Introduction

The volume opens with a detailed autobiographical sketch of the author's original meeting with Japan, which began in 1961 after taking up a post at ANU, Canberra (the result of a successful response to an advert in the Manchester Guardian).

After twenty-one years in Australia, Arthur Stockwin moved back to the UK to take the chair of the then recently-established Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies. He was to be in post there also for twenty-one years, his retirement coinciding with publication of his Dictionary of the Modern Politics of Japan (Routledge, 2003).