Sakamoto Ryōma — The Tosa Visionary Who United Satsuma and Chōshū
Among the many activists of the Bakumatsu, few are remembered as vividly as Sakamoto Ryōma. Though only a low-ranking samurai, he helped bind together the bitter rivals Satsuma and Chōshū and set in motion the current that swept away the shogunate. His life lasted barely thirty-one years.
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Born a lower samurai of Tosa
Ryōma was born in 1836 in the castle town of Kōchi, in the Tosa domain. The Sakamoto were a gōshi family — rural samurai who ranked low within the warrior class, separated from the upper samurai by a rigid status barrier. From an early age, Ryōma is said to have felt that injustice keenly.
In his youth he devoted himself to swordsmanship, traveling to Edo to train in the Hokushin Ittō-ryū at the Chiba school. As he sharpened his blade, he also breathed in the unsettled air of a country shaken by the arrival of foreign warships.
Leaving the domain, and a vocation at sea
In 1862 Ryōma left Tosa, becoming a rōnin. Free of his domain, he met Katsu Kaishū and changed the course of his life. Under Katsu — a shogunal official who nonetheless preached the need for a modern navy — Ryōma studied navigation and world affairs.
Before long he built, from a base in Nagasaki, a society devoted to trade and shipping. This became the Kaientai. The idea of moving the country through commerce and ships rather than force was strikingly forward-looking for its time.
Brokering the Satsuma–Chōshū Alliance
Ryōma's greatest achievement, and the one that secured his place in history, was the Satsuma–Chōshū Alliance.
At the time, the two domains were locked in fierce political enmity. Yet to check the power of the shogunate, they would have to join hands — and so Ryōma, together with Nakaoka Shintarō, patiently mediated between them. In 1866 the two domains concluded a secret pact in Kyoto, the decisive groundwork for the coming overthrow of the shogunate.
Toward the return of power
Ryōma also sketched a vision of a new state. The "Eight-Point Plan" he is said to have drafted aboard ship called for returning political authority to the imperial court and establishing a deliberative assembly.
In 1867 the fifteenth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, returned political power to the court — the event known as the Taisei Hōkan. Ryōma's quiet maneuvering shaped this attempt to shift power without bloodshed.
Cut down at the Ōmiya
Yet Ryōma never saw the new age dawn. Not long after the return of power, in December 1867, he was attacked along with Nakaoka Shintarō at the Ōmiya, a soy-sauce merchant's premises in Kyoto, and killed. He was thirty-one. The identity of the assassins remains debated to this day.
His short, intense life swelled into legend in later years. The historical Ryōma and the idealized figure passed down through popular memory must be carefully distinguished — yet the scale of the role he played at the Bakumatsu's turning point is beyond dispute.
The activists who raced through this era are profiled one by one in Bakumatsu Figures. For the background to Ryōma's famous portrait, see Photography in the Bakumatsu.
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