[This photo, published in “Ryōma Times,” No. 41　(newsletter of Tokyo Ryoma-kai), shows Miyaji Saichiro (right) on a trip to Kochi in 1968, with his mentor, the famous writer Osaragi Jirō, who at the time was working on Tennō no Seiki (天皇の世紀), his masterpiece of Bakumatsu-Meiji Restoration history.]

I first met Miyaji-sensei around November 1988, while working as a writer for Flash, a weekly magazine in Tokyo. The magazine was doing a special feature on Sakamoto Ryōma to commemorate his upcoming birthday. Since I was working on my novel about Ryōma at the time, the editor in charge asked me to accompany him to Miyaji-sensei’s home to interview him. Needless to say, I was thrilled to meet the great writer, whose books I depended on heavily in writing my novel.

Miyaji-sensei, born in Ryōma’s native Kochi, lived in Mitaka, Tokyo. He greeted us at the front door of his home, dressed in traditional kimono. During our visit I remember him saying something to the effect that he thought of me as an “American Ryōma.”

Years later, in December 1999, Miyaji-sensei gave me this copy of Nakaoka Shintarō Zenshū. He included this signed “complements from the author” slip, inscribed to me.

Related articles:

“Now is the time to reread Ryoma’s letters.” Miyaji Saichiro

“The Ryoma Phenomenon” – 龍馬現象 (11): My Five Favorite Books About Ryoma

Shimosawa Kan’s Shinsengumi Shimatsuki is one of the earliest accounts of the Shinsengumi. It was first published in 1928, just before Hirao Michio’s groundbreaking history Shinsengumi Shiroku (新撰組史緑; original title, Shinsengumishi, 新撰組史). As I mention in my Shinsengumi: The Shogun’s Last Samurai Corps, Shimosawa’s narrative is partially based on interviews with former corpsmen and other people who had direct contact with the Shinsengumi. But he was first and foremost a novelist. He began the preface of his book by stating, “It is not my intention to write history.” Some of his information has been repudiated by more recent studies, whose authors have enjoyed the benefits of nearly a century of subsequent scholarship unavailable to Shimosawa. Accordingly, like other early historical narratives of the Shinsengumi, Shimosawa’s book should best be taken for what it’s worth, and relished for its portrayal of the spirit of the men of Shinsengumi rather than a faithful history.

Hirao, on the other hand, was an historian, widely known for his writings about Tosa history including biographies of Sakamoto Ryoma, Nakaoka Shintaro and Yamauchi Yodo.

I have many books about the Shinsengumi in my private library. This edition of Shimosawa’s book (photo above), published in 1967, which I found in a used bookstore in Tokyo’s Kanda district years ago, is one of my prized possessions.

 

先日の「第28回全国龍馬ファンの集い in 九州」で「坂本龍馬とジョン・F・ケネディ：　「勇気ある２人 」」というタイトルで、この２人の案外な共通点について講演させていただきました。これについてこの数年間考えてきましたが、日本語による出版に向かって詳しく執筆中です。

Earlier this month I spoke at the 28th national convention of “Ryoma fans” in Fukuoka about some uncanny similarities between Sakamoto Ryoma and John F. Kennedy, which I have been thinking about for many years. Currently I am writing about this in greater detail toward publishing a book on this subject in Japanese. In the future I hope to write a book on the subject in English as well.

With my forthcoming Samurai Assassins: “Dark Murder” and the Meiji Restoration, 1853 – 1868 expected to be published sometime between spring and summer, 2017, I thought readers would benefit from the following brief synopsis:

The Japanese word for assassination is ansatsu, “dark murder,” and its significance in the samurai-led revolution which was the “dawn of modern Japan”—when the shogun’s military government was abolished and Imperial rule restored—forms the substance of Samurai Assassins.

For all the impact of “dark murder” on the revolution, most of the assassinations covered in Samurai Assassins have thus far received only cursory, if any, attention by Western writers, though the assassins and their deeds are an indelible part of the popular Japanese literary genre that focuses on the final years of the shogun’s government.

The shogun’s government, known as the Tokugawa Bakufu (or simply Bakufu), was controlled by the Tokugawa family, whose head held the title of seiitaishogun—commander in chief of the expeditionary forces against the barbarians (“shogun” for short)—conferred by the Emperor. The shogun ruled the isolated island nation peacefully for two and a half centuries on the Emperor’s behalf from his castle at Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in the east, while the powerless Emperor was sequestered in his palace at Kyoto in the west. But the era of peace ended when the Bakufu could no longer enforce isolationism against the industrial and technological advances of Europe and America. While Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain in 1842, the specter of Western imperialism reared its ugly head off Japanese shores. When a squadron of warships commanded by Matthew Perry of the United States Navy entered the bay near Edo in the summer of 1853, that specter hit home. The modern era had reached Japan. It was the onset of fifteen years of chaos and turmoil and violence, which would not subside until the collapse of the Bakufu and the restoration of Imperial rule—the series of events collectively called the Meiji Restoration.

During the decade after Perry’s arrival Japan was divided into two schools of thought. “Revere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarians” was embraced by samurai who called themselves “Imperial Loyalists” (“Loyalists,” for short). Meanwhile, the Bakufu and its allies advocated “Open the Country.” The Loyalists rejected the shogun as the legitimate ruler of Japan because he had failed in his most fundamental purpose of keeping the foreigners out, while the Bakufu and its allies believed that expelling the foreigners would be impossible without first modernizing the country militarily and industrially, which required opening up to foreign trade, technology, and ideas.

The Emperor had been a powerless figurehead for centuries until the early 1860s, when Loyalists from samurai clans of western Japan, most notably Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa, gathered in Kyoto to rally around the Imperial Court. Those samurai colluded with noblemen of the Court to orchestrate a renaissance of Imperial power, while the Bakufu and its allies believed that the reins of government must remain with the tried-and-true military regime at Edo. Restoring rule to the politically inept Court, they said, would jeopardize the sovereignty of the country. The two sides headed toward a final showdown, while the most farsighted among them realized the imperative for the samurai clans to unite as one powerful nation to fend off Western imperialism.

Samurai Assassins will be the only thorough presentation and analysis in English of “dark murder” and the assassins who committed it, without which the Meiji Restoration as we know it could not have happened. On a deeper level, the book is a study of the ideology behind the revolution. My previous book, Samurai Revolution (Tuttle 2014), is a comprehensive history of the Meiji Restoration and the first ten years of Imperial rule. Samurai Assassins provides an in-depth overview of the Meiji Restoration while focusing on significant men and events, and ideology, not expatiated in my previous book. The following breakdown does not include the twenty-two chapters, or the front or back matter:

• Introduction: On “Dark Murder”—and the Existential Crisis and Rediscovered Purpose of the Samurai Class

• Part I: The Assassination of Ii Naosuke and the Beginning of the End of the Tokugawa Bakufu

• Part II: The Rise and Fall of Takechi Hanpeita and the Tosa Loyalist Party

• Part III: The Assassination of Sakamoto Ryoma

• Epilogue: The Second Existential Crisis of the Samurai Class

Samurai Assassins is based mostly on primary sources and definitive secondary sources in Japanese. Among the primary sources are letters from Takechi Hanpeita, the stoic samurai par excellence who is the focus of Part II. Takechi composed the letters in his squalid prison cell, to converse with his wife and sisters, and to communicate with his cohorts on the outside who had been able to avoid arrest. His letters to his cohorts, written in formal language and tone befitting a samurai, provide an insight into his thinking, including his stoic philosophy, which is not seen in any other documents. His letters to his wife and sisters, on the other hand, overflow with the tender feelings of a husband and brother, and include self-effacing humor, complaints, despondency, and melancholy absent in the other letters. To the best of my knowledge, Takechi’s letters have rarely, if ever, been used by non-Japanese writers.

I will report more in this blog on Samurai Assassins as the publication date approaches. Look for updates, including publication date, on Facebook.

“Humility in victory is as much of a test of the fineness of a man’s character as is the ability to bear defeat and personal losses in the hour of disappointment at an ambitious plan gone wrong,” wrote Stanley Washburn in Nogi: A Man Against the Background of a Great War (Henry Holt, 1913). Washburn, a war correspondent for an American newspaper, had been with General Nogi when the Japanese forces under Nogi’s command defeated the Russians at Port Arthur in January 1905, a turning point in the war, during which Nogi lost 100,000 men including his eldest son (his other son had died in the same war). Washburn was again with Nogi in Manchuria later that year when news arrived that Admiral Togo Heihachiro (formerly of Satsuma) had crushed the Russian Baltic fleet in the Battle of the Sea of Japan. While Nogi’s staff and other generals and officers of the Japanese Army celebrated the news with champagne, Nogi reminded all present (in words Washburn heard from a Japanese Army interpreter) “that our enemy have had great misfortune for their portion, and as we drink to our victory, let us not forget our enemy in the hour of his distress. We must recognize in them worthy foes who have met death in a cause into which they have been unjustly forced. Let us drink with reverence to our own heroes and with sympathetic respect to our fallen foes.”