Sakamoto Ryoma’s Assassins

Posted on April 29, 2017 by Romlus Hillsborough

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the assassination of Sakamoto Ryoma, the architect of the relatively peaceful overthrow of the Tokugawa Bakufu. To bolster itself against its formidable enemies – in retrospect a vain attempt to stem the tide of history – the Bakufu established the security force Mimawarigumi, literally “Patrolling Corps,” in the spring of 1864, less than four years before its final collapse. Like the Shinsengumi, its more famous rival within the Tokugawa hierarchy, the Mimawarigumi was established to restore law and order in the Imperial capital of Kyoto. This was just months after the Shinsengumi had distinguished itself in the notorious attack on the rebels at the Ikedaya inn in the Kawaramachi district of Kyoto, just seven short blocks north of the soy purveyor called the Omiya. One of the vice-commanders of the Mimawarigumi was Sasaki Tadasaburo, who around three and a half years later would lead a small group of swordsmen to the Omiya to kill Ryoma.

Ryoma’s assassination remains shrouded in mystery. I focused on Ryoma’s assassins, their motives, and the actual attack in Part III of my new book, Samurai Assassins.

On the Difficulties of Reading Takéchi Hanpeita’s Letters from Jail

Posted on April 16, 2017 by Romlus Hillsborough

Takéchi Hanpeita, stoic samurai and accomplished swordsman, is the focus of Part II: “The Rise and Fall of Takéchi Hanpeita and the Tosa Loyalist Party” of my new book, Samurai Assassins. After his arrest and imprisonment for seditious activities, he wrote many letters to his wife and sisters, and to his cohorts on the outside who had not been arrested. As I mentioned in a recent post, to the best of my knowledge, Takéchi’s letters have rarely, if ever, been used by Western writers. Perhaps one reason other writers shun his letters is the difficulty of reading them. His letters, particularly those to his wife and sisters, are filled with so-called hentaigana, non-standard and obsolete kana forms, kana being the Japanese syllabary used with kanji (Chinese characters) in the Japanese writing system. Since hentaigana was abolished at the turn of the twentieth century, it cannot be easily read or even deciphered by the untrained eye among Japanese people today.

Nonetheless, as I wrote in Samurai Assassins, Takéchi’s letters to his wife and sisters overflow with the tender feelings of a husband and brother, and include self-effacing humor, complaints, despondency, and melancholy absent in the other letters. As such, they provide a look into the heart of this very important and complex historical figure. An example is the following excerpt from Samurai Assassins:

[A]fter having been locked up for about five months, he wrote to his wife and sister of his commiseration with the “sadness” of the “cherry blossoms that grow pale” in his cell, concluding the letter with the telling words, “I can’t bear that there is nothing I can do”—i.e., that he had no control over his own fate, the fate of Tosa, or the fate of the Imperial Loyalism movement.

[Takéchi’s letters are published in Takéchi Zuizan Kankei Bunsho (武市瑞山関係文書; “Takéchi Zuizan-related Documents”; Zuizan was Takéchi’s pseudonym). The images of the book shown here are from the from The National Diet Library Digital Collection.]

The Motives Behind Sakamoto Ryōma’s Assassination

Posted on April 6, 2017 by Romlus Hillsborough

Based on his resistance to the social iniquities and restraints under the Tokugawa Bakufu – i.e., the shogun’s government – Sakamoto Ryōma changed history through a series of unparalleled historical achievements: the founding of Japan’s first trading company; the brokering of a military-political alliance between the Bakufu’s most formidable enemies; and his great plan for peaceful restoration of Imperial rule.

After the shōgun’s historical announcement at his castle in Kyōto to relinquish power to the Imperial Court based on Ryōma’s peace plan, the situation in Kyōto was dangerous and volatile, with samurai “thirsty for blood” gathered there from all over the country, recalled Watanabé Atsushi, a Bakufu samurai who later claimed to have killed Ryōma. “Since Sakamoto was no good for the Bakufu or the Imperial Court…, I thought we had to kill him,” said Imai Nobu, a cohort of Watanabe’s, decades later.

Read more about Ryoma’s assassins and their motives in my new book, Samurai Assassins.

The Assassination of Sakamoto Ryōma (1)

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Romlus Hillsborough

The assassination of Sakamoto Ryōma on the eve of a revolution of his own design was probably the most tragic event of the Meiji Restoration. And certainly it was one of the most historically significant assassinations in what was thus far the most bloody and tumultuous period in Japanese history (1853-1868). In the Prologue of my novel, Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai (Ridgeback Press, 1999), I describe Ryōma as follows: “outlaw-samurai, pistol-bearing swordsman, freedom-fighter, pioneering naval commander, entrepreneur and statesman, a youth ahead of his time with an imagination as boundless as the Pacific Ocean–was a leader in the revolution to overthrow the shogunate and form a unified democracy in Japan.”

In my new book, Samurai Assassins, the printed edition of which was released today, I wrote, “To fully understand the scale of Ryōma’s tragedy, we must realize that he was a visionary and a genius—if genius means to conceive of original ideas and to have the courage and audacity to bring them to fruition.”

Part III of Samurai Assassins, is titled “The Assassination of Sakamoto Ryōma” His murder is shrouded in mystery. Samurai Assassins provides the first in-depth study of the tragic event in English, based mostly on primary sources.