Bøger af Brian Burke-Gaffney

The Nagasaki British Consulate was established on June 13, 1859, the first official British representation in Japan since the closure of the English East India Company factory at Hirado in 1623. Over the following decades, the consulate served as a node on the vast commercial and cultural networks of the British Empire, watching the growth of Nagasaki as an international port and the rise of Japan as a world power. The author discusses the history of the consulate from the first years in a Buddhist temple to its final location on the Nagasaki waterfront and abandonment shortly after the outbreak of World War II. He sheds light on the life and times of successive consuls, including the first consul George S. Morrison and the last consul Ferdinand C. Greatrex, who was arrested and confined by Japanese military police and deported by exchange ship the following year. The author also describes the immediate postwar period when the people of Nagasaki picked up the broken pieces of their city after the atomic bombing and the British government revived diplomatic relations with Japan. Sold to Nagasaki City in 1955, the former Nagasaki British Consulate is a National Important Cultural Property and local heritage site. Until now, however, little attention has been paid to the colorful history of the consulate--the first opened in Japan and the last to close when World War II drove a wedge between Great Britain and Japan.

The former Alt House is preserved today on its original site in Glover Garden, a historic theme park located in the Minamiyamate neighborhood of the former Nagasaki Foreign Settlement. A National Important Cultural Property, the house is the oldest Western-style building of stone construction in Japan. Completed in 1867, it evokes the style of a bungalow in British India, with sandstone walls and a row of Tuscan pillars marching along the front of a wide stone-paved veranda, and all the nostalgic nuances of the elegant if incongruous European colonial presence in East Asia. Yet despite the well-preserved physical condition of the building, the interior suggests that the decorators had scant information about the original position of furniture and ornaments or the function of individual rooms. Similarly, most of the pamphlets and books available on the subject of Glover Garden emphasize architectural features and gloss over stories of the buildings and the people who once lived there. For the first time in any language, the present work introduces former inhabitants and functions of the building and outlines the events that crisscrossed there from the year that Japan awakened from a long slumber and opened its doors to international engagement, until the postwar period when Nagasaki cleared the rubble of wartime destruction and chose tourism as a step to recovery.