Kyoto Shugoshoku Shimatsu by Yamakawa Hiroshi
This history of the protectorate of Kyoto (Kyoto shugoshoku), by a minister to the daimyo of Aizu, was published in 1911. The protectorate of Kyoto oversaw the Shinsengumi. The office was held by Matsudaira Katamori, daimyo of Aizu.
Most of my books thus far turned out to be much different in published form than I had originally intended. For example, the completed manuscript for Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai, which I began writing more than thirty years ago, was nearly twice as long as the version finally published in 1999. A couple years later, when I conceived of the book that was eventually titled Samurai Revolution, I had in mind a fictionalized autobiography of Katsu Kaishu (first-person narrative) – instead of how it turned out: a non-fiction historiobiographical narrative of the Bakumatsu-Meiji Restoration era, from the perspective of “the shogun’s last samurai.” Part 2 of the 3-part Samurai Assassins (published 2017), which I began in early 2012 shortly after finishing Samurai Revolution, originally focused on two of the most notorious assassins of the era: Okada Izo and Tanaka Shinbe. In published form, of course, the focus of Part 2 is on their leader, Takechi Hanpeita, whose revolutionary Tosa Loyalist Party wreaked terror on the streets of Kyoto and Osaka during 1862. My next book about the Shinsengumi, currently in process, began earlier this year as a collection of short somewhat fictionalized stories à la Samurai Tales, around 200 pages in all, not included in my first book about “the shogun’s last samurai corps.” It has since evolved into a detailed non-fiction historiography of the Shinsengumi, from a quite different perspective and containing lots of significant information not reported in my previous book. The evolution in the writing process continues.
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xUntil my Samurai Revolution, the biography by E. Warren Clark, Katz Awa: “The Bismarck of Japan” or the Story of a Noble Life (New York: B.F. Buck, 1904), was the only English-language account (in book form) of Katsu Kaishū (referred to as Katz Awa by Clark), published five years after Kaishū’s death. Clark’s book is more of a hagiographical sketch than a true biography. “HE IS THE MAN (sic) I love – the man to whom personally I owe more gratitude and respect than to any other individual I ever met,” Clark writes of Kaishū. A devout Christian, Clark was one of three American teachers invited to Japan by Kaishū (soon to be appointed minister of navy) in 1871, three years after fall of Bakufu, to help establish scientific schools. Clark excerpts Last Days of the Bakufu, the English translation of Bakufu Shimatsu, written by Kaishū for Clark’s benefit. Regarding Kaishū’s all-important role in the civil war of 1868, Clark asserts that the “surrender of military power on the part of [last shogun] Tokugawa Keiki [Tokugawa Yoshinobu], acting solely on Katz Awa’s advice, was voluntary, patriotic, and immediate.” Contrasting Japan’s handling of its greatest internal conflict with America’s Civil War, Clark lauds Kaishū for having “secured by one stroke of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice conditions of a national unity which we at the same epoch in the ‘sixties’ were struggling to attain in the United States at the cost of nearly a million lives.” Numerous inaccuracies in Clark’s book include the date and city of Kaishū’s birth, and claim that Kaishū served as “president of the naval training school at Nagasaki . . . about a year before . . . Perry’s advent with those barbarian ships” – though he actually served as head of naval cadets at the school several years after Perry’s arrival. Clark also incredulously claims Katsu Kaishū, an exemplar of an ancient society and culture to which Christianity was anathema, accepted Christian faith near end of life.
(In 1860, Katsu Kaishū, “the shōgun’s last samurai of Samurai Revolution,” traveled to San Francisco as captain of the warship Kanrin Maru, the first Japanese vessel to reach the United States. The above photo was taken at that time. The scans below are from a September 24, 1894 article about Clark’s visit to San Francisco in a local newspaper.)
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Included on these shelves are Nietzsche’s books, along with some of my favorite works of literature with Nietzschean themes. These books have provided me with a moral guide to help navigate through the morass of life in our times.
I have identified several fundamental Nietzshean ideas in the life and deeds of Sakamoto Ryoma, based on which I have written a long essay (not yet published).
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