Okubo Toshimichi: The Bismarck of Japan

Okubo Toshimichi: The Bismarck of Japan by Masakazu Iwata offers the first full-length English-language biography of one of the central architects of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Okubo (1830–1878), long overshadowed by his compatriots Saigo Takamori and Kido Koin, emerges here as the pivotal statesman who steered Japan from feudal fragmentation into a unified, modern state. Drawing on an impressive range of Japanese and Western sources, Iwata traces Okubo’s rise from low-ranking samurai in Sa...