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EP168 The Edo-Bakumatsu Ishin Shiryo Database

·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

The database notes that an American sailor was drunk and violent in Naha, and William Borde drowned under a bridge at Miyagusaku.

1. Samurai Archives Japanese History Podcast EP168 focuses on the Edo-Bakumatsu Ishin Shiryo Database and its English translation project at the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute. 2. Dr. Travis Seifman, a 2019 PhD in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, works as a researcher at the University of Tokyo Historiographical Institute, also called Shidio Hensanjo. 3. The episode asks what the Ishin Shiryo Koryo database is for, and Seifman answers that it turns a 10-volume printed chronology into a searchable research tool. 4. Seifman says professors in the 1910s and 1920s compiled thousands of primary sources into day-by-day summaries covering 1846 to 1871. 5. He explains that the University of Tokyo digitized the set in the 1990s and made it searchable by date, place, person, and keyword. 6. He says the English translation will let users search the same material without relying on Japanese-only interface and content. 7. Seifman describes the entries as one- to five-line summaries that often jump from one day to the next across Tokugawa Yoshinobu, domain petitions, and shogunate replies. 8. He says each summary can link to scanned manuscript material and references to documents held at the Historiographical Institute. 9. He says the project draws on shogunate records, domain records, Ryukyu government records, and published accounts such as the Perry voyage materials. 10. He names the database’s current public English coverage as running from 1846 through about 1854 or 1855, with more years to be added. 11. Seifman says Ryukyu appears most clearly in 1850, when the final Ryukyuan embassy to Edo is mentioned in preparation letters and travel notes. 12. He says Commodore Perry’s 1853-1854 trip included repeated visits to Ryukyu, not just Uraga and the shogunate. 13. He recalls a court refusing Perry access to the Ryukyuan king and saying he could meet only with a minister of foreign affairs. 14. He also recounts a British Protestant missionary in Ryukyu who acted as intermediary and interpreter and then became a nuisance to the court. 15. He reads an 1854 entry stating that an American sailor was drunk and violent in Naha and that William Borde was chased by Ryukyuans and drowned under a bridge at Miyagusaku. 16. He uses that entry to show how the database preserves a specific incident in only a few lines while still giving dates, places, and names. 17. The tone stays conversational and exploratory, with Seifman often pausing to qualify what he knows and what the database itself actually says. 18. The format is an interview, and the conversation moves from credentials to database structure, source types, Ryukyu examples, and Bakumatsu political tensions. 19. Listeners interested in Bakumatsu politics, Ryukyu history, or historical databases will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a fast general overview of the Meiji Restoration without source details may skip it.

As heard by us

A database tour that makes late Tokugawa politics feel immediate and documented.

Late-Edo political pressure is the real subject, and the discussion keeps it vivid by moving through translated records one item at a time. Letters, petitions, shogunate replies, and public accusations stop reading like archival clutter and instead form a clear account of a…

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Why you'd press play

You want late Edo politics explained through documents, not dramatization.

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