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danbigelow's review
3.0
Reading this biography of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the great conqueror of feudal Japan, is looking into both the career of the ruthless Ieyasu -- and the mind of the author, a smug Oxford-educated Oriental studies professor whose 1937 biography of the great shogun has the racism and sexism one might expect from the Thirties, along with a pro-fascist sensibility that reminded me fascism wasn't yet a failed ideology when the professor was writing.
Seeing Ieyasu through A.L. Sadler's eyes was illuminating in ways a modern biography might not have been, in that a modern sympathetic biographer might have elided or excused some of Ieyasu's more heartless traits and actions (he didn't hesitate to sacrifice even his own children in his rise to total power), while Sadler celebrates the age's barbarities (for instance, relating as an amusing anecdote how Ieyasu's eldest son murders a priest in a snit because of a failed falconry expedition).
Ieyasu may never be definitively portrayed in a biography because he was a man of iron self-control whose every public behavior and statement was designed to build and maintain the power of the house of Tokugawa. There is nothing to tell us of the man inside; all we see is the behavior of a man who would do anything at all, and does -- from faithful alliance to ruthless betrayal, from straight-up battle to backroom diplomacy, from piety to blasphemy -- to ascend to absolute power. His personality, if any, is beside the point, since he'll sacrifice any aspect of himself or anything else to take the next step to the throne -- he's a plodding, boring, unstoppable success machine.
Since Ieyasu has left no proof of the man inside (and lots of contradictory evidence), I suppose every biography of him must at some level be a reflection of the biographer. The reflection of Sadler that this factually accurate biography gives is not flattering by 21st Century standards, but I prefer to think of this as a feature of the book rather than a flaw -- it gives us a view of two different historical periods for the price of a single book.
Seeing Ieyasu through A.L. Sadler's eyes was illuminating in ways a modern biography might not have been, in that a modern sympathetic biographer might have elided or excused some of Ieyasu's more heartless traits and actions (he didn't hesitate to sacrifice even his own children in his rise to total power), while Sadler celebrates the age's barbarities (for instance, relating as an amusing anecdote how Ieyasu's eldest son murders a priest in a snit because of a failed falconry expedition).
Ieyasu may never be definitively portrayed in a biography because he was a man of iron self-control whose every public behavior and statement was designed to build and maintain the power of the house of Tokugawa. There is nothing to tell us of the man inside; all we see is the behavior of a man who would do anything at all, and does -- from faithful alliance to ruthless betrayal, from straight-up battle to backroom diplomacy, from piety to blasphemy -- to ascend to absolute power. His personality, if any, is beside the point, since he'll sacrifice any aspect of himself or anything else to take the next step to the throne -- he's a plodding, boring, unstoppable success machine.
Since Ieyasu has left no proof of the man inside (and lots of contradictory evidence), I suppose every biography of him must at some level be a reflection of the biographer. The reflection of Sadler that this factually accurate biography gives is not flattering by 21st Century standards, but I prefer to think of this as a feature of the book rather than a flaw -- it gives us a view of two different historical periods for the price of a single book.
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