Consul in Japan, 1903-1941: Oswald White’s Memoir ‘All Ambition Spent

Not a contemporary diary as such, but a write-up of notes made towards the end of White’s career spanning thirty-eight years. Importantly, it includes reflective passages on the momentous developments of the later 1930s, as Japan moved onto a war-footing in China - and as Consul-General in the Chinese treaty port of Tianjin under Japanese occupation, White was in the middle of the growing tensions between Britain and Japan. His post-war recollections are also valuable. Like others who had lived and worked in Japan, he sought to come to terms with what had happened to the country in which he had spent so much of his adult life. Along the way he provides fascinating vignettes of his colleagues, some well known, others less so, while his service in Seoul, Mukden (now Shenyang) and Tianjin provides fresh material on the Japanese colonial empire.