Hiroaki Sato
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Hiroaki Sato is best known as an expert and prolific translator of Japanese poetry into English. For 44 years, however, his day job was in the research department of a large Japanese trade organization in New York, writing reports on various aspects of American society. These observations led Sato to provide regular columns, as well as book reviews, to two English-language newspapers in Japan from 1984—89 and from 2000—2017. This anthology of...
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A remarkable and true tale of loyalty, vengeance, and ritual suicide... In the spring of 1701, the regional lord Asano Naganori wounded his supervising official, Kira Yoshinaka, during an important ceremony in the ruling shogunate's Edo Castle and was at once condemned to death. Within two years, in the dead of winter, a band of forty-seven of Asano's retainers avenged him by breaking into Yoshinaka's mansion and killing him. Subsequently, all the...
Author
Description
In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato confronts both the history and the legend of the samurai, untangling the two to present an authentic picture of these legendary warriors. Through his masterful translations of original samurai tales, laws, dicta, reports, and arguments accompanied by insightful commentary, Sato chronicles the changing ethos of the Japanese warrior from the samurai's historical origins to his rise to political power. A fascinating...