Learning
from SHOGUN:
Japanese
History and Western Fantasy
This book
appeared in September 1980, just before the television mini-series
based on James Clavell's novel SHOGUN.
It was the result of a workshop that I organized in the spring of that year at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was then teaching, and
was edited and produced in Santa Barbara over the summer. The
design was by Marc Treib of the College of Environmental Design at
Berkeley, then already well known for his graphic design and books on
architecture.
Learning from SHOGUN
was distributed by the Japan Society of New York through the good
offices of Peter Grilli, and two printings quickly sold out. The authors are pleased to
make it
available here in PDF
format for interested readers and teachers, but please remember that
this is copyrighted material and may not be reproduced for more than
personal or instructional use. Note that the PDF version is bookmarked
for easy access to the separate chapters. We also want to emphasize
that Learning from SHOGUN is
about Clavell's novel, not
about either the TV miniseries or the feature film versions. A
postscript to the book does offer my own first impressions of the
miniseries, however, of which I was able to see a preview before it
appeared on national television.
Twenty-five years later (as of late
2005), we are saddened to note the passing of Elgin Heinz on April 26,
2005, at the age of 91. Throughout his long and remarkable life, he served as a
leading expert in the field of teaching East Asian studies in the
schools; in 2001,
the US-Japan Foundation honored him with the establishment of the Elgin
Heinz Outstanding Teaching Award. All of the other authors of Learning
from SHOGUN remain alive and well. Of the three co-authors
from
the University of Illinois, Dave Plath and Ron Toby continue to be
active on that campus, while Chieko Mulhern has retired and now lives
in Tokyo where she leads a busy life as a writer and speaker.
Meanwhile, Bill Lafleur has moved from UCLA to
the University of Pennsylvania, Susan Matisoff from Stanford to UC
Berkeley, and
myself from UCSB to Columbia. Sandy Piercy successfully completed
her UCSB
dissertation in 1982 and now teaches history at the Chadwick School in
Palos Verdes, California.
Henry Smith
New York
October 2005
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