Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
The Shogun's Favorite Brit
By Jonathan D. Spence
Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan
by Giles Milton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $24.00
One of the defining battles in Japanese history was fought in late October 1600, in a narrow defile between ranges of steep hills, just outside the village of Sekigahara. The stakes were nothing less than the de facto control of the entire country, and came as the climax to decades of bitter feuding by the most powerful feudal overlords, the daimyo. Each of the two sides had marshaled about eighty thousand troops, cavalry and infantry, armed with muskets, spears, bows, and swords, and the fighting was protracted and fierce. The victor was the fifty-eight-year-old head of the Tokugawa family, Ieyasu, already a member of the five-person Council of Regents, who thus cleared the way for his own claim to be the shogun of Japan. The Tokugawa shogunate that he subsequently founded and passed on to his son Hidetada was to endure for two and a half centuries, until the civil war that accompanied Japan's forced opening to the West in the 1860s.
Review, 3195 words
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