Forever Foreign: Westerners in Historic Kobe

When a 21-year-old medical student from Melbourne, Harold S. Williams, arrived in Japan in 1919 to practise the language over his summer holiday, he never imagined his stay would eventually extend over 60 years. He took up a job with a Scottish trading firm in the cosmopolitan port city of Kobe, but his lifelong passion became collecting records documenting the lives of foreign residents. They are now held at the National Library of Australia as a highly sought-after collection. Keiko Tamura constructs a vivid account of the experience of Williams and three other Westerners, presenting a compelling picture of expatriate experiences and life in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century.