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Stuart Galbraith IV writes about All the Emperor’s Men

All the Emperor's MenStuart Galbraith IV, the author of the excellent Kurosawa and Mifune biography The Emperor and the Wolf, has published on his blog something like a review of Hiroshi Tasogawa’s All the Emperor’s Men: Kurosawa’s Pearl Harbor, the book which investigates Kurosawa’s part in the Tora! Tora! Tora! project.

As readers of The Emperor and the Wolf may remember, Galbraith himself explored the topic in some length, and is therefore in an excellent position to write about Tasogawa’s book.

Although Galbraith ultimately gives a positive assessment of the book, he does make several interesting points in his post, not least concerning Tasogawa’s lack of full identification of sources. I would definitely recommend anyone who read All the Emperor’s Men to check out what Galbraith has to say about the book and its sources.

My own glowing review of Tasogawa’s book can be found here.


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lawless

Does Tasogawa cite any English-language secondary sources? If not, I wonder if the omission is due to Tasogawa not being fluent enough to read Galbraith’s book. If Galbraith’s book has been translated and published in Japanese, that would be a different story.

I do not see how adding “sic” after grammatical errors amounts to plagiarism. That is the norm, especially if one is making the point that someone is less familiar with a language than he represents himself to be.

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Vili Maunula

Tasogawa actually wrote his book in English himself, and as he is a translator/interpreter, it is certainly not a case of him not being fluent enough in the language. Whether he ever read Galbraith is of course another matter. There is so much about Kurosawa written in Japanese that I could understand if Tasogawa simply didn’t feel the need to consult The Emperor and the Wolf, or maybe wasn’t even fully aware of its existence.

As for his sourcing, Tasogawa doesn’t really academically cite his sources at all, but this is at least partly because the vast majority of his sources are internal memos, letters and telegraphs, and he quotes them quite liberally whenever he needs to. To be honest, I didn’t even realise his lack of properly identified sources, so engaging is the book! Usually, this is the first thing I make note of.

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Ugetsu

I wasn’t aware Galbraith had a blog – thanks for posting that Lawless.

Its obvious – and I don’t blame him – Galbraith is a little annoyed with not being acknowledged. But his comments are very interesting. I haven’t read Tasogawa yet, so I can’t really comment on the substance of their conflicting interpretations, but Galbraiths argument is quite convincing I think. It makes me regret all the more that Kurosawa never got to make Runaway Train (having said that, it was always one of my favourite films, even before I got interested in Kurosawa).

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