Henry Spencer Palmer - Nineteenth Century FG Blogger

[Mulboyne]

Welcome to the The Henry Spencer Palmer Museum. This "museum" site has been put together by Jiro Higuchi, who appears to be Henry Spencer Palmer's grandson. It isn't exactly spelt out in the biography but since he writes this:

When I was still very young, I heard from my mother that her father, H.S. Palmer had designed and superintended the waterworks in Yokohama.

and since it doesn't look like his grandmother was Mrs. H.S. Palmer, it seems a fair bet that HSP may have played away from home. The Canadian branch of the family took it in their stride when the they found out who had been tending the old boy's grave in Aoyama Cemetery

Dear Cousin Higuchi

I was delighted beyond words to hear from Frances Woodward that the PALMER clan is far more extensive than previously thought!

There appears to have been a woman called Uta-san - who may or may not be Mrs. Utako Hozumi who met Palmer in the Imperial Hotel. Whoever she was, Higuchi writes that

Mrs. William Palmer...a very intellectual 80 year old lady, a graduate of Smith Girls' College in Boston and one of the first lady-journalists in U.S.A. [said] that Uta-san might have been "An Oasis in the Desert" to Palmer in Japan.

Anyway, the real reason to drag this site onto the board is that it has some decent photographs of late 19th century Japan here and a lot of Palmer's articles on Japan here. In another age, he would have been a blogger. He was one of the original expat hired guns as this contract from the Japanese government shows:

With regards to the terms of the agreement, I would propose that your employment be made for a period of two years (within which the work would, I estimate, be completed) at a salary of five hundred Silver Yen per month [Exchange rate Yen 1.333 per $] . The house accommodation during your stay in Japan, may I think, be arranged afterwards according to your convenience. Being an old and intimate friend I trust you will not hesitate to state your own terms, should the above not be acceptable to your views.

Palmer was put in charge of building Yokohama's waterworks, a job he felt needed doing elsewhere too:

In Tokyo the vast majority of wells yield water that is more or less unfit to drink, and even the naturally good Tamagawa water is soon befouled by its passage through the wooden underground pipes. In Osaka, the case is yet worse; for, though the Yodogawa water above the city is found to be of excellent quality, only needing sedimentation and filtration on a large scale to fit for domestic use, yet, from the moment it enters the city limits, it is systematically polluted with nearly every description of filth.

If you like stories about Japanese concrete, you'll enjoy this segment which describes how Palmer was coerced into using unreliable local suppliers of cement for the Yokohama Harbourworks. He died during the construction but problems soon came to light, as he had predicted. The Government took a firm view on where the blame should go:

Furuichi: It had been impossible to determine whether the defects in the blocks were due to bad materials or faulty mixing. But the responsibility rested with the superintending engineer, Major-General Palmer, and as he as dead, nothing could be done.
Baron Date: I am not at all content that the whole blame should be laid on a deceased foreign engineer.

[Taro Toporific]

[Charles]

That lower pic looks like my old neighborhood in LA. No wonder Tokyo felt so familiar, the first time I went over. I guess every megalopolis needs their own William Mullholland.