Katsu Kaishū

The spring of Bunsei 6. In a small residence in Honjo Kamezawa-chō, east of Edo, a boy was born. His common name was Rintarō, heir to the Katsu, a hatamoto house. A hatamoto was a direct retainer of the shogun, which sounds well enough. But the true state of this household stood near the very bottom of Edo's warrior class.

The Katsu were not, in fact, a warrior house by birth. Rintarō's great-grandfather, known as Yoneyama the kengyō, was a blind man born in Echigo. He made his way to Edo, built himself up as a moneylender, and with what he saved bought a gokenin's title—so the story runs. The samurai standing of this house was not something handed down through generations. It had been purchased.

In Kōka 2, the first man Rintarō called on was Mitsukuri Genpo, a scholar of Dutch of the very first rank. To study under him would have been the best of all outcomes. He was refused. No reason for it has come down to us.

A man who has been turned away does not have somewhere else lined up. Teachers of Dutch in Edo could be counted on the fingers. Rintarō went about anyway, and at length managed to enter under a scholar named Nagai Seigai. Entry, of course, required a fee. For a man without money, learning was first of all a question of coin.

In the summer of Kaei 6, four foreign ships appeared off Uraga. Two of them belched smoke and made way against the wind—ships that did not depend on sails. Aboard was the American envoy Perry, and what he carried was a letter demanding that the country be opened.

Edo was thrown into terror. For more than two centuries this had been a city that never seriously imagined soldiers arriving from across the sea. People bundled up their household goods to flee, merchants cornered the rice, and samurai dragged out rusted armor. But nowhere was there a man who possessed any means of stopping four ships.

In Ansei 2 the shogunate finally committed itself to building a navy. The place was Nagasaki, the harbor that had been the country's one window for two centuries. For instructors it turned to the Dutch, who had stood on the other side of that window. They even sent over a steamship for training: the Kankō Maru.

Rintarō was chosen as one of its students. He had written the memorial on coastal defense and had been translating Dutch books; the choice was a natural one. He left Edo and went down to Nagasaki—a late setting-forth, past the age of thirty.

In the first month of Ansei 7—the era would not change to Man'en until the third month of that year—a ship left Shinagawa. She was the Kanrin Maru, a steamship the shogunate had bought from the Dutch. Her destination was America. She sailed as escort to the embassy going to exchange the ratifications of the treaty of amity and commerce.

The officer responsible for the ship was Kimura Settsu-no-kami Yoshitake, commissioner of warships. Rintarō's title was head of instruction at the naval training academy; he was not her captain. Aboard as well were the crew of a wrecked American vessel—Lieutenant Brooke and his men, professional naval officers—nominally being carried home.

In Bunkyū 2, Rintarō was appointed deputy commissioner of warships, with an office stipend of a thousand koku. A man who had once sat in the unposted pool now held a position directing the practical work of a navy. It was a late advancement, on the verge of forty.

But holding a post does not conjure money. Funds to buy ships, a place to train men, machinery to send men there—all of it had to be extracted by dealing with the shogunate's bureaus. Most of the time he spent went not on the water but in negotiation, on tatami.

In Keiō 2, Kaishū was released from confinement and restored as commissioner of warships. The reason he was called back was simple: the shogunate had lost its war with Chōshū. The second expedition had collapsed on several fronts and the shogunal forces were falling back. Somebody had to settle the aftermath.

The task fell to Kaishū. He went to Miyajima in Aki and faced the Chōshū side at the temple Daigan-ji—Hirosawa Saneomi, Inoue Kaoru and others. Men who had been exchanging fire until very lately now sat in the same room to talk of an armistice.

Edo was handed over, and the house of Tokugawa was moved to Sunpu. A house whose own domains ran to four million koku—seven million if the fiefs of its bannermen are counted in—was cut down to seven hundred thousand. Of the retainers who followed it, very nearly all lost their livelihoods. Counting the hatamoto and gokenin with their families, tens of thousands of people were about to be turned out onto the road.

Katsu Yasuyoshi—the name he used from the Meiji era on—went down to Shizuoka as well. The new government pressed him repeatedly to take office, and he kept refusing. What he had to do first was to somehow put a floor under the lives of the former shogunal retainers who had nowhere to go.