Timeline

Hard at work on the Aizu chronology that is the preliminary element of my
senior thesis...have gotten ahold of the school's copy of Conrad Totman's
magnum opus "Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu"...my timeline is now to 7
pages and runs from Ieyasu's victory at Sekigahara in 1600 all the way
through to the reconstruction of Aizu Castle in the 1950s, with the bulk of
the timeline being the 1860s and thereabouts.

Geez, I thought Bakufu politics was complicated...it is MUCH, MUCH more
screwed up than I thought...Katamori got appointed to the Bakufu as an
advisor (san'yo), and got Matsudaira Shungaku of Fukui appointed...and
Shungaku screwed things up in a lot of ways, but helped in other ways-- a
HUGE difference being that Shungaku didn't know when to watch his mouth,
whereas Katamori knew tact and patience. Shungaku essentially used the
oldest trick in the book-- the "I have a headache, I'm going home" excuse to
twist the Shogunate's arm into doing whatever he wanted.

Ouch. Ow. Some headache, all right...

--M.