2) Gifted Writer of Prose: Sometime in the early hours of Keiō 2/1/24 (1866), two days after overseeing the conclusion of the Satsuma-Chōshū Alliance in Kyōto, Sakamoto Ryōma was attacked, wounded, and nearly killed by a Bakufu police squad at the Teradaya inn in Fushimi, just south of Kyōto. Ryōma described the attack and his narrow escape in a letter to his family, much of which is excerpted in my accounts of the incident in Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai and Samurai Revolution.

The attack at the Teradaya and the narrow escape (much to the credit of his girlfriend Oryō, who worked as a maid at the inn) have become legendary through literature and film. Similarly storied are the wedding ceremony between Ryōma and Oryō shortly thereafter, and their subsequent honeymoon (said to be the first in Japan) at the hot springs in the Kirishima mountains of Satsuma, where Ryōma recuperated from his wounds and took a much needed rest. Ryōma, whose myriad talents included a vivid, fluent writing style, described all of this and much more in two letters to his family, both dated Keiō 2/12/4 (1866). The first of these letters, in which Ryōma “took a hard look at a critical moment in his own existence, is a rarity in Bakumatsu history,” Miyaji Saichirō remarked. (Ryōma Hyakuwa, p. 150) Shiba Ryōtarō, whose popular novel Ryōma ga Yuku immortalized Sakamoto Ryōma in the psyche of the Japanese people, called the letter “the first piece of nonfiction literature of the Bakumatsu.” (Qtd. in Miyaji, Ryōma Hyakuwa, p. 152) Ryōma’s graphic account of the attack, I believe, captures the violence of the times as few surviving documents do.

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Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai 

The classic biographical novel of Sakamoto Ryoma, the only one in the English language.

Sakamoto Ryōma’s legacy is based on a series of unparalleled historical achievements during the last few years of his short life: Japan’s first trading company, the Satsuma-Chōshū Alliance, and his great plan for peaceful restoration of Imperial rule. I have discussed these in detail in my books, including Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai, Samurai Revolution, and Samurai Assassins.

Here I present the first of ten often overlooked facts to take a closer look at Sakamoto Ryōma, the man.

1) Genius: As I mentioned in Samurai Assassins, Ryōma 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. Nietzsche, Ryōma’s contemporary, alluded to genius with the following statement: “When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence.” Based on his determined resistance to the social iniquities and restraints under the Tokugawa Bakufu and its archaic feudal system, Ryōma influenced “his whole age” through the historical achievements mentioned above.

That Sakamoto Ryōma was endowed with an uncanny power of prescience is beyond dispute, as he demonstrated on numerous occasions during the last five years of his life. I have documented these over the years, starting with the biographical novel Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai (Ridgeback Press 1999), and more recently in Samurai Revolution (Tuttle 2014) and my new book Samurai Assassins (McFarland 2017).

On the 150th anniversary of Ryōma’s assassination let’s consider two striking examples of his apparent foresight of his own death:

• In a letter to his sister, Sakamoto Otomé, about two and a half years before his death, he wrote: “I don’t expect that I’ll be around too long. But I’m not about to die like any average person either. I’ll only die when big changes finally come, when even if I continue to live I’ll no longer be of any use to the country.” (quoted in Samurai Revolution)

• In a letter to a friend written four days before his assassination in Kyōto, he alluded to the great danger facing Japan under the Bakufu and urged his friend to be careful for his life. “Now is the time for us to act. Soon we must decide on our direction, whether it lead to pandemonium or paradise.” (quoted in Samurai Assassins)

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the assassination of Sakamoto Ryōma, which is the subject of Part III of my new book, Samurai Assassins. The murder of a genius of Ryōma’s caliber could not but have altered history. In writing the first in-depth account and analysis of the incident in English, I scoured all available important sources, including primary sources: Ryōma’s letters; testimonies and writings by, and interviews of, his alleged assassins; and accounts from people who were either present at the assassination scene or who arrived shortly after the fact. Excerpted below (without footnotes) is the opening paragraph of Part III (Chapter 15: Ryōma’s Greatest Achievements):

“Since Sakamoto was no good for the Bakufu or the Imperial Court…, I thought we had to kill him.” These words of Imai Nobuo of the Kyōto Mimawarigumi, a Bakufu security force, are as ironic as they are tragic—and in fact Sakamoto Ryōma’s assassination is the greatest tragedy of the Meiji Restoration. Sakamoto Ryōma and Nakaoka Shintarō were assassinated on the night of Keiō 3/11/15 (1867), about a month after the shōgun had announced his intention to abdicate and restore Imperial rule based on Ryōma’s peace plan. After the shōgun’s historical announcement, the situation in Kyōto remained dangerous and volatile, with samurai “thirsty for blood” gathered there from all over the country, recalled Watanabé Atsushi, another Mimawarigumi man who, like Imai, later claimed to have killed Ryōma. “We couldn’t let our guard down.” Whenever they were out on the street they were “vigilant” and “kept the mouths of our sword sheaths loose,” ready to draw the blades at any time.

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