Category: 幕末
Talks about the late Tokugawa period.
What do Samurai Have To Do With It?
I saw Margi Preus’s Heart of a Samurai (Amulet, 2010) and the title alone made me cringe: just what the world needs, another kid book touting the putative...
Turnbull Book on Ako
Stephen Turnbull, one of the most prolific and controversial writers on Japanese military history, has written a book on the 47 Samurai incident. The Samurai Ar...
Aizawa Yasushi on America
In the Prefatory Remarks to Aizawa Yasushi‘s 1825 New Theses (新論) we find an interesting little gloss on the relationship of the “Divine Realm”...
The Teahouse Fire: Painstaking
I don’t often get unsolicited books with handwritten notes from the authors, unless I worked with them in some way. What was even more surprising is that ...
Pearl Harbor and the longue duree
In honor of the 65th anniversary, HNN has a Pearl Harbor extravaganza this week. There’s a little recap, and the obligatory zombie error smackdown, which ...
Homosexuality in Japan: The Meiji Gap
The effects of Meiji reforms on women have been pretty well documented: the continued legality of prostitution, including indenture; the consolidation of male p...
Restoration or Renovation?
I’ve always found it interesting how certain events in Japanese history have become indelibly associated with a canonical English translation that often h...