Profile
A shogunate retainer born in Edo who captained the Kanrin Maru across the Pacific and negotiated the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle, sparing the city from war. He later served the Meiji government as Minister of the Navy, and his later-life conversations were compiled as 'Hikawa Seiwa.'
Katsu Kaishu (childhood name Rintaro, given name Yasuyoshi) was born on March 12, 1823 (the 30th day of the 1st month of Bunsei 6 by the old calendar), into a poor low-ranking samurai family in the Honjo district of Edo. His father, Katsu Kokichi, was an unemployed hatamoto whose stipend amounted to a mere 41 koku, placing the family among the lowest tier of the samurai class. From boyhood Katsu studied swordsmanship (in the Jikishinkage school) and Zen, and as a young man he threw himself into Dutch studies (rangaku), even hand-copying an entire Dutch-Japanese dictionary to teach himself in the absence of money for proper schooling. This self-taught grounding in Dutch learning would later become the foundation for his understanding of Western military science and navigation.
In 1855, Katsu entered the Nagasaki Naval Training Center newly established by the shogunate, studying navigation and gunnery under Dutch instructors. In 1860, he accompanied the mission sent to exchange ratifications of the Japan-US Treaty of Amity and Commerce, serving as captain of the warship Kanrin Maru on its crossing of the Pacific – the first ocean crossing piloted by a Japanese crew. After returning to Japan, he worked as a commissioner of warships to build up the shogunate’s navy, and took many young reformers, including Sakamoto Ryoma, under his wing as students. In 1868, as the new imperial army closed in on Edo during the Boshin War, Katsu, acting as the shogunate’s plenipotentiary, met with the imperial army’s chief of staff Saigo Takamori and negotiated the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle, sparing the city from the flames of war and saving countless lives.
After the Meiji Restoration, Katsu served the new government in posts including Councillor and Minister of the Navy, and later as a member of the Privy Council; in 1887 he was elevated to the rank of count. In his later years he lived at his residence in Hikawa-cho, Akasaka, Tokyo (present-day Akasaka, Minato Ward), and the candid, unsparing commentary he offered to visiting journalists on people and current affairs was compiled as ‘Hikawa Seiwa’ (‘Quiet Talks from Hikawa’), a book still widely read today. He died of a stroke on January 19, 1899, at the age of seventy-five. Though a former shogunate retainer, he devoted himself to building the new era, and his life – staying true to what he believed regardless of his past allegiances or position – remains highly regarded today.