of thought came to the fore. Kaikoku (Open the Country) was the official policy at Edo. Jōi (Expel the Barbarians) was violently advocated by the vast majority of samurai throughout Japan. Four domains stood at the vanguard of the antiforeign movement: Mito, Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa. As close relatives of the Tokugawa, the Mito rulers would never oppose the Bakufu. (Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, a son of the Lord of Mito, would become the last shōgun in 1866.) Meanwhile, the antiforeignism embraced by the Imperial Loyalists of Chōshū, Satsuma, and Tosa transformed into an anti-Tokugawa, nationalistic movement. At first they advocated Sonnō-Jōi (Imperial Reverence and Expel the Barbarians), which they eventually replaced with the more radical battle cry Kinnō-Tōbaku (Imperial Loyalism and Down with the Bakufu).
Chōshū, Satsuma, and Tosa were among the most powerful han in Japan. The Mōri family of Chōshū and the Shimazu family of Satsuma were bitter rivals, but they had borne a common and deep resentment of the Tokugawa for these past two and a half centuries. Both had been subjugated by the Tokugawa since Sekigahara. But the rulers of Chōshū had fared much worse at the hands of the victorious shōgun than had their counterparts in Satsuma. The Mōri’s vast landholdings had been reduced by two-thirds, while the Shimazu had been permitted to retain their entire domain. Since the income of the samurai was based on the rice yield of their domain, the Chōshū samurai felt the pain of Iéyasu’s punishment for the following two and a half centuries. It was probably for this reason that after the fall of the Bakufu, Satsuma tended to favor more lenient treatment of the Tokugawa than did Chōshū. Meanwhile, the Tosa daimyō, Yamanouchi Yōdō, found himself in a unique, if not wholly desirable, situation. He owed his very position as Lord of Tosa to the goodwill of the first Tokugawa Shōgun. Iéyasu had awarded Yōdō’s ancestor fifteen generations past with the vast Tosa domain, not for aiding him, but rather for not opposing him. Accordingly, while Lord Yōdō would never officially oppose Tokugawa rule, many Tosa samurai would.§
The majority of antiforeign samurai in Kyōto hailed from Chōshū, Tosa, and Satsuma. These men developed close relationships with radical nobles of the Imperial Court. They advocated Imperial Loyalism and Down with the Bakufu. They rallied around the Son of Heaven, a chronic xenophobe. They murdered Tokugawa representatives and sympathizers with an equal vengeance. Screaming “Tenchū”—Heaven’s Revenge—they severed their victims’ heads, mounted them atop bamboo stakes, and exposed them to the elements and public derision along the Kamogawa River near Sanjō Bridge.
The fear of things foreign among Emperor Kōmei and his court was based on ignorance. They had never been away from the Imperial Capital, and the emperor rarely left the idyllic confines of his palace. None of them had ever seen the ocean or, of course, the great ships that carried the “barbarians” to Japan. They had heard rumors of the foreigners, ridiculous as they were gruesome. Foreigners were monsters with long noses, round eyes, and red or yellow hair, who partook of human flesh and who harbored unholy designs on the sacred empire of Yamato.
Their ignorance notwithstanding, the emperor and his court were painfully aware of the Treaty of Nanking. Neither they nor the Loyalist samurai who revered the emperor believed that the encroachment of Western nations would stop with China. If British warships could bring to its knees the great Middle Kingdom, which had stood at the vanguard of civilization and culture since ancient times, certainly Japan faced similar peril.
Many of the Imperial Loyalists were rōnin, samurai who had quit the service of their lord. They claimed that Emperor Kōmei was the true and rightful ruler of Japan, although his ancestors had not held political power for a thousand years. The Loyalists, self-styled shishi—“men of high purpose”¶—professed that the Tokugawa Shōgun was merely an imperial agent whose ancestor had been commissioned by the emperor to protect Japan from foreign invasion. But the present shōgun and his councilors had upset the emperor by failing to deal firmly with the foreigners. If the Bakufu was unable to keep the foreigners out, the emperor and his court must be restored to power to save the nation. National politics gradually developed into a twofold structure: while the Bakufu continued to rule at Edo, the Imperial Court underwent a political renaissance at Kyōto.
The situation exploded in June 1858—the fifth year of Ansei—when Edo signed a commercial treaty without imperial sanction. The Loyalists cried lése-majesté. They charged treason. They vowed to punish the wicked Tokugawa officials who were responsible. The man they most hated was the Tokugawa regent, Ii Naosuké, Lord of Hikoné, who had usurped power two months earlier. Just before the subsequent death of the feebleminded Shōgun Tokugawa Iésada, the regent arranged for a twelve-year-old prince of the Kii domain, Tokugawa Iémochi, to succeed him. Under the boy-shōgun, the dictatorial regent ruled with an iron fist.
Regent Ii was determined that his enemies would not interfere with his plans. He unleashed his infamous Ansei Purge, the extent of which was unprecedented in scope and severity. Nearly one hundred shishi were arrested. A number of them were either executed or perished in prison. But Ii was not the devil incarnate his enemies believed he was, as indicated by a document handed down by the Ii family.
Fighting [the foreigners] and being defeated, and [as a result] having our country rent asunder, would bring the worst possible disgrace upon our nation. Which would be the graver—refusing [a treaty] and causing ourselves eternal disgrace, or concluding a treaty without imperial sanction, and so sparing our nation from eternal disgrace? At the present time neither our coastal defenses nor our armaments are sufficient. Our only choice for the time being is to concede [to a treaty], as the lesser of two evils. The aim of the Imperial Court is to avoid national disgrace. The Bakufu has been entrusted with the administration of the country. Those who administer the affairs of state must sometimes act with expediency as occasion demands. However, Naosuké is determined to bear upon himself the responsibilities of the grave crime of not obtaining imperial sanction.
Regent Ii would pay for his “grave crime” the following spring. On the unseasonably snowy morning of March 3, 1860 (the first and only year of the era of Man’en), the regent was assassinated by a band of swordsmen—seventeen from Mito, one from Satsuma—as his palanquin approached Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle. The authority by which the Tokugawa had ruled Japan these past two and a half centuries seemed to evaporate into thin air as the regent’s hot blood melted the freshly fallen snow just outside the castle gate and news of the Sakurada Gate Incident shocked the nation. If the most powerful man in Edo could be cut down by a small band of assassins, there was no limit to the havoc that hundreds, or even thousands, of rōnin could wreak throughout Japan.
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‡ Tokugawa Iémitsu, ruled 1623–1651.
§ 1 koku = 44.8 U.S. gallons.
¶ Tokugawa Yoshimuné, the eighth shōgun, added three additional branch houses to strengthen the foundation of his family’s rule. These were the Hitotsubashi, Tayasu, and Shimizu families. None of these additional three branch families possessed a provincial castle, but rather they lived permanently in Edo.
* New eras were promulgated to mark an extraordinary occasion or occurrence, such as the enthronement of an emperor, a good omen, or a natural disaster. The era name reflects the zeitgeist of the era. (Kojien)
† The Treaty of Peace and Amity is also known as the Treaty of Kanagawa, after the town where it was concluded.
‡ In Edo Bay.
