by John Man
“The story of how [the alphabet] came into being is a fascinating one and Man is the ideal writer to tell it. His scholarship seems boundless. . . . He also has a journalist’s ear for a story. . . . Straight out of Indiana Jones.”
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“Absorbing tale. . . . Many surprises on the way.”
—Sunday Telegraph (London)
GOBI
Tracking the Desert
For seventy years the Gobi, one of the world’s richest yet least explored wildernesses, was all but barred to outsiders. Mongolia’s position as a buffer state between Russia and China meant that few modern English speakers had ever roamed its expanses and plumbed its many mysteries. With the collapse of communism, however, the glorious diversity of the Gobi desert can be examined at last. Traveling from west to east across the Gobi, intrepid author and historian John Man retraces the steps of early explorers, living with herdsmen and drawing on the most recent scientific work to deliver an accessible and comprehensive look at one of the world’s richest deserts. Man’s journeys reveal the extraordinary wildlife and pristine natural beauty of Central Asia’s astonishing heartland.
“Vivid. . . . Enchanting.”
—Publishers Weekly
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COPYRIGHT
SAMURAI. Copyright © 2011, 2014 by John Man. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt from NINJA copyright 2012, 2013 by John Man.
Originally published in slightly different form in the United Kingdom in 2011 by Transworld Publishers.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-220267-3
EPub Edition MARCH 2014 ISBN 9780062202680
14 15 16 17 18 DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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FOOTNOTES
PROLOGUE
1 Morris, The Nobility of Failure.
CHAPTER 1
1 Safilios-Rothschild, “‘Honor’ Crimes in Contemporary Greece.”
2 Adamson, “Tribute, Turf, Honor and the American Street Gang.”
3 Translated and analyzed by Thomas Conlan: see Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention.
CHAPTER 2
1 Yamakawa Kikue, Women of the Mito Domain.
2 There have been equivalent systems. In the third millennium BC the Akkadians adopted Sumerian cuneiform signs, though there was no relationship between the two languages.
3 These details are from Mr. Fukuda, director of the Museum of the Meiji Restoration.
4 Fairbank, Cambridge History of China, vol. 10.
CHAPTER 3
1 Harris and Ogasawara, Swords of the Samurai.
2 There are dozens of others dating back over a thousand years in Japanese museums, many of them listed online at wiki.samurai-archives.com.
CHAPTER 4
1 Publication costs, paid by Congress, amounted to $360,000—an equivalent of between $7 million and $10 million in today’s terms. Perry got one thousand sets, which he shared fifty-fifty with his ghostwriter. (A thousand three-volume sets! Today, authors get a dozen of their hardbacks.)
CHAPTER 5
1 Mitford defines the term ronin as follows: “Literally a ‘wave-man’; one who is tossed about hither and thither, as a wave of the sea. It is used to designate persons of gentle blood, entitled to bear arms, who having become separated from their feudal lords by their own act, or by dismissal, or by fate, wander about the country in the capacity of somewhat disreputable knights-errant, without ostensible means of living, in some cases offering themselves for hire, in others supporting themselves by pillage.” See Freeman-Mitford, Tales of Old Japan.
2 Katsu, Musui’s Story, p. 11, footnote.
CHAPTER 6
1 Quoted by Morris, The Nobility of Failure, from an unpublished manuscript by Sakamoto Moriaki, one-time professor at Kagoshima University, “Saigo Takamori’s Posthumous Words.”
2 Mathers, Eastern Love.
3 Other earlier translations of the title include Conspectus of Sodomites, Mirror of Sodomy and Great Mirror of Pederasty.
CHAPTER 7
1 Actually, the last major action was the fall of Osaka Castle in 1615.
2 Oishi Shinzaburo, quoted by Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, p. 165.
3 Rising with Japan’s population, which reached about thirty million in the mid-eighteenth century. No one knows the exact figures, because the samurai were excluded from the data. Estimates vary from 5 to 10 percent of the population, which means that in Saigo’s life the samurai numbered between 1.5 and 3 million. (See Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, pp. 162, 172.)
4 Roberts, New Penguin History of the World, p. 841.
5 Trans. Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, p. 239.
CHAPTER 8
1 Now long gone.
2 Shingeno (1827–1910) was later president of the Historical Society of Japan—Ravina in The Last Samurai calls him “Japan’s first modern historian”—which suggests he was reliable.
CHAPTER 9
1 Lidth’s Jay, which occurs only here and on the next island to the south, pine-forested Tokunoshima.
2 The quotes are from Ravina, The Last Samurai.
CHAPTER 11
1 Satow, who drew on no written sources but relied solely on his diaries for the “reminiscences” recorded in A Diplomat in Japan, says that the Japanese paid up in cash, in full, in June 1863. In fact, he seems to be referring to only one of the many negotiations about payment. The Illustrated London News, in a dispatch dated Thursday, December 17, reports the actual payment being made “at the close of last week,” i.e. December 10–12.
CHAPTER 12
1 This “incident” has several names: the Forbidden Gate, the Hamaguri Gate or the Kimmon.
2 This paragraph is based upon Ravina, The Last Samurai.
3 Among them were Inoue Kaoru and Ito Hirobumi, two of the greatest statesmen of their age.
4 McClaren, “Japanese Government Documents”; also quoted in Mason and Caiger, A History of Japan.
5 By the Gregorian calendar, as are all dates given here. By the lunar calendar it was Meiji 1, the 15th day of the 5th month, which is sometimes mistakenly given as May 15.
6 Yoshinobu retired to a quiet life, indulging many hobbies—oil painting, archery, hunting, photography and cycling—and being granted a peerage, dying in 1913 at the age of seventy-six.
CHAPTER 13
1 Morris, The Nobility of Failure, quoting Moriaki Sakamot
o’s translation of Mushakoji Saneatsu, Great Saigo.
2 As Hilary Conroy points out in The Japanese Seizure of Korea, this was the stuff of high drama, and in fact became so in 1954, when the playwright Yamamoto Yuzo turned it into a three-act play.
CHAPTER 14
1 1 koku = 4.95 bushels, 180 liters or about 150 kilos, or about 330 pounds, supposedly enough rice to feed one person for one year. His honorarium was 30 tons of rice, about $9,000 in modern terms, but clearly costs have changed. In Saigo’s day, 2,000 koku was enough to feed 2,000 people for a year; you could not do the same today with $9,000.
2 A History of the Japanese People (New York, Encyclopedia Britannica Co., 1914).
3 Akebono Shimbun, trans. in the Tokio Times, May 19, 1877.
CHAPTER 15
1 Another estimate of deaths is four thousand per side, eight thousand in all, out of twenty thousand combatants (see James Buck, “The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877”). But to see the names written out is persuasive. Next time, I’d better count them.
2 This letter is quoted in full in Mounsey, The Satsuma Rebellion, without a source.
CHAPTER 16
1 Extracts were published by Hubbard’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Nock, in 1948.
2 Higo was the old name for Kumamoto prefecture, and Bungo was Oita, the prefecture to the north, from which he was expecting help.
CHAPTER 17
1 The quote is from Morris, The Nobility of Failure. The tale is retold by Alan Booth in Looking for the Lost. Both took it from Saigo’s biographer, the dramatist, novelist and poet Mushakoji (or Mushanokoji) Saneatsu (1885–1976).
2 The lava came not from Sakurajima but from another far more massive volcano, Mount Aso, thirty kilometers to the north. Aso, the largest volcano in Japan, is one of the largest in the world. An eruption some three hundred thousand years ago created a caldera up to twenty-five kilometers across, even bigger than Sakurajima.
3 The source is a photocopy of a map of Saigo’s flight from Mount Eno to Kobayashi. I have no idea when or by whom it was originally published, but the copy was made for me by Tsuyoshi Takayanagi, head of the memorial museum by the Nanshu Cemetery and a Saigo expert. Its information about dates and places is accurate, so I tend to trust this snippet. It makes sense of many disparities in the numbers at the beginning and end of the flight through Kyushu: five hundred fleeing from Mount Eno, plus three hundred who rejoined, which declined to the six hundred arriving on Shiroyama.
CHAPTER 18
1 No mention of the enlarged testicles, which, even if Hubbard had noticed such a detail in such circumstances, would no doubt have been too much to include in a letter to his wife.
2 “. . . and it was obvious that they killed each other,” he concludes. But that is not an obvious conclusion. There was no evidence of seppuku or ritual beheading. More likely the wounds were from bullets and enemy swords.