瘠我慢の説 English

The founding of a nation is a private matter, not a public one.

The human population of the globe is not merely countless in number; separated by the natural boundaries of mountains and seas, people gather into groups in each locality and go their separate ways — and this cannot be helped. Yet if each place has its own sources of food and wealth, people may live by those resources.

Or where one region has a surplus and another a lack, they may trade with each other — this too is permissible.

Such are the blessings granted by Heaven: till the soil and eat, manufacture and use, trade and attain convenience.

What more could human life require?

Why should it ever be necessary to divide the world into petty man-made nations and draw man-made boundaries?

Still less should nations divide and quarrel with their neighbors over those boundaries.

Still less should one seek profit for oneself without regard for a neighbor's misfortune.

And still less should a single leader be set up within a nation, revered as sovereign and served as master, for whose sake the lives and property of the multitude are squandered.

And still less should a nation be divided into numerous smaller districts, each with its own chief whom the people obey, and each in perpetual competition with neighboring districts, keeping their interests apart.

All of this springs from the private passions of humankind and is not the natural order of things — yet when one surveys the affairs of the world from its earliest beginnings down to the present day, one finds that the various peoples have separated into distinct groups, and within each group they share a common language and script, common history and oral tradition, intermarry and associate closely, eat and dress in much the same fashion, and come to share each other's joys and hardships — until they can no longer be dispersed.

This is precisely why nations are founded and governments established. Once a nation has taken shape and acquired a name, the people become ever more firmly attached to it, clearly distinguishing between themselves and others; toward foreign nations and foreign governments they behave as though they feel no common pain or pleasure. Beyond that, they pursue their own nation's profit and glory by every overt and covert means, leaving nothing untried — and the more vigorously they pursue it, the more it is adorned with the names of loyalty to the sovereign and love of country, and called the highest virtue of a citizen. How very strange.

Therefore, the words loyalty and patriotism, interpreted philosophically, are nothing but the purest private passions of humankind; yet given the actual state of the world as it stands today, one cannot but call them virtues. That is to say, what philosophy would term private passion becomes the common law of nation-founding, and this common law and common virtue is recognized not only within a single nation: wherever a nation contains numerous smaller districts, each district is necessarily governed by its particular interests, and what serves the nation outwardly against others comes to be recognized as the common law that serves those within.

Consider, for example, the several nations of the West facing one another, Japan and China and Korea lying adjacent and holding divergent interests — this goes without saying. But even within Japan, in the feudal age when the shogunate stood at the center and three hundred domains were arrayed beneath it, each domain jealously guarded its own profit and honor, yielding not a hair's breadth to any other, and the actual facts show that their rivalry often went as far as injuring others to benefit themselves — this too bears out the point.

Now, in carrying out this common law of founding a nation and establishing a government, times of peace present no particular hardship; yet as circumstances shift with time, no nation can avoid its seasons of rise and decline.

When decline sets in, it may no longer be possible to maintain one's ground; the prospect of destruction may already be plain — and yet, rather than submit, one exhausts every hardship and every last resource, and only when strength is truly spent does one fall. This too is what human feeling compels. To offer an analogy: it is like tending a gravely ill parent without ceasing, right up to the moment of death, even when there is no hope of recovery.

Viewed philosophically, one might say that since the patient will die either way, it is wiser to administer morphine and ease the dying rather than prolong the suffering through futile attempts at recovery. Yet as a child attending that parent, even grasping at one chance in a hundred million, one simply cannot bear to hasten a parent's death — that is what feeling forbids.

So it is that when one's own nation is in decline and there is plainly no chance of victory against an adversary, still to endure every hardship and exert every last ounce of strength, and only when the contest has truly reached its final extreme to sue for peace or resolve to die — this is the common law of nationhood, and what may rightly be called the duty that citizens owe their country.

In common parlance it is called lean stubbornness — yasegaman — yet whatever maintains the position of the weaker party when strong and weak stand opposed owes that maintenance to this lean stubbornness and nothing else.

Not only in the victories and defeats of war: even in the ordinary conduct of relations between nations, the one principle of yasegaman must never be forgotten.

In Europe, small nations such as the Netherlands and Belgium, situated between France and Germany, would perhaps find it more comfortable to be absorbed into one of those great powers than to maintain their own small governments — yet they persist in asserting their independence and will not be moved. This is the yasegaman of small nations, and it may be said that such stubbornness is what preserves a nation's honor.

In our own feudal age, a daimyo with ten thousand koku might neighbor a great domain of a million koku and yet remain a daimyo still, yielding nothing whatsoever — this too was owing to yasegaman. And though the matter is of a different order, for several centuries political power resided with the warrior class, and the imperial house existed yet was as if it did not exist. Had the court sought expedient arrangements at the time — a union of court and military, or some such convenient scheme — there were various options available. Yet the imperial house maintained its position through those many hardships and kept inviolate through it all the one principle that the supreme dignity must not be violated. For example, when the famous Middle Counselor Nakayama traveled east to Edo, he is said to have remarked openly that the shogun was merely the overseer of the eastern provinces — by the standards of that time this was surely yasegaman, yet it was precisely that yasegaman that gave weight to the imperial house.

Again, when speaking of excellence in the warrior spirit, none can surpass the Mikawa samurai. Among those individuals, each excelled differently — in letters or in arms, in wisdom or in valor — yet during the age of warring states and fragmented power, they served under the Tokugawa banner, kept the distinction between self and other perfectly clear and harbored no divided loyalties, recognizing no authority but that of their lord, right or wrong, and looking to nothing beyond. No matter what misfortune they endured or what suffering they tasted, they never lost heart; and when it was for the house or for their lord, the one quality of pressing forward bravely even with certain defeat and certain death before their eyes was the hallmark of all the Mikawa samurai — the very spirit of the Tokugawa house.

It was this that enabled their founding ancestor, Lord Ieyasu, to rise from modest beginnings and, managing affairs in every direction, ultimately seize supreme power over the realm; and it may be said that the fortune of that house was the gift of yasegaman.

Now, the principle of yasegaman originally springs from personal human feeling, and when argued from the standpoint of cold reason it may seem almost childish, admitting of no defense — yet in the actual practice of the world throughout all history, whoever sets a nation as their object and seeks to maintain and preserve it cannot do without this principle.

In our feudal age, the competition among the various domains that nurtured the warrior spirit derived from this principle; and now that feudalism is abolished and we have become the unified great Empire of Japan, seeking to broaden our horizon and assert our independent dignity in the civilized world, we must still rely on this same principle.

Therefore, so long as the affairs of human society remain as they are today, however much outward forms may change with civilization's advance, even a thousand years hence this single thread of yasegaman must be honored as the great foundation of nationhood, and cultivating it ever more fully, aiding the development of its essential element, will remain of vital importance.

This is the nobility of a nation's moral culture. Consider, for example, that at the time of the Southern Song dynasty, the court was divided between a faction for war and a faction for peace; those who argued for war were largely pushed aside, and some even gave their lives. Yet the verdict of later generations, down to the present, has never failed to condemn the peace faction for its faithlessness and to feel compassion for the solitary loyalty of those who called for war.

In practical terms, the great cause of weakened Song was already lost, and that they would lose every battle was beyond doubt; one might even say it was more advantageous to endure disgrace and preserve the ancestral rites of the Zhao house even one day longer.

Yet those who govern a country in later ages, when they seek to build sound governance and cultivate the warrior spirit, must reject the temporizing of the peace faction and embrace the yasegaman of those who called for war.

That is no doubt why the two groups bear such different reputations, fragrant and foul, down to this day.

Yet here I have cause for deep regret: in Japan, some twenty-odd years ago, the Meiji Restoration took place, and in the course of it, unhappily, great harm was done to this vital principle of yasegaman.

That is to say, at the final stage of the Tokugawa house, a portion of its retainers perceived early on that the great cause was lost, made not the slightest attempt at resistance against the enemy, and sought peace by every means, of their own accord dissolving the government. This, in terms of Japan's material economy, produced a temporary benefit; but the harm done to the spirit of the Japanese warrior, cultivated over hundreds and thousands of years, was by no means small.

It must be said that the gain did not compensate the loss.

The Restoration, though it carried the name and authority of the imperial house, was in substance nothing other than two or three powerful domains opposing the Tokugawa.

Had the Tokugawa house and its associated families retained the old spirit of the Mikawa samurai at that time, they would have returned to Edo after the defeat at Fushimi, rallied the pro-shogunate domains, and renewed the struggle; and if after two or three such efforts they still could not prevail, they would have fallen back to defend Edo Castle, prolonging the life of the house even one day more and hoping against hope for some unforeseen turn of fortune — and when all stratagems were exhausted, dying in the castle's defense.

This is no different, as I said earlier, from praying that a gravely ill parent might live one day longer.

Only then could the principle of yasegaman be called complete.

Yet Katsu Awa and those of his peace faction argued that the shogunate's warriors were unfit to fight, that the swords of the Satsuma-Choshu forces could not be resisted, that the peace of society must not be disturbed, that the lord's life was in danger — or sometimes put it in grand terms, saying that fighting among one's own walls was no policy for dealing with foreign powers — and they worked tirelessly in every direction. At times they exposed themselves to personal danger without flinching as they argued for a negotiated settlement, until at last Edo Castle was peacefully surrendered, the Tokugawa were resettled with seven hundred thousand koku, and the affair was brought to a quiet close.

It was a truly astonishing state of affairs. A certain foreigner commented at the time that every living creature attempts to resist when its death is near — even a tiny insect, when struck by a hundredweight iron hammer, will still stretch out its legs and make a show of resistance. Yet a government that had stood for two hundred and seventy years, faced with the forces of two or three domains, showed not the slightest intention of fighting back, but simply kept seeking terms and begging for mercy without cease — there is no precedent for this anywhere in the world throughout all history. That he found it quietly laughable was not without reason.

At bottom, Katsu and his associates held the view that civil war is the worst of disasters and a profitless waste of resources, and they believed on rational grounds that wherever one's side has no chance of winning, it is better to make peace quickly and bring the matter swiftly to a close.

What they said in public — the safety of the lord, or the interests of foreign relations — was one thing; but when one probes to the bottom of their reasoning, it belongs to the same philosophical school, and amounts to declaring that in human and national affairs yasegaman serves no purpose. They thereby, in a murky and obscure fashion, deceived and suppressed the one great principle most deeply honored in the upper reaches of Japanese society throughout all history — and to that there is no answer.

A momentary display of boldness may startle the timid, and a clever argument may captivate the young — but a man of clear sight and sound judgment can in the end neither be deceived nor led astray.

Now, I too knew along with Katsu that the long-enfeebled shogunate had no chance of victory; yet when argued from the standpoint of preserving the warrior spirit, at a moment of national crisis and mortal danger, whether one has any chance of winning is not the question.

All the more so given that there are no few instances in history of those who calculated certain victory and lost, and those who expected certain defeat and won.

Yet Katsu, anticipating defeat before the fact and before being actually defeated in practice, voluntarily threw away the shogunate's own authority, straining every effort to purchase peace. He thereby lightened the harm of killing and impoverishing people through war — this cannot be denied. But he cannot escape the blame of having damaged the warrior spirit of yasegaman, the spirit that is the very foundation of nationhood.

The harm of killing and plundering is a temporary calamity; the maintenance of the warrior spirit is the need of ten thousand generations.

To sacrifice one thing in order to buy another — whether the merits and demerits thus balance out is not a question that can be settled lightly.

Some say: the success or failure of the Meiji Restoration was an internal matter, a quarrel between brothers and friends as it were; though East and West stood opposed at the time, the adversaries were in truth not truly enemies; and all things considered, the fact that the shogunate dissolved its government without putting up a final desperate resistance was a skillful response to the circumstances — and they make a clever-sounding argument. But it is nothing more than an evasion and a pretext.

Whether a matter is internal, whether it lies between friends — once hostilities have broken out, the enemy is the enemy.

Now, if those in authority persuaded the warrior class that to resist such an enemy would be useless, reckless, and ruinous to the nation, steering them entirely toward peaceful accommodation, could those same leaders, when a foreign enemy threatened from without, have roused that warrior spirit to endure the most extreme hardship?

Those who lack yasegaman in domestic affairs will lack it in dealings abroad as well.

It is an ill omen even to write it down, but if — in one case in ten million — the Japanese people were ever to face a foreign adversary, calculate the situation, and with smooth efficiency dissolve and surrender of their own accord, what could one say of that?

True, the dissolution of the shogunate was an internal affair — there is no denying that. Yet it must be said that it established a precedent.

That said, Katsu too was a man of exceptional ability. Against the clamor within the shogunate, suppressing the fury of the bannermen, he sacrificed himself to dissolve the government and thereby smoothed the way for the success of the Meiji Restoration — saving lives and preserving property. His merit in that regard was by no means small.

In this respect I do not regard his achievement lightly. Yet what I find difficult to understand is this one thing: that in the new Meiji government he stood side by side with men who had formerly been on the opposing side, and comfortably occupied a position of fame and reward. (When argued from what the world calls the principle of righteous loyalty, all people of Japan are subjects of the imperial house, and among fellow subjects there should be neither enemy nor ally — yet the facts of the matter are never so simple.

In the final years of the shogunate, men of the powerful domains rose against the central government; in doing so they invoked the authority of the imperial house, reformed the structure of shogunal governance, and restored the ancient imperial rule — this act was given the name Meiji Restoration. The imperial house is therefore raised high above the world of politics, and all partake equally of its benevolent grace; yet among those dwelling below who fall into conflict with one another, a distinction between ally and enemy cannot be avoided.

This is something that the facts will not allow to be covered over.

Therefore, when the text above uses the word 'enemy,' some may object that this is improper language and argue their case accordingly — but when one reasons from the actual events of that time, the word enemy must be used.)

By the old conventions of East Asian writing — Chinese and Japanese alike — a man such as Katsu should not by rights have been permitted to end his days in peace.

When the founder of Han executed Ding Gong; when the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing excluded the loyal remnants of the fallen Ming; when in Japan Oda Nobunaga put to death the treacherous retainer of Takeda Katsuyori — the man Oyamada Yoshikuni who sought to sell his lord to Oda — and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, displeased with the conduct of Kuwata Hikouemon, the treacherous retainer of Oda Nobunaka, had him crucified before Nobunaka's grave as a lesson to the disloyal and unfaithful — such instances are in truth too numerous to count.

In times of strife, when two sides stand opposed and among the enemy there is a strategist who advocates peace — even if he harbors no divided loyalties — one's own side profits thereby. In the moment, this man is treated as a windfall and secretly shown favor. But once the fighting is over and the victorious leader moves to uphold social order and lay firm foundations for a new government with an eye to the next hundred years, he must, for the sake of the nation's common law, set aside private feeling and denounce as disloyal and faithless that very man from the enemy side whom he had formerly valued as a windfall — and not only exclude him, but at times even put him to death.

It is a cruel business, yet it is carried out as a necessary measure of statecraft.

This was the standard method of despotic rule in the nations of the East; and had Katsu lived in such an age of despotism, he might well have suffered some such unexpected calamity and been made an example to warn the new government's officials. Yet fortunately the Meiji government had no despotic ruler; political power lay in the hands of those who had achieved the Restoration, and their guiding principle was to follow in every respect the model of civilized nations, making magnanimity the governing spirit in all things. And so the man from the opposing side was not merely spared exclusion: the windfall of the moment was transformed into lasting good coin, he shed the old ways of the former shogunate and became a distinguished figure in the new government, making his way through the world contentedly — and not a soul found it strange. Truly this was an unprecedented spectacle, unheard-of in all history.

When I reach this point, though it pains me to say it on Katsu's personal behalf, I cannot but voice what I wish to ask.

The matter is as I said before: his efforts to dissolve the old government smoothly, thereby sparing lives and preventing ruin — that achievement was remarkable and great. Yet viewed from another angle, with the two sides facing each other before a single blow had been struck, he saw early on that there was no chance of victory and resigned himself, submitting — and though on the surface there was a public pretext offered to the imperial forces, the substance was this: the Tokugawa government, lacking the courage to face even two or three of its own subordinate domains, surrendered without ever testing the outcome of battle. This not only betrayed the spirit of the Mikawa samurai but violated the great principle of yasegaman native to the Japanese people, thereby relaxing the martial spirit that is the bedrock of nationhood — that blame cannot be escaped.

Sparing the people from temporary military suffering on the one hand, and wounding the warrior spirit for ten thousand generations on the other — can those merits and demerits be said to cancel each other out?

Posterity will render its judgment; and if I were to advise Katsu in his own interest, even though by today's civilized standards he was fortunate to preserve his life after the Restoration, he ought to look inward, acknowledge the guilt of having damaged the spirit of the upper-class warrior — so vital and weighty for the sake of our nation — and make clear that his conduct before and after the Restoration was a temporary expedient: that he negotiated for peace and settled affairs smoothly only in order to save the people from the calamities of war at that moment. But the essential requirement of a nation rests in the one principle of yasegaman — and all the more so given that one cannot guarantee there will be no foreign threats in the future.

In such a grave circumstance, the calamity of war is no cause for fear. Anyone who hereafter would found a nation and engage with the world must on no account learn from the manner of our Restoration and resort to such expedients. To show plainly that what the common tongue calls conduct unworthy of a samurai was his own personal failing, and that his descendants must never repeat it — to make this clear, he ought resolutely to have declined the new government's favor, cast away his rank and stipend, departed alone, and withdrawn from sight. Only then would the world have recognized where his true sincerity lay and honored his integrity; the dissolving of the old government would have been attributed genuinely to his credit; and at the same time it would have gone some small way toward sustaining the moral culture of the age.

Such is what I would have wished — yet as things stand, he appears to rest in his position as if he were a meritorious servant of the state; and without even needing to invoke the strict standards of Mikawa samurai, appealing to the common understanding of what it means to found a nation in the world, one cannot avoid feeling shame on his behalf.

This is something I grieve over not only for Katsu's own sake, but deeply, for the moral culture of the warrior class.

There was also, at the same time as Katsu, a man named Enomoto Takeaki.

I cannot pass over him without a word on this occasion as well.

This man, in the final years of the shogunate, differed from Katsu in his views: he exerted himself to the utmost to maintain the Tokugawa government, took several of the government's warships and defected to Hakodate, fought bravely against the western forces — but was eventually driven to extremity and surrendered.

At the time, the Tokugawa government, after its defeat at Fushimi, had no will to fight again and was simply begging for mercy; morale had already collapsed, and it was plain to all that there was no chance of victory. Yet Enomoto's action was what one calls the spirit of the warrior — yasegaman. In his heart he secretly expected certain defeat, yet for the sake of the samurai code he dared to make a stand; and so the shogunate retainers and those among the various domain samurai who favored the shogunal cause rallied under him as their commander, following his orders and sharing his fate to the last. The battle on the northern seas, the siege of Hakodate, the loyal bravery of that final, desperate resistance — it was admirable conduct; and judged from the standpoint of the moral culture of the Japanese spirit, it cannot be spoken of in the same breath as the way Katsu managed his affair.

Yet the forces that had defected fared poorly time and again, and their position grew steadily more desperate until nothing more could be done. The commander and some of his men then resolved that it had come to this, submitted to the enemy's army, were taken prisoner, and escorted to Tokyo — a misfortune, certainly, but success and failure are the common lot of soldiers, and there is nothing to reproach in it. The new government too, condemning the offense without condemning the man, commuted the death sentence by one degree and released him — this must be called a generous act of civilization.

Both Enomoto's conduct and the government's handling of the affair were finely done in their respective ways and left nothing to criticize. Yet when it comes to the fact that after his release Enomoto roused fresh ambitions and took his place in the court of the new government, I find myself unable to express admiration.

To surrender to an enemy and then serve that same enemy is not rare in history.

When a government changes hands, former retainers of the old government who have lost their means of independent livelihood and enter the employ of the new government to earn their bread — this is a commonplace throughout all ages of the world and gives no one pause, nor is such a person to be blamed. Yet there seems to be a circumstance in Enomoto's case that makes it impossible to cover over with the ordinary example.

That circumstance is the human feeling of a Japanese warrior.

Enomoto not only scraped by, but rose steadily through one promotion after another, was appointed as a special envoy, and eventually advanced to cabinet minister. He attained the ambitions of a man of distinction — a happy outcome, one might say — yet when he looked back and reflected on the past, there must have been things he could not bear.

At the time he had gathered men resolved to die and fought a bitter struggle in a remote corner of the northern seas; the north wind was merciless, and at last he surrendered — that could not be helped. But those who had defected with him had from the start relied on him as their leader, had fought hard for his sake, and some had died in battle for his sake. When the leader surrenders, even those among them who consented must have felt abandoned; those who did not consent must have felt still more so — and what of those who had already died in battle?

If the souls of the dead have any feeling, they must surely cry out in bitter grievance from beneath the earth.

I have heard it reported that when Goryokaku at Hakodate was opened to surrender, Commander Enomoto conveyed to his men his intention to surrender and urged them to do likewise. A portion of his men, hearing this, grew furious: they had not undertaken this enterprise expecting to win, they said; it was simply the samurai way to repay with one's own death the favor received over two hundred and fifty years — if the commander wished to live, let him go out and surrender; as for themselves, they would fall in accordance with their own code of the warrior. They fought on in fury and would not be stopped; and among them, it is said, there were fathers and sons who died together by their own hands.

"Though the waters of the Wu River run shallow enough for the steed to cross, one shred of righteousness forbids returning east" — these lines evoke the feelings of Xiang Yu at the moment of his death in the ancient war between Han and Chu. When the Chu army had faltered and Xiang Yu had fled to the bank of the Wu River, someone urged him that there was still hope of mounting another campaign and begged him not to die. But Yu would not hear it: he had led eight thousand young men from east of the river to march west; after so many desperate battles not one remained alive. After such failure, what face did he have to cross back east and show himself before the fathers and elder brothers of the dead? And so he took his own life. It was the feeling in his heart at that moment that the poem sets down.

The age of the Han-Chu wars and today's Meiji Japan are of course worlds apart.

To hold Enomoto to the standard of Xiang Yu three thousand years ago would seem almost absurd. Yet the feelings of the human heart do not change through ten thousand ages; and even if Enomoto had realized his ambitions in the Meiji government and moved through the world in comfortable prosperity, there must have been moments when he looked back and thought of Hakodate — imagining and hearing of the fallen, the wounded, all who had followed him, and the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters they left behind, who mourned their dead while wandering bewildered without direction along the roadside. In those moments even a man's iron heart could not but be cut to pieces.

On a night of autumn rain, cold and unable to sleep, the dying lamp flickering — alone in thought — the numberless ghosts of the dead and the living might well have appeared before his eyes with perfect clarity.

Surely Enomoto's true heart, even now, was not one that had abandoned those men who had defected. Surely he did not fail to honor their conduct and grieve for their deaths.

Here is one more piece of evidence: at Seiken-ji temple in Suruga Province there stands a stone monument. This monument was erected in memory of Haruyama Benzo and the other defectors who died when the shogunate warship Kanrin Maru was attacked in Shimizu harbor. On the back of the stone, in large characters, are nine Chinese words meaning, "One who has eaten another's salt must die in that other's service" — signed Enomoto Takeaki — and left open to public view without any concealment. From this, the general tenor of his feelings can be sufficiently guessed.

Enomoto, that is to say, had once eaten the Tokugawa's salt; and though misfortune had denied him the chance to die in the Tokugawa cause, when he saw others who had died in it, grief and longing welled up within him beyond suppression — and out of that overflowing admiration he at last carved those characters in stone.

But to honor another's loyalty and bravery is at the same time to feel, when one turns inward, a certain uncomfortable unease — this too is an inescapable truth of human feeling. Imagining the state of his heart: at times he would rest at ease in his present wealth and rank, enjoying luxury with no other care; at other times the memory of past misery would rise up and bring pangs of shame — joy and sorrow and grief and pleasure alternating irregularly, so that throughout his life he could never have known full and peaceful contentment.

And so, thinking of it on his behalf, I would say: I do not insist that because a man has eaten another's salt he must necessarily die in that other's service. Yet from the standpoint of human feeling alone, one cannot but feel a constant reticence toward others.

By ancient custom, a man of this kind might withdraw from the world and enter holy orders to pray for the souls of the dead — but if in today's prevailing wind the tonsure seems unsuitable, then at least to conceal oneself in some obscure corner of society, to live simply, to hold back and draw no attention to oneself before the world's eyes and ears — this, it seems to me, would have been the right course.

In sum: his failure in the defection at the time of the Restoration was a political death for Enomoto. Even though his physical body did not die, he ought to have resolved that his political life was at an end, restrained himself accordingly, and on the one hand mourned the souls of the comrades who had died fighting with him and comforted the surviving families in their grief and resentment; and on the other hand made clear the principle that whoever undertakes a great enterprise and occupies the position of leader must accept responsibility for both success and failure and never escape it — if one succeeds, one takes the glory alone; if one fails, one bears the hardship alone. To make this principle clear is a matter of the utmost importance for the moral culture of the warrior class in society.

This is the one thing I had wished of Enomoto's conduct — not only for his own sake, but as something that must not be lightly passed over for the sake of the warrior spirit's rise and fall in the hundred-year designs of the nation.

What I have set down above is not an attempt to attack the two gentlemen Katsu and Enomoto.

I have kept my pen restrained and used no harsh language, seeking only to preserve their reputations; and in practical fact I fully acknowledge their achievements in wisdom, loyalty, and bravery. Yet there are moments in the course of a human life when one must choose between wealth and rank on the one hand and lasting honor on the other — when to secure one's fame one must abandon wealth and rank.

Both of these men faced exactly that situation. Katsu's advocacy of peace and dissolution of the shogunate was truly a clever and able achievement; yet the dissolution of the shogunate and the consequent ruin of that house happened, as fortune would have it, to become the very means by which a former retainer acquired wealth and rank — and however unsought that wealth and rank may have been, however much it came as a gift from beyond, still: from the perspective of a man who was a descendant of the Mikawa samurai tradition and a member of the Tokugawa family, even a fine achievement and meritorious deed cannot help but lose its luster in the eyes of the world.

As for Enomoto: his espousal of the war position, his defection, and his fighting to the very limits of his strength before surrendering — up to that point he did not depart from his duty as a shogunate retainer, and his loyal bravery was a glorious achievement. But after his surrender and release, to rouse fresh ambitions and seek wealth and rank in the court of the new government — toward all those who had shared that enterprise with him, from the fallen and the wounded to those who had since wandered and lived in poverty, he could not but feel some degree of shame.

This too is something that diminished the worth of his achievement. In short, it was the wealth and rank of both men that rendered their respective merits vain; and so I can only pray that it is not yet too late — that both men will resolutely withdraw from the world, correct the wrong course they have followed since the Restoration, and thereby bring their already-earned achievements to a worthy completion.

Whether their names shall be fragrant or foul for all posterity depends on the resolution of the heart — and they must not fail to exert themselves.

Yet the human heart is frail, and there may be circumstances that make it impossible to follow what I have argued. That too cannot be helped.

Even so, if it can be said that during the Meiji era there was someone who set these words down in writing and offered this assessment of the two men, perhaps that too may serve in some measure to uphold the spirit of the warrior for those who come after — and so these clumsy strokes of the brush will not have been entirely in vain.