Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration

Наука и образование / История

Описание:
Exploring a tumultuous time in Japanese 19th-century history, when the country began to emerge from self-imposed exile, this study profiles activists such as Sakamoto Ryoma and Nakaoka Shintaro, who played an important role in the development of a unified nation state. In this book I have chosen to tell the Restoration story by examining the career and thought of Sakamoto Ryoma and, to a lesser extent, Nakaoka Shintaro. Both men were from Tosa, one of the fiefs that played an important role in Restoration politics. Both were of relatively low rank, and neither was at all at home in the circles of Japan’s "Western experts.” Tosa, their home, contributed to, but did not lead the Restoration process, so that regional power politics and ambition were at first less involved in their education in world affairs than was the case with their counterparts in more powerful fiefs. Sakamoto and Nakaoka were murdered shortly after the shogun’s resignation in 1867, and our view of their Restoration activities is not colored by their subsequent eminence or failure. Nevertheless they had important and exciting roles in the Restoration drama. Sakamoto’s colorful career, in fact, has drawn to it the talents of so many Japanese authors and playwrights that romance has to some degree come to overshadow fact. The foreign scholar, however, is less affected by this; published sources, which retain enough flavor of personality to explain the man’s attraction for biographers and authors, provide abundant opportunity to sift fiction from fact.