September 2026

If you have seen photographs of Kamakura, you have probably seen this one. A rider in medieval court dress, bow drawn, thundering down a sand track past a wooden target. Yabusame — mounted archery — at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū. It is spectacular, and it photographs beautifully, and almost every caption describes it the same way: samurai horseback archery, a demonstration of martial skill. That description is accurate and it misses the entire point. The remarkable thing is not the shooting. It…

Short answer first, because that is probably why you are here. Kazama Genba, Nezu Kamuro and Mochizuki Ayako are invented. No document records any of them. But the families they belong to — the Kazama, the Nezu and the Mochizuki — were real, and all three stood with Hōjō Tokiyuki, or stood close enough that the fiction is a reasonable one. So the characters are made up. Their placement is not. That is the easy part. The harder and more…

If you found this page after watching or reading The Elusive Samurai, you already know the name Godaiin Muneshige. You probably also know the verdict that comes attached to it: scum, monster, the worst man in the story. I understand the reaction. He betrayed a nine-year-old boy who had been placed in his care by a dying father — and that boy was his own sister’s son. But I have spent a long time with this episode now, and I…

If you have watched The Elusive Samurai (Nige Jōzu no Wakagimi), you know him as the antagonist: Ogasawara Sadamune, military governor of Shinano, a supernaturally gifted archer, and a distinctly strange man. If you have ever stood along the sand track at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura on the sixteenth of September and watched a rider in Kamakura-period hunting dress hit three targets at full gallop, you have seen something else entirely. These two things are the same thing. The riding…

I went to the Shingen-ko Festival in Kōfu because of a BBC documentary. The programme was about the fact that the retainer families of the Takeda — a clan destroyed in 1582 — still exist, still know who they are, and still gather. That struck me as worth seeing in person. So in 2026 I went. What I saw there sent me back to rewrite everything I thought I understood about a single sentence. The line A man in Takeda…

A car-free day trip from Tokyo — written for readers who arrived here through The Elusive Samurai. — If you have read The Elusive Samurai, you know how the story begins. Kamakura falls in 1333. A boy of the Hōjō house escapes and runs for Shinano, where a shrine priest called Suwa Yorishige takes him in. Two years later, Shinano rises. Most people who want to walk that story go to Suwa. That is the right instinct, and I have…

If you have been watching The Elusive Samurai, you have met Suwa Yorishige. He is the strange, laughing man who takes in a hunted eight-year-old boy and announces that this child will one day rule Japan. The manga makes him a prophet. That is fiction. But the real Yorishige was something stranger than a prophet, and the truth is not a softer version of the story — it is a harder one. He was a god. Not metaphorically. Institutionally. What…