The map featured in episode 12 (13AUG) of Blood and Tears that detailed troop movements during the Battle of Ueno, started with a woodblock print of Edo published in 1858—part of the Japanese Historical Map Collection housed at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
(Originally published in my blog, The Sporkball Journals, on July 20, 2008.) There is no small irony in the fact I now live just a 2-hour drive away from where my Grandparents, Father and Aunts were once imprisoned. On the other hand, you could call it a kind of fate
In episode 13, O-Bun entertains her friends with a scene from her favorite Kabuki play, The Subscription List (Kanjinchō).
The Battle of Ueno took place on May 15, 1868 (lunar date) at the Toeizan Kaneiji Temple complex on Mt. Ueno in Edo. Pro-imperial troops, spearheaded by the Satsuma and Choshu domains, launched an early morning attack
Blood and Tears is set during the Bōshin War, a tumultuous civil conflict that ends with the dissolution of Japan’s centuries-old governance by military families, the samurai.
