Harold S. Williams
Список книг автора Harold S. WilliamsTales of Foreign Settlements in Japan
Here are twenty-five tales about the Foreign Settlements or Concessions in Japan following the opening of the country to foreign trade in 1859, and an additional ten strange stories that revoke around those times. The tales are historically accurate, sociologically significant and, most important of all, eminently readable.These Tales of Foreign Settlements in Japan are the product of years of painstaking and scholarly research by a writer who is a business man and a recognized authority on the history of the Foreign Concessions in Japan, a man who has resided here for over thirty-five years.
Shades of the Past
Prowling among these stories about Japan one finds riffraff and gentlemen, pirates and warriors, saints and sinners, smugglers and legitimate businessmen.All those, in fact, who made up the foreign communities of Japan in the early days. Harold S. Williams tells about them with the same inimitable humor, irony, drama and whimsy that made his earlier Tales of the Foreign Settlements such a popular success. With due regard for historical accuracy he recreates those fantastic days and the furor and fun with which they were filled.Here you can enjoy the privileged social status of belonging to the Victorian Volunteer Steam Fire Engine Company of Yokohama; you can join those Japanese pirates who were the first to meet Englishmen; arbitrate Japan's first labor dispute, involving foreigners, of course; witness the massacre of forty thousand Japanese Christians; revel in Nagasaki when it was the Paris of the Far East; travel over the Tokaido when it was the most picturesque and colorful of the world's highways; watch at close range each gruesome detail of an act of harakiri; dive for sunken treasures; watch the world's largest wooden vessel burn to the water line; marvel at one of the greatest advertising feats of all time.
Foreigners in Mikadoland
This is an account of life in the foreign communities and former Foreign Settlements or Concessions in Japan that flourished after Japan was opened to foreign trade in 1859. It tells of the imposters, the eccentrics, and the scandals, no less than the achievements of the scholars, the merchants, and the diplomats who contributed so much to the development of modern Japan.Here you will meet Townsend Harris, the first U.S. Consul General to Japan, the Grand Duke Alexander, and many other less well known, but just as interesting figures such as the energetic Rev. Bailey, the remarkable Mr. McLeod, and the Misses Butterfly and Chrysanthemum.All these events are portrayed in a series of chapters, arranged as nearly as possible in chronological order, each woven around some of the happenings of those times. Carefully researched, all of these events are historically accurate in every detail, and are written in Mr. Williams' highly enjoyable style.