Shiba Ryotaro

Shiba Ryotaro was the most widely read historical novelist in modern Japan and shaped how the country understands its own nineteenth century more than any professional historian. He was born Teiichi Fukuda in Osaka and took his pen name from Sima Qian, the Han historian, meaning roughly far short of Shiba - a deliberate statement of modesty about a man he considered unreachable. He studied Mongolian at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, was conscripted as a tank commander, and spent the end of the war in northern Honshu waiting for an American landing with equipment he knew to be useless; he said afterwards that his life's work grew out of asking why the Japanese of 1945 had become so foolish, when the Japanese of the Meiji period had not been. He worked as a newspaper reporter before turning to fiction full time. Ryoma Goes His Way, on the Bakumatsu activist Sakamoto Ryoma, effectively created that figure's modern popularity. Clouds Above the Hill, serialised in the Sankei Shimbun between 1968 and 1972, follows three men from Matsuyama - two soldiers and a poet - from the Meiji Restoration to the Russo-Japanese War, and treats the victory over Russia as the last moment before the country lost its footing. Historians have criticised the resulting Shiba view of history as too admiring of Meiji and too forgiving of what followed. He refused for decades to let the book be filmed, on the grounds that it would become nationalist spectacle, and NHK adapted it only after his death. He wrote more than fifty books and travel essays. His non-fiction series Kaido wo Yuku ran for twenty-five years. The Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum in Osaka was built by Tadao Ando around the study he worked in, with the books left where they were.

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