#sagara sozo

So far so good. Satsuma commander Saigō Takamori had given Sagara his orders in Edo, and it seemed he was now continuing his patronage of Sagara and his new force. The two court nobles added an air of imperial legitimacy to the enterprise, even though in practice none of these nobles knew anything about the business of war.

On the ninth day of the first month, Sōzō returned to Kyoto to ask the court for formal recognition as a vanguard unit of the im­perial army. The court authorized the creation of the brigade after the fact, but refused to give Sōzō the brocade banner that would have bestowed official sanction. That would have to wait until the regular army marched east. Sōzō was further instructed to attach his brigade to the army taking the coastal road, the Tōkaidō.

This must have been galling. Instead of being offered a place at the front of the new army, Sagara and the Sekihōtai were being pushed towards an inferior position within the army. Sagara had wanted to move along the Nakasendō, the road to Edo through the mountains.  He had supporters along the way who would help him. Instead, he was being told to submerse his unit in the army which would eventually take the coastal road. 

The first month of 1868 was a period of transition and instability for the new government. Lines of command remained vague, irregular appointments were made, and political opportunism was the order of the day. While Sōzō was negotiating for official recognition in Kyoto, he may have well heard rumors that the court had decided to lower taxes in order to gain popular sup­port.

Sagara’s defenders would argue that he’d been told straight out in Kyoto that this was the government’s new policy, and they reneged on it. Very likely the new tax reductions were only meant for the lands that’d belonged to the shogunate. The Imperial government wasn’t abolishing the domains at this point, after all, but was trying to undermine the shogunate’s support.

It’s difficult to tell exactly what happened, but Sagara certainly believed the new government would be introducing tax reform throughout the lands. Sensing their chance for glory slipping away the Sekihōtai decided to seize the day for themselves. 

In the meantime, his brigade and the two court nobles convinced the domains lying in their path to give them arms. Flushed with success, they started moving up the Nakasendō, which is where Sōzō caught up with them. That first night and at every stop thereafter he erected a signboard announc­ing that the emperor had been restored to power, the land tax would be halved, and anyone who needed assistance would receive help from the court. This was to apply not only in bakufu lands but in domanial lands as well. Natu­rally enough, this announcement met with considerable dismay on the part of administrators (who considered the current tax rate far from adequate) and great rejoicing on the part of the peasants. The brigade's ranks swelled with each passing day.

In Rurouni Kenshin, Sagara meets two young peasant boys: Sanosuke and Katsuhiro, who join this triumphant procession. It must have really felt like a liberation to these two.

Still concerned that he had not received public authorization, Sōzō sent a messenger to Kyoto at the end of the first month asking that he be allowed to take the brigade up the Nakasendō where he knew the people and the land. His answer was an order to return to Kyoto. He and his followers feared that if they obeyed, the brigade would be disbanded and the leaders imprisoned. The two court nobles fled, and many members of the troop deserted. Determined to win the honor of being the first to enter the Kantō plain at the head of the imperial army, Sōzō pushed forward. He believed that if he could capture the important pass at Usui, his disobedience would be forgiven and forgotten in the flush of victory.

Sōzō spent his first night in the Ina Valley at a temple in Yamamoto. There he sent letters to the local notables and village officials asking for supplies and men. "We already know to what extent you have devoted your red hearts in loyal service to the emperor," he wrote in a letter addressed to Makoto.

Makoto was the oldest son of Sagara Sōzō‘s friend, Matsuo Taseko, a wealthy peasant woman who is the subject of Walthall’s biography.  Taseko, a fervent Imperialist, had brought her children up to be Imperialists as well. 

"At this great opportunity to restore the ancient imperial system of rule we ask for you to exhaust your strength once more in bringing this matter to a speedy conclusion. The two court nobles Ayanokoji and Shiganoi make this their sincere request as well, so please help us in raising troops." Makoto was in Kyoto, but his younger brother Mitsunaka in Yamamoto found some men later discovered to be gamblers and vagrants who were willing to join the brigade. Most of the men who provided provisions were Hirata disciples.

Hirata was a Shinto scholar with radical pro-Imperial ideas, popular among this group of Imperialists.

Sōzō set up camp at Lake Suwa on the sixth day of the second month. He sent messengers to nearby domains ordering them to submit to imperial authority, a command they cravenly obeyed. He reorganized and disciplined his troops, and he sent frequent reports on his activities to the headquarters of the regular imperial army. During this time, his friends in Kyoto wrote letters urging him to return. At one point he rushed frantically back down the Nakasendō, hoping to find someone to whom he could explain himself, but without success. In the meantime the troops encamped at Suwa learned that they had been branded a false imperial army. Other men whom Sōzō had sent to recruit soldiers knew nothing of this. They led their new troops against the guards at Usui pass and captured it in the name of the emperor. In a counterattack launched by the same domains that had earlier submitted to Sōzō but which were now embarrassed at having been duped, most of the new troops were killed or captured. When Sōzō returned to Suwa on the twenty-third, he appealed to Saigō Takamori to clarify his position. An exchange of letters settled nothing.

The end came swiftly. On the evening of first day of the third month Sōzō was summoned to meet with Iwakura Tomisada, the commander of the im­perial army for the Nakasendō . Thinking he was to join the regular army, he went gladly with one attendant, only to be arrested as soon as he entered the compound. The sixty men who had stood by him were likewise summoned by Tomisada in groups of two or three, stripped of their arms, and tied to the trees in the Suwa shrine precincts in a freezing rain to await the dawn. On the evening of the third, Sōzō and seven of his closest followers were be­headed without ever seeing or being seen by Tomisada and his staff, without any investigation or interrogation. In the announcement of the executions, Sōzō 's crimes were defined as having disobeyed orders and allowed men under his command to steal. The promise to halve taxes was carefully left unmentioned. The day after his execution, the military high command put Owari domain in charge of administering bakufu lands in Shinano and ordered it to collect the land tax in full.

Taseko was shocked. In a letter to her daughter-in-law she wrote, "worse things have happened than I ever expected."

Like the Mito warriors or the Hirata disciples who had beheaded the stat­ues of the Ashikaga shoguns, Sōzō assumed that zeal on behalf of the impe­rial court justified itself. Haga Noboru points out that the popular hero Saigō Takamori used Sōzō to rally popular support, then when the brigade made inconvenient promises and got in the way of the regular army, he betrayed and abandoned him. Samurai egoism may have come into play as well, in the form of jealousy over who was to be the vanguard, traditionally the most prestigious position. On the other hand, an old 1600 law had warned that if in battle any individual advanced in secret to put himself in the lead, he was to be executed. Sōzō's former comrades-in-arms Gonda Naosuke and Ochiai Naoaki blamed Iwakura Tomomi for his death. They planned to assassinate him, but he talked them out of it.

Iwakura Tomomi was a prominent figure in the new government, and the father of the teenage Tomisada who had Sagara Sōzō executed.

Later, when Naoaki was chief secretary for Ina prefecture in 1870, he, Makoto, Taseko's cousin Inao, and other local men petitioned the government for permission to raise a monument over Sōzō's grave and solicited contributions from nearby nativists. Among those who responded was Taseko. 

Sōzō’s fate constituted a warning to all grass-roots activists. Historians have long decried the lack of national consciousness among the commoners who remained largely apathetic to the conflict between court and bakufu that decided the future of their country The imperial cause in particular apparently attracted little popular allegiance. For the most part, however, the samurai commanders from the southwestern domains who led the troops that overthrew the bakufu disdained commoners' offers of anything but money. Kido Takayoshi even accused the militias of harming the state. Given their vulnerability to use and abuse by samurai strategists, the only option for dedicated loyalists was to play a subordinate role to the new imperial armies. This was the path taken by Taseko's son Makoto.

And that is the tragic story of Sagara Sōzō. What are we to make of it? Like so many Bakumatsu figures, he could be seen as a villain or a hero. He was either unjustly martyred or he got what was coming to him. Either way, he was cruelly betrayed by the people who had used him. 

I’ve posted before Michael Wert’s observation that it was this same vicious army that executed Kondou Isami and the shogunal retainer, Oguri Tadamasa. None of these three got any proper judicial process. 

Sagara’s story has become over the years the perfect symbol of how the Meiji government betrayed its promises, acting for its own selfish benefit instead of the people’s.That’s how Watsuki uses the incident in Rurouni Kenshin. I’ll finish off with what Watsuki had to say about the historical Sagara and his characterization in Rurouni Kenshin.

We’ll come back in a minute to exactly what Sagara did in Edo. Continuing with Walthall’s account 

Sōzō had no long-standing connection with Takamori; in fact he was not a samurai at all. As with so many of Taseko's friends, he came from a wealthy rural family with samurai pretensions. 

By the time Sōzō was twenty in 1858, his leadership qualities had already attracted almost a hundred men to accept his instruction in nativism and the martial arts. For a time he joined the Mito radicals fortified on Mt. Tsukuba, though he left before they had begun their doomed journey westward through the mountains. 

The Mito/Tengu Rebellion is, in my opinion, the bit of the Bakumatsu puzzle Western fans are most likely to have overlooked. It’s not part of the Shinsengumi’s story, and it’s only peripheral to the Choshu/Satsuma/Tosa narratives. Let’s say here that the rebellion, its suppression, and the later reprisals for the suppression in Mito were absolutely horrific. 

Sagara Sōzō slipped away from the Mito rebels, and didn’t share their fate. 

He ended up in Kyoto in 1866 where he managed to meet a number of prominent Satsuma samurai,including Takamori and Ōkubo Toshimichi.  At some point he also met Taseko.

Matsuo Taseko would prove to be a true friend. His Satsuma contacts? Well, they were ready to use him. In late 1867, Sagara Sōzō went to Edo to carry out the Satsuma plan to prod the Shogun into declaring war. William Steele gives an account of what happened next in Edo. 

.. a rash of murders, robberies, and acts of terror buffeted the residents of Edo. Beginning in the late tenth month and continuing well into spring of 1868, gangs of hoodlums roamed the streets, destroying, as far as commoners were concerned, any semblance of law and order. While the Edo poor did some of the looting, much of it can be attributed to Satsuma men, some of whom, it was said, had been sent by Saigō Takamori himself. Masterless samurai from Satsuma, calling themselves the Satsuma Advance Guard of the Imperial Army (Kangun Sempō Sasshū-han) were clearly responsible for setting fires and instigating riots. On the one hand they urged the people to rebel against the evil Tokugawa authorities, on the other they gave warnings to flee in order to escape injury in the upcoming civil war.

One of their handbills declared: 

In recent years evil officials of the bakufu have ignored court authorities, made pacts with Western barbarians, slighted the court, and destroyed the propriety between lord and vassal. Therefore the great lords of the western domains are cooperating in order to eradicate the evil bakufu officials. Although the shogun has returned political authority to the throne and is now simply one of the lords, evil officials in the Kantō ignore this. They secretly plot how to grasp authority once again. Therefore we propose the great plan that all determined men in the nation gather together on 11.4 and form a 'heavenly army' [tempei] to burn Edo Castle and set fires throughout Edo city and punish the evil officials. The only thing that we are afraid of is that the people may suffer because of this. You should quickly move your belongings and change your residence to avoid harm. We do not intend to harm the people, only to save them. 

- William Steele, pp. 65-66, Edo in 1868, the View from Below 

“We’re not here to hurt you, just to burn down your houses, so you’d better leave.”

Mark Ravina’s biography of Saigō Takamori has more details. Keiki mentioned here is the personal name of the last shogun, Yoshinobu. Shimazu is the surname of the Satsuma daimyo.

The stalemate was broken on 12/28 when Keiki received news from Edo. Five days earlier, after weeks of rumors that Satsuma agents were planning to attack Edo Castle, a suspicious fire had broken out and destroyed the castle women’s quarters.That same evening someone had shot at the Edo villa of Shōnai domain, a close shogunal ally. When men from Shōnai gave chase, the assailants had fled through the city to the Satsuma villa. These events came on the heels of weeks of brigandage attributed to Satsuma-led rōnin. Edo officials were outraged, indignant, and ready to fight. On 12/25 they attacked and burned the Shimazu villa, killing several men. In Edo, if not in Kyoto, war had broken out. The crisis in Edo was Saigō’s handiwork, the result of his orders to Sagara Sōzō, and the plan had finally pushed Keiki into a corner. Keiki was willing, if not eager, to step down as shogun and to surrender responsibility for the quagmire of foreign affairs.But the attack on Edo Castle and the Shōnai villa challenged Keiki’s dignity as a warrior. He could not ignore such an affront and still command the respect of his men. Keiki had consistently outwitted Saigō and Ōkubo in negotiations, so Saigō had brought talking to an end. Now, to retain his authority, Keiki would have to fight. 

- Mark Ravina,  pg. 148, the Last Samurai: the Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori

The Satsuma compound was burned to the ground with some resisting Satsuma retainers inside. 

Destruction of the Palace of Satsuma, in Edo, on January 19th 1868. L'Illustration, No. 1308, March 21, 1868.

But Sagara Sōzō slipped out of Edo’s harbour in the confusion. He’d now successfully carried out his Satsuma masters’ orders. His side had the upper hand in the ensuing Boshin War. He must have gone back to Kyoto hoping he’d be rewarded for his work with a command in the new Imperial Army.