Ieyasu may never be definitively portrayed in a biography because he was a man of iron self-control whose every public behavior and statement was designed to build and maintain the power of the house of Tokugawa. Sadler's eyes was illuminating in ways a modern biography might not have been, in that a modern sympathetic biographer might have elided or excused some of Ieyasu's more heartless traits and actions (he didn't hesitate to sacrifice even his own children in his rise to total power), while Sadler celebrates the age's barbarities (for instance, relating as an amusing anecdote how Ieyasu's eldest son murders a priest in a snit because of a failed falconry expedition). Reading this biography of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the great conqueror of feudal Japan, is looking into both the career of the ruthless Ieyasu - and the mind of the author, a smug Oxford-educated Oriental studies professor whose 1937 biography of the great shogun has the racism and sexism one might expect from the Thirties, along with a pro-fascist sensibility that reminded me fascism wasn't yet a failed ideology when the professor was writing. )ĪS for those newcomers interested in these three Unifiers of Japan, they may start with the epic-like novel entitled Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan (Kodansha 2001) by Eiji Yoshikawa. The first "Great Unifier" of Japan was Oda Nobunaga. ) as well as other related texts since his fame and character amazed me, I couldn't help admiring his greatness as the third warlord/ Shogun who wisely and famously helped unifying the 16th-century Japan. However, I kept reading on him in Wikipedia (. Whenever I picked it up to try to read, the best I could do was that I could go so far as a few pages as scribbled on page 6 (2019.2.18), then on page 18 (2020.11.7) indeed, in various year-long bouts of insufficient motive totaling more than five years. Sadler has long perched on my bookshelf till I thought I wouldn't finish reading it due to its 44 chapters in 320+ pages. Bought on November 30, 2013, this remarkable biography by Prof.
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