Stranger in the Shogun's City by Amy Stanley

Author:Amy Stanley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven TROUBLES AT HOME

The trouble in the realm might have started in Osaka, during the desperate summer of 1837, at the height of the Tenpō famine. Osaka was the second-largest city in Japan, home to nearly four hundred thousand, dominated by noisy, boisterous merchants who were said to eat better than anyone else on the archipelago. Along with Edo and Kyoto, Osaka was the shogun’s territory, as opposed to one of the domain lords’ cities. The shogun had claimed it for its strategic importance. Among Japan’s three great metropolises, Edo was the shogun’s seat and Kyoto was the emperor’s, but Osaka was the economic powerhouse that sustained them both.

The region surrounding Osaka had not suffered nearly as much as the northeast in the Tenpō famine, but rice prices were still extremely high, and the situation was exacerbated by the shogunate’s policy of diverting grain to Edo to forestall riots in the capital. As a result, Osaka’s poor were unable to afford basic provisions. A former shogunal official and Confucian scholar named Ōshio Heihachirō was appalled by the waste of life. Why should the poor starve while rich merchants hoarded rice and cash? Why should righteous men defer to arrogant bureaucrats who accepted bribes and spent their days and nights in dissipation? In truth, most of the shogun’s men were little better than robbers, common criminals who would steal food from children in the streets. In the summer of 1837, Ōshio raised banners—“Save the People”—and assembled an army of three hundred men. Together, they tried to wrest control of the city from the shogunate, convinced that they were delivering the judgment of heaven. But their rebellion lasted only twelve hours before it was put down, viciously, by the shogun’s forces. Thousands of buildings, a whole swath of the city, burned.

Ōshio escaped and survived briefly in hiding, but when his refuge was surrounded he lit the building on fire and perished in the flames. His co-conspirators, apprehended alive, were subjected to torture and eventually executed. Those who had died during interrogation had their bodies pickled in salt so that they could be crucified along with the others. Yet the sight of those charred, mangled, and silenced bodies wasn’t reassuring to the officials in power. If one of the shogun’s own men could launch a rebellion in one of the realm’s three greatest cities, then who knew what other kinds of violent dissent might be taking shape in other places, among men who weren’t pledged to the Tokugawa house? What did that portend for the Great Peace, the shogunate’s most important achievement? All over Japan, even in small, faraway villages like Ishigami, people heard and discussed news of the uprising, and they asked themselves the same questions.

In Edo, news of the rebellion in Osaka fueled anxiety about potential unrest in the shogun’s capital. The Edo City Magistrates had worked with wealthy commoner wholesalers and ward headmen to keep the city provisioned during the famine, and thanks to their efforts, the capital had narrowly avoided riots.

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