Katsu Kaishu
Katsu Kaishu: the man who saved early modern Japan
Katsu Kaishu is one of those figures who make you wonder how one person fit so much into a single life. He was a samurai and a fencer, a student of Dutch learning, the founder of the Japanese navy, a loyal retainer of the Tokugawa shogun and, at the same time, the mentor of men who helped overthrow the shogunate. This page summarizes his story as told by the historian Romulus Hillsborough. The facts are Hillsborough's; the telling is ours.
An outsider from Downtown Edo
Kaishu was born in Edo in January 1823, the only son of a poor, low-ranking samurai. Hillsborough describes him as an outsider by nature and by circumstance. He trained seriously in fencing, until his sword master urged him to give it up and study Dutch, the language through which Western science reached Japan.
One small story captures him well. He came across strange writing engraved on a cannon barrel in Edo, Dutch script, and the discovery strengthened his wish to see the world beyond Japan.
From proposals to the navy
When Commodore Perry arrived and the shogunate asked for ideas on dealing with the foreign threat, Kaishu sent his. Within a few years all of his proposals had been adopted, and in January 1855 he entered government service.
In January 1860 he commanded the Kanrin Maru, a small three-masted ship, on the first authorized overseas voyage in the history of the Tokugawa shogunate, bound for San Francisco. He stayed nearly two months, watching how American society worked and comparing it with Japan's rigid four-class system, where samurai looked down on merchants.
In 1862 he became vice-commissioner of the navy, and in 1863 he set up a naval academy in Kobe with the help of Sakamoto Ryoma, his protégé. Ryoma, an outlaw who became a key player in the fall of the shogunate, called Kaishu "the greatest man in Japan." The American educator E. Warren Clark, who knew Kaishu personally, called him "the Bismarck of Japan."
Peacemaker
In 1866, after the shogun's forces lost a series of battles to the Choshu army, Kaishu was sent to Miyajima to negotiate with the Choshu representatives.
His greatest moment came in 1868. The shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, had announced his abdication in October 1867, but hardliners in the Tokugawa camp wanted to fight, and the new imperial government planned to attack Edo. Kaishu feared a civil war would invite foreign intervention, yet he was bound by duty to his lord. He wrote to Saigo Takamori, the imperial commander, arguing that the Tokugawa retainers were part of the new nation and that Japanese shouldn't fight Japanese.
Saigo set conditions, including the peaceful surrender of Edo Castle. At their historic meeting on March 14, one day before the planned attack, Kaishu accepted those conditions.
Why it matters here
Kaishu lived through the same upheaval that ended the samurai class and set the stage for modern budo. His life is a good reminder that the samurai of the 1860s weren't only swordsmen. The best of them were also students, diplomats and people willing to change.
Sources
- Romulus Hillsborough, Ryoma: Life of a Renaissance Samurai, Ridgeback Press, hardcover, 614 pages (RBP-B-2035). Short quotations of Sakamoto Ryoma and E. Warren Clark are as given by Hillsborough.
