NHK’s taiga drama “Yae no Sakura” passed its greatest climax in September 1868 (Meiji 1), when Tsuruga Castle (Wakamatsu Castle) fell. In the Boshin fighting in Aizu, twenty-one members of chief retainer Saigo Tanomo’s family who had stayed in the castle town — his mother, wife, and others — took their own lives; you could not watch without tears.
On November 2, 2012, this blog introduced General Shiba Goro of the army, an Aizu native who witnessed the Takebashi Incident, and wrote that his grandmother, mother, elder brother’s wife, elder sister, and younger sister — five women — also killed themselves.
The fate of Aizu retainers after the war, as drawn in “A Meiji Man’s Record: The Testament of the Aizu Man Shiba Goro” (Ishiko Masato, Chuko Shinsho, 1971), compiled from Shiba’s notes, is harsh. In November 1869 (Meiji 2) the house was revived as Tonami Domain on the Shimokita Peninsula, and many retainers went there — but 230,000 koku was cut to 30,000, and the volcanic ash of the far north left them in poverty beyond words.
As “Yae no Sakura” also shows, Aizu men who had held the castle were put in a camp at Inawashiro and then sent to Edo — more than two thousand, they say. Another 1,800 former retainers who had moved outside the castle were entrusted to Takada Domain in Echigo. Shiba, eight at the time of the war, was evacuated to a mountain villa, reunited with his eldest brother Taichiro, wounded in fighting outside the castle, and the war ended. He accompanied Taichiro to Edo, accepted only as a servant nursing the wounded brother. After more than ten days on foot, “when we reached the shogunate grain warehouse called Otsukiya inside Hitotsubashi Gate, we were exhausted,” says the Record. It was June 1869.
In another document Shiba placed Otsukiya at “the place inside Hitotsubashi where the Ministry of Education stands.” After the Restoration, that ministry stood exactly where Palaceside Building stands now. That Aizu retainers were here is moving (the photo is the ministry around 1872 = Meiji 5).
The camps were called “places of confinement.” Others were at Gokoku-ji in Otowa, the military school in Ogawamachi, and the Koda residence in Azabu (later the Third Imperial Guard Infantry barracks); later Zojo-ji in Shiba was added. Shiba’s father, Satazo, sent to Edo before him, was at the military school; brother Gosaburo at the Koda house; brother Shigeshiro at Gokoku-ji — they were split up. Movement was fairly free: “we could visit one another.” Later an Aizu office was allowed in Iidamachi, and Yamakawa Okura — later Hiroshi, Yae’s childhood friend, played with stylish cropped hair and uniform by Tamayama Tetsuji in the drama — served as governor and negotiated with the new government (after release he ran Tonami as a senior councilor).
Judgments of the Aizu war and the treatment afterward vary. The cruelty is widely known; the book too lets Shiba’s anger burst: “Though we had no will to fight from the start, though the great government had already been returned, though the lord was confined in the Aizu castle town… they hung a stain on us and punished us, and committed outrages beyond language, making good people gasp in the mud…”
On the other hand, recent finds include a letter that Omura Masujiro — a former Choshu man who ran the new government’s military — treated Princess Teru, sister-in-law of lord Matsudaira Katamori (played by Inamori Izumi in the drama), kindly when she was moved, and let Katamori’s two concubines stay in Aizu until they gave birth. Some now say the new government was unexpectedly lenient.
In the salaryman world too you meet people who have ability and do the work, yet cannot work the room and stay unlucky. Aizu seems to have been swallowed by a great swell of the age and cast in that thankless part.