Sakamoto, Ryoma

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After much trial and tribulation, and as his first giant step toward realizing his great objective, Ryoma devised a preposterous plan of convincing Satsuma and Choshu to join forces with one another as the only means to topple the shogunate. But Satsuma and Choshu were bitter enemies whose hate for one another surpassed even that hate which they had historically harbored toward the Tokugawa. What's more, the braggart Ryoma had a reputation for exaggerating. When he told his friends of his plan, some initially dismissed it as so much "hot air," while others simply thought he was crazy. But in addition to many other talents, Ryoma, a truly Renaissance man, was endowed with an uncanny power of persuasion. After a year of planning and negotiation, in January 1866, Ryoma, now an indispensable "nobody," successfully brokered a military alliance between Satsuma and Choshu, which more than anything else hastened the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Although the shogunate had not yet learned of the secret alliance, Tokugawa police agents strongly suspected that Ryoma was up to no good. On the night after the alliance was sealed in Kyoto, Ryoma was ambushed by a Tokugawa police squad, as he and a samurai of Choshu, who had been assigned as Ryoma's bodyguard, celebrated their great success in a second-story room at Ryoma's favorite inn, the Teradaya, on the outskirts of the Imperial capital.

A young maidservant at the inn, named Oryo, had been soaking in a hot bath when she heard the assailants break into the house. Oryo immediately ran from the bathroom stark naked up the dark staircase to warn the two men upstairs. The scene is a very famous one, as is the ensuing battle, during which Ryoma wielded a Smith & Wesson revolver, his bodyguard a lethal spear, to fend off their assailants and escape through the backdoor. Equally famous is the wedding between Ryoma and Oryo, which took place soon after, and their subsequent trip to the hot-spring baths in the Kirishima mountains of Satsuma, which was supposedly the first honeymoon in Japan.

In spring 1867, Ryoma established his Kaientai, Japan's first modern corporation and the precursor to the Mitsubishi. Based in the international port-city of Nagasaki, the Kaientai was a private navy and shipping firm through which Ryoma and his men ran guns for the Choshu and Satsuma revolutionaries.

In the previous June, Ryoma had commanded a warship in a sea-battle off Shimonoseki, in which he aided Choshu's Extraordinary Corps, Japan's first modern militia, comprising both samurai and peasants, in a rout of Tokugawa naval forces. While Ryoma's anti-Tokugawa comrades from Satsuma and Choshu prepared to crush the shogunate by military might, the "nobody" from Tosa devised a plan to avoid bloody civil war and foreign intervention.  >>> CONTINUE ARTICLE