THE DOCUMENTS

THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS explain the origins of this, no doubt idiosyncratic, collection. The general section tries to give the overall flavour of all the ports, and is followed by material on individual places. There is an abundance of such matter for Kobe, Nagasaki and Yokohama but beyond that, what is available is very limited. Shimoda, briefly an open port between 1853 and 1859, had no foreign population, apart from the American consul, Townsend Harris, and is not represented here. There is some material on Hakodate and a tiny amount relating to Niigata. A few items deal with the afterlife of the treaty ports, which is also included in the plate selection. Taken altogether, the collection should be a useful adjunct to monographs and other works on Japan's modern history and specifically on its foreign relations.

The documents that make up this collection are an attempt to flesh out the outline given above. They represent but a small fraction of the available material, which could probably fill several more volumes. (To the publisher's horror, the first selection was exactly double what is included here, and was in itself but a fraction of the material I had collected over the years.) When I first started putting together the original collection, it was as an aid to writing my PhD 1971 thesis, described more fully in the ‘Retrospective’ section that follows this Introduction. In those days before the internet, collecting such material was largely a question of physically transcribing it, which I did with a number of the shorter pieces, or paying for very expensive photocopying. The latter has now become very cheap, with most home printers able to provide reasonable copies, while the availability of material on the internet has also made collecting easier.

I suspect that the first item that I consciously kept for future reference was the pamphlet by the supposed ‘Bishop of Homoco’ on Exercises in the Yokohama Dialect, published in Yokohama in 1879 (no. 57), but how or where I acquired it, I have long since forgotten.