The Namamugi Incident - De Lange, William
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On 14 September 1862, four Brits encountered the procession of the nobleman Shimazu Hisamitsu at a village called Namamugi along Japan's ancient T¿kaid¿ highroad. One of them, the Shanghai trader Charles Lenox Richardson, would not survive to tell the tale. Richardson's death eventually led to the Anglo-Satsuma War. The Namamugi Incident, as it has come to be known in Japan and the West, seems to sum up perfectly the clash of cultures that attended Japan's involuntary opening up to the West. Even today, one and a half centuries after it happened, the incident holds a particular spell among the…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
On 14 September 1862, four Brits encountered the procession of the nobleman Shimazu Hisamitsu at a village called Namamugi along Japan's ancient T¿kaid¿ highroad. One of them, the Shanghai trader Charles Lenox Richardson, would not survive to tell the tale. Richardson's death eventually led to the Anglo-Satsuma War. The Namamugi Incident, as it has come to be known in Japan and the West, seems to sum up perfectly the clash of cultures that attended Japan's involuntary opening up to the West. Even today, one and a half centuries after it happened, the incident holds a particular spell among the Japanese. Not a year goes by without some book, magazine, or television documentary delving into this particular episode from the closing days of Japan's feudal era. Japan's struggle to adjust to its new place in the world, its wounded sense of pride; the West's ill-conceived notions of the Orient, its imperialistic sense of superiority-all seemed to clash on that fateful sultry summer day when Charles Lenox Richardson came face to face with a Satsuma samurai named Narahara Kizaemon. Up till now the reading of this pivotal incident in Japan's late-feudal history has been skewed either to a Western or a Japanese view of what took place, partly because of cultural and political reasons, partly because of linguistic barriers. This book is the first account in the English language to take into account all versions of what happened on that fateful day: that of the foreign settlers in Yokohama, that of the Japanese and British officials, and that of the Shimazu retainers. As a result, reading De Lange's careful reconstruction of events reads like a latter-day version of Akira Kurosawa's brilliant Rashomon: our view changes and our insight deepens with the telling of each party's story-except that, in this case, it all really happened.
Autorenporträt
William de Lange was born in 1964 in Naarden, the Netherlands to Dutch and English parents. In the late 1980s, he traveled to Japan, where he supported himself by making traditional Japanese scrolls, working as a carpenter, and writing articles for the Japan Times Weekly. Having studied at Leiden and Waseda universities during the nineties, he lived in Japan for the next decade, studying the art of Japanese fencing under Akita Moriji sensei, eighth dan master of the Shinkage-Ryu. Since then, he has written a large number of books on Japanese history, culture, and art. More recently, he has appeared in the Netflix documentary Age of Samurai. His many books include Samurai Battles, Samurai Sieges, An Encyclopedia of Japanese Castles, and The Siege of Osaka Castle. He is perhaps best known for his epic history of the Yagyu clan, and his acclaimed biography of Miyamoto Musashi.