The Last Shogun - The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu

When Commodore Matthew Perry brought his squadron of “Black Ships” into Tokyo Bay, the world imagined that at last Japan had been “opened.” 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 off the coast of Japan was merely the spark that ignited the cataclysm in store for the Japanese people and their governments...