{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://kohopeh.com/blog/on_the_accuracy_of_dates",
  "description": "Sengoku Japan, Ayutthaya Thailand, getting the details right.",
  "path": "/blog/on_the_accuracy_of_dates",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-17T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:uegcbc2rfvudyawyn7zlaku5/site.standard.publication/3miiejufsbd2c",
  "tags": [
    "writingresearch",
    "japan",
    "thailand",
    "siam"
  ],
  "textContent": "On the accuracy of dates, and of historical details\n\nAs a writer of historical fiction, I believe dates and locations are key markers, and I try not to fudge them. Dates come in differing flavours: You have the very set date of a beheading or a tsunami; you have dates which are academically contested, such as whether N. is born is 1583, 1584, or 1581-1582; and the made-up dates that will stitch the story inside its context. Locations come in similar flavours.\n\nIn THE K BOOK project, I had to choose a well-considered date for the birth of N., as the difference in age with O. is important to their relationship, but it is also, as far as I understand, the most consensual date. I did fudge one date for Hon'ami Kōetsu by 3 years to better fit the story. No spoiler: The event did happen, and for the political reasons I am sketching in the book, but they took place 3 years later in real life, out of the time window for these characters.\n\nThen there is the shifting reality of the calendar itself. In the 16th century, the lunar calendar meant dates weren't static pegs; months could be twenty-nine or thirty days, and leap months were periodically inserted to keep the year in sync with the seasons. This is why even scholars of the period still argue whether a given event happened in 1583 or 1582. And people being one year old at birth. And years being collected in eras, as defined by the reigning emperor.\n\nThis temporal fluidity was compounded by the literal weight of distance. Travel time is not a rounding error in my plots; it is a narrative constraint. A character moving from Kyoto to Edo, or from Vimaya to Ayutthaya's harbour, wasn’t just 'traveling', people were disappearing into a tactical vacuum for days or weeks, cut off from news and reinforcements by the physical limits of a horse or a boat, or their own two legs. Unless the trip becomes the narrative as with the first 3 chapters of THE K BOOK. \n\nIn the end, I am no historian, I am a story-teller: try to get right, or at the least not wrong, but let the story dictate.\n\nOne has to be careful around dates and locations, but they are not the hard part. What is a danger to the writer of historical fiction is what you assume implicitly in the flow of writing. 'She wrote the letter...' Ah, non, wait, ordinary people at the time didn't routinely write or receive letters. What would she have done then? One educated character in Japan 1600 might actually have taken the brush and wetted the ink stone. Another in Vimaya 1500 might have called a young boy playing Mak Khum [^1] in the mud with his friends, and sending him on an errand for the price of a sweet. Details matter for immersion, as you want the reader to concentrate on the key question: the why not the what, when, where.\n[^1]: a sort of mancala game where players take turns moving beans in small shallow, holes.",
  "title": "On the accuracy of dates, and of historical details"
}