This week on the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: the sudden assassination of the tairo Ii Naosuke sparks the rapid ascension of imperial loyalism, an ideology devoted to the undoing of the unequal treaties and the overthrow of the shogunate. How did loyalism come to be a dominant force in the politics of the early 1860s, and how did its following collapse in just a few years?
Sources
Jansen, Marius. The Making of Modern Japan
Jansen, Marius. Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration
Beasley, Craig. The Meiji Restoration
Craig, Albert M. Choshu in the Meiji Restoration.
Keene, Donald. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World
Images
Transcript
The dominance of Ii Naosuke, tairo–chief elder–of the Tokugawa shogunate and instigator of the so-called Ansei purges which silenced dissent against the Harris Treaty and its successors, seems in hindsight to be a bit of a mirage.
I think it’s fair to say that if you asked most people living in Japan–foreigners and locals alike–they’d tell you that Tairo Ii had successfully brought dissent to heel, and reasserted the power of the shogunate over policy. The bakufu leaders of the earlier years–Abe Masahiro, Hotta Masayoshi, and their ilk–had been weak and unwilling to make hard calls, but Ii was not. He was willing to do what had to be done to protect the shogunate, and he had succeeded.
Ii had even managed to move beyond the first stage of his tenure in office–cracking down on his opponents–to the second. Way back in 1853, Ii had been one of the daimyo to offer advice to the bakufu about how to handle Commodore Perry, and we still have his letter today. He advised opening the country, since, “There is a saying that when one is besieged in a castle, to raise the drawbridge is to imprison oneself and make it impossible to hold out indefinitely; and again, that when opposing forces face each other across a river, victory is obtained by those who cross the river and attack. It seems clear throughout history that he who takes action is in a position to advance, while he who remains inactive must retreat.”
And so Ii recommended a diplomatic strategy of trade and negotiation with the West in order to learn from them and use their technology (and overseas connections) to strengthen the country. In early 1860, he got a chance to do just that, dispatching a warship (the Kanrin-maru, steam powered and purchased from the Dutch in 1857) to the USA for Japan’s first overseas diplomatic mission since the Tokugawa Ieyasu’s own lifetime.
One imagines the tairo himself had to be feeling pretty good about how things were going, and that he was in a jolly mood as he made his way to the shogun’s castle on May 24, 1860 for an audience to inform the boy shogun Iemochi of the status of his various projects.
Unfortunately, the audience would never happen. As Ii made his way in a palanquin to the Sakuradamon–the cherry blossom gate at the south end of the palace complex–his entourage of 60 guards was ambushed. His attackers numbered only 19 men, but they had a clever strategy. A group attacked the front of the procession, drawing guards forward to deal with them. A smaller set waiting in ambush then rushed Ii’s palanquin. One, a samurai named Arimura Jisaemon, drew a revolver–built in Japan using some of the weapons given by Perry as a model–and fired into the carriage, wounding Ii. He then reached inside, pulled the tairo out, and beheaded him.
The so-called Sakuradmon Incident of 1860 was a bloody affair. In addition to Ii’s own death, 8 of his guards died in the fighting or afterwards as a result of injuries. A further five were executed and five more sentenced to commit suicide for various degrees of cowardice in failing to defend their master.
On the side of the assailants, of the 18 men involved in the attack, six died in the fighting or committed suicide to avoid capture after Ii’s death. All but four of the rest were captured or turned themselves in, with all those so imprisoned either beheaded or dying in prison from maltreatment. Two of the four who did escape were hunted down within a year; only two would survive the end of the shogunate.
The assailants also left behind a manifesto outlining their reasons for killing Ii: “While fully aware of the necessity for some change in policy since the coming of the Americans at Uraga, it is entirely against the interest of the country and a stain on the national honor to open up commercial relations with foreigners, to admit foreigners into the [shogun’s] Castle, to conclude treaties with them, to abolish the established practice of trampling on the picture of Christ [to detect and execute secret Christians], to allow foreigners to build places of worship for the evil religion [of Christianity], and to allow the three Foreign Ministers (i.e. ambassadors) to reside in the land. Under the excuse of keeping the peace, too much compromise has been made at the sacrifice of national honor; too much fear has been shown for foreigners’ threats. Not only has the national custom [of seclusion] been set aside and the national dignity impaired, but the policy followed by the bakufu has not been approved by the Emperor. For all this the Tairo (…Our sense of patriotism could not brook this abuse of power at the hands of such a wicked rebel. Therefore we have consecrated ourselves to be the instruments of Heaven to punish this wicked man, and we have taken on ourselves the duty of ending a serious evil, by killing this atrocious aristocrat.”
Whether or not Ii Naosuke’s career constituted a serious evil depended, of course, on where your sympathies lay in the tangled politics of the age. But it’s pretty indisputable regardless that without him, the shogunate found itself in a far more challenging position than it previously had been.
Of course, once again it faced a leadership vacuum at the top; the shogun Iemochi was by the time of the tairo’s death only 14, and not really in a position to command a unified response from the shogunate. There also wasn’t really anyone in a position to take the reigns in Ii’s place, which would have required a combination of both clear strategic vision and pedigree (since you had to be of a certain rank in terms of background to hold a leadership role in the council of regents) that was getting increasingly rare.
The only real option there was the man who had been the other candidate to become shogun in 1858–Tokugawa Yoshinobu, by this time 23 and the child of one of the shimpan extended branches of the Tokugawa family.
Unfortunately, his main political champion was his biological father Tokugawa Nariaki (Yoshinobu was his third son and had been adopted into another branch of the Tokugawa family). But Nariaki had feuded with Ii and lost out on his influence as a result–and regardless, putting forward as a leader someone who had just barely lost out to the now sitting shogun was, to put it mildly, a politically challenging proposition.
And so the shogunate floundered after Ii, listless and leaderless. And this had two big implications for its future. First, in the absence of strong leadership from Edo, the role of the imperial court once again began to expand. Remember, before Ii, the conservative and xenophobic emperor Komei had become increasingly assertive–threatening to abdicate and withholding his approval of the Harris Treaty to try and force a political crisis and close the country once again.
Ii Naosuke had brought the court to heel–largely by arresting anyone in the Emperor’s inner circle he deemed critical of bakufu policy–but without his hand to direct the repression anymore, the atmosphere of court changed.
Suddenly, the bakufu needed the court to stave up its flagging legitimacy and political power–the bakufu leadership, rattled by Ii Naosuke’s death, was no longer talking about reasserting its control of the court but about a policy of kobu gattai–the union of the aristocracy and the warriors (or less poetically rendered, of the imperial court and the bakufu).
The logic of kobu gattai was simple; without Ii Naosuke, the bakufu lacked leadership, and regardless having its most prominent figure assassinated made it look weak. To shore itself up, the shogunate now needed the court–and that meant the court now had leverage to extract concessions from the shogunate.
This was more or less the exact advice given by one of Emperor Komei’s advisors from a minor aristocratic family by the name of Iwakura Tomomi. Iwakura suggested the emperor craft a marriage alliance using his youngest sister, the princess Kazunomiya–who could be wed to the boy shogun Iemochi as a symbol of the bakufu/court alliance.
That proposal had initially actually come from Ii Naosuke back in 1858, but had been rejected at the time given Ii’s heavyhanded treatment of the court. Now, however, matters had changed; Iwakura noted that the shogunate was now weaker than it had been, but also felt that attempts to overthrow it were unlikely to succeed and could invite foreign intervention in a Japanese civil war. Far better to cement a marriage alliance in exchange for, say, a requirement that the shogunate gradually abrogate the foreign treaties and submit any future major matters of state for the court to review.
Komei agreed with this advice, and by the fall of 1860 he was busily persuading his sister to accept the match (which she did, despite some serious misgivings about living in a place so “uncivilized” as Edo–after all, it had only been a city of renown for a few hundred years, compared to the thousand-plus year history of Kyoto).
Early in the spring of 1861, Kazunomiya’s entourage–surrounded by armed guards this time, the lesson of Ii’s assassination having been well learned–departed Kyoto for Edo.
Kobu Gattai radically changed the nature of the court-shogunate relationship, with the shogunate for the first time accepting the notion that the emperor should have some voice in political decisions.
But even this was not far enough for some, which brings us back to the imperial loyalist movement we ended last week’s episode with. Now, I do think refreshing you all on what loyalism was is important, but that’s also hard because it wasn’t frankly a very coherent ideology. Broadly, loyalism grew out of a fusion of older intellectual trends (Mito-style Confucianism and kokugaku, or national studies) with a sense of political crisis over the foreign treaties. Its basic premises were 1) the emperor was the genesis of Japan as a nation and symbol of its unity, 2) any other institutions were valid only so long as they upheld the emperor’s will and eased his divine mind by dealing with the burdens of rule, 3) the shogunate had manifestly failed to do this, and thus 4) it was clearly no longer a legitimate government and should be overthrow, with power restored to the emperor.
Loyalist militancy had become a growing issue in the last few years, and particularly after Ii Naosuke’s death it exploded–the men who killed him were all loyalists, overwhelmingly from the Mito domain, which had become a hotbed for the ideology. Their victory in killing the tairo proved galvanizing to the loyalist movement.
Kyoto in particular became a loyalist hotbed, with large numbers of adherents, particularly from the lower rungs of the samurai class (those most dissatisfied with the current order) making their way to the city. There, they pledged themselves to service in the emperor’s name (or to aristocrats who were known supporters of the movement), and busily set about attacking anyone they felt was insufficiently zealous in service to the cause.
And the loyalist movement could be quite brutal. Many loyalists were infuriated by the marriage of Kazunomiya to the shogun, which they insisted (despite statements by the court to the contrary) had been forced on her by a dictatorial shogunate. Officials associated with the marriage were targeted for assassination; for example, the severed head of one Shimada Sakon, a follower of Kujo Hisatada (one of the pro-shogunate members of the imperial court) was found one morning at Shijo Kawara, one of the major intersections of the city (his severed limbs had separately been thrown into the Takase river).
Shimada wasn’t the only one to meet this fate; assassinations by loyalists were a constant fixture of Kyoto politics in 1862 and 63. To say the city was under threat of violence was putting it mildly–the flocking of loyalists to the city, combined with a court that seemed on its face to be at least somewhat sanctioning loyalist ideas, created an upwelling of anti-shogunate and anti-foreign sentiment.
One might be forgiven for thinking that things were about to tip decisively against the shogunate. The Emperor Komei, emboldened by the lack of leadership shown by the shogunate, was increasingly assertive in his treatment of its officials; his 1863 new year’s message to the shogun did not just contain greetings for the season but a restatement of the emperor’s insistence that the foreigners be expelled–in a sense, he was giving Iemochi an order.
And to boot, his chosen envoy, a noble named Sanjo Sanetomi, protested against the usual manner of handing over the new year’s letter (which involved the envoy prostrating himself on a lower level of the audience chamber before the shogun first–he said this was degrading to the emperor’s dignity). Iemochi caved in; the letter exchange, when it did happen, was on far less humiliating terms.
But really, what choice did Iemochi have? The prestige of the shogunate was faltering; remember, the shogun was wealthy on paper but in reality his government was wracked with debt, and at any rate was still reliant on keeping a handle on the domains–which actually controlled most of the country’s wealth–to govern.
Given the hits the shogunate’s prestige had taken lately, Iemochi and his supporters needed Komei–which is why they were willing to deal with being kicked around a bit in exchange for offerings of support (like the aforementioned marriage of Iemochi to Kazunomiya, the Emperor’s sister).
Iemochi even took the unprecedented step, in the Spring of 1863, of deciding that he would go to Kyoto personally for an audience with Emperor Komei to discuss the expulsion of the foreigners, and the situation of the nation more generally.
This was, and I cannot stress this enough, a huge step. No shogun had gone to Kyoto personally in 200 years–he’d relied on deputies instead, because of course that sent a clear message.
If the shogun came to visit the emperor at his palace, that would be a message of subordination. And so most shoguns carefully avoided this appearance–but Iemochi had no choice but to throw himself into the pursuit of kobu gattai, the unity of the shogunate and imperial court. Only with their help could he succeed.
One might be forgiven for assuming that the power of the imperial court was growing at such a rate that before long, the shogunate would be supplanted by it outright–that the dreams of the loyalists might come true, and that imperial restoration was at hand. Certainly many of them felt similarly; the shogun’s visit led to a new round of loyalists flocking to the city, as did news that Komei would leave the grounds of the gosho, the imperial palace complex, to pray for victory against the foreigners at the Kamigamo and Shimogamo shrines–the first time that an emperor had left the palace grounds for any reason other than natural disaster in over two centuries.
While in Kyoto, under pressure from Komei, Iemochi even agreed to set a date for the expulsion of foreigners to be implemented, in late June of 1863. It was all–supposedly–finally happening.
Except then, it all really didn’t–and instead, over the course of the next year and a half, the loyalist and expulsionist cause imploded in the most spectacular of fashions.
Why that is remains a fascinating and hotly debated question, and just to be up front I am not going to try at all to cover it comprehensively because this is one of the most studied and storied periods in Japanese history, and the webs of alliance and counter-alliance are just WAY too complicated and involve throwing a LOT of names at you.
When taking the zoomed out perspective, I think there are a few things we can point to in order to explain why things worked out as they did for the loyalist movement. First and foremost, the Tokugawa position, while weaker than it had been in a long time, was not as weak as many loyalists assumed.
For a start, the journey by the shogun to the city–while it was a symbolic admission of weakness–was accompanied by a very real re-assertion of the bakufu’s authority in Kyoto.
Concern that loyalists might attempt to attack the shogun himself led to some serious crackdowns within the city, spearheaded by a Tokugawa family relative–Matsudaira Katamori, the daimyo of Aizu domain in northern Honshu, who was appointed Kyoto Shugoshoku–roughly, Military Commissioner of Kyoto–and sent to the city in the fall of 1862 to re-assert the shogunate’s authority there.
He did this mostly by moving both his own forces from Aizu and forces supplied by the shogunate into the city to crack down on loyalist disorder–the most famous of these groups being, of course, a force recruited primarily from ronin to the shogunate’s cause, the “Newly Selected Corps”, or Shinsengumi.
These are probably some of the most romanticized figures in Japanese history, primarily because of the later works of the historical novelist Shiba Ryotaro, whose novels on the Shinsengumi (most notably “Moeyo Ken”, or “Burn, My Sword”, was insanely popular and has inspired like a bajillion spinoffs).
The Shinsengumi and their romanticization are really interesting subjects in terms of the relationship of history and pop culture–especially in terms of how the ways we talk about history reflect our modern context more than actual events. But I regret to inform you all that in this particular series I will not get into them that much, because frankly for the overall sweeping history of this period they aren’t really that important.
More important, frankly, was the disposition of Emperor Komei in all of this–because many a loyalist assumed Komei backed them wholeheartedly, and in fact he did not.
Komei was a traditionalist–he shared the disdain of the loyalists for what he saw as Western imperialism besmirching Japan’s traditions and honor.
But he was also a traditionalist in that he believed in the traditional order–he wanted the imperial court to be stronger, yes, but still wanted a cooperative relationship with the shogunate, more akin to the “dual governments” of earlier years in terms of power sharing than the complete overthrow of the Tokugawa system.
So, for example, Komei was happy to hear that the bakufu planned to implement the expulsion edict in the summer of 1863, but when rumors reached him that loyalists within the imperial court were planning to make him the commander of the forces carrying out the expulsion–to put Komei as the commander in chief of the military, in essence–he was furious, and had said loyalists removed from their positions and placed under house arrest.
He was also eventually willing to listen to the shogunate’s advice that despite their promise to carry out expulsion, such a plan was not really viable in the summer of 1863. He never formally abandoned the idea, but as cooler heads prevailed in the shogunate he was at least willing to listen to their advice.
Komei even repeatedly refused requests by Tokugawa Iemochi that, for his failures to ease the imperial mind, he be allowed to resign as shogun.
One gets the impression that, while Komei disliked the imperious way the shogunate had treated the emperor and his court over the centuries, he was not willing to let them go–and in point of fact, was more than prepared to drag the shogunate into the model he wanted for it regardless of the desires of its leaders.
Probably the single biggest issue the loyalists had, however, was that the ideology’s most extreme adherents didn’t really have a sense of how popular their beliefs actually were. Simply put, they believed loyalism was a substantially more popular ideology than it actually was.
To be fair, magical thinking was kind of a part of the formula. As an example, we can turn to one of the loyalist parties that existed out in the feudal domains themselves–the Kinnoto, or Imperial Reverence Party, of Tosa domain in Shikoku. Founded by the samurai Takechi Hanpeita, the Kinnoto membership took it upon themselves to propagate the ideology of loyalism in their native Tosa.
But their methods for doing so were deeply unrealistic. For example, at one point the membership of the Kinnoto had a discussion about how they would fund plans to expand the coastal defenses around the main castle town of the domain–Kouchi–in preparation for a war with the foreigners.
The plan they settled on, and this is true, was to go to Tosa domain-aligned rice merchants in Osaka and ask for money–and if the money was not forthcoming, to commit suicide in front of the rice merchants one by one to show their sincerity until they caved.
This plan was, of course, never implemented because it’s insane–but it gives you a sense of the rhetoric that the loyalists bandied about. One gets the impression, given the core constituency–members of the lower samurai class whose prospects were never great, and who were overwhelmingly young and male–that the movement was less about realistic assessments of politics and more about a chance to proclaim defiance against a system they believed was unfair.
Regardless, it turned out that not many of the people who actually held power were on board with the loyalist plan to tear down the existing regime AND simultaneously trigger a massive international war where Japan was hugely disadvantaged.
For example, two domains with a heavy loyalist presence in their leadership–Choshu domain in Western Honshu, and Mito domain far in the east–did go ahead with plans to follow the edict to expel all foreigners from Japan in 1863.
But these were the only two domains that made such an attempt, and both ended disastrously for the loyalist cause. In Mito, the loyalists had popular support from many lower samurai but not from the domain leadership, and so attempted a rebellion against the domain government–one that was swiftly crushed.
In Choshu, loyalists actually did control the domain government–more or less the only place where they did–and so the domain attempted to use its coastal fortifications to close the Straits of Shimonoseki between Honshu and Kyushu, the major shipping lane connecting Osaka to the Asian mainland.
And they were successful for a time, bombarding foreign ships that attempted to cross the straits and driving them away, even forcing back an American frigate and a pair of French warships who attempted to make an issue of it.
But then, in September, 1864, a combined British-French-Dutch-American armada of 28 warships showed up off the coasts of Shimonoseki and blasted the absolute bejeesus out of the shore defenses, after which point a group of French Marines landed, made their way up to the fortifications, and spiked the remaining cannons–stopping, even to pose for a photo with their handiwork.
This was not exactly the grand upwelling of support that many a loyalist had been counting on to carry out their revolutionary program–if anything, it undercut the notion that fighting the West would end in any other outcome than crushing defeat.
Indeed, if anyone doubted that conclusion, they could look to Satsuma, another domain where defying Western imperialism had not ended well.
Now, Satsuma was not quite in the same camp as Choshu and Mito–its leadership was not openly loyalist. Satsuma did have a long history of anti-Tokugawa sentiment–but more as a result of a historical grudge from losing to Tokugawa Ieyasu during his rise than sympathy for loyalism.
Supposedly, its samurai were taught to sleep with their feet pointing toward Edo castle (an insulting gesture), and their new years ceremonies included an annual invocation “never to forget the defeat at Sekigahara” that had cemented the Tokugawa regime.
However, in 1863, the domain found itself embroiled in controversy with the West thanks to something called the Richardson Incident. The whole thing got going on September 14, 1862, when a group of British nationals including a merchant named Charles Wilcox Richardson were on an expedition near Namamugi in Kanagawa, right near the major foreign treaty port of Yokohama. Along the way, they encountered the armed retinue of Shimazu Hisamitsu, father of Satsuma domain’s daimyo, who was on his way to Edo.
The British party refused to make way for the Shimazu samurai–which was the law in the Edo period–and so the two sides got into a scuffle. And in said scuffle, two of the Brits were wounded, and Richardson was killed.
The British government of course demanded an apology from both the shogunate and Satsuma domain, as well as an indemnity–essentially a cash payment. The shogunate would agree to both, but Satsuma domain would not; its leaders perhaps assumed that they could just give the British the run around and string them along until they gave up, and that their remote position in southern Kyushu would protect them.
The British, of course, responded to all these delays and statements that Richardson’s killers were on the lamb and could not be found and refusals to pay in a calm, rational manner befitting international politics.
By which I mean they sent a fleet to Satsuma’s main castle town of Kagoshima in the summer of 1863 and burned half the damn city to the ground.
Simply put, anyone who had illusions about the ability to militarily resist Western imperialism as it existed in Japan in the 1860s was harshly disabused of that notion–or they didn’t live to tell the tale.
There were loyalists who survived this period of violence, of course–but those who did survive were largely disabused of the notion that they could make a fight of things against the West.
Even military resistance to the shogunate proved more challenging for the loyalists than many of them had imagined. At the end of the disastrous (from the loyalist perspective) summer of 1864, imperial loyalist samurai from Choshu domain made one final push to seize control of the government. Convinced that the emperor’s willingness to back the shogunate and temporize on the expulsion question was a result of “bad advice”–the classic thing to blame when a ruler is beyond reproach–these loyalists hatched a plot.
They were going to set a series of fires in Kyoto, and take advantage of the chaos those fires would create in a city of wood and paper construction to rush the imperial palace and seize Emperor Komei himself.
They would then secret the emperor away back to Choshu where, surrounded by “true loyalists”, he could finally direct the expulsion of the foreigners and the overthrow of the shogunate.
Of course, this whole notion was, to put it gently, completely nuts. There were a decent number of loyalists committed to the plan–it’s hard to know numbers for sure, but possibly in the thousands, mostly from Choshu but also including some loyalists who had deserted other domains to join the plot. But they were up against a garrison of several tens of thousands of Tokugawa-aligned samurai, mostly from Aizu domain and deeply loyal to the city’s military commissioner Matsudaira Katamori.
Thus, the attempted coup–known to history as the Kinmon or Hamaguri gate incident, after the Hamaguri Gate of the Imperial Palace (also known as the Kinmon, or forbidden gate) where most of the fighting took place–was a disaster for the loyalists.
They were driven back from the gate in short order and with substantial casualties, and while the fires they set were destructive–burning a huge swath of Kyoto, including thousands of homes–they did not provide enough cover even for the loyalists to get through the gates of the palace complex.
When the scale of Choshu involvement became clear–the domain karo, or elder, was even implicated in the plot–the shogunate responded by dispatching a punitive expedition to Choshu. The First Choshu Expedition, as it became known, came together within slightly over a month of the attack on the Imperial Palace–the shogunate was able to quickly marshall a force from the domains surrounding Choshu and crush the domain’s government.
By November of 1864, Choshu had surrendered, and the leaders responsible for Choshu’s involvement in the loyalist movement had either died in the fighting or had been ordered to commit suicide.
So, in the span of just a few years–really from 1861 to the end of 1864, the Loyalist movement exploded to prominence and then imploded just as spectacularly–the mood went from one of imminent revolution to cautious optimism for supporters of the status quo.
And yet, things were not quite as cut and dried as they appeared for the loyalist movement–while many of their supporters were dead, and the one domain where they’d really held power had been thoroughly humbled, the movement was not gone.
Admittedly, those who were most committed to the idea of expelling foreign influence from Japan and re-closing the country at the first opportunity had seen it clearly demonstrated that such a thing was no longer possible; the allied fleet which re-opened the Shimonoseki fleet and the British one which burned Kagoshima demonstrated very clearly the superiority of modern weaponry for anyone who had doubts.
But plenty of loyalists had survived defeat and the subsequent purges, and remained just as committed to the overthrow of the shogunate–albeit having accepted the necessity of relations with the West.
And even before the disasters of 1864, it wasn’t like every loyalist was an avid expulsionist–many were well aware of the strengths of Western technology, especially weapons, and were eager to use them in service of the cause.
For example, among the many committed radical samurai of Choshu were two men from minor families known as Ito Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru. Both had been students of Yoshida Shoin, one of the men executed in the Ansei Purges, and both had been part of extremist loyalist groups that had attacked their proclaimed “enemies.”
But both also participated in a program put together by the domain government BEFORE the First Choshu Expedition to study abroad–along with three others, they were sent to the UK in 1863 to study at University College, London and bring what they had learned of Western technology back to Japan.
This was a defiance of Japanese law at the time–the sakoku edicts were still on the books and forbade Japanese subjects from going overseas–but the domain leadership and all five samurai judged the risk worth the potential reward.
Their example helps demonstrate that while the most extreme wings of the loyalist movement could be…well, extreme in their antiforeignism, not all loyalists were like that even before 1864, and afterwards, well, pragmatism was the order of the day.
And furthermore, it wasn’t like every loyalist had been rooted out either; quite a few had, but others had gone to ground. For example, another Choshu domain samurai who had been part of the extremist movement (and a student of Yoshida Shoin’s) by the name of Takasugi Shinsaku had led part of the domain military before 1864. Afterwards, he took his followers and fled up into the mountainous interior of the domain, hoping to retake the domain for the loyalist cause.
And all this helps explain why, just three years after defeat, the fortune of the loyalists would swing once again–and by the winter of 1867, the Tokugawa shogunate would come crumbling down.