Author Archives: Romlus Hillsborough

Revising Samurai Revolution: A Revised and Expanded Edition Nears Completion

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Bookshelf with Japanese-language Bakumatsu and Meiji Restoration history volumes and framed portrait of Katsu Kaishū

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.

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate is now listed on Amazon USA

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Shinsengumi sleeve badge bearing the red character makoto (“sincerity”) above a stylized mountain-like pattern. According to the Ryozen Museum of History, the badge was worn on the sleeve by Shinsengumi corpsmen for identification and to prevent accidental clashes between members. Formerly owned by Shimada Kai. Courtesy of the Ryozen Museum of History.

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.]

Just before Sannan Keisuké’s Seppuku

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Cover of Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, (1863–1869) by Romulus Hillsborough

From my forthcoming Samurai Swordsmen:

At around four o’clock in the afternoon, “at dusk on that early spring day, someone came to my house to tell us that ‘Sannan is going to commit seppuku,’” Yagi recalled. The boy and his father “rushed” to the Maekawa house just across the narrow street—and the scene they witnessed was “pathetic.” “Just as I passed through the front gate of my house, there was a girl rushing by,” whom Yagi recognized as a woman from the Shimabara pleasure quarter who “had become intimate with Sannan.” Taken by surprise, the boy, “without saying a word, stood in front of the gate and watched as the girl ran over to the latticed bow window on the west side of the Maekawa house, and while knocking [on the window] screamed” Sannan’s name “over and over.” Soon Yagi approached the house and “silently stood there watching.”

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863–1869) (Helion, 2026) is now in production.