In 1878, ten years after the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Katsu Kaishū published a short, poignant narrative of tumultuous events that occurred between the fall of 1856 and around mid-1868. These events, in which Kaishū was either directly involved or witnessed directly or indirectly, informed modern Japanese history, and therefore influenced Asian and world history. The narrative is entitled Danchonoki (断腸之記) which I translate as “Heartrending Narrative.”

Katsu Kaishū, “the shogun’s last samurai” of my book Samurai Revolution, was a keen observer of human behavior. He had a deep understanding of human nature and, I think, the human condition. He was a prolific and penetrating writer, for which I am very grateful. One of my favorite quotes from his writing is the last line of the Epilogue of “Heartrending Narrative”:

“An old saying has it that one should not tell his dreams to an idiot. I reverse that to say: Only an idiot tells his dreams.”

(This photo of Katsu Kaishū was taken in 1860 during his stay in San Francisco. He sent a copy to his mistress in Nagasaki, Kaji Kuma, who was living with their son, Umetarō. It is used (without the frame) in Samurai Revolution, courtesy of Keisho Ishiguro.

Last week I wrote a little about Katsu Kaishu’s father, Katsu Kokichi. According to Kokichi’s autobiography, he studied sword-cutting techniques under Yamada Asaemon VII—also aptly known as “Asaemon the Beheader” (“Kubikiri Asaemon”). Eight consecutive generations of the Yamada family, each bearing the given name Asaemon, performed executions for the Tokugawa Shogunate. They were not retainers of the shogun, but rather possessed the indecorous position of unofficial executioner at Edo. The official executioner was a retainer of the shogun, who presumably preferred not to perform the hideous job. So the government hired the Yamada family to do it. Occasionally Yamada was called upon to perform a cutting test after an execution. When his clients obtained a new sword, they needed to confirm that it was sharp enough to cut through the tough sinews and hard bone of the human body. The corpses of executed criminals were used. Kokichi must have been a fast learner. “One day I performed a cutting test,” he wrote. “I cut through the torso. Since my son was at the palace [at Edo Castle], I didn’t have to take care of him.”

On a grimmer note, Yoshida Shoin, the great revolutionary hero of Choshu, was beheaded by Yamada Asaemon VII, under Regent Ii Naosuke’s crackdown against his enemies.

[I have written about Yamada Asaemon and cutting tests in Samurai Tales (Tuttle, 2010), and about Yoshida Shoin in Samurai Revolution (Tuttle, 2014). This photo of Yamada Asaemon VIII, taken in 1903, is used in Samurai Tales courtesy of Yuzankaku Publishing Co.]

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As a young boy Katsu Kaishū spent a lot of time at the inner-palace of Edo Castle, which was the residence of the shogun, his immediate family, and the women who surrounded the shogun. He was invited there as a playmate to the grandson of Shogun Tokugawa Ienari. Katsube Mitake, a Kaishū biographer, surmises that he “gained much by spending so much time at the inner-palace during his early youth,” which was “an opportunity that nobody else had,” particularly a poor boy of his low social standing. It was a period in history, writes Katsube, in which “Edo culture had ripened to the height of decadence. By that time Utamaro [Kitagawa Utamaro, woodblock print artist, 1754-1806] was already dead, but Hiroshige [Andō Hiroshige, woodblock print artist, 1797-1858] and Hokusai [Katsushika Hokusai, woodblock print artist, 1760-1849] were both still actively producing. It was a time of refined and delicate lifestyle in the great city of Edo, with its population of more than one million. Edo Castle was a place where the highest standard of that culture was practiced, and where one might imagine that advanced aristocratic tastes, comparable to those of the Palace of Versailles in France, were realized.” (Katsube, Mitake. Katsu Kaishū, vol 1. Tokyo: PHP, 1992: p. 337)

Men were not permitted in the inner-palace, where Kaishū surely learned about human nature, the shogun and his family, who, Katsube imagines, were “coming and going before his very eyes.” The experience would prove to be invaluable to Katsu Kaishū in his future capacity as a high-ranking Tokugawa official. As I wrote in Samurai Revolution, he probably heard the wives in the inner-palace talk about the shogun’s councilors and the feudal lords, and observed the complex relations among the women, some of whom wielded significant influence in the government. “I was a favorite among many of the old women,” Kaishū recalled. “That was a great help to me later in life. When those old women heard that even Saigō feared me, they thought that I had become quite a man.” That he became “quite a man” was in large part because of his father, Katsu Kokichi.

Kokichi, an accomplished swordsman, was not about to let his only son spend too much time with women, but rather took great care that he would be trained in the martial arts. One of Kokichi’s teachers was an extraordinary old man whom he praised as “an exceptional martial artist and superb scholar.” The teacher’s name was Hirayama Kōzō (1759-1828). He hailed from an old family of ninja who had practiced their secret art in the service of the shogunate six generations past. He was a highly skilled swordsman who was also trained in the arts of yarijutsu (“spear techniques”), jujutsu and artillery, and was an expert in the tried-and-true Naganuma school of military strategy. Hirayama lived by a daily routine of rigorous martial training and study. According to Kokichi, the old man slept in armor on a dirt floor, as if “always on the field of battle.” He wore only light cotton clothes, even in the dead of winter. He was an ascetic, whose house in Edo Kokichi likened to a “hermit’s dwelling.” Although Kokichi never received a formal education, for about ten years, from age sixteen, he received a classical education in military history through numerous and lengthy discussions at Hirayama’s home.

While Kaishū was still a young boy, his father enrolled him at the fencing school of Odani Seiichirō, a son of Kokichi’s eldest brother. When Kaishū was sixteen, a particularly skilled swordsman named Shimada Toranosuke enrolled at Odani’s school. Soon Shimada, who had come from Nakatsu Han, in the province of Buzen on Kyushu, opened his own school in Edo, which Kaishū joined at age eighteen, “thanks to the efforts of my father,” he recalled. Shimada, who urged his students to practice Zen “to gain a deeper understanding of kenjutsu,” had a profound influence on Katsu Kaishū, who stated that “Zen and kenjutsu became the foundation of my future life.”

This image of Shimada Toranosuke is taken from the website of Nakatsu City.

For more on Katsu Kaishū‘s martial arts training see Samurai Revolution, the only biography of the man in English.

The assassination of Sakamoto Ryoma is shrouded in mystery. Conspiracy theories abound, including that Ryoma’s friends from Satsuma eliminated him for having foiled their plans for a violent revolution. But there has never been any hard evidence uncovered that Satsuma was involved or in any way complicit in Ryoma’s assassination. Rather, the historical consensus, while not conclusive, is that he was cut down by swordsmen of the Kyoto Mimawarigumi (Kyoto Patrol Corps), a security force in Kyoto in service of the shogun’s government. Ryoma’s alleged assassins, then, were die-hard loyalists of the shogunate who blamed him for their imminent fall, based on his eight-point plan to avoid civil war.

Ryoma’s plan called for the shogun to abdicate and restore Imperial rule toward the establishment of two legislative houses of government, an upper and a lower, to be filled by able men, including feudal lords, nobles of the Imperial Court, and the Japanese people at large, under the Emperor and accountable to public opinion. The last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, accepted Ryoma’s peace plan, which was submitted to him through the influential daimyo of Tosa, Ryoma’s home domain. On the thirteenth day of the Tenth Month of the year corresponding to 1867, Yoshinobu announced his intention to abdicate and restore Imperial rule. Ryoma was assassinated about a month later on his thirty-third birthday, the fifteenth day of the Eleventh Month – about one month before the so-called “Restoration of Imperial Rule of Old,” a coup d’etat which took place on the ninth day of the Twelfth Month (January 3, 1868).

Ryoma’s plan, which Restoration historian Hirao Michio calls “the most noteworthy document in Restoration history,” embodied Ryoma’s second great contribution to the Meiji Restoration, following his brokering of a military alliance against the shogunate between two erstwhile enemies, Satsuma and Choshu, at the beginning of the previous year (1866). Ryoma’s plan served as the blueprint for the Charter Oath of the new Meiji government, promulgated by the Emperor in the Third Month of 1868.

I wrote in detail about Sakamoto Ryoma’s indispensable role in the Meiji Restoration in the novel Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai, and in the historical narrative Samurai Revolution.

[Sakamoto Ryōma, at Fukui in 1867]

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This year is the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Ii Naosuke, who as the shogun’s regent was the most powerful man in Japan. It is also the 155^th anniversary of his assassination. He was cut down in broad daylight at Sakurada Gate, a main entrance to the shogun’s castle on an unseasonably snowy morning in spring 1860. It was the most brazen offense ever committed against the Tokugawa Shogunate and the most politically significant assassination of an era plagued with assassination and bloodshed. The shogunate collapsed around eight years after the so-called Incident Outside Sakurada Gate.

This image of Ii Naosuke is from “The 200th Year Celebration of the Birth of Lord Ii Naosuke.”

“I cannot help but wonder who, if anyone, at the time realized the severe mental agony the regent was going through,” recalled Katsu Kaishu regarding Ii Naosuke’s mental state during the series of events surrounding the shogun’s successor and Japan’s first foreign trade treaties that resulted in Naosuke’s assassination. Kaishu was “the shogun’s last samurai” of my recent book Samurai Revolution, in which I have written about those events in detail.

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For more on Ii Naosuke and Katsu Kaishu, see Samurai Revolution, a comprehensive history of the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate.