at the foreign government offices, march some ninety miles west of Edo to the domain of Kōfu, and capture that castle as a military base from which to finally wage war against the foreigners. When the Bakufu received word of the plot, the order for Kiyokawa’s assassination was issued.
One morning in mid-April, two days before the planned uprising, Kiyokawa brushed off admonishments by friends that his life was in danger. He had an important appointment to keep at the home of a friend whom he intended to recruit for the Yokohama attack. But this friend turned out to be a traitor who had informed the Bakufu of the plan. The traitor made sure that Kiyokawa was treated to a generous amount of saké. When his intoxicated guest stood up to leave in the late afternoon, the host insisted on accompanying him along the way, citing the danger to his life.
Kiyokawa was ambushed shortly afterward by six swordsmen of the Tokugawa camp. He screamed, perhaps the name of one of his assailants, Sasaki Tadasaburō, whom he recognized as a fencing instructor at the Bakufu’s Military Academy.¶ Before Kiyokawa could draw his sword, he was cut from behind. Blood sprayed from his body as he collapsed on the street.
With Kiyokawa’s death, the planned attack on Yokohama was foiled. When word of the assassination reached a fellow conspirator, he became worried. Kiyokawa had been carrying a list of the five hundred men involved in the plot. If this list were to fall into the hands of the Edo authorities, all five hundred would be implicated, including the fellow conspirator. He rushed to the scene of the assassination. He found the body of his friend sprawled on the cruel ground. The swords were still in their scabbards. The body was dressed in wide trousers of gray stripes, and a black coat lined with silk. On the right side of the corpse was the severed head, the black hair still tied in a topknot. Nearby was a military helmet made of black lacquered cypress. The backside of the body was sliced open horizontally. A deep gash on the left shoulder was visible, and the right side was cut open cleanly to the nape of the neck. The right arm extended outward. Next to the right hand was an iron-ribbed fan, as if Kiyokawa had been holding it when attacked.
The fellow conspirator immediately searched through the pockets. To his great relief, he found the list. Wary of being discovered, he was eager to vacate the scene. But he felt obligated to at least give the head a proper burial. He removed the black coat. He wrapped the head in the coat, and carried the grim package to Yamaoka’s house. Yamaoka preserved the head in sugar. He hid it in the closet, but after a few days the stench became unbearable. Soon a local police officer cast a suspicious eye. To avoid detection, Yamaoka hid the head in a garbage bin, but the stench remained. When he attempted to grasp the head by the hair to remove it from the bin, the strands came out and he lost his grip. But he managed to bring the head to the adjacent training hall, where he removed one of the wooden planks and buried it under the floor. Now the smell permeated the training hall, so that he was compelled to bury it beneath a large silverberry tree behind his house. Yamaoka eventually secured a gravesite at nearby Denzūin Temple, from where Kiyokawa Hachirō and his “loyal and patriotic” corps had set out for Kyōto two months earlier.
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* See Appendix I (1).
† The rō of both terms literally means “wave” (the gist being “wandering aimlessly”). The nin of rōnin simply means “person,” while the shi of rōshi means “samurai.”
‡ For a detailed account of this incident, see Ryoma—Life of a Renaissance Samurai.
§ See Appendix I (2).
¶ Not to be confused with Matsudaira Katamori, Lord of Aizu and protector of Kyōto.
* Later Yamaoka Tesshū.
† The Rōshi Corps arrived in Kyōto on February 23 on the Chinese calendar, April 10 on the Gregorian calendar.
‡ The Ashikaga Bakufu ruled from 1338 to 1573.
§ For a detailed account of the Namamugi Incident, also known as the Richardson Affair, see Samurai Tales.
¶ Sasaki’s name would live in infamy, not as an assassin of Kiyokawa Hachirō, but as one of the alleged murderers of Sakamoto Ryōma.
Newly Selected Corps
Shinsengumi—literally Newly Selected Corps. Certainly the thirteen men who comprised the original membership were select. Under the supervision of the protector of Kyōto, the men of the Shinsengumi were commissioned to patrol the city day and night. They were not yet officially empowered with the authority to kill. But they shared a tacit understanding with their master that, added to their original purposes of expelling the barbarians and protecting the shōgun, was their more immediate task of restoring law and order by destroying the enemies of the Tokugawa.
The Shinsengumi were led by two extraordinarily strong-willed men. Kondō Isami and Serizawa Kamo were bitter rivals. Both had been chief instructors of their respective fencing schools, and both had brought with them into the corps their top swordsmen. Kondō Isami, born October 9, 1834, was the third and youngest son of a wealthy peasant family from the village of Kami’ishihara in the Tama region of the province of Musashi, a partial day’s journey westward from Edo along the Kōshū-kaidō Road. Cutting wide and deep through this fertile farm region of gentle hills flowed the Tamagawa River, a constant source of inner strength to the young men whose martial spirit flourished along its banks. Rising high above the mountains to the southwest of Tama was the ever-looming, sometimes snow-covered, always enigmatic conical symbol of Japan, Fujisan, chameleonic with the changing seasons.
Shinsengumi Commander Kondō Isami was a peasant by birth, a warrior by nature. He was a man of traditional values and a martial mind-set, whose black training robe was embroidered in white on the back with the image of a large human skull—a symbol of his resolve to die in battle whenever he entered the dōjō. He had enlisted in the Rōshi Corps with aspirations of becoming a samurai in the service of the shōgun. As leader of the shōgun’s most dreaded samurai corps, he secured a vehicle into the top strata of the Tokugawa hierarchy and indeed historic immortality.
While the entire face radiates raw power, the stern, penetrating eyes, complemented by the firm mouth and square, heavy jaw, are most striking. In his photograph, probably taken in February 1868, the then sole-surviving commander of the Shinsengumi is seated in the formal position, hands placed lightly on his thighs, prepared for battle at a moment’s warning. Behind him, within arm’s reach, is his long, lethal sword; and one wonders how many men he had cut down with its razor-sharp blade.
Kondō Isami’s name at birth was Miyagawa Katsugorō. He was a child of Tenpō—the era of Heaven’s Protection (1830–43)— certainly a misnomer, at least for the rural villages of eastern Japan, which were terrorized by marauding swordsmen during those years. The Tama region was a domain of the Tokugawa. The local people prided themselves as farmers of the shōgun. While peasants were generally forbidden by law to bear arms, the people of Tama were inclined
