Many people are familiar with my idea of a Hollywood film based on my book about “Renaissance Samurai” Sakamoto Ryoma. And recently I’ve been contemplating a movie based on my “Samurai Revolution”— the story of the tumultuous and bloody conflict between the shogun’s government and samurai hell-bent on overthrowing it — co-narrated by the “shogun’s last samurai” Katsu Kaishu and his friend Ernest Satow, interpreter to the British minister to Japan.
Students and writers of Meiji Restoration history lost an important teacher this week with the passing of historian Mamoru Matsuoka in Kochi, Japan, his hometown, and also the home of major Restoration figures such as Sakamoto Ryoma, Takechi Hanpeita, and Nakaoka Shintaro, on whom he wrote insightful and meticulously researched biographies.
Of several fine biographies of Ryoma that I have read, Matsuoka-sensei’s Teihon Sakamoto Ryoma-denis the “authoritative edition,” as the title indicates. His works on Takechi and Nakaoka have been of particular value to me as a writer because of the dearth of reliable biographies about these two men.
Matsuoka-sensei was my friend. As a writer, I am greatly indebted to him. My deepest condolences to his family.
[The photo of Matsuoka-sensei was taken in the garden at the ancestral home of Takechi Hanpeita in Kochi, on November 13, 2015. These six of his books are, clockwise from upper left: “Nakaoka Shintaro-den” (biography of Nakaoka Shintaro); “Teihon Sakamoto Ryoma-den” (biography of Sakamoto Ryoma: authoritative edition); “Takechi Hanpeita-den” (biography of Takechi Hanpeita); “Takechi Hanpeita”; “Seiden Okada Izo” (authentic biography of Okada Izo); “Tosa Kinno-to Shuryo Takechi Zuizan: Mikokai Shiryo no Shokai” (Tosa Loyalist Party Leader Takechi Zuizan: A Presentation of Unpublished Materials)]
