Shinok, this website is gone, and of course, in my very well kept note taking system I failed miserable to record the name of the person who wrote these articles, which is horrid. I like her writing style. She paints a realistic if unflatering history of the shinsengumi.
www.geocities.com/nobukaze23/china3.htm
Makato
As you have known by now, there are three major systems of belief in Japan since the year 600: Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.
Click here for how it all began, or here for the list of sects.
And you already have known that the trinity has really been a trinity; only social scientists and mad fanatix know where one system ends and another starts in the perfect mixture resulting from ancient Japan's super-synchretism. Any normal Japanese doesn't know it and every healthy Japanese mind doesn't care about it.
But this mixture has been the secret potion that enabled Japan to be whatever it chose to be in the past; it warranted unity no matter what, and it facilitated radical changes without hurting the nation too much -- from feudalism to chauvinist constitutional monarchy, from warrior-class domination to the everpresence of the 'economic animals'. The mixture was the sap in any territorial unit since the year 600, regardless of the weather.
Click here for the feudal territorial units of governance.
Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism are based on the same thing: non-individualist worldview. The only thing that matters is collectivity. The measurement is of your particular relation to your collectivity -- nuclear family, neighborhood & clan, region, the empire, in ascending order.
The element of the highest degree there is sincere faithfulness or loyalty -- as in the Shinsengumi's 'makoto'.
'Makoto' also means 'honesty' and 'truth'. It's just one of Bushido's seven virtues. Like you'd see (or so I hope), all of the meanings existed independently as far as the so-called 'universal' values were concerned.
You can't take them to mean what they mean in your system of thought.
They meant what they meant in the synchretic Tokugawanist frame of mind, nothing more, nothing less. (See the 'Bushido' page at this site.)
Now, the most important collectivity in feudal era, since 1185 until 1868, was a warlord's domain.
Your faithfulness, your duties, your responsibility, are ultimately to the warlord. He is more important than and must be prioritized before your father, the chief of your clan, your neighbors, and of course yourself.
And what's most important is that the faithfulness toward a warlord weighs more than universal abstractions such as 'truth' and 'justice'. So, here you can trek the Japanese way as deviating from the so-called universal ways to the core. This is the most essential reason why Japan had never really accepted Christianity.
The warlord is a rep of his domain, just like your dad is the rep of your family. He is more of a personification of the territory than an executive power or manager of the realm. That is why you must exalt him above all else; Shintoism, Buddhism and Confucianism all teach you about the peak of human duty: acting out filial piety.
How come, if everything is secondary compared with filial piety, you have to leave your daddy if he's wicked according to your warlord?
Because you were Japanese.
In China, Emperors wailed and withered under the same weight of filial piety (just the years under Empress Tzu Hsi alone can give you loads of examples). In Japan, father and son fought under the opposite banners in wars.
Like Konishi Yukinaga and his son So Yoshitomo at the battle of Seki plains in 1600, you could perhaps dodge the necessity of patricide, but even if you have no such a sentiment against shedding the blood of your dad or son or uncle or cousin, nobody would blame you for the gaping lack of sentimental family ties -- as long as it was done not for your own sake.
That's how come Saito Yoshitatsu of Mino killed his step-daddy Saito Dosan (Oda Nobunaga's father in-law) and thereby committed a crime. Because he did it for no higher cause than his own personal gain -- to snatch away control of the province. He didn't even have any good pretext for the action.
But if you do it for your warlord, for your overlord, for your Emperor, it would be very much okay. And in this, your own family is the staunchest supporter of your decision to wage war against your dad or brother or uncle or cousin.
How come?
The closest collectivity to you is your family, right? Well, face this: a Japanese family is a political unit, not an interpersonal club of people dearest to your heart.
You can't seek sanctuary at home like any average caucasian businessperson in weekends.
Your home is the warlord's domain, and even the Emperor's little geographical dot.
It isn't counted as a group of individuals.
But every individual is counted as a member of the group.
Catch my drift? There is a yawning difference between the last two lines.
If you'd only listen to 'the authorities', here's a direct quote from an essay by Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859) -- one heck of a guy, the philosophical backbone of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 even as it happened when he was no more.
Everyone who was born within the pale of our Empire must know the reason why it is called the Great Empire of Japan.
Isn't our Imperial Dynasty something that has been going on forever from time immemorial, in one single unbroken line?
Vassals of His Majesty received their domains from one generation to another. Rulers have been feeding the people, and so we must be grateful for it, and we are greatly indebted to them.
Rulers and the people are of one body. Loyalty to the ruler and filial piety to the parents are one and the same thing. In this world, our country is the only one that possesses this character.
As the Imperial line has been so from the beginning of time, our loyalty must also be maintained forever. Amano-oshihino-Mikoto spake, "He who dies for his lord doesn't die in vain."
This is Loyalty. This is the way of the samurai.
And Takeda Shingen of Kai (1521-1573) wrote something similar. Though certainly he would have said so because he was an overlord, it is nonetheless nothing unique and nothing so thickly garbled in self-interests, since it was the major belief anyway:
Everyone knows that if a man doesn't hold filial piety toward his own parents he would also neglect his duties toward his lord. Such a neglect means a disloyalty toward humanity. Therefore such a man doesn't deserve to be called 'samurai'.
The exact same thing was the basis of the darn famous 'Book of the Samurai Codes' (Hagakure Bushido), that the Tokugawa shogunate was so rabidy fond of citing:
A samurai who holds filial piety toward his father would stick by his lord in good and bad times, and never leave the lord even in the worst of adversities and even when the end is certain and near. He would never care about his own life, but try to keep that of his lord's no matter how much it costs.
We call one 'father' and we call another 'Lord', and 'filial piety' is due toward one while toward the other 'Loyalty', but those are the same thing.
There is an old saying, "Seek your retainers from among men who take the best care of their old parents".
It is sensible to assume that a man who doesn't obey his own father would never obey his lord, either.
And here's something from a holy man of Buddhism, none other than the founder of the largest Buddhist sect, Nichiren:
If a father is against your lord, as a son who understands his duties you will leave him and follow your lord. This is the ultimate filial piety.
That's why Akechi Mitsuhide is such a low-life criminal for his betrayal of Oda Nobunaga on June 21, 1582.
That's also why the mother of legendary captain of the 47 ronins of Edo, Oishi Kuranosuke, committed suicide before his son led his comrades to avenge the death of their lord. If she stayed around, she was afraid that her son would hesitate to do his duty. Mrs. Oishi has been remembered until this very minute as a paragon of greatest motherhood because she knew what filial piety was, and acted accordingly.
Now, how come the rest of the Japanese accepted the hegemony of the warrior class?
It wasn't a matter of arsenal and warlike qualities of the class. It was, above all else, a matter of obeying what every religion they believed in said, and a matter of being faithful -- to every step of collectivism as outlined above, in which the warrior class was just taken-for-grantedly the top of the pyramid.
Where's the reason?
Here's another quote, this time from Lord Tokugawa Mitsukuni of Mito (1628-1700), one of the greatest 'progressive' thinkers of Japan until even after Emperor Meiji's victory.
It also serves as a slice of specimen of the Japanese kind of filial piety: many historians agreed that if Mitsukuni lived in 1867, he would have led the pro-Meiji forces against his own clan's shogunate, because his ultimate loyalty was to the Imperial House.
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Nina Wilhelmina.
Sources I tapped for this page: Nihon Shakai no Kazoku teki Kosei (Tokyo: 1948); Kono Shozo, Kokumin Dotoku Yoron (Tokyo: 1935); Anesaki Masaharu, Nichiren, the Buddhist Prophet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1916); Robert Cornell Armstrong, Light from the East, Studies of Japanese Confucianism (University of Toronto, Canada, 1914); Sasama Yoshihiko, Nihon kassen zuten (Yuzankaku, 1997); William Aston, Shinto: The Way of the Gods (London: Longmans, Green, 1905); Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946); Charles Eliot, Japanese Buddhism (London, 1935); Futaki Kenichi, Chuusei buke no saho (Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1999); Kiyooka Eichii, The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Tokyo, Hokuseido Press, 1934); Konno Nobuo, Kamakura bushi monogatari (Kawade shobo shinsha, 1997); Nukariya Kaiten, The Religion of the Samurai (London: Luzac, 1913); A.L. Sadler, The Beginner's Book of Bushido by Daidoji Yuzan (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1941); Satomi Kishio, Nichirenism and the Japanese National Principles (NY: Dutton, 1924); Suzuki D.T., Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (Kyoto: The Eastern Buddhist Society, 1938); Henri Van Straelen, Yoshida Shoin (Leiden: Brill, 1952); Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion; Masaaki Takahashi, Bushi no seiritsu: Bushizo no soshutsu (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku, 1999); Paul Akamatsu, Meiji 1868, Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Allen & Unwin, 1972); Nitobe Inazo, Bushido, The Soul of Japan (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1970); Paul Varley and Ivan Morris, The Samurai (Weidenfeld, 1970); Inoguchi and Nakajima, The Divine Wind: Japanese Kamikaze Force in World War II (Hutchinson, 1959), Seki Yukihiko, Bushi no tanjo (Tokyo: NHK, 2000); Amino Yoshihiko, ed. Edojidai no mikataga kawaruho (Tokyo: Yosensha, 1998).
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Jibakutai & Kamikaze
So, what's the use of the samurai class? The only purpose for its existence is to maintain the Truth. Other people from other classes deal with real matters and handle real things, but the samurai does not. His business is with the unseen, the one that has no physical manifestation in this world but in his own class. If there is no samurai, Truth will vanish, society will fall into chaos, shamelessness will pervade, crimes and injustice will prevail.
'Truth' is a loose anglicized version of the Japanese word 'giri' that Tokugawa Mitsukuni used in his essay above. It can also get translated into 'obligations' or 'duties'.
Admittedly it all sounds too nonsensical and illogical to the hard-core 'Northern' minds (which means not just the caucasians but the rest of the globe, too, in this matter). But it was all too real to the Japanese, and as you have seen, it did work.
The entire Japanese Way, the most complete cosmology on earth, the unerring compass for all the Emperor's subjects, had been so deeply rooted within everybody's souls that when the merchant class started to have a say about their own place in this universe -- in 18th century -- they did it Japanesely.
Even as late as 19th century, even in the voices of the loudest advocates of the townsfolks, such as Ishida Baigan (1685-1744), Miura Baien (1723-1789), Motoori Norinaga, Kaiho Seryu (1755-1817), the Japanese struggle of the classes beneath the samurai had no ingredient that would have enabled it to belong to the same category with the French Revolution or the rise of the 'bourgeoisie' everywhere else.
The merchants and all their self-appointed messiahs only went on, like, "Please see us as something useful to the Empire, too" -- nothing more than that (why would they say so, see the 'Bushido' page).
It was never even a demand based on the fact that the merchants had been lending money to every samurai in the country and most of the debts were never paid back. It was a plea referring to the unchallenged system of values where the samurai perched on the top, as the inscrutable ideal of being human.
In the words of Ishida Baigan, founder of the 'Japanese middle-class movement' Shingaku, whose DNA was one hundred percent non-samurai:
The gods of our homeland received it from the gods Isanagi and Izanami. The sun, the moon, the stars and thousands of other things, are all within their power. Since there is nothing they don't conquer and rule, we call this homeland the land of the gods. This should be contemplated upon. It is so different from the way things are in China. In our country, the lineage of the Goddess of the Sun has always been preserved the way it was, and every time her offspring is on the throne. Thus people worship the at the Great Shrine (of the Goddess of the Sun, in Ise). Because she begot our rulers, who are descendants of the beings of Heaven, average people become pilgrims to her shrine. It is not this way in China.
It is the Way of Heaven (tendo) that the exalted nobles make use of the humble servants like us.....
The heart of the servant is bound towards his lord. The rice and the soup he eats are the rewards he receives from the lord. Without such rewards, how could he survive at all? Therefore the servant gives his body as the substitute for that of his lord's, and he sees his existence and identity as nothing more than a drop of dew or a speck of dust. This is the way of the servant.....
Even though samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants are different in their calling, all of them share one Way. If we are talking about the way of the samurai, the same way also applies to farmers, artisans and merchants; when we talk of the way of the farmers, artisans and merchants, it applies to samurai as well.
And that came from a man who has been seen as the most combative of all advocates of the despised class of merchants and townsfolks. You can imagine how it must have been, the same subject, in average Japanese minds.
So, whatever the class was, all these same values were held on to.
I just said, half a cup before, that Akechi Mitsuhide's crime against Oda Nobunaga -- his lord -- was such a heinous deed. So how come Oda Nobunaga's own action of banishing the last of the Ashikaga Shoguns, Yoshiaki (in 1573) was not a crime in this frame of mind?
Oda's was not a crime because what he did was something everybody else had been waiting for. You can guess that easily. Not a single one among the hundreds of warlords in 1573 (there were more or less 260 warlords at the time) declared war against Oda to defend Ashikaga Yoshiaki. A shogunate exacted the same kind of loyalty that Akechi should have given to Oda Nobunaga, but there is a limit to it. If the lord wasn't any good, they were free to depose him. That was the rule of the game. Once again, this is not just a matter of how many regiments your army consisted of.
Oda Nobunaga, at the time Akechi Mitsuhide attacked him, was not a bad ruler and not an insufferable lord that you could depose or kill based on your own judgment.
So, the principles that sound so absurd actually were the greatest of all such principles on this planet. It enabled the destroying of archaic social habits and conventions (like, Oda Nobunaga crushed the warrior-monks of Mount Hiei in 1571). It enabled radical changes (Emperor Kuammu discarded the capital city Nara and moved to Kyoto in 749; Emperor Meiji left Kyoto for Tokyo in 1890's). And while all those were commencing, the nation was kept intact, unbroken into Yugoslavian fragments.
Japanese valued learning and studying very much, but not as an end in itself. 'Enlightenment' is never individualistic -- it occurs to individuals, but it is always about a collective matter. One who was seen as 'intellectual' would instantly lose this title the minute he did something against his lord -- Akechi Mitsuhide was the arch-example of this, too.
So here is another streak that also sounds nonsensical today: the more educated you are, the more of an 'intelectual' you be, the more loyal you would be to your warlord.
This is why Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Niwa Nagahide, everybody under the Oda overlordship in 1582 had never foreseen Akechi Mitsuhide's betrayal on June 21 that year. Akechi was, in everyone's eyes, an intellectual; no way he would have even thought of attacking Oda Nobunaga.
Not at all sensible, you say? Well, that was, at any rate, how things went on in 16th century Japan. That explains why nobody -- not even the ninja corps of Tokugawa Ieyasu's, which were the best of all times -- was prepared for Akechi's attack.
What about the domestic realm of your own house?
It's all the same.
If your dad is an irrepairable alcoholic or unreformable sadist, leave him -- or depose him and take the title of the chief of the family yourself, or snatch it and give it to your uncle. If your dad raised arms against your lord, fight him. That's the utmost filial piety.
So loyalty is not passively harbored. Loyalty in Japan, especially in circumstances like the Shinsengumi's world, something active.
But can loyalty be lavished on the wrong subject?
It can.
How to determine whether it is the case?
Quite easy: headcount.
That's why Oda Nobunaga wasn't a bad lord; all of his Generals, Captains, and tributary warlords showed up at the 'battle of revenge' against Akechi Mitsuhide at Yamazaki in 1582. If he was as bad as Akechi thought he was, at Oda's death all these people would have joined Akechi; Akechi had sent tons of letters of invitation. But no one even replied.
And that's why Shinsengumi's famous slogan 'Loyalty' was wrong: the Tokugawas were the wrong subjects because they were against the Imperial House, which is the rep of Japan, thus they were against nothing less than Japan itself.
Moreover, the Emperor was the god on earth, so the Tokugawas were against nothing less than Nirvana.
That's really scary, spiritually and philosophically speaking. So the Shinsengumi picked up the wrongest of all wrong subjects to hand its loyalty to.
The Tokugawa shogunate sought (and a lot pf people say it attained) harmony during its reign between 1603 until 1868. That's why they thought up every nonsensical laws and rules to harness potentials of conflicts, regulating everything from social structure to women's hairdo and drama actors' makeup.
But harmony in the Japanese sense is self-maintaining.
Harmony is secondary when you face the collective goal that runs against it; harmony is also #2 when it concerns your lord.
That's how Japan facilitated itself in revolutions -- it never broke the essentials, it preserved the basic values no matter what.
That's where Japan differs from other nations that crave integration above all else -- such as Indonesia, which has always been prone to get itself chopped down to pieces whenever conflicts arise. The fact that Japan has been kind of homogenous (Indonesia is maddeningly heterogenous) surely helps a lot in maintaining unity.
The value put on collective goals is infinite. Whatever the goals are, and whoever the leader is, everybody's duty is to follow it and do everything he could to help attaining the goals. Goals might change radically -- like, from Tokugawa's to Meiji's -- but the values stay the same.
So, the Tokugawa shogunate and Emperor Meiji actually had the one and the same backbone, the same values, the same principles.
And all this has been fixed in the year 604 by Lord Regent/Prince Shotoku, via his famous Constitution of the Japanese Empire.
Social harmony, wrote the Prince, would be attained when everyone acknowledges the Emperor/Empress as the ultimate power in political, ethical, spiritual, even magical realms. This was the first time the word 'Emperor' was used. Before that, there were many terms that more or less only meant 'Chief'.
And like so many other basix of Japaneseness, the principle was imported by Prince Shotoku straight from China.
Now you can also stop wondering why Japan, of all nations, was actually the last on this planet to be wished for converting itself into Christianity. Christian doctrines are too far away from their frame of mind. Logic and rhetoric, the chief weapons in propagating Christendom, are two things the Japanese never value at all; Christianisty is much too verbose.
And it can't get along with other existing beliefs -- Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism -- it can't get synthesized with them. Its insistent monotheist creed runs frontally against the core of being Japanese: the faith in the Imperial line.
So Tokugawa Iemitsu was understandably much disturbed by the rise of this 'barbarian faith' within his realm in 1637.
What about the so-called essential streak of the Japanese warrior codes that have been known all over this little planet as some bulky preoccupation with death?
It did, actually, make sense. When you might lose your life any time this week not just because of your job description (a samurai's job description was just that, 'to die'), but it was also your duty to die, then the only way for you to get prepared for it is to get prepared. Right here and right now.
Luckily the Buddhist-Shintoist-Confucian Japanese knew exactly what lies beyond the last breath of mere mortals, so there was no reason for them to get freaked-up around the theme (that's something Christians do). The concept of life as a circle prevented the nonsensical view of death as if it is not a surety. There was no taboo around it; talking about death was normal because talking about life was.
As all books about the way of the samurai (in Tokugawanese term: 'bushido') have been ceaselessly elaborating, in a mercilessly philosophized view, the only thing a samurai can give to his lord, to his Emperor, to his country, was his life. So he lived a day to be able to give the life tomorrow. And as one of the quotations above showed, to lose life for your lord was, so to speak, a reward.
Something different was adhered to by ninjas.
Ninjas are samurai, but they had their own codes when it came to details of what must and what must not be done to serve their lord best. And one of these was not to die.
Not before a mission was accomplished anyway.
And not to die at all even after that, if possible.
That's why even among Japanese samurai there used to be some sort of unspoken and unshown disrespect toward the profession (maybe that made one of the reasons why Oda Nobunaga never liked ninjas, too).
The ninjas had a valid justification for it: how could they be of any use to their lord, if they kept dying before missions were done? M.I.A was the most horrible fate that could befall ninjas. So their code said that, whatever happened, just do anything to be able to get back alive. Otherwise the painstakingly-acquired info would have been a labor for nothing.
There's a famous illustrative event for the distinct ninjaistic way that wasn't the same as the rest of the warrior class'.
In 1570, Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent his ninja Watanabe to the province of Kai, Takeda Shingen's territory. Watanabe stayed undercover (pretending to be a Buddhist monk) for several months until he got enough facts to report about Takeda's plans to march to Kyoto. He decided to get back to Gifu.
But when he was on his way, another ninja came -- this one was the Takeda clan's ninja, Amakasu Sanpei.
Most best-known ninjas knew each other; so did Watanabe and Amakasu.
It was Amakasu's job to make sure no single sentence about the Takedas' plan was to get out of the mountains of Kai, and to do that meant killing Watanabe. It was Watanabe's job to make sure the info got into Toyotomi's ears, and this meant killing Amakasu.
But ninjas didn't share the samurai code that would have made them slashed each other at once.
Ninjas negotiated.
So did Watanabe and Amakasu.
Amakasu agreed to take Watanabe's robe, smeared with a little blood, to his HQ with a report that the man had been done away with. In exchange, Watanabe promised to leave out the info about Amakasu's manoevers in Mikawa (Tokugawa Ieyasu's province) when reporting to his boss. They could then part in peace.
Unfortunately this episode ended with the death of Amakasu, but such agreements like what he and Watanabe reached earlier were normal as long as ninjas were concerned. No 'daylight samurai' would even dream of bargaining for his life, and he would have killed himself if he did out of unbearable shame. But it was ninjas' prerogative.
The Roots of the Shinsengumi
www.geocities.com/nobukaze2...ngumi2.htm
The Tokugawa clan's Edo castle among Tokyo skyscrappers (left); portraits of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616) -- founder of the clan and the first of the Tokugawa Shoguns (center); the clan's crest and Ieyasu's personal battle-banner.
Tokugawa Ieyasu was Oda Nobunaga's ally until Oda's death in 1582. Then Toyotomi Hideyoshi that took up the reign of Japan in place of his late boss treated the Tokugawas as ordinary vassals. After Toyotomi died, Tokugawa Ieyasu won the last great war of the period, at Seki plains in 1600, against a nationwide coalition of Toyotomi's retainers -- which means a lot of famous and strong warlords and clans of warriors, like Uesugi, Ukita, and Mori clans. In 1615 the Tokugawas' victory was complete after they crushed the Osaka castle which had been the HQ of Toyotomi Hideyori, Hideyoshi's one and only son.
Even when Tokugawa Ieyasu had no more than 8,000 soldiers in every battle that they did together, Oda Nobunaga had never underestimated him or the clan's military prowess. In a very simplified pic, 30,000 of Oda Nobunaga's men might even have been equal with Tokugawa's 8,000. No kidding. Tokugawa built his army very slowly, but when it was ready to back Oda Nobunaga up in his wars, the few men Tokugawa sent or led by himself never let the ally down.
Under Tokugawa Ieyasu's son Hidetada, and then Iemitsu, even in the days of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi's shogunate in 1700, the Tokugawa army was still a formidable force to reckon with. That's why no warlord tried to break free even though a lot of the ones Ieyasu defeated in 1600 and 1615 had never really surrendered -- although their backlash must wait for 254 years.
Tokugawa Ieyasu's army, that he left for his offsprings to maintain, was very much like the World War II Japanese Navy in the matter of discipline, smooth chain of command, individual skills, determination to win, and esprit de corps. And Tokugawa Ieyasu regularly updated the military props and tools, too.
The 14th Shogun of the clan, Tokugawa Iemochi, died in 1866. The fact that under his reign the shogunate daily declined via ceaseless unrest in the streets while the cops and soldiers of the shogunate seemed to have achieved nothing in quenching it, was all evidence you need to summarize the condition of the shogunate at the time.
But it was no fault of Iemochi's that his military force deteriorated so much.
In 1637, Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu declared Japan as a forbidden terra as long as foreigners were concerned. Native Japanese were not allowed to as much as talk or meet with a foreign person, and they were not permitted to leave the country, on pain of death. Whosoever broke this rule was executed instantly, and there were quite a chunk of such outlaws. So everyone knew Iemitsu was serious about it.
Tokugawa Iemitsu took this drastic action because he was sick of what had just happened; the rebellion of 37,000 Roman Catholic peasants of Shimabara (near Nagasaki). He had crucified Christians, Japanese and foreigners alike, but he couldn't sleep soundly as long as there still existed a possibility of another revolt.
After Tokugawa Iemitsu died, his successors kept the insulation the way it was. While it certainly kept Japan oblivious of the latest development in armaments, it strengthened the national spirit and served to unite them for an incredibly long peaceful time, during which they perfected and refined what they already got.
But the Tokugawas in 18th century had departed from what the clan used to consist of; the samurai class -- devoid of real action in wars -- grew effeminate and steadily the Tokugawa armed forces dwindled. By the start of 19th century, the warlords under the shogunate were still keeping up their fake submission only out of habit; a good portion of them had got a contagion of the shogunate's martial ennui.
Tokugawa Yoshinobu (at the left side is as interpreted by actor Masahiro Motoki) ascended in Iemochi's place. At first he was reluctant to do so, perhaps realizing that he had neither personal charisma or military power to keep the job in the first place.
The picture at the right is an original snapshot of the real-life Tokugawa Yoshinobu in 1868, the very last Shogun on earth despite his name that means 'good and great'.
But no matter how bad the condition of the Tokugawas' military forces were, at least their cops (civil administrative bodies also double-functioned as precints, in their days) were working; and the legacy of Tokugawa Ieyasu's 'Central Intelligence Agency' of 1600's still showed traces of its unbeatable founding fathers (Tokugawa Ieyasu was known to have had the best ninjas in Japan, which no other warlord could match).
They were still quick in spotting dissenters even in 1866. The problem was in what to do with the info. A product of insulated meekness, Tokugawa Iemochi was as notoriously slow to decide anything as Ieyasu and others. But his good trait -- that differed him by a wide chasm if compared to his ancestors Ieyasu, Hidetada and Iemitsu -- was one of the things that brought him down: he didn't want to drag all these suspects to the nearest riverbanks and cut their heads off like the Tokugawas used to do.
All people around the Shogun saw it as a profound weakness, although they were no better either in keeping law and order. Plus some of them had started to defect, even though didn't dare to show it yet. Emperor Komei had just passed away, and his teenage son Mutsuhito ascended. Some of Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi's retainers and administrators shifted to the new Emperor's side, hoping for a better position when he won the contest for supremacy.
This Mutsuhito wasn't a genius or something (and his name only means 'the man from Mutsu'; compare that with Tokugawa Yoshinobu's), but he got the wrong kind of milieu that could eventually lead him to the right thing (savvy?) -- all the radical revolutionaries in his days gathered around the Imperial Palace, shoving in harmful ideas day by day -- harmful as far as the shogunate was concerned. The main idea was that the shogunate must get abolished, along with the samurai class altogether, and the entire feudalism as a whole.
Those people nursed such an idea because they got nothing from the present sociopolitical system. They were mostly samurai of the lowest rank of the warrior class, plus civilians who couldn't scrape a good living in their high social status within the Tokugawa feudal society, because their economic status didn't correspond with the social one.
Among them there were some earnest reformers who really thought of the country and the Emperor's interests, but even they took pains to withhold from the young Emperor the truths about the radical political overhaul that they championed -- that the Emperor would, in the new system, lose his right to directly rule via heaven's mandate.
This would have sounded like no difference at all from what had already been, since the Tokugawa Shoguns had been keeping Imperial authority for themselves to control Japan in the name of the Emperor, leaving none for the source of authority himself to keep.
Shogun Tokugawa Iesada and his successor Iemochi had been forced to agree with the Americans who threatened war if they were not given some trade concessions. Tokugawa Yoshinobu realized very well that doom was imminent already, that's why he refused the seat to start with -- although he had been talked into accepting the job.
The shogunate couldn't even discuss the thing in the light of honor.
It was not Yoshinobu's fault, but the late Emperor Komei and now his son Mutsuhito had been pissed big time because of some politically significant incidents invoked by Tokugawa Shoguns lately, that seemed to undermine the 'mandate from heaven'. And such a thing was absolutely dishonorable for a samurai to commit.
The U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry, clueless as caucasians in the East are still bound to be, handed President Millard Fillmore's formal documents to the Shogun's envoy, thinking that there (Shogun Tokugawa Iesada/Edo) was where the acme of authority in Japan laying at (instead of Emperor Komei/Kyoto). And in subsequent dealings with the Americans, Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi didn't correct the error at all. Maybe he relished the temporary form of address as the 'emperor' of Japan in the eyes of the caucasians.
Shogun Tokugawa Iesada had even actively committed a great breach of good manners at least -- if not a symbolic coup -- by signing official outbound documents with his name as 'the supreme ruler of Japan' ('tai-kun' in Chinese), while all people knew that in the Japanese feudalism a Shogun was no higher than the Emperor's Chief General and/or Minister.
Emperor Mutsuhito's young 'advisors' might have overlooked such things as having no meaning at all, but the old clans of loyal warlords couldn't dismiss it as anything trivial. To the codes of honor that they still upheld in 1868, whosoever was against the Emperor was the enemy of the state, and if it was the Shogun, then loyalist clans must defend the honor of the Imperial House by punishing the Shogun. A symbolic criminal action was already an act against the Emperor, since it smacked of a coup.
From then on, pro-Meiji rioters joined the already burgeoning chunk of anti-Americans in the streets. Some of the sword-swinging chauvinist bands were fighting for the Shogun, some were for the Emperor. It was the start of the confusing civil war that would in time ensue.
When unrest started to foment in 1863, the Tokugawas' original clan, Matsudaira, thought hard to quench what would have been their instant doomsday if not immediately deleted from earth: some voices already cried out for the shogunate to close down.
Among the measures the Matsudairas took was to launch the Shinsengumi.
It was founded in Kyoto, because the Shogun was kind of safe enough in Edo -- it had been the clan's main territory since 1600 -- while Kyoto was where Emperors Komei and Mutsuhito and the latter's dangerous hangout buddies were. The Matsudairas wanted to eradicate the very source of anti-Tokugawa disturbance before it spread elsewhere, although they did this already too late.
They couldn't employ the usual bodies of riot-quenchers, because what the Matsudairas had in mind was some sort of more radical measure -- organized assassinations. This must be done by a body of men which was not directly related to the shogunate, to preserve the latter's appearance of political cleanness.
Well-known samurai would not do either, because the target was to be achieved via 'namelessness' -- in short, they wanted an effective killing machine that would never ask questions and never had any individual reputation to mind, when doing all the gory assignments.
It was impossible for the shogunate or the Matsudaira clan to recruit masterless samurai ('ronins'); what would people think of them if they stooped so low? It was solved by getting an independent body of founders whose existence was not a secret but not officially acknowledged either.
All that the Tokugawas and Matsudairas would be bound to do was to supply enough money to pay these assassins with, and to finance their easy living, so that they would stay in the job.
And to avoid smearing the shogunate with mud, they thought up titles that wouldn't scare people (at least people who had never known what it meant) to bestow on the Shinsengumi, so that the financial reports in the shogunal treasury could be justified. At last they decided on something that implied the notion of "peacekeepers" and "protectors of order".
As the equivalence of Shogun Tokugawa's Shinsengumi, there were real assassins on the Emperor Meiji supporters' side -- whose reputation and actual killings were just as mountainous as that of the Shinsengumi's: the legendary swordsman Kawakami Gensai, mastermind Takechi Hanpeita, professional whackers Okada Izo and Tanaka Shimbei.
The stage was set for a real contest of might in 1867.
What the Real Shinsengumi was made of
www.geocities.com/nobukaze2...ngumi4.htm
The Political Wallpaper of This Scene
The U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry cluelessly handed his credentials and President Millard Fillmore's formal letters to the Shogun's envoy in 1853, thinking that there (Shogun/Edo) was where the acme of authority in Japan laying at (instead of Emperor/Kyoto). And in his own dealings with the Americans the next Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi didn't correct the error at all. Maybe he relished the temporary form of address as the 'sovereign' of Japan in the eyes of the caucasians.
Shogun Tokugawa Iesada had even actively committed a great breach of good manners at least -- if not symbolic coup -- by signing official outbound documents in 1850's with his name as 'the supreme ruler of Japan' ('tai-kun' in Chinese), while all people knew that in the Japanese feudalism a Shogun was no higher than the Emperor's Chief General and/or Minister (see the ranks in feudal Japan at another page). Emperor Komei, of course, didn't like the American-related incidents at all. But he didn't know what to do either.
In 1867, Emperor Mutsuhito's young 'advisors' might have overlooked such things as having no meaning at all, but the old clans of loyal warlords couldn't dismiss it as anything trivial. To the codes of honor that they still upheld in 1868, whosoever was against the Emperor was the enemy of the state, and if it was the Shogun, then loyalist clans must defend the honor of the Imperial House by punishing the Shogun. A symbolic criminal action was already an act against the Emperor, since it smacked of a coup.
From then on, pro-Meiji rioters joined the already burgeoning chunk of anti-Americans in the streets. Some of the sword-swinging chauvinist bands were fighting for the Shogun, some were for the Emperor. It was the start of the confusing civil war that would in time ensue.
The Birth of Shinsengumi
When unrest started to foment in 1863, the Tokugawas' original clan, Matsudaira, thought hard to quench what would have been their instant doomsday if not immediately deleted from earth: some voices already cried out for the shogunate to close down.
Among the measures the Matsudairas took was to launch the Shinsengumi. This happened on March 12, 1863.
It was founded in Kyoto, because the Shogun was kind of safe enough in Edo -- it had been the clan's main territory since 1600 -- while Kyoto was where Emperors Komei and Mutsuhito and the latter's dangerous hangout buddies were. The Matsudairas wanted to eradicate the very source of anti-Tokugawa disturbance before it spread elsewhere, although they did this already too late.
They couldn't employ the usual bodies of riot-quenchers, because what the Matsudairas had in mind was some sort of more radical measure -- organized assassinations. This must be done by a body of men which was not directly related to the shogunate, to preserve the latter's appearance of political cleanness.
Well-known samurai would not do either, because the target was to be achieved via 'namelessness' -- in short, they wanted an effective killing machine that would never ask questions and never had any individual reputation to mind, when doing all the gory assignments.
It was impossible for the shogunate or the Matsudaira clan to recruit masterless samurai ('ronins'); what would people think of them if they stooped so low? (Click here if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)
It was solved by getting an independent body of founders whose existence was not a secret but not officially acknowledged either.
All that the Tokugawas and Matsudairas would be bound to do was to supply enough money to pay these assassins with, and to finance their easy living, so that they would stay in the job.
And to avoid smearing the shogunate with mud, they thought up titles that wouldn't scare people (at least people who had never known what it meant) to bestow on the Shinsengumi, so that the financial reports in the shogunal treasury could be justified. At last they decided on something that implied the notion of "peacekeepers" and "defenders of the realm".
As the equivalence of Shogun Tokugawa's Shinsengumi, there were real assassins on the Emperor Meiji supporters' side -- whose reputation and actual killings were just as mountainous as that of the Shinsengumi's: the legendary swordsman Kawakami Gensai, mastermind Takechi Hanpeita, professional whackers Okada Izo and Tanaka Shimbei
Most of the firsthand knowledge about the Shinsengumi of late 1860's was tapped from the memoir of Nagakura Shinpachi. He lived long enough -- very long, as his original portrait that is still extant was taken when he was of a very advanced age (see the picture at the Shinsengumi main page at this site) -- to tell at least his version of the history and exploits of the group.
Nagakura's book was overloaded with detailed and vivid accounts of interrogation processes and methods of assassinations that the Shinsengumi had done between 1863 and 1869.
The most influential member and leader of the pack was this man, Hijikata Toshizo. That's his original photograph, a portrait painting executed in the classical style, and a statue at the monument to immortalize the real Shinsengumi.
Hijikata was, in all outward appearances, less scary than his more visible comrade Kondo Isami. But he's the one in charge of administrative stuff within the pack, and he maintained the structural integrity therein. He's probably the only resemblance to a thinker within this effective assassins' hangout -- although this was mostly applied in things such as invention of ways of torture in interrogations.
Relix of the Shinsengumi have been nearly zoomed out into objects of worship in the end of 20th century, such as this piece, Hijikata's sword. Legend has it that Hijikata used this in his last battle against the pro-Meiji troops. He died, fittingly, in battlefield.
Without the Shinsengumi's appearance in pop cultural exports from Tokyo in 1990's, the appeal to worldwide audience might have never been as great as today.
The most popular figure brought about by this flood of J-Pop is Saito Hajime (like in the picture at the right, that's Saito according to comic book artist Watsuki Nobuhiro in 1996). The picture at the left is one of Saito Hajime's original photos that still exist. He had already joined the Meiji cops at the time the picture was taken -- see the uniform that has been ubiquitous in virtually all woodblock prints, paintings, drawings and photographs from the era (click here for examples).
Saito Hajime was famous for his prior-to-ambush snooping around, using the Ishida Sanyaku medix (actually this was Hijikata's produce) as the gauze when he went undercover (that's the characteristic box of such medicines, at the left). Saito was a survivor of many individual, collective, and battlefield combats; but he died relatively in peace. That's the picture of Saito's grave at the right.
Statue of Kondo Isami, a peasant's son who trained himself in swordsplay, joined the Shinsengumi, and be its leader after the true-blue samurai leader of the pack -- Serizawa Kamo, who came from one of the most illustrious warrior clans in Japan -- was assassinated by Kondo himself.
Kondo said he was ordered to, by the 'supervisor' of the pack. The reason was because Serizawa's Shinsengumi had been nothing but a bunch of swaggering extortionists, reaping a few bucks daily from every mortified businessperson in Kyoto.
The Tokugawas wanted this kind of predictable development to stop, albeit its being wholly natural. What else would you expect to happen, if you put together some young jobless men from the lower classes, told them that they were some pillars of society, blessed them by saying that the life of the government depended on them, gave them a dazzling uniform, fed them like it was their last meal every time, opened up places for them to live in for free and called those 'Headquarters', and handed them a license to kill?
That Kondo didn't kill Serizawa upon his own personal stuff must be true because murdering a member of the Tokugawa shogunate's staunchest vassal clan was sure to invoke scary backlash if it was done behind the back of the shogunal inner circle.
The pic at the center is Kondo's grave today, and the picture he designed to be put on the back of his robe is at the right. Although both were equally lethal, Kondo was a different sort of man compared with Hijikata Toshizo; he was outwardly overbearing. He died assassinated before seeing any real war.
Ito Kashitaro jilted his colleagues to join the Emperor's supporters in the eve of the civil war of Japan in 1867. He was punished the Shinsengumi's way -- something that he had known so well. One of his relix is the helmet at the right.
Okita Soji had no leadership quality, but he has been one of the most famous members and leaders of Shinsengumi since people heard that he was the youngest of the pack, and the coolest (as in a fridge), too (see Okita's pictures at the Shinsengumi main page at this site).
Okita's short life didn't meet a violent end. He had TB, and just before the Shinsengumi's war he died.
The monument and cenotaph of Okita's always get adorned with fresh flowers whenever a pilgrim came by from places as far as San Diego, Ca., even as late as in 2005.
Shinsengumi's Policy in Foreign Affairs
The glaring errors in reading the real and original Shinsengumi has enabled the smooth slide of the pack into the 20th and 21st century pop culture, in which the Shinsengumi got fans from all over the world and a great chunk of whom have been Americans and Europeans.
And these multiracial Shinsengumists have been claiming that the real and original Shinsengumi fought against the pro-Meiji samurai whose slogan was ''Revere the Emperor and Expel the Barbarians" ('Sonno-joi' in Japanese; there were various groups of this kind) -- and therefore, they concluded, the Shinsengumi was not anti-'Barbarians'.
That was a very misled notion.
The real Shinsengumi had never as little as liked foreigners, let alone caucasian foreigners.
The crucial thing was in whose side the loud 'Expel the Barbarians!' flock be. They were people who saw the Tokugawa Shoguns' deals with the Americans as the ultimate un-patriotic sin, and so these xenophobic men sided with Emperor Meiji because they hoped that the Emperor would apply correction to the 'welcome to Japan' policy that the Shoguns were starting to apply in 1860's.
They would get very disappointed when the war was over and the Emperor won and the foreigners were even more welcome than before.
So these enemies of the Shinsengumi fought against Emperor Meiji later. In 1891 fightings were still going on randomly everywhere.
The core of the Shinsengumi's faith was the same as the Tokugawa shogunate: anti-foreigners.
How could it be any different, for it was the shogunate that gave birth to it?
The shogunate itself would have agreed to the slogan 'Sonno-joi' if the 'Expel the Barbarians' part didn't mean getting bombardment from American and European battleships.
Remember that the Shoguns -- Iesada, Iemochi, and Yoshinobu -- were forced -- at cannon-point -- to deal with the Americans under Commodore Perry.
They had never relished this crack of authority. The Tokugawa clan's history itself from the very beginning (click here) certainly ran against 'loving foreigners' at all.
Shinsengumi's Attitude Toward the Emperor
That Shinsengumi fought against the pro-Meiji forces never meant they were allergic to the idea of reverencing the Emperor. Heck, no one in Japan would have had such an attitude, even if their job was to kill the Emperor's supporters 24/7!
The Shinsengumi fought because the shogunate did. They owed their immediate allegiance to the Shogun, because the Shogun (or at least his circle) paid them. That's the same old biz like warriors of 16th century and their masters.
But even the Shogun was the Emperor's underling; he, too, had his duty as a samurai to revere the Emperor -- something that was still in force even at the peak of the Tokugawa regime in 1700's, when the Shogun ceased to pay homage to the Emperor physically, since which both houses only sent envoys to one another. No matter how freezing the atmosphere between the two was, the Shogun didn't only bow to the Emperor in physical terms.
The shogunate itself would have agreed to the slogan 'Sonno-joi' if the 'Revere the Emperor' part didn't mean banishing the Shogun to powerless obscurity.
A samurai's ultimate allegiance has always been to the Emperor.
So was a Shinsengumi member's, if he took himself as a samurai.
Even Hijikata Toshizo withdrew when the army bearing the Imperial Banner approached.
If he kept on fighting even after being told that he was to face the Imperial force, he would have been dubbed an enemy of the state.
In such a position, no one would be able to help him. Not even Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu if this were to happen in the year 1600.
Prelude To The Real War
www.geocities.com/nobukaze23/meiji2.htm
At their HQ in the unfriendly city of Kyoto, which belonged to their enemies, the Shinsengumi faced a variety of targets that they couldn't whack to shreds at once. The Shinsengumi's allies, i.e. warlords and samurai who didn't leave the sinking Tokugawa ship at this worst of times, were mostly far away. The city of the Tokugawas, Edo (Tokyo), was the best of all places to be if you were at the shogunate's side; because even the Naval Academy (est. in 1855), which belonged to the Tokugawa shogunate's Navy, was full of pro-Meiji cadets. It went out of control since the location was in Nagasaki, far away from Edo, in the Kyushu isles. The school became a depot of armaments just like Nagasaki itself was in 16th century -- all foreign vendors of guns and ammo were crowding the place in 1867, reaping a lucrative biz in their deals with both the pro-Meiji and anti-Meiji forces, plus the 'neutrals' and the 'independents', too, who got their own reasons to stock arms, especially in Tosa, Satsuma, Choshu, and Mito -- whose lord was a Tokugawa, but whose views of everything ran againts his own clan's.
Since 1863, who were friends and who were foes were at once apparent and dubious -- such a confusing atmosphere was characteristic of the entire Meiji War and the Meiji Era itself. However, right from the onset the warlords who were at the Emperor's side were identifiable; they were those whose hangout places were never near Edo but Kyoto.
So the Tokugawa shogunate, in real life between 1603 and 1867, held but their own clan's territories and nearly nothing more. Taxes were the only regular income of the Shoguns; the shogunate didn't have the right to tax the warlords' territories, so there was no 'national' taxation. No 'national' land, either. Until 1845, even a relatively inconsequential (in acres) area around Osaka still belonged to 165 different warlords -- those who went to the war at Seki plains in 1600 at the side of Tokugawa Ieyasu. These clans were staunchest vassals of the Tokugawas, so it would have been a suicide, as far as the clan's honor was concerned, to snatch away their deserved rewards for their support all those ages.
The rest of Japan was domains of ex-enemies of the Tokugawas, which comprised of more or less 95 warrior clans. And none of these 95 clans ever forgot the defeat at Seki plains two centuries ago. They would have been glad to have it avenged for.
So, even Tokugawa Ieyasu let some of the territories untouchable, because he knew the warlords of those areas didn't really submit to his shogunate. It took them more than two centuries to defy the shogunate openly, but in 1600 they already did in labyrinthine ways.
Among these untouchable warlords were overlords (warlords whose territory comprised of more than a single province, and had their vassals among the rest of the warlords who each held a province, too) that Tokugawa never conquered. These were the Mori clan of Western Japan, Shimazu of Satsuma (in Kyushu isles), Maeda of Kaga.
Then there was also another sort of 'untouchables', i.e. the never-conquered but nearly as allies to the Tokugawas (thus hardly of any lesser rank). This comprised of clans like Hosokawa of Higo, Date of Sendai, plus smaller warlords in Mutsu and coastal area of central Japan.
The Tokugawa shogunate since 1603 until 1867 put the 'silenced but not subdued' warlords into the category of 'under surveillance' by the shogunal cops and 'Central Intelligence Agency' (ninjas). These bodies gave hawks a bad name, since the birds were used in police business and employed in spying on people.
Here is the list of the greatest (meaning: richest, strongest, best-armed) clans during the Tokugawa shogunate's reign of 254 years.
Some of them became the natural upholders of Emperor Mutsuhito's war against the shogunate in 1863.
If your interest is in the 'Warring States Period' of 16th century, you must recognize most of the names as being Oda Nobunaga's Generals, Captains, and tributary vassals between 1560 and 1582.
Clan Province(s) HQ
M A E D A
S H I M A Z U
D A T E
H O S O K A W A
K U R O D A
A S A N O
M O R I
Kaga, Noto, Etchu, Tosa
Satsuma, Ozumi, Hyuga
Mutsu, Iyo
Higo, Hitachi
Chikuzen, Kazusa
Aki
Tosa, Suo, Nagato, etc.
Kanazawa
Kagoshima
Sendai
Kumamoto
Fukuoka
Hiroshima
Hagi
Crests of the 'Magnificent Seven' of 1860s
The 'Magnificent Seven' since 1603 until 1867. There's always an error whenever caucasian historically-minded persons observe the crests of the clans above; 9.5 out of 10 instantly assume that Shimazu was the Christian warrior clan. While the correct one is the Kuroda.
The assumption is still prevalent even after 2 centuries, only because the Shimazu crest looks like a circled crucifix.
You know what the 'cross' in Shimazu crest actually is? The clan lifted up their crest from the diagram of a bit-ring of horses.
Click here for real Christian warlords and samurai.
Tokugawa Ieyasu had left a more or less secured realm for his dynasty when he died in 1616. His formula was simple: he put your worst enemy, who would instantly seize any slightest chance to shoot your dog just for fun, right next to you on the map of Japan.
That's how he shifted landowning in 1600's. Tokugawa's sons and staunchest vassals were all circling the Yamashiro province where Kyoto (hence the Emperor) was -- because having the person of the Emperor meant power over the Empire.
The Mori clan was put close to Kuroda -- they had never been friends since Kuroda was Oda Nobunaga's and Toyotomi Hideyoshi's General who campaigned in Mori's territories in 1580's. Asano was also nearby; this clan was a relative of Toyotomi's. Hosokawa and Shimazu had to stay side by side in geographic terms when in real life they, too, hardly ever exchanged glances. And so on. Only Maeda never really had any enemy who swore to claw his clan to pieces; so Tokugawa Ieyasu put his sons around the domain belonging to Maeda.
Warlords of the outer isles were mostly against the Shogun, but not for the Meiji Restoration.
This isn't so confusing as it seems. These warlords and bands of sword-toting samurai were old enemies of the Tokugawas. Naturally they cherished the chance to crush the Tokugawa clan to dust. But they didn't want a modern system of governance.
That's why they felt like jilted by Emperor Meiji and his 'advisors' after the war was over and the Emperor won. While his victory was partly due to these warlords' efforts (they even used their own money to get ammo and such), they were whacked the hardest the instant victory was at hand. They were stripped of all titles and privileges, agrarian holdings, and sociopolitical rights of old, and compelled to assume new lives as ordinary urban gentlemen in Tokyo. Their castles were taken away, and then dismantled or auctioned.
Actually we are already very lucky that quite a lot of Japanese castles are still here today, because the spirit to destroy feudal architecture was scarily soaring those days in the aftermath of Meiji's victory. The Meiji supporters, a great chunk of which was lowest-ranked samurai and non-warrior-class people, naturally resented all the warlords of old and in the name of the so-called 'modernism' they wanted to whack as many as possible of those castles to dust -- since they and their kin and kith had never gotten anything from feudalism, being of the 'wrong' sociopolitical classes (click here for complete explanation and pictures of Japanese sociopolitical classes since 1185 until 1868).
Such things happened in the 'Warring States Period', to be sure, and happened to these warlords' ancestors in 1600 when Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the latter. But those only happened to the losers of the war, and the snatcher of all possessions was the victor that had beaten them up. That was the normal mode of operation in feudal Japan.
But this? They had won the war, yet they were treated exactly like losers, by the party for whom they went to war in the first place. Even if this has never been against the tide of revolutions all over the planet in any era, it certainly is against commonsense.
The warlords and samurai held on to their code of conduct that upheld loyalty to the Emperor above all else, and that departing from it woud mean ultimate disgrace. So they went to war because the Emperor needed an army. And they hoped things would change to the better for their advantage. When it did not, some of the warlords resigned to fate, since they couldn't disobey the Emperor, even as obeying him broke them all to pieces.
Some didn't accept what fate -- or Emperor Meiji -- handed to them. Although it is difficult to reconcile loyalty to the Emperor with defending what they already got, they tried anyway, and until the end they all never ceased to profess that they were not fighting against the Emperor. They only fought against the unjust New Order, or, if enemies must have faces and names, the Emperor's 'advisors' who had misled him so lamentably.
So you no longer wonder why things happened like in Tom Cruise's movie The Last Samurai.
But still the confusion rages on.
Daymare of the Black Ships
www.geocities.com/nobukaze2...ngumi3.htm
Commodore Matthew Perry's American 'Black Ships' that started to cruise in by the year 1853 sent the Japanese into indescribable panic.
They had never, ever, seen foreign ships before. They had never, ever, met caucasians for life.
So their first thought was, this was the Armageddon, those must be evil, and so on.
Meji vs Tokagawa
www.geocities.com/nobukaze23/meiji3.htm
On March 24, 1860, the Tokugawa shogunate's 'Prime Minister' Ii Naosuke, Lord of Hikone -- descendant of the great Tokugawa General Ii Naomasa of 1600's -- was assassinated in Edo, near the Tokugawa castle. He practically was just a breath away from where the Shogun was when 18 masterless samurai from Satsuma -- led by Sano Takenosuke and Oseki Washichiro -- blasted his entourage with the legendary super-long Satsumanese swords. Ii himself probably have died of a gunshot -- the sniper was really good -- but Sano cut his head anyway as samurai did to criminals.
Ii deserved getting assassinated a hundred times or so, according to a lot of Edoites at the time; his years had been overloaded with persecutions, incarcerations, exiles, and confiscations that even himself had lost count of. Deploying the 'modern' version of ninja forces, the Ii administration detained anybody suspected of as little as thinking of getting himself free from the shogunate's yoke. Ii's latest crime, so people said, was that he wrote the Shogun's outbound letters that were signed by Tokugawa Iesada as 'supreme ruler of Japan' ('tai-kun', a term that only existed in Chinese). He got to get punished for this and for masterminding the 'agreements' with the Americans, Russians, Britons, and so forth, too. Ii Naosuke was, in short, a man nobody seemed to miss when gone.
Ando Nobumasa filled up the vacant post that Ii left, and he, too, was a subject of assassination plans, and had to fight for his life one afternoon when his way was barred by anonymous but hostile ronins. Ando made it, yet the atmosphere was surely very unhealthy for the shogunate's officials.
There was no advertisement of whodunit both in Ii's case and in Ando's, too, but the Tokugawas arrested everyone they could lay their hands on, while the anti-Tokugawanists kept on stabilizing their death-toll and added to it incendiary jobs and random beatings of every caucasian around. Many people were kicked behind bars after some arson committed towards European and American warehouses. Others were nailed down after assaults toward caucasian expats in the streets. A few masterless samurai were even caught red-handedly in a symbolic vandalism -- of beheading statues of the Ashikaga Shoguns; had they done that in the year 2000 they would have been in the news as 'performance artists', but this was 1864 and so they were dragged to the classic jail instantly.
All the random actions throughout Japan were sparked by Sano Takenosuke's assassination of Ii Naosuke. Every disgruntled ronin in Japan seemed like taking it as a cue to wreak havoc.
On September 14, 1862, another cue, this time in high places, was set by another famous man from Satsuma.
It was a fine late afternoon, and the day was so hot that everybody wanted to cool off when it was possible to do so in open air. Lord Shimazu Saburo wasn't in a holiday mood; he was only wanting to get home quickly after work. So his little escort hurried through the streets toward Edo. They passed a lot of other groups, and one of these was British -- containing, among others, a woman and a merchant named Richardson who got some biz in Edo and just arrived from Hong Kong. The brawl started from the men who escorted the two carriages, and ended up with a free fight where the young Shimazu and the caucasian Richardson -- they were about the same age -- fought, too. Many of the people at the British side were badly wounded, including Marshall and Clarke, officers of the British Legation. Richardson died.
The Shogun didn't really have an appetite to question Shimazu because their clans had never been in any good terms even as the Shimazus officially got under the Tokugawas' rule for more than two centuries (see previous page). It was Emperor Komei himself who had to ask Shimazu why, and only after the British reps pressed him to. "Sire, I was insulted." That's all that Shimazu Saburo said as an explanation. The case was closed, and the shogunate paid some consolatory sum to the Brits.
The incident spread the hostility upward since. Satsumanese in particular, but also those from Tosa and Hizen, escalated their anti-foreigner stand. In this several warrior clans that had been more or less silent for the last two ages suddenly sprang up and started battles when the Dutch, British and French organised their troops to do what they called self-defense as attacks became more and more frequent. Fujimoto Teseki, Matsumoto Kensaburo and Azumi Goro -- of whom none ever heard before -- made a pack they christened 'Swordsmen of the Heaven's Wrath' ('Tenchugumi' in Japanese) as the shogunate's Shinsengumi's parallel at the Emperor's side.
The situation was such that the Emperor ordered all temple bells to get melted into guns and cannons in anticipation of a war against....he wasn't sure himself whom. Maybe the foreign troops as the Tenchugumi urged him to fight against, perhaps the Tokugawas, or whomever else, anyway he just got to get prepared.
In 1864, the warlord clans that for the last two hundred years had kept their duty to stay in Edo (as a warranty of loyalty to the shogunate), left the city in flocks and back to their own territories. Some of these stayed put and fortified themselves, but a handful rode to Kyoto and renewed the ancient custom of depositing allegiance at the feet of the Emperor without having to get through His Majesty's 'broker'. The Takeda clan, a mighty set of warriors few could match in 16th century, marched toward Kyoto and perished at the cannon shots of the Imperial Guards. Takasugi Shinsaku led his own men for the same purpose of taking possession of the Imperial Person, and met the same end although he was able to hold on for far longer.
The Mori clan -- still faithfully resembling their forefathers of 16th century -- did both. They went to Kyoto, and they built a new defense system at Shimonoseki, where the last battle of the greatest clans of 1000's, Minamoto and Taira, happened. Dealers in armaments were constantly 'reported' by the (literal) hawks as being spotted to and from the Mori domain.
The Moris wanted Emperor Komei to 'expel the hairy barbarians', cancel the treaties forced on the Tokugawas by the Americans (remember Commodore Matthew Perry's arrival in 1853?), and sealed up the ports, let them be Japanese for Japanese only like they used to be.
The Emperor said yes.
He also said the Mori clan was his most loyal vassal.
His men even began to prepare measures to the direction that the Moris pointed at.
Of course the Tokugawas couldn't let the Moris do anything like firing at 'hairy barbarians' ships that passed their territory (they did this often enough as a sort of rehearsal for the real big gig). The Shogun had promised all 'barbarians' that he warranted their safety -- because, if he couldn't, then they couldn't warrant his safety.
Shogun Tokugawa Iesada (he's the one who signed the treaties with Americans as 'tai-kun', a.k.a 'the supreme ruler of Japan', alias way beyond his actual title; died in 1858) and his successor Tokugawa Iemochi (he's the one who was forced to stretch the concessions even further) themselves didn't like being 'friendly' to the foreigners, but provoking the foreigners' anger meant turning on Zippo on the fuse of their cannons whose points were kept focused on Edo, so the shogunate tried not to do anything that might jeopardize the relation.
But Mori didn't care about the shogunate -- the clan had never really been the Tokugawas' vassal to begin with (see previous page). So they kept on with their routine 'target-practising' and ignored Tokugawa Iemochi's repeated orders to stop firing at American passenger vessels and come to Edo and get punished for scaring unarmed caucasians. The reply from the Mori clan was delivered to the Shogun via an Admiral of the Tokugawa Navy, and this was in the form of cannonballs.
By now the Emperor's inner circle had been manned by different kinds of people; the so-called 'intellectuals' from nondescript families (mostly sons of merchants and such), obscure samurai clansmen from places nobody ever heard of, and assorted 'revolutionaries'. They thought of the Moris as of one and the same kind with the Tokugawas. Which, in a sense, was very right: in 16th century, Mori was one heck of an overlord, they ruled the entire Western Japan or one-third of the main island of Honshu (more or less 10 provinces in all); Tokugawa, at the time, was only master of a speck of land at the edge of Central Japan (two and a half provinces, to be exact).
The people around the Emperor succeeded in re-molded His Majesty's most august mind and infusing this suspicion in no time.
So now the Emperor said that the Mori clan was a danger to the Empire, a potential enemy of the state, and everybody named Mori was banned from entering Kyoto for any purpose whatsoever.
The Tokugawas listened to all that with some funny feeling in the belly; they almost died laughing. For five minutes, at least. After hearing the allegations flung by the Emperor's spokespersons towards the Mori clan and several others, the Tokugawas thought and felt exactly the same with the Emperor and his men. Mori was accused of planning to take over Japan as a whole, which would be achieved by taking possession of the Emperor's person (that's the rule in Japan since time immemorial).
Well, if that was the case, then the Tokugawas couldn't let the Emperor handle the Moris alone -- what if His Majesty missed the target, or what if his most revered thought and majestic feeling got re-shaped again by someone else, and so he would pardon Mori?
The shogunate promptly made preps for a war against the Mori and their vassal clans of Western Japan (click here for a detailed map if you have no idea what I'm talking about).
Whatever the Mori clansmen really intended to do, they were really stunned by the Emperor's new decree.
Banned from Kyoto meant they were treated as criminals of the highest order -- which meant that anyone taking their heads would be a hero and most patriotic subject to the Throne.
The future Prime Minister Sanjo Saneyoshi, who was also sacked by the Emperor by the advice of his new milieu and ordered to leave Kyoto a.s.a.p or got to pack up for jail, wondered about the same thing that befell his clan and no less than 10 to 15 others. He didn't take any action, though. All he did was uniting his clan with the Sawa, one of the victims of this major expulsion, and waited in alert for a better day. In September 1863 they saw the fortifications of the Mori clan's in Suo and Nagato provinces (see the map again) and thought it might bring something bad to them.
In July 1864, a number of masterless samurai -- if they came from the banned clans they would never be able to get to Kyoto at all, that's why they had to be masterless for the purpose they were to attain there -- begged for an audience with the Emperor. They asked him to lift the ban up and restored the status of the Mori clan and others.
The Emperor didn't give them any reply because his advisors told him not to.
And his new advisors were scared by the arrival of many more masterless samurai, all were too near to the Imperial Palace (see the pictures above) to enable some good nap.
So they cheered the shogunate's army that opened fire at once at the band of masterless samurai.
The policial biz in Kyoto was in the hands of Shinsengumi's founder, Lord of Aizu, Matsudaira Katamori (click the blue words for his picture and story of his other bloody deeds); and he was the sort of little man who never took any chances. So he ordered his subordinates to gun down all the ronins and whosoever was suspected to be on their side.
The Mori clan had sent 200 soldiers -- lightly armed -- to the outskirt of Kyoto a few days earlier, just to try to get the ronins out of the city. But they couldn't risk breaking into Kyoto themselves.
At first the ronins only waited still for the Emperor's answer to their petition, but for 2 months it never came.
The letter that they received by the end of the 2 months was, instead, the Emperor's order to arrest them all.
At that point the number of ronins was a bit swelling, since people came there to join them during the 2 months of waiting in vain. The Matsudaira cops and soldiers virtually took over the Imperial Palace -- so, you see, the Emperor's own doing had given the shogunate the nicest of all prospects to get at him themselves. Protecting the Imperial Household was a Shogun's duty; and even as late as 1864 the Emperor still enjoyed this privilege despite the mounting tension between him and the Shogun. According to expats' diaries of the time, the Matsudairas even called in some irregular backups from their various domains such as Echizen, Kuwana, Hikone, Shirakawa, Sendai, etc., and because there was no place to house them all those new soldiers put up camps deep into the Imperial Garden, ruining all the splendid natural view, and this sent the expats into much lament.
On August 20, 1864, the ronins decided to return fire and considered it their last day on this planet (since they were obviously outnumbered and lacking arsenal).
At the end of the day, the city of Kyoto got massively destroyed, mostly by the Matsudairas and their allies in a rather obsessive 'cleansing' of buildings that they feared to be inhabited by the rest of the masterless samurai (they pulled up big cannons in front of these buildings and reduced them to debris). 37 or so of these samurai were caught alive only to get beheaded afterwards.
Then Matsudaira Katamori asked the Emperor to release a fixed decree branding the Mori clan as enemy of the state for good.
The Emperor said yes.
And the letter was produced in no time.
Now the shogunate had all the 'mandate from heaven' via His Majesty's own hands, to conduct a 'punishment' toward the Moris, in which expedition, as was the rule, all loyal warlords (loyal to the Emperor, that was -- click here if this adds to your headache) simply must take a part if summoned by the Shogun, or they, too, would be receiving the same kind of Imperial decree.
Before the Japanese forces even reached the Moris' territory, Shimonoseki was already bombarded by European and American battleships -- this was still in August 1864. Of course the 'barbarians' won this separate battle. Then they collectively and individually demanded some 'indemnity' of 3,000,000 Mexican bucks.
Unlike Tom Cruise's 'last samurai', the Mori clansmen dressed up just like the Americans who destroyed their cities from the sea, and they armed themselves with the same kind of weapons, too. No spears, no arrows, no swords, while all this was 13 years before Tom Cruise's arrival in Japan in that movie, to fight against his exotic samurai.
Anyway, all people with Tokugawa DNA in their veins, like I have showed you everywhere else all over this site, were notoriously slow in making decisions and preparing for wars. Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi was even slower. His army was only ready in 1866. That year they boarded the shogunate's relatively tiny battleships and sailed away westward, intended to teach the Mori clan the extent of their power.
What happened was predictably ludicrous; the shogunate's army and navy were all beaten up so bad in the long battle of 3 or 4 months. Mori army easily read their archaic tactics and hit them so hard that the soldiers who went back to Edo was only less than a third of the number of those who arrived 3 months ago.
At this point, the Shogun's own advisors, such as Katsu Kaishu and Yamanuchi Yodo (the latter got an obscure lowest-ranked samurai with wild ideas within his entourage, named Sakamoto Ryoma), who had been reading the wind for some time and had actually been defecting to the Emperor's side, started to loudly condemn Matsudaira Katamori and all of his 'martial adventures', such as building up the Shinsengumi band of assassins and leading the disastrous 'punishing' expedition to Shimonoseki.
The Emperor's advisors, seeing the failure, released similar statements from Kyoto -- as if they had nothing to do with the expedition to begin with, and as if the Imperial House had nothing to do with the shogunate at all.
But all this outrageous chain of events eluded His Majesty's most august ears. Emperor Komei had just quietly died.
In Edo, Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi got confused by his own men's 'funny' advice and PR releases, sick of the Emperor's advisors, and brokenhearted by the Matsudaira failure. Because of all this, he fell ill at the right time to prevent seeing how the bad came to worse. On September 19, 1866, he died.
On January 6, 1867, Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu, whose name means 'good and great', ascended, after repeatedly refusing to take up the job.
Yoshinobu wasn't really a bad seed; he would have been an averagely good Shogun in times of peace. But he lacked all that was needed in such a turbulent time his clan must face.
Yoshinobu was anti-foreigners, and the Tokugawa clan needed such a man to lead them. The clan had been thinking hard of how to revoke all the trade treaties with the Americans and all since 1860, and they wanted the 'votes' of the majority of Japanese, who were anti-foreigners.
And the new Shogun didn't hide his view in public. His first edicts were banning foreigners from Osaka and Nagasaki and declaring them closed ports. That's why the foreigners backed Emperor Meiji up when the advisors of Komei's put him on the throne in 1867.
So now there was a new and young Shogun Tokugawa in Edo, and a new and young Emperor Mutsuhito in Kyoto.
From Kyoto there was nothing new being heard, the advisors that kept the Emperor in tutorial of 'the new ways' were for some time clamming up, and mostly just waited for what happened next. From Edo, though, the Shogun's anti-foreigner stance was aired clearly. It got him some supporters from the streets.
But this little jump in the shogunate's popularity made the defecting advisors mad for some reasons. The same men who forced Yoshinobu to take up the reign now began to persuade Yoshinobu to resign, and to pull Japanese politicking back to 660 years before Christ, i.e. when Emperors governed for real.
The first people who said that for everyone to hear, though, was not very close to the Shogun; it was the chief of the venerable Maeda clan. He was followed by the advisors that I had mentioned before, and then by the Ishikawas, Yamanuchis, and Shimazus. From the lesser-ranked there were Saigo, Okubo, Togo, Kido, Hirozawa and some Owari-based clans that espoused the same view and did so loudly. A part of the Mori clan joined this band -- the part that didn't demand expulsion of 'barbarians' in drastic measures, although as a matter of fact all these clans didn't want to concede anything to the Europeans and Americans if they could help it.
On November 9, 1867, Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu could take no more of the pressure and affirmed the letter of resignation that was handed to him.
But that was, at the time being, all.
The Matsudaira clan that held Kyoto tightly didn't even move an inch from the Imperial vicinity; to the rest of the Tokugawas and their staunchest vassals, nothing had changed by the resignation, and nothing ever would, unless they were forced to evacuate.
On January 3, 1868, out of the blue (as far as the Matsudairas and Tokugawas were concerned) a large troop entered Kyoto from the provinces of Chikuzen (Kuroda clan's territory), Satsuma (Shimazu clan's domain), Tosa (Mori and Maeda clans' territory), Owari, Aki (Asano clan's province), and some others (click here for maps of provinces).
They kicked the Matsudairas out of the premises. Then they screened Emperor Mutsuhito's advisors and sacked the 'conventional' and the 'radical' ones among them (both were equally unpalatable to them).
Although the Shogun had resigned, the shogunate was still at large; they fixed this by getting Emperor Mutsuhito to release a decree abolishing the shogunate as a system as a whole. Status of the Mori, Sanjo, Sawa, etc. was put back to where it used to be. As temporary 'Prime Minister', they uplifted Prince Arisugawa no Miya, the Emperor's brother.
Matsudaira Katamori by now had succeeded in making Tokugawa Yoshinobu to regret his resignation. Together they went to Osaka and washed it clean from Emperor Mutsuhito's supporters.
The Emperor's advisors tried to avoid war by raking their brains up and finally came up with the idea of incorporating the Shogun and his closest men into the Emperor's administration, and the ex-Shogun said he would accept it.
But that was before he met Matsudaira. Now the agreement was annuled, of course, and there was no other thing on schedule but bloody battles.
The Meiji versus Tokugawa war started in Fushimi on January 27, 1868, when the troops of the Tokugawas, Matsudairas, Dates, and others were told by the Emperor's envoy to turn back and forget the plan to go to Kyoto with such a large (some said 30,000 men) army. They ended up firing at each other. The Shinsengumi from Kyoto joined the Tokugawas in this.
In just 3 days the Tokugawas and Matsudairas (and the Shinsengumi, whose chief Hijikata Toshizo died there) were decimated to such an extent that Tokugawa Yoshinobu was lucky to have escaped alive (they said he swam and climbed onto an American cargo ship).
When Lord Saigo Takamori (that same man from Kagoshima) led his pro-Meiji army to Edo and threatened to reduce the entire city to ashes, the Tokugawas and Matsudairas got all shaken and Tokugawa Yoshinobu sent a promise to really retire from the biz now -- which he, by the way, did.
But some of the Matsudairas and Dates retreated only as far as the mountainous and swampy Iga province, which was too close to Kyoto to the Emperor's liking, and they fortified themselves in Ueno. The remaining members of the Shinsengumi went there with them.
On July 4, 1868, Saigo and others attacked Ueno with all their might until the enemy was more or less perished.
Yet the Matsudairas had territories everywhere, and the ones at other places were now taking up arms even as they were sort of passively watching the previous battles. The assorted 'Imperial Army' had to march to the highlands of Aizu-Wakamatsu to face them.
After that, they subdued other clots of pro-Tokugawa forces very far away in Matsumae (Hokkaido today), in Sendai (Mutsu), Hakodate, and so forth. They got all the luck, and won all of those battles -- not all by superior power, but most of the time the 'rebels' themselves retreated and surrendered when the Imperial standard-bearer approached. They were, after all, born and raised as samurai, the Tokugawas, Matsudairas, Iis, Ishikawas, Dates, and all. They couldn't really raise arms against the newest son of the Goddess of the Sun. Emperors, being descendants of the gods, could do no wrong. At worst he was only 'misled by his advisors'.
In July 1869 Emperor Meiji's advisors had already announced overall victory -- although they still got more battles to come, and by July 1870 they were still fighting the same old Tokugawa and Matsudaira and their vassals.
The Meiji administration was now largely in the hands of Okubo Toshimichi, Minister of the Interior, and Ito Hirobumi, Prime Minister (click here for more pictures). They 'westernized' everything and everyone. They brought Emperor Mutsuhito off the clouds and made him far less godlike. They also advised him to move out of Kyoto -- the seat of all Emperors since the year 700 -- to Edo, which they advised to be renamed as Tokyo.
Matsue castle (left) used to belong to Oda Nobunaga's Captain Horio Mosuke before the Tokugawas pushed in their mandatory swapping-castles policy (to prevent warlords from growing any sort of local roots).
Matsu Mountain castle ('Matsuyama' in Japanese, right) belonged to the Mizuno clan before the same policy wrestled it away from them. Tokugawa Ieyasu himself was consequent in his 'one castle per province' rule applied to all warlords, so a number of his own castles were destroyed just to keep the rule in 1610's.
That's not the end of the story; after Emperor Meiji won the war, the Mori clan's castles all over Western Japan were uniformly converted into debris -- something that not even Oda Nobunaga ever did to the clan. The actually artistically and militarily sound Matsue, which had nothing to do with the Moris, was also crushed for no sensible purpose at all -- what was left since 1890 was just the part you see at the photograph above, which luckily still serves as a rep of Horio's legacy. Mount Matsu was left to vandals and abandoned for a long time until Japan cured itself from imperialistic daydreams and started to comprehend that when the Unesco said 'World Heritage' Japanese was included.
One of the most beautiful castles in Japan, nicknamed 'The Black Crow', i.e. Matsumoto castle (the pic at the center), was put by the Meiji government into a public auction; thank God the former owners of the castle were able to gather a support large enough from around them to buy it back just to give it to the government again instantly as a national asset.
'Matsu' meant 'pine tree', a symbol of longevity to the Japanese since the days gods roamed the planet; it also meant 'longing' -- it carried the sense of waiting indefinitely for the return of the one you love. Maybe that name should have been confined to TV dramas and never to call forts by.
On February 1872, a crowd of Japanese V.I.P's sailed to Washington, D.C. to discuss bilateral politics and trade. Among those were Ito Hirobumi himself, Okubo Toshimichi, Kido Takayoshi, Yamaguchi Masaka, Mori Arinori, and Iwakura Tomomi.
In 1873, hundreds of Japanese Christians were arrested, tortured, crucified, and exiled after being rounded up around villages of Nagasaki. The Meiji government only allowed caucasians to practice Christianity, but their policy about Japanese Christianity was the same with the Tokugawa shogunate's.
In 1875, ex-President and champ of the American Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant, came to Japan and stayed long enough to have himself pampered to infinity by the hosts anxious to please every caucasin around.
Next, the first Japanese-Americans were established in San Francisco and Hawaii. Okubo and his colleagues were Americanised to a high degree, and they wanted the country to be so, too -- they worked hard to attain this with the U.S. of A as the 'Mecca' of the Meiji era.
This was the real government of Japan at the time; to make Emperor Meiji comfortable in his lack of real governing -- it was the same as his daddy had under the Tokugawas -- the Ministers gave him a personal cult.
Meiji was the first Emperor whose presence was imposed upon the people as divine via propaganda of the state. Previous Imperial Persons never did that, and nobody ever thought it necessary either (see Shintoism page) -- you should believe in the Emperor's divinity if you're Japanese, but what you believe in is none of the Emperor's business -- that's the Imperial attitude about it for 2000 years or so before the Meiji era.
Now pictures of the Emperor and Empress were put everywhere, but in public places the faces in the photographs were hid behind a veil that cloaked the frames. To ensure the way was smooth enough for this neo-emperor-worship, decrees were released that forced a divorce between Buddhism and Shintoism, so that through the latter the worship could get monitored
In 1875, the samurai's indignation over the pace of 'americanisation' was such that even Lord Saigo Takamori -- the former Meiji defender and Chief of Staff, who resigned in 1873 out of disillusionment -- declared war against the Imperial Army and Navy that he had built himself (click here for story and pictures). His war of Kagoshima lasted until 1877.
The Shimazu clan, which helped ensuring the Throne's victory in previous wars, also fought against the Imperial Forces until 1891.
On March 28, 1876, a decree was released by the Prime Minister Office and the War Dept., that forbade the wearing of swords in any occassion in public, except when the wearer was on his way to a court audience with the Emperor (the traditional court dress would look funny without swords).
This instantly sparked bloody fights all over the empire between the newly-established Imperial Police Dept. personnels and the much-disgusted and unyielding samurai (anyone could be a cop and a soldier now without having to come from the warrior class).
From this year on, all the outward signs of samuraihood was to be extinct. The non-samurai cops took advantage of their numbers to overwhelm the intended targets, and patrolmen forced everyone in public spaces to shave their hair short and discard the Japanese culotte ('hakama').
On August 21, 1876, another decree was added: all the previous provinces and warlords' domains were to be melted into one and rearranged into new prefectures whose borders didn't correspond with the old map. As governors of these new administrative areas were those taken from 'anonymous' candidates.
On October 1876, rebellions broke out in Higo (whatever its name was by now according to the Meiji map), throughout the Kyushu isles, and Tosa (largest part of Shikoku isles). These were 'old-fashioned samurai' in the most Hollywoodian sense, who knew they were only heading to death by doing it and intended the whole thing as a symbolic warning to the Emperor that His Majesty's own Throne had been too much secularized and the Shinto faith was feared to have lost its essence.
On May 14, 1878, Okubo Toshimichi was assasinated in broad daylight.
He was the one who rolled the dice, and he was, fittingly, the closing chapter of the Meiji War.
After this year, the real Restoration took place and a parliament was assembled and a more westernized Japan faced the whole world anew.
In 1885, the first Cabinet in Japanese history was announced. Some of the clan names must have been familiar to you. It consisted of the following persons:
Ito Hirobumi Prime Minister
Tani Kanjo Minister of Agriculture & Commerce (1885)
Hijikata Hisamoto Minister of Agriculture & Commerce (1887)
Kuroda Kiyotaka Minister of Agriculture & Commerce (1888)
Tanaka Mitsuaki Cabinet Secretary
Enomoto Takeaki Minister of Communications
Inoue Kowashi Minister of Legislation
Yamao Yozo Director of Legislative Bureau
Mori Arinori Minister of Education
Matsukata Masayoshi Minister of Finance
Inoue Kaoru Minister of Foreign Affairs (1885)
Okuma Shigenobu Minister of Foreign Affairs (1888)
Yamagata Aritomo Minister of Home Affairs
Yamada Akiyoshi Minister of Justice
Saigo Tsugumichi Chief of Imperial Navy (1885)
Oyama Iwao Minister of War
By 1894, the Japanese had already felt that life had been kind of normal somewhat, so they declared war against China over Korea -- something that they seemed to always have been longing to do, since the years of Empress Jingu in 201, re-lived by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1592.
The sec Japan stopped the Tokugawaist gaze inward, they peered all across the Pacific, straight to Hawaii.
www.geocities.com/nobukaze23/meiji4.htm
Emperor Meiji's supporters were a large, diverse, disunited crowd of people.
The usual impression is that they consisted of unemployed and dissatisfied urban samurai of the lowest rank, masterless samurai from all over Japan, and nondescript bunch of 'open-minded' students and scholars.
But elements of the Japan of old were also there. And their part in the Meiji war for supremacy was more pronounced, immediate, and practical, because these elements were armies.
There were warlords whose clans had been forced to submit to the Tokugawas since 1600, and only because of uneven military power their ancestors got to bury their grudges as deep as they could, for around 250 years.
The Mori clan of 'Western Japan' was among these warlords. They used to be a mighty clan in 1570's. Oda Nobunaga waged an overall war against them in 1580's, then Toyotomi Hideyoshi put them into a loose vassaldom in 1590's, and after he died Tokugawa Ieyasu locked them up in that position.
There were other warlords whose ancestors were Roman Catholics, whose lives, power, territory and wealth were taken away by the first three Tokugawa Shoguns -- Ieyasu, Hidetada, and Iemitsu -- between 1600 and 1637.
The feudal duarchy meant there was no such a thing as an Imperial Army; whenever there was a nationwide threat, it was the Shogun's or overlord's job to fix, and in that capacity their armies were the Imperial Army as long as the campaign went on.
So Emperor Meiji didn't have an army.
He only got Imperial Guards.
It was these ever-ready armies of the warlords that fought for him in the start of the civil war against the Tokugawas in early 1860's.
And it was a warlord -- an 'independent' one, i.e. didn't like the Tokugawa shogunate but had qualms about the upcoming new administration of Emperor Meiji's -- who finally made Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu abdicate in 1867: Lord Yamanuchi Yodo of Tosa. The hero for the pro-Meiji forces, obscure samurai Sakamoto Ryoma, came from Lord Yamanuchi's territory.
In the euphoria after Emperor Meiji's victory, forgetting the warlords' contribution was excusable somewhat -- they, after all, were part of the old system that the Meiji Restoration sought to abolish.
But today we shouldn't just brush them off like that. The innermost thing of being Japanese is still, no matter what, the essence of what the old warriors used to uphold.
The Meiji Army Generals when there finally existed the national armed forces in 1867. They fought under the infamous flag (to the World War veterans), the 'Yamato' -- which looked like the crest of the mighty Satsuma warlords of the Ryutsoji clan of 16th century. The idea of Japan as the land of the rising sun is even more ancient.
The battle of Kagoshima
Lord Saigo Takamori of Kagoshima fought against the pro-Restoration forces using his own clan's resources in 1875, after he built the Meiji Imperial Armed Forces in 1867.
From the exact same spot also came one of the most important figures at Emperor Meiji's side: Minister of Interior Okubo Toshimichi. This one stuck to the Meiji government to the end (he was assasinated, and the suspects were the remains of Lord Saigo's men).
The Ikedaya Inn, Kyoto, where the anti-Meiji (including Shinsengumi) and pro-Meiji samurai clashed. The gory episode started a nationwide brawling session between the two kinds of samurai.
In this inn, in 1866, the basic hero for the Meiji supporters, Sakamoto Ryoma (click here) was attacked by unknown samurai -- not entirely anonymous, since it must have been a Tokugawa supporter. He managed to stay alive after that, although right after Tokugawa Yoshinobu (click here) abdicated Ryoma was finally assassinated.
The same old inn had the unfortune to host another bloody clash, too; this time among fellow warriors of the Satsuma clans. Some were for the Emperor, some were holding on to the shogunate's side -- the latter felt jilted by Emperor Meiji because their initial support didn't get politically rewarded the way they expected it to be.
Since it used to be the hangout place for the deserting Shinsengumi members, such as Ito Kashitaro and his gang, Ikedaya Inn was subject to an overall investigation by the pack after the assassination toward the Shinsengumi leader Kondo Isami, that happened elsewhere. The Shinsengumi couldn't find anything there.
One of the goriest battles of the Shinsengumi and other anti-Meiji forces happened in this tranquil area of Fushimi. The fuse of the Kyotoite 'Wolves', Hijikata Toshizo, died there.
Statues of Sakamoto Ryoma & Nakaoka Shintaro in Kyoto today. Sakamoto has been made too much out of, that the credit given to him for 'starting the Meiji Restoration' is often out of proportion, while the Restoration was actually a historical necessity.
By the way, Nakaoka was the man who killed Sakamoto -- just in case you are getting misled by the statues above, which deliberately make the two seem like the best of buddies.
The Real Shinsengumi
uk.geocities.com/rainfores...meiji2.htm
History of real-life samurai ended with the diehard supporters of the descendants of the Minamoto clan (click here for story & pictures).
The Shinsengumi of Kyoto was one heck of a bunch. They consisted of masterless swordsmen ('ronin' in Japanese) recruited via the hardest tests of their lives -- an audition often meant the end of such lives, mind you -- with the purpose of actively protecting the interests, persons, and properties of the Tokugawa shogunate. The said shogunate did need such a drastic measure; Tokugawa Iemochi and his successor Yoshinobu were among the weakest Shoguns ever, several lightyears away as a far cry from the clan's Ieyasu of 1600's (click here for story & pictures of the Tokugawa shogunate).
Nicknamed 'the Wolves of Mibu', the men of Shinsengumi literally hunted in packs for Emperor Meiji's supporters (click here for story & pictures) -- including their former comrades, since some of the 'wolves' (Ito, Okubo, and so on) jilted them to establish another pack under the Emperor's banner. The Emperor won the bloody power-struggle in 1868, and after the Toba-Fushimi battle, there virtually was no more olden-days-samurai left roaming around the country. Wearing a sword in public was outlawed; this led to countless unnecessary skirmishes and deadly brawls, especially between the cops -- such a thing was entirely new in Japan -- and the proud descendants of the warrior-class of the old regime. Only after years of civil wars (it was plural because each clan seems to have found it better to fight their own), after so many deaths among those who resisted the new order of things, Emperor Meiji's Japan came to lay its foundations of a nation-state firmly for good. In the last battles of the Tokugawa supporters, the Shinsengumi was virtually all gone, though a few of its members survived (click here for real war of Shinsengumi versus Meiji supporters).
But the 'Wolves', in real life, never die. Even this very minute of 21st-century Shinsengumi has too many admirers around the world; names of its faithful members such as Hijikata, Kondo, Okita, Nagakura, and so on have been household names even in Indonesia, South Africa, Germany and the USA; the former Kyotoite HQ of the Wolves has been an international tourist attraction (most of whose visitors take it as a pilgrimage).
So Shinsengumi is, by the time you waste your precious time to read this, one of the border-crossing pop cults on this sorry little planet earth. Since 1994, hundreds of local American Shinsengumist clubs have been springing up like vodka in a Muscovite winter.
On this Planet Pop, nobody seems to remember that the real-life and original and Japanese Shinsengumi of Kondo's and saito's and Okita's et.al., collectively and individually alike, would have loved to whack caucasians apart any minute of the day.
Especially Americans.
Much of what went on in Japan during this Meiji confusion of 1868 was a heavymetal attitude of being anti-foreigners.
Or else the bombings of Lord Saigo's beautiful samurai city Kagoshima by the American and British battleships, the assault toward the American Consulate by local samurai, the killings of British reps by another bunch of samurai, and so on, wouldn't have made any sense. (Click here for the Meijian view of it, or click here to continue real history of the Shinsengumi.)
It also makes no difference whatsoever even as politically-correct historians keep on telling these Shinsengumists that the Shinsengumi of 1800's was a group of ruthless urban omnivores, whose method was to storm into a private room, a public inn, or a cul de sac and first of all overwhelm the intended targets by sheer number.
What the rest of the globe knows about Japanese swordsmanship is that samurai don't fight in flocks; honor means a one-on-one swordsplay, and so forth; this has been hurting the image of Shinsengumi outside Japan (even inside there, so some said).
One of the best contemporary comic book artists of Japan, 1970-born Watsuki Nobuhiro, even has to make his leading character Himura Kenshin in the series bearing that name (you might have known his major work as Samurai X if you're not Japanese) to say this for the sake of fairplay:
"Don't judge the Wolves of Mibu wrongly. They always fought as a group not because they were a bunch of chickens. They simply followed the rule: there was no individual killing, everyone was responsible for executing every mission. They put forth togetherness before everything else. They served the Shogun as one body, one mind and one soul. Even I respect that."
Watsuki's Himura is an assassin on Meiji government's payroll -- so this is supposed to mean something.
And of course no one recalls the very factual thing that the Shinsengumi killed and get killed for the wrong side of Japanese politix. They upheld a crumbling political regime that had neither legitimacy, real power, statesmanship, leadership, or at least cash.
The Tokugawa shogunate at the time the real Shinsengumi was actively hunting people down was one heck of a pain in the neck, led by Shoguns that would never even got themselves elected to be supervisors in a small-time Japanese factory. Their reign was so inefficient that the Meiji Government later had to overhaul everything back from scratch.
'Samurai' is a fixed notion. You can't just twist and warp it to suit unrelated occasions. And to a samurai -- which must be a Japanese, being a samurai itself is equal to being Japanese, and don't forget that the core of Shinto and Buddhist faiths is an extension of filial piety towards your superiors -- fighting against the Emperor is the ultimate sociopolitical sin that you could possibly commit.
A Shogun was just a vassal (i.e. subordinate, a.k.a underling, alias those who must submit to the authority) of any Emperor, no matter how many cannons the Shogun owned. Once you take the Shogun as the ultimate authority in Japan, and unsheath your sword against the real source of mandate -- the Emperor -- you are a disgrace to the entire samuraihood (click here for the Japanese powergame since time immemmorial, and what it meant to be a Shogun, to begin with). Once you are against the Emperor, you are an enemy of the State. And that was against Shinto, against Buddhism, against the essence of being Japanese, against Life itself. There you are. It's a truly scary thing.
That's why the real-life and original Shinsengumi fought like mad against the armies of Emperor Meiji's warlords, such as the Mori clan of Western Japan (click here for history and pictures of the clan), but their commander in the battle, Hijikata Toshizo, pulled his comrades back when it was clear the Moris and such fought under the Imperial banner (click here if you have no idea what I'm talking about).
However, in 21st century it seems like everybody has downloaded a collective amnesia when it comes to the subject of why and what for the real Shinsengumi existed at all.
That surely is the most convenient amnesia, and it sustains the popularity of the historically-warped portrait of the Shinsengumi (click here for what other persistent errors are there about the original Shinsengumi).
For this undying fame Shinsengumi only owes itself; they are a ripe and ready-for-use material for fiction-weaving. They got a clear purpose to serve, they had boldly-scribbled faith (see that red banner with the word 'Loyalty' on it -- click here for the true meaning of the word, which is not what you think it is), they were mostly young and could easily be digitally beautified to seem good-looking somewhat, and (this is the best material of all) they had a uniform.
Oh, yes. A uniform is essential to the propagation of a cult. The Shinsengumi's signature headgear, for instance, would have been enough to generate a cult of fans; it's predictably a blast around fandomism as we know that they got a lot more than that.
For a visual treat of metal fangs and claws of this group, see Takita Yojiro's movie When the Last Sword is Drawn (Mibu Gishiden, 2004), starring Nakai Kiichi as Yoshimura and Sato Koichi as Saito. An anime has taken the 'Mibu Wolves' as its central characters, too: check out Peacemaker Kurogane (2004).
Watsuki Nobuhiro's comic books (started in 1994) that got animated since 1996 onward by directors Furuhashi Kazuhiro and Tsuji Hatsuki, Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X), covers the same period of history; it features the Shinsengumi. The leading character Himura Kenshin -- nicknamed 'The Master Slayer' ('Hitokiri Battosai') is a pro-Meiji swordsman ('Isshin samurai' in Japanese). This character is based on the real-life swordsman, traditionally assumed to be one of the best in his art, Kawakami Gensai (1834-1871). Started out as an assassin for the Meiji administration, Kawakami was framed and given a death-sentence when he was seen as outliving his usefulness for the new regime. There were abundant tales like this concerning real people of the era; a revolution always devours its own kids like the cliche says. Himura Kenshin's buddy Sanosuke Sagara was based on the life of a real person, too, the famous Satsuma streetfighter Sano Takenosuke. Click here to see what the anime movie is like.
How The Shinsengumi Worked
What was the Shinsengumi For Real?
Some 21st century Shinsengumists' sites and leaflets have been claiming that the original Shinsengumi of the churning end of 1860's was "the police of Kyoto".
There is nothing so far from the truth than that!
The Shinsengumi did use military and policial terms to dub their internal posts and assignments ('patrol', for instance), but that was just a style -- anyone having a license to kill could use the same lexicon in his adventures.
There WAS a police department, in its traditional form, in Kyoto. The Tokugawa Government had one precinct every few steps or so -- the chief of which was double-jobbing as civil official.
There also WAS the Imperial Guards, whose territory exceeded the imperial palace's gates in this scary era in Kyoto.
The only official title that the Shinsengumi got was as the Shogun's personal bodyguards -- which was given to them in 1867 after Tokugawa Iemochi died.
Before that, they were just something that we might call, elsewhere, a band of militia.
If you must use the word 'police' here, add 'secret'. You know there's nothing secret with 'secret police' -- like the Ton Ton Macoutes of Haiti, 'the green cars' of Argentina, and whatever the former U.S.S.R had in its own insulated backyard of history.
How Shinsengumi Worked
The Shinsengumi's patrolmen roamed around Kyoto and detained people who looked, sounded, smelled, or all three, suspicious.
The definition of 'suspicious' was as clear as the vision in a night during a tsunami -- but nobody ever asked.
Anyway, a 'suspicious' person had to produce some proof that they were not foes of the shogunate (or enemies of any individual member of the pack, as it often happened so).
If the response to the police-like demand was unsatisfactory, the unfortunate passersby would then get killed instantly on the spot.
Whenever their 'intelligence' had located some enemies, for example that some pro-Meiji samurai were reported of as hanging around a certain red-light district, then the Shinsengumi went there as a group and raid the premises, executed the said enemies.
If they still needed some info, they did what they called 'interrogation', after which the detained persons would of course get killed, regardless of whether he did blurt out some 'info' or not.
Leaders & Members of Shinsengumi
Kondo Isami
- captain/chief/leader
Hijikata Toshizo
- sergeant/deputy chief/manager
Ito Kashitaro
- strategician/political advisor
Matsubara Tadauji
- martial art coach
Takeda Kenryusai
- warfare instructor
Tani Sanjuro
- martial art coach
Tondo Heisuke
- martial art coach
Harada Sanosuke
- martial art coach
Inoue Genzaburo
- martial art coach
Yamazaki Susumu
- chief of the bureau of intelligence
Okita Soji
- captain of patrolmen
Nagakura Shinpachi
- captain of patrolmen
Saito Hajime
- captain of patrolmen
Suzuki Mikisaburo
- captain of patrolmen
Members, patrolmen, snoopies:
more or less 300 people by 1867
Above them all, there were some hazy big shots from Edo (usually this was attributed to Lord of Aizu) whose job was to check them out once in a while, relay orders from the Tokugawa inner circle, and give them handouts and wages.
Who Were Those Members?
Samuraihood was one heck of a pie in the sky for everybody beneath the warrior-class in Japan since 1185 (click here to know why so). The absolutely enviable status in society wasn's for sale, it couldn't be procured by wealth, it was immobile, it wasn't even available as rewards.
So you can imagine how it was like, for a village bully, or a slum brawler, to be able to call himself a samurai -- by getting a membership within the Shinsengumi.
Samuraihood couldn't be gotten by swordsplay, no matter how lethally good you were at it. So it wasn't Hijikata's swordsmanship, it wasn't Kondo's effective killing prowess, that made them 'samurai' at least in the memory of the rather clueless hordes of their fans after the year 2000.
What made a samurai was his allegiance -- what he lived for, what he fought for and what he fought against, and for whom he would kill and die for.
Most of the Shinsengumi members never thought of such things -- only their masters did, and their enemies did, too.
A good chunk of the Shinsengumi members only got in for free housing, free food, salary, and safety from the law.
No Japanese ship had been allowed to leave Japan, and to prevent aspiring outlaws from breaking this rule, Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu fixed the size and manpower of the made-in-Japan ships so that they practically couldn't cross any waterway but the inland rivers.
And this was done in 1637.
So the panic was normal.
No wonder they freaked up. None of them remembered the times when Oda Nobunaga ruled in 1570's with his relative laxity when it comes to expats (click here for story and pictures); and how Europeans were daily sights at Nagasaki when Omura Sumitada was lord of the area, and when Christian warlords of Kyushu and the surrounding areas were in their heyday (click here for story and pictures).
Anyway, Perry and his seabound vehicles and arms dropped by at the wrongest possible time in history, as far as the Tokugawa shogunate was concerned.
Individuals and little groups of anti-Tokugawanists had been sniffed at in Kyoto and other places even as early as in 1850. Accustomed to be 'the one we don't speak of' all around the country, this restart of enmity gave all shogunal officers a collective insomnia. So, Shogun Tokugawa Iesada and everyone else were annoyed by the arrival of Perry and his demand for trade treaties.
It turned out that Perry's arrival was more deadly than annoying to the Tokugawa clan as a whole.
With the anchoring of the 'Black Ships', all the chauvinists of the country woke up.
All their hereditary grudges against the Tokugawa clan, that had been hitherto stacked at the farthest nooks at the back of their minds, began to resurface in alarming velocity and frightening vividness. They snatched the moment to let it all out, regardless of the fact that the target they were aiming at wasn't really the one they intended to whack to shreds.
Then it even got worse: sensing that the Tokugawas were allergic to any sort of biz with foreigners, Perry threatened war if they refused to give him the economic license.
Upon which the shogunate couldn't do anything but to sign the formal documents and wished they were someone else.
The onlookers now said the Shogun had sold their fatherland to the devils and let the uncouth 'Southern Barbarians' to desecrate the soil, so the Shogun must go.
But in truth, the Shogun as a person and the shogunate as a whole, the Emperor and the people around him, all didn't want a threatening presence of any foreigner.
As late as in early 21st century, there still are Shinsengumists' sites and leaflets that said that Emperor Meiji 'loved' foreigners, while Shoguns Tokugawa Iesada, Iemochi and Yoshinobu 'hated' them, and so they missed reality by a very wide margin.
Equally wrong are those who, basing it on signatures within the trade agreement with Commodore Perry et.al., said that it was the Shogun who 'loved' foreigners while Meiji 'hated' them.
The civil war of Japan in 1868 was not about loving or hating Americans, for the gods' sake. It was about feudalism and modern politics, or more precisely about who got what when which one ruled.
The Shogun and the Emperor didn't really differ on the issue of foreigners. And they were supported by xenophobic warriors each, among other elements that both sides were manned by.
The Shogun had warlords behind him, so did the Emperor. The Shogun got masterless samurai, so did the Emperor. They both nested scholars and assorted urban supporters. They both employed streetwise assassins. And so on.
The diversity of goals, identities, and ideologies within Emperor Meiji's camp was the same as those at Shogun Tokugawa's HQ (click here for story and pictures).
That's why the war had confused foreign observers for so long until deep into 20th century.
The Americans' mission was economic, but they threatened war if requests for trade concessions were refused. The Shogunate didn't have any choice but to agree to this, since Tokugawa Iesada and his successor Iemochi thought that the shogunal armed forces wouldn't stand a chance if fighting against these poweful 'Southern Barbarians' (that's how the Japanese called caucasians -- click here if you really have no idea what I'm talking about).
Through all this talk, they used Chinese translators -- who couldn't speak Japanese.
It's really scary to know that earth-shaking decisions in the olden days were reached simply via guesses of what the other party was saying.
The shogunate never welcomed foreigners. Not even if they brought lucrative biz offers.
But a foreigner with trade in mind and cannons on ships was different; the two last Shoguns, Tokugawa Iemochi and Tokugawa Yoshinobu, agreed with their predecessor Iesada that Japan wouldn't stand a chance fighting against such sophisticatedly-armed 'Southern Barbarians'.
A war threat was enough to open Japan up for American tradesmen.
There had never been anybody in the entire course of the Tokugawa shogunate's history that ever threatened them.
It's a very complicated thing, the years 1863-1868.
Emperor Meiji's thoughts about foreigners and all were actually as unclearly mixed-up as the Shoguns'.
Shinsengumists of 20th and 21st century usually simplify matters by squeezing everything out of the package until what's left is just "Shogunate = anti-foreigners = traditional. Emperor = pro-foreigners = modern."
And then some of these Shinsengumi fans dangerously assumed that Shinsengumi, since it slashed people whose slogan was "Expel the Barbarians!" ('Sonno-joi' in Japanese) was 'pro-foreigners' and 'open-minded' and 'modern'.
Real-life in 1868 wasn't that un-labyrinthine.
At the core of it, both the Shogun and the Emperor didn't want Japan to get under any other nation's power -- being under a war threat was included.
And just in case you really have never noticed before, Shinsengumi was fed and clothed and enabled to buy swords by the 'anti-foreigner' and 'traditional' Tokugawa shogunate.
Where the wolves Roamed
www.geocities.com/nobukaze2...ngumi5.htm
When the Shinsengumi was still around, Kyoto was a zillion lightyears away from today's tranquil old town dotted with innumerable historic and artistic spots that clueless tourists are dragged to.
It was a dangerous habitat for the Shinsengumi. All around them were hostile forces; no wonder, because this capital city of old Japan was the very core of anti-Tokugawa movement that swept the country from one edge to the other.
Emperor Meiji's home was there, that's why all sorts of warlike specimens could be found roaming around with the opposite goal of that of the Shinsengumi's.
They came from the hitherto forgotten nooks such as Tosa, Kagoshima, Hagi, etc., as well as the predictable participant, Nagasaki (click here for story and pictures of why so). It seemed as if everybody whose ancestors had been beaten up by the Tokugawas in 16th and 17th century showed up in the streets where the Shinsengumi was counting the bricks, too.
When they were still under the command of Captain Serizawa Kamo (1863), Shinsengumi was a bunch of urban predators whose stuff included extorting 'tax' from the haves of the town and blackmailing shop owners around the business section with threats of destruction. This went on long enough to earn them fear and loathing that wouldn't die out, besides their notorious 'patrols' that left dead bodies along the route every night.
The Shinsengumi claimed to have saved the entire city of Kyoto from pro-Meiji samurai who were about to reduce it to ashes in mid-1860's. Since the said big fire was prevented before anything materialized, it stayed un-checked.
List of Shinsengumi Things
groups.yahoo.com/group/Nef...bti/sfupld
Commander 局長 (Kyokuchô)
* Kondo Isami
[edit]
Vice Commander 副長 (Fukuchô)
* Hijikata Toshizo
[edit]
General Secretary 総長 (Sôchô)
* Yamanami Keisuke
[edit]
Staff Officer 参謀 (Sanbô)
* Ito Kashitaro
[edit]
Captains 組長 (Kumichô)
* 一番組組長 Okita Soji (1st Unit Commander)
* 二番組組長 Nagakura Shinpachi (2nd Unit Commander)
* 三番組組長 Saito Hajime (3rd Unit Commander) (Commander in the Battle of Aizu)
* 四番組組長 Matsubara Chuji (4th Unit Commander)
* 五番組組長 Takeda Kanryusai (5th Unit Commander)
* 六番組組長 Inoue Genzaburo (6th Unit Commander)
* 七番組組長 Tani Sanjuro (7th Unit Commander)
* 八番組組長 Todo Heisuke (8th Unit Commander)
* 九番組組長 Suzuki Mikisaburo (9th Unit Commander)
* 十番組組長 Harada Sanosuke (10th Unit Commander)
[edit]
Spies,Investigators 監察方 (Kansatsugata)
* Yamazaki Susumu
* Asano Kaoru
* Shinohara Tainoshin
* Arai Tadao
* Hattori Takeo
* Ashiya Noboru
* Yoshimura Kanichiro
* Ogata Shuntaro (Later captain)
* Oishi Kuwajiro
* Yasutomi Saisuke (Later Vice Commander)
[edit]
Corporals 伍長 (Gochô)
* Abe Juro
* Hashimoto Kaisuke
* Hayashi Shintaro
* Ibaraki Tsukasa
* Ikeda Kotaro
* Ito Tetsugoro
* Kano Washio
* Kawashima Katsuji
* Kazurayama Takehachiro
* Kondo Yoshisuke
* Kumebe Masachika
* Maeno Goro
* Nakamura Kosaburo
* Nakanishi Noboru
* Obara Kozo
* Okuzawa Eisuke
* Ozeki Masajiro
* Shimada Kai
* Tomiyama Yahei
[edit]
Accountants 勘定方 (Kanjôgata)
* Kawai Kisaburo
* Ozeki Yashiro
* Sakai Hyogo
* Kishijima Yoshitaro
[edit]
Mibu Roshigumi 壬生 浪士組
* Serizawa Kamo (Commander)
* Niimi Nishiki (Commander, later Vice commander)
* Abiru Eisaburo
* Endo Joan
* Hirama Jusuke
* Hirayama Gorô
* Iesato Jirô
* Kamishiro Jinnosuke
* Kasuya Shingoro
* Negishi Yuzan
* Noguchi Kenji
* Saeki Matasaburô
* Shimizu Goichi
* Suzuki Chozo
* Tonouchi Yoshio
[edit]
Other members
(There were more than 400 members.)
* Adachi Ringoro
* Amaji Issen
* Aoyagi Makitayu
* Aridoshi Kango
* Echigo Saburo
* Fujimoto Hikonosuke
* Furukawa Kojiro
* Hayashi Shintaro
* Ichimura Tetsunosuke
* Ikeda Shichisaburo
* Inoue Taisuke
* Ishii Yujiro
* Ito Tetsugoro
* Kato Higuma
* Kawai Tetsugoro
* Kikuchi Tanomu
* Kiyohara Kiyoshi
* Kondo Shuhei
* Kondo Yoshisuke
* Matsumoto Kijiro
* Matsumoto Sutesuke
* Mazume Ryutaro
* Mazume Shinjuro
* Mori Tsunekichi
* Nakajima Nobori
* Nakamura Goro
* Nomura Risaburo
* Ono Uchu
* Otani Ryosuke
* Saito Ichidakusai
* Saito Seiichiro
* Sano Shimenosuke
* Sasaki Kuranosuke
* Shibata Hikosaburo
* Shibayama Tokusaburo
* Shinozaki Shinpachiro
* Soma Kazue (Last commander)
* Tachikawa Chikara
* Takagi Gojiro
* Takebe Ginjiro
* Takenouchi Takeo
* Tamura Ginnosuke
* Tomikawa Juro
* Tanaka Torazo
* Tani Mantaro
* Tanigawa Tatsukichi
* Taniguchi Shirobe
* Taoka Taro
* Yamano Yasohachi
[edit]
Regulations
The Shinsengumi Regulations (Kyokuchu Hatto) were established to control the members. The regulations were first used to purge Serizawa's Mito group.
1. Deviating from Bushido.
2. Leaving the Shinsengumi.
3. Raising money privately.
4. Taking part in litigations.
5. Engaging in private fights.
6. Anybody who breaks the rules will be ordered to commit seppuku.
Lord Saigo Takamori
www.geocities.com/nobukaze2...ngumi6.htm
There were many old-world samurai that fought real wars against Emperor Meiji's supporters in 1863 and a few years ahead (click here for picture and story of Eto Shinpei, and here for other samurai and warrior clans, including Shinsengumi's match at Meiji's side: the Tenchugumi).
But among the real big guys -- those who didn't brawl in the streets, didn't stalk people out of public bars and rib-joints, didn't raid private houses and hotel rooms, but waged real war in all the gory grandiose like their ancestors of 16th century, whether for or against Emperor Meiji, the most famous was Saigo Takamori, Lord of Satsuma (1827-1877).
He was in the category of 'against' -- but both sides recalled him with the same feeling: if only Saigo was born 300 years earlier than his actual lifetime, he would have been one heck of a General.
Lord Saigo's was the greatest war waged against the Restoration and the newly-whipped-up Meiji Imperial Army and Navy. Saigo was the real-life last samurai in every sense that Tom Cruise's movie was all about.
The Saigo clan had been virtually unheard-of in the era of real warlords in 16th century (the so-called 'Warring States Period'). But it had always been a good little samurai clan, vassal of the Shimazu clan. In 1854, Lord Shimazu Nariakira spotted the young Saigo Takamori among his lowest-ranked retainers and thought kind of highly of him. So he took the young man with him when he sailed to Edo (today's Tokyo) -- all of Tokugawa clan's vassals had the duty to present themselves there for some length of time as a show of loyalty.
Saigo's career climbed fast enough. In 1867 he was already Chief of the Imperial Army -- something that had never existed before, and which he built himself -- and he was on top of the world. Though his specialization was military stuff, he used to be involved in cabinet meetings and had some say in civilian matters, too.
But life took its strange turn in 1873. Saigo's over-patriotic ideas -- according to his colleagues in the Meiji government -- were alarming; his mostly non-samurai colleagues couldn't digest such things like suicidal missions (which included Saigo himself, so he proposed that year). "Lord Saigo is just too old-fashioned," Ministers said; "what would the world think of Japan if we do things as he wants us to!"
Saigo sailed back home to Satsuma, entirely disillusioned and his faith in the Meiji administration had diminished totally by the time he landed safely in his hometown Kagoshima, albeit the still-burning respect for the Emperor and the Imperial House.
If the Emperor and government officials wouldn't listen to him, so he thought, he better made his own kind of armed forces.
He opened up a military academy in Kagoshima in 1874, turning down no applicant. From the rest of the country young people came there since. So did the angry bands of warriors stripped off of all their previous privileges by the Meiji administration.
In a matter of months, Kagoshima became the HQ of 'old-fashioned' warriors of all sorts. And in 1875 Lord Saigo led them to a war against the Meiji Imperial Army and Navy that he had built himself, starting from local fightings, widened into regional skirmishes, and finally a clash with the Meiji armed forces.
They lost, as was kind of predictable. The American and European battleships had a part in this; they smashed Saigo's stronghold from the sea, and destroyed his arms factory.
The rebels had to retreat to remote spots -- where ammo was worth higher per gram than dope -- and from there the remaining members of the Saigo army did some guerrilla fightings -- to save the dash of gunpowder that they had, most of these localized battles were done with whatever lethal weapon that was around.
In 1877, having lost a final battle, Lord Saigo Takamori did what warriors of Japan always did in such occasion since 1180: he committed suicide.
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