed the first manuscripts and it took several months to replace them. It could be that some pages were lost in our first fire, or it could be that the editors did not think that the missing details were of interest.

Another reason that we could expect to have plentiful records of our first year's activity is that the Society had three newspaper editors among its original members. These were: J. R. Black, editor of the Japan Gazette and the weekly Far East; W. G. Howell, the editor of the daily Japan Mail and of the Japan Weekly Mail, and J. H. Brook, editor of the Japan Herald. Please think for a moment of Yokohama a hundred years ago. It boasted a total foreign population of only 1,600 people. How many towns of this size would you expect to support so many newspapers ?

All these papers printed some information about the Society, and the Japan Mail, in addition to carrying advertisements of the Society's meetings and reporting on them, even published in full most of the lectures given.