The Last Shogun

Author : Ryotaro Shiba
Publisher : Vertical Inc
ISBN 13 : 1568366248
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Shogun written by Ryotaro Shiba and published by Vertical Inc. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ryotaro Shiba's account of the life of Japan's last shogun, Perry's arrival off the coast of Japan was merely the spark that ignited the cataclysm in store for the Japanese people and their governments. It came to its real climax with the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the event which forms the centerpiece of this book. The Meiji Restoration—as history calls it—toppled the shogunate, and brought a seventeen-year-old boy emperor back from the secluded Imperial Palace in Kyoto to preside over what amounted to a political and cultural revolution. With this, Japan's extraordinary self-modernization began in earnest. Coming to power just as the Tokugawa regime was suffering the worst military defeat in its history, Yoshinobu strongly suspected that the rule of the Tokugawas—the third and longest lived of Japan's three warrior governments - was swiftly becoming an anachronism. During a year of frenetic activity, he overhauled the military systems, reorganized the civil administration, promoted industrial development, and expanded foreign intercourse, with the farsighted aim of creating a unified Japan. Alarmed by these reforms, pro-imperial interests moved against him, precipitating the Boshin Civil War and the final defeat of the shogunal armies. To the surprise of his enemies, Yoshinobu capitulated. It was this surrender of authority at a crucial point that made the transfer of sovereignty relatively peaceful. He then retired to Mito and lived quietly for the rest of his life, studying the new art of photography. Ennobled a prince in the new European-style nobility of the Meiji era, he died in 1913.

Author : Romulus Hillsborough
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1462922082
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps written by Romulus Hillsborough and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Power to them meant everything. It was founded on courage, which begot honor. And by this courage and for this honor they fought to the death." The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps tells the thrilling story of the Shinsengumi--the legendary corps of Samurai warriors tasked with keeping order in Kyoto during the final chaotic years of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600-1868). This book recounts the fascinating tales of political intrigue, murder and mayhem surrounding the fearsome Shinsengumi, including: The infamous slaughter at Ikidaya Inn where, after learning of a plan to torch the city, a group of Shinsengumi viciously attacked and killed a group of anti-Tokugawa plotters The bloody assassination of Serizawa Kamo, the Shinsengumi leader, under highly suspicious circumstances The final tumultuous battles of the civil war in which the Shinsengumi fought and died in a series of doomed last stands Author and Samurai history expert Romulus Hillsborough uses letters, memoirs, interviews and eyewitness accounts to paint a vivid picture of the Shinsengumi, their origins, violent methods and the colorful characters that led the group.

Author : Romulus Hillsborough
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
ISBN 13 : 146291358X
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shinsengumi written by Romulus Hillsborough and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shinsengumi: The Shogun's last Samurai Corps is the true story of the notorious samurai corps formed in 1863 to arrest or kill the enemies of the Tokugawa Shogun. The only book in English about the Shinsengumi, it focuses on the corps' two charismatic leaders, Kondo Isami and Hijikata Toshizo, both impeccable swordsmen. It is a history–in–brief of the final years of the Bakufu, which collapsed in 1867 with the restoration of Imperial rule. In writing Shinsengumi, Hillsborough referred mostly to Japanese–language primary sources, including letters, memoirs, journals, interviews, and eyewitness accounts, as well as definitive biographies and histories of the era. The fall of the shogun's government (Tokugawa Bakufu, or simply Bakufu) in 1868, which had ruled Japan for over two and a half centuries, was the greatest event in modern Japanese history. The revolution, known as the Meiji Restoration, began with the violent reaction of samurai to the Bakufu's decision in 1854 to open the theretofore isolated country to "Western barbarians." Though opening the country was unavoidable, it was seen as a sign of weakness by the samurai who clamored to "expel the barbarians." Those samurai plotted to overthrow the shogun and restore the holy emperor to his ancient seat of power. Screaming "heaven's revenge," they wielded their swords with a vengeance upon those loyal to the shogun. They unleashed a wave of terror at the center of the revolution—the emperor's capital of Kyoto. Murder and assassination were rampant. By the end of 1862, hordes of renegade samurai, called ronin, had transformed the streets of the Imperial Capital into a "sea of blood." The shogun's administrators were desperate to stop the terror. A band of expert swordsmen was formed. It was given the name Shinsengumi ("Newly Selected Corps")—and commissioned to eliminate the ronin and other enemies of the Bakufu. With unrestrained brutality bolstered by an official sanction to kill, the Shinsengumi soon became the shogun's most dreaded security force. In this vivid historical narrative of the Shinsengumi, the only one in the English language, author Romulus Hillsborough paints a provocative and thrilling picture of this most fascinating period in Japanese history.

Author : Romulus Hillsborough
Publisher : Tuttle Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1462913512
Total Pages : 608 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Samurai Revolution written by Romulus Hillsborough and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: See the dawn of modern Japan through the lens of the power players who helped shape it — as well as those who fought against it — in this exploration of Samurai history. Samurai Revolution tells the fascinating story of Japan's historic transformation at the end of the nineteenth century from a country of shoguns, feudal lords and samurai to a modern industrialized nation. The book covers the turbulent Meiji Period from 1868 to 1912, widely considered "the dawn of modern Japan," a time of Samurai history in which those who choose to cling to their traditional bushido way of life engaged in frequent and often deadly clashes with champions of modernization. Knowledge of this period is essential to understand how and why Japan evolved into the nation it is today. The book opens with the fifteen-year fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Japan for over 250 years, and the restoration of the Meiji emperor to a position of power at the expense of the feudal Daimyo lords. It chronicles the bloody first decade of the newly reestablished monarchy, in which the new government worked desperately to consolidate its power and introduce the innovations that would put Japan on equal footing with the Western powers threatening to dominate it. Finally, Samurai Revolution goes on to tell the story of the Satsuma Rebellion, a failed coup attempt that is widely viewed as the final demise of the samurai class in Japan. This book is the first comprehensive history and analysis in English that includes all the key figures from this dramatic time in Japanese politics and society, and is the result of over twenty-five years of research focused on this critical period in Japanese history. The book contains numerous original translations of crucial documents and correspondence of the time, as well as photographs and maps. Samurai Revolution goes in-depth to reveal how one era of ended and another began.

Author : Ryotaro Shiba
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 1568363567
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Shogun written by Ryotaro Shiba and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2004-08-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ryotaro Shiba's account of the life of Japan's last shogun, Perry's arrival off the coast of Japan was merely the spark that ignited the cataclysm in store for the Japanese people and their governments. It came to its real climax with the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the event which forms the centerpiece of this book. The Meiji Restoration—as history calls it—toppled the shogunate, and brought a seventeen-year-old boy emperor back from the secluded Imperial Palace in Kyoto to preside over what amounted to a political and cultural revolution. With this, Japan's extraordinary self-modernization began in earnest. Coming to power just as the Tokugawa regime was suffering the worst military defeat in its history, Yoshinobu strongly suspected that the rule of the Tokugawas—the third and longest lived of Japan's three warrior governments - was swiftly becoming an anachronism. During a year of frenetic activity, he overhauled the military systems, reorganized the civil administration, promoted industrial development, and expanded foreign intercourse, with the farsighted aim of creating a unified Japan. Alarmed by these reforms, pro-imperial interests moved against him, precipitating the Boshin Civil War and the final defeat of the shogunal armies. To the surprise of his enemies, Yoshinobu capitulated. It was this surrender of authority at a crucial point that made the transfer of sovereignty relatively peaceful. He then retired to Mito and lived quietly for the rest of his life, studying the new art of photography. Ennobled a prince in the new European-style nobility of the Meiji era, he died in 1913.

Author : Ryōtarō Shiba
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Shogun written by Ryōtarō Shiba and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lesley Downer
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1407033514
Total Pages : 482 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Concubine written by Lesley Downer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan, 1865, the women's palace in the great city of Edo. Bristling with intrigue and erotic rivalries, the palace is home to three thousand women and only one man - the young shogun. Sachi, a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, is chosen to be his concubine. But Japan is changing, and as civil war erupts, Sachi flees for her life. Rescued by a rebel warrior, she finds unknown feelings stirring within her; but this is a world in which private passions have no place and there is not even a word for 'love'. Before she dare dream of a life with him, Sachi must uncover the secret of her own origins - a secret that encompasses a wrong so terrible that it threatens to destroy her ....

Author : Marcus Bourne Huish
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 670 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Fifty Years of New Japan (Kiakoku Gojūnen Shi) written by Marcus Bourne Huish and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Adam Clulow
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231535732
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Company and the Shogun written by Adam Clulow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-24 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dutch East India Company was a hybrid organization combining the characteristics of both corporation and state that attempted to thrust itself aggressively into an Asian political order in which it possessed no obvious place and was transformed in the process. This study focuses on the company's clashes with Tokugawa Japan over diplomacy, violence, and sovereignty. In each encounter the Dutch were forced to retreat, compelled to abandon their claims to sovereign powers, and to refashion themselves again and again—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial sovereignty to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. Within the confines of these conflicts, the terms of the relationship between the company and the shogun first took shape and were subsequently set into what would become their permanent form. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company in Japan as something more than just a commercial organization, The Company and the Shogun presents new perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting relationships to develop between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise.

Author : A L Sadler
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136924698
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Maker of Modern Japan written by A L Sadler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tokugawa Ieyasu founded a dynasty of rulers, organized a system of government and set in train the re-orientation of the religion of Japan so that he would take the premier place in it. Calm, capable and entirely fearless, Ieyasu deliberately brought the opposition to a head and crushed in a decisive battle, after which he made himself Shogun, despite not being from the Minamoto clan. He organized the Japanese legal and educational systems and encouraged trade with Europe (playing off the Protestant powers of Holland and England against Catholic Spain and Portugal). This book remains one of the few volumes on Tokugawa Ieyasu which draws on more material from Japanese sources than quotations from the European documents from his era and is therefore much more accurate and thorough in its examination of the life and legacy of one of the greatest Shoguns.