RYŌMA!: The Life of Sakamoto Ryōma: Japanese Swordsman and Visionary, Volume I by Shiba Ryōtarō

Author:Shiba Ryōtarō [Ryōtarō, Shiba]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Life of Sakamoto Ryōma: Japanese Swordsman and Visionary
Publisher: Takahashi Akira
Published: 2018-04-21T23:00:00+00:00

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THE ALL-SCHOOLS KENDO TOURNAMENT OF THE ANSEI ERA (1854-1860)

The biographies and other materials regarding Ryōma tell us that the twenty-two-year-old youth who had received word of his father’s death “could not stop weeping and prayed in the direction of his hometown from distant Edo. He vowed to the gods of heaven and earth that he would repay his debt of gratitude to his late father.” And certainly his father’s death must have been a source of great sorrow and regret to Ryōma. Given that in later years, at the very end of the Tokugawa period, Ryōma baffled heroic figures from various domains and calmed the turbulence of the nation almost on his own through his creative ideas and stratagems, this image of his filial devotion to his father seems oddly ordinary. Yet it was a very frank and natural expression of his true feelings.

As a result, there are almost no anecdotes about Ryōma from the time he heard the news until the following year, 1857. He confined himself to the Chiba Dojo and worked as hard as he could on his swordsmanship. It is hard to believe that he could have spent this period in this way, since he was a curious youth and loved to be out and about. This shows how shocked he was by his father’s death. Soon he was awarded the certificate of full mastery, the highest rank in the Hokushin Ittō School, and became the head student at the Chiba Dojo in Oke-chō. He was only twenty-three.

The Chiba head student was regarded as the “flower” among the many swordsmen then active in Edo. Around this time, Katsura Kogorō of the Chōshū domain was the head student at Saitō Yakurō’s dojo in Kōjimachi (the Shindō Munen School), while Takechi Hampeita of Tosa had become the head student at Momonoi Shunzō’s dojo at Asarigashi (the Kyōshin Myōchi School). These three dojo divided the world of swordsmanship among themselves. It is a strange coincidence that the head students of these three famous dojo later became principal actors in the Meiji Restoration of the late 1860s.

In autumn of that year, two great kendo tournaments were held in Edo with the participation of the best swordsmen of the various schools. At the end of summer, Chiba Jūtarō asked Ryōma to come to a room where they could talk privately.

“What’s it about?” asked Ryōma, rolling over on the tatami and propping his head up on one hand. His manners had been getting worse and worse, and he no longer sat in proper formal posture in his private moments.

“This is the situation.” Jūtarō was sitting upright with both hands on his knees, his legs being politely folded under him. From that position, he looked steadily into Ryōma’s face as he lay lounging there on the tatami.

“For the two hundred years since the contest was last held in the presence of the shogun, there hasn’t been a contest involving all the schools in Edo. But this autumn there’s going to be one held under the auspices of Lord Yamauchi of Tosa.

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