Ryūkonroku: The Letter Yoshida Shōin Wrote Five Days Before His Execution

On October 27, 1859 (the twenty-seventh of the tenth month of Ansei 6), Yoshida Shōin was beheaded at the Tenmachō prison in Edo. He was thirty. Five days earlier, between the twenty-second and the twenty-fourth, he had written in his cell a letter to his students of just over two thousand classical characters — about five thousand in modern Japanese count. The text is known as the Ryūkonroku — Records of a Soul Left Behind.

The Conditions of Writing

Shōin had been transferred to Tenmachō in May 1859. The investigation focused on his role in the plot against the senior elder Manabe Akikatsu, and Shōin not only admitted his involvement openly but went further and explicitly stated his intent to overthrow the bakufu. His own statements were decisive in the death sentence. On October 25 the sentence was handed down at the Hyōjōsho; execution followed two days later. The Ryūkonroku is what Shōin chose, in the intervening interval — with his execution by then certain — to leave behind for his students.

Three Layers

The text falls into three layers. The first is the opening waka — 'Even should this body decay on the plains of Musashi, the Yamato spirit shall be left behind.' The second is the prose narrative of prison life, the investigation, and the stated motives for the Manabe plot. The third, the longest, is the Shiji no Ron — the Argument from the Four Seasons — which uses the cycle of the year to argue the meaning of a life cut short, and extends from there into specific expectations of the young students who would have to act after Shōin himself was gone. The whole document is short, but its third section reads as practical guidance, not abstract counsel, to a circle of late-teens and early-twenties men about what they should do after his death.

The Two and a Half Years That Came True

The actions the Ryūkonroku anticipated from his students were all carried out within the following nine years. Kusaka Genzui at the Kinmon Incident in 1864, Takasugi Shinsaku in the Four-Border War of 1866, the Chōshū forces at Toba-Fushimi in 1868, Kido Takayoshi with the Five Charter Oath in 1868 — each in turn carried out the program Shōin had outlined. The claim that the two and a half years of the Shōka Sonjuku made the Meiji Restoration is not figurative — it is the documented record of the Ryūkonroku's anticipations being realized in concrete political and military action. The original manuscript is on permanent display at the Hagi Museum alongside the autograph correspondence of the Shōka Sonjuku students who carried out the program.

"Even should this body decay on the plains of Musashi, the Yamato spirit shall be left behind."