Just about finished with this complicated and complex chapter, focusing on the Shinsengumi’s raid on the Ikedaya inn in the summer of 1864. I’ve been working on it for about three months – taking special care to give the most accurate and authentic account as possible of this extremely important event. As I wrote in my previous book about the Shinsengumi: Through the raid on the Ikedaya, the Shinsengumi probably delayed the Meiji Restoration by a year or so. “Had the Shinsengumi not achieved a great victory by attacking the Ikedaya,” Nagakura Shinpachi, a principal of the Shinsengumi, reportedly claimed, “the life of the Tokugawa Bakufu would have been that much shorter.” But the outrage it ignited among the anti-Bakufu side, led by Choshu, served to shore up a consensus for an all-out war against the Bakufu, marking a turning point in the revolution. And it is this fact that gives pause to the widespread notion that the Ikedaya Incident delayed the overthrow of the Bakufu and the Meiji Restoration, and rather lends support to the argument that it actually hastened that outcome.

“Think big! Create! Persevere!”