The Program

I love history. Hand me a book about the Civil War or Ancient Rome or legendary Portuguese navigators and you won't see me again for at least a week. Many people view this as a diversionary tactic to keep me away from exclusionary social events, which explains my glaringly introverted psyche and acute anti-social tendencies. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

But of all the history subjects I enjoy, nothing fascinates me more than Japanese history, specifically the Tokugawa or Edo Period in which the country became unified under a single Shogunate and began a self-imposed seclusion from the Western world. I couldn't even begin to tell you why, but the period is ripe with the type of events and sociopolitical developments that make for intriguing study and some marvelous fiction. James Clavell's bestselling Shogun is a fictionalized retelling of Tokugawa Ieyasu's rise from a mid-level daimyo to Shogun, the supreme military governor of Japan. Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima created Lone Wolf and Cub, one of the finest examples of graphic storytelling in the history of the medium. This epic tale of framed royal executioner Ogami Itto and his toddler-aged son Daigoro, set in the midst of the Edo Period, ran over 3000 pages in length and has captured the imagination of fans worldwide, a sad and glorious poem that acts as a requiem for the diminishing samurai class. Then there's Musashi Miyamoto, considered to be Japan's finest swordsman and strategist, whose exploits in the Battle of Sekigahara and beyond resulted in The Book of Five Rings, a tactical and philosophical tome whose contents have influenced countless readers over the centuries. His tales were also fictionalized in Eiji Yoshikawa's novel Musashi and Hiroshi's Inagaki's classic Samurai Trilogy (starring the great Toshiro Mifune as Musashi.)

But beyond the fiction, the Edo Period is simply fascinating material. The face of Samurai warfare changed. The seat of power transferred from Kyoto to Edo (Tokyo), while authority was quietly shifted away form the Emperor to the Shogunate. Missionaries and Christianity had come to Japan, moderately accepted at first and then utterly rejected and outlawed (culminating in the massacre known as the Shimabara Riot, in which 40,000 Christians were killed during a prolonged siege.) Japan was closed off to the West; save for a small Dutch island off the coast where select trading ships passed through, any Western influence and incursion was thoroughly discouraged. And in the end, we have the twilight of the Samurai class, whose power and prestige as the warrior class was trivialized in a time of relative peace and unification.

PBS's wonderful Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire provides for a highly generalized but extraordinarily fascinating program that highlights the broad sweep of history that passed through Japan during this time. The documentary, narrated by Shogun star Richard Chamberlain, features several filmed dramatizations, interviews with scholars and historians, footage of Edo-era castles, panoramic vistas of the Japanese coast and countryside, and beautiful shots of luminous woodblock prints. The feature runs approximately 160 minutes and is divided into three parts: The Way of the Samurai, which details the rise of the Shogunate and the unification of Japan, The Will of the Shogun, which focuses on major events occurring during the Edo Period, and The Return of the Barbarians , in which Japan finds itself opening up to Western influence once more.

The DVD

Video:

Japan: Memoirs of a Secret Empire is presented in a widescreen aspect ratio of 1.78:1, and the transfer has been anamorphically-enhanced for your widescreen-viewing wonderment. The transfer is pleasant and generally acceptable, although the picture looks somewhat soft throughout. There is a discernable amount of fuzziness to the transfer, especially during the live-action reenactments. Colors are satisfying, although there is some haziness and a general muted effect to the picture. Compression noise and blocking is sometimes visible, but the transfer is, for the most part, fairly clean.

Audio: