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 (opens in a new tab), 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). He is recorded in the Kōbusho fascicle of the Tokyo city history Kōbusho-bugyō shihai (講武所奉行支配).¹

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 (opens in a new tab), 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 (opens in a new tab)), 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.

In the Zoku Tokugawa jikki (続徳川実紀), the shogunate’s own chronicle of its last reigns, Yorozu appears on the fifth of the second month of Bunkyū 3 (1863) as a superintendent of the rōshi (浪士取締役) beside Yamaoka Tetsutarō, the two of them rewarded as the Rōshi-gumi set out for Kyoto. The other Matsuoka listed are: Kazaemon (嘉左衛門), the head of a company of foot who retires in 1845; Tokutarō (徳太郎) of the Hakodate magistrate’s staff in 1861; Jūzaburō (重三郎; once written with 金, a common error), a retainer of the Arima of Kurume taken into the kojūnin company in 1862 and sent ahead on the journey of 1863; Shōjirō (正次郎), a works official in 1866; and Bankichi (盤吉), a naval officer in 1868. Those are all the men of the name in volumes 3 to 5, which run from 1837 to 1868, with a gap in the later part of 1863.

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