Читать книгу Shinsengumi - Romulus Hillsborough - Страница 19

Loyal and Patriotic Corps

The situation in the Imperial Capital continued to deteriorate. Unruly rōnin flocked to Kyōto. Most were Imperial Loyalists with a vendetta against the Bakufu. All were men of high purpose. They wore two lethal swords at their left hip. They were raring to use their swords to expel the barbarians and punish the shōgun’s government for allowing them entrance. In the spring of 1863, as blood flowed and chaos reigned in the Imperial Capital, the shōgun was compelled to visit there—to report to the emperor his promise to expel the barbarians. The Bakufu instituted a new post—the protector of Kyōto. It was the official function of the protector of Kyōto to safeguard the Imperial Capital in preparation for the shōgun’s visit; but it was his true purpose to crush the enemies of the Tokugawa. Under the slogan “Loyalty and Patriotism,” the Bakufu enlisted rōnin in the east to subdue rōnin in the west. In vain, the government provided each man of the “loyal and patriotic” corps with a pittance of gold—an ill-conceived attempt to gain their loyalty. When the corpsmen proved no less possessed of anti-Tokugawa fervor than those they were commissioned to subdue, the protector of Kyōto and his bewildered allies in Edo balked.

Shōgun Tokugawa Iémochi could not expel the foreigners—his regime, and indeed Japan as a whole, lacked the military means to do so. The bitter truth of Japan’s weakness vis-à-vis foreign nations had long been expressed by no less an authority on Western military power than Katsu Kaishū.* A decade earlier, 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 through the eastern side of Kyōto. Few of these warriors from the east had ever laid eyes on the ancient Imperial Capital in the west. It was the height of spring.† The cherries were in full bloom in the green hills in the east of the city. The fallen blossoms covered the lowlands of the town like so much pink and white gossamer. In the distance, on the opposite side of the city, the corpsmen saw the five-tiered pagoda of Tōji Temple, a black monolith rising above the land in the southwest.

Telltale of these troubled times, on the night before the corps reached Kyōto, the heads of three wooden statues at a local Buddhist temple had been severed and displayed along the riverbank. These were images of three shōgun of the Ashikaga regime,‡ whose tenuous rule of Japan spanned fifteen generations. This symbolic act of Heaven’s Revenge was committed only days before Iémochi’s arrival at Kyōto, as a direct threat to the Tokugawa Bakufu.

The Rōshi Corps stopped in the western outskirts of the city, north of Tōji and two miles west of the Kamogawa. They set up headquarters at Shintokuji Temple in the village of Mibu, a rural area surrounded by farmland. They lodged at Shintokuji and other nearby temples and private homes. Most of the rōshi were destitute and shabbily dressed. Some did not display their family crests on their clothes, but instead wore striped cotton peasant jackets. But for the two swords at their left hip, they would not have been recognizable as samurai. The local townspeople, wary of the motley corps, assigned to them the unflattering epithet “Mibu Rōshi.” When some among the corps extorted money from wealthy merchants and otherwise intimidated or violated the local people, the more derogatory “Mibu Wolves” was applied.

No sooner had they arrived at Mibu than Kiyokawa assembled all 250 men into the cramped confines of the main building at their temple headquarters. The men seated themselves on the tatami-covered floor before the Buddhist altar, swords placed at their sides. Kiyokawa stood at the altar facing the assembly. Suddenly and in no uncertain terms he declared, eyes flashing, that men of high purpose must place their true loyalty with the emperor and not with the Tokugawa. The corps had been recruited for their loyalty and patriotism, he reminded them. Their actual purpose for coming to Kyōto had not been to protect the shōgun, but rather to help Iémochi fulfill his promise to expel the foreigners. Kiyokawa now presented his men with a letter addressed to the Imperial Court, expressing these views and offering up the “loyal and patriotic” corps as an army of Sonnō-Jōi. Every man signed the letter, because they did not have the will to oppose their self-imposed leader.

On the following day Kiyokawa submitted the letter to the court. It was well received by the radicals surrounding the emperor. The Tokugawa authorities were disturbed, to say the least. There were some among them who proposed assassinating Kiyokawa. But the possibility of repercussions among the court, renegade Loyalists, and even the Rōshi Corps persuaded the authorities to consider a less dangerous solution to the problem.

A less dangerous solution availed itself in connection with recent developments in Edo. During the previous August, a British subject had been cut down in cold blood by samurai of the Satsuma clan. The murdered man and three of his countrymen had unintentionally interrupted the entourage of the Lord of Satsuma as it passed through the small village of Namamugi near Edo.§

The British demanded reparations from Edo. The British fleet was now at Yokohama to await the outcome of talks between the two governments. Should the talks collapse, the British threatened to attack.

Kiyokawa proposed that his Rōshi Corps be allowed to return immediately to Edo to help expel the foreigners. The Tokugawa authorities accepted the proposal, but with an ulterior motive. The shōgun had been intentionally vague in his promise of Jōi. He would not be bound by an imperial edict that he knew he could not obey. But the Edo regime was no stranger to deceit. The Bakufu arranged for an order to be issued by an imperial advisor for the corps to return to Edo under the pretext that, in case of war, they would finally have their chance to fight the foreigners. But the true motive of the Tokugawa authorities was, of course, to rein in Kiyokawa and his followers before they could do any serious damage.

The imperial order notwithstanding, a small number of the corps defected and remained in Kyōto. Thirteen of these defectors, most of whom hailed from either Mito Han or the province of Musashi near Edo, bore a special loyalty to the shōgun. They had come to Kyōto under orders from the Bakufu, for the dual purpose of guarding the shōgun and expelling the foreigners. They would not obey an order to retreat issued by an imperial advisor who was swayed by a self-professed enemy of the Tokugawa. Rather, they resolved to quit the Rōshi Corps in order to achieve their “loyal and patriotic” objective under the authority of the shōgun. The thirteen defectors petitioned the protector of Kyōto for official permission to remain in the Imperial Capital to “guard the shōgun until he returns to Edo.” Their petition was readily accepted. These thirteen comprised the original membership of the dreaded Shinsengumi.

Kiyokawa Hachirō did not abandon his dissentious designs. Soon after returning to Edo he devised a plot to attack the foreign settlement at Yokohama. He recruited five hundred men to participate in the uprising, including Yamaoka Tetsutarō, who had returned with him. They intended to burn the town, and in the ensuing chaos slaughter as many foreigners as possible. They would set fire to the foreign ships that lay in port, plunder the coffers at the foreign government offices, march some ninety miles west of Edo to the domain of Kōfu, and capture that castle as a military base from which to finally wage war against the foreigners. When the Bakufu received word of the plot, the order for Kiyokawa’s assassination was issued.

One morning in mid-April, two days before the planned uprising, Kiyokawa brushed off admonishments by friends that his life was in danger. He had an important appointment to keep at the home of a friend whom he intended to recruit for the Yokohama attack. But this friend turned out to be a traitor who had informed the Bakufu of the plan. The traitor made sure that Kiyokawa was treated to a generous amount of saké. When his intoxicated guest stood up to leave in the late afternoon, the host insisted on accompanying him along the way, citing the danger to his life.

Kiyokawa was ambushed shortly afterward by six swordsmen of the Tokugawa camp. He screamed, perhaps the name of one of his assailants, Sasaki Tadasaburō, whom he recognized as a fencing instructor at the Bakufu’s Military Academy.¶ Before Kiyokawa could draw his sword, he was cut from behind. Blood sprayed from his body as he collapsed on the street.

With Kiyokawa’s death, the planned attack on Yokohama was foiled. When word of the assassination reached a fellow conspirator, he became worried. Kiyokawa had been carrying a list of the five hundred men involved in the plot. If this list were to fall into the hands of the Edo authorities, all five hundred would be implicated, including the fellow conspirator. He rushed to the scene of the assassination. He found the body of his friend sprawled on the cruel ground. The swords were still in their scabbards. The body was dressed in wide trousers of gray stripes, and a black coat lined with silk. On the right side of the corpse was the severed head, the black hair still tied in a topknot. Nearby was a military helmet made of black lacquered cypress. The backside of the body was sliced open horizontally. A deep gash on the left shoulder was visible, and the right side was cut open cleanly to the nape of the neck. The right arm extended outward. Next to the right hand was an iron-ribbed fan, as if Kiyokawa had been holding it when attacked.

The fellow conspirator immediately searched through the pockets. To his great relief, he found the list. Wary of being discovered, he was eager to vacate the scene. But he felt obligated to at least give the head a proper burial. He removed the black coat. He wrapped the head in the coat, and carried the grim package to Yamaoka’s house. Yamaoka preserved the head in sugar. He hid it in the closet, but after a few days the stench became unbearable. Soon a local police officer cast a suspicious eye. To avoid detection, Yamaoka hid the head in a garbage bin, but the stench remained. When he attempted to grasp the head by the hair to remove it from the bin, the strands came out and he lost his grip. But he managed to bring the head to the adjacent training hall, where he removed one of the wooden planks and buried it under the floor. Now the smell permeated the training hall, so that he was compelled to bury it beneath a large silverberry tree behind his house. Yamaoka eventually secured a gravesite at nearby Denzūin Temple, from where Kiyokawa Hachirō and his “loyal and patriotic” corps had set out for Kyōto two months earlier.

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* See Appendix I (1).

† The rō of both terms literally means “wave” (the gist being “wandering aimlessly”). The nin of rōnin simply means “person,” while the shi of rōshi means “samurai.”

‡ For a detailed account of this incident, see Ryoma—Life of a Renaissance Samurai.

§ See Appendix I (2).

¶ Not to be confused with Matsudaira Katamori, Lord of Aizu and protector of Kyōto.

* Later Yamaoka Tesshū.

† The Rōshi Corps arrived in Kyōto on February 23 on the Chinese calendar, April 10 on the Gregorian calendar.

‡ The Ashikaga Bakufu ruled from 1338 to 1573.

§ For a detailed account of the Namamugi Incident, also known as the Richardson Affair, see Samurai Tales.

¶ Sasaki’s name would live in infamy, not as an assassin of Kiyokawa Hachirō, but as one of the alleged murderers of Sakamoto Ryōma.