Shinsengumi. Romulus Hillsborough

historical era, nor social nor ethical mores is the stringent and unwritten Code of the Samurai, Bushidō, which they valued above all, including life itself, and by which they faithfully lived and died—although their interpretation of the code occasionally differed. But these men of the sword in the mid-nineteenth century, both the good and the bad, were heir to a rapidly changing society, when the age of the samurai and their noble code were fast declining, only to be replaced by the modern materialism of the encroaching West.

      * * * * *

      In the spring of the third year of Bunkyū, 1863, the shōgun issued his long-awaited promise to the emperor to expel the foreigners by May 10. In April he traveled from Kyōto to Ōsaka, to board the Tokugawa warship Jundō Maru, commanded by Katsu Kaishū. It was Iémochi’s purpose to observe Ōsaka Bay from shipboard, with an eye to fortifying the coastal defenses in that vital region, so close to the sacred Imperial Capital. The Shinsengumi proceeded to Ōsaka to guard the shōgun.On May 9, the day before the promised deadline, Tokugawa authorities yielded to the demands of Great Britain for reparations to the victims of the Satsuma samurai at Namamugi. This, of course, gave the radicals at court and their samurai allies a perfect excuse to strike out against the Bakufu. The authorities, in turn, called for the shōgun to return to his capital in the east, not for their falsely expressed purpose of expelling the foreigners there, which was nothing but a ploy to appease the radicals in Kyōto, including the Son of Heaven himself, but to get Iémochi away from the dangerous situation in the west.

      On May 10, to demonstrate their perfect loyalty to the emperor, and in preparation for the coming war against the Tokugawa, the Loyalists in Chōshū, that most radical of samurai clans, gathered at Shimonoseki, the southwesternmost point of their domain. The Strait of Shimonoseki separated the island of Kyūshū from the main island of Honshū. Foreign ships passed through this vital strait to travel from Yokohama to Nagasaki and on to Shanghai. On the evening of the tenth, two Chōshū warships fired upon an unsuspecting American merchant vessel in the strait. On the twenty-third of the same month, the Chōshū men shot at a French dispatch boat from their batteries along the Shimonoseki coast. Three days later they opened fire on a Dutch corvette in the same waters. While the Americans and the French had avoided casualties, the Dutch suffered four dead and five severely wounded.

      Chōshū had taken it upon itself to enforce the shōgun’s xenophobic, and impossible, promise. By so doing, it usurped influence over the Imperial Court at the expense of Satsuma—and as a result further diminished Tokugawa authority in Kyōto. But retaliation was hard and fast. On June 1, an American warship out of Yokohama sank two Chōshū ships at Shimonoseki, damaged a third, and shelled a battery along the coast. Four days later two French warships entered the strait and destroyed several more batteries. To add insult to injury, some 250 French troops landed at Shimonoseki and temporarily occupied two of the remaining batteries. They destroyed more of the Chōshū guns, threw stores of gunpowder into the ocean, and looted swords, armor, helmets, and muskets, before reboarding their ships and departing the same day.

      The swift and one-sided retaliation had taught the Chōshū men a hard lesson. Like samurai throughout Japan, they had always been confident that when it came to actual combat, the foreigners would be no match for their superior fighting spirit. This myth had been shattered in just five days by the superior military force of three foreign warships. These champions of Expel the Barbarians had once and for all realized that until they could eliminate the immense technological gap between themselves and the great foreign powers, their slogan was a pipe dream.

      Serizawa and Kondō felt certain that they understood the situation in the Imperial Capital better than the authorities three hundred miles away at Edo Castle. On May 25, they petitioned the Bakufu to keep the shōgun in Kyōto. Their purpose was to avoid giving the radicals an excuse to attack the Bakufu as punishment for the shōgun’s returning to Edo without fulfilling his promise. But Serizawa and Kondō were mere war dogs of the Bakufu. Consequently, their petition was ignored. In mid-June, the shōgun sailed for Edo aboard the Jundō Maru.

      It is an irony of history that the Shinsengumi and the Chōshū-led Loyalists shared the same great objective: expelling the foreigners for the sake of the emperor. However, the means by which they would achieve this objective made them bitter enemies. The Shinsengumi intended to fight the foreigners under the military authority of the Tokugawa Shōgun. The Chōshū-led Loyalists meant to destroy the Tokugawa Bakufu as the most dangerous impediment to their objective. After the Edo authorities agreed to pay reparations to Great Britain, Kondō Isami realized that the Bakufu was not yet ready to implement Jōi. Although he intended to eventually return to the east to wage war against the foreigners there, he nevertheless determined that his corps, the avowed protector of the shōgun, must for the time being remain in the turbulent west, even in Iémochi’s absence. His corps must suppress the anti-Tokugawa radicals who would use the shōgun’s inability to expel the foreigners as an excuse to strike out against him. For Kondō Isami, protecting the Tokugawa Shōgun now took precedence over everything.

      The Shinsengumi’s mortal enemies basked in imperial grace during the sweltering and frenetic summer of the third year of Bunkyū. In Kyōto, the Chōshū Loyalists enjoyed the support of the extremists surrounding the emperor, led by court noble Sanjō Sanétomi. But Chōshū’s glory in Kyōto was as short-lived as its triumph at Shimonoseki had been. In mid-August, Aizu and Satsuma formed a military alliance, tipping the balance of power at the Imperial Court back into the hands of the Tokugawa. On August 18, under the cover of night, heavily armed Satsuma and Aizu troops seized the Nine Forbidden Gates of the palace, barring entrance by the Chōshū men. Fourteen hundred armed Loyalists, including one thousand rōnin, assembled at Sakaimachi Gate, which thus far had been Chōshū ’s to guard. The tense scene was described by a chief vassal of the outside Lord of Yonézawa, in a letter to his son:

      The two sides faced each other, their cannon and rifles ready to fire.... Each man wore armor, and I wish you could have seen the imposing spectacle. Chōshū Han showed no fear in the face of [the dangerous situation]. Among their samurai were youths who looked to be around fifteen or sixteen years old. They wore white crepe jackets and white headbands, carried Western rifles in their hands and thought nothing of the huge army confronting them. Rather, they advanced to the front of the line, eager for the enemy to attack.

      Their brave determination notwithstanding, the Chōshū warriors were no match for their heavily armed Satsuma and Aizu foes. Betrayed by the Imperial Court, these champions of Imperial Loyalism aimed their guns at the palace. But now they were presented with an imperial order to retreat immediately or be branded an “Imperial Enemy.” They had no choice but to obey. Chōshū was banished from Kyōto, along with seven radical court nobles led by Sanjō Sanétomi. Satsuma and Aizu were aided in the fight by men of the Shinsengumi, including Hijikata Toshizō. The Demon Commander’s valor was evident in the two enemy sword marks left on the iron head guard he wore at his forehead. He sent this head guard to his brother-in-law, Satō Hikogorō, in Hino. Accompanying the package was a letter, in which Hijikata glibly remarked, “In Kyōto, I have not yet been killed.”

      The so-called Coup of 8/18 exacerbated the turmoil in the city. Chōshū samurai and their rōnin allies who managed to remain in Kyōto went into hiding. They renewed their vows of Heaven’s Revenge, and there were rumors that Chōshū was planning a countercoup in Kyōto. Panic spread through the general populace and the court. In the aftermath of the coup, the Shinsengumi received official orders from the protector of Kyōto to “patrol the city day and night.”

The Shinsengumi did their job well. The extraordinary sense of self-importance and the unyielding will to power of their leaders interacted with each other, and reacted with the unique historical era they had inherited, to produce in these particularly skilled swordsmen a propensity to kill unsurpassed even in these bloodiest of times. Soon a semblance of order was restored to the city. In the following month the Imperial Court rewarded each corpsmen with one gold ryō.‡

The protector of Kyōto was similarly happy with his Newly Selected Corps, which, in fact, were becoming his most powerful security force. The corps’ unprecedented strength