Author Archives: Romulus Hillsborough

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.

Samurai Swordsmen Listed on the Publisher’s Website

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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

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi amid the Fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1863–1869) is now listed on the website of its publisher, Helion & Company. The book is scheduled for publication in fall 2026.

The listing marks the formal public cataloging of the volume, which represents the culmination of many years of research into the history of the Shinsengumi and the political world of late Tokugawa Japan. The book builds on my earlier work while incorporating extensive primary-source material not previously available in English.

Further updates will be posted here as publication approaches.

View the book on the Helion website

Background: The Shinsengumi Hub

 

From Traitor to Count: Katsu Kaishū on the Rise and Fall of Reputation

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Katsu Kaishū standing beside a chair in the garden of his Hikawa estate in Tokyo, photographed late in his life.

While revising Samurai Revolution for its expanded new edition, I’ve been rereading Katsu Kaishū’s later interviews—many of them at once hilarious and profound. One favorite comes from an 1895 Kokumin Shimbun (newspaper) interview, when Kaishū was seventy-three years old. In the interview he alluded to his title of count, bestowed by the Emperor eight years prior:

I’m naturally a bad person, which is why I put a market price on society. I know that when the price goes up, it’ll eventually go back down. When the price goes down, it’ll eventually go back up. And it never takes more than ten years for the market price to rise and fall. So, if I see that the price for me is down, all I need do is hunker down and wait a while—and sure enough it’ll rise again. The former villain and traitor Katsu Rintarō [Rintarō being his given name] is now Count Katsu Awa [his official name in later life]. But even if I act as if I’m important now, after a while I’ll only grow old and senile, and nobody will even bother to spit on me then. So anyway, that’s the way the market price of society is. A person who has the patience to wait out those ten years of rising and falling is a great man. And actually I’m one of them.

[Katsu Kaishū is the “shogun’s last samurai” of Samurai Revolution.]

A Universal and Timeless Passage from Samurai Revolution

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Saigō Takamori (1828–1877), key figure in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Shogunate) and leader of the Meiji Restoration. Widely recognized as one of Japan’s most revered samurai.

[After the Meiji Restoration of 1868] Saigō disdained the extravagant lifestyles and arrogance of government officials in Tokyo, particularly central government leaders whom he considered “thieves” for their high salaries and residences in former estates of feudal lords, while the common people around them suffered. In one of his moral precepts he stated that a government leader, in order to carry out his office properly, must conduct himself frugally with utmost restraint and decorum, and “be on guard against extravagance,” as a role model for the people. But, he admonished, those leaders of the post-Restoration government who had installed themselves in stately residences, adorned themselves with the finest clothes, and “keep beautiful mistresses and contrive to enrich themselves,” could never accomplish the great tasks which comprised the very purpose of the Restoration.

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi (Helion, 2026) is now in production.
For professional guidance on Bakumatsu–Meiji Restoration history, see Historical Consulting.
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