Shades of the Past

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.