Thursday 11 May 2006
6:00pm – 8:00pm

'Falling Blossom' by Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams

Daiwa Foundation Japan House

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo Japanese Foundation

Based on over 800 letters written by a British army officer, Arthur Hart-Synnot, to Masa Suzuki in Tokyo in the early years of the twentieth century, this book not only tells the moving story of its protagonists but sets this against the rapid changes that were taking place in British and Japanese society, and the conflicts of the time.

Arthur Hart-Synnot met Masa Suzuki when he was sent to Japan to study Japanese on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. Covering a twenty-five year period, the letters trace their relationship through the First World War and the troubled decades that followed, as the great earthquake of 1923 ravaged Tokyo, and as the Japanese military seized political power. By 1941 the two former allies were at war, leaving Arthur and Masa on opposing sides.

Peter Pagnamenta, well-known for his penetrating BBC documentaries on Japan, and his co-author and translator, Momoko Williams, bring this period of history to life with their perceptive account of a cross-cultural relationship that transcended national boundaries.

The book will be published by Penguin in the United States in June, under the title ‘Sword and Blossom’.

About the contributors

Peter Pagnamenta

Peter Pagnamenta is a writer and television documentary maker, with a special interest in Japan. He conceived and wrote the eight part BBC series ‘Nippon’, an archive and testimony history of Japan’s recovery after 1945, as well as ‘Bubble Trouble’, about Japan in the 1990s. Other series for the BBC include the twentieth century industrial history, ‘All Our Working Lives’, for which he wrote the book with Richard Overy, and the 26-part ‘People’s Century’. He is a former editor of ‘Panorama’.

Momoko Williams

Momoko Williams was born and brought up in Japan and came to Britain in 1966 after graduating from Meiji University, Tokyo. She has coordinated and produced programs for Japanese broadcasters in Britain and Japan. She worked on the major NHK series ‘The 20th Century’, and ‘Pacific War’. She is interested in Anglo-Japanese cultural connections and initiated and produced the photographic exhibition ‘Japanese in Britain 1863-2001’. She is married to an Englishman and lives in London.