I WAS APPOINTED Acting Vice-Consul at Osaka in 1913 and subsequently Vice-Consul, a post I held till 1919. In those days it was a Vice-Consulate under the control of the Kobe Consulate General. I came back in 1931 when it had become an independent Consulate-General and was in charge till 1937 so that, altogether, I have served twelve years at Osaka.

Life in Osaka

I always had a little grudge against my first chief in 1913. Some time earlier he had decided that the Vice-Consul at Osaka should live in Osaka and not outside. In theory, the opinion was irreproachable; in practice, it was not. The work at Osaka has always been almost entirely commercial. Since ninety per cent of the leading merchants, Japanese and foreign, live outside Osaka, there was really no need for the Vice-Consul to be at his post out of office hours. During the four years I lived in Osaka, on no occasion was I called on to do any work out of office hours that could not perfectly well have waited over.

However, the Consul-General had decided that the Vice-Consul should live in Osaka and a tiny lot had been acquired in the old foreign concession. A Vice-Consulate and residence combined was later built and my family and I moved in at the beginning of 1915.

At first, living conditions were not too bad. It was true the building fronted on a main road down which trams rumbled for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. The dust was bad and the smoke from the river, fifty yards off, where small steamers were arriving and leaving at all hours of the day and night, was troublesome. A far more serious matter was that two factories on the other side of the river were stirred into great activity by the Great War and commenced to pour sulphuric acid fumes into the air which, with the prevailing wind in summer, settled down in our quarter.

I once tried to get this nuisance abated. First, I called on the zinc refinery, which was one of the culprits. The director I saw was most sympathetic. It was an outrage that the air should be polluted in this way.