William Johnston was born in 1925 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He joined the Jesuit Order in 1943 and after completing his studies at the University of Dublin, travelled to Japan in 1951. There, he taught English literature while earning a PhD in Theology, and later wrote a number of books on religion and mysticism. He died in 2010 at the age of 85.

Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia Editor of The Times. He was born in 1969 and was educated at Oxford. He has been visiting Asia for eighteen years and since 1995 has lived in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent, first for the Independent and now for The Times. He has reported from twenty-one countries and several wars, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, East Timor, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Kosovo and Macedonia. His work has also appeared in the London Review of Books and the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of In The Time of Madness, an eyewitness account of the violence that interrupted in Indonesia in the 1990s, and People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.