This week: the start of a multi-part “modernized biography” intended to help us explore postwar Japan through the lens of a single, fascinating life. This episode is mostly focused on introducing our subject–Miyazaki Manabu–and his unique and fascinating circumstances as the scion of a small yakuza family.
Sources
Miyazaki, Manabu. Toppamono: Outlaw,, Radical, Suspect. My Life in Japan’s Underworld. Trans. Robert Whiting.
Images
I think presenting the divide in the Histories between ‘person driven’ and ‘systems driven’ as so stark, as you do, isn’t particularly helpful or illuminating.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but:
‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please (…) but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’