Hiromi T. Rogers

978-1-898823-22-3  w Hardback w  312pp. +12pp.  col. plates  w £24.95

E-book: 978-1-898823- 39-1

 October 2016

As a native of Japan, and a scholar of seventeenth-century Japanese history, the author delves deep into the cultural context facing Adams in what is one of the great examples of assimilation into the highest reaches of a foreign culture. Her access to Japanese sources, including contemporary accounts -  some not previously seen by Western scholars researching the subject – offers us a fuller understanding of the life lived by William Adams as a high-ranking samurai and his grandstand view of the collision of cultures that led to Japan’s self-imposed isolation, lasting  over two centuries.

The year is 1600. It is April and Japan’s iconic cherry trees are in full flower.  A battered ship drifts on the tide into Usuki Bay in southern Japan. On board, barely able to stand, are twenty-three Dutchmen and one Englishman, the remnants of a fleet of five ships and 500 men that had set out from Rotterdam in 1598. The Englishman was William Adams, later to be known as Anjin Miura by the Japanese, whose subsequent transformation from wretched prisoner to one of the Shogun’s closest advisers  with the status of hatamoto – a high rank in samurai culture - is the centrepiece of this book.