Ryoma : Life of a
Renaissance Samurai
by Romulus Hillsborough
First Literary Biography of Japan's Most Magnificent Samurai
|
Samurai Sketches
by Romulus Hillsborough
A collection of historical sketches from the bloody final years of
the Shogun, never before depicted in English
|
In June 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy led a squadron of four
heavily armed warships into Sagami Bay, to the Port of Uraga, just south of the shogun's
capital at Edo. What the Americans found was a technologically backward, though
intricately complicated, island nation, under the rule of the House of Tokugawa, that had
been isolated from the rest of the world for two and a half centuries.
Whether or not the Americans realized the far-reaching effects of their gunboat diplomacy,
they now set into motion a coup de theatre which fifteen years hence would transform the
conglomerate of some 260 feudal domains into a single, unified country. When the fifteenth
and last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, abdicated his rule and restored the emperor to his
ancient seat of power in November 1867, Japan was well on its way to becoming an
industrialized nation, rapidly modernizing and Westernizing in a unique Japanese sense.
Quite a transformation in just fifteen years, and much of the credit goes to a lower
ranking samurai from the Tosa domain named Sakamoto Ryoma. When Ryoma fled his native Tosa
in spring 1862, he was a "nobody." Although he was a renowned swordsman who had
served as head of an elite fencing academy in Edo, and was also a leader of the young
samurai in Tosa who advocated the radical slogans Expelling the Barbarians, Imperial
Reverence and Toppling the Shogunate, in the eyes of the power that were he was a
"nobody." He had never held an official post, and he never would. When in the
following October the "nobody" met Katsu Kaishu, the enlightened commissioners
of the shogun's navy, it might have been with intent to assassinate him. But, of course,
Ryoma did not kill Kaishu. Instead, this champion of samurai who would overthrow the
shogunate and expel the barbarians became the devoted follower of the elite shogunal
official. Kaishu opened Ryoma's eyes to the futility of trying to defend against a foreign
onslaught without first developing a powerful navy; and to this end Japan desperately
needed Western technology and expertise. Ryoma now worked with Kaishu, whom he called
"the greatest man in Japan," to establish a naval academy in Kobe, where he and
his comrades studied the naval arts and sciences under their revered mentor. But certain
of his hotheaded comrades called Ryoma a turncoat for siding with the enemy, which, of
course, was not true. As if to belie the false accusation, in the following June Ryoma
vowed, in a letter to his sister, to "clean up Japan once and for all." What he
was talking about was overthrowing the military government, which Kaishu loyally served.
Earlier in the same month, ships of the United States and France had shelled the radical
Choshu domain in retaliation for Choshu's having recently fired upon foreign ships passing
through Shimonoseki Strait. News of the attack deeply troubled Ryoma, who was concerned
about possible designs among the Western powers, particularly France and England, to
colonize Japan as the latter had China. When Ryoma learned that the foreign ships that had
bombarded Choshu were subsequently repaired at a Tokugawa shipyard in Edo, he was fighting
mad. "It is really too bad that Choshu started a war last month by shelling foreign
ships," he wrote his sister. "This does not benefit Japan at all. But what
really disgusts me is that the ships they shot up in Choshu are being repaired at Edo, and
when they're fixed will head right back to Choshu to fight again. This is all because
corrupt officials in Edo are in league with the barbarians." But, now, through the
good offices of Katsu Kaishu, Ryoma too was in league with some very powerful men.
"Although those corrupt shogunal officials have a great deal of power now, I'm going
to get the help of two or three daimyo and enlist likeminded men so we can start thinking
more about the good of Japan, and not only the Imperial Court. Then, I'll get together
with my friends in Edo (you know, Tokugawa retainers, daimyo and so on) to go after those
wicked officials and cut them down."
Ryoma was not opposed to boasting, and he had a big ego, declaring to his sister:
"It's a shame that there aren't more men like me around the country." For all
his boasting, however, Ryoma was also a realist. "I don't expect that I'll be around
too long. But I'm not about to die like any average person either. I'm only prepared to
die when big changes finally come, when even if I continue to live I will no longer be of
any use to the country. But since I'm fairly shifty, I'm not likely to die so easily. But
seriously, although I was born a mere potato digger in Tosa, a nobody, I'm destined to
bring about great changes in the nation. But I'm definitely not going to get puffed up
about it. Quite the contrary! I'm going to keep my nose to the ground, like a clam in the
mud. So don't worry about me!"
It seems that Ryoma was also an incredible visionary who foresaw his own destination. Four
years later the "nobody" from Tosa forced the peaceful abdication of Shogun
Tokugawa Yoshinobu, and the restoration of the emperor to power - the event that
historians call the Meiji Restoration.
But how could Ryoma - who had plunged from the status of "nobody," to that of
outlaw, and one of the most wanted men on a long list of Tokugawa enemies - be of
sufficient consequence to force the abdication of the generalissimo of the 267-year-old
samurai government? And what were his reasons for doing so, even at the risk of his own
life? To answer the second question first, and to put it quite simply, Ryoma was a lover
of freedom - the freedom to act, the freedom to think, and the freedom to be. These were
the ideals that drove Ryoma on his dangerous quest for freedom - which, of course, was
nothing less than the salvation of Japan. But the greatest obstacle to this freedom, and
to the salvation of Japan from foreign subjugation, was the antiquated Tokugawa system,
with its hundreds of feudal domains and suppressive class structure, which men like Katsu
Kaishu and Sakamoto Ryoma meant to replace with a representative form of government styled
after the great Western powers, and based on a free-class society and open commerce with
the rest of the world.
While Ryoma was painfully aware of the necessity to eliminate the shogunate, the means for
revolution eluded him. Having abandoned Tosa, he was a ronin, an outlaw samurai - a status
which at once aided and confounded him. Unlike his comrades-in-arms from Choshu, Satsuma
and other samurai clans, he was not bound to the service of feudal lord and clan. On the
other hand he did not enjoy the financial support and protection of a powerful feudal
domain. After much trial and tribulation, and as his first giant step toward realizing his
great objective, Ryoma devised a preposterous plan of convincing Satsuma and Choshu to
join forces with one another as the only means to topple the shogunate. But Satsuma and
Choshu were bitter enemies whose hate for one another surpassed even that hate which they
had historically harbored toward the Tokugawa. What's more, the braggart Ryoma had a
reputation for exaggerating. When he told his friends of his plan, some initially
dismissed it as so much "hot air," while others simply thought he was crazy. But
in addition to many other talents, Ryoma, a truly Renaissance man, was endowed with an
uncanny power of persuasion. After a year of planning and negotiation, in January 1866,
Ryoma, now an indispensable "nobody," successfully brokered a military alliance
between Satsuma and Choshu, which more than anything else hastened the collapse of the
Tokugawa Shogunate.
Although the shogunate had not yet learned of the secret alliance, Tokugawa police agents
strongly suspected that Ryoma was up to no good. On the night after the alliance was
sealed in Kyoto, Ryoma was ambushed by a Tokugawa police squad, as he and a samurai of
Choshu, who had been assigned as Ryoma's bodyguard, celebrated their great success in a
second-story room at Ryoma's favorite inn, the Teradaya, on the outskirts of the Imperial
capital. A young maidservant at the inn, named Oryo, had been soaking in a hot bath when
she heard the assailants break into the house. Oryo immediately ran from the bathroom
stark naked up the dark staircase to warn the two men upstairs. The scene is a very famous
one, as is the ensuing battle, during which Ryoma wielded a Smith & Wesson revolver,
his bodyguard a lethal spear, to fend off their assailants and escape through the
backdoor. Equally famous is the wedding between Ryoma and Oryo, which took place soon
after, and their subsequent trip to the hot-spring baths in the Kirishima mountains of
Satsuma, which was supposedly the first honeymoon in Japan.
In spring 1867, Ryoma established his Kaientai, Japan's first modern corporation and the
precursor to the Mitsubishi. Based in the international port-city of Nagasaki, the
Kaientai was a private navy and shipping firm through which Ryoma and his men ran guns for
the Choshu and Satsuma revolutionaries.
In the previous June, Ryoma had commanded a warship in a sea-battle off Shimonoseki, in
which he aided Choshu's Extraordinary Corps, Japan's first modern militia, comprising both
samurai and peasants, in a rout of Tokugawa naval forces. While Ryoma's anti-Tokugawa
comrades from Satsuma and Choshu prepared to crush the shogunate by military might, the
"nobody" from Tosa devised a plan to avoid bloody civil war and foreign
intervention. Ryoma's "Great Plan at Sea," an eight-point plan which he wrote
aboard ship, called for the shogun to return the reins of government to the Imperial
Court; for the establishment of Upper and Lower Houses of government; for all government
measures to be based on public opinion, and decided by councilors comprised of the most
able feudal lords, court nobles and the Japanese people at large. Rather than merely
saying that Ryoma was once again "blowing hot air," or that he was
"crazy," there were now some among his comrades who felt betrayed. These men
advocated complete annihilation of the shogunate to assure it would never rise again, and
felt that Ryoma was a traitor. But Ryoma convinced one of his more level-headed friends,
Goto Shojiro, who was a close aide to Yamanouchi Yodo, the influential Lord of Tosa, to
urge Yodo to endorse the plan. Meanwhile, Ryoma continued to run guns for the
revolutionaries, because he knew that the only way to convince the shogun to abdicate
would be to demonstrate that his only alternative was military annihilation, which, of
course, was no alternative at all. Lord Yodo took Goto's advice and sent Ryoma's plan to
the shogun, as if it were his own brainchild. Eleven days later, on October 14, 1867, in
the Grand Hall of Nijo Castle in Kyoto, as Satsuma and Choshu hastened their final war
plans, the shogun announced his abdication before his adversaries had the chance to
strike.
With the overthrow of the corrupt and decrepit Tokugawa regime, the "nobody"
from Tosa had made good on his vow to "clean up Japan" - although, unfortunately
for his country, he would pay for it with his life. Sakamoto Ryoma was assassinated one
month later, on November 15, his thirty-second birthday, in the second-story room in the
house of a wealthy soy dealer in Kyoto which he used as a hideout.
Equally unfortunate for Ryoma's country was that cleaning up Japan "once and for
all" proved to be too long a period of time, even for a genius like Ryoma. This is
why, amidst the rampant corruption in Japanese business circles today, many people in
Japan have expressed their wish that a leader of Ryoma's caliber would somehow
miraculously emerge. A couple years ago executives of 200 Japanese corporations were asked
by Asahi Shimbun, an national daily newspaper, the question: "Who from the past
millennium of world history would be most useful in overcoming Japan's current financial
crisis?" Sakamoto Ryoma received more mention than any other historical figure,
topping such giants as Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Saigo Takamori, Oda Nobunaga and
the founders of NEC and Honda. Evidently many Japanese people today think their country
needs a good scrubbing once again.
Copyright(c)2002 Romulus Hillsborough
To be continued with Katsu Kaishu
(Romulus Hillsborough
is the author of RYOMA - Life of a Renaissance Samurai (Ridgeback Press, 1999) and Samurai
Sketches: From the Bloody Final Years of the Shogun (Ridgeback Press, 2001) RYOMA is the
only biographical novel of Sakamoto Ryoma in the English language. Samurai Sketches is a
collection of historical sketches, never before presented in English, depicting men and
events during the revolutionary years of mid-19th century Japan. Reviews and more
information about these books are available at www.ridgebackpress.com.)
Japanese Rifles of
World War II
by Duncan O. Mc Collum Paperback (January
1996)
Excalibur Publications
Japanese
Hand Guns
by Leith Hardcover (July 1976)
Borden Pub Co
Military
Pistols of Japan
by Fred L., Jr. Honeycutt Hardcover 3rd edition (November 1991)
Julin Books
Military
Rifles of Japan
by Fred L., Jr. Honeycutt F. Patt Anthony Hardcover
5th
Japanese Army
Handbook 1939-1945
by George Forty
Hardcover -
288 pages 1 edition (July 1, 1999) Sutton Pub Ltd
Japanese Rifles of
World War II
by Duncan O. McCollum
Paperback (January 1996)
Excalibur Publications
Akira Kurosawa DVDs
Dersu Uzala
Dreams
(1990)
The Hidden
Fortress
(Criterion Collection)
High And Low
(Criterion Collection)
Limited Edition
Kurosawa Collection
Ran (Masterworks Edition),
Madadayo, Kurosawa (documentary)
Madadayo
Ran
Rashomon
(Criterion Collection)
(1951)
Red Beard
(Criterion Collection)
directed by Akira Kurosawa
(1968)
Sanjuro
(Criterion Collection)
The Seven Samurai
(Criterion Collection)
Yojimbo
(Criterion Collection) |
