12 - Memories of the Past: The Legacy of Japan's Treaty Ports

Summary

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 This last section is a return to a subject that I only ever properly looked at in an unpublished presentation on “Yokohama – key to modern Japan?”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.