The outlaw Sakamoto Ryoma first met Katsu Kaishu, a high-ranking officer of the shogun’s nascent navy, at the latter’s home in Edo, some time during the final few months of the Japanese year corresponding to 1862. During the following spring, while Kaishu moved forward with plans to establish an official Naval Training Center at Kobe, Ryoma, as Kaishu’s right-hand man, recruited his friends from Tosa and elsewhere, most of them renegade samurai (i.e., ronin) like himself, to study under Kaishu. Following is a slightly edited excerpt from my historical novel, Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai:

[begin excerpt] While Kaishu used his close relationship with the seventeen-year-old shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, to gain permission to establish an official Naval Training Center in Kobe, Ryoma used his influence among the Imperial Loyalists in Kyoto to recruit nearly one hundred of them for Kaishu’s private school. The Bakufu’s [i.e., shogunate’s] institution and the private academy would share the costly facilities supplied by the Edo government. Under Kaishu, Ryoma, at age twenty-eight, was on the verge of realizing his dream of establishing a navy. He drolly expressed his excitement in a letter to his sister, Otome:

“Well, well! In the first place, life sure is strange. There are some men who are so unlucky that they die by breaking their balls just trying to climb out of a bathtub. Compared to that I’m extremely lucky: here I was on the verge of death but I didn’t die. Even if I tried to die I couldn’t, because there are too many things which compel me to live. I have now become the disciple of Katsu Rintaro, the greatest man in Japan, and I am spending every day on things I have always dreamed about. I don’t intend to return home until I’m around forty.” [“Rintaro” was Katsu Kaishu’s given name, “Kaishu” being his pseudonym.]

Part 3 of this series was posted on November 23, 2015.

[The above photo is from Sakamoto Ryoma Zenshu, Miyaji Saichiro, ed. Katsu Kaishu is in the middle, with Ryoma on the right.]

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