Sakamoto Ryōma became a political outlaw upon fleeing his native domain of Tosa on a rainy night in the spring of 1862, amid unprecedented social and political upheaval. Following is a slightly edited excerpt from my Samurai Revolution, Chapter 11 (without footnotes):

The crime of fleeing one’s han (i.e., feudal domain) was among the most serious in samurai society. It not only entailed forsaking one’s feudal lord and clan, but also abandoning one’s family—cardinal sins in a society based on Confucian morals. But Ryōma, an extremely independent sort, was unlike most men of his time. He was an iconoclast who would prove to be an enigma to many of his confederates in Tosa and other clans. Few if any of his fellow Imperial Loyalists, for all their avowed loyalty to the Emperor (and indeed readiness to die for their cause), had the audacity to throw off their loyalty to their han. But Ryōma did. In fleeing, it seems, he demonstrated his dissatisfaction with feudalism, including feudal lord and clan, and intended to break the feudal bonds forever.

His dissatisfaction had sprung from a gnawing resentment of the iniquities in feudal society (particularly Tosa), and more recently from his rejection of the violence perpetrated by his fellow Tosa Loyalists. While many of his friends were ready and willing to kill men of the Bakufu (i.e., Tokugawa Shogunate) and their supporters, Ryōma, an original member of the Tosa Loyalist Party, would ultimately turn peacemaker, bristling at unnecessary bloodshed even as he opposed the Bakufu to the bitter end. And while other “patriots of high aspiration” clamored to expel the barbarians and overthrow the Bakufu, they were jealous of the position of one another’s han in a post-Tokugawa Japan. Few, however, had a viable plan for the future. But Ryōma did—based on an uncanny foresight by which he saw beyond the boundaries of the feudal domains toward a unified Japanese nation. And it was another famous outsider, Katsu Kaishū, who would nurture that vision in Ryōma’s very supple mind. [end excerpt]

[Read Part 3 of this series here.]

It is well known that Katsu Kaishū and Sakamoto Ryōma had a very close relationship for a couple of years. But their relationship abruptly ended with the dismissal of Kaishū as the shogun’s commissioner of warships and his subsequent house arrest near the end of 1864, for harboring the likes of Ryōma 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.

Kaishū taught Ryōma 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 Kaishū. All of that was essential to Ryōma’s greater achievement of brokering an alliance between Satsuma and Chōshū against the shogunate in early 1866. Satsuma was led by Saigō Takamori, to whom Kaishū had introduced Ryōma just before his dismissal from the government – and it is doubtful that without his Kaishū connection Ryōma would have been in the position to even talk to Saigō. Without the Satsuma-Chōshū 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 Chōshū 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 Keiō 3 – January 3, 1868. Saigō represented the Imperial government in the talks with Kaishū to avert all-out civil war in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in the spring of 1868. Kaishū, 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 Saigō represented the Imperial government, “the talks would have broken down immediately.” Catastrophe would have followed, undoubtedly changing the course of history – and Katsu Kaishū 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.]

Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi (Helion, 2026) is now in production.
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The mokuroku is the only extant certificate that Ryōma received from Chiba. But notably it was for the halberd (naginata) and not the sword. Nor was it for the rank of kaiden, awarded to a swordsman who had mastered the style. And so, some argue, Ryōma wasn’t such a skilled swordsman after all. But as reported by Yomiuri Shinbun on October 14, 2015, a recently revealed handwritten list of certificates in the Hokushin-Itto style that Ryōma had supposedly received includes certificates of heiho kaiden (“expert in the art of warfare”) for the halberd and the sword, along with a mokuroku for the sword. The scrolled certificates were reportedly kept at the Hokkaido home of a Sakamoto family descendent, which was destroyed in a fire in the early part of the twentieth century.

The late Meiji Restoration historian Mamoru Matsuoka offered a cautious view at the time. In a 2015 note on Facebook, he observed that while the list includes the mokuroku certificate for the sword, it omits the intervening ranks that would normally precede kaiden. Therefore, he considered the “kaiden” entry a copying error for mokuroku.