Shades of the Past: Indiscreet Tales of Japan Book

Prowling among these Shades of the Past one finds riffraff and
gentlemen , pirates and warriors, saints and sinners, smugglers and legiti - mate 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 Selllements 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 ; get the feeling that YOU WERE THERE.