Chanbaralla

By late 1863, Izo had drifted away from the Tosa Kinnoto, losing his financial backing along with it. He was now destitute, living hand-to-mouth in the capital and even eventually selling his long sword to survive.

In February 1864, Kyoto police arrested him. He was broke, starving, and homeless. To survive, he had turned to a practice known as oshikari: low-level extortion, shaking down Kyoto merchant houses for money. When interrogated, Izo gave a false name, Tetsuzo, and managed to hold to it long enough that the Kyoto police initially failed to realize they had one of the hitokiri sitting in their cells.

For his crimes, he received a brutal three-part sentence: tattooing, public flogging, and banishment from the city.

The tattoo was the standard corporal punishment for minor crimes — petty theft, swindling, burglary, and fighting. Authorities would forcibly tattoo a specific mark onto the criminal's arm or forehead as a permanent, unerasable criminal record. Each region used its own design, so that anyone who saw it would know exactly where the bearer had been convicted and what they had done. For Izo's crimes in Kyoto, the mark was two upright bars — roughly the width of a thumb and twice as long — tattooed above the elbow.

Flogging (tataki) was another formal punishment of the Edo period, applied only to commoners and ronin, not to samurai, women, or boys under the age of 15. Fifty lashes constituted a light beating; one hundred, a heavy one. It was used for minor crimes such as theft and fighting. The instrument was a bamboo whip called a bokijiri, one shaku and nine sun in length, applied to the shoulders, back, and buttocks while carefully avoiding the spine. Before the punishment began, a mat was laid out and the prisoner stripped and made to lie face down, with four men holding his arms and legs. A counter stood nearby to tally the blows, and in the case of a heavy flogging, the prisoner was given water (and smelling salts, if he had fallen unconscious) after the fiftieth stroke while the beaters rotated for the remainder. The beating was typically carried out in public, before a crowd. For a string of burglaries like Izo's, he would almost certainly have received the maximum: one hundred blows.

By the time the Kyoto authorities were finished with him, Izo's back would have been deeply bruised and perhaps bloodied, even though the punishment was not designed to break the skin, while his arm bore the fresh ink of a common thief's tattoo.

The records show he was also sentenced to formal banishment from Kyoto and its surrounding suburbs. In June 1864, he was escorted to the border gate, where Tosa domain officials seized him, bound him, and placed him under heavy guard for deportation back to his hometown.

(Warning, things just get worse from here.)

Because Okada Izo was arrested in Kyoto, he had to be transported back to Tosa — a journey that could take a week or more.

The moment he was turned over to Tosa at the city gate, he was placed inside a transport cage called a shujinkago (also known as a toumarokago): a bamboo basket just large enough for a person to sit upright, bound entirely in rope and carried by lower-class laborers like cargo. Sometimes a wooden plaque bearing the prisoner's name and crimes was fastened to the outside.

The cage was a utilitarian device designed for security, public shaming, and total physical confinement. Inside, there were no comforts: no padding, no seating, no protection from the elements. A prisoner wasn't simply placed inside and left to sit freely, either. Before being loaded into the cage, his hands would be bound tightly, and his legs might be shackled as well.

Long-distance prisoner transport in the Edo period was a brutal exercise in bare-minimum survival. Because Izo needed to stand trial alive in Tosa, his guards were obligated to keep him from dying of dehydration or starvation, but they managed his basic needs with absolute security and zero dignity. Water was delivered by sliding a wooden ladle or bamboo tube through an opening or between the cage's narrow slats and pouring it directly into his mouth. If he refused to drink, guards would use a wooden wedge to pry his jaw open. Food was equally stark: cold balls of coarse brown rice, broken into small chunks and fed to him by hand.

The most degrading aspect of the journey, however, was sanitation. Prisoners were almost never released from the cage because the risk of escape was too great. The cage floor was not solid wood. Some versions featured wooden or bamboo slats with gaps between them (like the reproduction in the first photo), others had a small removable panel positioned beneath the prisoner's seat. Slide-in trays or straw mats attached under the floor collected human waste while the procession marched. At rest stops, the lower-class laborers would pull the trays out, dump and rinse them, and slide them back into place.

Transporting a prisoner from Kyoto to Tosa entirely overland was impractical, so the domain relied on its established shipping routes instead. Izo was first carried south to the port city of Osaka, where the Tosa domain maintained a large fortified warehouse. There, the cage was loaded onto a transport ship, stowed in the dark below deck, and the vessel set sail west through the Seto Inland Sea before cutting south through the Kii Channel to round the rugged eastern coast of Shikoku.

The full journey from Kyoto to Tosa took roughly one to two weeks, depending on weather, sea conditions, and the precautions taken along the way. The land leg from Kyoto to Osaka moved at a heavy, deliberate pace, with the procession stopping regularly at designated checkpoints to swap out the exhausted laborers carrying the cage.

Once aboard the ship, the timeline shifted to the mercy of wind and current. In ideal conditions, a fast vessel could reach Urado Bay, the coastal gateway to Kochi, in about three days. Rough seas or unfavorable headwinds could force the ship to anchor or shelter in a coastal port, stretching that leg of the trip to a week or more. After docking at the bay, guards marched Izo along the Tosa road system until they reached the city.

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