Publisher, literary agent and founding director of the English Agency Japan, William Miller was an archetypal Press Club personality who belonged to what one can only call the “old school.”Always genial, sometimes eccentric and ever hospitable, William was a figure from the past and someone with a very interesting past himself. He embodied the kind of gentility and charm that seems to be disappearing from our midst nowadays.

One member of the FCCJ, where William was first an Associate and later a Professional Associate member, remembers him as a “delightful drinking companion,” and it would be difficult to improve on that description.

He was ever ready to share a glass (or bottle) of wine with friends at the bar and it was impossible to spend time with him at the Press Club, or at the old Papas bar in Omotesando where he also held court, without coming away feeling enriched by his encyclopedic knowledge of literature and its practitioners.

He was a man of letters without being “bookish” in the sense of being out of touch with the real world. Indeed, William could lay claim to being a highly colorful character with a most interesting background which predated his professional life as a publisher and literary agent. One of the most unusual scrapes he got himself into was in his university days when he managed to get himself prosecuted under Britain’s Official Secrets Act

It happened while he was up at Oxford, reading history. During that time, as recalled by Peter Thompson in an obituary notice which he kindly supplied, William “co-edited an edition of the university magazine Isis in which the government’s contingency plans in the event of a nuclear war were revealed. This led him to be charged for breaking the Official Secrets Act, tried at the Old Bailey, and sentenced by the Lord Chief Justice to three months in jail (which led to problems when he later travelled to America on business).”

An Internet site on Isis offers another account of the incident. The late 1950s, it recalls, were a “very lively period” for the century-old university magazine. Participating in the often heated debate on the H-Bomb at this time, Isis published a piece by William Miller and Paul Thompson, both ex-national-service undergraduates, revealing some of Britain’s intelligence operations in Russia. After the revelations were taken up by the national press, the pair found themselves prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.

Succeeding Miller and Thompson at Isis, editor Dennis Potter continued the campaign, which eventually led Isis itself into trouble. As result, the proprietors stepped in, with the objection that the staff of the magazine was “definitely left-wing and will almost inevitably remain so.”

William too remained basically left-wing in his sympathies (as is often the case with gifted intellects). His brand of socialism was strongly influenced by the Fabian Society, a British intellectual movement that was dedicated to advancing the principles of social democracy through gradual reform rather than by revolution (and which was named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, who advocated wars of attrition rather than frontal attack).

William’s politics, like the man himself, were essentially “compassionate,” recalls renowned author and long-time FCCJ Regular member Karel van Wolferen, who remembers him as a “warm and enthusiastic” friend. “It was William’s judicious choice of publisher that helped to make my book (The Enigma of Japanese Power, published initially by MacMillan) an international success,” van Wolferen acknowledges.

When he left Britain in 1979 to come to Japan, William Miller was “quite a figure in publishing, and he gave up a very promising career there,” adds van Wolferen

Or, as Peter Thompson tells it: “William came to Japan after a stellar career as a publisher in London in the 1960s and ’70s, with Panther, Granada, and latterly Quartet, when, under the banner of ‘making good books popular, and popular books good,’ he enlivened British paperback publishing, and brought authors such as Beryl Bainbridge, Len Deighton and Fay Weldon to public attention, and published the British editions of The Joy of Sex, the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden.

“In Tokyo, William began a second career as a literary agent, as a founder,
and the first managing director, of The English Agency Japan, which, under his 24-year stewardship, grew to become one of the leading agencies in Japan, selling the rights of, amongst many others, Karel van Wolferen, Margaret Atwood, J. G.
Ballard, Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro and Samuel Huntington; and, in the reverse direction, introducing Japan-based authors, notably David Peace, to an international audience.”

Adds Thompson, “Many regular members [of the FCCJ], most of whom felt they had at least one book in them, were either encouraged to write one, or enlisted his aid to publish their efforts. William’s contribution to a Press Club seminar on ‘How to get a book published’ was felt by many to be unusually helpful and practical.”

Another former journalist and Club member, Christopher Wood (late of the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Economist, and nowadays managing director of brokerage CLSA in Hong Kong) was among those who felt they had to progress beyond the scribbling of daily or weekly journalism. “I remember William Miller first and foremost for his wonderful encouragement for my first book project,” recalls Wood.

“While himself utterly unconvinced about how the Western world could ever again prevail over a then-ascendant Japan, as a good former journalist and entrepreneurial agent William was interested to read the other side of the story,” says Wood, whose book The Bubble Economy viewed Japan in a rather unflattering light following the collapse of the late-1980s bubble.

“A supreme individualist and certainly a larger-than-life character himself, William was a strong believer in the merits of Japanese culture, in contrast to the inequality and rapacious individualism of the West,” adds Wood. “As such, he always struck me as being extremely comfortable in Japan.”

William retired as managing director of The English Agency Japan in 2003, but he continued working as a literary agent and, adds Thompson, “luckily for aspiring writers, his successor, Hamish Macaskill, is also a member of the [Press] Club.”

William was born in Kent, England, in 1934, of Scottish parents, both from seafaring families in the far north. His father, a chief engineer in the Merchant Navy, died of malaria during World War II, and William went to boarding school in England. Christopher Wood (himself an Old Etonian) describes him as a “classic rebel product of a British ‘public school’ education.”

William entered hospital (Nisseki Byoin) on Oct. 5 for treatment of an infected foot and died there on Nov. 5. “The foot was eventually healed, but, as it transpired, at the cost of his life,” wrote Thompson in his obituary notice, adding that, “such is the way with hospitals.” It is sad that William, an abundant drinker and heavy smoker (who remained loyal to the Press Club even after smoking was banned), should have survived these nowadays politically incorrect habits only to succumb to what another report of his death described as “blood poisoning.” ❶