Sakamoto Ryoma, the Foreteller

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Romlus Hillsborough

“I’ll only die when big changes finally come. . . .” 私が死日 (シヌルヒ) ハ天下大変にて生ておりてもやくにたゝず

Sakamoto Ryoma was truly a Renaissance man: outlaw-samurai, pistol-bearing swordsman, gifted writer,* freedom fighter, pioneering naval commander, founder of Japan’s first modern trading company, and leader in the “samurai revolution at the dawn of modern Japan.” And, as it turned out, he also foretold the future.

“I don’t expect that I’ll be around too long. But I’m not about to die like any average person either. I’ll only die when big changes finally come, when even if I continue to live I’ll no longer be of any use to the country. Though I was born a mere potato digger in Tosa, a nobody, I’m destined to bring about great changes in the country.”

The above is from a letter Ryoma wrote to his sister in the summer of 1863. Less than four and a half years later, in the fall of 1867, the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, announced his decision to abdicate and restore Imperial rule based on a peace plan from the “nobody” from Tosa. The next month, on his 32^nd birthday, Ryoma was assassinated.

* [Shiba Ryotaro, the popular historical novelist who immortalized Sakamoto Ryoma in the psyche of the Japanese people, called Ryoma’s famous letter depicting the near fatal attack at the Teradaya inn, “the first piece of nonfiction literature” of the times. (Qtd. in Miyaji Saichiro. Ryoma Hyakuwa. Tokyo: Bungei Shunshu, 1997, p. 152)]

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Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai, the only biographical novel about Sakamoto Ryoma in English, is available on Amazon.com.

Takasugi Shinsaku: The Dynamic Leader of the Choshu Rebels

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Romlus Hillsborough

“Takasugi Shinsaku was young. The times being as they were, he didn’t have the chance to demonstrate his full potential. But he certainly was a dynamic man.”

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.

Sakamoto Ryōma’s Heroic Wife, Oryō

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Romlus Hillsborough

“It was only because of Ryo that I survived.”

After Sakamoto Ryōma had overseen the conclusion of the military-political alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū in Kyoto in early 1866, thus hastening the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate (Bakufu) less than two years later, his life was in danger. Though the Satusma-Chōshū Alliance was still secret, and so unknown to the Bakufu, the Tokugawa authorities in Kyoto had been after him for “going back and forth between Bakufu enemies Satsuma and Chōshū,” Ryōma wrote to his family later that year.

On the day after the alliance was concluded, Ryōma was attacked by Tokugawa police, at an inn called the Teradaya, in Fushimi just outside of Kyoto. He had arrived at the inn late at night. As he was about to sleep in an upstairs room, a young maid, Narasaki Ryō (better known simply as Oryō), whom Ryōma had met and married about a year and a half earlier, was downstairs soaking in a hot bath. Following is an excerpt from my Samurai Revolution:

Oryo as a young woman, according to a descendent of her second husband, whom she married after Ryoma’s death. (Miyaji Saichirō. Sakamoto Ryōma Shashinshū. Tōkyō: Shinjinbutsu Ōraisha, 1986).

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]

Ryōma, with Miyoshi Shinzō, a samurai of Chōfu (branch house of Chōshū), assigned by the Chōshū men as Ryōma’s bodyguard, fought their way out of the inn and managed to escape, though Ryōma 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.” “It was only because of Oryō that I survived.”

Sakamoto Ryōma and Nakaoka Shintarō: Very Different, Yet Very Similar

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Romlus Hillsborough

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.

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi (Helion, 2026) is now in production.
For professional guidance on Bakumatsu–Meiji Restoration history, see Historical Consulting.
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Been at this for thirty years!

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Romlus Hillsborough

I started writing Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai thirty years ago, while living in a small, ramshackle apartment near the Shimokitazawa district of Tokyo. During the six years it took me to complete the novel, I often felt as if I were living in the Edo era — and a very strange feeling it was!

One of the most memorable times I had while writing the book was my first trip to Kochi, and my chance encounter with Mr. Mamoru Matsuoka, who took me in his Jeep to some of the historical sites, including Takechi Hanpeita’s house and gravesite, and the home of the late Mr. Masao Tanaka, at Shibamaki, in the mountains northwest of the city.

Mr. Tanaka was a direct descendent of a boyhood friend of Ryoma’s. Following is an excerpt from the Preface to Ryoma:

In front of the Tanaka house with Mr. Tanaka (far left); my Japanese teacher Mrs. Tae Moriyama, a Kochi native; and Mr. Matsuoka

The house was the same one that Ryoma often visited in his youth, and where he apparently stopped, in need of cash, on the outset of a subversive journey he made in 1861 as the envoy of a revolutionary party leader [i.e., Takechi Hanpeita]. “My family lent Ryoma money at that time,” the elderly Mr. Tanaka told me, as we stood atop a giant rock behind the house [八畳岩= Hachijo-iwa], looking out at the Pacific Ocean far in the distance. Mr. Tanaka informed me that Ryoma liked to sit atop this same rock when he visited the Tanaka family, . . . where he would indulge in wild talk of one day sailing across the ocean to foreign lands. “Ryoma never repaid the money, so I guess he still owes us,” Mr. Tanaka joked.