The above words of Katsu Kaishu, the shogun’s last samurai in my Samurai Revolution, are complemented by biographer Kaoru Furukawa, who writes of Takasugi’s penchant to “think while on the run.”

To be sure, the leader of Choshu’s revolutionary forces had a wild reputation. He was an unruly swordsman who in a drunken rage reportedly cut a feral dog in two. He was a gifted poet whose boyish features were belied by piercing eyes. He was the founder and commander of Japan’s first modern army, who played on the three-stringed shamisen even as the war around him raged. He was a consumptive who kept his saké cup near the sickbed from where he laid his war plans—in bold defiance of the Tokugawa Bakufu and the disease that would finally kill him.

Takasugi “didn’t have the chance to demonstrate his full potential” because he died at age twenty-nine in 1867, around eight months before the fall of the Bakufu. Had he survived the “samurai revolution,” there can be little doubt he would have played a prominent role in the Imperial government after the Meiji Restoration. And it is certain that without him the restoration of Imperial rule would have been delayed by months if not years.

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Takasugi Shinsaku features prominently in Samurai Revolution.

The bathroom was located at the rear of the house, near a narrow corridor leading to the rear staircase. Oryō heard the assailants break in, and, as she recalled over thirty years later:

There was a thumping sound, and before I had much time to think about it, someone thrust a spear through the bathroom window, right by my shoulder. I grabbed the spear with one hand, and in an intentionally loud voice, so that I could be heard upstairs, yelled, “Don’t you know there’s a woman in the bath? You with the spear, who are you?” “Be quiet,” [a voice demanded], “or I’ll kill you.” “You can’t kill me,” I hollered back, jumped out of the bathtub into the garden [outside], and still wet and throwing on just a robe, with no time to even put on my sash, ran barefoot [to warn the two men upstairs]. [end excerpt]

Ryoma, with Miyoshi Shinzo, a samurai of Chofu (branch house of Choshu), assigned by the Choshu men as Ryoma’s bodyguard, fought their way out of the inn and managed to escape, though Ryoma was wounded. The enemy, he reported in a separate letter to his sister, Otome, “cut the base of my right thumb, split open the knuckle of my left thumb, and hacked my left index finger to the knuckle bone.” And giving credit were credit was due (in full Ryoma fashion), he wrote, “It was only because of Oryo that I survived.”

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For more details about the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance and Sakamoto Ryoma’s narrow escape from the Teradaya inn, see Samurai Revolution.

The alliance between Satsuma and Choshu, concluded in early 1866, was a turning point in the revolution. Sakamoto Ryoma’s biographers never fail to point out that the epochal event was brought about by a political outlaw who considered himself “a nobody.” While Ryoma receives so much of the historical limelight, it must not be forgotten that Nakaoka Shintaro, Ryoma’s cohort from Tosa, also played an indispensable role in bringing about the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance.

Nakaoka Shintaro

Until the alliance was concluded, Satsuma and Choshu were bitter enemies. But they embraced the same goal: to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate. Ryoma and Nakaoka worked for more than a year to persuade their connections in Satsuma and Choshu, namely Saigo Takamori and Katsura Kogoro, to meet. About a year and a half after the alliance was concluded, in the summer of 1867, Ryoma wrote to his sister Otome that Nakaoka “is just like me.” But in many ways they were quite different. Consider the following from Samurai Revolution:

The “man of the sea,” Sakamoto Ryōma, hailed from a “town-samurai” family in the central urban setting of Kōchi Castle Town, situated just inland from the bay that extends outward to the vast Pacific. The “man of the land,” Nakaoka Shintarō, came from the outlying mountains of eastern Tosa. If there is truth in the symbolic association of the wide-open sea with the flexibility of mind and freedom of spirit possessed by Ryōma, and that of the age-old tradition-steeped land with the stoic, rigid nature attributed to Nakaoka, why did Ryōma liken himself to his friend? [end excerpt]

Probably not because both were early members of the Tosa Loyalist Party with close connections to party leader Takechi Hanpeita. Nor because in the month after Ryoma wrote the above-mentioned letter Nakaoka would form and command a land auxiliary force (Rikuentai) in Kyōto, complementing the naval auxiliary force (Kaientai) that Ryoma had organized three months earlier. Nor could it have been because Nakaoka, who, with the leaders of Satsuma and Choshu, advocated the total destruction of the House of Tokugawa by military force, even while Ryoma, just days before writing the letter to his sister, had drafted a conciliatory plan to restore peace to the nation. Nor was it because less than five months after the above letter was sent, Ryoma and Nakaoka would be assassinated together in Kyoto on the eve of the revolution that they had fought so hard to achieve; nor because soon thereafter their graves would be set side by side in the cemetery of heroes on the east side of the city, where they remain to this day. No—Ryoma certainly had something else in mind in likening himself to Nakaoka.

Though Nakaoka, like Ryoma, was originally against opening the country to foreign trade, just before the conclusion of the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance, he wrote a famous letter to friends, in which he reported the changes in his anti-foreign stance in order to learn from foreign nations to develop a “rich nation and strong military.” Nakaoka’s words echo the ideas of Sakuma Shozan (one of the most farsighted thinkers of his time, who in 1850, three years before the arrival of Perry, realizing that isolationism was no longer possible, had advised the Bakufu to modernize in order to defend against Western imperialism) and Katsu Kaishu. Nakaoka had met directly with Sakuma. And though I don’t think he ever actually met Kaishu, he quoted him in the above-cited letter: “Military power depends on the clarity of moral principles, and not on military training or machinery,” Nakaoka informed his friends. “Without the right people, regulations and machines are useless.”

Sakuma was Kaishu’s teacher. Kaishu was Ryoma’s teacher. As such, Ryoma’s thinking was greatly influenced by both of them – as was Nakaoka’s. And therein lies the greatest and most enduring similarity between Ryoma and Nakaoka.

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For more on the fascinating history of the dawn of modern Japan, see Samurai Revolution.

It is well known that Katsu Kaishu and Sakamoto Ryoma had a very close relationship for a couple of years. But their relationship abruptly ended with the dismissal of Kaishu as the shogun’s commissioner of warships and his subsequent house arrest near the end of 1864, for harboring the likes of Ryoma and other known renegades intent on overthrowing the shogun’s government. And though the two men would never meet again, neither could have accomplished his greatest task without the other.

Kaishu taught Ryoma how to navigate a steamship, state-of-the-art technology that enabled him to establish and operate his merchant marine (Kaientai=Naval Auxiliary Corps), by which he ran guns for the revolution after his break with Kaishu. All of that was essential to Ryoma’s greater achievement of brokering an alliance between Satsuma and Choshu against the shogunate in early 1866. Satsuma was led by Saigo Takamori, to whom Kaishu had introduced Ryoma just before his dismissal from the government – and it is doubtful that without his Kaishu connection Ryoma would have been in the position to even talk to Saigo. Without the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance, of course, it is highly unlikely that the Meiji Restoration would have happened as and when it did – that is to say, it is doubtful that it would have been led by Satsuma and Choshu between the end of 1867 and early 1868.

The shogunate was abolished and the Imperial government was established at the end of the Twelfth Month of the year Keio 3 – January 3, 1868. Saigo represented the Imperial government in the talks with Kaishu to avert all-out civil war in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in the spring of 1868. Kaishu, as commander of the military forces of the fallen shogun, agreed to surrender the shogun’s castle in Edo to avoid war. But he later remarked that had anyone but Saigo represented the Imperial government, “the talks would have broken down immediately.” Catastrophe would have followed, undoubtedly changing the course of history – and Katsu Kaishu would not have gone down in history as the man who saved the great city of Edo from the ravages of civil war.

[Read Part 2 of this series here.]

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For more on Katsu Kaishu’s relationships with Ryoma and Saigo, see Samurai Revolution.