Ian Ruxton's page about Sir Ernest Satow
Sir Ernest Mason Satow, P.C., G.C.M.G.
(1843-1929)
Satow in 1900 (Illustrated London News)
Scholar-Diplomat (Oxford DNB entry, pdf uploaded with permission)
A great Englishman, a great European and a great friend of East Asia, especially Japan
Playlist of my YouTube videos about Satow
Lecture on Satow given on October 19, 2021
The Diaries of Sir Ernest Satow, plus current research into his China correspondence, 1900-06.
Playlist of Satow-related videos on YouTube
2024
August 16: Ernest Satow`s Book Collection at Cambridge University Library
July 9: Added YouTube video reading of Satow's diaries for 1870 and 1871.
March 1: The National Diet Library of Japan acknowledges by email receipt of a donated hardcover copy of Ernest Satow's Japanese Book Collection.
"The title will certainly prove to be a valuable addition to the collection of the National Diet Library.Your generosity in augmenting the collection of this library is highly appreciated."
February 26: A hardcover copy of Ernest Satow's Japanese Book Collection is donated by the translator to Kyushu Institute of Technology Library (Tobata campus).
February 16: Ernest Satow's Japanese Book Collection at Cambridge University (my translation of Noboru Koyama's book) is now available as a free PDF download from Kyutacar academic repository.
January 14: Satow's Letters to W.G. Aston and F.V. Dickins - new 6 x 9 inch amazon edition
January 6, 2024: Happy New Year! I have added a hardcover version of Satow's diaries 1870-1883, also 6 by 9 inches. It is available from amazon.com and a few other amazon websites.
2023
December 20, 2023: A new handier smaller (6 by 9 inch paperback) edition of Satow's diaries 1870-1883 is now available from amazon websites. The first paperback published in 2009 was 8.5 by 11 inches, and is still available from Lulu.com.
2022
November 1, 2022: New translation published through Amazon KDP:
Ernest Satow's Japanese Book Collection at Cambridge University Library
May 2022: Update. I am now translating from Japanese to English Noboru Koyama's important book about Satow's book collection mentioned below. It's a long job but I have done such things before, including one of his books.
2021
May 23, 2021: The hardcover, paperback and kindle book of The Correspondence of Sir Ernest Satow, British Envoy in China, 1900-1906 Volume One are now available. The same is true of The Correspondence of Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister in Japan, 1895-1900, four volumes or five hardcover volumes, since the first volume is divided into Volume 1a and Volume 1b.
May 1st: The Correspondence of Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister in Japan, 1895-1900 is a four volume series, already complete in kindle and paperback formats.
April 7, 2021: Brand new Kindle available, the first volume in a new series titled The Correspondence of Sir Ernest Satow, British Envoy in China, 1900-1906.
Paperback will be available in due course.
Kindle (March 2021): Satow's Japan Diaries, 1895-1900
2020
Newly published (November 2020) book by Cambridge University librarian Noboru Koyama in Japanese about Satow as a book collector.
Lecture about Satow's Legacy which I gave to Informasia
(October 2020) Japanese version (May 2021)
Kindle Book: A Diplomat in Japan Part II
Kindle Books: Sir Ernest Satow's Private Letters (Three volumes, also available as large paperbacks).
My author page on Amazon has many books (paper and Kindle) and most of them are related to Sir Ernest Satow.
My Research Results (from 1994 until 2020) are freely downloadable here. Approximately half are about Ernest Satow. All (including No. 1 which is Satow's Peking diaries and letters to the F.O. in London) are in English, except for No. 40, which is in Japanese. ResearchGate entry
Satow Bibliography (including my publications)
"Blessed are the Peacemakers" is written at the bottom of his gravestone in the churchyard of St. Mary's Church, Ottery St. Mary, Devon, England where he lived from 1907 until his death in 1929.
Welcome! You are visitor number
since April 27, 2018.
Commemorative plaque at
Beaumont House, installed
in 2019
I presented on Satow's connection with Japan in his retirement at the EAJS Conference in Tsukuba University on September 15, 2019. Click here for the PDF.
MY BUSINESS TRIP TO ENGLAND
August 29 - September 8, 2018
I did a Book Launch of Satow's diaries for 1912-1920 in Ottery on September 1, 2018 at 2pm in The Curious Otter bookshop, No. 10, Mill Street, Ottery St. Mary, EX11 1AD
See Facebook album here, and a video of the Powerpoint I used is here. The Ottery Heritage Society has just opened a splendid Museum and they are keen to attract Japanese tourists to the town. Maybe at some point in the future a Satow memorial hall could be built in his honour. (It might need Japanese government support...)
Before the book launch I attended the BIHG conference at Exeter University from August 30th to September 1st, and presented a paper about Sir Ernest Satow at the Second Hague Peace Conference held in 1907. The video of the Powerpoint for that is here.
And in the week after the book launch I was honoured to be part of a Japan Society panel at the newly reopened Japan House in London on September 6th. Further details are here.
Introductory Remarks
Ernest Satow is best known in Japan for his book A Diplomat in Japan (first published in 1921) which describes the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and beginning of the Meiji Era in 1868. He arrived in Japan in September 1862, a few days before the Namamugi Incident.
Outside Japan Satow is probably better known as a scholar of international law. His Guide to Diplomatic Practice (first published in 1917) has been revised and republished several times. It is now in its seventh and centenary edition (2016) under the title Satow's Diplomatic Practice.
I want Japanese people to know more about Satow's importance outside Japan, and non-Japanese people to understand his importance within Japan. Put more simply, I would like more people in the world to know about this great but quietly influential man. To this end I am helping Sir David Warren write Satow's biography.
Ian Ruxton, Kitakyushu, Japan
I first came across Ernest Satow's name in 1993 when I was writing my first ever academic paper about The Kobe Incident of 1868. Satow and A.B. Mitford were ordered by Sir Harry Parkes to witness the seppuku/harakiri of the Bizen officer, Taki Zenzaburo, held responsible for firing on foreigners in the settlement. He wrote that "It was no disgusting exhibition, but a most decent and decorous ceremony, and far more respectable than what our own countrymen were in the habit of producing for the entertainment of the public in front of Newgate prison." (A Diplomat in Japan, 1921, pp. 346-7). I found this to be a very interesting comment from a man who was clearly not afraid to make cross-cultural comparisons, nor to conclude in fairness and after careful thought that non-British ways might, after all, be better sometimes.
IMDb has a two-part TV series broadcast in 1992 based on A Diplomat in Japan. I uploaded part of the first programme to YouTube. See here.
On New Year's Day 2017 I appeared briefly in a TV programme (a docu-drama) on NHK titled "Edo Jo Muketsu Kaijo" (The Surrender without Bloodshed of Edo Castle) which suggested that Ernest Satow played a key role as an intermediary between Katsu Kaishu and Saigo Takamori in preventing Edo (now called Tokyo) and the whole country of Japan being engulfed and consumed by the flames of civil war in 1868, with the foreign powers intervening much as they are now doing in Syria. He certainly knew both men, and was in Edo at the time, but his diary for the critical period is (deliberately?) blank, so it is hard to confirm the theory at this stage. See article in Japan Times, December 30, 2016.
Shinnosuke Mitsushima played Ernest Satow very well and amusingly, even though he is 3/4 Japanese. I dream of a movie of Satow's life, with Eddie Redmayne as the young Satow and Jeremy Irons as the older Satow. (But frankly I fear the kind of cavalier approach to known historical facts and realities which many movie directors espouse. All the more so since the truth of Satow's life is more glorious and extraordinary than the imagination of most scriptwriters could ever comprehend!)
Satow Family Photos - see also E.M. Satow, The Family Chronicle of the English Satows (privately printed, Oxford, 1925) and my paper about his early life.
Discussion of diary entries (mainly legibility, but also Greek etc.)
My Book Covers (Facebook album)
My first book about Sir Ernest Satow, The Diaries and Letters of Sir Ernest Satow published in 1998 has been translated into Japanese.
Downloadable PDFs of some presentations which I have given about Satow:
1. Ernest Satow in the Bakumatsu (1862-9) and 1870-83 in Japan
2. The Many Faces and Legacy of Sir Ernest Satow
3. Meiji Japan through the Eyes of Ernest Satow
4. A presentation which I gave at Nikko on 11 September 2016
5. Ernest Satow's Visits to Japan from Siam (in 1884 and 1886)
Satow was an important collector of Japanese books.
1) See Hamish Todd, 'The Satow Collection of Books in the British Library: Its History and Significance' in Daiei Toshokan shozō Chōsenbon oyobi Nihon kosho no bunkengakuteki, gogakuteki kenkyū 大英図書館所蔵朝鮮本及び日本古書の文献学的・語学的研究, ed. by Yukio Fujimoto (Toyama: Toyama Daigaku, 2007)
2) Most of his rare Japanese books are in the Cambridge University Library. See Nozomu Hayashi and Peter Kornicki, Early Japanese books in Cambridge University Library; a catalogue of the Aston, Satow and Von Siebold Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1991, first paperback edition 2012)
Ernest Satow was also a pioneer Japanologist. I wrote a paper in 1996 about that for the Asiatic Society of Japan, the oldest academic society in Japan, of which Satow was one of the founders in 1872. Most of his Japan studies were published in the Transactions of the A.S.J. A scan of my paper can be downloaded here.
You can download some more of my papers about Satow (and other topics) from Kyutacar archive. The paper which I consider my best and most significant ('Ernest Satow, British Policy and the Meiji Restoration') is about Satow's foray into amateur journalism in 1866 when he wrote three anonymous and untitled articles in the Japan Times about the need for constitutional change in Japan. As a diplomat it was quite improper for him to meddle in the affairs of another country, as he admitted later in A Diplomat in Japan. But his articles were translated into Japanese - he himself did this with the help of his teacher! - and then circulated widely throughout Japan as "Eikoku Sakuron" (British Policy). This translation had a major influence towards the Meiji Restoration of 1868, being read by court nobles such as Iwakura Tomomi, daimyos of Satsuma and other clans, and members of the Shogunate, though its effect is difficult to measure precisely, as Grace Fox observed in her excellent but neglected Britain and Japan 1858-1883 (Oxford U.P., 1969). See also Tsuyoshi Sakakibara's 2015 thesis here.
My most recent addition to the Kyutacar archive is a list of Satow's general correspondence, 1906 to 1927. It has already been published as a hardcover book via lulu.com and is available from amazon and other online retail websites also.
By far the most popular deposit in terms of the numbers of PDF downloads has been Satow's Peking diary (Vol. 1, 1900-03, Vol. 2 1904-06) and his semi-official correspondence from Japan and China, 1895-1906. These were deposited in 2007, and were completed in the previous year as the result of a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi).
Here is the book which I plan to launch at Ottery St. Mary on September 1st:
The Diaries of Sir Ernest Satow, 1912-1920
I have recently approved proof copies of both volumes, which will allow the book to be made available through online retail outlets such as amazon, as my other paperback books on lulu.com have been. (Both volumes are now available at the Ottery St. Mary Library, to which I have donated one of each.)
And here is a list of my other books, hardcover and paperback:
General introduction - my first book:
Ruxton, Ian C. (ed.), The Diaries and Letters of Sir Ernest Mason Satow (1843-1929): A Scholar-Diplomat in East Asia, Lewiston, New York and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998.
Diaries - transcribed, annotated and indexed:
Morton, Robert and Ruxton, Ian (eds.), The Diaries of Sir Ernest Mason Satow, 1861-1869, Kyoto: Eureka Press, 2013.
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Ernest Mason Satow, 1870-1883, Lulu.com, 2010; Kyoto: Eureka Press, 2015.
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Ernest Mason Satow, 1883-1888, Lulu.com, 2016.
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister in Tokyo 1895-1900, Tokyo: Edition Synapse, 2003. Lulu.com, 2010.
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Ernest Satow, British Envoy in Peking, 1900-1906, Lulu.com, Volume One and Two, 2006. Eureka Press revised edition, 2 vols., 2016.
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Ernest Mason Satow, 1906-1911, Kyoto: Eureka Press, 2015.
Letters - transcribed and annotated
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), The Correspondence of Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister in Japan, 1895-1900, Lulu.com, Volume One (2005), Volume Two (2011) Volume Three, Volume Four (2014).
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), The Semi-Official Letters of British Envoy Sir Ernest Satow from Japan and China 1895-1906, Lulu.com, 2006.
Ruxton, Ian (ed.), Sir Ernest Satow’s Private Letters to W.G. Aston and F.V. Dickins: The Correspondence of a Pioneer Japanologist, Lulu.com, 2008.
Ruxton, Ian, List of Sir Ernest Satow’s General Correspondence from 1906 to 1927, Lulu.com, 2018.
Sir Ivor Roberts, editor of Satow's Diplomatic Practice 6th and 7th editions, discusses the latter edition on YouTube.
Book review on YouTube of Satow's Diplomatic Practice (Centenary edition, 2017) by barrister Phillip Taylor, MBE
See also Joachim Schwietzke, 'Ernest Satow's Guides to Diplomatic Practice. From the First Edition in 1917 to the Sixth Edition (2009)', in Journal of the History of International Law/Revue d'histoire du droit international, Volume 13, Issue 1, pages 235-245. Published in 2011.
ISSN: 1388-199X.
He points out quite correctly that the sixth edition and the first edition are quite different - for one thing, the first edition only had one author (Satow himself) while the sixth (and seventh) editions have multiple authors. This is separate from all the changes in the substance of diplomacy which have also occurred since 1917.
I am a member (and was President 2017-19) of the International Association for Japan Studies. I have written papers about Ernest Satow in the IAJS Journal as follows. (Note: each of these three papers can be downloaded as pdfs.)
Volume 1 (2015, pp. 23-32): Sir Ernest Satow in Japan, 1862-69: Comparing his diary ('journal') and his memoir titled A Diplomat in Japan
Volume 2 (2016, pp. 35-44): Sir Ernest Satow in Japan, Britain and Europe, 1870-1883, as seen through his diaries: A chance to deepen his knowledge of Japanese culture and other matters
Volume 3 (2017, pp. 21-30): Sir Ernest Satow in Siam, 1884-87: Focusing on his visits to Japan from Siam in 1884 and 1886, and his Research into Japan-Siam Relations
Volume 4 (2019, pp. 37-45): Sir Ernest Satow and Nikko: His Favourite Place for Rest and Recuperation in Japan
Here is a video on YouTube showing how Satow's house at Lake Chuzenji (Nikko) looks now that it has been restored by Tochigi prefecture. I honestly wonder if it ever looked as smart as this, and whether the restoration has in some ways gone too far? I should like to see old photographs of the interior and exterior from the early days. Satow had it built to Josiah Conder's design in 1896.
Thank you for reading this far! I am delighted that you are apparently so interested in Sir Ernest Satow. As a modest reward for your stamina(!) you can download the pdf of the Oxford DNB entry mentioned at the top of the page (uploaded with permission from Oxford University Press). It was written by my good friend Nigel Brailey of Bristol University, who taught me a great deal about Satow and whose passion for Satow's life and letters ignited my own. He also wrote about Satow at the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907, which is the subject of my paper at the upcoming BIHG conference at Exeter University on August 31, 2018. R.I.P.
