the streets of Kyōto became an everyday phenomenon. According to the reminiscences of a ranking retainer of the Lord of Aizu, “the men of the Shinsengumi tied their topknots into great clumps of hair. When they walked against the wind the bushy ends would flare out wider, evoking an even more imposing spectacle.” Before long there were few, if any, in Kyōto, the nearby mercantile center of Ōsaka, or the surrounding areas who did not readily recognize them as the Tokugawa’s select and terrible band of swordsmen.
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There had always been rōnin throughout the Tokugawa era. Formerly rōnin were men of the samurai class who had, for one reason or another, intentionally or not, become separated from liege lord and clan. In short, they were “lordless samurai.” But the rōnin of the turbulent final years of Tokugawa rule—the biggest turning point in Japanese history—were a different breed altogether. They were far greater in number than their predecessors. And they did not necessarily derive from the samurai class. Many came from peasant households. Kondō Isami and Hijikata Toshizō are two of history’s most celebrated examples of peasants-turned-rōnin. The great majority of these latter-day rōnin, however, hailed from the lowest samurai ranks of their respective clans—most notably Mito in the east, Chōshū and Tosa in the west, and Satsuma and Kumamoto in the south. During an age when the entire nation faced unprecedented dangerous straits, most of these lower samurai were prohibited from participating in government or even voicing their opinions in official matters. Depending on their han, they were nominal samurai—permitted to wear the two swords and take family crests and names, but otherwise treated as commoners. Serizawa Kamo is a famous example of a nominal samurai who became a rōnin. Another is Sakamoto Ryōma, who came from a wealthy merchant-samurai family in Tosa.† These rōnin, in essence, quit the service of their daimyō, forfeiting the financial security and physical protection provided by their feudal lords for the freedom to participate in the dangerous national movement, often at the cost of their own lives. Like the leaders of the Rōshi Corps, most, if not all, of them were ardent xenophobes, raring to fight the foreigners.
The rōnin phenomenon of this era has been likened to a movement for social equality in a suppressive society. Many rōnin had been motivated more by a desire to wear the two swords and look like samurai than by lofty political aspirations. They fulfilled this desire by becoming rōnin under the false pretext of “loyalty.”
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As swordsmen, Kondō Isami and Hijikata Toshizō were perhaps technically inferior to certain of their subordinates in the corps—most notably the fencing genius Okita Sōji. But what they lacked in technical finesse they compensated for with strength of mind, courage, and an unyielding will to power. Their will to power, certainly their most formidable weapon, would time and again prove indomitable on the bloody streets of Kyōto.
For all its worth, however, when the will to power is combined with the germ of self-importance—the conviction that one is of greater worth than his fellow human beings—it tends to transform into the stuff of tragedy, often lethal to the host. Although not a pathogen in the biological sense, self-importance is a germ nonetheless; throughout the history of mankind it has been commonly carried by unscrupulous men, more often than not possessed of an unyielding will to power. Among them have been dictators, despots, conquerors, gang bosses, mass murderers, cult leaders—tyrants, criminals, and thugs, one and all—with a propensity to kill unrivaled by the mass majority whose unfortunate lot it has been to share with them the same time and space of their brief existence on this earth. What distinguishes Kondō, Hijikata, and certain other of their countrymen, friends and foes alike, and even including scoundrels such as Serizawa, from the unscrupulous club of murderous villains who have been bound neither by national border, historical era, nor social nor ethical mores is the stringent and unwritten Code of the Samurai, Bushidō, which they valued above all, including life itself, and by which they faithfully lived and died—although their interpretation of the code occasionally differed. But these men of the sword in the mid-nineteenth century, both the good and the bad, were heir to a rapidly changing society, when the age of the samurai and their noble code were fast declining, only to be replaced by the modern materialism of the encroaching West.
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In the spring of the third year of Bunkyū, 1863, the shōgun issued his long-awaited promise to the emperor to expel the foreigners by May 10. In April he traveled from Kyōto to Ōsaka, to board the Tokugawa warship Jundō Maru, commanded by Katsu Kaishū. It was Iémochi’s purpose to observe Ōsaka Bay from shipboard, with an eye to fortifying the coastal defenses in that vital region, so close to the sacred Imperial Capital. The Shinsengumi proceeded to Ōsaka to guard the shōgun.On May 9, the day before the promised deadline, Tokugawa authorities yielded to the demands of Great Britain for reparations to the victims of the Satsuma samurai at Namamugi. This, of course, gave the radicals at court and their samurai allies a perfect excuse to strike out against the Bakufu. The authorities, in turn, called for the shōgun to return to his capital in the east, not for their falsely expressed purpose of expelling the foreigners there, which was nothing but a ploy to appease the radicals in Kyōto, including the Son of Heaven himself, but to get Iémochi away from the dangerous situation in the west.
On May 10, to demonstrate their perfect loyalty to the emperor, and in preparation for the coming war against the Tokugawa, the Loyalists in Chōshū, that most radical of samurai clans, gathered at Shimonoseki, the southwesternmost point of their domain. The Strait of Shimonoseki separated the island of Kyūshū from the main island of Honshū. Foreign ships passed through this vital strait to travel from Yokohama to Nagasaki and on to Shanghai. On the evening of the tenth, two Chōshū warships fired upon an unsuspecting American merchant vessel in the strait. On the twenty-third of the same month, the Chōshū men shot at a French dispatch boat from their batteries along the Shimonoseki coast. Three days later they opened fire on a Dutch corvette in the same waters. While the Americans and the French had avoided casualties, the Dutch suffered four dead and five severely wounded.
Chōshū had taken it upon itself to enforce the shōgun’s xenophobic, and impossible, promise. By so doing, it usurped influence over the Imperial Court at the expense of Satsuma—and as a result further diminished Tokugawa authority in Kyōto. But retaliation was hard and fast. On June 1, an American warship out of Yokohama sank two Chōshū ships at Shimonoseki, damaged a third, and shelled a battery along the coast. Four days later two French warships entered the strait and destroyed several more batteries. To add insult to injury, some 250 French troops landed at Shimonoseki and temporarily occupied two of the remaining batteries. They destroyed more of the Chōshū guns, threw stores of gunpowder into the ocean, and looted swords, armor, helmets, and muskets, before reboarding their ships and departing the same day.
The swift and one-sided retaliation had taught the Chōshū men a hard lesson. Like samurai throughout Japan, they had always been confident that when it came to actual combat, the foreigners would be no match for their superior fighting spirit. This myth had been shattered in just five days by the superior military force of three foreign warships. These champions of Expel the Barbarians had once and for all realized that until they could eliminate the immense technological gap between themselves and the great foreign powers, their slogan was a pipe dream.
Serizawa and Kondō felt certain that they understood the situation in the Imperial Capital better than the authorities three hundred miles away at Edo Castle. On May 25, they petitioned the Bakufu to keep the shōgun in Kyōto. Their purpose was to avoid giving the radicals an excuse to attack the Bakufu as punishment for the shōgun’s returning to Edo without fulfilling his promise. But Serizawa and Kondō were mere war dogs of the Bakufu. Consequently, their petition was ignored. In mid-June, the shōgun sailed for Edo aboard the Jundō Maru.
It is an irony of history that the Shinsengumi and the Chōshū-led Loyalists shared the same great objective: expelling the foreigners for the sake of the emperor. However, the means
