Matsuoka Yorozu

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

Matsuoka Yorozu (松岡万, 1838–1891) — tsūshō Shōichirō (昌一郎), gō Kodō (古道) — was a shogunal retainer (幕臣), a member of Kiyokawa Hachirō’s Torao-no-kai (虎尾の会), one of the Rōshi-gumi (浪士組) torishimari, and later commander of the Seiei-tai (精鋭隊).

The Matsuoka Shōichirō (松岡昌一郎) recorded in the Kōbusho fascicle of the Tokyo city history as Kōbusho-bugyō shihai (講武所奉行支配) is this man.¹

The reading of his given name is unsettled — the sources closest to him (Ogura Tetsuki’s Ore no Shishō (おれの師匠) and Ōhashi Bishō’s memoir) give Yorozu (よろず), while regional gazetteers offer Tsumoru (つもる) and Mutsumi (むつみ) — but Yorozu is followed here.

House and Status

This line of Matsuoka was a hereditary bannerman house of falconers (鷹匠; takajō), a Fujiwara branch recorded in the Kansei Chōshū Shokafu (寛政重修諸家譜). The line entered shogunal service when Matsuoka Takamichi (松岡孝道), a Kishū-han retainer, was taken on as a takajō in Kyōhō 2 (1717) and rose to kumigashira; the house held a 100-hyō, three-man stipend and repeatedly used the graphs 万 and 古 in its names. Yorozu was born in the twelfth month of Tenpō 9 (1838) in Edo, son of the takajō Matsuoka Daisuke (松岡大助); whether he himself succeeded to the falconer’s post is not certain.

Martial Training

Every account agrees Matsuoka was an accomplished swordsman — described as “of hard temperament and much accomplished in the way of the sword” (性剛にして頗る 剣道に達していた) — but the line he trained in is not firmly established, and the sources disagree.

• A Shinkage-ryū (新陰流) mokuroku survives among his relics at the Matsuoka shrine, implying study in a line under that name, though which branch is unclear;
• Tsukamoto Shōichi’s Makinohara Zanshō (牧之原残照) calls him “a disciple of Odani Seiichirō, Jikishinkage-ryū” (男谷精一郎の門弟・直心影流), but cites no source;
• Fujishima Ikko’s Bakumatsu Kenkaku Monogatari (幕末剣客物語) makes him a near-menkyo pupil of Kondō Yanosuke (近藤弥之助) of Chūya-ha Ittō-ryū (忠也派一刀流), himself a Kōbusho kenjutsu kyōju-kata from 1856;
• Ogura’s Ore no Shishō (おれの師匠) has him taking up Hokushin Ittō-ryū (北辰一刀流) at Yamaoka Tetsutarō’s dōjō after the two became associated;
• Ezaki Shunpei’s Nihon Kengō Retsuden (日本剣豪列伝) says he served no single teacher and styled himself a posthumous disciple of the martial-scholar Hirayama Shiryū (平山子竜; Kōzō 行蔵).

Matsuoka Yorozu is also said to have pursued naginata, iai, and Zen. The defensible statement is that he was a strong, largely self-directed swordsman with attested contact with the Shinkage / Jikishinkage and Ittō lines, but no single documented lineage.

Bakumatsu Career

Matsuoka was a founding member of the Torao-no-kai (虎尾の会), the sonnō-jōi society around Kiyokawa Hachirō, and is named among the planners of the 1861 (Bunkyū 1) scheme to burn the Yokohama foreign settlement; he appears on the Zenshōan “Sonnō-jōi-tō Hokki” (尊皇攘夷党発起) roll. Through this period he held a post under the Kōbusho magistrate (講武所奉行支配) — an administrative, not a teaching, appointment, and probably held from before Bunkyū 1, contemporaneous with Yamaoka Tetsutarō serving there as a kenjutsu sewa-kokoroe. When the bakufu formed the Rōshi-gumi he became one of its torishimari alongside Yamaoka and Chūjō Kinnosuke (中條金之助).

After the Restoration he in turn led the Seiei-tai (精鋭隊; later Shinban-gumi), escorting the retired Yoshinobu from Shimizu to the Hōdaiin with some fifty men, then served the Suruga domain as suiri-rotei-gakari (水利路程掛; waterways and roads) and joined the Makinohara reclamation with Chūjō, himself a former Seiei-tai head. He died in 1891 (Meiji 24) and is enshrined at two Shizuoka shrines, among them the Matsuoka / Ikenushi shrine (松岡霊社・池主神社) at Iwata Ōhara.

Shibusawa’s Keiki-kō den (慶喜公伝), vol. 4, records (渋沢 栄一 1918): 「或夜半に、公は松岡萬を以て急に良輔を召されたり、良輔恐懼して是れ必ず重き御咎をや蒙るべき…」

One night the lord [Yoshinobu] urgently summoned Ryōsuke by way of Matsuoka Yorozu (松岡萬); Ryōsuke, in dread, [supposed] he must surely be about to receive some grave reprimand…

Shibusawa’s authorized life of Yoshinobu puts Matsuoka Yorozu in close personal attendance, carrying the lord’s summons at night — the same role he plays in the Shōgitai senshi (彰義隊戦史) vignette where he gallops to fetch Yamaoka for an urgent go-meshi (御召; summons). The man summoned here, Ryōsuke, is on the natural reading Sekiguchi Ryōsuke (関口良輔), who stands beside Yorozu on Yamazaki’s Seiei-tai roster.

Two independent works from the 1910s thus place the same small set — Yorozu, Sekiguchi, Yamaoka, Chūjō — around Yoshinobu, which is good mutual corroboration for the Seiei-tai membership.

In the Tōkyō shishi gaihen, the one substantive Matsuoka is Shōichirō, named among direct bakufu appointments “responsive to the times” — alongside the sōjutsu instructor Takahashi Ise-no-kami (高橋伊勢守) and Yamaoka Tetsutarō (山岡鉄太郎) — in the passage leading into the Shinchō-gumi and the Kōbusho.

In the Shōgitai senshi, the Seiei-tai material names Yorozu three times as 松岡萬 — in the section-26 roster beside Yamaoka, Sekiguchi Ryōsuke, Ōkusa Takijirō (大草瀧次郎), and Umeda Katsutarō; in the night-summons narrative; and beside Chūjō and Yamaoka, with his gō Kodō (古道), and that a Matsuoka Yorozu-den (松岡萬傳; Life of Matsuoka Yorozu) stands in the first volume of the Kinsei Ijin-den (近世偉人傳).

Two 1861 (Bunkyū 1, seventh month) exculpatory statements (弁明書) reproduced in Kuzuu Yoshihisa’s Kōshi Yamaoka Tesshū (高士山岡鐵舟) are signed jointly “Yamaoka Tetsutarō / Matsuoka Shōichirō.” The command-tier Matsuoka of the bakumatsu record is therefore Yorozu.

The administrative placement is from the Tokyo city history (東京市史外編, 講武所, p. 98); the signed benmeisho are transcribed in Kuzuu Yoshihisa, Kōshi Yamaoka Tesshū (高士山岡鐵舟). Biographical detail follows Gamō Shigeaki’s “Matsuoka Yorozu-den” (松岡萬傳) in Kinsei Ijin-den (近世偉人伝, 1878) and Ōhashi Bishō’s “Bakushi Matsuoka Yorozu no Den” (幕士松岡萬の傳, Dōhōkai-shi), with house data from the Kansei Chōshū Shokafu and the bukan. The synthesis draws on Odaka Teruyuki’s multi-part study of Matsuoka (2024), a careful secondary compilation.²

Image credit: the picture shown with this article in the list of writing is the main hall of Zenshōan (全生庵), Taitō, Tokyo: “Zenshoan temple 02” (opens in a new tab) by tak1701d, 2012, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 (opens in a new tab); cropped.

End Notes