Takechi Hanpeita — The Loyalist Leader Forced to Cut His Belly

A man who gathered the low-born and tried to move a whole domain with them. Takechi Hanpeita led the Tosa Loyalist Party and was, in the end, forced to cut his own belly.

Contents

Who Was Takechi Hanpeita?

Hanpeita was the head of the Tosa Loyalist Party.

Tosa was a domain of unusually rigid status barriers, with an all but uncrossable gap between the upper samurai and the goshi, the lower rank. Sakamoto Ryoma and Okada Izo both came from that lower side.

Hanpeita assembled the goshi and lesser samurai by the hundred under the banner of revering the emperor and expelling the foreigners, and set out to steer the domain's politics the way they wanted.

Moving a domain from below was his project.

Sword and Learning

Born in 1829 into a Tosa goshi family — of comparatively high standing within that rank.

Hanpeita was a master of the sword. He trained in Ono-ha Itto-ryu in Tosa and in Kyoshin Meichi-ryu at Momonoi Shunzo's Shigakukan in Edo, where he served as head student. He was also learned, and commanded respect.

Sword, learning, and standing together made him the party's leader. Young men gathered to him, Okada Izo — whose swordsmanship Hanpeita had recognized — among them.

The Tosa Loyalist Party

In 1861 Hanpeita founded the Tosa Loyalist Party.

Close to two hundred men are said to have joined, sealing their names in blood. It aimed to carry the whole of Tosa toward reverence for the emperor and expulsion of the foreigners.

Hanpeita worked on the domain's senior officials to shift its policy, and for a time nearly succeeded. The minister who held real power, Yoshida Toyo, was assassinated, and factions close to the party influenced domain government for a while.

Yoshida Toyo was in fact a reformist and an advocate of court-shogunate cooperation, at odds with the party's line. Party members are held to have been involved in his killing, though how far Hanpeita himself directed it is debated.

Tenchu

The party was active in Kyoto as well.

There, men judged to have collaborated with the opening of the country, or marked as enemies of the loyalists, were assassinated one after another. The killings were called tenchu, heaven's punishment, and the party supplied some of those who carried them out.

One of the executors was Okada Izo. Some of the killings are held to have been carried out on Hanpeita's instructions — the relation of those who held the ideas to those who did the deeds, inside one party — though how directly he ordered each incident varies from case to case.

That structure produced the party's tragedy.

Suppression, and Seppuku

In 1863 the politics of Kyoto turned over. The coup of the eighth month drove the expulsionists from the court, and the situation in Tosa changed.

Real power in Tosa lay with the retired lord, Yamauchi Yodo. Yodo detested the party and suppressed it thoroughly. Hanpeita and the rest were arrested one after another.

Hanpeita was imprisoned and interrogated at length. He admitted no guilt and did not break.

What undid them was the testimony of the men who had done the killing — above all Okada Izo, who broke under torture and talked. A story even survives that Hanpeita sent Izo poison to silence him (its truth is uncertain).

In the summer of 1865 Hanpeita was ordered to commit seppuku. He was thirty-six (thirty-seven by the traditional count).

He is said to have performed a three-cut disembowelment, a form harsher than the usual — a last assertion of a warrior's will in the manner of his death.

His Wife and Descendants

Hanpeita had a wife, Tomiko. Theirs was a close marriage, and she is said to have sustained him throughout his imprisonment.

They had no children. He therefore has no direct descendants, and the Takechi house continued through adoption.

Letters he wrote to Tomiko from prison, and a self-portrait, survive — showing that even cornered, his hand stayed calm.

Timeline

For other Tosa men see Sakamoto Ryoma and Okada Izo; for the lord who crushed the party, Yamauchi Yodo.