Shades of the Past

Indiscreet Tales of Japan

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.