In 1858 the Tokugawa Bakufu, the shogun’s government, concluded its first trade treaties with Western nations including Great Britain, France, Holland and the United States, igniting the “samurai revolution” that would bring about fall of the Bakufu and the modernization of Japan. The trade treaties were opposed by samurai throughout Japan, led by a few powerful feudal domains, including Choshu [present-day Yamaguchi Prefecture]. In the summer of 1864, Choshu, in violation of the trade treaties, militarily blocked the passage of foreign ships through the strait of Shimonoseki, along the vital trade route at the western tip of the Choshu domain, on the main Japanese island of Honshu. In reaction, England, France, America, and Holland dispatched an allied squadron to bombard Shimonoseki – with the tacit approval of the Bakufu. The bombardment began on the 4^th day of the Eighth Month of the Japanese calendrical year corresponding to 1864, with the Choshu forces routed in just four days. Following is a slightly edited excerpt from my Samurai Revolution:

Katsu Kaishu had heard a rumor from Sakamoto Ryoma that Kokura Han, a pro-Bakufu domain located just across the Shimonoseki Strait, had welcomed the allied squadron’s arrival at Shimonoseki, assuring the foreigners that they would not have any trouble from its people. Did the foreign ships attack Shimonoseki at the request of the Bakufu? Kaishu wondered. “Even if Choshu is guilty of crimes,” he noted in his journal, “employing foreign assistance to punish our own countrymen” would itself be criminal. Since “such a crime . . . would be a national disgrace,” the matter must be investigated. [emphasis added; end excerpt]

The president of the United States was recently acquitted for a similar crime by his accomplices in the Senate.

[The photograph of Edo Castle at the end of Tokugawa era appears in Samurai Revolution, p. 488, courtesy of Yokohama Archives of History. Katsu Kaishu is “the shogun’s last samurai” of Samurai Revolution.]

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It was 20 years ago this month, December 3, 1999, that a group of us visited Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi at his official residence in Tokyo. Mr. Obuchi was a famous admirer of Sakamoto Ryoma. Our group included five distinguished Japanese gentlemen, all with a unique relationship to Sakamoto Ryoma: Saichiro Miyaji and Kiyoharu Omino, both eminent Ryoma biographers; Dr. Kanetoshi Tamura, then-chairman of the Tokyo Ryoma Society; Kunitake Hashimoto, the “godfather” of Ryoma societies around Japan; and Yasuhiko Shingu, a descendent of Shingu Umanosuke, an original member of Ryoma’s famed Kaientai (Naval Auxiliary Corps), precursor to Mitsubishi.

During the meeting I asked the prime minister to speak about Ryoma and hand out copies of my recently published book at the Group of Eight Summit, which he was scheduled to host in Okinawa the following summer. When the prime minister graciously agreed, I thought that Ryoma was on his way to international stardom. A few months later Mr. Obuchi suffered a stroke from which he never recovered.

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Sakamoto Ryoma was assassinated in the Eleventh Month of the Japanese year that corresponds to 1867. John F. Kennedy was assassinated about ninety-six years later, on November 22, 1963. With this in mind, I quote from the Forward to my Samurai Tales:

As a young boy in Los Angeles during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was overcome with fear by talk at the family dinner table that at any time we all might be blown to smithereens, that Doomsday was just a heartbeat away. As I cried, my parents quoted Shakespeare: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; /The valiant never taste of death but once.” And while those words still ring true, I do not believe that the measure of true courage—moral courage—is limited to the overcoming of fear or even a resolve to die, whether on the field of battle or in mundane everyday life.

In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy called courage “the most admirable of human virtues.” He quoted Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage as “Grace under pressure.” Kennedy’s life and presidency were shining examples of that grace—but for JFK it was not enough. He embellished upon Hemingway’s definition, asserting that courage is an unyielding determination to accomplish one’s convictions, regardless of consequence to reputation, career, possessions, body, or indeed life—and usually in defiance of dangerous adversary. [end quote]

In A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. included, on the page before the Foreword, the following famous passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms:

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.”Schlesinger included this passage for its relevance to JFK’s life and death. But, as anyone who has studied the life and death of Sakamoto Ryoma will readily understand, these words of Hemingway also apply to Ryoma as well.

坂本龍馬とジョン・F・ケネディ

「勇気のある２人」

ケネディは上院議員となった３年後の１９５６年に8名の上院議員たちの伝記と自分の政治家としての信念をつづった「勇気ある人々」（Profiles In Courage）を出版した。その第一章の書き出しに「勇気」を“the most admirable of human virtues”とし、ヘミングウェイが「勇気」を「重圧のもとでの気高さ」と定義していたことを述べた。戦争の英雄でもあり、英雄大統領ともされるケネディの人生そのものは「重圧のもとでの気高さ」の立派な手本であった。でもケネディにとっては「重圧のもとでの気高さ」だけでは満足できず、ヘミングウェイの勇気の定義にもうひとつ付け加えた。「勇気」とは政治家としての名望や職にどんな悪影響が与えられても、自分の財産や身体と命にどんな危険があっても、どんな強い適が前に立っても、自分の信念を果たす断固たる決意にある、とケネディは主張した。

「世に多くの勇気をもってくるなら、この世は彼らを打ちのめすために彼らを殺さなければならない。それで、もちろん、この世は彼らを殺してしまう。この世はすべての人を打ちのめす。そうなると多くの者は打ちのめされた箇所で強くなる。だが、打ちのめされようとしないものは、この世が殺す。それは、善いもの、やさしいもの、勇敢なものを、わけへだてなく、殺す。」(ヘミングウェイ「武器よさらば」高村勝治訳, グーテンベルク21, 1971年)

上記のヘミングウェイの言葉はアーサー・M・シュレジンジャーが「ケネディ――栄光と苦悩の一千日」の前書きの前のページに引用した。ジョン・F・ケネディに相当する言葉だが、もう１人の大人物に も相当する言葉だと私は思う。それは坂本龍馬である。

This November 22 marks the 56^th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I deeply admire JFK and his brother Robert F. Kennedy; and I have had a near lifelong fascination of the Kennedy clan. So when I sent a copy of Samurai Revolution to Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter who was then the American ambassador to Japan, it was not without a certain feeling of awe and even affection. And I appreciated her consideration in sending along a thank you note as confirmation that she received the book.

Though Sakamoto Ryoma was the author of the plan for the peaceful restoration of Imperial rule, he was also a leading proponent of Tobaku, “Down with the Bakufu.” These two seemingly contradictory stances underlie the tragedy of his assassination. In a letter to Ryoma the Choshu leader Katsura Kogoro, using the name Kido Junichiro, likened Tobaku to a “Great Drama,” the final act of which was getting underway in Kyoto in the fall of 1867, as Satsuma and Choshu, in collaboration with Court nobleman Iwakura Tomomi, prepared to destroy the Bakufu. With Ryoma’s assassination around two months later, on the eve of a peaceful revolution of his own design, that drama turned tragic.

Tragedy may have different connotations depending on interpretation; but perhaps its most widely understood definition is based on the tragic drama of ancient Greece. Nietzsche wrote that Greek tragedy reveals that “the divinity often sends men unjustified suffering, not arbitrarily, but to preserve a customary world-order.”[1] And he held that the horror of tragedy is at the root of its enduring allure—the gist being, as Nietzsche’s English translator Walter Kaufmann observes, that the sublime beauty of ancient Greek tragedy enabled the audience to endure “the utter terror and absurdity of existence.”[2] Ryoma was behind a sea change in Japan’s world-order; and his 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 unjustifiable as it was horrible.

Julian Young, a Nietzsche biographer, wonder “what kind of satisfaction we could possibly derive from witnessing the destruction of the tragic hero, a figure who, in many respects, represents what is finest and wisest within us.”[3] The answer lies, says Nietzsche, “in the tragic enjoyment of the destruction of the noblest,” with nobility being inseparable from sublime beauty.[4] And to this we should add, as any modern-day moviegoer knows, the pleasure derived from the comfort zone between the viewer and the tragedy unfolding before his eyes.

That the tragedy that is Sakamoto Ryoma’s assassination has endured for more than a century and a half as an allure to historians, novelists, and filmmakers—and indeed a wide segment of the Japanese public—is testimony of the truth of these Nietzschean theories, not least the philosopher’s ideas regarding the destruction of nobility, a quality with which Ryoma was certainly endowed. And Ryoma’s death was truly horrible—for how else describe the butchering of a founder of modern Japan at the dawn of a new era as he was about to finally achieve his dream of engaging in international trade to enable his country to compete with the great Western powers—a dream which had it been fulfilled might well have altered subsequent history to such a degree that future Japanese leaders might not have conceived of the need to create a “Greater East Asia” sphere to counter Western power, a policy that was inextricably entwined with the events leading up to World War II?

[1]Young, Julian. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 41,

[2]Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollindale, trans. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage-Random, 1968, section 1029, note 83.

[3]Young, p. 40.

[4]The Will to Power, section 29.