Gentlemanly capitalism and the club: Expatriate social networks in Meiji Kobe

This research is primarily based on material gathered from the Harold S. Williams Collection in the Australian National Library; material from the English-language press in Japan and from various accounts concerning the foreign experience in Japan. While the evidence of foreign influence in the city is plainly obvious, from the historic ijinkan or foreign houses in the city's Kitano-cho, to the monolithic buildings of the city's old foreign settlement, these days the foreigners themselves seemed to be conspicuously absent. The findings of this research offer an alternate view of the often 'rose-tinted' depictions of interactions between the Japanese and the West by highlighting how the Euro-American populations of the foreign settlements imported their own social hierarchies onto Japanese soil via their own social institutions. Although the second largest of Japan's foreign settlements, the foreign experience in Kobe is perhaps one of the best documented, in English, and the city remains famous throughout Japan for its 'foreignness'. Harold S. Williams (1898-1987) was an Australian author who spent nearly his entire adult life in Kobe and wrote extensively about the history of foreigners in Japan. He published several books on the subject, most notably Tales of Foreign Settlements in Japan (1958) and Foreigners in Mikadoland (1963). Williams himself took an active role among the communities many gentleman's clubs, most notably the Kobe Regatta & Athletic Club, the Freemasons and the Kobe Club. What follows is an examination of the role of the social networks and various institutions that formed the backbone of the community in the Meiji and pre-WWII eras.