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In the previous
June, Ryoma had commanded a warship in a sea-battle off
Shimonoseki, in which he aided Choshu's Extraordinary Corps,
Japan's first modern militia, comprising both samurai and
peasants, in a rout of Tokugawa naval forces. While Ryoma's
anti-Tokugawa comrades from Satsuma and Choshu prepared to crush
the shogunate by military might, the "nobody" from Tosa
devised a plan to avoid bloody civil war and foreign intervention.
Ryoma's "Great Plan at Sea," an eight-point plan which
he wrote aboard ship, called for the shogun to return the reins of
government to the Imperial Court; for the establishment of Upper
and Lower Houses of government; for all government measures to be
based on public opinion, and decided by councilors comprised of
the most able feudal lords, court nobles and the Japanese people
at large. Rather than merely saying that Ryoma was once again
"blowing hot air," or that he was "crazy,"
there were now some among his comrades who felt betrayed. These
men advocated complete annihilation of the shogunate to assure it
would never rise again, and felt that Ryoma was a traitor. But
Ryoma convinced one of his more level-headed friends, Goto Shojiro,
who was a close aide to Yamanouchi Yodo, the influential Lord of
Tosa, to urge Yodo to endorse the plan. Meanwhile, Ryoma continued
to run guns for the revolutionaries, because he knew that the only
way to convince the shogun to abdicate would be to demonstrate
that his only alternative was military annihilation, which, of
course, was no alternative at all. Lord Yodo took Goto's advice
and sent Ryoma's plan to the shogun, as if it were his own
brainchild. Eleven days later, on October 14, 1867, in the Grand
Hall of Nijo Castle in Kyoto, as Satsuma and Choshu hastened their
final war plans, the shogun announced his abdication before his
adversaries had the chance to strike.
With the
overthrow of the corrupt and decrepit Tokugawa regime, the
"nobody" from Tosa had made good on his vow to
"clean up Japan" - although, unfortunately for his
country, he would pay for it with his life. Sakamoto Ryoma was
assassinated one month later, on November 15, his thirty-second
birthday, in the second-story room in the house of a wealthy soy
dealer in Kyoto which he used as a hideout.
Equally
unfortunate for Ryoma's country was that cleaning up Japan
"once and for all" proved to be too long a period of
time, even for a genius like Ryoma. This is why, amidst the
rampant corruption in Japanese business circles today, many people
in Japan have expressed their wish that a leader of Ryoma's
caliber would somehow miraculously emerge. A couple years ago
executives of 200 Japanese corporations were asked by Asahi
Shimbun, an national daily newspaper, the question: "Who from
the past millennium of world history would be most useful in
overcoming Japan's current financial crisis?" Sakamoto Ryoma
received more mention than any other historical figure, topping
such giants as Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Saigo Takamori,
Oda Nobunaga and the founders of NEC and Honda. Evidently many
Japanese people today think their country needs a good scrubbing
once again.
Recommended links: Katsu Kaishu story
Meeting a
Japanese man in Kyoto
©
Copyright 2002 Romulus Hillsborough
About
the author
Romulus
Hillsborough is the author of RYOMA - Life of a Renaissance
Samurai (Ridgeback Press, 1999) and Samurai Sketches: From the
Bloody Final Years of the Shogun (Ridgeback Press, 2001) RYOMA is
the only biographical novel of Sakamoto Ryoma in the English
language. Samurai Sketches is a collection of historical sketches,
never before presented in English, depicting men and events during
the revolutionary years of mid-19th century Japan. Reviews and
more information about these books are available at www.ridgebackpress.com |
