Takasugi Shinsaku

The autumn of Tenpō 10. In the castle town of Hagi, in Chōshū, a baby boy was born. His father was Takasugi Chūta, of a house ranked among the upper samurai of the Chōshū domain—a family of real standing. Their residence stood in Kikuya Lane, close to the castle, and they wanted for nothing. The firstborn son would one day be known as Shinsaku. This was Takasugi Shinsaku himself.

Under the same Chōshū sky was another man who would one day shake the age. From the Sugi household of Matsumoto village—a low-ranking samurai family of the slenderest stipend, who worked the fields together just to scrape by—came Yoshida Shōin. The two who would in time become teacher and pupil already stood in contrast from the very rank of the houses they were born into. One grew up in the smell of the soil; the other, in the comfort of the castle town.

Ansei 4. Shinsaku, now nineteen by the traditional count, passed through the gate of a small private academy in Matsumoto village, in Hagi. The Shōka Sonjuku—its master was Yoshida Shōin. He had once traveled through the provinces, been seized for trying to board the black ships, and was now, as a convicted man, kept under house confinement at his family home. Within that scant freedom, Shōin had opened this schoolhouse of some six mats.

For the child of an upper samurai to attend a village academy run by a convicted man was, in the eyes of the world, a somewhat strange choice. The domain had a splendid academy of its own, the Meirinkan. By his family's standing, that was where Shinsaku's road should have led. But what drew this youth, who found the road laid out for him dull, was not the learning within the walls, but the gaze of Shōin, who sought to see beyond them.

Ansei 5. Having obtained the domain's leave, Shinsaku set out for Edo to study. For a youth whose eyes had been opened to the world at the village academy, the castle town of Chōshū had grown far too narrow. To touch a broader learning, and a greater number of people, in Edo, the center of the realm—that thirst turned him eastward.

In Edo he gained the chance to study at the Shōheikō, the shogunate's own academy. He set his desk beside the brilliant minds gathered from across the country and vied with them in learning. But Shinsaku was not one to shut himself away in the study alone. He also attended a swordsmanship training hall and poured out his sweat there. The sword he had honed in Hagi, he now tested against the finest swordsmen of the realm.

Bunkyū 2 (1862). A chance beyond all others came to Shinsaku. The shogunate, it was announced, would send a ship to Shanghai in the Qing to investigate the true state of trade. Its name was the Senzaimaru. As the man to place aboard this ship, the Chōshū domain chose Shinsaku. In an age of national seclusion, to cross the sea openly—for one who thirsted to see the world, it was a tale like a dream.

Aboard the Senzaimaru, which had set sail from Nagasaki, were gathered prodigies chosen from each domain. Nakamuta Kuranosuke of the Saga domain, and Godai Tomoatsu of the Satsuma domain—men who would later make their names were rocked by the same ship, across the barriers of domain. Among them, it is said, were some who, not permitted to board as proper domain samurai, disguised themselves as deckhands to get aboard. All bore the same thirst to see the world.

What awaited Shinsaku on his return from Shanghai was a Japan seething with the fever of expelling the foreigner. Drive out the barbarians—that cry now swept the whole country like a storm. Shinsaku was a man who had seared the ruin of Qing China into his eyes more vividly than anyone. His anger at the humiliation of a nation devoured by foreign powers burned fiercer than any other's.

It was precisely because he had come to know the reality of the world that he stood at the forefront of expelling the foreigner—a figure contradictory at first glance. Yet within Shinsaku there was no contradiction. The anger of "I will not let us be made into another Qing" pushed him toward the very center of the whirlpool of jōi. In Edo he bound himself, together with Chōshū comrades who held the same resolve, in a pact to carry out the expulsion.

Bunkyū 3 (1863). The Chōshū domain, having put the expelling of the foreigner into practice, fired upon the foreign ships passing through the straits of Shimonoseki. But the reprisal was ferocious. An allied fleet of the Western powers bore down upon Shimonoseki and, with the greatest ease, silenced the Chōshū batteries. Fighting spirit and old-fashioned defenses were utterly no match for the military power of the modern age.

This defeat was the moment when the foreboding Shinsaku had felt in Shanghai became reality. However hot the heart for expelling the foreigner might burn, without the power to make it real, Chōshū would only follow in the footsteps of Qing China. He preached to the domain at the top of his voice: with the old samurai army, they could no longer prevail against foreign nations. The army itself must be remade from its very foundations.

Genji 1. The Chōshū domain had been driven into a plight such as it had never known before. Beaten in the fighting at Kyoto, saddled with the infamy of an enemy of the court—a rebel against the throne—it became the target of a punitive expedition, assailed by the great host of the shogunate. The loyalist men of purpose who had led the domain were cornered one after another. Chōshū, which had once gloried in its stand against the foreigner, now stood at the very brink of ruin.

Within the domain, the conservative faction—the Zokuron party, who preached submission to the shogunate—was swiftly regaining its strength. To quiet the shogunate's wrath, they seized the loyalist men of purpose one after another and put them to death. The flame of toppling the shogunate was, at any moment, about to be blown out. What had been so long built up was crumbling with an audible sound—and many, thinking that this was surely the end, turned their faces to heaven.

Keiō 2 (1866). Chōshū had turned its rudder toward toppling the shogunate with the rising at Kōzan-ji, and now the shogunate attacked it once more with a great host. The Second Chōshū Expedition—fought along the four borders of Chōshū, and so also called the Four-Border War. Against the shogunate bearing down with all its might, Chōshū was but a single domain. The difference in force of arms was plain to every eye.

But Chōshū was no longer the Chōshū of before. Taking its defeat at Shimonoseki as nourishment, it had reformed its military system, and the corps—the Kiheitai foremost among them—had been forged with Western-style equipment and drill. And the man entrusted with the defense of the sea in this war was Shinsaku. He led the navy, standing against the shogunate's army as it bore down. The man who had witnessed Western naval power with his own eyes at Shanghai now held the position of commanding a fleet himself.