Harold S. Williams

[citation needed] At his father's urging he also received Japanese language lessons from a Mr Inagaki, who ran a local laundry business.

In 1919, Harold Williams visited Japan on holiday to improve his Japanese, but deferred his return to Australia, as he found an interesting position with a foreign business firm, Findlay Richardson & Co., Ltd.,.

Jean and their young daughter had returned to Melbourne in December 1940, and with hostilities imminent he followed in August 1941 in a Dutch ship that sailed via Java.

In 1945 he returned to Japan with the Occupation Forces, and was attached to General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo, where his knowledge of the country and its language proved invaluable.

During his more than 60 years in the country Harold Williams built up an extensive library of books, manuscripts, pictures, serials and other materials dealing particularly with foreign settlement in Japan since its opening to the West in the mid-19th century.

Williams made the trip in 1967 and his extensive notes about the grave and life on the island are part of his archive held at the National Library of Australia.

Myer reported back to the Council that Harold Williams was "a most interesting and dynamic man completely dedicated to his research work on the activities of foreigners in Japan".

This work was honoured when in the Queen's Birthday List of June 1972 Harold Williams was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to historical research.

They range in subject matter from the killing of two British officers, about which Harold Williams wrote with Hiroshi Naito in The Kamakura Murders of 1864 (1971), to more peaceful scenes of the foreign communities in Kobe, Nagasaki and Yokohama.

In 1989, Jean Williams was interviewed on tape as part of the National Library's extensive oral history program for recording the lives of prominent Australians.