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Meiji Firestorm: The Collapse of the Samurai World
52 Plays21 days ago
Episode twenty-seven of the new series of Pieces of History takes us into the turbulent final years of the Tokugawa shogunate — a period of political upheaval, foreign intrusion, and samurai-driven revolution that culminated in the Meiji Restoration. It is one of the most transformative chapters in Japan’s history, when centuries of tradition collided with the urgent need for national survival and modernisation.
Joining me for this episode is author and historian Romulus Hillsborough, whose decades of research into the Bakumatsu era have helped illuminate the lives, motives, and struggles of the people who shaped it. Romulus, whose work can be found at samurai-revolution.com, guides us through the downfall of the shogunate, the rise of powerful domains like Satsuma and Chōshū, and the remarkable figures — including Sakamoto Ryōma and Saigō Takamori — who forged Japan’s path into a new age. We also discuss his forthcoming book, Samurai Swordsmen: The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi, and his newly established consulting services for authors, editors, documentarians, screenwriters, and others exploring this era.
Drawing on original letters, diaries, and memoirs, we explore how Japan navigated foreign pressure, internal fragmentation, and the existential question of identity. We reflect on what surprised Romulus most in his years of research, how samurai ideology evolved during the crisis, and why the Meiji Restoration remains one of the most astonishing political transformations in world history.
Email: piecesofhistorypod@outlook.com
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Romulus Hillsborough: https://www.samurai-revolution.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Pieces of History'
00:00:13
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pieces of History. I'm Colin McGrath and in each episode I explore both the well-known and the overlooked stories that have shaped our world.
Japanese History: Tokugawa to Meiji Era
00:00:24
Speaker
Today we're travelling back to one of the most dramatic turning points in Japanese history, the final years of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the revolutionary upheaval that reshaped the nation in the Meiji Restoration.
00:00:37
Speaker
It was an era of political intrigue, sudden assassinations, foreign pressure and samurai force to confront the world changing faster than tradition could hold.
Guest Introduction: Romulus Hillsborough
00:00:48
Speaker
Joining me is author and historian Romulus Hillsborough, whose decades of research have made him one of the leading English language voices on the Bakumatsu era.
00:00:58
Speaker
His extensive writing, including his forthcoming book, Samurai Swordsman, The Definitive History of the Shinshu Gumi, brings this turbulent age to life, vivid detail and deep archival insight.
Political Turmoil and Samurai Loyalties
00:01:11
Speaker
You can learn more about his work at samurai-revolution.com, where he also offers historical consulting for authors, editors, publishers, documentarians, screenwriters and others exploring this remarkable period.
00:01:26
Speaker
In this episode, we explore the collapse of the old shogunal order, the ascent of powerful reformist domains, and the influential individuals who helped steer Japan into a new age.
00:01:38
Speaker
We examine why samurai turned against the very system that had defined their status, how foreign pressure hastened political turmoil, and what this transformative moment ultimately meant for Japan's national identity.
00:01:51
Speaker
I hope you enjoy.
00:01:54
Speaker
Romulus, thanks very much for joining me. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule.
Inspiration and Research Process of Romulus
00:02:00
Speaker
I've been looking forward to this conversation and getting your perspective on a period that I find fascinating, but I still plenty to learn about.
00:02:07
Speaker
So to kick us off, you spent many years living in Japan and studying its history. What first drew you specifically to the samurai and the Bakumatsu Meiji Restoration era?
00:02:19
Speaker
I was drawn to the history by a really... a very long novel I read about Sakamoto Ryoma, who is the protagonist of my first book, which was a novel.
00:02:31
Speaker
So the book that I read was written by one of Japan's greatest historical novelists. His name is Shiba Ryotaro. Maybe you've heard of him. Anyway, I read that book in the 1980s. I was living in Japan. I'd been living and and studying Japan for several years by then, studying Japanese language.
00:02:50
Speaker
Once I started reading the book, I couldn't put it down. When I finished it, I thought I'd get the translation right into English. But I gave that, I abandoned that idea pretty quickly because I don't really enjoy translating.
00:03:08
Speaker
Writing something I've always done. i started writing when I was a kid. I still have a couple of short stories wrote where I wrote when I was around 10 years old, for example.
00:03:19
Speaker
I decided after reading this book I just mentioned that I'd that i'd write a book about Sakamoto Ryoma's life and time. So I started researching it. In other words, started researching Ryoma's life and the history of Bakumatsu Japan, the which was the final years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ranged from 1853 1868.
00:03:41
Speaker
At first, I read everything I get my hands on about Ryoma and his history, this history. After a while, I figured out who the most important historians were, and then I focused on them.
00:03:53
Speaker
While reading, I also started writing, and I did a lot of traveling to cities and towns around Japan where Ryoma was most active and where the revolution unfolded, including his hometown of Kochi in Kyoto, which was the center of the revolution.
00:04:10
Speaker
in Kagoshima, down in the south, in Nagasaki, on Kyushu, also in Shimonoseki, and other places. So it took me about six years to finish the book.
00:04:22
Speaker
And as I think I mentioned, it's a novel, which i was published in 1999, titled Ryoma, Life of a Renaissance Samurai. That's how I got started.
00:04:35
Speaker
Your books blend deep archival research with narrative storytelling. How do you approach balancing rigorous scholarship with accessible narrative? Because there's some books I've read, they are fantastically detailed and the scope of them you know are broad, but again, they're a bit too academic and they're quite like a tome. How did you find that balance?
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I'm glad you asked it because that was something, the balance that you just mentioned is something that has been very important to me to maintain.
00:05:05
Speaker
And that was one of the things that I was very conscious of and determined about. to do when i first wrote my first when I wrote my first book. To begin with, so the storytelling part is storytelling, as you know, is a craft.
00:05:19
Speaker
And I've learned it or studied it by reading the great writers and by writing myself. As I said, I've been writing since I was a kid.
00:05:31
Speaker
So when I first, when I started writing this first book, Ryoma, the novel I mentioned, I was determined that it would be both historically accurate and culturally, and that's important, authentic.
00:05:43
Speaker
So not just the history, but also i wanted it to be realistic culturally. a lot of a lot of stuff written in English to me just isn't.
00:05:54
Speaker
so and And then also importantly, it needed to be an engaging read. That's where the storytelling comes in. Yeah, so I use primary sources heavily. In the case of my first book, even though it was a novel, I used primary sources. The main the main ones being Ryoma's own letters.
00:06:13
Speaker
At the time I was writing the book in the 80s and early 90s, there were about 120 of his ah letters available, extant, actually. And I think I just mentioned this, but unlike the academic histories that you've mentioned and that I had read by then, or some of them, I really wanted to avoid dryness.
00:06:35
Speaker
I wanted the book to be a good read. I wanted to engage my readers, not put them to sleep. So basically, that's where I was coming from. Whenever you're going through those letters, diaries and primary sources, were there any accounts that challenged or reshaped your understanding of this period?
00:06:53
Speaker
No, absolutely not. And the reason the reason being is that my understanding of the period deepens as I examine and read these materials, these primary sources written by people involved in the history.
00:07:09
Speaker
those are Those include, I should say, letters and journals, memoirs, even histories written after the fact by people that were involved in history itself. So those are primary sources.
00:07:25
Speaker
I have to say about these about these primary sources, they're written in archaic Japanese. In other words, a lot of that material is incomprehensible even to average Japanese people today.
00:07:39
Speaker
Not all of it, but a lot of it, I believe, which is why lots of many historians writing today, historians and biographers, they they cite these primary sources but And then they usually translate them into modern Japanese to make them comprehensible.
00:07:56
Speaker
So ah just ah a couple of words, a little I'd like to discuss a little bit about these sources, if I may. When I first started researching this this stuff in the 80s, when I wrote my first book, I had no problem reading the important biographies and histories written in the 20th century.
00:08:15
Speaker
But when it came to Ryoma's letters and other primary sources written in the archaic language, that was a whole new thing for me. it was a new problem. More than reading Ryoma's letters, for example, i had to decipher them. I would find myself doing that.
00:08:32
Speaker
Fortunately, I had this major publication, a mass collection of Ryoma's letters and other documents, either written by him or written or written or or letters written to him compiled by my friend and mentors, Miyagi Saichiro.
00:08:51
Speaker
Anyway, without that book, I would have been lost. It was all, and his letters, Ryoma's letters were annotated in that book. So that's that's how I got through that, writing that book.
00:09:01
Speaker
And it wasn't until I started writing Samurai Revolution, the dawn of modern Japan seen through the eyes of the shogun's last samurai around 10 years later,
00:09:13
Speaker
that I got rather good at reading primary sources. my My change, my great metamorphosis as I look at it, came through just a lot of hard work.
00:09:24
Speaker
Samurai Revolution is both a comprehensive history of the era and a biography of one of its most important figures. I'm not sure if you've read it, but it seems to me that you have based on some of the things you have said to me. Anyway, the important figure is Katsukaishu.
00:09:40
Speaker
He's the Shogun's last samurai of the title. So i had to learn to read and understand his journals, Katsukaishu's journals and his other writings, including memoirs and histories, along with other primary sources,
00:09:55
Speaker
of the era, including, for example, the oral recollections of the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinogu, and lots of other stuff. So while researching and writing the book, i I got used to reading that stuff, and I more or less learned how to do it during that
Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan
00:10:12
Speaker
process.
00:10:13
Speaker
By the time I was finished writing the book, I thought, well, I i can read just about anything now. but then I started my next book, Samurai Assassins, and i realized that, no I kind of couldn't yet.
00:10:25
Speaker
I still can't. I'll probably never be able to, but it comes in stages. This stuff is just really hard. So when I started writing Samurai Assassins, which is divided into three different parts, part two focusing on ah a man named Takechi Hanpeita, who is a good friend of Ryoma's, by the way.
00:10:46
Speaker
So part two focuses on Takechi, who was a mastermind of assassinations and who led a major revolutionary political party of the time. He got arrested and he spent the last couple of years of his life in prison.
00:10:59
Speaker
And from his cell, he wrote letters to his wife and sister. And he used an archaic form of Japanese, which at first I thought, I can't read this because it he, not he he, used a form of ah non-standard or variant writing,
00:11:21
Speaker
physically, like the characters themselves, the syllabary, the syllabary, the kana characters. I don't know if you're familiar with the word kana, but it's a phonetic syllabary of characters as opposed to the the major, the Chinese characters of which there are thousands. The kana, there's just, a there's only a few dozen.
00:11:43
Speaker
anyway Anyway, those are, that's where, that's the phonetic part of the writing system. And he, He bastardized. Not he didn't. that's i didn't I shouldn't have used that word. He used a variant or nonstandard form of these characters, which I had to learn how to read using a dictionary.
00:12:01
Speaker
So that was it that was just another challenge I had in learning this archaic Japanese. And then there's another component called kambun, which is classical language.
00:12:13
Speaker
Chinese style of writing generally used among the educated classes, including samurai, of course. And this was used by Takechi and by Kaishu and by the leaders of the Shinsengumi and many others. And the leaders of the Shinsengumi are specifically Kondo Isami. Are you familiar with them? I'm not, no.
00:12:35
Speaker
But Kondo Isami and Hijikata Toshizo, If you read other of my books, you will be become familiar with them for sure, because they're the subject of my forthcoming book, Samurai Swordsman, The Definitive History of the Shinsengumi.
00:12:49
Speaker
So anyway, getting back to your question about primary sources that challenged or reshaped my understanding of the of the of the history. Well, this history is dynamic and it's complex to the extreme.
00:13:04
Speaker
But anyway, Japan was closed to the outside world for around two and a half centuries by the time this era began.
Samurai Conflict and Emperor's Role
00:13:12
Speaker
it sparked by Commodore Perry of the United States Navy in the summer of 1853 when he shows up off the coast of Edo, the shogun's capital, modern day Tokyo, with demands that that Japan open its doors to foreign trade.
00:13:31
Speaker
The shogunate eventually yields to Perry's demands, and reaction, certain samurai factions are around the country call for the overthrow of the shogun's government and restoration of imperial rule.
00:13:47
Speaker
They face off with other samurai factions who are just as determined to preserve and bolster the shogun's regime as the best way to keep the foreign barbarians, as they call them, out of the country.
00:14:02
Speaker
So primary sources written by men on opposing sides of the revolution naturally contradict each other. They don't reshape my thinking as much as they, again, I'm repeating myself, they deepen it.
00:14:17
Speaker
Because neither side right or wrong, they're just written from different perspectives. You've just have slightly touched on it there about the foreign pressure, notably Commodore Perry and the opening of Japan.
00:14:31
Speaker
Would you say that that was the catalyst of the revolution and how significant was this external influence compared to Japan's own internal turmoil? And you you did slightly touch on it there, but can you go into a bit more depth about it?
00:14:43
Speaker
the word catalyst. Generally speaking, Perry is considered the catalyst of the Bakumatsu era, which I've called the Samurai Revolution.
00:14:55
Speaker
There are certain historians and writers that that go back a little little further, a couple decades, and they talk about political and economic problems that might have also caused, might have been precursor, might have been heating things up, so to speak. But in general, I think Perry's arrival was the catalyst.
00:15:18
Speaker
How significant were these was this external influence, i.e. Perry and then other other Western powers, including Great Britain and France and Holland and Russia,
00:15:33
Speaker
but mostly Great Britain and France were the big players. How significant was this external influence compared to Japan's own internal turmoil? First of all, um I'm gonna reiterate. So Britain, France, Holland, Russia, they all concluded treaties right around the same time that Perry did in 1854 with Japan, with the Shogun's government. There weren't trade treaties, but they opened the country. They forced Japan to open its doors to the rest of the world for the first time in two and a half centuries.
00:16:07
Speaker
So now the internal turmoil part, almost all samurai, almost probably to a man, were literally up in arms over Perry's Demands.
00:16:21
Speaker
I use the word literally. Some of them weren't, but most of them were quite literally up in arms. they they didn't They didn't like foreigners demanding anything of them. And why would they?
00:16:33
Speaker
None of them were about to surrender their sovereignty because of a bunch of foreign barbarians who demanded it. But there were certain farsighted men, educated things Western,
00:16:45
Speaker
including Katsukaishu, who I mentioned a little earlier, the Shogun's Last Samurai of my book, Samurai Revolution. And and these these guys ah had educated themselves in in military and technological
00:17:04
Speaker
aspects of the world, the Western world, Europe and the United States. And they understood the superiority of Western military power via vis-a-vis their own country. and they And they were deeply worried. They they had seen the what happened to China, the colonization of China by Great Britain and France, and they saw what happened to India.
00:17:29
Speaker
And they they were determined that wasn't going to happen to Japan. They were, again, they were very they were broad-minded, they were flexible, and they were educated.
00:17:41
Speaker
They were farsighted. so I'm comparing them, and they must be compared to the greater population of samurai who were just wanting to go to war.
00:17:52
Speaker
But the this farsighted group of of of men realized that they had no choice but to yield to the foreigners' demands. And the policy of open the country, as they called it, was eventually adopted by the chauvinist.
00:18:08
Speaker
Thus, the treaties with Perry and later, a few years later, the trade treaties that were signed. Especially when the trade treaties were signed, that that incurred the wrath of samurai throughout the country.
00:18:21
Speaker
they at that By then, they rallied around the xenophobic emperor, and he was, he just did not want to open his country to foreign barbarians, even though he didn't have any political power.
00:18:37
Speaker
That was the political power arrested with the shogun's government.
Satsuma-Choshu Alliance and Shogunate's Fall
00:18:41
Speaker
But that's ah pretty complicated, and I don't want to get in too much of that in our conversation now.
00:18:48
Speaker
It should be understood that the emperor had not, the imperial court had not held political power since the 12th century. So going back, there was the summer there were the the samurai who rallied around the xennoote the xenophobic imperial court in Kyoto versus those who supported the shogun's regime in Edo, which is in the East, modern day Tokyo, and they faced off.
00:19:15
Speaker
That face off lasted for from around or so until 1868, eighteen fifty eight or so until eighteen sixty eight And even after the Sjogren's government fell in 1868, it continued for another year and a half or or so as a civil war in the northern part of the country.
00:19:37
Speaker
Satsuma and Koshai, Choshai? Choshu, Choshu. Played crucial roles in overturning the shogunate. So what made those domains so effective and how did their samurai culture differ from that of Edo?
00:19:51
Speaker
That's a great question. And again, I'm glad that you asked it. But first, I'd like to just give a little bit of historical background before before answering it.
00:20:03
Speaker
So throughout the two and a half centuries that the shogun The Tokugawa shogunate ruled Japan. The country had been comprised of hundreds of feudal domains under its hege hegemony, basically.
00:20:17
Speaker
The shogun was the head of the Tokugawa family, and his military government was known as the Tokugawa bakfu, or shogunate, as we call it in English. Each of these feudal domains was ruled by a feudal lord called daimyo, and that's that's in the English dictionaries now, that word.
00:20:37
Speaker
as is shogun, so they're they're easily understandable, I think. The highest ranking daimyo were relatives of the ruling Tokugawa family. In other words, they were related to the shogun in one way or another.
00:20:51
Speaker
When the first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, a very famous, important historical figure, When he defeated his enemies in the decisive battle at Sekigahara, located near the geographical center of Japan at the turn of the 17th century, that first shogun made those warlords who had sided with him his direct vassals.
00:21:20
Speaker
And for generations, those direct vassals of of the first shogun and all subsequent shoguns, for generations, their descendants occupied high posts within the shogun's government.
00:21:33
Speaker
Then on the opposite side, you have the warlords who had sided against the first shogun in that decisive battle, or those who at least had not aided him in battle.
00:21:48
Speaker
So they were subjugated as the so-called outside lords. Their land holdings, the land holdings of some of them were reduced, and some of them had vast land holdings.
00:22:01
Speaker
One of the biggest reductions came to the daimyo of Chōshū, by the way. And furthermore, those daimyo, including Chōshū and Satsuma,
00:22:14
Speaker
and Tosa, the three leaders of the revolution, they were not included in the government. So all outside lords were just excluded from government. Only the allies of the first shogun and they're their descendants were included in the government.
00:22:33
Speaker
Well, that engendered a deep resentment among the samurai of these feudal domains that were excluded for generations and generations, not only politically excluded, but it it affected them economically because their their domains were reduced their lands were reduced, thus there their a ability their rice yielding capacities were reduced, which gave the samurai lower income because the samurai lived off of the rice produced by the peasants in their domains.
00:23:09
Speaker
That was their agricultural economy, et cetera, et cetera. But anyway, that's a different tangent. So among the most powerful outside lords were daimyo of Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa.
00:23:23
Speaker
So Satsuma and Choshu were rivals, and they became bitter rivals during the eighteen sixty s they were even They were fighting each other, but they both intended and were determined to overthrow the shogunate.
00:23:38
Speaker
and restore the imperial monarchy or restore the imperial court to power. Sakamoto Ryoma, who I mentioned earlier, the subject of my first book, well, he was from Tosa.
00:23:51
Speaker
In 1866, about a year and a half before the shogunate was finally overthrown, Ryoma brokered a military political alliance between Satsuma and Choshu, who agreed to this because they knew that alone they couldn't bring the shogun down.
00:24:11
Speaker
But with a union with each other, they felt much more confident in their ability to overthrow the shogunate and finally affect the restoration of imperial rule, which is the Meiji Restoration.
Recommended Resources on Samurai History
00:24:30
Speaker
So finally, for listeners new to this era, what resources, including your own works, which you have touched on, would you recommend it as the best entry point into samurai and early modern Japanese history?
00:24:42
Speaker
Again, before I answer that, I'd like to say that coming from myself, It might sound a little bit, it's a little awkward, but I don't know of any writers in English who delve as deeply as I do into the psychology, the moral, the guts, the heart and the soul of these guys, these samurai who made the history.
00:25:01
Speaker
I just don't. That has been my objective for the past 40 years to do that. And it was from the beginning. For example, you take the journals and memoirs of Katsukaisu and the letters of Ryoma,
00:25:15
Speaker
that i mentioned earlier, they provide an invaluable in-depth window into this history. or the documentation related to the Shinsengumi, the shogun's police unit, elite police unit that is the subject of my ah my forthcoming samurai swordsman.
00:25:35
Speaker
So that Shinsengumi-related documentation, specifically the letters written by its two leaders, that provides really valuable in-depth view into the thinking of the enemies of Satsuma and Shoshu and the shogunate, and the shogunate's allies, I mean. the the shiinnzzegumi was representing the chauin Okay, so but my point is this.
00:25:58
Speaker
I said I don't know of any writers in English who delve as deeply as I do into the psychology and the morals and the heart and the soul of these samurai.
00:26:10
Speaker
And I think one of the biggest reasons is i don't think that they're using the same primary sources that I am. I don't think to the same extent they're using Ryoma's letters or Katsukaishu's journals and his his memoirs or his histories or the letters of the Shinsengumi leaders that I've been using throughout all my books.
00:26:32
Speaker
That's my answer. now but i would So I would recommend to to listeners, to people that are new to this history, my most important three most important books, Samurai Revolution, Samurai Assassins,
00:26:47
Speaker
and the forthcoming Samurai Swordsman. i would also recommend another very important book of the era written by Marius Janssen entitled Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration, though a dry academic work.
00:27:07
Speaker
It's important, very important. Furthermore, i would but I would also recommend Donald Keen's Emperor of Japan, which is really good. good book and a good read.
00:27:20
Speaker
It doesn't focus only on this era. It focuses on the Meiji Emperor, which was who was the emperor during the Meiji era, of course.
00:27:31
Speaker
And then also another book I highly recommend to people is the classic, A Diplomat in Japan, the Memoirs of Ernest Sato. He was a secretary to the British minister to Japan during the Bakumatsu and Meiji Restoration era, so he knew these guys.
00:27:48
Speaker
many of them personally and he writes about them. It's fascinating. So I would recommend those three books.
Closing Remarks and Contact Information
00:27:56
Speaker
That was historian and author Romulus Hillsborough offering a fascinating look into the turmoil and transformation of Japan's Bakumatsu era.
00:28:05
Speaker
My sincere thanks to Romulus for sharing his insights and for guiding us through the lives and decisions of the samurai who shaped one of the greatest political shifts in Japanese history. If you would like to learn more about his work, you can visit his website at samurai-revolution.com where you'll also find details about his upcoming book, Samurai Swordsmen, The Definitive History of the Shinshi Gimi and his newly launched historical consulting services for writers, producers, editors, publishers and anyone developing projects on this era.
00:28:37
Speaker
Don't forget to subscribe and rate Pieces of History on iTunes and Spotify. And if you'd like to get in touch, you can email me at piecesofhistorypod at outlook.com or follow the podcast on Instagram and Facebook at Pieces of History.
00:28:51
Speaker
Thanks for listening.