earticle

영어

Edo Castle symbolized the political power of Tokugawa shoguns for more than two and a half centuries. Its bloodless surrender on April 11, 1868, to the army of the new imperial government was the most important landmark in the Meiji Restoration. This event made it possible to avoid a nationwide civil war with consequent foreign intervention. It also prevented the extermination of the Tokugawa family by the army of the imperial government and a large loss of civilian life in Edo. The negotiation process between the former Bakufu and the new imperial government over the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle has been perceived as consisting of a single stage—the formal negotiations between the commandant of the Bakufu army, Katsu Kaishū, and staff officer to the imperial army’s commander in chief, Saigō Takamori, held on March 13-14, 1868 in Edo. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the negotiation consisted of two stages. And it was the first stage, that is, the negotiations between Yamaoka Tesshū and Saigō Takamori in the city of Sunpu on March 9, which made the bloodless surrender possible. The paper further explains that the neglect of the first stage in the historiography originates not in the lack of attention or primary material, but in what appears to be a deliberate disregard, rooted in a century-long “Meiji bias,” of a significant role of some Bakufu retainers in the Meiji Restoration.