#SHOGUN RISE OF THE SAMURAI FREE#

The second, entangled, theme is the conflict of 1854 between the spiritual power of the Emperor, declaring that the Westerners must be expelled from Japan, and the temporal power of the Shogun, the country's actual samurai ruler for the previous 200 years and friend of the Westerners. These conflicted feelings about Westernisation(still visible in Pom Poko and other modern Japanese movies) is the first half of Fall of the Samurai's theme. My own conviction, and that of many impartial and more experienced observers of Japanese life, is that Japan has nothing whatever to gain by conversion to Christianity, either morally or otherwise, but very much to lose.вЂќ More than hundred and sixty years ago Kaempfer wrote of the Japanese 'In the practice of virtue, in purity of life and outward devotion they far outdo the Christians.' And except where native morals have suffered by foreign contamination, as in the open ports, these words are true of the Japanese to-day. вЂњThat the critical spirit of modernised Japan is now indirectly aiding rather than opposing the efforts of foreign bigotry to destroy the simple, happy beliefs of the people, and substitute those cruel superstitions which the West has long intellectually outgrown-the fancies of an unforgiving God and an everlasting hell-is surely to be regretted.

#SHOGUN RISE OF THE SAMURAI FREE#

It's a fantastic book with humiliatingly good writing, itвЂ™s forgotten by all but distracted antiquarians like me, and itвЂ™s free on Project Gutenberg.The country in those days is all buddhist temples and cocklegatherers and jinrickshas and hungry spirits, but Hearn still manages to convey the feeling that modernisation / westernisation has damaged Japan irreparably. I've been reading an old, pre-WWI tourist book on Japan, Lafcadio Hearn's Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.

HereвЂ™s the first diary of his attempts to restore traditionalism to an empire heading towards modernisation: a tale of betrayal, Fukushima and Project Gutenberg. Dan has been playing through Total War: Shogun 2 - Fall of the Samurai for us.

Shogun rise of the samurai