While revising Samurai Revolution for its expanded new edition, I’ve been rereading Katsu Kaishū’s later interviews—many of them at once hilarious and profound. One favorite comes from an 1895 Kokumin Shimbun (newspaper) interview, when Kaishū was seventy-three years old. In the interview he alluded to his title of count, bestowed by the Emperor eight years prior:

I’m naturally a bad person, which is why I put a market price on society. I know that when the price goes up, it’ll eventually go back down. When the price goes down, it’ll eventually go back up. And it never takes more than ten years for the market price to rise and fall. So, if I see that the price for me is down, all I need do is hunker down and wait a while—and sure enough it’ll rise again. The former villain and traitor Katsu Rintarō [Rintarō being his given name] is now Count Katsu Awa [his official name in later life]. But even if I act as if I’m important now, after a while I’ll only grow old and senile, and nobody will even bother to spit on me then. So anyway, that’s the way the market price of society is. A person who has the patience to wait out those ten years of rising and falling is a great man. And actually I’m one of them.

[Katsu Kaishū is the “shogun’s last samurai” of Samurai Revolution.]

[After the Meiji Restoration of 1868] Saigō disdained the extravagant lifestyles and arrogance of government officials in Tokyo, particularly central government leaders whom he considered “thieves” for their high salaries and residences in former estates of feudal lords, while the common people around them suffered. In one of his moral precepts he stated that a government leader, in order to carry out his office properly, must conduct himself frugally with utmost restraint and decorum, and “be on guard against extravagance,” as a role model for the people. But, he admonished, those leaders of the post-Restoration government who had installed themselves in stately residences, adorned themselves with the finest clothes, and “keep beautiful mistresses and contrive to enrich themselves,” could never accomplish the great tasks which comprised the very purpose of the Restoration.

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.
Explore my books at Books at a Glance.

I am pleased with the recent progress I have made in revising Samurai Revolution for a new edition. The revision reflects an enriched historiography grounded in expanded use of key primary sources, including the journals, letters, and memoirs of Katsu Kaishū, letters of Sakamoto Ryōma, Nakaoka Shintarō, and Saigō Takamori, and further analysis informed by leading Japanese historians. I’ll share publication updates as the project develops. Thank you to everyone following the work.

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.
Explore my books at Books at a Glance.

Sakamoto Ryoma & Katsu Kaishu

Sakamoto Ryōma first met Katsu Kaishū, a high-ranking officer of the shogun’s nascent navy, some time during the final months of 1862. In the following spring, while Kaishū moved forward with plans to establish an official Naval Training Center at Kobe, Ryōma, as Kaishū’s right-hand man, recruited his friends from Tosa and elsewhere—most of them “outlaw samurai” (i.e., rōnin) like himself—to study under Kaishū. Following is a slightly edited excerpt from my historical novel, Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai:

While Kaishū used his close relationship with the seventeen-year-old shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, to gain permission to establish an official Naval Training Center in Kobe, Ryōma used his influence among the Imperial Loyalists in Kyoto to recruit nearly one hundred of them for Kaishū’s private school. The Bakufu’s institution and the private school would share the costly facilities supplied by the Edo government. Under Kaishū, Ryōma, at age twenty-seven, was on the verge of realizing his dream of establishing a navy. [end excerpt]

In a letter to his older sister, Otome, dated Bunkyū 3/3/20 (May 7, 1863), Ryōma drolly expressed his excitement over his “disciple-teacher” relationship with the Bakufu’s vice-commissioner of warships: “Well, well! In the first place, life sure is strange. There are some men who are so unlucky that they die by breaking their balls just trying to climb out of a bathtub. Compared to that I’m extremely lucky: here I was on the verge of death [after fleeing Tosa and becoming an outlaw], but I didn’t die. Even if I tried to die I couldn’t, because there are too many things which compel me to live. I have now become the disciple of Katsu Rintarō [his given name, ‘Kaishū,’ being a pseudonym], the greatest man in Japan [italics mine], and I am spending every day on things I have always dreamed about. I don’t intend to return home until I’m around forty.” [translation from my novel Ryoma]

In the last lines before the postscript to the letter, Ryōma expressed his joy that their older brother, the Sakamoto family patriarch, had “forgiven” his transgression of fleeing Tosa, and conveyed his intention to “do my utmost for the country [Tosa] and the nation [greater Japan]”—which, for an “outlaw samurai,” required the unwavering support of the influential vice-commissioner of warships.

[Read Part 5 of this series here.]

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.
Explore my books at Books at a Glance.