Once a month, I organize a thematic weekend around a favorite TV or movie series of mine. November is usually Shogun month. This year I realized that I had not read any books on the real Anji-Sama and this was the book I settled on to remedy this. With mixed results.
This book is very good in giving the surrounding events that preceded and precipitated the arrival of William Adams in Japan. The Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch missionaries and merchants that established the first European landfalls in Japan and then erected obstacles in William's way. And even tried to have him crucified.
It is also a very well researched book, with a full Notes-on-Sources, Index and Picture-Sources sections. By maintaining the original spelling and wording of the source letters, the book conveys an air of authenticity. However, all this does not save it from a mediocre end result.
The life of William Adams (who is the main selling point of this book after all) is only scantily described whereas his rise in the court of Tokugawa Ieyasu (who would later become Shogun and the first of the dynasty that ruled Japan up to the 1860's) is very rapidly passed over.
What we get, instead, is a very detailed account of how the first English Factory (or trading house) of the infamous East Indian Company was established in Japan - and how William Adams aided them in every way he could. However, this is a book I picked up to learn about about the everyday life of Samurai Williams - and not the troubles of...Richard Cocks who was head-factor of said Factory.
Not a bad book altogether. Unfortunately it does not deliver what it promises.
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