Portrayal of Momotarō as a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army fighting hostile nations was already happening by the (First) Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The Momotaro tale was altered by Iwaya Sazanami in 1894 so that the "oni" lived to the northeast of Japan, a thinly veiled reference to Qing China given the then current geopolitics. Iwaya was not purely a major figure in children's literature, but a government official working as the head of the editorial bureau of the Ministry of Education, since 1878. Iwaya would later pen a whole book of essay on the use of Momotaro as an instructional tool, "Momotarō-shugi no kyōiku" ("the Education Theory Based on Principles in Momotaro", 1915).