Season 12, Episode 11: Bakumatsu, Part 1 -- The Ansei Purge
On the last day of March in 1854, the Treaty of Kanagawa had been signed and Commodore Perry departed with his eight warships. This event served to catalyze the various factions who supported a restoration of the imperial house to secular power. This included unorthodox Neo-Confucians who believed that the emperor represented some kind of ideal heavenly ruler, ambitious daimyo - usually but not always tozama - who resented the shogunate’s domination over them, as well as Kokugaku adherents, who wanted to excise Confucian and Buddhist influence from Japan entirely. These somewhat disparate groups agreed on little outside of imperial restoration and they adopted a rallying cry that crystallized the issue with a simple, four-kanji phrase: Sonno joi.
This phrase originally appeared in the Analects of Confucius in which the great sage praised a Chancellor of the Zhou Dynasty for expelling outsiders from Zhou domains who did not act within the customs expected of its citizens. These outsiders also wore their hair in different fashions and had other customs that marked them as distinct from the Chinese groups who lived under the Zhou Dynasty. These differences marked them as barbarians and Confucius summed up the Chancellor’s policy with a four ideogram phrase that meant “Revere the king and expel the barbarians.” In Chinese this was pronounced Zunwang Rangyi, but the same characters in Japanese were pronounced “Sonno Joi.”
In my opinion, “Revere the Emperor and expel the barbarians” deserves a place in the catchy political slogan hall of fame, somewhere near “No taxation without representation,” and “Workers of the World, Unite!” It was easy to remember and recite, and kept the focus on the two primary issues in which the shogunate was holding an unpopular position. They had forced the emperor to ratify the Treaty of Kanagawa, a humiliating unequal agreement, and they had not only failed to expel the barbarians, they had made Japan’s commercial productive wealth available to them.
The kuge of the imperial court itself had also been divided along sakoku-created lines. One faction, called the joi faction, made the issue expelling the barbarians their primary platform. The other faction was not really in favor of opening Japan to trade so much as they were frightened of reprisals from the Bakufu. It had been a well-established precedent that when kuge began interfering in national politics that the shogunate’s agents would trump up charges against them. The lucky ones enjoyed remote exile; the less lucky were executed.
Such a purge of the imperial court, however, required a Bakufu who had its head in the game. The shogunate as it existed in 1854 very much did not have its head in the game. Worse than their tendency to put unsuitable candidates into the office of shogun itself was their absolute ignorance of the power vacuum that was created as a result. Having an unsuitable person as the head of state is not a problem as long as there are competent, able ministers who can act on their behalf. Unfortunately for the shogunate, they did not have competent, able ministers to enforce discipline at this critical time. The emperor thus was not only in the presence of troublesome kuge who insisted that the shogunate was failing in its duty to expel the barbarians, but Komei-Tenno even showed that faction favor and sought them out for advice.
Toward the end of 1854, amid the public debates and fiery criticism, Japan was struck by several earthquakes. On December 23, a tremor measuring 8.4 on the Richter Scale caused the collapse of over ten thousand buildings along Honshu’s central southern coast and caused over 2,000 deaths. A tsunami followed which caused further destruction in that same area and also flooded the southern coast of Shikoku. The next day, a second 8.4 quake struck further to the west, causing the collapse of over 30,000 buildings along with 3,000 deaths throughout Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu. Two days after that, a quake struck in the Toyo Strait, which is the strip of ocean between Kyushu and Shikoku. This 7.0 tremor caused even more damage to an area already devastated by nature’s wrath. There would continue to be large quakes periodically throughout the remainder of the 1850s, all of which fueled anti-Bakufu activists who claimed that these disasters were clear signs of the gods’ displeasure with Japan’s capitulation to barbarian powers.
The United States of America was far from the only barbarian power interested in securing Japanese trade. The Russian Empire had dispatched a fleet at almost the same time as Commodore Perry’s mission but opted for a gentler, more diplomacy-based approach than their American rivals. They made port at Nagasaki in late August of 1853 and explained that they had done so in spite of receiving orders to sail directly for Edo out of their respect for Japan’s sovereign laws. The governor of Nagasaki sent messages to the shogunate urging them to accept Russia’s overtures, but the Bakufu was in the midst of securing Tokugawa Iesada’s succession after the recent death of his father and their response was delayed. After a bit of diplomatic cat-and-mouse, with Admiral Putyatin threatening to sail straight for Edo if he did not receive a timely answer, Japanese officials opened official negotiations with the Russians at the port city of Shimoda in Kanto on December 22, 1854. The following day, the aforementioned Tokai earthquake struck and the Russian fleet itself was largely wrecked by the tsunami that came afterward. Nevertheless, in early 1855 the Treaty of Shimoda was signed and it included, among other provisions, opening the ports of Shimoda, Nagasaki, and Hakodate to Russian trade, allowing for barter trades, the establishment of a maritime border between Japanese claims in the north and Russian domains, and Most Favored Nation status for Russia.
By the end of 1858, the Japanese government would sign and ratify exceptionally generous treaties with the Netherlands, Great Britain, and France and would sign upgraded agreements with both the US and Russia. It is not exaggerating to say that the conditions of these treaties chipped away at Japan’s sovereignty while enriching these imperial western powers at Japan’s expense. More ports were now opened to trade, the import duties were decided by an independent national board which meant that Japan had no power to determine its own tariffs, and foreign citizens living in any of the designated port cities were subject to the laws of their own nation but not to those of Japan. Making matters worse, the currency exchange system favored foreign speculators, who were able to exchange silver for gold in Japan at a ratio of 5 to 1, then sell that gold for silver almost anywhere else in the world at 15 to 1.
This led, in a very short amount of time, to a massive outflow of gold from Japan, which inevitably rippled through the already-fragile domestic economy. Japanese merchants hoping to profit from the opening of foreign trade increasingly were caught up in scams or fell victim to plain dishonesty by their foreign counterparts. Many went bankrupt, which forced them to call in loans from around the nation, which caused both unemployment and inflation to rise -- a dangerous pair in any economy. The Bakufu once again scrambled to get ahead of these crises and once again proved themselves too slow. The best they could offer was debasing the coinage which helped to staunch the outflow of gold but did little to turn their economic ship around.
While the unequal treaties that allowed foreign powers to reap massive benefits at the expense of the shogunate’s economic ignorance were generally very unpopular, they did serve one of the Bakufu’s long term goals quite nicely: acquiring modern weapons which could be used to defend Japan in case of war with one of these empires. The proponents of Rangaku, or western learning, had been out of favor for several decades leading up to the Bakumatsu period but now that the barbarians were not only at the gates but literally melting the gates down for profit, the shogunate decided that modernization was the key to bringing their administration back into balance.
Scholars and samurai who favored modernization had been clamoring for military reform since at least 1840. One of the loudest voices for this reform was one Takashima Shuhan, a senior administrator of Nagasaki, who had read countless reports about the First Opium War and concluded that a change was needed in Japan’s military readiness. With permission from the local Bakufu Daikan, he organized two divisions of arquebusiers with a cannon battery and arranged a demonstration. The Bakufu was suitably impressed and granted him permission to pursue the study of western-style arms and tactics in 1843 but reversed course in 1846 and arrested him on trumped-up charges of smuggling and corruption. He lived under house arrest until 1853, when the shogunate once again reversed course in the face of the Perry Expedition’s arrival.
Some of the tozama daimyo, especially those of Choshu and Satsuma domains, secretly pursued the technology necessary to craft bronze cannons during the years of Takashima Shuhan’s detention. Employing students of rangaku, they managed to construct furnaces which could produce higher-quality alloys capable of casting longer-range cannons and more durable arquebuses by around 1852. By the time this all came to light, the shogunate was so busy scrambling to modernize Japan’s military that they had little time for accusations of treason.
One of the first concrete modernization actions taken by the Bakufu was the establishment of the Nagasaki Kaigun Denshū-jo, or Nagasaki Naval Training Center. The government hired officers from the Royal Netherlands Navy to educate Japan’s future mariners as well as Dutch physicians to teach western medicine. The Royal Netherlands Navy, in the name of Dutch King Willem III, gifted the shogunate one of their own steam-powered warships called the Soembing. The Bakufu renamed the vessel Kanko Maru, a name taken from a passage in the I Ching which referred to the light of the nation. The Nagasaki Naval Training Center would continue growing and developing throughout the 1850s, building factories to provide for steamship repairs and construction under the guidance of Dutch experts. Attendance at this school was not limited to samurai and many local commoners were given the chance to earn a place in Japan’s new navy.
The Kanko Maru was soon joined in 1857 by another steam-powered ship also built by the Dutch: the Kanrin Maru, or “Unyielding,” followed by the Choyo, or “Morning Sunshine,” in 1858. Both of these new ships utilized an underwater screw rather than paddlewheels like the Kanko Maru. Japanese crews, under Dutch instruction, learned to operate these ships in spite of the language barrier and were soon maneuvering their state-of-the-art craft in drills and mock battles. However, there was a problem.
Although Nagasaki was officially part of the Bakufu’s domain, it was on the other end of the nation from Edo and shogunate officials soon began to worry that the tozama daimyo in that part of the country might gain a military advantage which could be used to topple the government. At this point, they were frankly worried that even the fudai daimyo whose authority stemmed from the shogunate might betray them and side with the tozama. Thus in 1859, just four short years after it was founded, the Nagasaki Naval Training Center was shuttered. Besides the distrust of potential tozama empowerment, the Dutch government was also growing apprehensive that their fellow western imperial powers might accuse them of helping the Japanese prepare for a coming war against them.
In this regard, the Dutch were not entirely incorrect but it would be many decades before the Japanese engaged in their first modern war, in spite of the wishes of the xenophobic factions who pointed to the 1854 earthquakes as clear signs of the gods’ anger. In 1858, a further portent would present itself as Japan experienced its first cholera outbreak. This primarily occurred in Edo, where the disease was said to have caused between 100,000 to 200,000 deaths. This was part of a global cholera pandemic that began in 1846 and which in 1849 took the life of former US President James K. Polk. In 1860, cases would finally dwindle as the pandemic ended in Japan but the anti-Bakufu movements across the nation enjoyed an influx of recruits as the citizenry wondered what, if anything, the country was gaining from allowing foreign influence besides a wrecked economy, national embarrassment, and plagues.
Meanwhile, the Bakufu’s executive leadership was in a state of disarray. Abe Masahiro had resigned as the chief of the roju in the fall of 1855 shortly after being pressured to step down by tozama daimyo and the imperial court who accused him of cowardice in the way he had appeased the foreign powers. He remained on the roju council and threw his support for its next chief behind Hotta Masayoshi, an old partisan of Mizuno Tadakuni who had favored ending sakoku. He lasted a few years in this position but caught a lot of heat for the many unequal treaties which were signed in 1858, which we discussed earlier in this episode. These treaties infuriated many anti-Bakufu tozama daimyos as well as the imperial court and much of the nation at large. Unpopular though he was, Hotta Masayoshi still had the trust of shogun Tokugawa Iesada and advised him to support the elevation of Ii Naosuke, a somewhat like-minded official who had previously advocated for opening only Nagasaki to all foreign trade. He also advocated modernizing Japan and buying weapons wholesale from the Dutch to make them able to repel a foreign invasion.
Ii Naosuke was something of a firebrand and he organized coalitions of daimyo to lobby for his policies. He faced one considerable obstacle to his new ascendency, however, from one of the gosanke - the five branches of the Tokugawa Family who produced eligible hereditary candidates for shogun. The Mito branch, led by Tokugawa Nariaki, had followed their daimyo down the path of kokugaku nationalism which favored violent expulsion of the foreign barbarians. In 1853 he had penned an essay entitled “Japan, Reject the Westerners,” which listed his ten arguments for keeping Japan isolated and, if it came to it, waging war against foreign interlopers who had intruded on their national harmony.
Shortly after becoming the new Tairo, Ii Naosuke was faced with a fresh crisis in the midst of all the other crises. The health of shogun Tokugawa Iesada took a turn for the worse in 1858 and the question of succession came to the forefront. On the advice of Ii Naosuke, the shogun adopted the heir of Wakayama Domain, a young man known as Tokugawa Yoshitomi who later changed his given name to Iemochi out of respect for his adopted father. This choice proved extremely divisive, as Tokugawa Nariaki and his party lobbied for Nariaki’s own son Yoshinobu, who had previously come under consideration as a candidate for future shogun during the reign of Tokugawa Ienari.
When Tokugawa Iesada died at last, it was his adopted 12-year-old son Iemochi who was installed as the new shogun. Ii Naosuke, desperate to keep control of the Bakufu in the hands of his partisans, initiated a series of mass arrests against Nariaki’s pro-war faction following the new shogun’s elevation. He may have hoped that such decisive action would cleanse the shogunate of its damaged reputation and put the fear of the central government back into the hearts of belligerent daimyo nationwide. These detentions were referred to as the Ansei Purge, named for the imperial era in which they took place.
The purpose of this purge was to reassert the Bakufu as the dominant political power on Japan -- to close the door which arguably had been opened by Abe Masahiro when he polled the tozama daimyo during the interim between Commodore Perry’s visits. Over a hundred people were eventually caught up in the Ansei Purge, most of whom were merely subjected to indefinite house arrest. This included openly hostile daimyo like Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito Province but it also included Bakufu officials who had expressed a desire or even a willingness to negotiate with imperial restorationists.
While most of the victims of this purge were either placed under arrest or simply removed from their positions within the shogunate, there were some high-profile executions that resulted. One was Hashimoto Sanai, a supporter of Tokugawa Yoshinobu who had lobbied to prevent the elevation of 12-year-old shogun Iemochi. Another was radical imperial restorationist samurai Yoshida Shoin, whose colorful history is worth recounting. A student of Sakuma Shozan, a samurai scholar who advocated for both adoption of western technology and the preservation of traditional Japanese values, Yoshida Shoin had served the Mori Clan in Choshu domain but had been dismissed in 1852 for leaving the domain without permission. In 1853 when Commodore Perry’s fleet showed up, both he and Sakuma Shozan became convinced that the shogunate should send scholars like themselves to study in the United States, learn as much as they could, and bring that learning back to Japan. The shogunate refused all such requests, determined at the time to preserve the secondary aspect of sakoku, which forbade Japanese people from leaving Japan.
Just before the Black Ships departed from their initial visit, Yoshida Shoin piloted a small craft to the fleet and requested permission to board. When this was denied, he attempted to sneak aboard the USS Powhatan in the dead of night but was discovered and forbidden from coming on board. The Bakufu was alerted to Shoin’s actions and placed him under house arrest. He operated a school while under this house arrest in Choshu domain and kept abreast of national matters by having his students travel the nation and report back to him. Eventually he was released and hatched a plan.
In 1858, after Japan had signed the updated treaty with the United States, Ii Naosuke sent a messenger to Kyoto to have the emperor ratify this treaty just as he had done with the previous agreements. The imperial court was not happy about continually being made to sign agreements without being allowed to provide input, so they refused the messenger entry into the Imperial Palace. While the messenger waited, Yoshida Shoin and several of his students attacked him but he escaped with minor injuries. Hoping to inspire a larger rebellion, Shoin sent out a call to arms for any ronin in the Kansai area to flock to the emperor’s cause. This appears to have gone unheeded by any local ronin, however, and instead Shoin was taken back to Choshu domain where he found himself once more under house arrest. In the fall of the next year, at the height of the Ansei Purge, he was brought to Edo, tried for treason, and executed. The school that he founded in Choshu would continue his mission after his death, however, and his most loyal students would later become extremely important members of the Japanese government.
While the Ansei Purge was intended to revive the shogunate and remind the daimyo of its ability to enforce discipline, its larger purpose was to end the growing collaboration between the imperial court and the more influential tozama daimyo. However, instead of continuing the shogunate’s usual course of impoverishing the court and using the emperor as a symbolic rubber stamp, Ii Naosuke wanted to improve relations between the Bakufu and the emperor in hopes that they both might rule the nation and thus inspire harmony during the tumultuous 1850s.
This policy was called kobu gattai, which means “Union of the Imperial Court and the Shogunate.” The practical form it took was the arranged marriage between the young shogun Tokugawa Iemochi and imperial princess Kazu, a maneuver meant to assuage increasingly belligerent imperial restorationists nationwide. At first the princess refused, and the emperor regretfully informed the Bakufu that he could not force her to accept the young shogun’s hand. However, Emperor Komei became convinced by several kuge that this union would benefit the court and told the shogunate he would support it if they nullified the unequal treaties and expelled the foreign barbarians. The agreed, though probably had no intention of honoring his conditions, so Komei-Tenno pressured Princess Kazu to accept, claiming that he would abdicate if she continued to refuse. The princess acquiesced and by all accounts she and Tokugawa Iemochi would later have an extremely amicable marriage.
While it had been arranged, the marriage itself took several years to actually happen. In the meantime, Ii Naosuke’s enemies of the sonno-joi persuasion were not as easily cowed by his Ansei Purge as he had hoped. In March of 1860, while traveling to Edo Castle to attend meetings with various daimyos, there was an attack near the front of his long procession and his bodyguards rushed to assist their fellows. As Ii Naosuke sat in his palanquin relatively unguarded, a samurai named Arimura Jisaemon came out from his hiding place and fired a colt revolver into the palanquin, wounding its occupant. The assassin dragged Ii Naosuke from the litter and promptly beheaded him.
The assassins left behind a copy of their manifesto, which protested the opening of trade relations with foreign powers and the establishments of permanent diplomatic embassies. Because he had been killed in front of the Sakurada Gate of Edo Castle, this assassination is referred to as the Sakurada Gate Incident. Thus the 1860s began, in Japan, with a bloody political assassination. Many more would follow as the Bakufu strove to keep their tenuous grasp on power and fueled the fires that inspired the sonno joi faction to greater and greater acts of violence and upheaval. Next time, we will continue our discussion of the Bakumatsu Period as the shogunate would seek even more extreme measures to crack down on dissidents while international incidents would threaten to plunge Japan into civil war.