Mark Ravina
Auteur van The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori
Over de Auteur
Mark Ravina is the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair in Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Last Samurai and Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan.
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Saigō's life story is truly fascinating; I liked reading about his early years in Kagoshima, and the descriptions of the traditional samurai education he received, with an academic curriculum centred on the Confucian classics with an emphasis on Zhu Xi thought, but also giving Saigō opportunity to study the teachings of Wang Yangming, which influenced him deeply. Ravina holds that Saigō sought the middle ground between these two teachings since his teachers were all synchretists. I’m not going to go further into Saigō’s own ethical philosophy or his life story here; short bio's are easily found by a quick web search.
Only the last chapter is a bit uneven, and here we get back to the whereabouts of Saigō's head. Ravina presents a quote from an American sea captain, who writes in a letter of having seen Saigō's head being placed by his body – which is of course interesting, but Ravina appears to take this to be the absolute goddams truth (since it was coming from an American??), not even considering that the captain may have (pardon my bluntness) lied to embellish his own story, nor does he give any weight to the fact that the captain didn’t actually know Saigō – so how would he have been able to recognize his head? But this is the only instance where I found a certain naiveté instead of scholarship. There were some other parts where I didn’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, but in those cases Ravina at least gives arguments for his view. In no way does it diminish the rest of the book, and for the most part I really enjoyed the read.
One thing I really missed in this book was an 'index of important persons'. There are so many names to keep track of, and I often had to leaf back to try to remember who was who. There’s a general index, which helped some, but not nearly enough. Ravina clearly knows his material well, and he writes as if he expects the reader to have as good an overview as he has himself. It keeps the pace up however, though I think the editor should have been able to take note of something like that. I would also have appreciated some better maps. Still, I do not hesitate to recommend this book. It’s a fairly compact biography with its 250-odd pages, but it still has depth and plenty of detail - and at times it reads almost like a thriller.
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