Teiichi Fukuda (福田 定一, August 7, 1923 – February 12, 1996), also known as Ryōtarō Shiba (司馬 遼太郎), was a Japanese author.

The magazine Shukan Asahi (ja:週刊朝日) printed Shiba's articles about his travels within Japan in a series that ran for 1,146 installments.

[3] Shiba was a prolific author who frequently wrote about the dramatic change Japan went through during the late Edo and early Meiji periods.

His most monumental works include Kunitori Monogatari, Ryoma ga Yuku (see below), Moeyo Ken, and Saka no Ue no Kumo, all of which have spawned dramatizations, most notably Taiga dramas aired in hour-long segments over a full year on NHK television.

He also wrote numerous essays that were published in collections, one of which—Kaidō wo Yuku—is a multi-volume journal-like work covering his travels across Japan and around the world.

[citation needed] Several of Shiba's works have been translated into English, including Drunk as a Lord: Samurai Stories (2001), his fictionalized biographies of Kukai (Kukai the Universal: Scenes from His Life, 2003) and Tokugawa Yoshinobu (The Last Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, 2004), as well as The Tatar Whirlwind: A Novel of Seventeenth-Century East Asia (2007) and Clouds Above the Hill (2012, 2013, 2014).

Kaidō wo Yuku (街道をゆく, "On the highways") is a series of travel essays initially published in Shūkan Asahi, a weekly magazine,[5] from 1971 until 1996.

Though mostly about different areas of Japan, the series includes several volumes on foreign lands as well—China, Korea, the Namban countries (Spain and Portugal), Ireland, the Netherlands, Mongolia, Taiwan, and New York.