Bombardment of Kagoshima
The archives are housed in a newly built annex of the former British Consulate building. The British Consulate building, which replaced a building destroyed in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, was completed in 1931 and used as a consulate until 1972. The ground floor of the building is open to the public and there is a small exhibition room which is free. There are plaques in the building commemorating consulate employees who died in the earthquake, as well as British sailors who died during the British Bombardment of Kagoshima in 1863. The British Court for Japan, under the British Supreme Court for China and Japan, sat in the consulate compound from 1879 to 1900. Prior to that the British Provincial Court for Kanagawa sat in the compound from 1865 to 1878.