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8 - No 48, Yokohama
- Edited by Hugh Cortazzi
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- Book:
- Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits Vol X
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 07 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2016, pp 98-105
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Summary
THE BUILDING
KANAGAWA PREFECTURE'S OLDEST surviving Western structure is the remnant of the ruined building, currently named Mollison Shokai or Mollison & Co., located at the corner of a block of land now called No. 54, which absorbed No. 48. It is a Kanagawa prefectural cultural asset with protected status. The Mollison in the Mollison Shokai name was James Pender Mollison who lived in No. 48 for many years from 1868 (see below).
There used to be two buildings at No. 48; what remains is part of the office but adjacent to it was a residence. The two buildings were the home and work place of a group of prominent Scottish businessmen who also played an important role in the sports scene in Yokohama for most of the second half of the nineteenth century.
In the dining room of the residence, the Yokohama Cricket Club (YCC) was founded in 1868 and No. 48 became the de facto ‘club house’ for the cricket club and other sports clubs before a pavilion was built on the cricket ground in Yokohama Park in 1877.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, No. 48 became better known as the Japan office for Alfred Nobel's sales of dynamite than for its association with sports.
Today at Yamashitacho 54 in the old ‘foreign settlement’ area of Yokohama, just behind what used to be called Honcho Dori (main street), a huge modern theatre complex occupies what was originally designated in 1859 as several blocks of land and rented out to the first foreign merchants to come to Japan. On one corner a small strange single-storeyed structure sits awkwardly as if it had been abandoned for some reason after being half-demolished. There is no glass in its windows, no real floor and only a very basic roof. It looks as if it originally extended into the street and that the city's planners crazily built a major street over half of it. Indeed, they did just that not long after the 1923 earthquake.
A plaque on a piece of stone briefly declares that the building is a protected cultural asset. It is Kanagawa prefecture's oldest surviving Western structure and was built in 1883. Today its most attractive feature is the stone lintel that sits at the top of the arch of what is clearly the main entrance.
5 - William Henry Smith (1838–1884): Prominent Publicspirited Figure in Early Yokohama History
- Edited by Hugh Cortazzi
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- Book:
- Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits Vol X
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 07 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2016, pp 58-73
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INTRODUCTION
WILLIAM HENRY SMITH, commonly known as ‘Public Spirited Smith’ or ‘P.P.S.’, was one of the key figures in the development of the foreign settlement in Yokohama in the 1860s and early 1870s. He was involved in nearly every major important initiative in the town. John Reddie Black described him as ‘one of the most energetic and indefatigable men to come to this country’.
‘Any description of “Yokohama in the Sixties” would be incomplete without mention being made of one of the Pioneers, “Public Spirited Smith”,’ wrote Arthur Brent in an article published in 1902. In many ways Smith was the heart, soul and pulse of early Yokohama but in the mid-70s his world suddenly disintegrated financially; he completely disappeared from the spotlight and escaped from Yokohama. He left Japan for the last time in 1883 in order to build a new life in another country but died soon afterwards.
Certain of his grandest creations like the Grand Hotel, the Yokohama United Club and the Bluff Gardens were prominent features of Yokohama life for many decades after his departure.
Of the pioneering Westerners in Yokohama, no one could match his early triumphs in improving life in the town and his popularity. Few experienced such a dramatic and tragic downturn in their fortunes and reputation.
EARLY LIFE AND CHINA DEPLOYMENT
William Henry Smith was born on 14 November 1838 in East Tuddenham in Norfolk, England, where his father, also called William Henry Smith, was the rector. William was the eldest of ten children. In the 1851 Census, William was recorded as a scholar at the school of Mr Joseph Thompson in Guildhall Lane, Dereham, Suffolk.
In August 1851 he entered the relatively new Marlborough College where he developed basic skills in sports such as cricket, football and possibly wall-based sports. After leaving school at the end of the Easter term in 1855 Smith joined the Royal Marines Light Infantry as a gentleman cadet and was commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant in the Portsmouth Headquarters. He served at Lewes and again in Portsmouth before being sent, at the age of nineteen, to China with the 2nd Battalion. From August 1857 to May 1861 he was attached to the Chinese Coolie Corps in northern China until the evacuation of Peking by Allied Forces.
7 - Edgar Abbott (1849–1890): Athlete and Brewer
- Edited by Hugh Cortazzi
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- Book:
- Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits Vol X
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 07 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2016, pp 86-97
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INTRODUCTION
EDGAR ABBOTT was the initial promoter (with W.H. Talbot) of the Japan Brewery Co., Japan's first real joint-stock company, which is today the global enterprise, Kirin Brewery Co. He was the initiator of the amalgamation of the football, baseball, athletics, and cricket (and tennis) clubs in Yokohama in 1884 to form the multi-sport Yokohama Cricket & Athletic Club (YC&AC). He was an outstanding athlete and recorded the fastest times in Japan in the 19th century over 100 yards and 150 yards. He was among the best footballers and cricketers and excelled at every sport he turned his mind to.
EARLY DAYS
EDGAR ABBOTT was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer on 25 November 1849, the fourth of eight children, mainly born in and around London, of whom only four (three brothers and one sister) survived beyond childhood. His family was prominent in the brewery business. Edgar's father, Edwin Morton Abbott, took over the Bow Brewery in the East End of London from his father Edwin. Edwin had originally owned another brewery in Wapping and had first bought into Bow Brewery in around 1829 and then, in around 1849, taken over the Bow Brewery made famous by George Hodgson when he pioneered the export to India of a new beer called Indian Pale Ale (IPA) that could not only survive the rough six-month sea voyage to India better than competing beverages like porter but actually improve its taste during the journey. Before Edwin Morton took over Bow Brewery, the business was already in decline, largely due to the appearance of strong competition from IPA brewers based in Burton–on-Trent.
Edgar and two of his brothers attended Marlborough College but left the school in 1862 probably before Edgar turned 12. His entry in the Marlborough College Register gives his father's address as ‘The Brewery, Bow, Middlesex.’ The likely reason for the abrupt departure of the Abbott brothers from the school was that in January 1862 the business of Bow Brewery was suspended and a meeting of the creditors soon afterwards decided to liquidate the business by a deed of assignment rather than by initiating bankruptcy proceedings. Abbott was obliged by an indenture to hand over all his assets for distribution among creditors at the end of the month. In fact, Bow Brewery had been struggling for some time as evidenced by a meeting of its creditors in 1860.
6 - Alan Owston (1853–1915): Naturalist and Yachtsman
- Edited by Hugh Cortazzi
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- Book:
- Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits Vol X
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 07 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2016, pp 74-85
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INTRODUCTION
ALAN OWSTON, WHO lived in Yokohama from 1872,when he was nineteen, until his death in 1915,was recognized worldwide as a naturalist and ornithologist focusing on Japan. He created large, comprehensive and important collections relating to Japan's natural history.
Owston is credited with the discovery or co-discovery of a large number of new species, with many bearing his name in some way. This is principally by the pseudo-Latin word Owstoni which is based on his surname, but there are some where his first name is used (Japan White-eye ssp. Zosterops japonicus alani) and there is even one – Storm-petrel Stonowa – where the Latin genus name is an anagram of his surname and initial. Many specimens supplied to Owston by Japanese collectors and natural history experts, who worked with or for him, are at least partially named after those people. Some of the species named after Alan Owston are listed in the appendix to this chapter.
The exhibition rooms and storage rooms of the leading natural history museums around the world including the Smithsonian in Chicago and the Natural History Museum in London are today graced with Owston's fine and valuable natural history collections covering marine life and birds.
Alan Owston was also a keen and competitive yachtsman, a cofounder of the Yokohama Yacht Club, and helped to make yachting one of the most popular sports in Yokohama. He spent much of the latter half of his life sailing round the coast of Japan on his motorized yacht, dredging the ocean floor for specimens of unknown marine life. Whereas most experts were closely affiliated with a leading insti tution, which took a lot of the credit, Owston was totally independent and experts in other parts of the world contacted him by writing simply to ‘Alan Owston, Yokohama.’
EARLY LIFE
Alan Owston was born in Pirbright in Surrey on 7 August 1853, the second son of a clergyman with an M.A. from Cambridge University. He attended St. John's College at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex as a boarder and was listed as being there in the 1871 census. At the age of eighteen he went to Shanghai to work for Lane, Crawford and Co. After working there for six months, he moved in 1872 to Yokohama to work for the same firm. His elder brother Francis became a sea captain and eventually followed him to Japan.
13 - Introduction of Football from Britain into Nineteenth-century Japan: Rugby Football and Soccer
- Edited by Hugh Cortazzi
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- Book:
- Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits Vol IX
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 30 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 148-160
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RUGBY FOOTBALL AND soccer/football have already been covered separately in this Biographical Portraits series, namely by Alison Nish's ‘British Contribution to the Development of Rugby Football in Japan 1874–1998’ in Biographical Portraits volume III and Derek Bleakley's ‘British Links with Japanese Football’ in volume VII.
My research has revealed that versions of rugby football were being played regularly season after season by talented non-Japanese players in Japan from much earlier than was believed and that there were talented Japanese players playing in the UK before the sport was introduced to Keiō University students.
For most of the period the sport being played in Yokohama and Kobe was simply referred to as ‘football’ with its rules determined by the local club. Soccer/association football as we know it today was still in its infancy and there is no evidence of it being played in Japan until the 1880s. Then in the early and mid-1890s it actually eclipsed rugby football – so much so that rugby stopped being played for a while and soccer itself was simply referred to as ‘football.’
ORIGINS OF RUGBY IN JAPAN
It is widely believed that rugby football started in Japan in 1899 when Tanaka Ginnosuke and Edward Bramwell Clarke introduced the sport to Japanese students in Keiō University. However, the reality is that rugby has been played in some form almost continuously for longer in Japan than in almost every major rugby playing country outside of the British Isles and Australia.
The earliest evidence of football in Japan is in a 1908 Sydney newspaper article reporting how Admiral Sir Harry Rawson (1843–1910), then governor of New South Wales, ‘recalled playing in the first cricket match played in Japan in 1863, a remarkable feature of which was the fact that half the players were playing football’. One can only surmise that perhaps a number of batsmen on both sides were enthusiastically playing with a football when not actually batting or after the cricket match finished.
The oldest reference to football in early Yokohama newspapers is dated 26 January 1866.
12 - Cricket in Late Edo and Meiji Japan
- Edited by Hugh Cortazzi
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- Book:
- Britain & Japan Biographical Portraits Vol IX
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 30 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 October 2015, pp 135-147
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INTRODUCTION
A CRICKET MATCH, played in 1863 in ‘curious circumstances’ in Yokohama is the first documented game of cricket in Japan. It is also the first recorded game in Japan involving a major western team sport.
The 1863 cricket match was played between a Yokohama team captained by a Scotsman, James Campbell Fraser, and a Royal Navy XI from the warships in the harbour including the flagship HMS Euryalus. The 16 April 1908 issue of the magazine Cricket has a lengthy account of the game. According to the article ‘a filled-in swamp at the back, but inside the settlement, furnished a mud cricket ground’. The article has lots of background but no scorecard and no information about the actual game except that the Navy gave Yokohama ‘a jolly good licking’.
Photographs of the two 1863 teams show that there was no shortage of cricket bats. Most of the bats were probably supplied by the cricket-loving naval officers, who would have found it much easier to bring their cricket equipment with them to the Far East than any businessman or traveller.
No date is given but Fraser refers to ‘a certain day’, which may well have been 25 June 1863. This was the date proclaimed in an order in the name of the shogun for the killing of foreigners who had not left the country before then. The expression ‘curious circumstances’ refers to the fact that marines guarded the ground and that the players carried guns. Fraser wrote that ‘they played with their revolvers on, ready for any emergency. It was a most novel sensation for the wicket keeper, as he carried his revolver backwards and forwards from wicket to wicket and placed it behind the stumps. Fortunately, no attack took place either on that day or afterwards.’
Tension was very high in Yokohama in 1863 and had been so since the murder of Charles Lenox Richardson a few miles outside of Yokohama while riding with friends in September 1862. The British government had demanded compensation for the attack on its citizens both from the Shogun and from the daimyo of the Satsuma fief whose samurai was responsible for the attack.
Towards a Radiocarbon Calibration for Oxygen Isotope Stage 3 Using New Zealand Kauri (Agathis Australis)
- Chris S M Turney, L Keith Fifield, Jonathan G Palmer, Alan G Hogg, Mike G L Baillie, Rex Galbraith, John Ogden, Andrew Lorrey, Stephen G Tims
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- Journal:
- Radiocarbon / Volume 49 / Issue 2 / 2007
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 18 July 2016, pp. 447-457
- Print publication:
- 2007
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It is well known that radiocarbon years do not directly equate to calendar time. As a result, considerable effort has been devoted to generating a decadally resolved calibration curve for the Holocene and latter part of the last termination. A calibration curve that can be unambiguously attributed to changes in atmospheric 14C content has not, however, been generated beyond 26 kyr cal BP, despite the urgent need to rigorously test climatic, environmental, and archaeological models. Here, we discuss the potential of New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) to define the structure of the 14C calibration curve using annually resolved tree rings and thereby provide an absolute measure of atmospheric 14C. We report bidecadally sampled 14C measurements obtained from a floating 1050-yr chronology, demonstrating repeatable 14C measurements near the present limits of the dating method. The results indicate that considerable scope exists for a high-resolution 14C calibration curve back through OIS-3 using subfossil wood from this source.