Sakuma Shozan, Katsu Kaishu
and Sakamoto Ryoma
National Background
by Romulus Hillsborough
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As I have mentioned, in this issue I focus on three remarkable men of the Bakumatsu, noted for their essential roles in modernizing their nation and bringing about the revolution which was the dawn of modern Japan. Their names are Sakuma Shozan, Katsu Kaishu and Sakamoto Ryoma. When the Bakufu attempted to rebuff Perry, citing a Tokugawa law requiring foreign affairs to be handled at Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan, the commodore positioned his four warships just inside the entrance to the Bay of Edo, in dangerous proximity to the capital. The Japanese called Perry's ships, "Black Ships." Much larger than any Japanese vessels of the time, they were described as "floating castles." Watching the dangerous scene through a pair of binoculars, from a height above the coastline, was a samurai of the Matsushiro clan. His name was Sakuma Shozan. "In the west there is Saigo, in the east Sakuma," proclaimed a famous saying during those tumultuous times, comparing Sakuma to Saigo Takamori, the great military leader of Satsuma. Sakuma's knowledge of Western technology, most notably military science, was unparalleled in Japan. He was an expert in the casting and operation of Western-style guns. He was a firm believer in the aphorism "know the enemy," and his cherished slogan was "control the barbarians through barbarian technology." Sakuma Shozan was born in 1811, forty-two years before the maelstrom begot by Commodore Perry. He was the eldest son of a low-ranking but well-bred samurai in the service of the Lord of Matsushiro. According to one of Sakuma's students, he was endowed with extraordinary physical strength, was reticent, and his voice, though not loud, was penetrating. He was tall about five feet eight. He was a handsome man with a light complexion, long face, broad forehead, high cheekbones, moustache and goatee. His ears were slanted backwards, making them invisible from the front and earning him the moniker "owl," which he bore with pride. His feudal lord likened him to a "swift horse, wild and hard to handle." In 1842 the Treaty of Nanking ended the Opium War between Great Britain and China. Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain and several Chinese ports were forced open to international trade. The Japanese were, to put it mildly, alarmed by the encroaching danger of Western imperialism. Around this time the Lord of Matsushiro was appointed as the shogun's adviser for maritime defense. By force of an exceptional intellect, strong will and hard work, Sakuma Shozan, at age thirty-two, was selected to serve as advisor to the Lord of Matsushiro. Before studying military science, Sakuma he had been a Confucian scholar, who believed that China, under the Ch'ing dynasty, stood at the pinnacle of civilization. But not even China, he wrote to a friend, could defend itself against European military technology namely modern guns and warships. As advisor to the Lord of Matsushiro, Sakuma professed that the only way to defend Japan from foreign aggression was to acquire this technology. To Sakuma, the Tokugawa law of isolationism was a dangerous relic of the past. Perry reached Japan in the summer of 1853. In the following spring he returned to exact the treaty. At that time the Matsushiro and Kokura clans were in charge of guarding a reception post for the Americans in Yokohama. One day, as Perry passed by the Matsushiro camp, he encountered Sakuma, whom he saluted. A senior councilor to the Shogun was taken aback by the salute. "You're the only one whom Perry has saluted," he told Sakuma, who, to be sure, was proud of the compliment. In fact, Sakuma bragged about it in a letter he wrote to his wife shortly afterward. Yoshida Shoin, the revolutionary teacher of the Choshu clan, was one of Sakuma's most famous students. www.ridgebackpress.com/essays/yoshida.htm When Yoshida divulged to his teacher his intention to board one of Perry's ships to travel overseas in defiance of Tokugawa law because "seeing something once with your own eyes is worth more than hearing about it a hundred times" (i.e., "know the enemy") Sakuma urged him to do so. At that time Sakuma wrote a poem for Yoshida, which the latter cherished and stored in his travel case. When Yoshida was refused passage by Perry and subsequently arrested by the Tokugawa authorities, the poem was confiscated, incriminating Sakuma as an accomplice. Sakuma spent five months in jail in Edo, after which he was returned to Matsushiro and placed under house arrest. (He would remain under house arrest for more than eight years, until the end of 1862.) In 1854, shortly after the conclusion of the treaty with the United States, which Sakuma strongly opposed, he wrote that the "conduct and words of the Americans were unreasonable to the extreme, and arrogant. As a result they have disgraced Japan's honor to an extreme degree." Sakuma's sentiment is echoed by another one of his famous students. Upon returning from an historic voyage to the United States in the spring of 1860, Katsu Kaishu decried the Americans' gunboat diplomacy: "When the American barbarians arrived, although they knew that it was prohibited, they nevertheless entered Uraga [Bay], displayed a white flag as a sign of peace, presented their letter [to the shogun from President Millard Fillmore demanding a treaty], then proceeded further into the bay. They fired blank shots from their cannon, and even took soundings of their own accord. Their arrogant insult was outrageous, and truly the worst humiliation in the history of our nation." Foreign Trade Throughout the centuries of national isolation, foreign trade had been limited to the Dutch and the Chinese in their respective enclaves in the port city of Nagasaki. Accordingly, knowledge of the West, including Western military science, had, for the most part, been introduced through native scholars of so-called Dutch studies in Nagasaki, under the tutelage of instructors from Holland. Sakuma, of course, was a Dutch scholar. Three years before Perry's arrival he intended to publish a Japanese-Dutch dictionary. He borrowed the required money from the Matsushiro treasury, and proceeded to Edo to begin editing. But official permission was required to publish the dictionary. He applied with the Bakufu for permission, saying, "In order to control the barbarians we must understand the way they feel. In order to understand the way they feel, we must be able to understanding foreign languages. The most urgent task for maritime defense that we now face is learning about foreign countries. And there is no quicker way to accomplish this than to print a dictionary." But the authorities would not listen, and permission was refused. Sakuma was not astonished by the sight of Perry's four warships although he knew perhaps better than anyone the destruction their guns could cause to the Japanese capital. But Sakuma was unlike most of his countrymen. He was a famous admirer of Russia's Peter the Great. In the previous century, after touring Western Europe, Peter the Great had introduced Western technology and culture into Russia and completely overhauled his government and military system. Sakuma was poignantly aware of the dire necessity for Japan to learn from the Russian czar's example. Eleven years before Perry's arrival, when Sakuma had warned of foreign invasion if Japan did not acquire European military technology, he advised the Bakufu to build modern warships and guns to form a powerful navy, and to hire instructors from Western countries to teach military science. But the Edo authorities neither recognized Sakuma's vision nor heeded his "preposterous" advice. When Perry arrived, Sakuma urged the Bakufu to send men of ability to study overseas so that they may return to Japan armed with the technical know-how required to achieve his maritime objectives. But still the Bakufu would not listen. Sakuma was a radical who advocated the abolishment of the entire feudal system, under which some 260 feudal domains were controlled by the Tokugawa regime. Japan must become a unified modern nation, he professed, and take its rightful place among the great Western powers. Sakuma was an elitist who believed that the Japanese race was superior to all other races in the world, and that he, Sakuma Shozan, was superior among Japanese. This self-professed superman idolized Napoleon, and believed that he was the only person in Japan who shared Napoleon's genius. He wrote a poem to his late hero, in which he pined for him to return from the dead to lead the superior Japanese race in its natural dominance of the world. Sakuma resented the Bakufu's outdated policy of assigning governmental posts based on one's lineage rather than ability because that policy prevented "the most superior man" from serving in a position of power to deal directly with the foreigners, despite his unparalleled knowledge of their military. "In order to defend the nation the most important thing is to be sure that the foreigners do not look down upon Japan," he wrote while under house arrest. He criticized the Bakufu's "lack of reason" in the manner in which coastal guns were arranged, and its inability to use those guns properly. "The officials in charge of dealing with the foreigners are mediocre people who have no idea about armaments. With the situation as it is, the scorn of foreigners is unavoidable." These thoughts were shared by Katsu, Yoshida and others of Sakuma's numerous students on both sides of the revolution. Among Sakuma's students who opposed the Tokugawa was Miyabe Teizo, a ronin from the Kumamoto domain. In the summer of 1864, Miyabe was a national leader in the anti-Tokugawa movement. He was also the ringleader of a planned uprising in Kyoto, foiled by the Shinsengumi's notorious surprise attack on the rebels at the Ikedaya Inn. The Shinsengumi was the dreaded band of swordsman recruited by the Bakufu in the spring of 1863 to suppress the anti-Tokugawa ronin who terrorized the streets of Kyoto. (For more about the Shinsengumi and the Ikedaya Incident, see Samurai History Papers, Issue No. 1, Fall 2004, and my upcoming book, Shinsengumi: The Shogun's Last Samurai Corps.) Sakuma became a confidant of Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, then-heir to Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi. (In December 1866, Yoshinobu would resume the Tokugawa family name of his birth and become the last shogun of the dynasty.) After Sakuma was released from house arrest, he traveled to Kyoto. There his brilliant career was cut short by an assassin's sword on July 14, 1864 one month after the Ikedaya Incident, just five days before the Choshu-led rebels were defeated at the Battle at the Forbidden Gates of the Imperial Palace, and about three and a half years before the collapse of the Bakufu. Sakuma was cut down while on horseback, dressed in Western clothes and mounted on a Western saddle, riding through the streets of Kyoto the turbulent Imperial Capital and center of the antiforeign and anti-Tokugawa movement. Sakuma had been targeted for, among other reasons, embracing Western ideas and culture and advocating Open the Country. More specifically, he had aroused the hatred of the anti-Tokugawa Imperial Loyalists by advising the Bakufu to remove the emperor's holy person from his palace in Kyoto to the nearby Hikone domain, a close Tokugawa ally. At the time, the Choshu-led rebels were poised to attack pro-Tokugawa troops (Aizu and Satsuma) in Kyoto. While the entire nation was bitterly divided, Sakuma rose above the internal discord to point out the absolute necessity of strengthening the nation so that Japan may preserve its national sovereignty in the face of foreign encroachment. While he had advised that the emperor be removed to Hikone for reasons of security, his intentions were misconstrued as treasonous. His killer, Kawai Gensai, was a notorious assassin one of the three "Hito-kiri" (literally, "man-cutter," actually "killer") who terrorized Kyoto during those bloody times. It seems that Kawai realized his misunderstanding of Sakuma's intentions a little too late after killing Sakuma he called him "the greatest man of the age," and stopped killing people altogether. Sakuma Shozan, Katsu Kaishu and Sakamoto Ryoma Indispensable Minds of the Meiji Restoration Back to Table of Contents -- Samurai History Papers # 2 Back to Samurai History Papers List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2005 by Romulus Hillsborough. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com |