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.

 

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.

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.”

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