Shinsengumi. Romulus Hillsborough

in the face of Perry’s gunboat diplomacy and while most men in Japan blindly opposed Open the Country, Kaishū, then an obscure Tokugawa retainer, had submitted a letter to the Bakufu. In this famous document he expressed the urgent and unavoidable necessity for Edo to lift its centuries-old ban on the construction of large oceangoing vessels and to develop a modern navy. To this end, international trade would be imperative to raise capital for building warships and manufacturing Western-style guns. Although these and other of Kaishū’s proposals were adopted by the Bakufu during the 1850s, in the spring of 1863—and for years to follow—Japan was still a technologically backward nation. While most of his countrymen ranted and raved about expelling the foreigners through virtue of their “samurai spirit,” Katsu Kaishū, always ahead of his time, continued to profess that without foreign assistance—i.e., modern military technology—Japan could not hope to stand up to Great Britain, France, Russia, or the United States. Unless Japan prepared itself for the future, it would share the fate of China and India, under the yoke of foreign subjugation. Kaishū knew, as did a small handful of other farsighted men both within and outside the Tokugawa camp, that Edo’s proposed promise to expel the foreigners was at best appeasement, at worst deception, of the Imperial Court.

Lord Matsudaira Katamori was less concerned with the bitter truth of Japan’s weakness than with protecting the shōgun. The Matsudaira family of Aizu Han were among the Tokugawa Bakufu’s staunchest allies. As one of the Related Houses, their crest displayed the three hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa. At age twenty-seven, the Edo-born Lord Katamori, head of the House of Matsudaira and daimyō of Aizu, was appointed protector of Kyōto. His first task upon assuming his new post was to safeguard the streets of Kyōto in preparation for Iémochi’s visit. At the end of 1862, the second year of the era of Bunkyū, the Bakufu authorities had devised a plan to assist him. In former days they would have deployed samurai of the Edo camp to suppress the renegades in Kyōto. But now the authorities came up with a novel idea. For the first time in its history, the Tokugawa Bakufu officially recruited rōnin, whom the authorities generally referred to by the preferred term rōshi, to suppress the renegades.† To this end, the Bakufu proclaimed a general amnesty, whereby even incarcerated criminals deemed worthy were set free to enlist. By February hundreds of men, whose majority hailed from the east, had been recruited into the Rōshi Corps to serve the shōgun in the troubled west.

      In April of the previous year, Shimazu Hisamitsu, the father of the Satsuma daimyō and de facto ruler of that powerful clan, had led an army of one thousand men into Kyōto in an unprecedented display of military might by an outside lord. Hisamitsu, a sometimes ally of the Tokugawa, urged the Imperial Court to accept Edo’s much vaunted call for a Union of Court and Camp. By uniting with Kyōto to shore up national strength against the foreign threat, Edo hoped to regain its unchallenged authority of the past. The reasoning: once the union had been completed, the Imperial Loyalists could no longer oppose the Bakufu, for so doing would be tantamount to siding against the Imperial Court. Lord Hisamitsu, meanwhile, had ulterior motives. In his role as great mediator, he would strengthen his influence at Edo and gain prestige at Kyōto, at the expense of his Chōshū rivals.

Upon his arrival in the Imperial Capital, Lord Hisamitsu, as he fully expected, was commanded by the court to reestablish order there—which, of course, was the paramount desire of Emperor Kōmei. Lord Hisamitsu was therefore vexed to learn of a planned uprising by radical samurai, including twenty of his own vassals. These radicals would invade the Imperial Palace and assassinate supporters of the Tokugawa, whom they claimed had “infested” the court. They had been waiting for the Satsuma host to arrive, counting on the support of Hisamitsu, whom they assumed had come to declare war on the Bakufu. When the rebels learned that they had misjudged Hisamitsu’s intent, they gathered at the Terada’ya inn, in the town of Fushimi just south of Kyōto, to finalize their war plans. Hisamitsu appointed a squad of nine Satsuma samurai, all expert swordsmen, to proceed to the Terada’ya and bring their twenty errant brethren back to Satsuma’s Kyōto headquarters. The result was the notorious fratricidal sword battle at the Terada’ya inn, the first, though unsuccessful, attempt at a military uprising aimed directly at the Tokugawa Bakufu.‡

Among the planners of the failed uprising was a rōnin named Kiyokawa Hachirō. Kiyokawa was the eldest son of a family of wealthy saké brewers of Shōnai Han in northern Japan. He disliked his family business, pursuing instead his passion for the martial and literary arts. He studied at the celebrated Chiba Dōjo, one of the three great fencing academies in Edo,§ and became a renowned swordsman licensed to teach the Hokushin Ittō style. Kiyokawa was also a noted Confucian scholar who taught his subject at his private academy in Edo. He was a charismatic speaker, with flashing eyes and a tall, slender frame. He was a man of political ambition who, like many of his peers, censured the Edo regime for its weakness in dealing with foreigners. Kiyokawa was particularly outspoken in his anti-Tokugawa views. He was a man of strong conviction, and it seems that he also had a short temper. One evening at dusk, as he walked through the center of Edo after an afternoon of heavy drinking, he nearly collided with a man coming from the opposite direction. The man carried a walking stick, with which he attempted to strike the samurai. The samurai lost his temper. The next instant he drew his sword, and with one clean stroke beheaded the man with the walking stick.

      The local Tokugawa magistrate in Edo had kept a close watch on Kiyokawa. He was aware of Kiyokawa’s openly anti-Tokugawa views. The magistrate used the incident of the slaying as an excuse to order Kiyokawa’s arrest. But Kiyokawa would not be arrested. Instead, he traveled through western Japan to recruit shishi into the Loyalist fold and wielded significant influence among the radicals of Chōshū, Satsuma, and Tosa. Although the uprising in Fushimi had indeed been crushed, Kiyokawa would not abandon his ultimate objective of Imperial Loyalism and Down with the Bakufu.

The plan for the Rōshi Corps was nominally proposed by one Matsudaira Chikaranosuké,¶ chief fencing instructor at the Bakufu’s Military Academy in Edo and close relative of the shōgun. Matsudaira’s intentions included reining in the radical elements in and around Edo who threatened the Bakufu. Once these rōnin were in the Tokugawa fold, the Bakufu could more readily effect a Union of Court and Camp. The actual planners of the corps, however, had different ideas. One of them was Kiyokawa. The other was Yamaoka Tetsutarō,* a low-ranking Tokugawa samurai. Kiyokawa and Yamaoka were close friends. The two had studied kenjutsu (literally, sword techniques) at the Chiba Dōjo. Shortly after the commercial treaties had been concluded, they formed a subversive political party that advocated Imperial Reverence and Expel the Barbarians. Yamaoka served as assistant kenjutsu instructor at the Bakufu’s Military Academy. His loyalty to the Tokugawa was unquestioned; but he was nevertheless Kiyokawa’s equal in his reverence for the emperor and resentment of the foreign intruders. Around the same time that Yamaoka received orders from the Bakufu to oversee the Rōshi Corps, Kiyokawa was selected by Matsudaira as the ideal man to attract other rōnin to enlist. Kiyokawa was pardoned of his crime under the general amnesty. With Kiyokawa as the leading member of the corps, its slogan, “Loyalty and Patriotism,” became its byname and synonymous with Imperial Reverence and Expel the Barbarians. Kiyokawa recruited other “loyal and patriotic” men. Soon the ranks swelled to 250, as large as the armies of many of the feudal domains.

      The first visit to Kyōto by a shōgun in over two centuries demonstrated Edo’s diminishing ability to dominate Japan. It served to further empower the radical elements at the Imperial Court and to embolden the Loyalists. On February 8, 1863, the third year of Bunkyū, the Rōshi Corps left Edo for Kyōto as an advance guard to the shōgun’s entourage.

For the time being, Kiyokawa’s corps outwardly obeyed the Bakufu’s original purpose of protecting the shōgun. They gathered at Denzūin Temple in Edo, the starting point of their three-hundred-mile overland trek. Two weeks later, nine days ahead of the shōgun, they crossed the wooden Sanjō Bridge over the Kamogawa River, which flowed