In Search of Freedom

Failure and Rebellion

Although the Neesima family did not have high status as samurai, it is said that their life was relatively stable as they opened a calligraphy school. Around the time of Neesima’s birth, education for human resources was beginning to spread as part of the reform of the clan government. This was an opportunity for the children of lower-ranked samurai to move up the hierarchy.
　Katsuaki Itakura, the lord of the Annaka Clan, regarded as one of the wise monarchs at the end of the Tokugawa Era, developed an aggressive policy of fostering human resources. In 1856, he invited a Dutch scholar, Junsuke Tajima, and selected three of his young and talented vassals’ children to study Dutch studies. The youngest of the three was 13-year-old Neesima. Because Tajima went to Nagasaki for less than a year, Neesima’s interest in Dutch studies did not deepen, but he was motivated to study Chinese studies, and the following year he was appointed assistant professor at the Chinese school. Just as he was about to begin a life different from that of his grandfather and father, the lord of the domain (feudal lord) passed away suddenly, and his younger brother, Katsumasa, was appointed as the lord of the domain. The new feudal lord showed no interest in fostering human resources, and measures to encourage learning failed. Neesima, who had dreams and hopes of studying, experienced a significant setback. He later stated, “I felt as if all hope of continuing my studies had been wiped out” (“Life and Letters of Jo Neesima,” CWJN, Vol. 10, p.32). In a letter to a friend in 1858, he harshly criticized the new feudal lord, saying, “The new lord, Katsumasa, should be killed” (“Unknown, to a certain person,” CWJN, Vol. 3, p.6) and “I had hoped that I would be released from my post for reasons that disregarded the sovereign’s order” (“Life and Letters of Jo Neesima,” CWJN, Vol. 10, p.33).
　For the samurai, losing loyalty is a matter of the warrior’s raison d’etre. Under the political situation at the end of the Edo period, it was not particularly rare for a samurai to shift his loyalty from the feudal lord or shogun to the emperor and from the feudal lord or shogunate to the united nation. However, the loss of loyalty, as with Neesima, was a critical situation for the samurai and highly unique.
　The Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States was concluded in 1858, and the opening of Japan to the outside world began in earnest. In Japan, in addition to reverence for the emperor and the expulsion of foreigners and ideas of opening the country to the outside world, the issue of the successor to the shogun was also involved. The samurai society was divided into two factions: the “Anti-Shogunate Faction” (which denied the shogunate) and the “The Shogunate Faction” (which defended the shogunate). The fifteen-year-old Neesima was not a member of one of these factions. Under these circumstances, Neesima wrote to his retainer, asking him to persuade his father to pay for his studies.

　Neesima was remarkably sober-minded about the situation in Japan, which was dividing the country into openness to the outside world and exclusion of foreigners, and was preoccupied with his interest in learning before a civil war broke out and the U.S. military invaded. Neesima did not try to enter the political world in response to the situation brought about by the “Black Ships.” Instead, he turned his attention to his personal and internal problems of living within the closed feudal system.
　Neesima’s duties as an assistant to the scribe were to take the feudal lord to and from his house and to keep a daily record of the day’s activities. In between these duties, he began to study Dutch studies again. As this new study became intensely interesting, he began to show passive resistance to the clan and the feudal lord (“Life and Letters of Jo Neesima,” CWJN, Vol. 10, p. 33).

New Hope

　In 1860, Neesima traveled from Edo to his hometown Annaka Clan to guard the feudal lord, and he even came to think, “When I returned from Annaka, I was completely disgusted with the idea of serving the feudal lord” (ibid., p. 34). As already mentioned, it was not so unusual in the political situation at the end of the Tokugawa shogunate to view clans and feudal lords in this relative light. Many young samurai called “patriots” became involved in politics by deserting their domains (leaving them without the feudal lord’s permission). Still, in any case, they did not abandon their loyalty as warriors. By shifting his loyalty to the emperor or the “imperial” state, the idea of relativizing the clan, the feudal lord, or even the shogun emerged. In the case of Neesima, neither case corresponds.
　A turning point for Neesima came when he entered the Shogunate’s Warship Training School. Here, Neesima studied mathematics and navigation and boarded a Western-style sailing ship to learn practical navigation skills. The November 1860, when he entered there, was the time just after the warship arrived in Japan, over ninety people, including Kaishu Katsu (1823–99) and Yukichi Fukuzawa (1830–1901), sailed across the Pacific Ocean on the warship “Kanrinmaru” under the command of Yoshitake Kimura, the officer in charge of warships and returned to Japan. Here, Neesima began to understand the West as something closer to home. He read the book Hyoryu-Kiji (The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe), translated by Kikuro Kuroda around this time, and yearned for the “autonomous” life of an independent person living freely without any restraints on an isolated island in the South Seas. He was also enormously impressed by a Chinese book on the geography of the United States, Renpo-Shiryaku, written by a missionary, E. C. Bridgman, who was engaged in missionary work in China, and he later wrote the following about his impressions of the book.

　His disappointment with the clan, the feudal lord, and the feudal system that had confined him grew in proportion to his yearning for the West. Unlike the young men called patriots who accepted the emergence of the West as a crisis for Japan as a nation, Neesima took the emergence of the West as a liberation of himself from the confines of a closed society. Here we see a new image of the Japanese youth, one that seeks freedom and independence and an awareness of independence as an individual unparalleled among Japanese youth of the time. The alienation brought about by his loss of loyalty was transformed into a new justification of his existence when he encountered a Chinese translation of the Bible, a forbidden book, and a longing for the West.