With the permission of Michiko Jameson; Bill Jameson’s daughter, I have taken the contents of “The Hawking of Japan” Published in 1962 and formatted it for digital reading. As this book is no longer in print it has become a collectors item and purchasing a copy of it is a rare find. Although any dedicated and avid falconer should have this amazing article on their shelf I wished to make sure the knowledge and hard work held within Mr. Jameson’s work will never be lost and is easily available to those who wish to read.
“Falconry in Japan and Europe has a centuries-long history, but it was uncommon in North America when E. W. Jameson, Jr. (1921-2010) was a student at Cornell University, where he flew his first hawks. Most falconers then were largely self-taught, there being little literature available. He was a member of the first national falconry club before the war and knew its founder, R. Luff Meredith, now regarded as the “Father of American Falconry.”
Jameson went on to earn degrees in Zoology from Cornell and to become an authority on ectoparasites of rodents, studying fleas and chiggers in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. He is the author of books on subjects including zoology, falconry, and Chinese ideography. In Japan, he not only found antique stores with falconry literature and art, which he collected, but also a Japanese wife who translated the book that, with updates from Jameson, became Hawking of Japan.
Realizing the need for a primer for the growing number of North American falconers, he and co-author Hans Peeters published American Hawking in 1970. It is noteworthy that Bill chose a master printer for American Hawking and Hawking of Japan, Lawton Kennedy of San Francisco, who favored the vanishing features of string binding, uncut pages, and tipped-in color plates. ”
