Author Archives: Romlus Hillsborough

“Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai” The 20th Anniversary (13): Ryoma’s Love of Freedom

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I guess I was most attracted to Ryoma’s personality by his love of freedom. Which was why I dedicated this book to “the spirit of freedom in the soul of man.”

Ryoma 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. His genius, I think, was directly related to his love of freedom. Nietzsche, who was Ryōma’s contemporary, alluded to genius as follows in The Gay Science: “When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence.” I think this could apply to Ryoma.

Based on his determined resistance to the social iniquities and restraints under the Tokugawa Bakufu and the archaic feudal system, Ryoma influenced “his whole age” through a series of unparalleled historical achievements: Japan’s first trading company, the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance, and his great plan for peaceful restoration of Imperial rule.

ryoma
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“Went up to the castle”

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“Went up to the castle.” Katsu Kaishu repeated this phrase often in his journal, as vice commissioner and later commissioner of warships. He was, of course, recording his visits to the shogun’s castle, during the heady and dangerous years leading up to the revolution. “Went up to the castle” is the title of Samurai Revolution, Chapter 13, which opens as follows:

“ . . . I frequently encountered danger, which sometimes encouraged me. But sometimes it was difficult to endure the misery, and even when I hoped for death I survived only to suffer numerous more hardships.” (Katsu Kaishu)

The tide of revolution had been on the rise this past decade. The swirl began in Edo with the arrival of Perry’s “Black Ships” in Kaei 6 (1853). Occasionally the tide ebbed, as during the reign of Ii Naosuké, only to surge again with the regent’s murder at the castle gate and the spree of assassinations of foreigners in Edo and Yokohama. As the Bakufu attempted in vain to stem the tide—through a union with the Imperial Court, consummated by the marriage between the young shōgun and the Emperor’s sister—the architect of the marriage plan was nearly assassinated. Then sometime around the end of Bunkyū 2 (1862) the tide suddenly turned, and the center stage of the gathering revolution shifted from the shōgun’s stronghold at Edo to the Emperor’s capital at Kyōto.

[The photo of Katsu Kaishu, taken just before surrender of Edo Castle, is used in Samurai Revolution, courtesy of Yokohama Archives of History. Katsu Kaishu is the “shogun’s last samurai” of Samurai Revolution.]

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Hijikata’s Swordsmanship

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While much has been written about practical application versus philosophy in kenjutsu (Japanese swordsmanship), Hijikata Toshizo, vice-commander of the Shinsengumi, practiced kenjutsu to learn to “kill people,” according to Yuki Minizo.*

[The photograph of Hijikata Toshizo is used in Shinsengumi: The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps, courtesy of the descendants of Sato Hikogoro and Hino-shi Furusato Hakubutsukan Museum.]

*Yuki Minizo is sometimes identified as a former Shinsengumi corps. However, technically he did not serve in the Shinsengumi. He was recruited by Kondo Isami after the Shinsengumi was reorganized as the Koyōchinbutai (“Pacification Corps”) in early 1868.

 Shinsengumi

“Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai” The 20th Anniversary (12): “Ryoma never repaid the money, so I guess he still owes us.”

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In researching the book, beside Ryoma’s native Kochi I traveled around Japan to the cities and towns where he was most active during the last five years of his life after he fled his native Tosa Han. These include Kyoto, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Hagi, and the picturesque fishing village of Tomo on the Inland Sea (Hiroshima Prefecture). Among my most memorable experiences was in 1988, about a year or so into writing the book, when I visited the home of the late Masao Tanaka, a direct descendent of a boyhood friend of Ryoma’s, located in Shibamaki, in the mountains northwest of Kochi Castletown.

As I wrote in the Preface:

The house was the same one that Ryoma often visited in his youth, and where he apparently stopped, in need of cash, on the outset of a subversive journey he made in 1861 as the envoy of a revolutionary party leader [Takechi Hanpeita]. “My family lent Ryoma money at that time,” the elderly Mr. Tanaka told me, as we stood atop a giant rock [called “Hachijo-iwa”] behind the house, looking out at the Pacific Ocean far in the distance. Mr. Tanaka informed me that Ryoma liked to sit atop this same rock when he visited the Tanaka family, and where he would indulge in wild talk of one day sailing across the ocean to foreign lands. “Ryoma never repaid the money, so I guess he still owes us,” Mr. Tanaka joked.

[The photo above was taken in front of the Tanaka house with Mr. Tanaka (far left); my Japanese teacher Mrs. Tae Moriyama, a Kochi native; and Mr. Mamoru Matsuoka, biographer of Sakamoto Ryoma, Takechi Hanpeita, Nakaoka Shintaro, and Okada Izo, who took us to the Tanaka residence in his Jeep.]

View from Hachijo-iwa

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Next Shinsengumi Book (18): The Irony of the Ikedaya Incident

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The Shinsengumi was the shogun’s paramount police force. In its attack on the Ikedaya Inn in Kyoto in the summer of 1864, the Shinsengumi foiled a planned uprising against the Bakufu, the shogun’s government, by Choshu-led rebels, who represented the so-called Imperial Loyalism movement. The rebels’ purpose was to regain the control over the Imperial Court they had lost in the coup of the previous summer, by which Choshu had been driven from Kyoto; to expel the “foreign barbarians” from Japan, which the Emperor himself desired; and to ultimately overthrow the Bakufu.

Numerous rebels including several of their leaders perished during the so-called Ikedaya Incident, many at the hands of the Shinsengumi. But Shinsengumi Commander Kondo Isami and his men were no less determined to “expel the barbarians” than the rebels themselves; nor were they any less fervent in their Imperial Loyalism.

[The photograph of the miniature Shinsengumi Banner is used in my previously published Shinsengumi: The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps, courtesy of Hijikata Toshizo Museum.]