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"Samurai History 17th century."
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The Shogun's Chinese Partners: The Alliance between Tokugawa Japan and the Zheng Family in Seventeenth-Century Maritime East Asia
During the seventeenth century, an alliance took shape between Japan's Tokugawa bakufu and the Zheng organization of southeastern China and Taiwan. The Zheng, especially under the half-Japanese Koxinga in the 1650s, were ideal partners because of their domination of maritime East Asian trade, privileged access to much-coveted Chinese goods, and commitment to Ming restoration against the Manchu Qing, a popular stance in Japan. The organization jointly administered the Chinese community at Nagasaki with the bakufu, and received aid in Japanese armaments and probably mercenaries. Starting in the 1660s, the alliance unraveled amid the depletion of silver to purchase Chinese goods, the rise of a robust domestic market in Japan, and the destruction of the Zheng by the Qing. This article portrays Japan's “isolation policy” (sakoku) as a dynamic process, from active involvement overseas to withdrawal, based upon rational assessments of the international climate and subject to contestation from local and foreign players.
Journal Article
The samurai of Seville : a novel
In 1614, twenty-two Samurai warriors and a group of tradesmen from Japan sailed to Spain, where they initiated one of the most intriguing cultural exchanges in history. They were received with pomp and circumstance, first by King Philip III and later by Pope Paul V. They were the first Japanese to visit Europe and they caused a sensation. They remained for two years and then most of the party returned to Japan; however, six of the Samurai stayed behind, settling in a small fishing village close to Sanlâucar de Barrameda, where their descendants live to this day.Healey imbues this tale of the meeting of East and West with uncommon emotional and intellectual intensity and a rich sense of place. He explores the dueling mentalities of two cultures through a singular romance; the sophisticated, restrained warrior culture of Japan and the baroque sensibilities of Renaissance Spain, dark and obsessed with ethnic cleansing. What one culture lives with absolute normality is experienced as exotic from the outsiders eye. Everyone is seen as strange at first and thenwith growing familiarityis revealed as being more similar than originally perceived, but with the added value of enduring idiosyncrasies.
Book
The political process of the revolutionary samurai: a comparative reconsideration of Japan's Meiji Restoration
In the 1860s and 1870s, the feudal monarchy of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan for over two centuries, was overthrown, and the entire political order it had commanded was dismantled. This immense political transformation, comparable in its results to the great social revolutions of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in the West, was distinctive for lacking a major role for mass political mobilization. Since popular political action was decisive elsewhere for both providing the force for social revolutions to defeat old regimes and for pushing revolutionary leaders to more radical policies, the Meiji Restoration's combination of revolutionary outcomes with conservative personnel and means is puzzling. This article argues that previous accounts fail to explain why a group of relatively low-status samurai— administrative functionaries with some hereditary political privileges but in fact little secure power within the old regime—was able to overcome far more deeply entrenched political actors. To explain this, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between two political processes: the longstanding political relations of feudal monarchy and magnate lords and the unprecedented emergence of independent samurai political action and organizations cutting across domain boundaries. It was the interaction of these two processes that produced the overthrow of the Tokugawa and enabled the revolutionary outcomes that followed it. This article's revised explanation of the Meiji Restoration clearly places it within the same theoretical parameters as the major revolutions of the seventeenth century and later.
Journal Article
The most daring raid of the samurai
In 1609, the Samurai from the Shimazu clan of Satsuma took control of the independent kingdom of Ryukyu. This audacious military campaign brought an end to centuries of warfare between the Shimazu clan and the king of Ryukyu. Every aspect of this dramatic raid is laid out in accessible language.
Book
Territoriality and Collective Identity in Tokugawa Japan
Howell examines the boundaries of the early modern Japanese state, with a focus not only on the political boundaries of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), but also the boundaries of collective identity and social status in that period.
Journal Article
Monkey Fist
Preparing to return from China when Kyoko, a member of the Cockroach Ryu, is abducted, the Samurai Kids make a perilous journey to the Forbidden City, where they meet the mysterious forest-dwelling Lin People and confront Sensei's old enemy, Lu Zeng, an evil minister who is obsessed with eternal life.
Book
Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700
Phipps reviews Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai: Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550-1700 edited by Tonio Andrade and Xing Hang.
Book Review
Child of Vengeance
This coming-of-age biographical novel features the famous seventeenth-century samurai warrior-poet Musashi Miyamoto, who created the double sword fighting method kenjutsu. Readers unfamiliar with Japanese history initially may feel lost in this detailed and measured account of the samurai's life and the strict traditions surrounding family and personal honor.
Book Review
New & Noteworthy Paperbacks
The idea that a television journalist could be the most trusted man in America seems preposterous today, but 30 years ago, Walter Cronkite was said to be exactly that. This memoir details his long career, from World War II to the Kennedy years and on to the forging of the Israeli-Egyptian peace. It is ''a short course on the flow of events in the second half of this century -- events the world knows more about because of Walter Cronkite's work, and some of which might not have happened without it,'' Tom Wicker said here earlier this year. Ballantine has also reissued EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION, by David Brinkley ($10.95), a collection of commentaries from 15 years of ''This Week With David Brinkley.'' In this television newsman's view of Washington, ''sighs of resignation alternate with dark humor,'' Douglas A. Sylva wrote in these pages in 1996. Composed of episodes that read like short stories, this novel focuses on a character who has the same name, appearance and career as the author. But this Paul Theroux is also a different person, one who lives on the page the life his creator might have led if he had made other choices. The book's ''best stories . . . must rank among the strongest things Theroux has ever written,'' Michael Gorra said in the Book Review last year. Theroux's early novel SAINT JACK (Penguin, $11.95) has also been reissued. The title character, a pimp in Singapore, has created his own rationalizing morality, until circumstances and a visiting Englishman intervene. In 1973 our reviewer, R. V. Cassill, praised ''the very great merit of this novel.''
Book Review