In the first month of Bunkyū 3 (1863), the former domain lord of Tosa, Yamauchi Toyoshige, departed from off Shinagawa on the steamship Taihō-maru. At the time, the naval magistrate Katsu Rintarō was temporarily borrowing steamships from various domains for the shogunate and using them for training in fleet maneuvers. Kōnan Gorōemon, Inui Taisuke, Ogasawara Tadahachi and others accompanied Toyoshige.
However, the ship met strong winds on the Enshū Sea and was pushed southward. The rocking was so severe that everyone aboard prepared themselves for sinking. Turning back north, on the 15th they arrived at Shimoda, the very port they had set out from. Katsu, who happened to be there, made a request concerning those who had left the Tosa domain and were likely to be charged with crimes. His request was that he was sheltering 8 or 9 men, including Sakamoto Ryōma, as his own disciples, and asked either that they be pardoned or that the matter be left in his hands.
Toyoshige had a cup of sake, then laughingly answered that he would leave their custody to Katsu. The proof of this was a fan painted with a sake gourd. Tokutomi Sohō writes that through this, Ryōma and the others came to be protected as Katsu’s disciples. The party left Shimoda on the 17th and landed at Osaka on the 21st. On the 23rd they went up the Yodo River, and on the 25th they entered Kyoto.
Toyoshige, 36 years old by the traditional count, entered the city riding a horse named Senzai. Tokutomi Sohō writes that the young and old among the onlookers praised him as a fine leader. In Kyoto, the activities of the Tosa Loyalist Party were advancing, and Masaki Tetsuma and Hirose Kenta had received written orders from a prince. Hirai Shūjirō, the assistant rusui who met them at Fushimi, put forward three proposals, including one for reforming the court. But his opinions expressed on the night of the 29th angered Toyoshige, and on the 1st day of the second month he was relieved of his role in dealing with other domains.
Hirai was also forbidden from visiting the houses of court nobles, and Tokutomi Sohō sees this as having discouraged his comrades. On the 21st day of the first month, Ikeuchi Daigaku was killed, and on the night of the 29th, Kagawa Hajime, a retainer of the Chigusa house, was killed. On the morning of the 7th day of the second month, a severed head was placed on Kobashi Bridge over the Takasegawa, behind the domain residence to which Toyoshige had moved. A wooden placard was also set up, demanding that a deadline for expelling the foreigners be set quickly. In the margin of a letter to his close friend Matsudaira Yoshinaga, Toyoshige added that it was pointless killing, not even fit to serve as an accompaniment to sake.
Matsudaira Katamori, the Kyoto Shugoshoku, presented to Yoshinaga’s side a plan to use the radical rōnin gathering there as a vanguard against foreign ships. Yoshinaga avoided giving an immediate answer. On the 7th day of the second month, 12 court nobles went up to the palace to press for a deadline, and the answer given was that it would be carried out on the day the shogun returned to Edo. Even so, Kyoto did not settle down, and Tokutomi Sohō concludes that controlling the shishi was impossible. Toyoshige left behind a poem saying that he spent his days resolved not to raise needless waves on the Kamo River.
From the scene of Sakamoto Ryōma moving under Katsu’s protection to the point where Toyoshige moves to restrain the Tosa Loyalist Party, the course of events can be followed through Tokutomi Sohō’s account in Kinsei Nihon kokuminshi, vol. 49: Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians.
The tenth day of the first month of Bunkyū 3 (1863).Original
A steamship lay at anchor off Shinagawa.Original
The Taihō-maru.OriginalOriginal
At the time, there was a plan for the shogun to travel to Kyoto by sea.Original
Katsu Rintarō, the naval magistrate, had temporarily requisitioned steamships from various domains for the shogunate in order to conduct fleet maneuvers.Original
Those accompanying him included Kōnan Gorōemon, Inui Taisuke, and Ogasawara Tadahachi.Original
That night they stayed anchored off Shinagawa, and set sail the following day, the eleventh.OriginalOriginal
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Open the original page at the National Diet LibrarySouth and South over the Enshū Sea
On the thirteenth, the weather was still unsettled.Original
But seeing Japanese-style ships one after another spreading their sails and putting out to sea, Toyoshige urged the captain, Hida Hamagorō, onward.Original
At last they put out to sea.Original
Just as they tried to cross the Enshū Sea, they met a fierce northwesterly gale.OriginalOriginal
They changed course partway, but were driven ever southward.Original
The ship’s rolling was so severe that all aboard, it is said, resigned themselves to capsizing.Original
The next day, the fourteenth, they drifted amid a boundless, hazy ocean.Original
Seeing the wind ease, they set a course due north and sailed on for some hundred ri, but not a single island came into view.Original
Turning again to the northeast for several tens of ri, land suddenly came into sight, and on the fifteenth they finally returned to the port of Shimoda.OriginalOriginal
Two days had passed since they set out.Original
The place they arrived at was the very port they had departed from.Original
Shimoda, the Sake Gourd Fan
At Shimoda, Katsu Rintarō happened to be in port, on his way back to Edo from Kamigata.Original
Katsu went ashore and visited Toyoshige, who was staying at Hōfukuji.Original
The exchange on this occasion is recorded in Katsu’s own hand.OriginalOriginal
Toyoshige received Katsu and asked about the recent state of affairs in Kyoto, and Katsu answered what he had seen and heard.Original
On top of that, he made one request.
Among the retainers of the Tosa domain, many had recently fled and were on the verge of incurring guilt for their extremism; “Sakamoto Ryōma and eight or nine others are presently hiding under my roof.”Original
They bore no ill intent.Original
He asked that they be pardoned with lenience, or, failing that, be entrusted to him.OriginalOriginal
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Open the original page at the National Diet LibraryToyoshige gave no answer, but took up the sake gourd he was holding and spoke.Original
Unless you drain a cup, I will not answer.Original
Katsu forced himself to drain a cup.Original
Toyoshige clapped his hands and laughed loudly, saying, “Their fate I entrust entirely to you. Do not let them fall into extremism again.”Original
When Katsu replied, “A promise made in drink is hard to trust,” and asked for the sake gourd as proof, Toyoshige laughed all the more, drew out a fan, and wielding his brush, gave it to Katsu.OriginalOriginal
On the face of the fan was painted a sake gourd, and within it were written the words, “Drunk three hundred sixty times a year, the whale-sea drunken lord.”Original
Three hundred sixty days a year, drunk.Original
Thus the Tosa fugitives, Sakamoto Ryōma and the others, were sheltered as Katsu’s disciples and were able to preserve their lives, Tokutomi Sohō writes.OriginalOriginal
On Horseback for a Thousand Ages
On the seventeenth of the first month, they set out again from Shimoda.Original
Once more the winds and waves of the Enshū Sea ran high, and only on the eighteenth did they finally enter the port of Toba in Shima.Original
They set out again on the twentieth, and on the twenty-first landed at Osaka.Original
It was the eleventh day since leaving Edo.OriginalOriginal
Takechi Hanpeita and the other loyalist retainers of lower rank associated almost exclusively with the shishi of Chōshū.Original
Toyoshige’s close attendants, on the other hand, tended rather toward cooperation with Satsuma.Original
On the fourth day of the first month, Inui and Ogasawara both visited Ōkubo Ichizō at the Satsuma domain residence in Takanawa, and on the ninth Ōkubo visited the Tosa domain residence.OriginalOriginal
On the twenty-third, they went up the Yodo River.Original
On the twenty-fourth, they stayed one night at Fushimi.Original
On the twenty-fifth, they entered the capital.OriginalOriginal
He wore trousers of chestnut-brown pongee woven with a pine-branch pattern, a long-skirted black-figured haori, and at his waist a fine sword in a wax-finished scabbard.Original
That year he was, by reckoning, thirty-six.Original
He stood five shaku six sun tall, was fair of complexion, with a fleshy face and eyes that shone with an unusual brilliance.Original
Mounted astride a splendid horse named Senzai, he rode grandly into Daibutsu Chishakuin.Original
Onlookers, young and old, praised him as “a truly splendid commander,” and even the domain retainers accompanying him are said to have felt a swelling pride.OriginalOriginal
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Open the original page at the National Diet Library“Thus did Yamauchi Yōdō enter the capital in high spirits. One cannot know what he truly intended to accomplish.”OriginalOriginal
The Decree and the Reprimand
In Kyoto, meanwhile, the activities of the Tosa loyalist faction were steadily advancing.Original
Hirai Shūjirō, serving as the domain’s junior rusui, was mediating between the court nobles and the shishi of the various domains.Original
Masaki Tetsuma and Hirose Kenta of the loyalist faction.OriginalOriginal
Toyosuke, remaining in the domain, served as a backer of the conservative faction.Original
To reform the domain, Toyosuke had first to be moved.Original
Ordinary means would not move him.Original
That, according to Sohō, is his explanation for why he sought the prince’s decree.Original
In their later statement of confession, Mazaki and Hirose described it this way.Original
Since men of their low rank could not possibly convey the prince’s words orally, they had asked that, if he truly wished well for the Tosa domain, he grant a written decree, and permission had been given.OriginalOriginal
The loyalist faction was so pleased that they pressed their hands to their foreheads, saying “our cause is achieved.”OriginalOriginal
On the third day of the first month, the prince summoned Takechi Hanpeita and, his face showing anger, said that the various men of resolve doubted his sincerity, and that he had no choice but to retire from the world.Original
Takechi, choked with tears, remonstrated with him, and is said not to have left even after night fell.OriginalOriginal
文久三年正月三日、靑蓮院宮は、武市半平太を召し、予の心事を疑ふ者あり、長藩も不平を懷き、兵衞等を斥す-に議論あるやに聞く。此上は決然隱遁の外なしと、
Open the original page at the National Diet LibraryThen came Yamauchi Toyoshige’s entry into Kyoto.Original
On the twenty-fourth, when he arrived at Fushimi, Hirai was the first to greet him, and set forth a three-point policy: to correct the order of the court, to establish an imperial guard, and to demand new contributions from the shogunate and the daimyo.Original
On the night of the twenty-ninth, Hirai specifically requested an audience and laid out his views on the current situation in detail.Original
He at once incurred Toyoshige’s anger and was reprimanded.Original
On the first day of the second month, the anger had still not subsided, and Hirai was dismissed from his post of dealing with other domains.Original
Kusaka Genzui of Chōshū and Miyabe Teizō of Higo, who happened to be visiting, are said to have been greatly astonished when they heard of this.OriginalOriginal
In his diary, Hirai wrote that he had taken it upon himself to serve the realm, yet as soon as the old lord came from Edo, he “was suddenly met with abuse and forbidden to pass through the gates of the court nobles.”Original
His comrades were stunned and dismayed.Original
Sohō observes that it was no wonder the Tosa loyalist faction, who had hoped to look up to Toyoshige as the foremost champion of expelling the barbarians, in their disappointment branded him with the name “the hesitant one.”OriginalOriginal
The Little Bridge on the Takasegawa
In Kyoto, heads had been rolling.OriginalOriginal
On the twenty-first day of the first month, Ikeuchi Daigaku, who had been denounced for betraying his comrades during the Ansei purge and escaping with a light sentence, was assassinated on his way back from visiting Toyoshige’s residence at Nagahori in Osaka, and his head was exposed atop Naniwa Bridge.Original
On the night of the twenty-ninth day of the first month, Kagawa Hajime, a retainer of the Chigusa house, was killed, and at dawn on the first day of the second month, his hands were thrown at the Iwakura and Chigusa houses, and his head was thrown at the lodging of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the guardian of the shogun.OriginalOriginal
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Open the original page at the National Diet LibraryAfter Toyoshige moved from Chion’in to the domain residence at Kawaramachi, before long, on the morning of the seventh day of the second month, a severed head wrapped in a cloth was found abandoned on the little bridge over the Takasegawa behind the residence.Original
A wooden placard had been set up.Original
It read that this head belonged to Karahashi Sōsuke, who had wormed his way into the Chigusa house.Original
It said that if the old lord Toyoshige, having come to the capital, meant to deal with this crisis, he should quickly fix a deadline for expelling the barbarians and settle the direction of the people’s hearts, and that this head was offered before his gate as a proof of that sacrifice.Original
“This was, indeed, a measure meant as an affront to Yōdō,” Sohō writes.OriginalOriginal
Toyoshige added the following at the edge of a letter he sent to his close friend Matsudaira Yoshinaga, who was then in the capital.Original
“This morning a head was offered at my gate. It is no accompaniment for sake; what a pitiful, useless act of killing.”Original
This means: this morning a head was offered before his gate; it was no accompaniment for sake, a pitiful and useless act of killing.OriginalOriginal
The Unwanted Waves of the Kamo River
On the twenty-second day of the first month he boarded ship from the Tsukiji naval training school, and on the twenty-third set out from the waters off Shinagawa aboard the Junto-maru, but due to wind and rain he made stops at Uraga, Tago-no-ura, Ōshima in Kishū, and Yura, finally arriving at Osaka on the twenty-ninth.Original
Sohō writes that it seems Katsu Rintarō himself was aboard the Junto-maru as its captain.Original
On the first day of the second month, Katsu met with Yoshinaga and, in extremely fierce terms, urged him to make up his mind, saying that “the current state of the realm has reached the utmost danger.”OriginalOriginal
此の如く春嶽が乘船順動丸には、勝自身に艦長として乘組みたるものと思
Open the original page at the National Diet LibraryYoshinaga had “leapt into the very midst of the great confusion of Kyoto.”Original
Matsudaira Katamori, the Kyoto Shugoshoku, found that even with the military strength of Aizu he could not control the violence of the rōnin.OriginalOriginal
On the fifth day of the second month, the day after entering the capital, Katamori visited Yoshinaga’s residence.Original
Yoshinaga was running a fever from a cold, and Nakane Yukue, a leading figure of Echizen, received him in his place.Original
Katamori’s proposal was that the extremist rōnin gathered in the capital be placed under the command of the respected Takeda Kōunsai, and used as the vanguard for expelling the barbarians against the foreign ships that had come to Hyōgo harbor.Original
“As I hold the post of Shugoshoku, I wish to gather these men of resolve, employ them as the vanguard of expelling the barbarians, and let them fulfill their loyalist aspirations.”Original
The meaning is that, since he himself held the office of Shugoshoku, he wished to bring these men of resolve together, use them as the vanguard for expelling the barbarians, and let them satisfy their loyalist ambitions.Original
Sohō regards this as having been a “desperate measure.”Original
Above were extremist court nobles, below were extremist rōnin.Original
It was probably a plan born out of being caught between the two.OriginalOriginal
Yoshinaga avoided giving an immediate answer.Original
He thought that opening war with foreign countries merely to suppress violent men was no long-term policy for the state, and that the court’s deliberations must first be made firm.Original
In a letter dated the tenth, he stated that if, “at this moment when the great command to expel the barbarians has been issued,” the men of resolve continued to harbor resentment, it would hinder the unity of the people’s hearts.Original
This means that, at the time when the order to expel the barbarians had been issued, if the shishi remained filled with resentment, the hearts of the people within the country would not become one.Original
But Sohō writes that the text remains “inescapably vague” as to what this “court deliberation” actually referred to.OriginalOriginal
On the seventh day of the second month, twelve court nobles suddenly appeared at court and pressed the regent to fix a deadline for expelling the barbarians.Original
The result of the deliberation was a resolution that it would be carried out on the day the shogun returned to his castle in Edo, but the situation in Kyoto was not to be settled by that alone.Original
The extremist faction had Sanjō Sanetomi at court and the Mōri house among the daimyo.Original
Sohō declares that, unless these men could be restrained, controlling the shishi among the populace was “utterly impossible.”OriginalOriginal
Toyoshige composed a poem.Original
“On the Kamo River, resolved that no unwanted waves shall rise, I pass my days and months.”Original
The poem means that he had resolved in his heart not to let needless rough waves rise on the Kamo River, and so he spent his days.Original
Sohō calls this “a true expression, laying bare his very state of mind.”OriginalOriginal
Riding astride the ages, praised as a splendid commander, he had entered Kyoto.Original
Before his very gate, two weeks later, a head was placed.Original
Before the man who had resolved not to let waves rise, had the waves not already risen?
Beneath the lightness of the line he wrote — that it was no accompaniment for sake — what lay hidden?Original
Of that, Sohō says nothing, leaving behind only the single phrase: “a pitiful, useless act of killing.”OriginalOriginal
| Source text | Kinsei Nihon kokuminshi, vol. 49: Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians (1940). National Diet Library Digital Collections (PDM). PID 1228673 |
| Checked against | Ishin shiryō kōyō, vol. 4. PID 1046672 |
| Dates and names | All 6 dates in the text exist in the calendar for their year, and the Western years given alongside them agree. Of the 12 people named in the text, 11 also appear in Ishin shiryō kōyō, vol. 4. |
| English gates | 119 of 119 sentences passed the checks on the English text. |
This article is a reading of Kinsei Nihon kokuminshi, vol. 49: Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians. Tokutomi Sohō’s views are those of the 1920s and 1930s and may differ from current scholarship. The source text is a century old and may differ from current scholarship.
