This is history written in saddle sores and gunpowder. Algernon Mitford arrived in Japan as a young diplomat in 1867 and found himself embedded in the most extraordinary upheaval of the nineteenth century: the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the violent birth of the modern Japanese nation. With his colleague Ernest Satow, he trekked through snow-choked mountain passes, outran planned ambushes in Echizen, and navigated the assassin's streets of late-Tokugawa Yedo. He witnessed Osaka Castle burn, rode through hostile countryside as civil war engulfed the country, and stood among the chaos as the old order gave way to imperial rule. This is not the sanitized version of the Meiji Restoration you learned in school. This is the raw, perilous, darkly funny account of a British diplomat who simply tried to do his job while an empire collapsed around him. Mitford met the architects of modern Japan-Ito, Gotō, the exiled Prince of Tosa-and survived to tell the tale with the vivid irreverence of a man who clearly enjoyed the adventure far more than he perhaps should have.
