Twenty-Seven Years: What the Restoration Owed Takasugi, Even After His Early Death

On April 14, 1867 (the fourteenth of the fourth month of Keiō 3), Takasugi Shinsaku died at the Shiraishi Shōichirō residence in Shimonoseki. The cause was tuberculosis. He was twenty-seven, and he had missed the Meiji Restoration by about ten months. The density of his career against the early age of his death has been the recurring theme of biographies for a century and a half.

Onset to Death

The progression of Takasugi's tuberculosis had become severe around the Four-Border War in 1866. While directing combat at Shimonoseki he had repeated coughing attacks with hemoptysis. He withdrew for treatment from late 1866 into early 1867; the illness did not recede. In April 1867 the disease abruptly worsened and he died. The medicine of the period had no cure for tuberculosis; in his last months he was cared for at the bedside by his disciples Itō Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru. His death poem — 'What is a world without joy? Make it joyful, then' — survives, with a record that his final lucid moment was an attempt to complete it.

The Ten Months He Did Not See

From Takasugi's death to the Meiji reign-name was about eighteen months. The events he missed: the Restoration of Imperial Rule (October 1867), the proclamation of the Restoration of Imperial Rule (December 1867), the Battle of Toba-Fushimi (January 1868), the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle (March 1868), and the Five Charter Oath (April 1868). All of these proceeded along political and military conditions that Takasugi had put in place between the Kōzanji coup and the Four-Border War. One available reading is that he died at a point where the situation no longer required his personal intervention.

His Legacy Inside the Meiji Government

Of the Chōshū-origin figures who occupied the core of the Meiji government — Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru, Yamagata Aritomo, Shinagawa Yajirō — almost all were Takasugi's direct working colleagues. The organizational thinking and political judgment they had learned in the Kiheitai and the Kōzanji coup were carried directly into the management of the new Meiji state. The Chōshū influence on conscription, on the constitutional framework, and on industrial policy traces back to the small organizations Takasugi built in his twenties. The legacy of an early-dying revolutionary, realized over the half-century that followed his death — a rare case.

"What is a world without joy? Make it joyful, then."