Katsu Kaishu was a great lover of books. But in his poverty as a young man, “I didn’t have the money to buy books” he told an interviewer from the Kokumin Shimbun newspaper on March 19, 1898. “Between Nihonbashi and Edobashi [districts in downtown Edo], . . . was a small bookstore. . . . I used to go there often and stand in front of the store reading the books. [The proprietor], realizing that I was too poor to buy books, was always very kind to me.

“There was a merchant from Hokkaido, named Shibuta Riuemon, who also used to frequent that store. He had heard about me from [the proprietor], and, in fact, was a very admirable man. He also loved books and said that he wanted to meet me. Finally we met at the bookstore. Well, Shibuta said that since we had the same interest he hoped that we could be friends. He said that he would visit me at my home and invited me to the inn where he was staying. He wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. The inn was located near the old Eitaibashi [bridge]. We ended up spending the entire day there, just talking about things.

“He was from a merchant family in Hakodate. He had been very fond of books since he was a boy and spent all his time reading, much to the displeasure of his parents. So they forbade him to read, but he would nevertheless read on the sly. One time they found him reading and gave him a terrible scolding. As punishment they tied his hands together and shut him in a room in the upstairs of their house, so that he had nothing to eat the entire day. When evening came, his parents, thinking he had learned his lesson, went upstairs to see him. Far from learning his lesson, when they found him he was reading a picture book that lay on the floor, which he had opened with his feet. Well, his parents finally gave in and told him that he would be allowed to read as long as he did not neglect the family business. Shibuta was very happy. Whenever he had time off from the family business, he would go out and buy books to read. . . . He had some very interesting things to say. He was a refined person, and thin with a light complexion like a woman. But there was something about him that was resolute—he stood firm and was a man of character.

“Two or three days after [our first meeting], Shibuta came to my house. I was extremely poor back then. For floor covering all we had were three worn out tatami [mats]. We had used up all of the ceiling boards for firewood. But Shibuta wasn’t bothered by any of that. . . . [The two men spent the afternoon talking.] Then, as he was leaving, he took 200 ryo [nearly five times the annual stipend of the Katsu household] from his pocket. ‘This isn’t much,’ he said. ‘But use it to buy books.’

“At first I was at a loss for words and just stared at him. Shibuta told me not to worry about it. ‘If I didn’t give you this money, I’d spend it soon enough,’ he said. ‘I’d rather that you used it to buy some rare books. Then after you’ve read them, you can send them along to me.’ Then he left. He also gave me . . . [some] writing paper. ‘If you find any interesting books in Dutch, translate them on this paper,’ he said. . . . He thought that I was too poor even to buy paper. . . . [It was on this same paper that Katsu Kaishu would write his famed Keio 4 Boshin Journal. (Matsuura Rei. Katsu Kaishu. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2010, p. 323) Regarding Keio 4 Boshin Journal, see Samurai Revolution, beginning of Chapter 26.]

“After that we continued to correspond. Shibuta was very happy for me when he learned that I would be going to Nagasaki to study [at the Bakufu’s naval academy in 1855] … I really appreciated his support and had intended to repay him someday. But regrettably Shibuta died [of tuberculosis in 1858 at age forty-one] while I was in Nagasaki. I had never felt so sorry about anything in my life.” (Hikawa Seiwa (Katsu Kaishu Zenshu 21) Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973, pp. 8-10.)

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Samurai Revolution, a comprehensive history of the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the rise of Imperial Japan, is also the only biography of Katsu Kaishu in English.

The above words of Katsu Kaishu, the shogun’s last samurai in my Samurai Revolution, are complemented by biographer Kaoru Furukawa, who writes of Takasugi’s penchant to “think while on the run.”

To be sure, the leader of Choshu’s revolutionary forces had a wild reputation. He was an unruly swordsman who in a drunken rage reportedly cut a feral dog in two. He was a gifted poet whose boyish features were belied by piercing eyes. He was the founder and commander of Japan’s first modern army, who played on the three-stringed shamisen even as the war around him raged. He was a consumptive who kept his saké cup near the sickbed from where he laid his war plans—in bold defiance of the Tokugawa Bakufu and the disease that would finally kill him.

Takasugi “didn’t have the chance to demonstrate his full potential” because he died at age twenty-nine in 1867, around eight months before the fall of the Bakufu. Had he survived the “samurai revolution,” there can be little doubt he would have played a prominent role in the Imperial government after the Meiji Restoration. And it is certain that without him the restoration of Imperial rule would have been delayed by months if not years.

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Takasugi Shinsaku features prominently in Samurai Revolution.

The bathroom was located at the rear of the house, near a narrow corridor leading to the rear staircase. Oryō heard the assailants break in, and, as she recalled over thirty years later:

There was a thumping sound, and before I had much time to think about it, someone thrust a spear through the bathroom window, right by my shoulder. I grabbed the spear with one hand, and in an intentionally loud voice, so that I could be heard upstairs, yelled, “Don’t you know there’s a woman in the bath? You with the spear, who are you?” “Be quiet,” [a voice demanded], “or I’ll kill you.” “You can’t kill me,” I hollered back, jumped out of the bathtub into the garden [outside], and still wet and throwing on just a robe, with no time to even put on my sash, ran barefoot [to warn the two men upstairs]. [end excerpt]

Ryoma, with Miyoshi Shinzo, a samurai of Chofu (branch house of Choshu), assigned by the Choshu men as Ryoma’s bodyguard, fought their way out of the inn and managed to escape, though Ryoma was wounded. The enemy, he reported in a separate letter to his sister, Otome, “cut the base of my right thumb, split open the knuckle of my left thumb, and hacked my left index finger to the knuckle bone.” And giving credit were credit was due (in full Ryoma fashion), he wrote, “It was only because of Oryo that I survived.”

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For more details about the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance and Sakamoto Ryoma’s narrow escape from the Teradaya inn, see Samurai Revolution.

The alliance between Satsuma and Choshu, concluded in early 1866, was a turning point in the revolution. Sakamoto Ryoma’s biographers never fail to point out that the epochal event was brought about by a political outlaw who considered himself “a nobody.” While Ryoma receives so much of the historical limelight, it must not be forgotten that Nakaoka Shintaro, Ryoma’s cohort from Tosa, also played an indispensable role in bringing about the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance.

Nakaoka Shintaro

Until the alliance was concluded, Satsuma and Choshu were bitter enemies. But they embraced the same goal: to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate. Ryoma and Nakaoka worked for more than a year to persuade their connections in Satsuma and Choshu, namely Saigo Takamori and Katsura Kogoro, to meet. About a year and a half after the alliance was concluded, in the summer of 1867, Ryoma wrote to his sister Otome that Nakaoka “is just like me.” But in many ways they were quite different. Consider the following from Samurai Revolution:

The “man of the sea,” Sakamoto Ryōma, hailed from a “town-samurai” family in the central urban setting of Kōchi Castle Town, situated just inland from the bay that extends outward to the vast Pacific. The “man of the land,” Nakaoka Shintarō, came from the outlying mountains of eastern Tosa. If there is truth in the symbolic association of the wide-open sea with the flexibility of mind and freedom of spirit possessed by Ryōma, and that of the age-old tradition-steeped land with the stoic, rigid nature attributed to Nakaoka, why did Ryōma liken himself to his friend? [end excerpt]

Probably not because both were early members of the Tosa Loyalist Party with close connections to party leader Takechi Hanpeita. Nor because in the month after Ryoma wrote the above-mentioned letter Nakaoka would form and command a land auxiliary force (Rikuentai) in Kyōto, complementing the naval auxiliary force (Kaientai) that Ryoma had organized three months earlier. Nor could it have been because Nakaoka, who, with the leaders of Satsuma and Choshu, advocated the total destruction of the House of Tokugawa by military force, even while Ryoma, just days before writing the letter to his sister, had drafted a conciliatory plan to restore peace to the nation. Nor was it because less than five months after the above letter was sent, Ryoma and Nakaoka would be assassinated together in Kyoto on the eve of the revolution that they had fought so hard to achieve; nor because soon thereafter their graves would be set side by side in the cemetery of heroes on the east side of the city, where they remain to this day. No—Ryoma certainly had something else in mind in likening himself to Nakaoka.

Though Nakaoka, like Ryoma, was originally against opening the country to foreign trade, just before the conclusion of the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance, he wrote a famous letter to friends, in which he reported the changes in his anti-foreign stance in order to learn from foreign nations to develop a “rich nation and strong military.” Nakaoka’s words echo the ideas of Sakuma Shozan (one of the most farsighted thinkers of his time, who in 1850, three years before the arrival of Perry, realizing that isolationism was no longer possible, had advised the Bakufu to modernize in order to defend against Western imperialism) and Katsu Kaishu. Nakaoka had met directly with Sakuma. And though I don’t think he ever actually met Kaishu, he quoted him in the above-cited letter: “Military power depends on the clarity of moral principles, and not on military training or machinery,” Nakaoka informed his friends. “Without the right people, regulations and machines are useless.”

Sakuma was Kaishu’s teacher. Kaishu was Ryoma’s teacher. As such, Ryoma’s thinking was greatly influenced by both of them – as was Nakaoka’s. And therein lies the greatest and most enduring similarity between Ryoma and Nakaoka.

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For more on the fascinating history of the dawn of modern Japan, see Samurai Revolution.