While working on a novel on the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, Ryotaro Shiba wrote in 1967 that one of the prime features he wanted to highlight was the "almost ridiculous optimism" shared by top political and military leaders in Japan during the Meiji Era (1867-1911).
In the chronicle of the war, "Saka no Ue no Kumo" ("Cloud Above the Hill"), the 1993 recipient of the Order of Culture vividly described how these "unprecedented optimists" led an underdeveloped Japan to victory over one of the major European powers of the time.
Almost 30 years after Shiba, who died in 1996, completed the novel, William Naff, a professor emeritus of modern Japanese literature and history at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been appointed translator of the popular work under a program funded by the Japanese government.