Читать книгу Shinsengumi - Romulus Hillsborough - Страница 18

Historical Background

The fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868 was one of the great events in Asian and, indeed, world history. The creation of the shogunate over two and a half centuries earlier was the pivotal event in the history of Japan. In 1600 Tokugawa Iéyasu, head of the House of Tokugawa, defeated his enemies in the decisive battle at Sekigahara, the historical and geographical center of Japan. Iéyasu emerged from Sekigahara as the mightiest feudal lord in the empire. In 1603 he was conferred by the emperor with the title sei’i’taishōgun—commander in chief of the expeditionary forces against the barbarians, or simply, shōgun. The new shōgun established his military government in the east, at Edo (modern-day Tōkyō). He and his descendants ruled from Edo Castle, which by the time of the third shōgun of the Tokugawa dynasty‡ was the largest fortress in Japan. The emperor, meanwhile, remained a powerless figurehead at his palace in Kyōto, the ancient Imperial Capital in the west.

During the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868), Japan was comprised of hundreds of feudal domains. These domains were called han. Their number fluctuated slightly, but by the end of the Tokugawa Period there were approximately 260 han. Each han was ruled by a feudal lord, or daimyō. The samurai retainers of each daimyō administered the government of their lord’s han. In turn, the samurai received annual stipends which were calculated in koku—bushels of rice.§ The rice was produced by the peasants, who ranked just below the samurai in the social hierarchy. Beneath the peasants were the artisans and merchants.

The Tokugawa regime, known as the Tokugawa Bakufu, Edo Bakufu, or simply Bakufu, subjugated the han throughout Japan. Shōgun Tokugawa Iéyasu bequeathed upon his favorite sons the great domains of Owari, Kii, and Mito. These became the Three Branch Houses of the Tokugawa. The heads of the Three Branch Houses were the highest-ranking feudal lords under the shōgun. By Iéyasu’s provisions, in the event that a shōgun failed to produce an heir, his successor was to be chosen from among the branch houses.¶ Following in the hierarchy were the twenty Related Houses, descended from Iéyasu’s younger sons. Below them were the hereditary lords, whose descendants had aided Iéyasu at Sekigahara. The hereditary lords were direct retainers of the Tokugawa and, generally speaking, occupied the most important governmental posts, including those of regent and senior councilor. During the final years of Tokugawa rule, there were 145 hereditary lords. The progeny of those who either had been defeated by Iéyasu or had not sided with him were the so-called outside lords, of whom there were ninety-eight at the end of the Tokugawa Period. The Yamanouchi of Tosa, the Shimazu of Satsuma, and the Mōri of Chōshū were among the most powerful families of outside lords. From these three han would emerge the leaders in the revolution to overthrow the Bakufu and restore the emperor to his ancient seat of power. This revolution was the Meiji Restoration.

In 1635 the Bakufu initiated the system of alternate attendance, by which all daimyō were required to maintain official residences at Edo and live in them in alternate years. Through this system the Bakufu ensured that half of the feudal lords would always be present in Edo, while the other half were in their respective domains. The vast expense of maintaining Edo residences and traveling back and forth to the shōgun’s capital necessarily reduced the amount of money left the feudal lords for military expenditures. Further safeguarding against insurrection in the provinces was the requirement that each daimyō keep his wife and heir at his Edo residence as virtual hostages during his absence from the capital.

The Tokugawa ruled more or less peacefully for the next two and a half centuries. To maintain this peace, the Bakufu had strictly enforced a policy of national isolation since 1635. But the end of this halcyon era approached as the social, political, and economic structures of the outside world underwent major changes. The British colonies in North America declared independence in 1776. The remnants of feudalism in Europe were obliterated by the French Revolution in 1789 and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars. The nineteenth century heralded the age of European and North American capitalism and, with it, rapid advances in science, industry, and technology. The development of the steamship in the early part of the nineteenth century served the expansionist purposes of Western nations. Colonization of Asian countries by European powers surged. In 1818 Great Britain subjugated much of India. Through the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the first Opium War in 1842, the British acquired Hong Kong.

The foreign menace reached Japan on June 3 of the sixth year of the era named Ka’ei—July 8, 1853, on the Gregorian calendar.* It was on that day that Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy led a squadron of heavily armed warships into Edo Bay, off the shōgun’s capital, eventually forcing an end to Japanese isolation and inciting fifteen years of bloody turmoil across the island nation. Perry carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore demanding a treaty between the United States and Japan. After months of stormy and unprecedented debate among samurai and daimyō both within and outside the Tokugawa camp, and even including members of the general populace, the authorities eventually yielded to Perry’s gunboat diplomacy. In March 1854, the first year of the era of Ansei, Japan relinquished its policy of isolationism and signed the so-called Treaty of Peace and Amity with the Americans.† Similar treaties with England, Holland, France, and Russia followed. Two ports were opened—one at Shimoda, not far from Edo; the other at Hakodaté, on the far-northern island of Ezo.

Samurai throughout Japan were outraged over the humiliation they suffered at the hands of the foreigners. The situation was tersely explained by one who rose above this outrage in order to deal with the unprecedented and pressing dangers facing Japan. “Since the time that the American warships arrived at Uraga‡ in 1853, public opinion became divided between the advocates of war and peace, so that a decision could not be made either way,” Katsu Kaishū wrote four decades later, in a brief chronicle of the origin and downfall of the Tokugawa Bakufu. Kaishū was an expert swordsman who never drew his sword on an adversary. He was a philosopher-statesman, founder of the Japanese navy, and, during those dangerous times, probably the most valuable personage in the entire Edo regime. “At that time the Bakufu decided to open the country, and gradually did so. There were many people, including feudal lords, who resented this. They said that the Bakufu was forced by the barbarians to open the country because of its cowardice and weakness, and that this was why the Bakufu submitted to this humiliation. They no longer believed in the Bakufu. There was heated argument everywhere. People were killing foreigners, and assassinating government officials.”

Two schools of thought came to the fore. Kaikoku (Open the Country) was the official policy at Edo. Jōi (Expel the Barbarians) was violently advocated by the vast majority of samurai throughout Japan. Four domains stood at the vanguard of the antiforeign movement: Mito, Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa. As close relatives of the Tokugawa, the Mito rulers would never oppose the Bakufu. (Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, a son of the Lord of Mito, would become the last shōgun in 1866.) Meanwhile, the antiforeignism embraced by the Imperial Loyalists of Chōshū, Satsuma, and Tosa transformed into an anti-Tokugawa, nationalistic movement. At first they advocated Sonnō-Jōi (Imperial Reverence and Expel the Barbarians), which they eventually replaced with the more radical battle cry Kinnō-Tōbaku (Imperial Loyalism and Down with the Bakufu).

Chōshū, Satsuma, and Tosa were among the most powerful han in Japan. The Mōri family of Chōshū and the Shimazu family of Satsuma were bitter rivals, but they had borne a common and deep resentment of the Tokugawa for these past two and a half centuries. Both had been subjugated by the Tokugawa since Sekigahara. But the rulers of Chōshū had fared much worse at the hands of the victorious shōgun than had their counterparts in Satsuma. The Mōri’s vast landholdings had been reduced by two-thirds, while the Shimazu had been permitted to retain their entire domain. Since the income of the samurai was based on the rice yield of their domain, the Chōshū samurai felt the pain of Iéyasu’s punishment for the following two and a half centuries. It was probably for this reason that after the fall of the Bakufu, Satsuma tended to favor more lenient treatment of the Tokugawa than did Chōshū. Meanwhile, the Tosa daimyō, Yamanouchi Yōdō, found himself in a unique, if not wholly desirable, situation. He owed his very position as Lord of Tosa to the goodwill of the first Tokugawa Shōgun. Iéyasu had awarded Yōdō’s ancestor fifteen generations past with the vast Tosa domain, not for aiding him, but rather for not opposing him. Accordingly, while Lord Yōdō would never officially oppose Tokugawa rule, many Tosa samurai would.§

The majority of antiforeign samurai in Kyōto hailed from Chōshū, Tosa, and Satsuma. These men developed close relationships with radical nobles of the Imperial Court. They advocated Imperial Loyalism and Down with the Bakufu. They rallied around the Son of Heaven, a chronic xenophobe. They murdered Tokugawa representatives and sympathizers with an equal vengeance. Screaming “Tenchū”—Heaven’s Revenge—they severed their victims’ heads, mounted them atop bamboo stakes, and exposed them to the elements and public derision along the Kamogawa River near Sanjō Bridge.

The fear of things foreign among Emperor Kōmei and his court was based on ignorance. They had never been away from the Imperial Capital, and the emperor rarely left the idyllic confines of his palace. None of them had ever seen the ocean or, of course, the great ships that carried the “barbarians” to Japan. They had heard rumors of the foreigners, ridiculous as they were gruesome. Foreigners were monsters with long noses, round eyes, and red or yellow hair, who partook of human flesh and who harbored unholy designs on the sacred empire of Yamato.

Their ignorance notwithstanding, the emperor and his court were painfully aware of the Treaty of Nanking. Neither they nor the Loyalist samurai who revered the emperor believed that the encroachment of Western nations would stop with China. If British warships could bring to its knees the great Middle Kingdom, which had stood at the vanguard of civilization and culture since ancient times, certainly Japan faced similar peril.

Many of the Imperial Loyalists were rōnin, samurai who had quit the service of their lord. They claimed that Emperor Kōmei was the true and rightful ruler of Japan, although his ancestors had not held political power for a thousand years. The Loyalists, self-styled shishi—“men of high purpose”¶—professed that the Tokugawa Shōgun was merely an imperial agent whose ancestor had been commissioned by the emperor to protect Japan from foreign invasion. But the present shōgun and his councilors had upset the emperor by failing to deal firmly with the foreigners. If the Bakufu was unable to keep the foreigners out, the emperor and his court must be restored to power to save the nation. National politics gradually developed into a twofold structure: while the Bakufu continued to rule at Edo, the Imperial Court underwent a political renaissance at Kyōto.

The situation exploded in June 1858—the fifth year of Ansei—when Edo signed a commercial treaty without imperial sanction. The Loyalists cried lése-majesté. They charged treason. They vowed to punish the wicked Tokugawa officials who were responsible. The man they most hated was the Tokugawa regent, Ii Naosuké, Lord of Hikoné, who had usurped power two months earlier. Just before the subsequent death of the feebleminded Shōgun Tokugawa Iésada, the regent arranged for a twelve-year-old prince of the Kii domain, Tokugawa Iémochi, to succeed him. Under the boy-shōgun, the dictatorial regent ruled with an iron fist.

Regent Ii was determined that his enemies would not interfere with his plans. He unleashed his infamous Ansei Purge, the extent of which was unprecedented in scope and severity. Nearly one hundred shishi were arrested. A number of them were either executed or perished in prison. But Ii was not the devil incarnate his enemies believed he was, as indicated by a document handed down by the Ii family.

Fighting [the foreigners] and being defeated, and [as a result] having our country rent asunder, would bring the worst possible disgrace upon our nation. Which would be the graver—refusing [a treaty] and causing ourselves eternal disgrace, or concluding a treaty without imperial sanction, and so sparing our nation from eternal disgrace? At the present time neither our coastal defenses nor our armaments are sufficient. Our only choice for the time being is to concede [to a treaty], as the lesser of two evils. The aim of the Imperial Court is to avoid national disgrace. The Bakufu has been entrusted with the administration of the country. Those who administer the affairs of state must sometimes act with expediency as occasion demands. However, Naosuké is determined to bear upon himself the responsibilities of the grave crime of not obtaining imperial sanction.

Regent Ii would pay for his “grave crime” the following spring. On the unseasonably snowy morning of March 3, 1860 (the first and only year of the era of Man’en), the regent was assassinated by a band of swordsmen—seventeen from Mito, one from Satsuma—as his palanquin approached Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle. The authority by which the Tokugawa had ruled Japan these past two and a half centuries seemed to evaporate into thin air as the regent’s hot blood melted the freshly fallen snow just outside the castle gate and news of the Sakurada Gate Incident shocked the nation. If the most powerful man in Edo could be cut down by a small band of assassins, there was no limit to the havoc that hundreds, or even thousands, of rōnin could wreak throughout Japan.

___________________

‡ Tokugawa Iémitsu, ruled 1623–1651.

§ 1 koku = 44.8 U.S. gallons.

¶ Tokugawa Yoshimuné, the eighth shōgun, added three additional branch houses to strengthen the foundation of his family’s rule. These were the Hitotsubashi, Tayasu, and Shimizu families. None of these additional three branch families possessed a provincial castle, but rather they lived permanently in Edo.

* New eras were promulgated to mark an extraordinary occasion or occurrence, such as the enthronement of an emperor, a good omen, or a natural disaster. The era name reflects the zeitgeist of the era. (Kojien)

† The Treaty of Peace and Amity is also known as the Treaty of Kanagawa, after the town where it was concluded.

‡ In Edo Bay.

§ Among the most prominent leaders of the revolution were Sakamoto Ryōma and Takéchi Hanpeita, both from Tosa. I have written in detail about these and other Tosa men, as well as about the special relationship between the Yamanouchi and the Tokugawa, in Ryoma—Life of a Renaissance Samurai and in Samurai Tales.

¶ Kojien, the standard Japanese dictionary, defines shishi as (1) “a person of high purpose;” (2) “a person of high purpose who risks his own life for the nation or society.” Many of the shishi in Kyōto were rōnin. Most of the shishi during the final years of Tokugawa rule hailed from the Chōshū, Tosa, Satsuma, and Higo clans. But the term was by no means limited to Imperial Loyalists. Numerous supporters of the Tokugawa, including samurai of Mito, Fukui, Aizu, and the Shinsengumi, also called themselves shishi. Nor was the title limited to samurai; it was also claimed by peasants, merchants, and clerics who risked their lives on both sides of the revolution.