Late Bakumatsu Military Units

An excerpt from my book From the Kōbusho to the Butokukai: Swordsmanship in Transition on 19th and 20th century Japanese swordsmanship.

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Utagawa Yoshimori, Honnōji kassen no zu (本能寺合戦之図), 1869: the Battle of Ueno of 4 July 1868, shown under the name of a sixteenth-century battle. The black gate (Kuromon) of Kan'ei-ji is at the right.

Seiei-tai

The Seiei-tai (精鋭隊) was a guard corps of Tokugawa direct retainers raised late in Keiō 3 (1867), after the return of governing authority to the court (taisei hōkan, 大政奉還), to protect the retired Tokugawa Yoshinobu (opens in a new tab).

Formed in the circle around Takahashi Deishū (高橋泥舟) and Yamaoka Tetsutarō — the later Yamaoka Tesshū (opens in a new tab), who negotiated the surrender of Edo Castle with Saigō — it had several commanders, among them Chūjō Kinnosuke, appointed by Katsu Kaishū at the corps’ formation and reckoned a first-rank swordsman, who took it down to Mito with Yoshinobu in the fourth month of 1868 and on to Shizuoka; it counted Matsuoka Yorozu among its officers.¹

When Yoshinobu withdrew to Mito and the Tokugawa house was then removed to Suruga, the corps escorted him aboard the warship Banryū-maru (蟠龍丸) from the Chōshi coast to Shimizu and on to the Hōdaiin (宝台院); once his safety was secured near Kunō it was renamed the Shinban-gumi (新番組) and attached to Tokugawa Iesato’s Shizuoka domain.

Accounts differ on the nominal headship — variously naming Chūjō Kinnosuke, Yamaoka Tesshū, or Takahashi Deishū, with Matsuoka Yorozu leading a detachment of some fifty men — a spread that most likely reflects overlapping roles of overall organizer, field head, and detachment leaders rather than a single contradiction.

It belongs to a tier the Keiō reforms deliberately created. When Yoshinobu’s reforms from 1866 dissolved or shrank the old-style organizations such as the Ōban, the ablest of the surplus personnel were folded into the army as units of praetorian character (親衛隊的な性格; elite guard character): the Okuzume-jūtai (奥詰銃隊) and the Yūgeki-tai (遊撃隊, the successor to the okuzume inner guard).

The Seiei-tai is of that same family: a guard close to the shogun’s person, formed from the best of the dissolved guards plus the old Kōbusho academy’s sword and spear masters. The academy was effectively the recruiting pool for this guard tier, which is why the same handful of names keeps reappearing in the units’ rosters.

Chūjō Kinnosuke Kageaki (中條金之助景昭, 1827–1896) was the son of a koshōgumi hatamoto, trained in Yamaga-ryū, Shingyōtō-ryū and Hokushin Ittō-ryū, served the 13th shogun Tokugawa Iesada from Kaei 7 (1854), and at the Kōbusho was a jūjutsu randori sewa-kokoroe.²

He became a kenjutsu kyōju-kata at the Kōbusho after it opened, associated with its Shingyōtō-ryū (心形刀流) contingent. At that time at the Kōbusho, the 9th-generation Iba Hidetoshi was a kenjutsu kyōju-kata (later shihan-yaku-nami), and from this school Mitsuhashi Torazō, Chūjō Kinnosuke (Kageaki), and Minato Shinpachirō became kenjutsu kyōju-kata, forming a major bloc there.³

In Bunkyū 2 (1862) he became a superintendent of the Rōshi-gumi alongside Yamaoka Tesshū, and afterward held oversight posts over the Shinchō-gumi (新徴組).

The escort to Mito included Yūgeki-tai as well as Seiei-tai men, among them Chūjō Kageaki and Takahashi Deishū.⁴

Some two hundred people, Seiei-tai men and their families, went down to Sunpu (駿府, modern Shizuoka); one account puts the escorting “bakufu elite” at around three hundred.

Disbanded as a military body when Iesato became domain governor, the corps turned in the seventh month of Meiji 2 (1869), with his leave, to reclaiming the Makinohara (牧之原) plateau south of Kanaya as the “Kanayahara Reclamation Party” (金谷開墾方).

Under the job-ranked allotment recorded in the Shizuoka-ken Chagyō-shi (静岡県茶業史), Chūjō Kageaki held the post of reclamation head (開墾方頭) with 76 chōbu and Ōkusa Takashige (大草高重) the deputy post (開墾方並) with 65 chōbu, against a settler average near 4.8 chōbu; roughly 250 Shinban-gumi households — with about 85 Shōgi-tai remnants — took up some 1,425 chōbu (about 1,410 hectares), planting the tea for which the plateau became known. The two head-counts given here belong to different moments and count different things: the some two hundred people who went down to Sunpu with Yoshinobu in 1868, and the roughly 250 households settled on the plateau in the seventh month of 1869. Matsuoka Yorozu, by then the domain’s suiri-rotei-gakari (水利路程掛; water-and-road commissioner), supported the venture and is named among its backers alongside Katsu Kaishū, Yamaoka Tetsutarō, and Ōkubo Ichiō (opens in a new tab) (大久保一翁, 1818–1888; also known as Ōkubo Tadahiro 忠寛) — the former bakufu official who helped bring about the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle and was then governor of Shizuoka and of Tokyo, and not the Satsuma statesman Ōkubo Toshimichi. The individual settlers’ plots and names are preserved in the Makinohara shizoku kaikonchi ezumen (牧之原士族開墾地絵図面). ⁵

Shōgi-tai

The Shōgi-tai (彰義隊, roughly “Corps to Manifest Righteousness”) was a pro-Tokugawa militia formed at Edo early in 1868.⁶ It is distinct from the Seiei-tai — different origins, different leadership, opposite fate. It is the fighting group Sakakibara Kenkichi was invited to join before the Battle of Ueno.

After defeat at Toba-Fushimi, Tokugawa Yoshinobu (opens in a new tab) returned to Edo, and in 1868 he declared submission to the new government, and the next day entered confinement at Ueno’s Kan’ei-ji.⁷ Bakushin and Hitotsubashi-house retainers who rejected that submission organized in response; the corps was formed in 1868 to guard Yoshinobu, and it received from the bakufu the duty of policing the city of Edo.⁸

Its tōdori (頭取; head or chief) was Shibusawa Seiichirō (渋沢成一郎, also Kisaku 喜作), a cousin of Shibusawa Eiichi, with Amano Hachirō (opens in a new tab) (天野八郎, 1831–1868) as deputy; neither was a hereditary bakushin — both had risen from farming or village-headman backgrounds into Hitotsubashi or bakufu service — and the name “Shōgi” expressed the aim of making the great cause manifest, seeking Yoshinobu’s reprieve and restoration, and fighting if the new government would not grant it.⁹

The old bakufu’s submission faction tried to manage the militia by recognizing it and giving it city-patrol duties, and it first placed its headquarters at Hongan-ji, then moved to Ueno — to Kan’ei-ji, the Tokugawa family temple, where it rallied around the Rinnōji-no-miya Kōgen Nyūdō Shinnō (輪王寺宮公現入道親王).¹⁰

After the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle in 1868 and Yoshinobu’s removal to Mito, Shibusawa argued for withdrawing from Ueno, clashed with Amano, and left to form the Shinbugun (振武軍), eventually joining Enomoto Takeaki and fighting at Hakodate, while Amano took command of the Shōgi-tai. (Totman 1980)¹¹

The hardliners who remained were joined by Shinsen-gumi remnants and stayed at Kan’ei-ji under the banner of protecting the Rinnōji-no-miya and the Tokugawa mausolea. The unit’s dress and bravado briefly made it fashionable in Edo; estimates of its strength range from over a thousand to around two thousand men.¹²

In the lead-up to the Battle of Ueno (Ueno sensō, 上野戦争), the Shōgi-tai refused the order to disband and refused to return the Rinnōji-no-miya to Kyoto, repeatedly clashing with and killing government soldiers, so that the new government’s authority in the city sank to the point that some leaders even proposed abandoning Edo Castle.¹³

The high command then resolved to destroy it: on the 15th of the fifth month, following Ōmura Masujirō’s plan, Satsuma troops attacked frontally from the Kuromon while Chōshū struck from the Hongō Dangozaka direction and others closed in, annihilating the Shōgi-tai in a single day, after which the Rinnōji-no-miya escaped and later became the nominal head of the Ōuetsu Reppan Dōmei.¹⁴

This was 4 July 1868, with Saigō Takamori leading the Satsuma assault at the gate, and Hizen’s Armstrong guns firing across Shinobazu Pond. Some 266 bodies were afterward gathered and cremated, which is why the Shōgi-tai graves (opens in a new tab) stand both in Ueno Park and at Entsū-ji.¹⁵

This is the same engagement, seen from the other side, in which Sakakibara — having declined the Shōgi-tai — got the prince out to Mikawajima. Amano was captured and died in custody that year; survivors scattered north to Aizu and the alliance or to Hakodate.

Yūgeki-tai

The Yūgeki-tai (遊撃隊) was formed on 22 October 1866 out of former Kōbusho instructors and okuzume (奥詰; inner-guard) bakushin (幕臣; shogunal retainers). It had as its tōdori the spearman Takahashi Deishū and the swordsmen Sakakibara Kenkichi (opens in a new tab) and Mitsuhashi Torazō.

The Yūgeki-tai grew out of the okuzume-shū (the shogun’s personal guard): Iba Hachirō was promoted at 21 from Kōbusho swordsman to okuzume, and the okuzume were then reorganized into the bakufu Yūgeki-tai, which fought at Toba-Fushimi.

Figures like Chūjō Kinnosuke and Matsuoka Yorozu went into the Seiei-tai. After Toba-Fushimi the corps went to Kisarazu, drew in Jōzai-han lord Hayashi Tadataka, took the Futtsu jin’ya, then campaigned through Izu, Kōfu and Numazu, where it reorganized.

When the Shōgi-tai opened the Battle of Ueno on the fifteenth of the fifth month — 4 July 1868 — the Yūgeki-tai moved in concert, trying to hold the Hakone barrier against the Odawara-han troops; Iba was shot in the hip at Sanmaibashi and lost an arm, then went north to join Hijikata Toshizō, and died at Hakodate at 26. Field leadership ran through Iba Hachirō and Hitomi Katsutarō. Iba was the heir of the Shingyōtō-ryū Renbukan (練武館), son of Iba Gunbei Hidenari and adopted heir of Iba Sōtarō.

Iba Sōtarō (伊庭惣太郎) is the ninth head of Shingyōtō-ryū, formally Iba Gunbei Hidetoshi (伊庭軍兵衛秀俊, 1822–1886). Originally a disciple named Haga Sōtarō (垪和惣太郎), he so excelled among the students at the Renbukan that the eighth head, Hidenari, named him heir over his own son, Hachirō, in keeping with the school’s practice of adoption by merit. When the Kōbusho was founded the summons went to Hidenari, who declined it and sent Sōtarō in his place together with two nephews, Mitsuhashi Torazō and Minato Shinpachirō. Sōtarō then succeeded to the headship and took the house name Gunbei, rising from kyōju-kata to shihan-yaku and from okuzume to a head of the Yūgeki-tai. Gunbei is the succession-name of the Iba house and not a personal one, so an “Iba Gunbei” on a Kōbusho roster of these years is this man and not his adoptive father. He should not be confused with the tenth head, the homophonous Iba Sōtarō (伊庭想太郎, 1851–1907), who was Hidenari’s fourth son.¹⁶

End Notes