Gaijin to the Grave: Harold S. Williams and Japan

This article sees the life and work of the Australian-born, Kobe-based historian Harold S. Williams (1898–1987) as a paradox – an acclaimed writer on Japan who is relatively indifferent to the country, its people, customs and traditions. Japan itself does not engage him. Rather, his subject is the reverberating impact of the foreigners who settled in the newly created treaty ports after Japan’s ‘opening’ to Western trade and influence in the 1850s and 1860s. Williams’s focus on the sometimes violent antagonism to their presence in the turbulent years leading up to (and beyond) the Meiji Restoration recreates Japan as a proving ground of character and culture, with the fortitude of the foreigners in entrenching their place in hostile territory afforded an almost mythic status. My analysis reveals that his obsessive interest in the grave sites of foreigners who lived, strived and died in Japan indicates a personal project that is essentially commemorative. As a proud ‘gaijin’ – a Western outsider detached from Japanese society, even after living and working there for almost 70 years – Williams identifies with an essentially British tradition of heroic overseas achievement and service: a cultural allegiance that reflects his colonial Australian origins.