Kaigai Shinwa seems to have enjoyed a broad circulation in late Tokugawa times, although exact figures are impossible to come by. As well, it helped create a whole genre of fictionalized or semi-fictionalized accounts of the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion in late Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan.
Some works in this genre, such as Iwagaki Gesshu's Saisei Kaishin
Hen were fantastic forms of escapist literature. Iwagaki, for example, has Tokugawa Nariaki leading an army overseas to chastise the British.
On the other hand, many works in this genre were serious writings that
depicted recent events with some degree of accuracy. But however accurate or inaccurate, they did much to shape popular Japanese images of key historical events and personages