Post by washi on May 12, 2015 7:18:37 GMT
A prominent member of the Google Earth Community once told me that what he knew about Japanese history, he learned from watching the television miniseries Shōgun. He is not alone. A lot of Westerners, including myself, discovered a hitherto unknown world when they saw it. The story I want to tell in the file attached to this post is not the same story that Clavell, in a highly fictionalized way, told. It is a story not particularly well know in Western countries, but it is a story that every Japanese school child knows.
The main events in my story took place decades before Clavell's tale begins. There is only one brief reference to it, in the scene after Blackthorne rescues the Portuguese navigator Rodrigues. Rodrigues does most of the talking:
Toranaga. What's he like?
Same as the rest of them, and worse. They had 600 years of civil war in this country, Inglese, and about 35 years ago, this monkey-sama by the name of Goroda, conquered half all Japan and made himself ichi-ban lord of the whole rotten country. And you know who helped him? Toranaga. Then, oh, I guess it was 16 years ago, one of his own generals killed Goroda, and another general stepped right into his sandals. General Nakamora. And you know who helped him?
Toranaga?
And another big monkey-sama, Ishidō. Toranaga in the east. Ishidō in the west. Sooner or later, there'll be another bloody civil war.
Clavell used fictional names for historical persons, to free him, I think from the quibbles of historical accuracy. Toranaga is Tokugawa Ieyasu. Gorada is Oda Nobunaga, the first of Japan's great unifiers. Nakamora is Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second. Clavell's epic is about the founder of the Tokugawa Shōgunate that ruled Japan for nearly three centuries. My story is about Akechi Hidemitsu, "one of Goroda's own generals," the thirteen-day shōgun.
Because Akechi's life story has the sweep and scope of Shakespeare's plays, because it contains many of the dramatic elements that Shakespeare employed, and because the events of Akechi's life are roughly contemporary to his own, I have cast my tale as a scenario for a Shakespeare play, a play that Shakespeare might have written if he had only known the story.
One thing I tried to accomplish in writing this file was to make all of its contents available without expanding a KMZ file. I nearly succeeded, but there is one point where a user must, if he or she wishes to view a self-paced animation, expand a file and click on some radio buttons.
Download FilePost last revised March 10, 2023.
