Understanding Tokugawa Japan from the Unusual Perspective of Emperor Go-Mizunoo

By: Derek Dwight Anderson

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 1 hr and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

This volume in a series of world history case studies investigates the life of the Japanese emperor who abdicated in 1629 and then dedicated the rest of his life to promoting Japanese cultural traditions and artistic forms as a poignant resistance to the assertion of Tokugawa authority. The story of Go-Mizunoo’s defiance, which was deeply tied to the development of Buddhist sects in Japan, presents the familiar story of the rise of the shoguns from an unexpected perspective that helps us to understand the complexities of seventeenth century Japan in a new way.

This book is a volume in the Understanding World History Through Biography series.

Exceeded my Low Expectations

This is a stand-alone chapter of a larger work, and as such it weighs in at around 1 hr and 44 mins - 40 minutes of which are end matter such as suggested reading and end notes. But the hour of content is not bad, especially if you're not paying extra for this as it is included in certain memberships.

What I'd really like to comment on here, though, is the Virtual Voice narration. This was not as bad as I expected! I have a minor in Japanese language and was particularly worried the Japanese pronunciations would be mangled; this was happily not the case. The one exception was the word "kami" for which the "a" was consistently pronounced like the 'a' in 'air', but this one mistake out of many mistake opportunities is not bad. I note all this in particular because, if you listen to only the sample, which for me was a reading of the front matter, this narration is filled with strange pauses and the reading of the ISBN number as if it were a single number - strange indeed. So don't let that stop you from enjoying an hour of interesting Japanese history.