This doorstopper of a tome is a weighty, often insightful and quirky view of post-World War II Japan through the eyes of a who's who of British sojourners in these islands. The venerable Hugh Cortazzi, former British ambassador to Japan and frequent contributor to The Japan Times, has assembled a broad sampling of remembrances, impressions and personal anecdotes from more than 100 disparate contributors.
To what purpose? Cortazzi suggests he is helping out future historians, providing a one-stop treasure trove of contemporary source material, but one suspects that he is really engaging in that singularly British penchant (or is it affliction?) for expatriate personal memoirs that appears to be one of the lingering legacies of the colonial era. Reading through these kaleidoscopic accounts of life in Japan, one suspects that an anthropologist could mine this volume as much for the revealing nuggets about overseas British culture, affectations, smugness, humor, teeth gnashing, parochialism, cosmopolitanism and eccentricities as for its perspectives on Japan.
English teachers will enjoy Mike Barrett's wry observation that, "There is no country in the world where more time, effort and money has been spent on teaching English to so little effect as Japan. A massive industry pumps out courses, publications, media, but somehow . . . it does not produce practical results." In his work with the British Council Barrett masochistically tried to introduce innovation via NHK, as fusty an institution as one will find in Japan. Predictably, this unlikely channel for improving how English is taught proved unsatisfactory, and 30 years on the need for reform remains as pressing as the resistance steadfast.