I am reading the page proofs of my forthcoming Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863–1869), and I am once again struck by the depth and breadth of this book, which took me around seven and a half years to write.
At a house in the Shimabara pleasure quarter of Kyoto, probably around the Fourth Month of Genji 1, the Japanese calendrical year corresponding to 1864, Kondō Isami, commander of the Shinsengumi, inscribed three characters on the back of an iron-ribbed fan owned by his friend Tomizawa Chūémon, a village headman from his native Tama near Edo:
I translated Kondō’s calligraphy in my forthcoming Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863–1869).
It expresses a particularly powerful desire of Kondō Isami, which he would realize in less than two months in the Shinsengumi’s notorious raid on a meeting of anti-Bakufu rebels at the Ikédaya inn in Kyoto. The translation is revealed in Chapter 14: The Ikédaya Incident.
Work on the revised and expanded edition of Samurai Revolution is now nearing completion. Since the original publication, I have continued researching the Bakumatsu and Meiji Restoration through expanded use of Japanese primary sources, including the journals, memoirs, letters, and historical writings of Katsu Kaishū, letters of Sakamoto Ryōma, Nakaoka Shintarō, and other leading figures of the era, contemporary accounts relating to Kaishū and other important men on both sides of the revolution, as well as authoritative scholarship on the era and its principal figures.
The new edition incorporates this research throughout the text. It also includes revised translations where closer study of the original Japanese warranted them, a second appendix, and new maps. My aim has been not simply to update the book, but to deepen its historiography while making this extraordinary period of Japanese history even more vivid and accessible.
Before the revised edition of Samurai Revolution appears in spring 2027, Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863-1869) will be published by Helion this September.
My book Samurai Swordsmen will finally be published in September (in the UK and the rest of Europe), after a nine-year journey through mostly stormy seas. The USA release will follow several weeks later.
Should the book fail to find readers, I shall spend the remainder of my days muttering dark things about the decline of civilization.
This volume has occupied me for years. At more than 270,000 words, it is by far the most comprehensive work I have written on the Shinsengumi and the fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu. While centered on Kondō Isami, Hijikata Toshizō, and the Shinsengumi, the book is also a broader narrative of the political and military collapse of the Tokugawa order during the final years of the samurai age.
In many ways, Samurai Swordsmen continues and expands the historical world of Samurai Revolution. Together with The Last Shogun, the third book of the Samurai Revolution Trilogy (now in progress), it forms part of a larger attempt to narrate the fall of the Tokugawa Bakufu and the men who shaped its final decades.
More updates soon.
Romulus Hillsborough
[The Shinsengumi sleeve badge bearing the character makoto (“sincerity”) is courtesy of the Ryozen Museum of History.]