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.

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.]

[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.
Explore my books at Books at a Glance.

I am pleased with the recent progress I have made in revising Samurai Revolution for a new edition. The revision reflects an enriched historiography grounded in expanded use of key primary sources, including the journals, letters, and memoirs of Katsu Kaishū, letters of Sakamoto Ryōma, Nakaoka Shintarō, and Saigō Takamori, and further analysis informed by leading Japanese historians. I’ll share publication updates as the project develops. Thank you to everyone following the work.

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.
Explore my books at Books at a Glance.