This year marks the 150th anniversary of the assassination of Sakamoto Ryōma, which is the subject of Part III of my new book, Samurai Assassins.

Ryōma’s assassination is shrouded in mystery, and this book provides the first in-depth study of the tragic event in English, based mostly on primary sources. My most important primary sources for Part III include Ryōma’s letters; testimonies and writings by, and interviews of, his alleged assassins; and accounts from people who were either present at the assassination scene or who arrived shortly after the fact. These primary sources, described in Chapter 17, are published in Miyaji Saichirō’s monumental Sakamoto Ryōma Zenshū. (from the Preface)

Though Ryōma was the author of the plan for the peaceful restoration of Imperial rule, he was also a leading proponent of Tōbaku, “Down with the Bakufu.” These two seemingly contradictory stances underlie the tragedy of his assassination. In a letter to Ryōma dated Keiō 3/9/4 (1867), the Chōshū leader Katsura Kogorō, using the name Kido Junichirō, likened Tōbaku to a “Great Drama,” the final act of which was getting under way in Kyōto, as Satsuma and Chōshū, in collaboration with Court nobleman Iwakura Tomomi, prepared to destroy the Bakufu. With Ryōma’s assassination around two months later, on the eve of a peaceful revolution of his own design, that drama turned tragic.

Ryōma’s murder by multiple sword wounds to the body and a blow to the head from which his brains reportedly protruded even as he was still able to move around and speak, was as horrible as it was tragic. To fully understand the scale of Ryōma’s tragedy, we must realize that he 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. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Ryōma’s contemporary, alluded to genius, I think, with the following statement: “When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence.” Based on his determined resistance to the social iniquities and restraints under the Tokugawa Bakufu and its archaic feudal system, Sakamoto Ryōma influenced “his whole age” through a series of unparalleled historical achievements: Japan’s first trading company, the Satsuma-Chōshū Alliance, and his great plan for peaceful restoration of Imperial rule.