Takechi Hanpeita, the leader of the Tosa Loyalist Party who was determined to overthrow the Tokugawa Bakufu and restore Imperial rule, had languished in prison for nearly two years. On the 29^th day of the Fifth Month of the Japanese year corresponding to 1865, he wrote to his wife from his squalid prison cell that “to lay down one’s life for one’s country or for one’s liege lord is true bushido.” Soon thereafter he was ordered to commit seppuku on the evening of the 11^th day of the intercalary Fifth Month. Sentenced to die by his own hand based on trumped up charges of political crimes, he nonetheless took solace in the fact that he was at least given the honor of dying as a samurai, rather than be beheaded as a common criminal.“ [T]he heart of a samurai [must be] as solid as a rock,” he wrote. Now he would have the chance to live up to his words. His stunning seppuku, which he performed with such bravery that even his enemies witnessing the event “were left speechless,” is depicted in detail in Chapter 14 of Samurai Assassins.

[Takechi Hanpeita is the focus of Part II of Samurai Assassins. His self-portrait, which he produced in his prison cell, appears in Samurai Assassins courtesy of Kochi Prefectural Museum of History.]

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“Went up to the castle.” Katsu Kaishū, “the shogun’s last samurai,” repeated this phrase often in his journal, as vice commissioner and later commissioner of warships. He was, of course, recording his visits to the shogun’s castle, during the heady and dangerous years leading up to the revolution. “Went up to the castle” is the title of Samurai Revolution, Chapter 13, which opens as follows:

“ . . . I frequently encountered danger, which sometimes encouraged me. But sometimes it was difficult to endure the misery, and even when I hoped for death I survived only to suffer numerous more hardships.” (Katsu Kaishū)

The tide of revolution had been on the rise this past decade. The swirl began in Edo with the arrival of Perry’s “Black Ships” in 1853. Occasionally the tide ebbed, as during the reign of Ii Naosuké, only to surge again with the regent’s murder at the castle gate and the spree of assassinations of foreigners in Edo and Yokohama. As the Bakufu attempted in vain to stem the tide—through a union with the Imperial Court, consummated by the marriage between the young shogun and the Emperor’s sister—the architect of the marriage plan was nearly assassinated. Then sometime around the end of 1862 the tide suddenly turned, and the center stage of the gathering revolution shifted from the shogun’s stronghold at Edo to the Emperor’s capital at Kyoto.

[The photo of Katsu Kaishū, taken just before surrender of Edo Castle, is used in Samurai Revolution, courtesy of Yokohama Archives of History.]

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Katsu Kaishu is the “shogun’s last samurai” of Samurai Revolution, the only full-length biography of him in English.