Bookshelf 001

Ryotaro Shiba's The Last Shogun



When Commodore Matthew Perry brought his squadron of "black ships" into Tokyo Bay, the world imagined that at last Japan had been "opened up" After two and a half centuries of determined self-isolation from the rest of the world, it seemed the process of modernization was inevitable.

In Ryotaro Shiba's account of the life of Japan's last shogun, however, Perry's arrival 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 that 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 modernization began in earnest.

The facts Ryotaro Shiba provides us with in this account of Tokugawa Yoshinobu are unquestionably true. Yet The last Shogun, when published in Japan, was, like the rest of his work, published as a novel because Shiba uses a number of fictional narrative devices. In its accuracy, however, it is a faithful depiction of events of that now far-off time, and can safely be called history.

This is something I bought around April or May last year and I never really got around to reading it until only recently. In history class now we're studying about the Meija Era, which comes just after the Edo Era which is where this piece of history takes place. In fact, it's just on the borderline when Japan was forced to open the country after 260+- years of isolation and there was a upsurging movement in the country to replace the rule of the Shoguns and return all the power to the Emperor.

This book is so fantastic, if there were a word even more fantastic than fantastic I'd use that instead. For anyone who wants to know more about Japanese history as well as some cultural background and a little insight into the mind of a Japanese - this your book.