British news coverage of North Korea suffers for two primary reasons: an insular attitude toward the outside world and the British public's relative lack of interest in Korean affairs. The result is a triviadominated approach that emphasizes the weirdest stories over substantive issues.

This state of affairs seems unlikely to change as British media are addicted to this style. Falling customer numbers and revenues mean that there is less money available to provide more informed coverage. The rest of the world is of little interest compared with the success of British sports or the antics of celebrities. Korea, little known in Britain except to those with a direct interest, is unlikely to displace such stories.

THOUGHTS ON THE BRITISH MEDIA

The current media age is remarkable. Probably never before has so much news and information flashed around the world, reaching vast audiences. Where once speedy knowledge and analysis of the news was confined to a privileged few, now it is available for all. However, while modern communications produce masses of information and analysis, much of what is presented as news is gossip or trivia, lacking substance and importance. Tabloids and some websites may be the worst but they are not the only offenders. In Britain, even major news outlets such as the BBC, The Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph will present news in bite-sized pieces that, as often as not, take a mocking or jokey tone. The tabloids, for their part, report on most of what passes for foreign news in a flippant tone, with xenophobia never far from the surface. This happens even when a story, such as the recent defection of the London–based North Korean diplomat, Thae Yong Ho, appears to have possible serious repercussions. Thae's alleged addiction to golf and his wife's to shopping played as large a role in the reporting as did any political significance of the move.

The main emphasis in British coverage of North Korea is on the odd and the peculiar. For instance, haircuts are a perennial favorite subject: Kim Jong Un's hair is regularly mocked, even though the style seems to be common all over northern Europe. The supposed compulsory styles forced on young men is frequent feature, even if there is plenty of evidence that many different styles can be seen throughout the country. Even Thae's defection was linked to the haircut story.

On the morning of 12 December 2000, at a brief signing ceremony in the office of the Permanent Undersecretary, Sir John Kerr, in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London, Britain and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK – North Korea) signed a document in which they agreed to exchange diplomatic missions. The signatories were Sir John Kerr for the United Kingdom, and Mr Kim Chun Guk, head of the European Department of the DPRK's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) for the DPRK. Within minutes, the news of this development had appeared on the FCO's website, and was being announced throughout the world. Given the past history of lack of contact between the two countries, some expressed surprise at the apparent speed of developing relations. Among international news services, only Radio China International noted that Britain was the first Western permanent member of the United Nations’ Security Council to establish diplomatic relations with the DPRK.

This essay, which partly derives from presentations to workshops run by the British Association for Korean Studies in December 2001 and December 2002, is both a short history of how that ceremony came about and a very personal account of what came next. Where possible, I have provided references to published or available sources, but for some matters in which I was personally involved, this has not always been possible. The views expressed are my own, and do not necessarily represent British government policy.

BACKGROUND: BRITAIN'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DPRK 1948–2000

Before 2000, Britain and the DPRK had tended to ignore each other. Indeed, before the Second World War, and the subsequent division of the Korean peninsula, British involvement in the northern half of the peninsula had been minimal. Britain had briefly maintained a proconsul at Wonsan, and there was some missionary activity. The main British interest at that period was gold mining.

Following the 1945 division of the Korean peninsula, and the emergence of two separate Korean states by 1948, Britain, in common with most Western countries, had recognised the Republic of Korea (ROK – South Korea) as the “only legitimate government” on the peninsula. This recognition did not extend to the ROK's claim to the whole peninsula, but nevertheless Britain had no dealings with the authorities north of the 38th parallel. The Korean War (1950–53), though it made no legal difference, reinforced the position taken in 1948.

William Keswick was an important figure in Jardine-Matheson's role in China and Japan, and in the London-based Matheson and Company, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards until his death in 1912, yet he has scarcely received the attention that might have been expected from this long involvement in East Asian trade. He is curiously absent from the current Dictionary of National Biography, though several of his Jardines’ relations are so honoured. His Who was Who entry, based on his own account of himself, is amazingly brief, omitting both his wives, and what many would see as his major role in the China Association, for example, though noting his onetime membership of the Hong Kong Legislative Council. His role as a Conservative MP from 1899 and his appointment as JP and High Sheriff for Surrey receive as much prominence as his work in Asia. His years in Japan, where he established Jardine's presence immediately after the 1858 treaties allowed foreign residence, go wholly unnoticed.

William Keswick was born on 1 January 1835, according to his Who was Who entry, though most sources say 1834, in the Scottish lowlands. A nephew of William Jardine, he attended Merchiston's school in Edinburgh, and went out to China in 1855, the first of five generations of the Keswick family to be associated with Jardines. His younger brother, James Johnstone Keswick, also joined the company in China. By that stage, Jardine, Matheson, which can trace its origins back to 1782 and a bewildering collection of intermediate names, was well-established on the Chinese coast, though faced with major rivals such as Dent and Company, and was distancing itself from its early role in the more questionable aspects of the China trade.

Naturally enough, Jardines was interested in the new trading possibilities opening up in East Asia in the 1850s, as the pressure increased on Japan to abandon its isolation. Before the treaties permitted formal trade with Japan, Jardines had traded in Japanese products usually through the Ryukyu islands or Taiwan, although there was also contact with Chinese merchants established at Nagasaki. The trade, officially forbidden by the Japanese authorities, was always small, but no doubt it served to whet appetites.

The earliest treaties with Japan, concluded by United States’ and British naval officers in 1853 and 1854, had been little concerned with trade.

INTRODUCTION

In December 2000, Britain and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK – North Korea) signed an agreement to establish diplomatic relations. It had been no easy journey. From the formal establishment of two states on the Korean Peninsula in 1948, Britain had been a firm supporter of the Republic of Korea (ROK – South Korea). This support had been maintained even when there were grave doubts about the policies of the Presidents Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee. The Scandinavian countries regarded the dissolution of the Korean War-era United Nations Commission for the Unification and Rehabilitation of Korea in 1973 as a removal of any legal barrier to recognizing the North, an interpretation shared by Britain's senior legal officers, but Britain continued to deny recognition to the North. There was some modification of this position after the two Koreas joined the United Nations in 1991, at which point Britain recognized the DPRK as a state. Nevertheless, ministers on both sides of the political spectrum declined to go any further and, even as late as July 2000, a proposal from officials for a change in policy was firmly turned down.

Yet the international relationship with North Korea was changing rapidly. Early in 2000, Italy had broken European Union ranks and established relations. South Korea, especially after the June 2000 North- South Summit, was keen that more countries should open relations with the North to end its isolation. The DPRK itself was reaching out. These factors all contributed to a change of position by ministers at the time of the Europe–Asia meeting in Seoul in September 2000.

The December signing (agreeing to establish diplomatic relations) led to the question of whether and how the relationship would be carried forward. Although it was decided that Britain would not open an embassy in Pyongyang, it was felt there should be at least one dedicated person to take relations forward. At that point, I was the only person at the right grade in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) who had expressed a wish to go to North Korea if we ever established relations. Now I was taken at my word and I readily agreed.

LIFE BEFORE PYONGYANG

In 1981 I was asked to go to the embassy in Seoul as head of chancery and consul. We spent nearly four enjoyable years there.

INTRODUCTION

At the end of October 1883, Sir Harry Smith Parkes, long the doyen of British diplomats in East Asia, arrived in Seoul to complete the negotiations for a treaty which was to replace that negotiated in 1882. That had aroused widespread opposition and had finally been abandoned. The negotiations in Seoul were successful, and a new Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation was signed in the Kyŏngbok Palace on 26 November 1883. Parkes left Seoul the next day, before the Han River froze for the winter, but he was to return the following April to exchange ratifications.

Thus began formal relations between Korea and Britain. To mark the anniversary, numerous events were planned. The first ever official visit by a member of the British Royal Family took place in May, when His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester came at the same time as the Royal Ballet. There was a second Royal visit in October, when the Duke of Kent led a British Overseas Trade Board mission to Korea. Other British visitors to Korea included the novelist Iris Murdoch, the playwright Arnold Wesker and the economist Professor Frank Hahn. From both countries, there were ministerial and other official exchanges. If the Royal Ballet is the major British cultural manifestation to mark the centenary, the exhibition of Korean art in london from February 1984 is a fitting reminder of Korea's cultural importance. In addition to these high-level contacts, there have been numerous others, covering the whole range of contacts between the two countries.

This paper traces the history of British interest in Korea from long before Parkes's treaty to the present. It seems particularly appropriate that such a paper should be given to a Royal Asiatic Society audience, for the British in Korea were very much in the forefront of the move to found the RAS, and were certainly in the forefront of its activities until the Pacific War. Since then, the changes in Britain's position in East Asia have been reflected in the RAS, no less than in other fields.

The paper does not claim to be a piece of original research. Others have covered the ground, sometimes indeed in front of RAS audiences. But it does include some new material, and attempts to bring the story up to the present, which has not been done before.

INTRODUCTION

Britain's Japan Consular Service was not designed to operate outside Japan. Its members were trained for work there, with emphasis on acquiring the language and knowledge of the country, its people and its customs. Three factors changed this. In times of need, the availability of trained and capable staff was a great temptation. Second, promotion was always slow. Finally, with the spread of Japanese influence and the establishment of an empire, it made sense to send members of the consular service to these new places.

KOREA

The first use of staff in Korea arose from Sir Harry Parkes’ interest in Korea that began when he was Minister in Japan from 1865 to 1883. Parkes’ concern was strategic: to keep Korea out of Russian hands. To this end, in the 1870s, he campaigned for the occupation of Komundo (Port Hamilton), a group of islands off Korea's southern coast. This was at variance with the Foreign Office view of Britain's interests in East Asia and Parkes was told that Her Majesty's Government were not in the habit of appropriating other country's territory. Meanwhile, two members his staff, Ernest Satow and W.G.Aston, began studying Korean from the late 1870s because of its links with Japanese, but also providing Parkes with a solid understanding of Korea.

Vice-Admiral Willis negotiated Britain's first treaty with Korea in 1882. Aston accompanied him but Willis appears to have paid little attention to his adviser. The result was a treaty generally deemed unsatisfactory. It was abandoned, and under Parkes’ guidance, a new treaty was negotiated in 1883. To effect this, Aston, with Walter Hillier and C.T. Maude from China, went to Korea in 1883. As well as treaty negotiations, Aston leased the land on which the British Embassy still stands. In November 1883, Parkes, now Minister at Beijing, arrived to finalize and sign the new treaty.

Parkes (and the Treasury) felt there was no need to establish a diplomatic presence in Korea. The minister in Beijing would be sideaccredited, an arrangement that lasted until the late 1890s. However, there was a need for a consular establishment since British merchants were already arriving, and Parkes proposed Aston as consul general. The Treasury would only agree to temporary appointments. Other staff came from China.

Aston's appointment did not last long.

I. THE ‘NEW MAN SOCIETY’

In 1918 a ‘New Man Society’ (Shinjinkai) was founded at Japan's leading academic institution, Tokyo Imperial University, by a group of young students and academics. Although now known as ‘Japan's first student radicals’ because of their revolutionary activism a few years later, initially the Society members were not fire-breathing radicals but idealistic liberal-democrats who were, by no coincidence, gentlemanly young members of the privileged elite. As in Europe after World War I, there was a widespread conviction that the ‘new age’ required a ‘new man’. Thus, fascists were by no means the only ones to make use of the idea – it was part of the general zeitgeist of the age, as other writers in this volume have pointed out was also the case in Europe. Politically speaking, it would be hard to imagine a more inoffensive and moderate group than the Japanese New Man Society of 1918. Nonetheless, as William Miles Fletcher has written, they ‘aspired to be the “new men” who would pioneer the economic and social rebirth of Japan’. With all the high idealism and ambition of youth, they yearned not merely for political reform but for a far more fundamental transformation of the underlying values and structure of society. In their own high-flown language, they sought nothing less than ‘to eradicate the system of materialistic competition which stands in the way of love and peace and to liberate mankind from the state of materialistic struggle’. These idealistic students at first opened themselves to a variety of international political and social influences and reformist movements – most especially, at first, the new populist and unionist developments that were occurring in British parliamentary democracy (with the rise of the new Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald).

By the mid-1920s, however, most members of the New Man Society had veered sharply to the left. In Japanese political history today, in fact, the New Man Society is known as an important and influential group of elite young Marxist intellectuals who eventually served as a propaganda arm of the Japanese Communist Party and, for several years, put up a brave last-ditch stand against the rising tide of militarism and fascism in late 1920s Japan.

PREFACE

Although written in the early Shōwa period, Shimazaki Tōson’s Yoake mae (Before the Dawn, 1929–35) may be regarded as the longawaited ‘great Meiji novel’ in at least two important respects: on the one hand, it seems to approximate more successfully than earlier works of Japanese fiction the nineteenth-century Western ideal of the novel espoused by Meiji writers since Tsubouchi Shōyō; on the other hand, it presents a satisfying ‘national narrative’ of historical developments leading up to and following the central event of the Meiji period: the imperial restoration. And yet, when we look more closely at this massive and obviously important work, we find that it still retains some of the more ‘intimate’ features of that ‘peculiarly Japanese’ form of more or less autobiographical fiction which Tōson had spent most of his career writing: the shi-shōsetsu (literally, ‘I-novel’).

Given the argument recently in favour among scholars of Japanese literature that a strict distinction should be made between the Western novel and the Japanese shōsetsu, we might well ask: is Yoake mae ultimately a novel or a shōsetsu, or is it a unique hybrid of both? If both, do its novelistic elements and its shōsetsu elements work harmoniously together or are they in irreconcilable conflict? Finally, do our answers to these questions throw any light on the novel/shōsetsu argument or, indeed, do they threaten that argument with a reductio ab absurdum?

I. NATIONAL NARRATIVE IN MODERN JAPANESE FICTION PRIOR TO YOAKE MAE

When Japanese writers began to read and translate Western literature in the late nineteenth century, they encountered a very powerful vehicle of national narrative: the nineteenth-century Western novel. Just as one of the main features of Western political history over the previous few centuries had been the rise of the modern nation state, so an equally central feature of Western literary history had been the rise of the novel. These two phenomena were not merely parallel but symbiotic: each had contributed to the other's growth. And this mutually enriching relationship reached its climax and apogee in the nineteenth century – at exactly the historical moment when Japan ‘reopened’ to the West.

I only met Dr Carmen Blacker (1924–2009) once, towards the end of her life, when she was already very ill. Although our only previous contact had been a somewhat scratchy exchange of letters over a possible contribution to a volume of Biographical Portraits that I edited, I found her easy to talk to and charming. Our main common ground was her first book, on Fukuzawa Yukichi, which had been published in 1964, as I started my own far less distinguished career in Japanese Studies. Reading this fascinating mixture of Dr. Blacker's diaries, more formal Writings, and reminiscences by those who knew her makes me wish I had known her better. Her companion and later husband, Dr Michael Loewe, and several former students and friends, contribute memoirs. These inevitably overlap, but they bring out the many formative influences that made her what she was.

Clearly important was family life and school. It was through school that she met Julia Piggott. Carmen was already interested in Japan and the Japanese language but the meeting with Julia Piggott was to provide a strong boost to that interest. Julia, who had actually lived in Japan, was the granddaughter of F. T. Piggott, a legal adviser to the Meiji Government, and the daughter of his son, Major General F. S. T. Piggott, twice military attaché’ in Tokyo. The friendship would last until Julia's death, and the encounter would consolidate Carmen's interest in things Japanese, and eventually lead to her career in Japanese studies. General Piggott, perhaps recognizing a fellow enthusiast, encouraged her and provided her with formal training in the language. He was something of a controversial figure, who could see no wrong in the Japanese, but Carmen clearly regarded him with affection and benefitted from his training as her account of ‘Two Piggotts’, published in 1991, makes clear.

Piggott's tutoring and her own efforts meant that by the time war came with Japan in 1941, she already had a good command of Japanese. After some intensive training in military Japanese at SOAS, she joined Bletchley Park. lt was not a happy experience. She felt undervalued both in terms of salary and the work she was given. However valuable it might have been as war work, she did not enjoy the monotony of carding Japanese words that might just be useful in decoding.

Felix Abt's account of his seven years in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK-North Korea) is a first on two counts. While there are a few accounts by foreign experts and diplomats, as far as I know it is the only such work by a businessman. There are plenty of photographs in it, though they are not quite as unusual as the author seems to believe. And for the RSAA's Journal, this is the first ever review of a book only available in e-book format.

The book is well worth reading for the picture it gives of a country that, unlike the conventional Western image, is not full of mad people following the instructions of mad leaders. Some issues may be avoided but Abt tells what he saw rather than what others told him was there. He is Swiss, with a long record of work in Europe, Africa and South East Asia with multi-national companies such as F. Hoffman-La Roche and ABB. He took up his appointment as ABB's representative in North Korea with enthusiasm. That enthusiasm led him to co-found the European Business Association in Pyongyang and to serve as its first chair, and to establish a short-lived Pyongyang Business School. He also created a successful pharmaceutical company, along the way selling the idea of advertising to the North Koreans. He learnt to work closely with his Korean staff and, like others, found that Korean women, whether in North or South Korea, often provide a more capable and efficient body of staff. They are as well-educated as their male counterparts but do not suffer from the same status hangups of the latter.

Abt also discovered that while his North Korean colleagues and partners were willing and eager to do business, international sanctions and restrictions, the result of the DPRK's nuclear programme, often made it difficult. He is scathing about the Western approach to North Korea and about the methods used to try to make it conform, which, he argues, hit ordinary people and legitimate business in North Korea, despite claims to the contrary. He dismisses stories about North Korean production and sales of illicit drugs and, in particular, about US claims that the country is the source of the counterfeiting of US $100 bills.

As its title clearly indicates, Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature brings together two ideas currently very much in vogue: that of the ‘invention of tradition’, especially in support of the processes of modernization and nationbuilding, and the related idea of the literary canon as a more or less arbitrary expression of power that is, as artificially constructed for political rather than literary or aesthetic purposes. In other words, the traditional view that a long-established cultural monument or institution such as the literary canon represents quite simply, in Matthew Arnold's words, ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, is now seen as politically naïve at best and as disingenuous (along elitist, racist, sexist, or imperialist lines) at worst. As one of the editors, Haruo Shirane, writes in his Introduction, the word ‘canon’ is used in this book in the ‘broader, more political sense’ to mean ‘those texts that are recognized by established or powerful institutions’ (p. 2). (He refers to Paul Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production [1994] as a key text of this new canon theory.) More specifically, the book's objective is to ‘historicize this complex sociopolitical process [of Japanese canon formation], particularly as it relates to the emergence of linguistic and cultural nationalism. which privileged certain texts as ‘cultural icons of Japan's “tradition”’ (p. 1). Against the traditional ‘foundational’ canon theory which sees a foundation in the text, ‘some universal, unchanging, or absolute value’, the new relativistic approach is described by Shirane as ‘antifoundational’ in that it ‘holds that there is no foundation in the text, that works in a canon reflect the interests of a particular group or society at a particular time’ (p. 2). Shirane argues further that this concept of canon implies conflict and change, unlike the terms classic and tradition, ‘both of which suggest something unchanging or given’ (p. 2). ‘Traditions’ and ‘classics’ are now seen as ‘constructed, particularly by dominant communities or institutions’, rather than (presumably, although Shirane does not really spell this out) as naturally or spontaneously arising out of a lengthy aesthetics-based literary-historical process of sifting out the great from the merely good – or the downright bad.

INTRODUCTION

John Carey Hall never acquired the fame of some of his contemporaries in the Japan consult service. Yet he was one of the early student interpreters and was among the longest serving members of the service, holding senior positions at all the main posts. He was particularly attached to Kobe, but ended his career as consul-general in Yokohama. He qualified in Japanese, was called to the Bar and did important legal work at various stages in his career.

EARLY CAREER

Like many of the China and Japan consular services, Hall was from Ireland. He was born in Coleraine on 22 January 1844, and was one of five brothers. In family memory, he was Presbyterian and a ‘moderate Irish nationalist’. He attended Coleraine Academical Institute and then studied at Queen's College Belfast. Applying to the Foreign Office (FO) in August 1867 for a student interpreter post, he wrote that he ‘held a scholarship in each year of [his] undergraduate course, [was] a senior scholar in Ancient Classics and at the last annual examination, had graduated with first class honours in the same subject…’ Hall passed and asked to go to Japan, about which he claimed to know as much as the study of books in English would allow. All the Japan slots were filled, but one of those selected withdrew and Hall took the place. Japan would be his home for forty-six years.

He arrived early in 1868. He later recalled that the ship had briefly anchored off the port of Hyogo, where the new foreign settlement at Kobe was in the process of being established. On arrival in Tokyo, he settled down under the guidance of Ernest Satow, the Japanese Secretary, on a salary of £200 a year. Hall was somewhat handicapped by physical problems. A fall while a student left him partially deaf and he grew deafer as the years went by. His eyesight was poor and also deteriorated over the years.

Yet he seems to have made a good start. He applied himself to language study. Then as a junior assistant he served as acting vice-consul at Tokyo, and become involved in legal work. As early as 1870, he was seconded to the Japanese commission established to devise a new scheme for prisons.

This chapter is more of an essay than a specialised paper. It looks at the way the Japanese treaty ports, once seen as the forward thrust of an alien world, have been steadily incorporated in the canon of history in Japan. Although some of its ideas have been inspired by works such as The Invention of Tradition and some of the writings of Robert Bickers on the Chinese treaty ports, it is not theoretical. Rather, it represents the reflections of one trained as a historian. In addition, it also looks at the wider legacy of the treaty ports, in an attempt to assess their role in the development of Japan since the 1860s. This last section is a return to a subject that I only ever properly looked at in an unpublished presentation on “Yokohama – key to modern Japan?” that I gave at the University of Sheffield in May 1972 and to which I had always intended to return one day. Here, I consider it in the context of the positive way the Japanese view the treaty ports.

I did not return to the subject until now for a variety of reasons. By 1972, my career had largely moved away from things Japanese. As a member of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office's Research Department, my focus shifted to China and, from the 1980s onwards, to the Korean Peninsula. Only in the 1990s did I ever spend much time on Japan, mainly concerned with issues such as the treatment of prisoners of war between 1941 and 1945 and on post-war Japanese apologies. Treaty ports played no part in this work, even if the historical background some-times proved useful. The treaty ports never entirely disappeared from my life, and I produced a few academic papers about them. Later, I found myself playing a role in Sir Hugh Cortazzi's major project on Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, writing about subjects such as Britain's Japan consular service, newspapers and foreign employees. A break from the office in 1992–1993 at last allowed me some time finally to focus on turning my PhD into a book. This involved a certain amount of updating, but relatively little fresh work had appeared on the subject. Where I failed was not to take sufficient account of the great increase in works on the ports in China and the new themes and issues being considered.

We have all done it. An interesting paper comes across the desk or is picked up along the way. One glances at it, perhaps even makes some cursory study and then tosses it into a box against some future need or just because it looks too interesting to throw away. That is just what Second Lieutenant Ian Nish of the Intelligence Corps did while working on Japanese documents as part of the British Commonwealth occupation force in Western Japan from 1946 to 1948. Now, as Professor Emeritus in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Britain's leading scholar of matters Japanese, he has brought out some of the contents of the box, to throw light on Japanese attitudes on a range of subjects during and after the war.

That is not all. Nish gives his personal account of what it was like to live and work among Japanese far away from the centre as they came to terms with defeat. A small section of Nish's photographs and ephemera add to the interest, and, for good measure, he also includes a brief memoir by the late Professor William Beasley of the School of Oriental and African Studies, who worked as a naval intelligence officer in Tokyo just after the war ended. Beasley's experience, living in the former British Embassy, now recommissioned as a naval station, was very different but the account is equally valuable. We have much information on the making of high policy during the occupation, and it is useful to be reminded that orders issued from above could look very different at ground level. Young occupation officers might be called upon to explain democracy or to sort out black marketing. And whatever official injunction there may have been about non-fraternization, even the lowest-ranking intelligence officers had to deal with Japanese people on a day-to-day basis, which gave them some insight into what they were thinking both about the war and about the new world that descended on them after Japan's surrender. Travel was also possible, and, even if travelling conditions left much to be desired, it provided further opportunities for learning. For both Nish and Beasley, their time in Japan and their increasing skill in the language would provide the basis for their future academic careers as well as giving them Japanese and other friends for the rest of their lives.

I. POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL USES OF THE KOJIKI

What one might call the standard ‘snapshot’ view of the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712 AD) is that it was compiled by order of the early Nara imperial court, the ritsuryō state, with one central political purpose in mind: to legitimize the Yamato clan's hegemony – that is, to support the claim of the Yamato clan chiefs, ancestors of the Japanese emperors, to a ‘divine right’ to rule over all other Japanese clans. This view has been constructed mainly by historians and political scientists who naturally seek to place this, the oldest extant Japanese text, in the context of the early development of the Japanese nation state. Since the kokugakusha or ‘national scholars’ of the eighteenth century, this has also been basically the view of the Kojiki promulgated by emperorcentered Japanese nationalism – and as such it still has great popular currency, perhaps especially among people who have never actually read the work. And, as we have already seen, emperor-centered nationalism still shapes the worldview of Japan's ruling political establishment.

But the question I would like to raise here is: to what extent does the Kojiki, the real text as opposed to the ‘snapshot’ version of the political historians or the religio-mythic canonical version of the nationalists, actually support this belief system?

II. THE FULL COMPLEXITY OF THE WORK

Reading the Kojiki one finds abundant evidence that, in the several centuries which preceded its compilation, Japan underwent a momentous transformation. This oldest of Japanese books embodies the great ‘ juncture’ or ‘rupture’ between the old and the new ways of thinking and living, one preliterate, prehistorical and prenational, a world of clans and chieftains, shamans and sorcerers, gods and heroes – a mythological world – the other literate and historical, a world of nations and emperors, imperial courtiers and bureaucrats, monks and scholars, a recognizably modern world which, because it now included T’ang dynasty China, included the most sophisticated art, science, medicine, technology and philosophy found anywhere on earth at that time. This was a massive transformation, a transformation more meaningfully from ‘ancient’ to ‘modern’ than even the transformation Japan underwent in the late nineteenth century. (And the Kojiki compilers themselves were fully conscious of living in ‘new times’ – thus their title's self-conscious reference to ‘ancient’ – that is, ‘pre-modern’ – matters.)

Germany's quest for colonies came late, partly because Germany itself came late. Only after the establishment of the German Empire in 1871 did the country begin the search for colonies. Until then, the issue of unification, and the struggle between Prussia and Austria as to which would dominate a unified German Empire, absorbed German energies. Given that much effort was still required after 1871 to mould the new entity – no easy task given that German kingdoms such as Bavaria continued to exist and free cities such as Hamburg were not eager to see their privileged position disappear – historians have struggled to explain the German quest for colonies. Charles Stephenson states that Germany's colonial empire was not acquired in a fit of absentmindedness, as Britain's was supposed to have been, but he struggles to find an answer to the question why it was acquired. No doubt it was partly because that was what other European states were trying to do, and it may also have been to distract attention from issues at home. Stephenson seems to think that it was the latter motive which lay behind Bismarck's initial interest in the acquisition of overseas colonies, but he is not sure. Germany's first colonial interest was Africa; East Asia and the Pacific came later, and had more of a feel of absent-minded acquisition than Germany's first colonies. In the end, however, it was perceived naval needs that pushed Germany towards the acquisition of its Pacific and Chinese territories. Coal-powered ships needed readily available supplies, and the way that such supplies could be guaranteed was by the acquisition of coaling stations. Up to the 1890s, Germany had relied on Hong Kong to fuel its ships in East Asian waters but there was growing concern that Hong Kong would not be available if Britain and Germany were on bad terms. It was thus that, in 1897, the Germans acquired the enclave on China's Shandong peninsula known today as Jiaozhaou, but which Stephenson prefers to refer to by one of its many contemporary variations, Kiautschou. The main town in that enclave, now Qingdao, is referred to as Tsingtau throughout. While no doubt both forms will strike a responsive cord with those who have only used the German archives, their usage in a modern work is only likely to confuse the reader.