Finding History Everywhere

Looking at the way history is used in manga

Imagine that during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency a disease began to spread throughout the United States and killed two-thirds of the male population and boys between the ages of 5-25 had a 25% survival rate. Now also imagine that Jefferson dies and his daughter Martha somehow took on the presidency. The United States is a matriarchal society and becomes completely isolated until the disease is cured, and then all of that history is erased. If that sounds interesting I have a story for you.

This is similar to the premise of the award winning manga series Ōoku: The Inner Chambers by Fumi Yoshinaga. In it during the reign of the third Tokugawa Shogun Iemitsu, the red face pox decimates the male population of Japan and women end up taking up the leadership of Japanese society for two centuries.

I started reading Ōoku back in 2021, but my local library only had the first 5 volumes, and I was not invested enough in the story. Fast forward to 2025 and I finally finished the series. As someone with a degree in history, I found myself more invested this time than the first, as I had now taken plenty of history courses and had studied historiography to some extent. What drew me in was not the art or the characters, but how Yoshinaga used history to tell her story.

History as a field at times has a bad reputation. If I had a nickel for every time someone has told me that history is boring, I could have paid off my student loans. History is a hard sell to people. The historian Sarah Maza makes a great point in her book Thinking About History writing, “Ideally (though, alas, is far from true in practice) anyone should be able to pick up any history book, even an academic one, and understand its contents without the benefit of prior training.”¹ No matter how much I scream from the rooftops that history is fun, there is an accessibility problem, but there are ways to challenge it.

Historical fiction is a tool of introducing people to history, and some works of historical fiction are better than others. Ōoku is a good example of intriguing historical fiction. It almost reads like a work of history, and part of that has to do with the ways Yoshinaga uses history to keep the reader entertained.

The story of Ōoku is recorded as the “Chronicle of a Dying Day” it is the story of how Japan will eventually collapse, and that the Tokugawa Shogunate is doomed to be the end of Japanese history. Yet, only those that live in Edo Castle know about the chronicle and know the full history of Japan. The reader is peeking behind the curtain of Japanese History. Yoshinaga is trying to preempt questions the reader may have.

Why do all the Shogun’s take male names? When the red face pox began it was a way to prevent the outside world from knowing that men were still in control, and to signal that nothing was wrong. It also explains the Sakoku period of extreme isolationism; no one can know the truth that a seemingly warrior based society has lost its warriors. Why are all the paintings and photos of the Shoguns men? Well they would use a male concubine as a stand in. What about visits by foreign dignitaries? Simple, male stand in, either a servant or concubine would dress as the Shogun, and in some cases if the historical records say that the Shogun seemed small had a high pitch voice then Yoshinaga shows to the reader that it was one of the women Shogun sitting in the meeting.

Yoshinaga is able to show and tell the reader how easy it is for the historical record to be altered to fit a certain narrative. Primary sources can be like puzzle pieces with historians trying to create a clear image out of what they have, but they are missing the box. Yoshinaga does something similar in telling her alternate history.

Anyone with a bare minimum of Japanese history knows that the Meiji restoration ends the centuries long military rule of the different Shogunates in favor of an imperial restoration, but Ōoku changes part of the motivation.

Before the Meiji restoration occurs, and before the short rule of Yoshinobu, Japan again is ruled by two women Shoguns, and by this point in the story the red face pox has been cured, and Japan has been forced to open up by the US. Reactionary forces within the nation, those predominantly male samurai class, are asking why men are not in charge of the government, and women have continued to allow foreigners to enter and change Japan. Yoshinaga is showing the reader that the Shoguns are doing everything to save Japan from colonialism and imperialism by foreign powers as is happening to the Qing, a nod to her own bias. These men are calling for a strong male leader, and they see it as the emperor. Japan’s imperial period is being presented as a reactionary revolution started by male chauvinism.

In contrast to the rise of the Japanese Empire, the Shogun’s are each seen as great thinkers and leaders, and that many of their advisors were forward thinking. Near the end of the series the advisors are starting to tax the growing merchant class as a way to make money. It is the dream of Abe Masahiro, the senior chief counselor to the Shogun in Ōoku, to eventually to move Japan to a democracy. Yoshinaga presents Abe as a forward thinker and strong woman. Take this depiction and compare it to Yoshinaga’s depiction of Emperor Komei, as this weak willed pathetic man. While neither of these depictions may be completely historically accurate they are each rooted in the actions of these historical figures.

Yoshinaga uses artistic liberties to tell a history of the Tokugawa Shogunate, but how is it different from ways historians will write biographies? Yoshinaga wants the audience to rethink their knowledge of the period, and in fact question Japan’s own imperial history. Japan much like the US has had a growing struggle in regards to historical revisionism and there has been an attempt to sanitize Japanese Imperial history. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was well known for his historical negationism, with him challenging that the Japanese military used comfort women. Even today the current prime minister Sanae Takaichi, a close ally of the late Abe, shares many of his views on Japanese history, even referring to war crimes Japan committed as being over exaggerated. Ōoku can be viewed as a challenge to this type of historical revisionism.

Ōoku was written from 2006-2020 most of this was during Abe’s time as prime minister. Instead of fanning the flames of a growing nationalist sentiment, Yoshinaga gave an alternate story that flattered the Shogunate, and critiqued the Empire. Liberal democracy is seen as something to hope for in the world of Ōoku. Yoshinaga not only wrote an alternate history, but also a revisionist history. She wrote of powerful women and weak men. She highlighted great leaders and created stories of those in the bottom of society and how they helped save a dying world. Ōoku made history more available and accessible to audiences, and now historians have to do it too.

1. Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (Chicago, Chicago Press, 2017), 2.