This is a new series which publishes for the first time the correspondences of Sir Harry Smith Parkes (1828 - 1885) the second British Minister of Japan, and includes the complete transcriptions of his `private' letters to and from Edmund Hammond, permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who was the decision maker about major issues in the British relation to Asia, and his successors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Chronologically arranged, the series covers all such letters during his 18 years in Japan and with the first volume for Bakumatsu, the end of the Shogunate era. ...