鳳来の夢、伊達政宗の慶長遣欧使節 Horai no yume: Date Masamune no Keicho Ken-oh shisetu (“Horai Dream: The Keicho Mission of Masamune Date”) is my forthcoming book from Sojinsha Joint-Stock Enterprises, NJK Kotobuki 1-3-4, Taito-ku, Tokyo.
Be watching in 2024 for a sister edition in English, tentatively titled A Japanese Mission to 17th Century Rome, from Lexington Books (Lanham, MD), USA.
Our prayers seem to have been answered! 鳳来の夢、伊達政宗の慶長遣欧使節 Horai no yume: Date Masamune no Keicho Ken-oh shisetu (“Horai Dream: The Keicho Mission of Masamune Date”), is on schedule to be published in Japan this May of 2021.
Before Seiko and I did our tag-team presentation of my talk on the role of the search for the Tornaviaje in the Keicho Mission at Sendai Sensai Fukko Kinenkan, we stopped by to pay our respects.
Daruma is encouraging us to keep on keeping on, and my Japanese-language book 鳳来の夢、伊達政宗の慶長遣欧使節 Horai no yume: Date Masamune no Keicho Ken-oh shisetu (“Horai Dream: The Keicho Mission of Masamune Date”) is doing just that!
Ryoji Onzo, publisher of Sojinsha press, is back in action. Rich Nibley, our dauntless translator, is once again sending proofs.
Slowly but surely we are moving towards publication!
As text-edits continue to be completed and dropped into the book layout, daily we come closer to going to press with “Horai Dream: the Keicho Mission of Date Masamune” from Sojinsha Press, Tokyo. Looks to hit Japanese bookstores in February, with digital English version available for purchase online! Stay tuned for a possible April book-signing at the San Francisco branch of Kinokuniya. My wishing-Daruma will soon receive his second eye, as a reward!
As the 4000 cherry trees of Hirosaki Castle, far in the north of Tohoku, burst into bloom, it is time to celebrate!
My last post asked whether perseverance was worth it, whether giving a paper on Horai at the New Orleans AAG last spring was worth it and now, as the petals fall to make “sakura soup” in the castle moat, I can say “YES!”
The surprise is that the book will be released in Japan as a paperback by Shojinsha press, fully translated into Japanese, maps and all, in time for the Christmas 2019/New Year’s 2020 holiday gift-giving season.
The full Appendices, in Japanese and English (as long as the book itself) will be accessible online, as will the English version of the book.
Thanks to my husband Robert for his stalwart support and to Sato-San, Nibley-san and Onzo-san for making this particular dream come true!
So I went to New Orleans last month and presented a paper by this name to my fellow geographers at the AAG Annual Conference, the idea being to raise some consciousness about the Keicho Mission and snoop around for a proper press to give Teisam and Padre (or Daimyo and Saint, as they prefer) a home.
“Horai” I defined as a Japanese vision for utopian perfection, seen differently by Tokugawa Ieyasu than by Date Masamune, and illustrated here in a Hiroshige print of Horai-ji near Shizuoka. There are several sacred mountains of this name in Japan, meaning a place so perfect that the sacred Phoenix lands there…
Three presses expressed an interest, AND I learned from a professor at Kyoto University that there is an old canal near Tokyo called Sendai Bori, which can only mean that Date was busy there, too, having built two bori (intra-coastal water-way canals) in Sendai proper. Always new info surfacing!
Watch this space for news as to whether the many dollars spent for lodging, registration, and jambalaya were worth it!
Here we see the true Date look: the "swoosh" on the helmet, masked, and all in black and with the rising sun on his battle-flag. Follow the latest publication progress (and where our heroes were, 400 years ago) on my Facebook page, at: https://www.facebook.com/DaimyoSaint/
This book is written, fully illustrated and provided with a wonderfully massive appendix of original sources, put by the author and friends into English. Out currently looking for a publisher, it is a series of historical and ruminative essays presenting the Keicho Expedition of 1613-1615 from Sendai to Rome, little known outside Japan and hidden away even from general Japanese knowledge throughout Japan's period of closure to the outside world.
Based on a spectacular map that covers an entire wall of the Sendai City Museum, this shows the administrative and rice production units (koku) of the Sendai Fief in the time of Date Masamune, as well as the canals and other transport infrastructure built in his reign.
What’s the connection, you ask?
Take a look at my Daimyo and Saint Facebook page to soak up the timeline I’m using as a basis for my WCAAS paper later this month in Aliso Viejo (near San Diego, named by Sebastian Vizcaino, whose expedition made this map and who was sent to Japan to do likewise and spy for the Spanish). No way I can cover all that in 20 minutes, so I will focus on the intimate links between mapping the west coast of North America and the southern and eastern coasts of Japan.