On The 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration (8)

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Romlus Hillsborough

The Assassination of Ii Naosuké and the Onset of the “Samurai Revolution”

The assassination of Ii Naosuké, regent to the boy-shogun Tokugawa Iémochi, in the spring of 1860, launched the “samurai revolution” that would bring about the Meiji Restoration nearly eight years later. Ii’s assassination is the subject of Part I of my three-part Samurai Assassins, which I wrote as a companion volume to Samurai Revolution. The assassination was the work of a band of eighteen samurai, including Arimura Jizaemon of Satsuma. Arimura is depicted on the cover of Samurai Assassins.

[This image of Arimura Jizaemon beheading Ii Naosuké is part of a series entitled Kinseigiyuden (“Biographies of Loyal and Courageous Men”) by Ichieisai Yoshitsuya (1822 – 1866), originally published in a magazine called “Nishikié.”]

On The 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration (7)

Posted on April 23, 2018 by Romlus Hillsborough

Katsu Kaishū: “the shōgun’s last samurai” (2)

[In 1868], Katsu Kaishū, who had risen through the ranks by force of character and a keen and creative mind, was in command of the Tokugawa military. He had at his disposal a fleet of ships and thousands of troops raring to attack the enemy. But just who was this multifaceted, enigmatic man upon whom the deposed shōgun rested his life and the fate of his family and indeed the entire country? Unlike [Shōgun Tokugawa] Yoshinobu’s other advisors, he hailed neither from a noble house of feudal lords charged for generations with the Bakufu’s [shōgun’s government’s] highest offices, nor from the privileged families of Tokugawa samurai whose sons traditionally filled the most important magistracies and commissionerships. Born to the humblest of samurai families in service of the shōgun, he was at once the consummate samurai and streetwise denizen of downtown Edo; an expert swordsman who refused to draw his sword even in self-defense; a statesman who commanded the respect of allies and foes alike; an inviolable outsider within the shōgun’s regime; an iconoclast, historian, prolific writer, and creator of the Japanese navy. And though his loyalty to the Tokugawa was unsurpassed, he was nevertheless a friend and ally of men who had overthrown the government. [from Samurai Revolution]

Katsu Kaishū is “the shōgun’s last samurai” of Samurai Revolution.

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On The 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration (6)

Posted on April 15, 2018 by Romlus Hillsborough

Katsu Kaishū: “the shōgun’s last samurai”

As a New England Yankee, [Edward Warren] Clark might have cherished a question posed nearly three years before the Meiji Restoration, by Abraham Lincoln, who, during the American Civil War, was beset with difficulties and woes similar to those of Katsu Kaishū’s. “Haven’t you lived long enough to know that two men may honestly differ about a question and both be right?” Lincoln asked a congressman who called for the hanging of rebel leaders shortly before Lee’s surrender to Grant. Certainly Katsu Kaishū, revered and reviled by men on both sides of Japan’s civil war, had feelings similar to Lincoln’s, when, having been “unexpectedly placed in a most responsible position,” he struggled to bring the two opposing sides together to save Japan from ruin. Clark recognized this quality in Kaishū. “It is not often that a man can see both sides at once,” Clark wrote, adding that Kaishū did—“and that is what made him a unique character.” [from Samurai Revolution]

Katsu Kaishū is the “shōgun’s last samurai” of Samurai Revolution.

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