Japan’s victory over Russia in their 1904-5 war, on land and at sea, is well documented. Less well-known is the superior Japanese performance in the then nascent field of public diplomacy. While the Russians made little effort to secure the sympathies of the other Powers, the emerging force that was Meiji Japan sent one leading English-speaking figure to the US and another to Europe, each to engage actively in the local political discourse on behalf of their country. Matsumura tells the story of Baron Kencho Suematsu, the Japanese politician, diplomat, journalist and historian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who was sent to London to carry out the European part of the plan. A Cambridge-educated renaissance man, he was in his very person the disproval of European perceptions of Japanese inferiority.

In dispatching Suematsu the Japanese sought to nip in the bud western European sympathy with their fellow Christians. As one French commentator put it at the start of the conflict, “God cannot do otherwise than give victory to the Russians, for they are only schismatics, whilst the Japanese are terrible pagans!” That this sentiment was proven wrong was down to Japan’s refusal to leave any aspect of the struggle to divine providence. Suematsu wrote letters and articles for the British, French and German newspapers, gave erudite lectures on a wide variety of topics, some directly relevant to the war, some less so, and pressed Japan’s case with the movers and shakers of the day.

Matsumura summarises Suematsu’s activities well, and appropriately reproduces in places some of the Baron’s finer writing or speeches. The deficiency is the shortage of third party assessment of whether Suematsu’s mission achieved its aims; Matsumura’s attribution of success because of the absence of a surge of pro-Russian sentiment is insufficient in the absence of a counterfactual. 

This book is one for the historian or at least amateur version thereof, not the general reader. But it is a welcome addition to the English language material on the Russo-Japanese war, and an insight into the very astute political leadership that Japan enjoyed at that time. A quality of leadership that has sadly not been matched by any of the subsequent generations.

The crafting of new tales for another writer’s character is a well-established literary tradition, although not one always done with success. Dale Furutani takes on the considerable challenge of adding adventures for Sherlock Holmes and emerges triumphant, temporarily relocating Conan Doyle’s legendary amateur detective to the mountain resort of Karuizawa in Meiji-era Japan. Such a move might have felt strained, but with Furutani’s feel for language, character, Japan and Holmes it is pulled off with an elegant plausibility. 

Hiding out in Japan from the threat to his life posed by the now deceased Moriarty’s surviving criminal network, Holmes adopts one of his Conan Doyle aliases, “Mr Sigerson”, and as this Norwegian explorer is secreted in the home of an English-speaking Japanese doctor, Junichi Watanabe. Together they form a formidable pair, solving mysteries and murders involving locals and westerners, deepening their understanding of each other and each other’s culture as they do so. If Holmes, or rather Sigerson-san, remains an elusive if distinctive silhouette, it is Watanabe-sensei whose character is given greater depth as the book proceeds. The cultural clashes are interesting and amusing, but with the restraint of manner and the attention to detail Japanese culture and Sherlock Holmes are not entirely unsuited. 

Each of the stories in this book is well-crafted and impressively distinct from the others. Given the volume of rubbish on Japanese television it is surprising that some NHK executive has not decided to commission a short series based on these tales, which would no doubt be greatly enjoyed by a Japanese audience. If the book has a weakness it is that the drama never reaches the highest pitch; the twists in the tale being more gentle curves. Nevertheless, Mr Furutani has created readable, entertaining new stories about the great detective, and that was far from elementary.

David Gaughran's "Let's Get Digital" was the Bible for many of us who self-published our novels, and I am one of many who owe this author a debt of gratitude. Is the follow-up, "Let's Get Visible", as good? Well, no, but it's clearly written and worth reading for the tips it has on digital book promotion that can only help those of us still struggling to get the word(s) out. As sequels go this may not be Godfather II, but it's not Legally Blonde II either. 

Gaughran goes in detail into how the Amazon sales ranking works (just sales - reviews, free downloads and price don't make a difference), as well as how Amazon creates its recommendations, popularity lists, top rated charts and category best sellers. This is all valuable information for the self-published author, even if some of it you probably worked out for yourself. "Let's Get Visible" also discusses the now diminished power to boost sales through free download offers, and explains promotions, advertising, KDP Select and other relevant issues and tools. It's a comprehensive guide to all that the self-published author needs to know.

Thanks to this book I adjusted the categories in which "Milligan and the Samurai Rebels" was listed, and after a few good days reached as high as #4 on Amazon UK's Political>Humour bestseller list. Not quite fame and fortune, but thanks to this book I have indeed become more visible.

Anyone interested in the late Edo period of Japanese history owes a debt of gratitude to Romulus Hillsborough, who in Samurai Tales: Courage, Fidelity and Revenge in the Final Years of the Shogun, as in his other work "Shinsengumi", brings to an English audience fascinating material otherwise unavailable. This is not to say that the book is perfect. Again, Hillsborough shows himself a better historical researcher than a writer, and he demonstrates here an excessive reverence for any samurai conduct, even when it is more worthy of condemnation or ridicule.
"Samurai Tales" is a series of vignettes: pen portraits of characters and incidents from the mid-19th century, when Westerners had forcibly returned to Japanese shores and the Tokugawa Shogunate was crumbling as a result. There were plenty of interesting incidents and characters during those turbulent times, and many are documented in these pages. I particularly "enjoyed", if that is the right word, the chapter on official execution, a task handed down in one family from father to son, with each executioner named after his predecessor. By the 1860s the post was held by Yamada Asaemon VII, being the 7th generation, and the monopoly on the manufacture and sale of medicine made from human liver - livers cut out of executed corpses - was also passed down. A yucky but lucrative family business. 
The book suffers a little from too much stylistic innovation, with "Settings" and "Players" listed at the beginning of each chapter, and italicised psychological editorials inserted at the front and often elsewhere too in each tale. The latter in particular should have been dispensed with. Hillsborough is also for my taste too in awe of his subjects: their courage and their willingness to sacrifice for a cause may be admirable, but respect for those who value human life so cheaply should surely be tempered. Young samurai playing a version of Russian roulette to demonstrate their bravery is an example not of nobility but of stupidity. Samurai behaviour that is absurd is never held up as such: the tendency of the great hero Ryoma Sakamoto to pee in friends' front gardens when departing their houses is reported straight-faced and as a further sign of his greatness.
The main joy in "Samurai Tales" is in the information unearthed, rather than in how the stories are told, but for any fan of this period there is more than enough of that joy to justify purchase of this book.

Modern Tokyo is an unusual but fitting setting for a thriller, and long-term resident Hugh Ashton is sufficiently familiar with its physical and cultural nooks and crannies to create an authentic fictional version of the city. Ashton’s use of an IT geek everyman, Kenneth Sharpe, as his protagonist is a successful choice, and At the Sharpe End nicely captures both life for a westerner in the Japanese capital and the sense of an ordinary person caught in events beyond his control. 

The plot revolves around a Japanese IT genius who has made an invention desired by several national governments and the Japan-based Korean underworld. Sharpe is unwittingly drawn into this mess and retains an endearingly anti-establishment, phlegmatic approach as he moves step by step towards life-threatening danger. The other principal characters - Sharpe’s wife and the Indian couple who are their best friends - also work well, being clearly delineated and rounded figures. This reader at least still has the hots for Vishal’s wife Meema and would have found it difficult to be as restrained as Kenneth Sharpe. The secondary characters are perhaps less successful, with none of the gangsters, policeman or diplomats that feature quite finding their own voice, but they serve their purpose in keeping the plot moving.

As a former employee of the British Embassy in Tokyo I took particular pleasure in seeing its fictional diplomats embroiled in an international criminal conspiracy. My own spell at the Embassy pales into tedium in comparison.

Does spelling matter? That's the titular question posed by a new book from Oxford academic Simon Horobin, reviewed in The Guardian today. Most of us would surely say "yes":  a free-for-all might have some appeal to those who struggle with their orthography, but reading would become pretty tough if the spelling of words differed wildly from one document to the next. Ever tried reading Chaucer in the original? And the distinctions between "discreet" and "discrete", "where" and "wear" and many other homonyms would be lost if there were no established orthodoxy.
Of course there is some difference between even correct spelling across the varieties of English. American spelling tends to be simpler than the British, but then it has to be (I kid my dear cousins, I kid). Frankly, living as I do in Japan, a non-English speaking country where American English is the most common form of the language, I find myself looking at my extra Us and the additional "-me" on the end of "programme" and thinking it would be a great deal easier if all forms of English agreed to use Daniel Webster's version. But then I catch myself, like Luke realising he has one black glove.
Horobin makes the good point that English spelling, while infuriating at times, has value because it captures the history of the language. Too true - we Brits at least have all those superfluous Us to remind us of our Norman overlords, and can draw on sturdy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary when referring to our current rulers.
In my view, a common orthography, shared at least among users of each version of English, is needed for the same reason that a shared grammar and even a shared literary canon are needed: they provide common ground for us to communicate.
As for the apocryphal end to a job application letter, "I look forward to herring from you shorty", why assume it was a spelling mistake? Just reply "We're out of herring fatty; will you accept haddock?"

If ever a historical figure was the right man at the wrong time, Yoshinobu Tokugawa - the last Shogun - must be him. In Ryotaro Shiba’s novelistic history, “Keiki”, as he is most commonly referred to in this book, was an intelligent, articulate, charismatic leader who would have been a great Shogun; at any time other than that at which he assumed the office. 

Keiki was born into an offshoot of the Tokugawa family that made his chances at birth of later becoming Shogun extremely small. However, succession was more flexible than simple primogeniture, and Keiki’s adoption into another branch of the family and the deaths of other contenders made him the logical choice for Shogun when the vacancy arose in 1858. Pressured by foreign forces and internal dissent, at that stage there was still probably an opportunity for a strong Shogun to reunite the country and secure the future of Tokugawa rule. But the Shogunate advisors feared Keiki’s very strength, and opted instead for his malleable teenage cousin. After eight years of civil strife and poor leadership, upon the cousin’s death the advisors turned in desperation to the candidate they had previously stymied, but it was too late. Not only was it impossible by 1866 even for a man like Keiki to maintain the status quo, but a strong Shogun such as Keiki paradoxically ruled out the House of Tokugawa playing some reduced role in the new constitutional arrangements that followed the restoration of Imperial rule in 1868. 

Shiba is seen by the Japanese as one of their best writers in any genre, but sadly not many of his books are available in English. While at times his playful style does feel very much translated in this English edition, he has a talent for character that will engross anyone interested in the fascinating period that was the end of the Shogunate and the birth of modern Japan. Ryotaro Shiba vividly captures both Keiki’s greatness and his contradictions. Highly recommended historical biography.

The next installment of the “Milligan” novels may not quite rank up there for expectation with the return of the Son of God or even The Stone Roses’s follow-up attempt (vaingloriously and gloriously entitled The Second Coming), but it is quite a big thing in my little world. So at this very early stage of writing my new novel I thought I would share a few observations on what is, or at least seems different this time around.

1. The pressure of the first time is gone. As with other activities, the first time can be daunting. Performance anxiety seems to diminish.
2. There’s a fear instead that maybe the first time was as good as I’ll ever get. Plenty of writers’ first books were their best. Joseph Heller was once asked by a mean-spirited journalist how it felt to have failed to write anything as good as “Catch 22” in the years that followed that book’s publication. “Not so bad” he replied, “I mean who has?” Great retort, but I fear that the quality of “Milligan and the Samurai Rebels”, proud of that novel as I am, is not sufficient to allow me to paraphrase Heller if my next books disappoint.
3. My planning has become more structured. I now have a better idea what ingredients are needed to make a story come together. Less time is needed to fret over writing style and characters, since those questions were mostly answered with the first novel. Instead I can worry about the story arc, the balance between the true history and the fiction, and how I’m going to get enough sex into the book.
4. I’m doing less editing as I go along. All the guidance says something along the lines of “don’t obsess about the editing as you write it, just bash on through to the end and then edit”. Sorry, couldn’t do it. For my first novel, the first page was the only page of my creative writing in existence (or at least since ‘O’ Level English classes) so I couldn’t cope with it being imperfect. I spent months on the first thirty pages, and the final version bears only a passing similarity to the first stab. And I don’t think this was a mistake; I needed to find a writing style and get the character of Milligan right. Bashing on through to the end of the plot would have been a mistake. That doesn’t apply this time, so bash on I will.

The stuff that stays the same? Mainly not having enough time to write the bloody thing.