(Book Review)
I became acquainted with "Shinsengumi" recently from watching "When the Last Sword is Drawn", a film one of my students lent to me. Although I initially gave that film a bad review on this blog, after talking to my student about the movie and the historical story behind it, I became more and more interested in the history of Shinsengumi. And then, the next time I was in Fukuoka it turned out there was an English book out on the subject, so I decided to pick it up.
The Shinsengumi were a collection of ronin (masterless) Samurai who were selected to form a new elite corps in the city of Kyoto, and to police the city during the final days of the Tokugawa Shogun dynasty (right before the Meiji Restoration), in the days when Kyoto was seething with terrorists and revolutionaries.
Whether or not the Shinsengumi caused more bloodshed than they prevented has been a matter of debate ever since. As Romulus Hillsborough demonstrates, the power went straight to their heads and they often killed people on a whim.
This was especially true of one of their co-commanders Serizawa Kamo, who Hillsborough portrays as simply psychotic. Eventually, when his excesses got too carried away, Serizawa was assassinated by his rivals in the Shinsengumi corp.
At the same time, when recounting the sheer bravery and daring of the Shinsengumi, it's hard to hate them completely and a tone of admiration seems to leak into much of Hillsborough's writing.
Eventually the tide of history turned against the Shinsengumi, and when the Shogunate fell they found themselves on the wrong side of a revolution. Hillsborough recounts how most of the Shinsengumi fought to the death even after the last Shogun himself had resigned and made peace with the Meiji Restoration.
It has often been said that Samurai movies are the Japanese equivalent of cowboy Westerns, and I'm only just now starting to appreciate the truth of that statement. 19th Century Kyoto as depicted in this book is a lawless city filled with terrorists, assassins, revolutionaries, loyalists, and masterless Samurai. You can't help but think of an old Western town as you read about the daily street battles between Samurai, with the local authorities powerless to impose order.
Of course the comparison does have its limits. The revolutionaires in Kyoto were a lot more politically motivated than the bandits of the old West. Which is perhaps why my student, when explaining the Shinsengumi to me, chose to compare Kyoto to the insurgent situation in Iraq instead.
But I still prefer the old west comparison. And just as old west shoot outs were recorded in detail by eye-witnesses and later told and retold in various books in movies, so the epic battles of the Shinsengumi are all seem to have been recorded in a lot of detail, and many of them are retold in this book.
But I still prefer the old west comparison. And just as old west shoot outs were recorded in detail by eye-witnesses and later told and retold in various books in movies, so the epic battles of the Shinsengumi are all seem to have been recorded in a lot of detail, and many of them are retold in this book.
As this book deals with the last days before the Meiji Restoration, it occurs during the same time as "The Last Shogun". And many of the same events are recounted in both books, although with a different emphasis. ("Shinsengumi" focused on recounting in detail the various street battles in Kyoto. "The Last Shogun" focused on the broader political situation at the time, but both books have a lot of overlap). For most of the time I was reading these two books concurrently, and each helped me a lot to get a fuller picture of what was happening in the other. But I think each can be read on it's own as well.
Link of the Day
No comments:
Post a Comment