The title of this painting, “returning from the surrender of Edo Castle,” is misleading because Katsu Kaishū did not attend the official (formal) surrender ceremony. But he did negotiate the peaceful surrender of the castle with Saigō, which of course resulted in the actual surrender. For that he was considered a traitor by many in the Tokugawa camp. Behind Kaishū is supposed to be a stonewall of the castle, to the left side of which is a fellow Bakufu samurai, sword drawn, as if ready to attack him.

This portrait is based on a photograph taken at the British Legation in Yokohama by Ernest Satow, secretary to Sir Harry Parkes, the British minister to Japan, around the time the castle was surrendered. “I was so very sleepy at the time,” Kaishū recalled years later. “But they dragged me over there. Satow took it, because, as he said, ‘You’re going to be killed.’”

This painting is the work of Kawamura Kiyo’o, whose grandfather, Kawamura Tajima-no-Kami, a high official in the Bakufu, had served in magisterial posts in Niigata, Sakai, Osaka, and Nagasaki. Kiyo’o, who grew up in Nagasaki, developed a keen interest in oil painting, a Western art form. He was sent to study in the United States in 1871, after which he traveled to Europe to study oil painting in France and Italy. Kaishū built a studio for Kawamura within the compound of his estate at Hikawa in Tokyo.

…on August 14, 1895 (Meiji 28), at age seventy-three, Count Katsu Awa gave an interview to the Kokumin Shimbun newspaper, in which he alluded to his title. “I’m naturally a bad person, which is why I put a market price on society,” he said in his signature mock self-deprecatory tone, which he was apt to quickly change to self-praise underpinned by the truth.

“I know that when the price goes up, it’ll eventually go back down. When the price goes down, it’ll eventually go back up. And it never takes more than ten years for the market price to rise and fall. So, if I see that the price for me is down, all I need do is hunker down and wait a while—and sure enough it’ll rise again. The former villain and traitor Katsu Rintarō is now Count Katsu Awa. But even if I act as if I’m important now, after a while I’ll only grow old and senile, and nobody will even bother to spit on me then. So anyway, that’s the way the market price of society is. A person who has the patience to wait out those ten years of rising and falling is a great man. And actually I’m one of them.”

[The above is excerpted from Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen Through the Eyes of the Shogun’s Last Samurai. Katsu Kaishū (aka Katsu Awa and Katsu Rintarō) is the “Shōgun’s Last Samurai.” The statue stands at Asakusa, Tokyo, near the Sumidagawa river, pointing out at the Pacific Ocean.]

In the early days of Keiō 2, the Japanese year that corresponds to 1866, Sakamoto Ryōma was attacked and nearly killed by a Bakufu police unit at the Teradaya inn in Fushimi (below), just south of Kyōto. A young woman named Oryō, soon to be Ryoma’s wife, was working at the Teradaya. Taking a bath downstairs when the intruders stormed the place, she ran up the stairs to warn her lover that Bakufu men had come to kill him. It was probably because of her quick thinking and courage that Ryoma escaped with his life. Less than two years later the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, would announce his intention to step down and restore political power to the Imperial Court, based on Ryōma’s famous plan to avert civil war. For details about Ryōma’s narrow escape from the Teradaya and Oryō’s heroic role therein, see my Samurai Revolution, Chapter 19, and  Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai, “Attack At the Teradaya.”

(To avoid any misunderstanding, I should add that the original building was destroyed in a fire. The building, as seen in these photos, stands today as a monument of past history. If not an exact replica, it captures the feeling and image of the Teradaya during the Bakumatsu.)