James Murdoch

James Murdoch (27 September 1856 – 30 October 1921) was a Scottish Orientalist scholar and journalist, who worked as a teacher in the Empire of Japan and Australia. From 1903 to 1917, he wrote his "monumental" three-volume A History of Japan, the first comprehensive history of Japan in the English language (the third volume being published posthumously in 1926). He had been chosen from among 130 applicants for the position but became unpopular with the trustees (possibly because of his atheism), and he was dismissed in March 1885. He worked for the next two years as assistant master at Brisbane Grammar School. In 1886, he also sat for the Bar examinations but failed in two of the eight papers because he had mistakenly attempted to answer every question. He left the school at his own wish and became a journalist at the radical nationalist newspaper, The Boomerang. In a series of articles, he predicted that within a generation the Australian colonies would form an independent republic, which would turn socialist through a violent revolution unless the harsh living conditions of the working classes were alleviated.

Life in Japan Murdoch came to Japan as a foreign advisor, from September 1889 – 1893 as a professor of European history at the First Higher School, an elite institution for young men entering the Tokyo Imperial University. His most famous student during his first period in Japan was Natsume Sōseki. By the time of his arrival, however, about one-third of the colonists had seceded, and far from the socialist paradise he had imagined, he found only poverty, dissention, and disease. He remained only a few days and, leaving his 12-year-old son Kenneth in South America, returned to London in ill health.

In 1908, Murdoch's teaching contract was not renewed. Murdoch, nevertheless, decided to remain at Kagoshima. He contributed regularly to the Kobe Chronicle newspaper and, to supplement this income, planted a citron orchard. Although he was never to achieve fluency in speech, he had now become so proficient in classical written Japanese that he no longer had to rely on assistants. A History of Japan From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. appeared in 1910. In 1915, following the completion of the manuscript of the third volume, The Tokugawa Epoch 1652–1868, poverty forced Murdoch back into teaching, this time at the junior high-school level.

Return to Australia In February 1917, however, Murdoch was able to return to Australia to teach Japanese at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and at the University of Sydney (where he founded the Japanese studies program), concurrent appointments instituted on the initiative of the Australian Defense Department. The following year, in response to an effort made by Waseda University to bring him back to Japan, the University of Sydney raised his status to that of a fully tenured professor and as the founding professor of the Chair of Oriental Studies. In return for £600 a year from the Defense Department, the university also permitted Murdoch to visit Japan annually to obtain first-hand information on shifts in Japanese public opinion and foreign policy. The first such visit resulted in a memorandum highly critical of Australia's intransigence on the racial equality issue raised by Japan at the Paris Peace Conference. Similarly, two years later Murdoch was called to Melbourne to give the Prime Minister of Australia his views on the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

Selected works

In an overview of writings by and about Murdoch, OCLC/WorldCat lists roughly 60+ works in 130+ publications in 4 languages and 1,300+ library holdings. A History of Constitutional Reform in Great Britain and Ireland : With Full Account of the Three Great Measures of 1832, 1867 and 1884, Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1885 The Narrative of a Japanese : What he has Seen and the People he has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years, 1890; Tokyo: Maruzen, 1895; San Francisco: American-Japanese Publishing Association, n.d. (with Joseph Heco) Don Juan’s Grandson in Japan, with Notes for the Globe-Trotter’s Benefit, A. Miall (pseudonym of James Murdoch), Tokyo: Hakubunsha, 1890 The Nikkō District, Yokohama: Kelly & Walsh, ca. 1890 Ayame-san : A Japanese Romance of the 23rd year of Meiji (1890), Yokohama, etc.: Kelly & Walsh, 1892; London: Walter Scott, 1892 (with photographic illustrations by W. K. Burton (William Kinnimond Burton) et al.) Felix Holt Secundus, and, A Tosa Monogatari of Modern Times, Allahabad: A.H. Wheeler & Co., ca. 1892-93 (Indian Railway Library, no. 18) From Australia and Japan, London: Walter Scott, 1892; republished as: A Yoshiwara Episode. Fred Wilson's Fate., Allahabad: A.H. Wheeler & Co., 1894 (Indian Railway Library, no. 22);

A History of Japan References to volume numbers can be confusing, as the books were later issued in sets where volume number does not correspond to order of original publication. During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542–1651), in collaboration with Isoh Yamagata, published by the Kobe Chronicle, Kobe, Japan, 1903. This was Vol. II in the Routledge set. From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D., published 1910 by Trench, Trubner, & Co. Note that this was labelled Vol. 1, and was Vol. I in the Routledge set. The Tokugawa Epoch 1652–1868, published 1926.