Here at WoWasis, we’ve never read a Sterling Seagrave book that we could easily put down. We were glued to our chair, reading The Yamato Dynasty: the Secret History of Japan’s Imperial Family (1999, ISBN 0-7679-0496-6) by Seagrave and his wife Peggy Seagrave, when our back gave out, and we were now really glued to the chair, and it took us a half-hour to get extricated from that situation. That’s what a great book will do to you, and all of the Seagraves’ books, from The Marcos Dynasty on down, have been in the same category: fascinating, impressively written and researched reads for people wishing to more about the historical facts behind the great underbelly of Asia. 

As the Seagraves so forcefully reveal in the book, that bad back of ours was nothing compared to getting murdered by the backroom power structure behind the several generations of Japanese Yamato rulers, from Meiji, to Taisho, to Hirohito. As the Seagraves say, “Japan is more than a one-party dictatorship. It is a one-class dictatorship by a financial elite evolved from the clan lords of previous centuries. Their rule by manipulation, intimidation and corruption is as complete as that of the Stalinists…” Here,  the reader will thrill to the lèse-majesté laws that stifle the press and anyone voicing a public opinion: a violation is punishable by death. The royal family is shown to have a relationship with the underground Yakuza, enabling them to control Manchuria on the way to the massacre at Nanking, where 20,000 women and little girls were raped, and 20,000 military-age men were gasolined, used for live bayonet practice, buried alive, you name it, and none of it was pretty. 

In more recent memory, rigged public works contracts (p. 274) and the Tsutsumi scam over the 1988 Nagano Olympics (pp. 281-283) seem to have some degree of intersection with various royal family members or hangers-on. Think you know Japan? If you know all the back-alley secrets the Seagraves have revealed in this book, we’ll bet you do. Buy it now at the WoWasis estore, powered by Amazon.