leaders of the revolution were Sakamoto Ryōma and Takéchi Hanpeita, both from Tosa. I have written in detail about these and other Tosa men, as well as about the special relationship between the Yamanouchi and the Tokugawa, in Ryoma—Life of a Renaissance Samurai and in Samurai Tales.
¶ Kojien, the standard Japanese dictionary, defines shishi as (1) “a person of high purpose;” (2) “a person of high purpose who risks his own life for the nation or society.” Many of the shishi in Kyōto were rōnin. Most of the shishi during the final years of Tokugawa rule hailed from the Chōshū, Tosa, Satsuma, and Higo clans. But the term was by no means limited to Imperial Loyalists. Numerous supporters of the Tokugawa, including samurai of Mito, Fukui, Aizu, and the Shinsengumi, also called themselves shishi. Nor was the title limited to samurai; it was also claimed by peasants, merchants, and clerics who risked their lives on both sides of the revolution.
Loyal and Patriotic Corps
The situation in the Imperial Capital continued to deteriorate. Unruly rōnin flocked to Kyōto. Most were Imperial Loyalists with a vendetta against the Bakufu. All were men of high purpose. They wore two lethal swords at their left hip. They were raring to use their swords to expel the barbarians and punish the shōgun’s government for allowing them entrance. In the spring of 1863, as blood flowed and chaos reigned in the Imperial Capital, the shōgun was compelled to visit there—to report to the emperor his promise to expel the barbarians. The Bakufu instituted a new post—the protector of Kyōto. It was the official function of the protector of Kyōto to safeguard the Imperial Capital in preparation for the shōgun’s visit; but it was his true purpose to crush the enemies of the Tokugawa. Under the slogan “Loyalty and Patriotism,” the Bakufu enlisted rōnin in the east to subdue rōnin in the west. In vain, the government provided each man of the “loyal and patriotic” corps with a pittance of gold—an ill-conceived attempt to gain their loyalty. When the corpsmen proved no less possessed of anti-Tokugawa fervor than those they were commissioned to subdue, the protector of Kyōto and his bewildered allies in Edo balked.
Shōgun Tokugawa Iémochi could not expel the foreigners—his regime, and indeed Japan as a whole, lacked the military means to do so. The bitter truth of Japan’s weakness vis-à-vis foreign nations had long been expressed by no less an authority on Western military power than Katsu Kaishū.* A decade earlier, in the face of Perry’s gunboat diplomacy and while most men in Japan blindly opposed Open the Country, Kaishū, then an obscure Tokugawa retainer, had submitted a letter to the Bakufu. In this famous document he expressed the urgent and unavoidable necessity for Edo to lift its centuries-old ban on the construction of large oceangoing vessels and to develop a modern navy. To this end, international trade would be imperative to raise capital for building warships and manufacturing Western-style guns. Although these and other of Kaishū’s proposals were adopted by the Bakufu during the 1850s, in the spring of 1863—and for years to follow—Japan was still a technologically backward nation. While most of his countrymen ranted and raved about expelling the foreigners through virtue of their “samurai spirit,” Katsu Kaishū, always ahead of his time, continued to profess that without foreign assistance—i.e., modern military technology—Japan could not hope to stand up to Great Britain, France, Russia, or the United States. Unless Japan prepared itself for the future, it would share the fate of China and India, under the yoke of foreign subjugation. Kaishū knew, as did a small handful of other farsighted men both within and outside the Tokugawa camp, that Edo’s proposed promise to expel the foreigners was at best appeasement, at worst deception, of the Imperial Court.
Lord Matsudaira Katamori was less concerned with the bitter truth of Japan’s weakness than with protecting the shōgun. The Matsudaira family of Aizu Han were among the Tokugawa Bakufu’s staunchest allies. As one of the Related Houses, their crest displayed the three hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa. At age twenty-seven, the Edo-born Lord Katamori, head of the House of Matsudaira and daimyō of Aizu, was appointed protector of Kyōto. His first task upon assuming his new post was to safeguard the streets of Kyōto in preparation for Iémochi’s visit. At the end of 1862, the second year of the era of Bunkyū, the Bakufu authorities had devised a plan to assist him. In former days they would have deployed samurai of the Edo camp to suppress the renegades in Kyōto. But now the authorities came up with a novel idea. For the first time in its history, the Tokugawa Bakufu officially recruited rōnin, whom the authorities generally referred to by the preferred term rōshi, to suppress the renegades.† To this end, the Bakufu proclaimed a general amnesty, whereby even incarcerated criminals deemed worthy were set free to enlist. By February hundreds of men, whose majority hailed from the east, had been recruited into the Rōshi Corps to serve the shōgun in the troubled west.
In April of the previous year, Shimazu Hisamitsu, the father of the Satsuma daimyō and de facto ruler of that powerful clan, had led an army of one thousand men into Kyōto in an unprecedented display of military might by an outside lord. Hisamitsu, a sometimes ally of the Tokugawa, urged the Imperial Court to accept Edo’s much vaunted call for a Union of Court and Camp. By uniting with Kyōto to shore up national strength against the foreign threat, Edo hoped to regain its unchallenged authority of the past. The reasoning: once the union had been completed, the Imperial Loyalists could no longer oppose the Bakufu, for so doing would be tantamount to siding against the Imperial Court. Lord Hisamitsu, meanwhile, had ulterior motives. In his role as great mediator, he would strengthen his influence at Edo and gain prestige at Kyōto, at the expense of his Chōshū rivals.
Upon his arrival in the Imperial Capital, Lord Hisamitsu, as he fully expected, was commanded by the court to reestablish order there—which, of course, was the paramount desire of Emperor Kōmei. Lord Hisamitsu was therefore vexed to learn of a planned uprising by radical samurai, including twenty of his own vassals. These radicals would invade the Imperial Palace and assassinate supporters of the Tokugawa, whom they claimed had “infested” the court. They had been waiting for the Satsuma host to arrive, counting on the support of Hisamitsu, whom they assumed had come to declare war on the Bakufu. When the rebels learned that they had misjudged Hisamitsu’s intent, they gathered at the Terada’ya inn, in the town of Fushimi just south of Kyōto, to finalize their war plans. Hisamitsu appointed a squad of nine Satsuma samurai, all expert swordsmen, to proceed to the Terada’ya and bring their twenty errant brethren back to Satsuma’s Kyōto headquarters. The result was the notorious fratricidal sword battle at the Terada’ya inn, the first, though unsuccessful, attempt at a military uprising aimed directly at the Tokugawa Bakufu.‡
Among the planners of the failed uprising was a rōnin named Kiyokawa Hachirō. Kiyokawa was the eldest son of a family of wealthy saké brewers of Shōnai Han in northern Japan. He disliked his family business, pursuing instead his passion for the martial and literary arts. He studied at the celebrated Chiba Dōjo, one of the three great fencing academies in Edo,§ and became a renowned swordsman licensed to teach the Hokushin Ittō style. Kiyokawa was also a noted Confucian scholar who taught his subject at his private academy in Edo. He was a charismatic speaker, with flashing eyes and a tall, slender frame. He was a man of political ambition who, like many of his peers, censured the Edo regime for its weakness in dealing with foreigners. Kiyokawa was particularly outspoken in his anti-Tokugawa views. He was a man of strong conviction, and it seems that he also had a short temper. One evening at dusk, as he walked through the center of Edo after an afternoon of heavy drinking, he nearly collided with a man coming from the opposite direction. The man carried a walking stick, with which he attempted to strike the samurai. The samurai lost his temper. The next instant he drew his sword, and with one clean stroke beheaded the man with the walking stick.
The
