Harold S. Williams and Japan with Professor Robin Gerster

Libby Cass: Yuma, good afternoon, and welcome to the National Library of Australia. I'm Libby Cass, Director of Curatorial and Collection Research at the Library. And I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations peoples as traditional owners and custodians of this land, and give my respect to elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Thank you for attending this event. Coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country.  

This afternoon's presentation, Harold S. Williams in Japan by Professor Robin Gerster, a 2024 National Library of Australia Fellow. Our distinguished fellowship program supports researchers to make intensive use of National Library’s rich collections through residencies of three months. National Library of Australia fellows are made possible through philanthropic donations. And Professor Gerster's fellowship is generously funded by the Harold S. Williams Trust for Japan studies. Robin Gerster has published prolifically on the cultures of war and travel and on Australian interactions with Asia. Among his books are the award winners, "Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan," and "Big-noting, the Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing." Other works include Japan travel book, "Legless in Ginza," and the co-written study of photography and the Australian-Japan relationship, "Pacific Exposures". His latest book, "Hiroshima and Here: A Cultural History of Australian Responses to Nuclear Energy and Weaponry and the Threat of Nuclear War."  

Today's presentation focuses on Australian businessman and historian Harold S. Williams known for his research into the impact of the foreign arrivals who helped facilitate Japan's transition from feudalism to modernity after its opening up to the west in the 1850s. Williams' own life and career in Japan spanned almost 70 years, ending with his death in Kobe in 1987. Equally, at home in his ambiguous position as both an insider and outsider, Williams sought to entrench the historical place of the foreigner, gaijin, in the local landscape. Appropriately enough, he achieved this by an almost obsessional interest in visiting and describing the grave sites of those foreigners who ventured to Japan and never left. Please join me in welcoming Professor Robin Gerster.   

Robin Gerster: Thanks, Libby. Thanks for coming. Hello, everyone. I should open by thanking the staff of the NLA for their hospitality and help. I've been coming to this place for decades since I was a postgraduate student, and it's always been a really good experience. And of course, I must acknowledge the Williams Trust, which has generously supported my research here. The Williams Collection is a wonderful resource for those of us who work on Japan. Benjamin Disraeli once wrote that “the East is a career”, implying that its study had the potential to turn into a lifelong professional and personal commitment. One could refine that to Japan as a career. For Japan tragics, the Williams Collection is like manna from heaven.  

So, a bit of a textual trigger warning here. I'll be treating Williams as a serious writer, not just a humble historian. That means probing his weaknesses as well as his strengths.  

So, let's take ourselves back in time. It's May 1921 and we are in the city of Kobe. Edward the Prince of Wales is in town on the last leg of a four-week trip to Japan. That's him third from the right if you're not familiar with his fairly famous face. In Tokyo, he had gone duck shooting with the young Prince Regent Hirohito, and had attended a British civilization exhibition that showcased Britain's beneficial influence on Japan. Kobe was the perfect place to conclude the visit. One of the treaty ports created in the late 1850s with the signing of trade agreements that ended Japan's 200 years of isolation from the world. Kobe had a cosmopolitan flavour, but it was also a bastion of Britishness with the businesses, elite social clubs, cricket fields, and race tracks to prove it.  

The early 1920s was a prosperous time in Kobe for the recent World War had boosted international trade and shipping. A royal ball in Edward's honour was held by the resident Britons, the cream of Kobe Society. You can see them there. The venue was the Oriental Hotel, one of several elegant western-styled hotels built to cater to the influx of foreigners. No less an imperial figure than Rudyard Kipling had given the Oriental his seal of approval. He had a very good lunch there apparently. The latest version of the hotel was especially palatial, a fitting venue for a visiting royal, the heir to the British throne no less. Now, in the photograph, you can see a man on crutches just to the left of centre wearing a black tuxedo. I think that's him. Might have partied a bit too hard.  

Now, over his right shoulder, there he is, you can see a partly obscured, slightly blurred face of a young man. I think I've got him there. What's he doing there? He's a medical student from Melbourne, Australia who'd arrived in Yokohama just 18 months earlier, age barely 21 on what was supposed to be a summer holiday. It's Harold S. Williams. He was decades before his time, a young travelling Australian motivated by an interest in Japan language and history. No cheap air flights in those days. A long... A long boat trip to Yokohama.  

Soon after arriving in Japan, Williams found himself working for a Scottish trading firm. And when this photograph was taken, he had begun a business career in Kobe that would extend more than 60 years while becoming increasingly engaged with deep historical research into the world he had entered as a young man. By the time of his death in 1987, he would become recognised as the great authority on the foreign presence in Japan since the 19th century.  

This picture from Williams' vast photographic collection held by the NLA reveals the imperial tone of the Kobe foreign settlement even as late as the 1920s. It also suggests Williams' own determination to work his way into that colonial world, to put himself into the picture as it were. After all, he was a British subject on a British passport, words that adorned Australian passports until as late as 1967. Compared with a major international figure like Edward, the king who was to famously abdicate the throne for the love of a woman, Williams was an insignificant figure, a face in the crowd. If he had returned to Melbourne and completed his medical studies, he probably would've remained invisible, unknown, but Japan made him.  

In a lecture to students of an international school in Kobe in 1961, Williams remembers looking at a map of Japan at the age of eight or nine and thinking Kobe was a very strange name. He says he never imagined he would spend most of his life there and, quote, "Would come to know so much about the place that even Japanese would visit me as an authority to learn more."  

The pivotal part played by foreigners in helping transform Japan from a feudal backwater to a modern powerhouse is a subject Williams pursued in numerous books, countless articles in newspapers and magazines, in lectures and talks, and in often caustic letters to the editors of English language newspapers in Japan. He produced a series of some 66 articles under the title "Shades of the Past" in the Mainichi daily newspaper for over 20 years and was still publishing prolifically until and indeed after his death in 1987. The “Shades of the Past” articles provided the bulk of his three main books. He published several, but these are the three main ones I wouldn't omit, I suppose. "The Foreign Settlements in Japan," "Shades of the Past: Indiscreet Tales of Japan." They're not that indiscreet. And "Foreigners in Mikadoland."  

Collectively, these articles reveal a writer on Japan who sees the country almost exclusively through the prism of the foreign presence. This, despite the often inglorious habits of the interlopers, especially in the early days when the Newport attracted all manner of human flotsam and jetsam, lured by the prospect of easy money, the brothels, drinking days, gambling dens, and general licentiousness. As Williams remarks specifically of the Yokohama community, the foreigners were an arrogant bunch and were quote “loathed to give the credit, Japanese the credit for much. Loath to give the Japanese credit for much”.  

Though his view of the Japanese is more detached than dismissive, one might be inclined to say the same thing about Williams. Certainly, during the final decades of the 19th century, the era we know has Meiji Japan, the country drew on Western examples and western knowledge in its headlong rush to modernization to the point of mimicry. Part of the process of imitation, it might be said, was that Japan ruthlessly sought to build an empire of its own. Yet as I argue later, Williams' focus on the foreigners does tend to minimise the Japanese role in the remaking of their country.  

Nonetheless, as I indicated maybe at the beginning, Williams is a much more complex writer than a mere recorder of historical detail, which he's often taken to be. And so, reputation fostered by himself where he is constantly insisting his primary objective, his only objective was faithfulness to fact, and it is true that Williams gives little of himself away. Scouring his archives for personal disclosure, scandal, is a waste of time. He collected, catalogued, and cross-referenced everything, even kept an award for safe driving that the Kobe authorities gave him at one point. But he revealed little of his inner self.  

Sometimes, the newspaper articles he collected suggest his inclination, especially when annotated in his own handwriting. He was contemptuous, for example, of foreign endurance of Zen Buddhism who made the pilgrimage to to Japan and found it hard going. A sign of Williams' own practise of keeping Japan safely at a distance.  

In his later years dressed in his conservative suit and tie and looking direly at the camera, Williams comes across as a kind of historical accountant. It is more interesting than that. A writer with a sardonic and even risque sense of humour, which is sometimes playfully directed at the foreigners. In one anecdote, he describes foreign tourists “sitting smugly on the wide veranda of the Oriental Hotel listening to the colloquial songs of Japanese women labouring in the factory nearby, oblivious to the fact that they were being lampooned by songs full of dirty jokes”. Williams may have been a realist dedicated to factuality, but his sense of what he called the mysterious forces that will not permit the past to die led him to engage in flights of fantasy back in time or even into a haunted present maybe as an escape from humdrum contemporary reality.  

I'll give you one example. I don't expect you to read that by the way. It's just there. It's a piece called "I Met a Samurai in Ueno Park" published in the 1960, one of these “Shades of the Past” series I referred to. 1956. Williams visits Tokyo's Ueno Park on a cold winters day to do research in the public library. Once the burial grounds of the Tokugawa shoguns, the park had been colonised by the homeless and lost since the late war. Later in the misty darkness, he encounters one of the park's ragged denizens who invites an uncertain Williams into his rough shelter, which he pointedly calls "My home." Is he being hospitable or is he staking his ground? Armed with two fake swords, he proceeds to regale an enchanted, if occasionally alarmed Williams with dramatic tales from his bloody past. “Is he a demented kabuki actor of bygone days?” Williams wonders. “Or merely some unfortunate living amid all the grandeur and pride of the past?” This is a story that reveals, perhaps unconsciously, Williams' anxieties as a foreign intruder into a world very different from his own. And is there also a mocking side reference to his own obsession with the past, which involved to some degree a... Not a denial of the present, but a strange lack of interest in it.  

A buster of myths, Williams is not above retelling local legends when it suits him. In a piece about the murder of two British officers near Kamakura in 1864, Williams relates with a straight face that it is a well-known fact to all those who live near the side of the killing that, quote, "A strange murmuring in some foreign tongue can be heard almost every evening."  

For somebody who swears he's just a humble historian, Williams does a good impression of Edgar Allan Poe. Some of his most powerful writing evokes the supernatural atmospheres emanating from Japan's cemeteries, housing the remains of the foreign dead, including chilling encounters with the spirits of the departed, shades of the past who manifest in palpable form, ghosts.  

Williams' fascination. I'll get rid of this. Williams' fascination with Japan's foreign cemeteries was a sore point with members of his family. "What? Not another cemetery," they would groan. He not only constantly visited them. He photographed them and wrote extensively about them. He read the inscriptions on headstones like books, studying them for what they revealed of the past. He badgered local authorities to maintain the upkeep of the cemeteries and protect them from the desecration of sightseers while, at the same time, publishing motoring directions to help people visit them. He even succeeded through a campaign of public lobbying to have all the graves in a derelict 19th century graveyard in Osaka moved to a brand new facility. What's with his obsession with foreign cemeteries? It's a subject I'll return to at the end. Pardon me.  

I'm no historian of Japan. So, in order to get some sense of the context for Williams' research enthusiasms, I felt I needed to acquire at least a... A superficial grasp of Japanese politics and life in those tumultuous years of internecine conflict in Japan when the Tokugawa Shogun finally disintegrated and the central power of the throne was restored in the form of the Emperor Meiji in 1868.  

So, at the risk of boring you for one minute, maybe more, here's a small dose of history relevant to Williams' life and writing. Well, his writing. In the late 1850s, Japan entered into international agreements that entered its long seclusion, made firstly with the US, then Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. These were known as treaties of amity and commerce. However, they were effectively forced on the Tokugawa Shogun, then faltering, which was intimidated by the American gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry's black ship entering Tokyo Bay in the early 1850s. Along with similar agreements made between Asian countries and foreign powers, they are known as the unequal treaties, and with good reason for they imposed unfair trading conditions on the Japanese, flooding the country with imports and creating shortages of exported local commodities.  

Importantly, the treaties also granted extraterritoriality to the settlements. The chief of which were Nagasaki, a Dutch enclave dating way back to the early years of the isolationist period, and the former little fishing villages of Yokohama, how it's changed, and Kobe. These were to become virtually autonomous little city states with their own municipal administration, fire brigade, police, and in the case of Kobe, its own red light district reserved for foreigners. They thought of everything. Importantly, the settlements retained their own system of consular justice. This is important. Insisted upon as a means of protection and security against the gruesome public punishments meted out to criminals under Japanese jurisdiction. Opposed from the first by the incoming major regime, extraterritoriality was only abolished in 1899. 

 Kobe is perhaps the most interesting of all the settlements because of the tenacity with which the foreigners clung to their tradition. Even in the post extraterritorial age, 20th century, the foreign community, the businessmen and their wives and children tended to eat, drink, play, and pray together. In "Forever Foreign," 2007, her invaluable study of expatriate lives in the city, published by the NLA, Keiko Tamura argues that the foreign, the Kobe foreign concession can be seen as, quote, “the last phase of the colonial settlements that flourished in many parts of the British empire”.  

In his overwhelming support for the positive contribution of these small colonies of foreigners toward the making of modern Japan, Williams' writing sit comfortably within a recognisable kind of western cultural and political master narrative. The settlements provide an interesting historical link to the postwar American-led military occupation of Japan, which Williams himself participated in as a member of the Australian contingent of the British commonwealth. In the words of the eminent Japan scholar, John Dower, the occupation was, quote, “the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as the white man's burden.” The Americans rationalise their mission as an act of benevolent redemption in demilitarising and democratising Japan, but behind it lay a pragmatic purpose in recreating Japan as a reliable regional client state in its global fight to curb the spread of post-war communism.  

The occupation was an enterprise inspired by good intentions and did many constructive things, but it was accompanied by some very bad behaviour, including numerous crimes committed against the Japanese. Williams can certainly be excused any complicity in the midst of the occupation period. He was a model soldier, a paragon, but his support for the Occupation Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur could be problematic. In response to local offence to MacArthur's notorious comment that, quote, "Measured by the standards of modern civilization, the Japanese would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years." In response to that, the Japanese offence taken to that remark, Williams accused the Japanese of divisiveness and ingratitude, and this was some years later in 1968.  

At this point, this is Williams at home in 1959. By now, a well-respected historian. A couple of books into his career in his home library. This point I just want to, I'm just gonna start showing you some more interesting photos. It's worth drawing on Williams' photographic archive to map a few milestones in his life and career in Kobe for the way they reveal how he settled into the milieu he described in such detail.  

Relocated to Kobe from Yokohama soon after he started his employment in a trading firm, Williams stayed in a boarding house for foreigners run by the family of Ernest W. James, who later became a key figure in his life. Acceptance into Kobe society was conditional upon joining the prestigious gentleman's club, the Kobe Club, and the less snooty, more sporty, Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club. Williams joined both and eventually wrote the histories. The Kobe Club in 1921. I went through a few incarnations just trying to point Williams. I think that's Williams there. I'm led to believe. Anyway, for this purpose, we'll pretend to believe that. Handsome building could be in Melbourne or any of the cities built during the great colonial period of the late 19th century.  

Darren Swanson, I think, had the Williams Fellowship some years ago, has written some very good stuff about the Kobe Club and other institutions like it, and about how these distinctly Anglophile sites expressed imperialistic attitudes based on the certainty, the certainty of European superiority. Williams himself admitted that he first went to Japan armed with the impression gained from Kipling that in the east, the best is like the worst. In this, he was no different from most Australians of his era, who had inherited the British view of the world despite the country's proximity to Asia, or perhaps because of it.  

The bar of the Kobe Club where members seemed to spend most of their time was a place of sharing and spreading influence. Williams was not blind to the Kobe Club's elitism, far from it. Concerned to safeguard its respectability in an environment teeming with riffraff, the club initially decided on the rule of no shopkeepers, no Eurasians, and no mariners. “Thus,” says Williams, “much social injustice was done.” As for women, they weren't even allowed on the premises. Williams notes that, quote, "Some of the old diehards almost burst a blood vessel when, in the 1930s, the Kobe Club Committee finally decided to allow the wives of members to come inside their stronghold on one night, but only one in the year."  

Williams himself was a diligent worker and an unenthusiastic drinker. Most of the academics I know are the other way around. In the 1920s, he spent much of his time away from the office, engaged in healthy pursuits, playing sport or hiking through the mountains of the relatively unspoiled Japanese countryside, which he loved. Here's is the hockey player Williams on the left, turning out for the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club against Tokyo's Keio University, place I taught at for a while, in 1923. He may have been small in stature, but he was very willing. Do another one. Here, he is out and about in Japan, late 1920s, I think. Dressed, as you can see, a little self-consciously in a yukata, and also promenading with two unnamed Japanese ladies. This is a relatively rare image of Williams' consorting socially with Japanese of either gender at this time.  

In the meantime, his business career flourished. In 1926, he joined the Kobe's silk trade at Cooper Finland and Co. as a manager. A group photo of Cooper and Co. taken in 1927. Williams in the front row, seated to the left of the man in the pale coloured suit there as you can see. One, two, three, four, five, six in from the left and front row. Now, if the photo had been taken a few years later in 1934, he would've been seated in the centre of the front row for by then he was the managing director, a post he held until 1941 when the outbreak of war in the Pacific necessitated a swift departure from Japan.  

On holiday in the antipodes in 1934, he met Jean, actually Gertrude, but she was known as Jean, a New Zealander on a boat to Auckland. Within five weeks, they were married. An impulsive move for a man of Williams' cautious temperament. The romance of this whirlwind courtship is sullied by a delicious detail related by Keiko Tamura. It seems that Williams made his proposal to Jean by telegram with a reply paid arrangement thrown in. How could she possibly say no? As Tamura relates Williams' choice of partner cemented his place in the foreign as distinct from Japanese community. Here's a rather charming image of the young couple on an island just off Kobe. In the 1930s. Good photo.  

With some trepidation, his bride accompanied him back to Kobe, where they first lived in a Japanese styled house before the intervention of the war forced them to flee Japan to Australia where upon Williams joined the AAF in which he served in Australia and in several overseas theatres. Returning to Japan after the war attached to the occupation force, Williams and his wife and now three children live for a while in Tokyo prior to his discharge in 1949, before returning to Kobe to resume his business career. The family settled back into a housing estate in Shioya to the west of Kobe, the brainchild of his old acquaintance, Ernest James.  

Born in Kobe, James had made his fortune on the Osaka stock market and Kobe's economic boom occasion by World War I. Like Williams, he spoke Japanese fluently and rose rapidly through the business ranks. If Williams' passion outside the business world was for history, James' was for building an exclusive housing estate for foreign residents, which would clinch Kobe's status as a western financial and social hub. In the 1930s, James purchased a large area of uninhabited hilly terrain overlooking Osaka Bay. He constructed his own mansion after which he erected over 50 large western style houses, many with spacious gardens. Lit by underground electric cables, the estate had private roads, its own water supply, its own police station, and naturally its own social club, the Shioya Country Club. At the entrance to the estate squatted a large British lion carved in granite. There were a few Japanese people to disturb the view of the bank managers and senior businessmen who lived there for the only Japanese were the servants and gardeners. Here's a an aerial view of the estate Shioya in 1953.  

Appropriately enough, during the postwar occupation, the estate was requisitioned as suitable officer accommodation, firstly those of the Australian army, and then US military personnel. Apparently, they trashed the joint. After the war, James eventually suggested to Williams that he joined forces with his own flourishing company while he concentrated on expanding the estate even further. After James' death in 1952, Williams acted as his sole executor and trustee. In the 1960s, Williams and his wife became the sole shareholders of the company. Due to the crushing costs of inheritance taxes and maintenance issues, the James estate was eventually sold for cash to the Japanese head of the Sanyo Electric Company. A sign of the times. The (unclear) Williams had earlier purchased two blocks of land for himself from James and built a house near the top of the estate where he spent the rest of his days. The house is no longer there and nor are any of the others except for James' extensively restored mansion, now, inevitably, a wedding venue and restaurant. Roast beef is on the menu. I naturally checked. James would've approved.  

Now, some foreigners take offence at being called "gaijin," the Japanese term reserved mainly for western expatriates, which more or less translates as outside person. They see it not unreasonably as a sign of mass stereotyping with derogatory connotations, but Williams didn't find it offensive at all. He was the ultimate gaijin, both insider and outsider, intimate and interloper, part of the placebut very much apart from it. Despite having cordial relations with many Japanese, especially in the business world, he never made close Japanese friends. Indeed, he was doubly divided as an Australian in a largely British foreign community.  

Yet he never really expressed a great deal of patriotic pride in Australia, though he did write about the Australian presence in Japan a bit. He made several trips back home and was away for four years during the war. But Japan, or at least Kobe, always drew him back. He didn't suffer from homesickness, but he didn't turn Japanese either. Intellectually, at least, he resided in major Japan.  

Williams was no fool, quite the opposite. In numerous articles, he argued that the so-called good old days of the final decades of the 19th century were not good at all. Sanitation was terrible and the food was suspect. Whiskey was cheap, but the water was dangerous. The sad details on gravestones revealed that fatal diseases were rife, and the foreigners were surrounded by people who really didn't want them there. Williams was not infatuated with old Japan like (unclear)or numerous other of Japan (unclear) from that time.  

Yes, he decried the destruction of a beautiful natural landscape with industry, though earnest James' ravaging a virgin countryside to erect his estate didn't seem to bother him. He lamented what had been lost as well as gained in the process of Westernisation, and he warned that the country was in danger of losing its soul if it continued to blindly imitate the West. He noted the ruinous effects of tourism on sites such as Mount Fuji, and he recoiled from the coarsening of Japanese manners.  

But in the end, it was not so much Japan, but the characters, calamities, and controversies of the foreign settlements as they fought to protect their tenuous foothold in the country that compelled his attention. This focus on the foreigners has the effect of reducing the Japanese to bit players in their own country, except as a perpetual lurking menace that manifests in spasms of violence, especially in the 1860s. Williams' characterization of Japan as a “land of assassins” overstates the number of foreigners killed or wounded in Japan after the opening of the ports, which was relatively small. Yet the indiscriminate attacks had a terrorising effect on the foreign community and the dangers were real for its privileged presence was considered a national humiliation by the Japanese across the political and social divide from the emperor right down.  

The soon to be superannuated Samurai class bitterly resented the foreign intrusion. "These swaggering men," says Williams colourfully, "were quick to take offence and ever anxious to try their swords on an opponent." Confrontation was inevitable, and in more than one case took place on horseback. Riding to his first audience with the Emperor Meiji in March, 1968, the party of the British minister to Japan was attacked by two swordsmen. At least, the minister was on horseback. Some of the more notorious attacks were perpetrated on foreigners riding for pleasure. Horse riding was a favourite pursuit in the early days of the settlements, especially in Yokohama. "Most of the foreigners owned a horse," Williams writes. "Those who could not afford a horse," he adds, "ominously carried a whip." Some foreigners. Probably, dated probably the 1860s on a jaunt to an onsen, a hot springs somewhere to the west of Tokyo.  

Now, horse riding had created the potential for confrontation. For in feudal Japan, only the military class was permitted to ride on horseback. The despised merchants had to walk. One can imagine the affront caused by foreign merchants, mostly British gatting about on horseback. Even their Chinese servants rode ponies, which was an insufferable source of offence. Getting there. Should be on time. In September, 1862, a group of four English subjects was riding along the old Tokaido road to visit a temple near Kawasaki. En route, they encountered the armed procession of a powerful feudal lord of the Satsuma domain in southern Kyushu coming from the opposite direction. Accounts of what happened next differ. The English account was that the accompanying retinue of Samurai attacked without provocation. The Japanese version was that the Englishman had insolently given offence by not dismounting to allow the procession to pass.  

Extraterritoriality thus came into conflict with Japanese cultural custom. The swordsman attack with one of the Englishmen, a Shanghai-based businessmen named Richardson, murdered and mutilated. Outraged, the British government demanded reparations, apologies, and the execution of the perpetrator. These not being entirely met, the British responded with the naval bombardment of Tokushima, the Satsuma capital. A slight overreaction one might say. Williams wrote a story about the Richardson murder and about how a young Japanese woman tended to the dying man.  

He wrote more extensively about another of these random murders, that of the killing of two English soldiers, Major Baldwin and Lieutenant Bird, guards of the Yokohama settlement. The pair are on their horses on the sightseeing ride to visit the famous Daibutsu of Kamakura when they were ambushed and murdered by two ronin or masterless samurai. In his co-written book, "The Kamakura Murders," Williams describes the Japanese executions of the perpetrators in grizzly detail, augmented by a photograph of the public display of decapitated head of one of them. I'm gonna show that in a second if you want to shut your eyes. That's officially known as a trigger warning, I believe. Such images are used plentifully in Williams' books, reinforcing the tacit argument of the barbarity of the world confronting the foreigners and serve to justify their insistence on extraterritoriality. So, I'll show this. The photo of the head of one of the perpetrators of the murder placed on public display. This appears in the book "The Kamakura Murders" and another of Williams' books and probably more than one. Okay, get off that. This is a photograph of the graves of the two murdered Englishmen in Yokohama Foreign Cemetery, which I'll talk about in a tick.  

Williams' tendency to accentuate the threat of the Japanese in the early years of the foreign settlements is striking. I think it is worth pondering the extent to which the Pacific War affected his view of the Japanese historically and hence impacted his writing, all of which appeared after the war. In Australia, revelations of Japanese wartime brutality toward Australian POWs created a hatred of Japan that festered for decades. Williams was no Japan basher. Unlike several of his Australian contemporaries, he didn't exploit the tragedy of the war to launch racial attacks on the former enemy, but it is hard to believe he did not harbour some residual bitterness.  

Much of his wartime service had involved investigating the fate of Australian prisoners. And in 1945, he was attached to the American Supreme Command, assisting the prosecution in the Tokyo war crimes trials. The trials were presided over by a judge from Queensland who had earlier produced for the Australian government a report containing shocking disclosures, including the casual slaughter of prisoners, the rape and mutilation of women, the infamous beheading of an Australian airman, and most appalling of all, documentary evidence that starving Japanese soldiers had resorted to butchering unburied human cadavers. Significantly, in his story, "We Buried Our Dead Here," he makes gruesome reference to cannibalism committed against the allied dead in the Pacific War, especially the removal of livers. An atrocity he tenuously attributes to a Japanese belief that the human liver and other viscera are effective treatments for leprosy and other diseases.  

Williams' occupation era scrapbooks and photograph albums are revealing in a no doubt upsetting post-war visit to a Kobe ravaged by air raids. He had himself photographed among the ruins of the Kobe Club and in the devastated downtown. But there's no evidence that I can find that Williams ever visited atom-bombed Hiroshima. Although Hiroshima prefecture was the centre of Australian operations during the occupation. The same goes for nuked Nagasaki, a city had he had visited many times while researching its life as a treaty port.  

Finally, it is worth noting his antagonism to the development in the late 1960s of the Japanese memorial site at Cowra. Williams was a member of the official board of inquiry into the Cowra breakout of Japanese POWs in 1944, in which four Australians died, and he resented the public attention it was attracting. What particularly seems to have galled him was the effort to make the site into something akin to sacred ground for the Japanese. He really resented and campaigned against this.  

Fine, but it's just happens to be in sharp contrast to his sense of the foreign cemeteries in Japan as being hallowed ground in his words. Obscure men like Baldwin and Bird whose graves are there in Yokohama become heroic figures akin to soldiers slain in foreign fields far from home. One thinks of Rupert Brooks World War I poem "The Soldier" with its reference to some corner of a foreign field that is forever England. Though in Williams, that corner could be forever Dutch or French or American. For Williams, commemorated foreigners from all over if they were Western. In fact, as an epigraph to his book, "The Foreign Cemeteries of Kobe and Osaka," Williams turned to another iconic English poem, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" published in 1751. In that poem, Grey famously contemplates the graves of the unheralded dead, speculating on the great things they might have achieved had their lives not been cut short. Williams takes up this theme in his piece, "We Buried Our Dead Here," in referring to four Americans in Commodore Perry's original party who died in a far away land and are buried in a little graveyard in Shimoda. “Little did those Americans know” Williams said :that immortality was ahead for them and that they will be remembered probably for centuries long after many great men have been forgotten”.  

Getting to the conclusion here. Williams' entrenchment in a tradition that so captivated him reached a logical conclusion with his own burial in 1987 in the Foreigner Cemetery located in the hills above Kobe, in the area where he used to hike as a young man. In his final "Shades of the Past" piece published a month after his death, issued as if directly from the grave. This is the last article in the series "Shades of the Past," he wrote, "It must necessarily be the last because I recently died, so I'm now myself a shade of the past." In death, perhaps Williams also made his peace with Japan itself.  

He always did like to have the last word, so I'm gonna give it to him. In the conclusion to this final article, Williams harks back to his very first "Shades of the Past" piece, which appeared in 1953. In this piece titled, "A Foreign Cemetery in the Tokugawa Road," Williams reflected on a new road constructed in the hills behind Kobe. By this route, the processions of feudal lords passing through the area would avoid the foreign settlement on the coast, and hence there'd be no possibility of drama. The younger Williams rests upon a log and reflects on the irony that the road ran adjacent to the new foreigner cemetery, the very place where he now lies buried. A local man sits alongside him and tells him that on moonlit nights, the cemetery is invaded not only by foxes and badgers, but by the ghostly presences of those old antagonists, the samurai and the foreigners. No longer enemies. They now greet each other respectfully and gravely pass on their way. Referring to that moment long in the past, Williams ends his final article this way.  

I think you'll agree that these aren't the words of a stern historical accountant from Melbourne. That is Williams' reputation. In fact, they possess a poetic sense of the fragility of time, which is almost, dare I say it, Japanese. These are his final words from his final article. “The old log on which I sat more than 50 years ago has long since decayed and turned to dust, and the path has become a tangled mass of undergrowth and trees. But there are still quiet paths on the mountain where the passersby may stop and ponder and hope that the quietude of these delightful hills will continue for centuries to come. They will hope that the foxes and badgers will continue to gather wild nuts for the next winter's food. And that on moonlit nights, the shades of the past may continue to wander along those paths all undisturbed by the turmoil of noise from the great city below or the misdeeds of man.” Thank you. That's it. Thanks. 

Libby Cass: Thank you, Robin. We now have time for some questions. And as this presentation is being recorded, please wait for the microphone to reach you before asking your questions. So, if you do have a question, please raise your hand and my colleagues will pass you a microphone. Yes, from my colleague Blake in the front. 

Audience member 1: Thank you so much for that. It was really interesting. I was wondering if any of his writings, does he actually demonstrate any admiration for Japan and Japanese culture beyond that lens, the foreign lens that you've referred to? 'Cause he's spent such a long time there. Did he have any admiration for-   

Robin Gerster: Well, he stayed, that sort of tells you something. He certainly... Certainly loved Kobe. And late in his life, he said that how much he loved the place and how it had changed so dramatically from the time he went there till now as it were. But it still retains his essential self and that's why he's still there. So, I think certainly Kobe where he was so entrenched, he responded positively to. Japan itself, it's unsure. I don't think, it's a matter of omission. It's not that he's critical, particularly. He just sort of ignores it to a great degree because he's concentrating so much on the past and it's the reverberating legacy of the past in the present. When he writes about present day in Japan, whether it's the '50s, the '60s, or '70s or into the '80s when he died, he writes fairly negatively, but not in any detail. I think didn't really, he doesn't write about Kyoto, which is kind of interesting 'cause it's sort of the, you know, the epicentre of Japanese culture probably. Probably wrongly. But he doesn't write about Kobe really at all. All the cultural treasures there. His wife was rather more interested in those traditional elements of Japanese culture than he was. She would go off with her friends every Saturday to visit temples, and Kyoto's very close to Kobe, while Williams worked at home. So, look, I don't think he's critical. He's just sort of strangely disinterested. 

Libby Cass: From my colleague Rebecca.   

Audience member 2: Thank you. That was a wonderful presentation. You talked a little bit about the women in the Kobe Club. Did he write much about the foreign women that were part of the community?   

Robin Gerster: Yes. Williams, well, I'll answer this two ways. He had a kind of hero worship of some of the great men of Meiji, Japan. Like, the Nagasaki merchant Thomas Glover. Self-made men who had an impact on Japan. He wrote a lot about them. Women, he tended to ignore or would remark fairly negatively on gossiping women and wrote quite a bit about, the houses of pleasure in Tokyo and otherwise. So, there's that sort of risque element. I'm rummaging through my mind for sort of significant portrayal of women and I'm not coming up with much at the moment. There was that story I alluded to. I didn't give the title. It's called "Black Eyed Susan," about a female tea house owner who tended to the dying Richardson in that episode I described. She's about as close as it gets, I think, to a heroine as it were in Williams. But I might be wrong, but it's something I probably... It's a good question to ask. Because like Williams, I guess I've concentrated on the men, but he certainly does. 

Audience member 3: What happened to his children?   

Robin Gerster: The son Peter still alive, I think. Yes, he's in Queensland I believe, and he... Is Keiko around here? She's not here. Gave a very good interesting interview, which the NLA has on tape and a transcript. Don't know, I'm not sure about the other two to be honest. I mean, if I was to pursue Williams, I'm not really interested in doing a biography, but that would be a line of inquiry. Peter... Peter and his father weren't, well, they were close, obviously. I'm not saying they weren't, but... I think Peter didn't really share Harold's passion for history. 

Libby Cass: Are there any other questions? Please raise your hand. And while you get the microphone, I might ask one of myself if I may. I guess I was just curious if you could answer, Robin. Just let me find my notes. I guess he didn't miss Australia. He wasn't homesick, you expressed, but I guess he left his collections to the National Library and money to us to support them. I'm just curious, what was it? If he wasn't homesick, what do you think motivated him to leave them here and perhaps for them not to be somewhere else? 

Robin Gerster: Well, he was deeply suspicious of Japanese archival practises. It's a constant with him. Japanese museums and libraries are not much chop. He lost his own library when he had to flee Japan in '41 and never forgave them for that. So, I think there's that element of not wanting to leave his precious materials in Japan. But I imagine that he saw the National Library as a fitting repository for it all that it would be well looked after possibly because he was worried about what would happen to it in Japan. 

Libby Cass: Thank you. I think there's a- 

Robin Gerster: But he wasn't a patriot in that.   

Libby Cass: Right? Yeah.   

Robin Gerster: You know, he didn't really talk about Australia much at all to be honest with you.   

Libby Cass: I think there's two questions. One up in the middle row there. And another one coming. Microphone will come to you, sir. 

Audience member 4: About the time of the photograph with the Prince of Wales, a number of people from the subcontinent moved to Kobe and set up businesses. I'm curious to know what Williams' relationship was with them, given that they were foreigners but they weren't European. I certainly know that, you know, the Kobe Regatta and Athletics Club did, at one stage, have a cricket team. While the Indians, well, now Indians and Pakistanis would've been great proponents of such, you know, social matches. Does he make reference at all to those, any encounters like that? 

Robin Gerster: Not really. Well, I guess, that'd be members of the Commonwealth anyway. So, they're part of the family, I guess. I think that photo I showed there looks like there may be one or two sort of subcontinental people in that photograph.   

Staff member: There is one,   

Robin Gerster: Huh? Sorry? 

Staff member: There's one online question as well. Okay. Right. 

Robin Gerster: Okay. 

Libby Cass: And then another hand raised down- 

Robin Gerster: We didn't really answer your question, sorry. Okay. 

Libby Cass: You'll read the online question.   

Staff member: Did he speak and read Japanese?   

Robin Gerster: Yes. Yep. Well, he certainly spoke it and I'm not sure of his reading skills. I think they're probably pretty good. 

Libby Cass: Thank you. Question from the middle.  

Robin Gerster: I mean, as well as I said, you know , to do what he did, to show an interest in Japan in, you know, 1917, 17 18, 19, and then decide to visit it was a long way before the hippie trail. I don't think he would've liked that analogy either. 

Audience member 5: Thank you, Robin. Look, I just wanted to ask about what Williams had to say about his involvement with POW treatment after the war. I got the impression from your talk that you said he had involvement in that. 

Robin Gerster: Yeah, well, yeah, for several years, he was investigating the fate of Australians who were lost at sea and transporter ships or... And as I said, in Cowra, in Japan after the war. 'Cause his Japanese skills were very useful to, he was requisition to the American command during the occupation, and his Japanese language skills were very good in interviewing and so on. I mean, never, as I said, he never... He never really showed that real hatred towards the Japanese that a lot of his contemporaries did in print. 

Audience member 5: Well, it's the reason for my question. My own father was a prisoner of war in... And I also lost an uncle on one of the troop ships. So, I'm just interested to know his, how he expressed, how he came to terms with looking at those sort of things and whether it's useful to look at his papers.   

Robin Gerster: Well, it'd be a good thing to do. I'm afraid, but my answer is he doesn't give anything away. I mean, he rarely expresses a personal opinion. The best way to deduce his opinions, as I mentioned in here, is to go, he collected. He was a great collector of articles. So, he collected everything on cannibalism in the war, for example. So, you need to look at his handwritten, the margin area is quite useful where he makes comments himself, which is sometimes quite pointed and quite illuminating. But other than that, I mean, his attitude was that he was just pursuing fact. He had no opinion, no private opinions at all, which is of course rubbish. But because everyone has private opinions, but he doesn't really... He never wrote a personal narrative at all. So, he's very elusive. You've gotta sort of deduce things. 

Libby Cass: I think there might- 

Robin Gerster: That's a good query that you have though. 

Libby Cass: There might be one more question online. Is there, Fran?  

Staff member: Does Robin have any comments on Williams' dispute with the Shioya fisherman's co-op? 

Robin Gerster: Could I have that again? 

Staff member: Any comments on Williams' dispute with the Shioya, I hope I got that pronunciation right, fisherman's co-op? 

Robin Gerster: I have no idea. I'm sorry. That's an interesting question. Don't know. 

Libby Cass: We'll pass that on to our- 

Robin Gerster: I didn't know there was a dispute and I don't know about the co-op. 

Libby Cass: All right, are there... I think if there's no more questions, we might wrap it up. And now, I'm sure our colleagues and Ask a Librarian might be able to pick up that final question for our online colleague. Well, as we draw to a close, I just would like to take this opportunity to thank Robin again for such a fascinating talk on such a fascinating individual and a round of applause for Robin. Thank you.  

And if I may, just some promotional opportunities while I have a captive audience. I hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture, experiencing institutional care by 2024 fellow Dr David McDonald. And this lecture is happening next week on the 8th of August. Our website is the place you'll be able to find recordings of the very interesting and diverse recent talks and performances from our fellows. And they're also available on the Library's YouTube channel. Please pass through our exhibition and bookshop on your way out if you have time. They're both fabulous. And thank you again for attending. And please join me once again in congratulating Robin Gerster for today's fascinating presentation. 

Robin Gerster: Thank you.