Review: “Famous Japanese Swordsmen” series by William de Lange

Considering some of the comments that flew around after my last review, I considered not doing one again, but in the end it is just my opinion so take it or leave it as you will.

Review: Famous Japanese Swordsmen series by William de Lange

From 2006 to 2008 William de Lange published a three part series on the history of some of Japan’s more famous swordsmen. In the order of publication of the volumes of this series was Famous Japanese Swordsmen of the Warring States Period which is about Iizasa Choisai Ienao and Kamiizumi Ise no Kami Nobutsuna, Famous Japanese Swordsmen of the Two Courts Period featuring Nenami Okuyama Jion and Chujo Hyogo no Kami Nagahide, and concluded with Famous Japanese Swordsmen of The Period of Unification, which is about Ono Jiroemon Tadaaki and Yagyu Tajima no Kami Munenori. As both a practitioner of traditional Japanese sword arts and something of a Japanese history buff, I was rather surprised that the publication of these works completely slipped my attention until a couple of years after the fact.

I, and many others, have lamented the near complete lack of new works published in English on Japanese sword arts and traditional martial arts in general over the past seven or eight years, so I was intrigued by the possibility of a series that devoted half a book to each individual swordsman. Furthermore, the author states that he goes into great detail on the history of the period and major players that surrounded these swordsman’s lives. This made me even more hopeful, so I broke down and ordered all three books and read them back to back.

In this age of print on demand books of often poor quality, I am happy to say that the quality of the physical product is nice. The layout of the books is clear and easy to read. There are numerous maps, charts of major figures in each swordman’s story, and a large number of pictures (although sometimes of poor quality) to help illustrate the history the author plans to discuss. On first glance all three works appear to be the very sort of thing I am interested in. Sadly, I must report, that these books did not come anywhere near close to the expectations I had for them.

The author states that “The reader will soon find that in the telling of the story of these two remarkable men, much space has been given to the wider military and political events through which they lived.” This is obviously included to explain the large amount of discussion of historical matters that are often only distantly related to the swordsmen being discussed at best. He goes of the further state “One of the aims of this book is to place these men firmly back in their proper context, in the place and time in which they lived…” While I could not agree more with these goals, in my opinion, the author spends so much time focusing on the general history of the period of these individuals lived in, that the actual swordsmen who are supposed to be the central focus of these works get completely lost.

Furthermore the author refuses to acknowledge anything but the most basic of details regarding the biographical information of these individuals. The author seems to feel that this is a good thing as, he feels, all the stories we have of these individuals have been blown out of proportion. While this is undoubtedly the case in certain instances, the author carries this to such an extreme that we are left with little but an empty shell of what these men may have been. Infact often we are left with no impression other than the fact that they lived. In essence, to this reader at least, all three of these works do not feel like they are histories of these swordsmen, but rather general histories of Japan in the areas and time period these men were active. Let me be clear, having been a student of Japanese history in university I have zero problem with a very heavy dose of historical context. In fact I prefer it in. But this is carried to such an extreme that at the end of the all three works, I had no sense whatsoever of who these swordsmen were, what they had accomplished or any feeling as to why they are famous today. In fact in the entire three volumes there was only one time where I felt the author had made a successful point and I felt I learned something I previously hadn’t considered. I was often left with the feeling that perhaps the author simply did not have much information about the men he intended to write about and all the historical information, much of which gets repeated in other volumes, was a way to fill the space required. I am not saying that that was the case, just that it felt that why to this reader at times. As a brief and easy to confirm example, large passages of the introductions of each book are completely identical with sections simply altered to match the change in period and people under discussion. Furthermore, for a work that takes such pains to appear as something of a serious academic discussion, there are no footnotes or endnotes. While for the average reader this may not be a problem, for readers such as myself it proves troublesome as, for example, in the one good point I thought the author made about the context of on point Iizasa Choisai’s life and a position he is claimed to hold and how that situation could have influenced his world view later on, I was left with no way to go back and verify any source material for the statement.

In the end, perhaps the simplest criteria on whether a series of works like this is successful is when upon reading them, does the reader feel like his knowledge of the subject been improved. Sadly in this case, for this reader, the answer is a resounding no. Rather than reading three books about the swordsmen advertised, I was left feeling like I had read three books about the general history of when these swordsmen lived, with theirs names and very little other biographical information dropped in on occasion.

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