“An unusual pair of brothers,” said Monta, as they walked. “Whose children were they?”
“I haven’t a clue.” Ito matched the other man’s pace, hiding his own mawkish feelings with a smile. “It was my first time meeting them. I couldn’t tell you who they were or where they came from.”
4
Shunsuke Ito was born in 1841, the 30th year of the Tenpo era. At his birth, however, he was not called Shunsuke Ito, but Risuke Hayashi.
He was born the son of a farmer in the Province of Suo. When he was twelve, his impoverished father, as was common at the time, was adopted into a samurai family, and the family name changed to Ito. Along with his father, Risuke Ito became a foot soldier for the Choshu Domain.
Although his academics were poor, at age fifteen Risuke was made a student at Shoka Sonjuku, a private school run by Shoin Yoshida. He drew Shoin’s attention and received the name Shunsuke.
In July of the following year, under Shoin’s recommendation, he accompanied the Choshu detachment to Kyoto for three months. When he returned, he studied in Nagasaki for close to a year. That autumn he moved to the Choshu Domain’s Edo Yashiki—the Choshu Daimyo’s compound in Edo—which was where he met Monta Shiji, with whom he would later travel to London.
It was at this time, in 1858, that the Chief Minister of the Edo Bakufu, Naosuke Ii, signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States without obtaining imperial approval. The Bakufu fiercely quashed any of its opponents. As a result, Shoin Yoshida, a Bakufu dissenter, was imprisoned too.
The news struck Ito with grief and anger. In contrast to the Tokugawa Bakufu and the Satsuma Domain, who had espoused the opening of Japan since the arrival of Perry’s black ships, the Choshu Domain strongly advocated for Japan to maintain its isolationism.
Joui. Expel the barbarians. Drive them from our shores.
Under this banner of joui the young retainers of the Choshu Domain dedicated themselves to war, seeking to overthrow the Bakufu. Though Ito would later speak of joui as an outdated notion to young Sherlock, at the time he too had been a soldier in its cause. He had participated in the burning of the British legation at Gotenyama, in Shinagawa. This was something he hadn’t been able to bring himself to reveal. At the time, the legation was under construction and therefore uninhabited—but Sherlock and Mycroft surely would still have been horrified.
After becoming a Choshu retainer Ito changed his name once again. He still called himself “Shunsuke,” but with a character meaning “spring.”[3] He aspired to become the type of person who would fill people with the hopeful warmth of spring. Ito had changed—he began to question joui itself. Burning the foreign legation only seemed to have spread chaos and weakened the country as a whole. If they continued on the path they were on, wouldn’t this only open the way for the West to invade?
He began to wonder whether it might not be better for the Choshu Domain to temporarily join with the West and learn from their more advanced technology to overthrow the Bakufu.
Then Monta Shiji concocted a plan to travel to England. Along with Shunsuke, they gathered three other likeminded individuals—Yozo Yamao, Yakichi Nomura, and Kinsuke Endo.
The five of them were granted permission by the lord of the Choshu Domain, Takachika Mori, to travel to London and study in secret to learn Western technology and bring it back with them when they returned. Initially, however, they were unable to even ascertain their form of travel. There would be a considerable amount of funds required. And not least, if the Bakufu learned of their plans they would be sentenced to death.
Eventually they were able to use the funds meant for purchasing guns as collateral to borrow 5,000 ryo from a merchant with ties to the Choshu Domain. A thousand ryo per head was certainly a large sum, but in terms of covering the five of them crossing the sea and living in London, it was far from extravagant.
They slipped out by boat under cover of night. At Shanghai their party divided into two ships. Thereafter, Ito’s days were spent in hard, slave-like labor. The journey was long. The five were already long out to sea by the time their petition reached the daimyo in Edo.
After a grueling four-and-a-half months, they finally reached London and the house of Professor Alexander Williamson. Yakichi Nomura taught the other four conversational English—of the five he was the only one who had learned English beforehand, from a legation clerk in Hakodate.
The sights that awaited them in England were near-miraculous: the museums, the art galleries, the naval facilities, the banks, the factories. This proof of the astounding difference in strength between their nations hastened their party’s sense of urgency. They could hardly sit idly by as Choshu marched to war with Britain, America, France, and the Netherlands. So Ito undertook yet another three-month passage, and somehow was able to return to Yokohama with Monta. But they were too late to negotiate for peace. Then there was the Battle for Shimonoseki. After four months of shelling by naval forces allied against them, Choshu’s batteries were destroyed.
After the war Ito continued to work for peace. It was a dangerous business. Even now Choshu retainers adhered to joui, and plotted sabotage and assassinations. A growing rift between those in the domain who believed in deferring to the Bakufu and those who believed in pursuing joui promised future tensions.
When the Bakufu sent a force to subjugate Choshu, Choshu surrendered. Then Shinsaku Takasugi instigated a rebellion. Ito rushed to Takasugi’s side, leading private militias against the loyalists. Joined by irregular forces, they were able to defeat the loyalists and topple the Bakufu’s second Choshu expedition. With victory secured and the Bakufu’s forces routed on all sides, the shogunate’s influence was greatly weakened.
Thereafter, the Choshu and Satsuma domains joined forces, with Ryoma Sakamoto of the Tosa Domain mediating. This alliance overwhelmed the Bakufu forces, and Yoshinobu Tokugawa, the fifteenth shogun, was forced to finally restore imperial rule.
Finally the Edo Bakufu had fallen. The Choshu and Satsuma domains formed the core of the new Meiji government that would develop afterward.
After the Meiji Restoration, pockets of adherence to joui remained, with frequent assaults on French sailors by retainers from Bizen, Tosa, and other domains. Ito was constantly travelling the country, putting out new fires. In recognition of his accomplishments, he found himself appointed to a succession of posts in the Meiji Government: among them the junior council for Foreign Affairs, the first governor of Hyogo Prefecture, and the first minister of Public Works, the last post in which he worked to promote industrialization. During his stint as junior assistant minister to both the Ministry of Treasury and of Popular Affairs, he changed his first name yet again, this time to Hirobumi.
The English he had learned proved very useful. From November 1870 (3rd year of Meiji) to the following May, he travelled throughout the United States; upon returning, he helped establish Japan’s first coinage law. In November of that same year he travelled to the United States once more, that time to serve as vice-envoy to the Iwakura Mission, during which he delivered a speech in San Francisco. The following spring, he received an audience in Berlin with German Emperor Wilhelm I, during which he also made the acquaintance of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
Throughout all of this, Ito never forgot his first impression of a train in London. Throughout his rise through the Japanese government, one of his greatest ambitions remained the construction of a railway. He pushed to include railway construction in development plans he worked on with Shigenobu Okuma, and in June 1872 finally procured provisional operation of the new Tokyo to Yokohama line, extending from Shinagawa to Yokohama. In October the entire line opened in earnest, going all the way to Shimbashi.