Admiral Togo: The Nelson of the East

Togo Heihachiro (1848–1934) was born into a feudal society that had withdrawn into seclusion for 250 years. As a teenage samurai, he witnessed the destruction wrought upon his native land by British warships. As the legendary "Silent Admiral," he was at the forefront of innovations in warfare, pioneering the Japanese use of modern gunnery and wireless communication. Togo is best known as the "Nelson of the East" for his resounding victory over the tsar’s navy in the Russo-Japanese War, but he also lived a remarkable life, studying at a British maritime college and witnessing the Sino-French War, the Hawaiian Revolution, and the Boxer Uprising. After his retirement, he was appointed to oversee the education of Emperor Hirohito.

This new biography spans Japan’s sudden, violent leap out of its self-imposed isolation and into the twentieth century. Delving beyond Togo’s finest hour at the Battle of Tsushima, it portrays the life of a diffident Japanese sailor in Victorian Britain; his reluctant celebrity in America, where he was laid low by Boston cooking and welcomed by his biggest fan, Theodore Roosevelt; his role in forgotten wars over the short-lived Republics of Ezo and Formosa; and the accumulation of peacetime experience that forged a wartime hero.

Jonathan Clements studied Chinese and Japanese at the University of Leeds before receiving a master’s degree from the University of Stirling. He has written books on many prominent figures in Asian history, including Marco Polo, Chairman Mao, Confucius, and the Japan volume in the Makers of the Modern World series on Prince Saionji.