I can hear you: Smaug, since you read the other nine books and you hated them all, why the HECK are you reading the tenth one?! Well, it's because I am a wishy-washy old grouch, that's why. I got this far, I might as well finish the series.
Man, where to start? Yet another extremely mediocre book with bad world-building, bad characters, and poorly done plot. Blatant spoilers ahead, by the way.
The whole Japanese thing does not work for John. He basically took the entire Japanese language, culture, climate etc. and tweaked things here and there to suit his tastes. Like how all Nihon-Jan are short and dark-haired, sit in a position uncomfortable to Westerners (in real Japanese culture they fold their legs underneath them--- you know, the tea ceremony position. In this book, they sit on their heels, legs apart, like a bunch of barbarians), drink green tea all the time, and have delusions of honor. And what John did for the language --- get this --- he took plain ol' Japanese and just made a few glaring grammatical and alphabetical inconsistencies. He altered the meaning of Will's nickname (Chocho, which means "a little" in Japanese and spelled "chiyo chiyo", means "butterfly" in Nihon-Jan) and for some reason against all grammar made the Nihon-Jan pronounce Horace's name as "Or'ss." I mean, WHAT?! Any dummy who knows even a little bit of the Hiragana alphabet can spell "Horace" in Japanese! I've studied hiragana, one of the Japanese alphabets, so I know quite a bit of pronunciation and such. And Horace could be said like this: Horasu. Not all that hard. I just don't understand how the Nihon-Jan language works. Also, may I add, "Nihon" means "Japan" in Japanese? How's that for originality!
More proof for bad language making: the Senshi class ("senshi" means "warrior" in Japanese) is the warrior class (just like feudal Japan), they call the Araluens "gaijin" (which literally means "foreigner"), and they call Halt "Halto" which has the letter L in it. The Japanese cannot pronounce the letter L. But apparently they make an exception for Halt but not for Will, whom they call "Wirru?" I get the feeling that John tried to combine all Asian languages to make the Nihon-Jan language, which would've worked fine if he hadn't made %99 of the culture Japanese. In fact, despite Nihon-Ja being extremely isolated for so long, most of the citizens can speak ENGLISH?! And that Alyss can speak Nihon-Jan?! Like, what the heck! If you stay away from each other for centuries, you can't speak each other's EXTREMELY DIFFERENT languages: rule of thumb.
The story was pretty lacking. It was almost exactly the same as ALL OTHER Ranger's Apprentice books with a castle/fortress and/or army. Will teaches the army some amazing, new, incredible effective way to fight (see Battle for Skandia) in which they become almost completely unbeatable. Halt hatches this sort of master plan. Horace either stands around scratching his head telling everyone how dumb he is, beats up people or displays his surprising cleverness in battle tactics. Literally the only reason they added Alyss an Evanlyn (whose name the Nihon-Jan misspell in a stupid way -- E-van-in or something like that when it should be Evu-anrin) was for them to acquire an extra army of apes for the rest of them --- again, an army that comes out of nowhere and is invincible. Also some romance where Evanlyn and Horace decide to get married (why would Evanlyn want to marry such a blockhead? Who knows?) but John could've done that in ANY OTHER BOOK. Also, a note on Horace's weapons: he lost his broadsword so he got a new, invincibly-forged one later. And then he slays a bunch of enemies with it. You know who would win if you pitted a katana-wielding samurai vs. a broadsword-wielding knight against each other? The samurai, of course! His blade is razor sharp and made for speedy slashes. Also, it's thin, so it can get into the cracks between the armor, AND they samurai SPECIFICALLY valued speed over force, so when Horace wins without a scratch, I just can't help but cringe. Nothing is right about the duels.
One more thing: the Nihon-Jan apparently don't battle all vs. all: each warrior finds another warrior to duel and then duels him until one of them dies. This is inconsistent with Japanese battling. In the 17th century, they fought like mad. It was total chaos, not honorable, organized duels.
The allied Nihon-Jan generals are noble, honorable, willing to give their lives for their even nobler cause, compassionate, and always cool under pressure, while the enemy Nihon-Jan as a whole are dim-witted, blindly obedient, or in the generals' cases, cowardly, greedy, cruel and out-of-control. Not a single enemy leader has any good qualities whatsoever. This is obviously unrealistic, because even HITLER had some good qualities, for crying out loud! He was a great leader of men, charismatic, and he even had a little girl over for strawberry cake because they shared the same birthday! D'awww! (That's not to say he wasn't the devil incarnate: he just wasn't bad ALL the time.)
The child, Mikeru, showed an astonishing amount or wisdom and knowing about weaponry, along with all the other farmers. Excuse me, I didn't get the impression that farmers, of all people, made it a point to study who weapons worked and what they should avoid when creating them. They had better things to do, after all, like providing food for their families.
As you've probably seen, this book annoyed me to near-death. I'm this far into the series, though, so I'm going to plow on --- mainly because it's a clean fantasy.
But if you skip this book, that's fine. Nothing happens that won't be explained in the next books.
And the worst part is, I was looking forwards to this one the most, since it was Japanese and stuff.