This is written the day after the William-Catherine marriage. We Americans joined in the hoopla to a rather greater extent than I would have predicted. But we’re really not prepared to have “theses” about monarchs. Washburn captures the problem in his concluding sentences: “By the middle of the 19th century the political ground of imperial legitimacy had become routinely symbolic — a situation in which power flowed from the charisma of an institution rather than an individual. Meiji remains just beyond the biographer’s grasp because his life was lived at that vanishing point where the public image of the emperor and the private life of the man become indistinguishable.”

I think the scope of the book — and the generally slow pace of Meiji-era studies, not the hot topic it used to be — means that it’s taking time to absorb it into the canon.

I don’t think Keene was trying to prove definitively that Meiji was the “actual ruler” but to provide enough evidence that his role — which varies widely over the years of his reign — could be evaluated. I do agree that Keene’s narrative style leaves little room for critical analysis, and assumes things that really need to be addressed separately in future scholarship (or have been addressed, in some cases!).

I should probably go back over the early chapters and give them a bit more of the detail I put in the later ones, but I don’t know that it’s going to be a high priority anytime soon.