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This sounds pretty interesting, can you recommend any books on Japan about this particular period/topic?
by burn_cycle 8y ago
This sounds pretty interesting, can you recommend any books on Japan about this particular period/topic?
- lainga 8y agoMy major source for all this was Marius Jansen's The Making of Modern Japan. It's a sweeping book - 600 pages, I think, and covers everything from 1300 to 2000 - but one of its main focuses is the end of the Sengoku period and the rise of the Tokugawa.
- burn_cycle 8y agoThis looks fantastic, thank you.
- Sangermaine 8y agoFor a view of what this looked like on the ground, you should check out "Musui's Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai". It's the autobiography of Katsu Kokichi (Musui is another name he was known by), a samurai born in the early 19th century to a very low-ranking family. It's a firsthand account of life at the very lowest fringe of Shogunate society at the very end of that system, and is quite entertaining because Katsu is a lazy good-for-nothing who can't even get one of those pointless bureaucracy jobs and survives by doing "lowly" merchant work. I think it would make a pretty funny TV show because the protagonist is such a hapless loser.
- clairity 8y agoyou could also read shogun by james clavell, which is a fictional novel based on tokugawa. i read his whole asian saga series because that first book was so good.
- walshemj 8y agoOh yes and a bet a large number of readers fell in love with Mariko