Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Woman’s Life In Nineteenth-Century Japan
AMY STANLEY
(CHATTO & WINDUS, 352 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Most Westerners know of Commodore Matthew Perry. Stephen Sondheim even made a musical about him, the American naval commander who, on 8 July 1853, sailed into Edo Bay, firing blanks from the 73 cannons of his flagship, and terrifying local fishermen with an ear-splitting siren: the beginning of a successful attempt to force the Japanese to open their ports to world and, in particular, American trade.
What is less known is that this brutal “visit” ended almost 200 years of what the Japanese call “The Great Peace”. While Europe, America, China and India were engulfed in conflicts, military or mercantile, Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate (military governors) had lived, since 1633, in largely peaceful isolation.
The emperor had a decorative role, writing poetry in Kyoto; the real capital was in Edo (later Tokyo), and society was stable, ordered and fixed: the Samurai class looked after defence and security; the priests, merchants and farmers would never have to fight and were free to pray, trade and harvest. One in five people was literate, and middle-class women were educated alongside, if a little differently from, the men. So long as everyone followed the rules, society ticked along nicely.
This book is the story of one woman who challenged the status quo in the last 50 years of the shogunate, dying of a fever about a week before Commander Perry changed things for ever.
