Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- List of Figures and Plates
- Preface to ‘All Ambition Spent’
- Chapter 1 The Japanese View
- Chapter 2 Student Interpreter in Tokyo, 1903–1905
- Chapter 3 Tokyo in 1904 and 1905
- Chapter 4 Assistant at Yokohama, 1905–1908
- Chapter 5 Stray Notes on Language
- Chapter 6 Assistant in Corea, 1908–1910
- Chapter 7 Corea in 1909 and 1910
- Chapter 8 Vice-Consul at Yokohama, 1911–1913
- Chapter 9 Vice-Consul at Osaka, 1913–1919
- Chapter 10 Consul at Nagasaki, 1920–1925
- Chapter 11 Consul at Dairen, 1925–1927
- Chapter 12 Consul-General at Seoul, 1928–1931
- Chapter 13 Consul-General at Osaka, 1931–1937
- Chapter 14 Consul-General at Mukden, 1938–1939
- Chapter 15 Consul-General at Tientsin, 1939–1941
- Chapter 16 Anglo-Japanese Relations
- Index
Chapter 16 - Anglo-Japanese Relations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- List of Figures and Plates
- Preface to ‘All Ambition Spent’
- Chapter 1 The Japanese View
- Chapter 2 Student Interpreter in Tokyo, 1903–1905
- Chapter 3 Tokyo in 1904 and 1905
- Chapter 4 Assistant at Yokohama, 1905–1908
- Chapter 5 Stray Notes on Language
- Chapter 6 Assistant in Corea, 1908–1910
- Chapter 7 Corea in 1909 and 1910
- Chapter 8 Vice-Consul at Yokohama, 1911–1913
- Chapter 9 Vice-Consul at Osaka, 1913–1919
- Chapter 10 Consul at Nagasaki, 1920–1925
- Chapter 11 Consul at Dairen, 1925–1927
- Chapter 12 Consul-General at Seoul, 1928–1931
- Chapter 13 Consul-General at Osaka, 1931–1937
- Chapter 14 Consul-General at Mukden, 1938–1939
- Chapter 15 Consul-General at Tientsin, 1939–1941
- Chapter 16 Anglo-Japanese Relations
- Index
Summary
Note: I wrote this chapter in the summer of 1941 while on leave in Canada. Now that we are at war with Japan, it is out of date but I leave it as my own impression of the conditions that led up to the war. It is true that the first blow was struck against the US and that we ourselves then declared war but until it became clear that the US and Great Britain were going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in opposing Japan, it was the latter that Japan regarded as the main stumbling-block in the path of her progress.
HAVING SERVED THE whole of my official life in Japan or in territories under her dominion or control, I may be forgiven for holding very definite opinions on the subject of Anglo-Japanese relations and the manner in which we have handled them in recent years. The views I have formed are not, I believe, generally held and since I am not so conceited as to think everyone is blind except myself, I put them forward with some diffidence as a contribution, shall we say, to a study of the problem.
I begin with certain quotations from Sir Austen Chamberlain:
It seems that we are becoming the scold of Europe. We run about shaking our fists in people's faces, screaming that this must be altered and that that must stop. We get ourselves disliked and distrusted and misunderstood, and in the end we achieve nothing and relapse into humiliated silence or laboriously explain how pleased we are. Curzon is convinced that all is well if he delivers an oration or pens a ‘superior’ despatch.
Do not repeat in this matter the mistake of the Curzon despatch – a great opening, a pause and then nothing.
(Extracts from letters written by Austen to Neville Chamberlain in September and October 1923, quoted in The Life and Letters of the Rt Hon Sir Austen Chamberlain by Petrie, pp. 227 and 229).
We decide the practical questions of daily life by instinct rather than by any careful process of reasoning, by rule of thumb rather than by systematic logic.
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- Consul in Japan, 1903-1941Oswald White's Memoir 'All Ambition Spent', pp. 193 - 206Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017