When some twenty-five years ago, the British historian Richard Pares observed, Good history cannot do so much service as money or science: but bad history can do almost as much harm as the most disasterous scientific discovery in the world.’ Professor Chang has identified some bad history and has set about correcting it; the result is good in parts only. The bad history is the account given by some Japanese historians of the way foreign courts established in Japan under the nineteenth-century ‘unequal treaties’ dispensed justice. Leaving aside the question of whether or not these treaties were inherently unjust, Chang shows that there has been a persistent tradition that Japanese could not expect justice in the foreign courts, which were invariably partial to foreign defendants.

The origins of this belief are to be found in Japanese nineteenthcentury polemics’ but it has survived intact in modern historical writing. Chang begins with an account of the establishment and organisational framework of the extraterritoriality system in Japan during the 1850s and 1860s. He claims that this is the first time this has been done. In fact, much of the same ground has been covered in the work of F. C. Jones, published as long ago as 1931 and cited by Chang, and in two studies not mentioned, Yokota Kisaburō, ‘Nihon ni okeru Chigaihōken’, in Kokkagakkai Goiusshanen-shi Kinen, 1952, and my article, ‘ Extraterritoriality in Japan, 1858–1899’, in TASJ, volume 18, July 1983, published too late for citation in Chang's book.

For some of his information about the structure and scope of consular courts in Japan, Chang has clearly relied on information supplied by archivists and other officials’ rather than his own researches. This, plus what I suspect is basic unfamiliarity with much of the material he is using, has led him to some errors. It is not correct to say that France established its first consulate in Japan at Edo in 1859 and in 1877 redesignated it the French consulate at Tokyo, nor that France founded a second consulate in Yokohama in 1870 and another one in Kobe in 1879. The French had a consulate at Yokohama from the earliest days. There were no consular, as distinct from diplomatic, establishments at Edo/Tokyo until that city was opened to foreign residence in 1869.