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Sakamoto Ryoma – outlaw-samurai, pistol-bearing swordsman, freedom-fighter, pioneering naval commander, entrepreneur and statesman, a youth ahead of his time with an imagination as boundless as the Pacific Ocean – was a leader in the revolution to overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate and form a unified democracy in Japan.

Sakamoto Ryoma was born in 1835, the youngest son of a wealthy merchant-samurai family in Kochi castle town, the center of the Tosa domain. During the turbulent years of the late 1850’s, Ryoma emerged, with his friend and mentor Takechi Hanpeita, as a leader of the xenophobic and radical Imperial Loyalists in Tosa, who advocated sonno-joi (Imperial Reverence and Expelling the Barbarians) and kinno-tobaku (Imperial Loyalism and Toppling the Bakufu). Disgusted with Tosa society and determined to take his place in national politics, Ryoma fled his native domain in the spring of 1862, which was a crime punishable by death.

Later that year he visited the home in Edo of Katsu Kaishu, the enlightened commissioner of the Tokugawa Navy. Kaishu espoused Opening the Country to foreign trade and culture, and some believe that Ryoma visited Kaishu with intent to kill him. But Ryoma, of course, did not kill Kaishu. Instead he became Kaishu’s devoted disciple, and called him “the greatest man in Japan.” Kaishu opened Ryoma's eyes to the futility of trying to expel the foreigners without first developing a powerful navy, and to this end, Japan desperately needed Western technology. Ryoma now worked with Kaishu to establish a naval academy in Kobe, where he and his comrades studied the naval arts and sciences under their revered mentor.

There is much more to Ryoma's story, but this is where it stops for now - his quest to make Japan grow has, of course, been put on hold for this unexpected visit to a foreign land known as "Paixao".

[from Ridgeback Press.]