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This is a collection of biographical studies of fifteen leading figures in Japanese political life in the Tokugawa Period, which extended from 1600 to 1868. The fourteen authors are specialists in the Far East, professors at leading universities, and all of them former students of Edwin O. Reischauer of Harvard. Twelve of them are historians, one an anthropologist, and one a specialist in Japanese literature.
It is therefore not surprising that the volume, whose scholarship is clearly indisputable, is directed toward scholars already familiar with the history since 1600 of a country which, unfortunately, is virtually unknown even to a highly literate segment of American readers. It presupposes either a pre-existing knowledge of Japanese political and territorial organization and problems, or a degree of interest in Japan sufficient to motivate the reader to master a considerable number of unfamiliar terms and place names. He must also do his best to remember a sizeable number of historical personages with a baffling array of names, none of which he will in all likelihood have heard of. In short, it would not be surprising if relatively few readers of this journal will persevere in the mastery of this scholarly and, at the same time, interestingly written volume. But those who do may be stimulated, as I almost have been, to make it a first step in a continuing program of the study of Japanese history.
A careful perusal of Craig's twenty-eight-page introduction will, however, provide the reader whose interest is limited with an overall view of the 268-year Tokugawa Period and of the interaction between its leading political figures and the times in which they lived. This introduction highlights the relationship between the public personality and the individual behind the official mask, stressing the difficulty in recreating the individual from available documentary evidence. For “the Japanese official … donned the mask of his office and wore it until it became a part of