At one point in this study of the thought of the major Japanese literary critic of the twentieth century, Kobayashi Hideo, 1902–1983, Ninomiya Masayuki describes Kobayashi's conviction that being born a Japanese was an inescapable destiny that included specifically for the writer an obligation to work within the traditions of the Japanese language. Ninomiya then confesses: ‘Le fait que le Japonais que je suis écrit cet ouvrage en français contredit … l’idée de Kobayashi sur ce point’ (p. 85). Indeed it does, and we may all be thankful that Ninomiya has dared to defy his linguistic destiny – and his intellectual hero – by writing this first major study of Kobayashi in any Western language. Furthermore, the fact that it is written in French by someone intimate with French culture is an equally fortunate circumstance because, as Ninomiya abundantly shows, French literature and philosophy loomed large in the background of Kobayashi's thought – although it must be added that, as often with Japanese writers, this ‘influence’ seemed mostly to reinforce tendencies already present (for instance, his emphasis on vital forces and on intuition seems as much traditionally Japanese as Bergsonian).

Finally, a more subtle but equally significant advantage is suggested by Ninomiya himself when he poses this rhetorical question:

To which I can only answer with an emphatic ‘oui, oui!’ and ‘bravo, Monsieur Ninomiya!’

The work is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different phase of Kobayashi's response to one of the great ‘turning points’ of modern Japanese history, those few hectic years in the 1940s during which the country went from the apex of military and imperial power to a catastrophic defeat and then to a new postwar ‘liberal democratic’ order imposed by the Allied Occupation. For the normally rather apolitical Kobayashi, this was the period of his life when his relation to his own country was, as Ninomiya puts it, most ‘aiguë’.

Art created in immediate response to disaster must confront certain ethical as well as aesthetic issues. Indeed, this is one clear case in which ethics and aesthetics seem inextricably linked – and, more than that, a case in which they often seem to conflict with each other. With time comes detachment, but in the immediate aftermath of a disaster writers and artists can feel themselves condemned to silence by the sheer overwhelming magnitude of human suffering that surrounds them. They are virtually compelled to ask fundamental questions about the value or appropriateness of their art in the face of such suffering. And they often tend, in the first instance, to be overcome by the debilitating sense that mere words or images cannot do justice to the enormity and tragic meaning of the disaster, or even that the making of ‘artistic capital’ out of it is a kind of ‘disaster exploitation’ on a par with the proverbial ambulancechasing of other professions. But such fainthearted hesitations or ambivalences also, almost inevitably, give rise to a creative counter-reaction and new forms of ‘apologia’ for the ultimate value of art. The creative energy of the artist overcomes initial ethical reservations and, especially in those most aware of this ethical/aesthetic conflict, a new and more powerful form of artistic expression may ultimately result.

Writers, for instance, must write, even if almost in spite of themselves, and their words can possess a mysterious healing power of their own. In the wake of ‘3/11’ (as the March 11, 2011 ‘triple disaster’ of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in northeastern Japan is now conventionally designated), Tanikawa Shuntarō, a senior figure in the Japanese poetic world, wrote a poem called ‘Words’ which, as Jeffrey Angles notes, poses ‘the question of how we can even write about things for which there are no words; yet “Words put forth buds / From the earth beneath the rubble”’.

This familiar pattern (in Japan as elsewhere) – an initial traumatized silence followed by a ‘defiant’ outburst of creative productivity – may be seen among writers and artists after an earlier disaster such as the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and it may also be found in the literature and art produced, ultimately in great profusion, in the aftermath of 3/11. One significant new factor in the recent disaster, however, was the omnipresence of social media: Twitter, Facebook, and other communications progeny of the Internet.

It was always worth going to hear a lecture by Hugh Baker, now Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He had the knack of picking out the interesting tit-bit that turned a scholarly presentation into a performance delivered with verve. There was no doubt about the scholarship but he went beyond mere knowledge, bringing things Chinese to life.

The same is true of Ancestral Images. In one sense, this is not a new work. Back in the 1970s, Baker did a series on Hong Kong television on Hong Kong life and history, which drew on his research work in a clan village in the New Territories. From this developed a series of short pieces in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), which were subsequently published in three slim volumes, with the same title as the present book. These went out of print when the SCMP withdrew from book publishing. A selection appeared in 1990, published by the Hong Kong University Press, which has now decided to publish all the original 120 articles in one volume. We are the beneficiaries. Baker has slightly revised the articles, to make them reflect the huge changes that have taken place in Hong Kong and the New Territories since the 1970s, but their essential freshness is there. Baker's own photographs provide charming illustrations. Baker is somewhat dismissive of his photographic skills but the pictures chosen are apt and informative. They are also historical records in their own right, since much of what they depict has long since disappeared. The material is primarily concerned with Hong Kong, but the reader will find many reflections on Chinese society more widely, historical matters, such as the Imperial Customs Service, and the wrestling of Chinese students with the vagaries of the English language. There is no claim to original scholarship, but one would have to put in many long hours to accumulate what Baker presents in easily understood and digestible form. Food and death and burials are perhaps the most recurring themes, but there are also many reflections on gods and religion. Baker is always stimulating, occasionally provocative, but never boring. Reading the collection straight through throws up some repetition but, taken as it should be, dipping in here and there, one does not notice this but rather enjoys the clever linking of the past and the present.

Treaty ports are back in fashion. Once seen as a minor appendage of imperialism, they are increasingly seen as worthy of study in their own right. In Britain, much of the credit for this renewed interest belongs to Professor Robert Bickers. Bickers has put Chinese studies at the University of Bristol at the forefront of this revival through his own record of thorough and readable books and papers. But, as this book shows, scholars from all over the world are now re-evaluating the China treaty ports in the light of new approaches and the increasing availability of new material, often from Chinese sources.

In the Introduction, the editors indicate the new fields being explored, moving away from the doings of the great powers towards examining what actually went on in the treaty ports and how they affected China. The most interesting part, however, is an imaginative account of a composite theoretical port, “Suidi”. Through its supposed history can be traced the rise and fall of a typical treaty port. Despised and reviled by all Chinese governments in the 20th century, now, as its architecture is seen in a more positive light and its archives emerge from the ban long placed on access to them, it is increasingly seen as part of China's history rather than just an intrusion.

The other 12 essays, each of which has substantial notes and references, cover some of the themes outlined in the Introduction. The first, by Par Cassel, looks at the issue of extraterritoriality, the legal system which underpinned the whole treaty port system in East Asia. This is a subject that has long fascinated me and about which I have written as it affected Japan. Cassel makes a number of interesting points but also some debatable ones. It was the first time that I had heard of the idea that the system was supposed only to apply in the ports and that, away from them, foreigners would come under Chinese jurisdiction. Some Chinese may have thought this but I doubt that many foreigners or foreign governments did.

Isabella Jackson contributes a fascinating analysis of who actually ran the Shanghai foreign settlement, the largest and most complex in all of Asia. Equally illuminating is Chiara Betta's essay, which looks at the complexity of Shanghai's land system through the rise and ultimate fall, after 1949, of the Hardoon family.

INTRODUCTION

The end of the 1914–18 war saw Britain at the forefront of aircraft developments. Under the stress of war, the new science of aviation had developed at breakneck speed, and the quality of aircraft, pilots and engineering staff had improved beyond all recognition. Despite these advances, the end of the war removed the need for the large air forces that then existed, and the successful pilots, designers and engineers found themselves out of work in their own countries. But the developments had not gone unnoticed elsewhere, and there were soon opportunities overseas. Thus Cecil Lewis, a noted British fighter pilot, found himself recruited by the Vickers Aircraft Company, which had secured a contract with the warlord government based in Beijing, and spent two years trying to teach Chinese officers to fly.

Japan too was eager to capitalize on British wartime experience. The 1921 unofficial British aviation mission to Japan led by the Master of Sempill (Colonel William Forbes-Sempill) is well-known, not least because many see it as a foretaste of Sempill's later alleged leanings towards the Axis powers in the Second World War. Far less known is the presence of another, also unofficial yet arguably equally important, British aviation delegation in Japan at the same time. John Ferris hints at its presence in a reference to the British government allowing ‘aircraft manufacturers’ to go to Japan in 1921, though that is not an accurate description. As we shall see, this was not a group sent by British manufacturers, but one recruited from redundant staff from the Sopwith Aircraft Company.

This group arrived earlier than the Sempill mission and stayed longer. It was based at the Mitsubishi factory at Nagoya which would become the centre, first of the Mitsubishi Aircraft Company, and later of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. It was then the headquarters of the Mitsubishi Internal Combustion Engine Company, established to make aero engines. The Sempill mission, which was a substitute for the official delegation that the Japanese had sought, had close contacts with the British embassy, and the ambassador's annual reports for 1922 and 1923 noted its presence and its problems. yet, although the reports also reported the existence of the Mitsubishi factory, describing it as having ‘the largest actual and potential output [of aircraft] in Japan’, the British staff who had helped make this possible went unmentioned.

Our careers are a mixture of necessity, happenstance, and design. Some have it easier than others, but our life experiences, be they trials and tribulations or the need to change direction as we take on family or other responsibilities, including those that come with our jobs, always offer potential for personal development. It is up to us whether we take advantage of the hand we are dealt, even if it takes us along paths that we do not expect. We are, indeed, fortunate that Jim followed the meander that he did. He would have been a very different scholar had he spent his career in academia, but, equally, he would have been a very different diplomat had he not written a PhD thesis on Japanese treaty ports during the Meiji era.

There have been few academic posts in East Asian subjects until recently, resulting in some of our best scholars having to traverse circuitous routes as they develop the expertise for which they come to be appreciated. Jim renders meaningless our custom of pigeonholing those who we rely on for bringing us knowledge of the East Asian region into a single category, as an academic, a diplomat, or an expert commentator. Indeed, he slots neatly into all three of these categories, and more. It comes as no surprise that he dislikes the ‘scholar-diplomat’ label, because that too readily dilutes one element at the expense of the other. We admire his writing, and his interventions at symposia and conferences, precisely because he refuses to slot neatly into our expectations of what such categories mean. And, since his retirement from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he has also enjoyed a late career as expert commentator, one that would have been likely to incur the wrath of government during his diplomatic career. Not that we should really consider him a normal diplomat, since his day job was as a member of the FCO Research Department (now Research Analysts), and from there he took postings to Seoul, Beijing and Pyongyang. In fact, in ‘Diplomacy in the East’ (2007), he remarks that his only training in diplomacy was his PhD training.

Distant it certainly was. Despite a brief flurry of activity in the late nineteenth century, which included the temporary occupation of one of Korea's many island groups, British interest in Korea before 1950 was largely limited to a handful of missionaries, a few scholars of porcelain, and even fewer diplomats. In the 1930s, a couple of British academics had produced historical works which touched on Korea in the nineteenth century, but there were no real Korean scholars in Britain. In 1950, it would be safe to say that for most people in Britain, Korea and its problems were unknown territory. The ancient and out-of-date maps and photographs which British newspapers produced to illustrate the stories they ran on the early stages of the conflict were further proof, if such were required, of the general British lack of knowledge of Korea.

The war which began on 25 June 1950 was to change that. By the time an uneasy armistice was agreed some three years later, 60,000 British servicemen and women had been involved in Korea, over a thousand had lost their lives and many others had been wounded. Large numbers had been taken prisoner, enduring the primitive conditions of North Korean and later Chinese POW camps. The British economy, fragile after six years of world war and five more years of austerity, was hit again by the demands of the unexpected involvement in Korea. By April 1951 – a little beyond the scope of this volume – when the “Glorious Glosters” held the Chinese at bay at the village of Solmari north of Seoul in the battle of the Imjin River, the distant shores of Korea seemed almost as familiar from newsreel and newspaper accounts as Normandy or the Ardennes had done six years previously. In the end, though, for all but a handful the perception was short-lived. Other conflicts quickly overlaid the Korean war in British consciousness. The term “forgotten war” could justly be applied to the British perception of this particular war. The fact that it has taken from the end of the conflict in 1953 until 1990 to produce an official history is further evidence of how remote from Britain's interests the Korean war has generally appeared.

Lord Lindsay of Birker, now Professor Emeritus of Far Eastern Studies at the American University, Washington DC, spent the years 1938–45 in China. He went originally to teach at Yenching University. Then following the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, he joined the Communists fighting the Japanese, first with General Nieh Jungchen's forces in the Shansi-Ch’ahar-Hopei region and, from the spring of 1944, with the CCP HQ at Yenan. The present book is a mixture of personal reminiscences and the history of the CCP's fight against the Japanese, coupled with a photograph collection which reflects these two themes.

Lindsay got to know the Communists during vacation trips from Yenching. Soon after reaching China, he had decided that the Japanese must be opposed. Since the Communists seemed to be more active in their opposition than the Kuomintang, it was natural for Lindsay to begin aiding the communist forces. This he did by smuggling essential supplies, and the occasional person, from Peking to the Shansi-Ch’ahar Hopei region. This was not as dangerous as it sounds – Lindsay was protected as a foreigner by extraterritoriality and the Japanese “ occupation” forces were often in fact Chinese puppet forces who took their duties casually. With the coming of war between Japan and the west in 1941, Lindsay and his wife, Li Hsiao-li, one of his former students with her own history of anti-Japanese activities, fled to the communist areas. They later learnt that they had made their escape 10 minutes ahead of the Japanese who had come to arrest them. For the next four years, the Lindsay family lived and worked with the Communists. Lindsay's considerable amateur knowledge of radio and telecommunications were put to good use in training CCP radio technicians. With justified pride, he notes that when he revisited China in 1973, many of his former pupils occupied prominent positions in China's telecommunications industry.

It is certainly valuable to have both the text and the pictures of the present volume. The pictures in particular are good value. Lindsay purchased a Zeiss Ikon 3–5 camera soon after arriving in China and it served him well. In spite of the often difficult conditions in which the films were processed, the quality of those reproduced here is uniformly high.

Most cities have their ghosts. Peking (Beijing) is no exception. But as well as imperial concubines, strangled eunuchs and the reminders of more recent political struggles, Peking has ghostly buildings. They are everywhere. Behind a factory wall is a temple. A cadre school hides another, a kindergarten a third. A museum was once a noble's palace. The Academy of Social Sciences sits on the site of the imperial examination halls, while a ring road replaces the city walls. Old Peking sits amid modern starkness. Recent years have seen attempts to save or restore some of the character of bygone days. Some hutong will be preserved and temple fairs revived. Books of photographs of the old city find a ready market. In the middle of Peking, close to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, sits the largest ghost of all, the former Legation Quarter. Once the symbol of foreign dominance of China, it is now disappearing before the city's developers and the ravages of neglect. Sixty years ago, when to visit the Great Wall had not yet become the ambition of all travellers to China, the Legation Quarter often occupied more space in foreign guidebooks than the Temple of Heaven or the Lama Temple. Today, its existence is scarcely mentioned.

After 1949, the new government set out to reclaim the Legation Quarter for China. It was relatively easy. War and revolution had disrupted the arrangements of the past. Many of the former Legation buildings were empty since their former occupants had not established relations with the new China. Friendly nations like the Russians were willing to comply with Chinese demands. Others like the British were subjected to pressures which in the end forced them to move. By the early 1960s, the Legation Quarter was Chinese. Chinese organizations now sat where foreigners had once lorded it over them. If the Cultural Revolution had not swept upon the scene, some of the buildings might have been better preserved. But in the throes of a movement attacking both the old and the foreign, the Legation Quarter was lucky to escape destruction. Instead, it survived neglected for the most part. Today it is the demands of the developers which threaten the remainder, though perhaps China's rulers would not be unhappy to see the Quarter's final disappearance. Tianjin or Shanghai may be able to see merit or even part of China's history in old foreign-style buildings.

What Is Hong Kong?

To answer this question, it is usual to begin by explaining how Hong Kong came into being from a historical point of view. As succinctly noted by John Carroll, while the Chinese Government officially holds that ‘Hong Kong has been part of the territory of China since ancient times,’ until recently, British historians ‘generally dismissed the idea of Hong Kong as having any real history until the British arrived’. It was just a ‘barren island’, or to borrow Richard Hughes’ often-cited term, just a ‘borrowed place living on borrowed time’ – ‘Hong Kong did not exist, so it was necessary to invent it.’ Regarding this assessment, Carroll cited the example of James Hayes, historian and former colonial official, noting that ‘the island was certainly well-established in settler communities long before 1841’. That said, I would rather take up the question from a different perspective, which may seem out of the blue. Refuting Hughes’ concept of ‘borrowed time, borrowed place’, renowned Hong Kong author Kai-cheung Dung has argued that ‘space and time can never be borrowed’: ‘I and many others like me simply don't accept this description of the place where we live’ because ‘we belong to the space-time that is ours. Nobody lends it to us and we don't borrow it from anybody.’ Two years older than Dung and having grown up in Hong Kong with a similar background, I share his view completely. Hong Kong has been commonly known as a barren rock, a Chinese fishing village, an imperial outpost, a capitalist metropolis, a city between worlds and a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China under the unprecedented ‘one country, two systems’ framework.

The euphoria that marked the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union (USSR) has long since vanished. We now know that there was no “end to history”, and that the Cold War rhetoric of capitalism versus communism masked deeper, more long-lasting problems. The opening of once closed archives and the publication of memoirs allow us to examine the course of the Cold War in great detail and to reach a clearer picture of how the Cold War began and how it was waged. Professor Westad, Director of the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics, concentrates on how the conflict was played out in the Third World, that rapidly disappearing term once used to cover all countries that were not a) superpowers – the USSR and the USA; or b) developed countries, such as most of Western Europe and Japan. He argues that the Cold War was essentially a conflict between the two superpowers, and that their historical experiences had much to do with the way this developed. Both were slaveowning empires until the 1860s. They were each convinced of their own righteousness and their obligation to bring enlightenment to the lesser breeds on their respective peripheries. Despite establishing huge empires in the adjacent lands, they both distinguished their actions from what they regarded as the more reprehensible imperial actions of countries such as Britain and France, and later Japan. The Americans opposed central power, or the power of the collective, both of which reminded them of the European past that they had rejected. The Russians, on the other hand, embraced collectivism as a means of incorporating their new subject peoples. In the 20th century, these positions became even more entrenched. Both championed freedom, but their concepts of freedom were very different, and positions that favoured their respective state interests were soon seen as the “right” way towards freedom for colonial or semi-colonial peoples. After 1917, on one side there was fear of communism, on the other fear of imperialism. Until 1945, little more than rhetoric marked these two positions, both the USSR and the USA retreating into relative isolation which intensified the fear of the unknown on both sides.

World War II changed all that.

Just occasionally, a book comes along that changes one's whole perspective on a subject that seemed very clear and settled. Michael Auslin's study of Japanese diplomacy from the arrival of Commodore Perry in Tokyo (then Edo) Bay in 1853 until the successful renegotiation of the treaties in from 1894 onwards is just such a work. Auslin argues that, contrary to the general picture painted by others (including me), the Bakufu, the effective rulers of Japan when Perry arrived, were not passive actors in the face of this threat from outside. He also questions how far developments in China influenced the course of events in Japan, pointing out that the way the treaty system developed in Japan proved to be very different from what had happened in China. Admittedly, once or twice imperialism showed its iron fist, but on the whole Japan escaped the imposition of a regime of control that favoured foreigners. The round of treaty making that really began with Townsend Harris's treaty of 29 July 1858 – the earlier American and British naval treaties having been found wanting when their august negotiators got home – saw Japan emerge in a much better condition than China. Japan was not semi-independent, as China seemed to many. Foreigners remained under tight control, with limited access to the interior of the country. There was no Japanese Imperial Maritime Customs, under foreign control and largely staffed by foreigners as was the case in China. None of Japan's treaty ports were able to achieve the quasi-independence that marked Shanghai from the 1850s to 1941. In Japan's most important treaty port, Yokohama, the foreigners effectively abandoned any real attempt at self-government as early as 1867, were never able to claim it back. The British and the French maintained small garrisons at Yokohama into the 1870s, but there was nothing ever in Japan to compare to the Beijing Legation Quarter, which from 1900 until 1941 had permanent garrisons and where Chinese law effectively did not run. Other Chinese cities had foreign garrisons and a permanent foreign naval presence. Japan escaped all this, Auslin argues, because its negotiators had very clear ideas from the beginning. They were also adept at playing one foreign barbarian off against another, for they quickly realised that the Western powers were not united in their approach, however much they might appear so at first sight.

JAPAN'S TREATY-PORT PRESS

By the time of the Meiji restoration’ the foreign language press, the majority of whose journalists were British, was an established feature of Japanese treaty-port life. This was not surprising. From humble beginnings at Canton in 1827, newspapers had spread to most foreign settlements in East Asia. They were sometimes little more than advertising sheets but they met a local need and ‘mail editions’ gave the foreign communities an international voice. Their history is often obscure, though much can be gleaned from the publications themselves, especially from the editorial quarrels which enlivened their pages and from the court cases which sometimes resulted. John Reddie Black was the only journalist to write a book on local history.

The first foreign-language newspaper in Japan, the Nagasaki Shipping List and Advertiser, started at Nagasaki in 1861. Its founder was A.W. Hansard, an auctioneer and jobbing printer. The annual subscription was $20 Mexican, the accepted currency in the Japan ports, for four sides of news and advertisements four times a week. In subsequent years, over forty newspapers and some thirty magazines and periodicals were published in settlements whose foreign population, excluding the Chinese, was at its maximum about 5000. Most were produced in Yokohama where, by the mid-1890s, some 2500 Western residents lived. One contemporary noted, perhaps tongue in cheek, that this showed ‘a remarkable degree of journalistic activity’, indicating ‘a positive craving for news on the part of the public’. Other factors included international rivalries, personal ambitions and subsidies. A craving for news was probably low on the list.

Even successful papers seldom sold more than five hundred copies. The result was high subscription rates averaging $24 per year, with overseas or special editions extra. Advertisements were lucrative; Yokohama rates in 1882 were up to four times those of major London newspapers. Also important was job printing. One British official in 1885 claimed this was the chief source of profit for many papers, and another wrote in 1897 that it was ‘highly lucrative … far more so than the newspaper’, for one Nagasaki publisher. Capital equipment was cheap. The Japan Gazette was still printed on hand presses in 1891. In 1893 the presses of the Rising Sun and Nagasaki Express were valued at only $1000, although paper and binding materials were worth $7000. Salaries were a major cost.