TOWARDS THE END of 2014, I became aware of a collection of photographs on the internet relating to John Carey Hall, a member of Britain's Japan Consular Service, whose final post was as Consul-General in Yokohama. Hall, a contemporary of Satow and Aston, was, like them, a good student of Japanese. I had always found him an interesting character, not least because he appeared to be virtually blind and deaf yet had continued at Yokohama until he reached retirement age. I had undertaken to write a short biography of him, which is what had led me to the photographs.

That in turn led me to the person who had posted the pictures, Hugo Read. I had hoped that there would be papers from Hall, but although Hugo was his great-great-grandson, there was little except a newspaper article written for the Japan Chronicle in 1918. But what Hugo did reveal was that Hall's son-in-law, Oswald White, had left a memoir. White I also knew. He, too, had been a consul in Japan, serving in Seoul and Manchuria, and had also ended his career as Consul-General. And so I was introduced to ‘All Ambition Spent’. It was not, as might be assumed from the low-key title, a record of unfulfilled dreams, but an amusing and informative account of White's career and family, including an affectionate portrait of his father-in-law, together with much rumination about how the exotic Japan of his early career had become the militarist machine of 1941. Thanks to Hugo's preliminary work, it had not only been transferred to typescript but had also undergone some editing. It seemed to me well worth publishing.

Very few first-hand accounts by foreigners in Japan from the opening years of the late 1850s until the Pacific War appear to have survived. We have good archival and press material but the records of individuals are limited in number and most relate to the early years. One can read several accounts by participants in the Perry expedition, a few from the years 1858–1868 but thereafter virtually nothing. So, a first-hand account of living and working in Japan from 1903 to 1941 gives a unique insight into an important period and well-deserves being made more widely available.