THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA - CHAPTER THREE : THE CURTAINS FALL (A LESSON IN HISTORY)

In popular culture, there is a common misconception that the Boshin War was a clear-cut, ideological conflict between the forces who wanted to modernize Japan and open it up to the rest of the world, and the old regime that desperately fought to preserve the country’s traditional values and cultural identity - the gunmen against the samurai, with a tendency to romanticize the latter, portraying them as noble souls who attempted to resist the viciousness of globalization. History, however, ain’t never that simple, and this interpretation cannot be further from the truth. But in order to figure out what in hell’s name was going on in the bloodiest civil war that the country has ever experienced – and what was Toshizo Hijikata’s personal contribution to this clusterfuck - we need to go back to the beginning, to July 8th 1853, the day of the Kurofune Incident.

To get there, let us begin by establishing some facts about Edo Japan.

The Edo period officially began in the year 1600, when Ieyasu Tokugawa won the battle of Sekigahara, effectively uniting Japan as a single country under one ruler, after centuries of internal conflicts between warmongering feudal states. Ieyasu Tokugawa promptly did two things. First, he firmly and decisively divided the power, establishing the Shogunate ruling system. The Emperor, being the earthly descendant of gods, had nothing but a symbolic, ceremonial role, whereas the actual decision-making ability - the executive power, if you will - was in the hands of the Shogun, a title now belonging to the Tokugawa family. Second, he proclaimed the Decree of Sakoku, the “locked country”, banishing all foreigners from the territory of Japan, from that day until forever.

For two hundred and fifty years, Japan was exclusively Japanese. The only outsiders allowed in the land of the rising sun were the Dutch who had access to the island of Dejima for trade – and if a foreigner ever dared to set foot on Japanese soil outside of the Dejima port, the punishment was death on the spot. Japan developed in isolation, left to its own devices, joyfully cut away from the world, and not regretting it one bit.

Yet on the morning of July 8th 1853, everything changed.

Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy – name’s the same as Chandler from “Friends” –sailed into the Edo Bay with his four steamboats. The steamboats were large and dark and armed with heavy canons. They roared black smoke into the sky, and looked like nothing the Japanese had ever seen before. Soon enough, rumors about the ghastly black ships, the “kurofune”, started spreading like wildfire, causing terror. It was exactly what Commodore Perry wanted. He came to the shores of Japan to offer the Shogun a simple-to-understand ultimatum – you’ll either be a good boy and open your goddamn country for us to access its resources, or I’ll be happy to demonstrate to what extent exactly our American steamboats are superior to any military contraption you Japs might have.

Needless to say, it was an offer the poor Shogun couldn’t refuse.

Cornered by Perry, he signed a bunch of agreements known as the Unequal Treaties, which offered the Americans unprecedented trade privileges. In short, the United States were now allowed to export Japanese goods cheaply, while expensive, imported American goods were given monopoly on the Japanese market. The American profit was ginormous, the Japanese economy quickly ended up in ruins, and the country – traditionally hostile toward all things foreign and pretty damn proud of it – soon found itself overwhelmed by outsiders. They roamed freely in their strange western clothes, their curiosity measuring up only to their arrogance, trying to impose their strange western values, behaving as if everything in this world belonged to them. For Edo Japan, obviously, it was the beginning of the end.

The last 16 years of the Edo Period, starting from the Kurofune Incident in 1853 and ending with the fall of the Ezo Republic in 1869, are called the Bakumatsu. In Japanese, it means “the closing curtains” – and never has there been a more poetic name for downfall. The Bakumatsu was a time of change, one of those moments in history when old values can no longer hold, but no new system is created to replace them. It was a time of paradoxes, of controversies, of beauty and of madness, when things deemed impossible started coming true. And such a time needed its hero – or villain, depending on whom you ask – who would embody all these contradictions of the Bakumatsu. No wonder that Toshizo Hijikata became the poster boy of the closing curtains.

Here’s how it happened.

The root of every revolution lies in economy – once a society reaches the critical mass of angry, starving people, it’s easy to slap on an ideology as the catalyst for rebellion. With Japan’s economy depleted by the Unequal Treaties and them pesky foreigners creeping everywhere, it was a matter of time before someone would point the finger at the Shogun – the dimwit who signed the bloody papers – as the culprit. Thus the Sonno Joi ideology was born, its motto being “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians” – or, let’s get it over with the Shogunate, give the executive power back to our true sovereign, and get rid of these bloody foreigners once and for all, and if we do that, we bet that Japan will overnight become prosperous and wealthy again. The loudest proponents of Sonno Joi were the samurai united in the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance – and funnily enough, many of them descended from clans that had fought against Ieyasu Tokugawa at Sekigahara. These guys, it seemed, were more than happy to hold a grudge for several centuries, and wait for the perfect moment to strike back.

In 1863, as the tensions were boiling, the Shogun decided to pay an official visit to the imperial city of Kyoto. Since that’s where, well, the Emperor’s Palace was, the Sonno Joi movement was particularly strong in the region of Kyoto, with Satsuma-Choshu supporters on every corner. With the Shogun’s arrival approaching, Katamori Matsudaira, the fledgling Lord of Aizu and the man in charge of security in Kyoto, started panicking. He was seriously understaffed, lacking the necessary number of samurai to maintain order in the city, and the Shogun’s visit to Kyoto was a bit like entering the wasp’s nest. So Matsudaira came to this brilliant, creative idea: screw the samurai! If he announced an open call for able-bodied men no matter their origin – the only criteria being their sword skills and their loyalty to the Shogun – he’d surely be able to fill his ranks with enough people to avoid any security disasters while the Shogun was there.

It was the kind of call that the Shieikan guys had waited for all their lives.

So in 1863 they packed their bags and left Hino never to come back, as happy as a clam at high tide, going to the imperial city to become the Shogun’s men.

~to be continued~



Next chapter: Boys in Blue Uniforms
THE STORY OF TOSHIZO HIJIKATA - CHAPTER FOUR: Boys in Blue Uniforms