Opening a Window to the West

"In this informative and engaging book, Peter Ennals provides the very first study of Kobe's Foreign Concession during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Ennals has carried out careful research into the daily life and characters who inhabited the foreign settlement using archival material from a diverse array sources. He also illuminates the broader economic and social conditions that shaped the success and challenges of this distinctive period in the city's history." -- David Edgington, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

The first book-length study of Kōbe’s Foreign Concession, Opening a Window to the West situates Kōbe within the larger pattern of globalization occurring throughout East Asia in the nineteenth century.

After more than two centuries of self-seclusion, Japan finally opened itself to Western traders and influences in the 1850s. However, Westerners were restricted to a handful of Foreign Concessions set adjacent to selected Japanese cities, where they could fashion a working urban space suited to their own cultural patterns, and which provided the Japanese with a microscopic lens on Western ways of behaviour and commerce. Kōbe was one of these treaty ports, and its Foreign Concession, along with that at Yokohama, became the most vibrant and successful of these settlements.

The first book-length study of Kōbe’s Foreign Concession, Opening a Window to the West situates Kōbe within the larger pattern of globalization occurring throughout East Asia in the nineteenth century. Detailing the form and evolution of the settlement, its social and economic composition, and its specific mercantile trading features, this vivid micro-study illuminates the making of Kōbe during these critical decades of growth and development.