MY FIRST TEACHER, of Japanese, General F.S.G. Piggott, often used to impress on me that anyone aspmng to leam this most difficult of languages owed an immense debt to three remarkable Englishmen. These three men had, a century ago, laid the foundations of our knowledge of Japanese. They had come to Japan knowing nothing. They had had no dictionaries or grammars to help them. But with an extraordinary courage, linguistic flair and scholarly genius had set to work to make their own grammars and dictionaries, and then to wnte the basic classic studies of Japanese literature, history, Shinto, and Japanese culture in general.

These three giants of men were, of course, Chamberlain, Aston and Satow. I never forgot this debt, and as I plodded along in my study of Japanese, both wntten and spoken, I realized more and more clearly what giants these three must have been. It is easy, a century later, to criticize them for being ‘Victorian’. It takes more imagination than such critics possess to realize how extraordinary their achievements were. It has been a joy for me to recall all three of them for this lecture, and to honour them as part of the Eikokusai this year. Even though, as I have realized all along, each one of these three deserves a whole course of lectures to himself, not simply the third of part of one that I am able to give them today.

Let me first recall them in a general way, and try to put them together in a context, before I tell you something of what each of them accomplished.

Satow was the first to arrive in Japan, as early as 1862 when he was only nineteen years old. He was to stay altogether nearly twenty-five years in Japan. Aston comes next, two years later in 1864 aged twenty-three. He, too, was to stay twenty-four years. Chamberlain was the junior of the tnumvirate in age; he did not reach Japan until 1873, Meiji 6, but he was to stay altogether nearly forty years in Japan. He did not return to Europe until 1911.

So both Satow and Aston were in Japan during the Bakumatsu period. Satow in particular, as we shall see, was to play a crucial diplomatic role during the six turbulent years of that revolutionary penod.