Monthly Archives: November 2018

The Hamakawa Battery of Tosa Han, at Shinagawa – and my friend Kiyoharu Omino

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“Ryoma fans” at the annual gathering held in Tokyo last October visited Sakamoto Ryoma-related sites. Shinagawa was one of the destinations. Located there was Tosa’s residence at Samezu, where the retired daimyo of Tosa, Yamauchi Yodo, had lived for a number of years; and where Ryoma and other Tosa samurai had been stationed.

Kiyoharu Omino, the distinguished writer and scholar of Bakumatsu history, gave talks at Yodo’s nearby gravesite and at the reconstructed Hamakawa Battery of Tosa Han – whose eight guns would not have been able to hit Perry’s ships in Edo Bay in the summer of 19854 even if they had been fired. Ryoma, at age twenty at the time, received gunnery training at the Hamakawa Battery as a student of Sakuma Shozan, Mr. Omino wrote in the explanatory panel at the site.

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“Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai”: The 20th Anniversary (1)

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Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai. It is the first biographical novel in English of Sakamoto Ryoma, and the only one written originally in English. The publisher, Ridgeback Press, is named for this dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback. His photo was used as the press’ logo – as anyone who owns a copy may recognize.

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Next Shinsengumi Book (15) – Ikedaya Incident (3)

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Just about finished with this complicated and complex chapter, focusing on the Shinsengumi’s raid on the Ikedaya inn in the summer of 1864. I’ve been working on it for about three months – taking special care to give the most accurate and authentic account as possible of this extremely important event. As I wrote in my previous book about the Shinsengumi: Through the raid on the Ikedaya, the Shinsengumi probably delayed the Meiji Restoration by a year or so. “Had the Shinsengumi not achieved a great victory by attacking the Ikedaya,” Nagakura Shinpachi, a principal of the Shinsengumi, reportedly claimed, “the life of the Tokugawa Bakufu would have been that much shorter.” But the outrage it ignited among the anti-Bakufu side, led by Choshu, served to shore up a consensus for an all-out war against the Bakufu, marking a turning point in the revolution. And it is this fact that gives pause to the widespread notion that the Ikedaya Incident delayed the overthrow of the Bakufu and the Meiji Restoration, and rather lends support to the argument that it actually hastened that outcome.

“Think big! Create! Persevere!”

Last Shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu secluded himself in this room after the fall

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The last shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, upon returning to his native Mito on the day his castle was surrendered in spring 1868, secluded himself in this room at the Kōdōkan, the official school of Mito, to demonstrate his loyalty to the new Imperial government. The room, named Shizendō (至善堂), is an Important Cultural Property, designated by the Japanese government. Its name means something like “Hall of Ultimate Virtue.”

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Kōdōkan of Mito: The Birthplace of the Meiji Restoration

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On The 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration (21)

Kyōto, Kōchi, Kagoshima, Hagi, Shimonoseki, major cities of the Meiji Restoration, contain some of the most interesting sites in Bakumatsu history. But the Kōdōkan, the sometimes overlooked official school of Mito Han, is particularly fascinating to me – because Mito is the cradle of Imperial Loyalism (Kinnō), which of course culminated in the Meiji Restoration. It was at the Kōdōkan where Mitogaku (“Mitoism”), the ultra-nationalistic school of thought, attained prominence. Mitogaku was the cornerstone of Imperial Loyalism.