Rating: 
Summary: The life and times of William Adams
Review: A gripping, well-written account of Willaim Adams, the first Englishman to reach Japan, and the short-lived attempt by the English to expand its burgeoning Empire to this most unique country. Milton does and excellent job of piecing together the various extent contemporary accounts--including those left behind by Adams himself--into a facinating story. One will be disappointed, however, if one expects this to be a detailed account of Williams Adams himself--as far as I know, an impossibility given the amount of material that he left behind. A considerable amount of the narrative deals with trade in East Asia, the workings of the Jesuits in Japan, and the English factory established at Hirado.
Rating:
Summary: A strange, new world
Review: A most interesting book, although the title is a bit misleading. While the book does spend a good bit of time on the story of William Adams, an English seaman who found himself marooned in Japan, it is really more a straightforward account of the attempts by the English and the Dutch to open Japan to trade.
The rivalries between the two nations, and between the Protestant English and Dutch and the Catholic priests who were already in Japan, make up a good bit of the book. (When Adams arrived in Japan, he was in quite a bit of danger from the Jesuits, who feared that through him the shogun would discover that, contrary to what they had led him to believe, there was not "one Christian faith".) The alliances shifted, and often those of both nations who were tending to trade in the Far East, were caught up in events happening far away, as their countries made war or peace on each other thousands of miles away.
Then, Japan enters the period of sakoku, closed country, and it will be a two centuries before it is again open to the West.
There is a good deal of reliance on primary sources, though I could wish that the end notes were more specific. But this isn't a scholarly work, so I suppose I should be glad that we are given end notes at all!
Rating: 
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: I was very disappointed by this book. Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg was one of the best histories I have ever read. This was not even good."Samurai William" - William Adams - is almost an afterthought in the book. Rather the book is page after page of anecdotal information about members of Britain's East India Company in Japan. There is far more information about their parties, girlfriends, gifts given and received and the like than anyone needs or would find interesting. More troubling, is that Mr. Milton was so bogged down in the minutae, that no broad picture was ever painted. The anecdotal history had no context. Therefore it was merely tedious. Had there been a thesis or broad stroke backdrop, the anecdotes might have fleshed out the narrative. Instead the history was notably thin and left me with very little to take away. The title character is most often a tangential figure. He is always called upon to bail out the other Englishmen because of his closeness to Japan's rulers. Mr. Milton never quite explains (or even theorizes) why he was so revered by the Japanese. Surprisingly, at the end of the book, he notes that an area was named for Adams and he was still revered 200 years later. No explanation was given why. I strongly recommend that you skip this and go to Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg. I got the strong feeling that the author had researched thousands of pages of East India Company documents and figured he ought to get another book out of the effort. It needed much more Japanese history and culture explanations to make it worthwhile.
Rating:
Summary: Good writing, questionable history
Review: Like most reviewers before me, I was quite enthralled with the story of William Adams, the foremost Englishman in early Tokugawa Japan period. I supposed the recent released of Shogun on DVD have inspired me to read this book since the main character of that show was based on the titled character. The book was well written but like one reviewer before me stated, it relied totally on European sources which have a tendencies to be very inaccurate or even bias. How can one write anything on Japan at all without Japanese sources. A good example of this was when the author described Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu as "sadistic" for the way he dealt with the Christians. Considering that he was considered as quite an enlightened ruler by many historians, the author totally failed to point out that Iemitsu's actions against the Christians took on a devastating scale only after the Japanese Christians and their padres mounted a full scale revolt at Shimabara Castle in 1637. While considered as a "peasant revolt", primary fighting forces were Christians. This revolt shocked the Tokugawa bakufu to the core which led to drastic reaction. Such oversight like this cheapen the accuracy of the well written words. (What ruler in Europe would not have done the same if a large group of Buddhists joined a large scale revolt against crown and realm??) While the book was supposed to be on William Adams, it basically centered around the English effort to promote trade with Japan. Ironically, it might be hard to regard this as Adams' biography at all. He seem to be a background character a lot of time. What really hurt this book was that the author appears to be totally unfamiliar with Japanese history and totally lacks Japanese sources. Would a book on English history be any worth if there was no English sources?? Two stars for good writing and entertaining reading material though, can't fault the man's skill with the English language! PS: In that revolt mentioned above, Dutch provided a warship that help pummeled that revolt to the ground. It was probably one of the major reasons why the Dutch kept their trade base opened while all other European powers did not.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Milton presents an easy-to-read account of early European ventures in Japan. The key figure which holds this book together is William Adams (of Shogun fame). Adams is an English pilot who finds himself in Japan after a particularly perilous journey. Being a stranger in a strange land, he faces many difficulties, but through luck and skill in adaptation, he becomes someone of importance in his new home country. Years later, a group of Englishmen from the East India Company come to set up a factory (trading post). Even though the title of this book is Samurai William, it would be more accurate to describe this book as a history of the East India Company trading post in Japan. Throughout most of this book, Adams appears only as a supporting character. This book is useful for it's descriptions of Japan in the early 1600's. It's interesting to read about the reations the English and the Japanese had to each other. For example, the English reacted to the violence and strict justice in Japanese society, and the Japanese reacted to the uncleanliness of the English. It's definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Turning Japanese
Review: Milton's "Samurai William" is a brilliantly researched story about William Adams, a smart young fellow from England with very little pedigree but a facility for Oriental languages and a deft negotiating style. Upon reaching Japan he survived the customary welcome for foreigners (viz. public beheading) and then parlayed his way into a trade monopoly, cleverly outsting (or sometimes merely outlasting) the Dutch and Portuguese traders. Adams had one solid advantage over his fellow Westerners: humility (or at least an ability to fake it). (If there's one thing that this story teaches you, it's the occasional importance of remaining silent while the blowhards self-destruct.) Milton is also unsparing about the macarbre execution rituals of seventeenth-century Japanese society.
Rating:
Summary: Turning Japanese
Review: Milton's "Samurai William" is a brilliantly researched story about William Adams, a smart young fellow from England with very little pedigree but a facility for Oriental languages and a deft negotiating style. Upon reaching Japan he survived the customary welcome for foreigners (viz. public beheading) and then parlayed his way into a trade monopoly, cleverly outsting (or sometimes merely outlasting) the Dutch and Portuguese traders. Adams had one solid advantage over his fellow Westerners: humility (or at least an ability to fake it). (If there's one thing that this story teaches you, it's the occasional importance of remaining silent while the blowhards self-destruct.) Milton is also unsparing about the macarbre execution rituals of seventeenth-century Japanese society.
Rating: 
Summary: A Period Piece
Review: Personally, I think this book suffers a bit of a personality disorder. The title is deceptive with Samurai William himself occasionally sidelined for what are probably more interesting developments that occured in Japan and the Orient at the time.
I think Milton realised that, had he simply concentrated on his main subject, he wouldn't have much of a read. This is because the sources of info on Samurai William are fairly sparse. In order to develop the book into something readable a lot of other detail is included.
Not to say that this isn't interesting. It is. We get to hear about various Europeans experiencing an extremely interesting period of Japanese history and get a pretty clear picture of the time.
So, if you are a serious student of history focussed on William himself, this book is likely to disappoint. If however, as I am, you are a lover of Japanese history, you will benefit from a read of this.
Rating:
Summary: Vivid account of the early Japanese-European encounter
Review: The book spans the time between the Portuguese navigator Fernão Mendes Pinto first arrived in Kyushu, Japan in 1542 (Pinto was the first European to set foot on Japan) till the time of the English pilot William Adams' death in 1690 at Adams' age of 55. Pinto's own records as well as Francis Xavier's (Spanish Jesuit missionary) are used to describe Japan during the time of Pinto. William Adams' ship log was used to reconstruct his voyage to Japan. Adams' ascension in the shogun's (Tokugawa Ieyasu) court is treated rather lightly through his own, scant records. The remaining half of the book roughly follows Richard Cocks' (an English Merchant who arrived in Japan later than Adams) account of events. This is first and foremost a maritime history. Though Japanese culture, domestic military struggles (Ieyasu's victory over the 4 regents, and over Hideyori -- Hideyoshi Toyotomi's son; Ieyasu had been appointed as the regent for Hideyori -- in Osaka) are covered, the emphasis lies on the voyages and the trades the 4 competing Europe powerhouses (Spain, Portugal, Holland, and England) made during this time span. Detailed descriptions of trades these four countries made at/with Bantam (Indonesia), Ayutthaya (Thailand), Moluccas (or "Spice Islands" in Indonesia), Macao, Ming Dynasty are plentiful. Also found abundant are: records of power struggles among these European countries, internal correspondences of the East India Company, and the vulgarities of the European sailors. Given the title of the book I expected something resembling a biography -- I expected more first-hand accounts of Adams or clearer focus on him. However the book did not turn out to be a disappointment. To the contrary it was greatly entertaining to read maritime history weaved with individual voices. Later on I began to suspect that the publishers and not the author had named the book. The obnoxiousness of the subtitle "the Englishman who opened Japan" is my reason as of why.
Rating:
Summary: Rather Three-and-a-half Stars
Review: The writing is pretty good and the text of this book is good for anyone with absolutely no understanding of Japan and the early exploration of the North Pacific. It does paint a rather broad canvas. This is selective and course history -- the bits have been ripped out and pieced together to paint a rather gory and exciting tale. The book really holds your attention and it a rather quick and surprisingly light read --- in that sense it is also a good introduction to the early contact with Japan. If you like well written, light history, this will keep you turning the pages. If you are interested in using it as a starting point to dropping off in deeper reaches of exploration. I enjoyed it. I am not sure it is good history however. But if you read enough history, then this is not a problem.
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