The Last Shogun - The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu by Ryotaro Shiba, 256 pages

When Commodore Matthew Perry brought his squadron of 'black ships' into Tokyo Bay, the world imagined that at last Japan had been 'opened up'. After two and a half centuries of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, it seemed the process of modernisation was inevitable.

In Ryotaro Shiba's account of the life of Japan's last Shogun however, Perry's arrival was merely the spark that ignited the cataclysm in store for the Japanese people and their governments. It came to its real climax with the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868, the event that forms the centrepiece of this book.

The Meiji Restoration (as history calls it), toppled the shogunate, and brought a seventeen year old boy emporor back from the secluded Imperial Palace in Kyoto to preside over what amounted to a political and cultural revolution. With this, Japan's extraordinary modernisation began in earnest.