A Diplomat in Japan¶

A Diplomat in Japan is an annotated scholarly edition of Sir Ernest Satow's memoir of the same name, covering his years as a student interpreter and diplomat in Japan from 1861 to 1869 -- one of the most turbulent decades in Japanese history, spanning the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate through the Meiji Restoration.

Satow arrived in Yokohama as a young man of eighteen, witnessed the murder of foreign merchants, the bombardment of Kagoshima, the naval assault on Shimonoseki, the collapse of the shogunate, and the outbreak of civil war. His account is written with the candour and precision of a trained diplomat who was also a gifted linguist, and stands as one of the finest eyewitness records of Bakumatsu Japan in English.

This edition presents the full text of the memoir alongside scholarly margin notes that identify people, places, firms, and events mentioned in passing -- bringing into focus the wider world Satow moved through. Notes draw on contemporary sources and are linked to further reading. Each sentence is numbered to allow precise citation and cross-reference.

Features of this edition¶

• Margin notes on people, places, and historical events, appearing alongside the relevant passage
• Interactive maps locating key sites mentioned in the text
• Sentence-level line numbering for precise scholarly citation (e.g. ch02.14)
• Cross-references linking later mentions back to the note's first appearance
• Full-text search across all thirty-six chapters