Battle of Toba-Fushimi

What Happened

The Battle of Toba-Fushimi (鳥羽・伏見の戦い, Toba-Fushimi no Tatakai) was fought over four days beginning on 27 January 1868, when forces loyal to the Tokugawa shogunate clashed with troops of the allied domains of Chōshū, Satsuma and Tosa near Fushimi, a town just south of Kyoto. The opening shots were fired on the Toba road, the highway running from Kyoto toward Osaka, and the fighting spread along the approaches to the old capital. The first exchanges went badly for the Satsuma side at Fushimi, but the shogunate advance stalled and then broke.

The shogunate army was the larger force, marching south from Kyoto after the shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu had withdrawn from the imperial court. It never recovered its momentum. By the end of the fourth day the shogunate columns were in retreat toward Osaka, and the battle ended in a decisive defeat for the shogunate. The engagement is dated to 31 January 1868 in the Western calendar used by many reference works, corresponding to the third day of the first month of the fourth year of Keiō by the lunar calendar then in use in Japan. It was fought in Yamashiro Province, the old provincial name for the region around Kyoto, and it formed the opening land battle of the Boshin War.

Background

The battle grew out of the political crisis that followed the arrival of American warships in Japan in the 1850s and the collapse of the shogunate's monopoly on foreign policy. For more than two centuries the Tokugawa shogunate had governed Japan from Edo, while the emperor in Kyoto reigned without ruling. By the 1860s, domains on the periphery of the country — above all Satsuma in the south and Chōshū in the west — had built modern military forces and demanded a larger role for the imperial court.

In late 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the fifteenth and last Tokugawa shogun, agreed to return governing authority to the emperor, an act known as taisei hōkan (大政奉還, "return of the great authority"). The move was intended to preserve Tokugawa influence inside a new council of domains rather than to surrender power outright. On 3 January 1868, a coup in the imperial palace declared the restoration of direct imperial rule and stripped Yoshinobu of his lands and titles. Yoshinobu left Kyoto for Osaka, and in late January his forces marched north toward the capital to challenge the new government. The two armies met on the roads south of Kyoto.

Why It Mattered

Toba-Fushimi decided which side would hold the emperor, and therefore which side would be legitimate. When the shogunate troops advanced, the new government declared them enemies of the court and flew the imperial banner over its own lines. Many shogunate units, unwilling to fire on what was presented as the emperor's army, lost cohesion or defected. The defeat drove Yoshinobu back to Osaka and then by ship to Edo, and it opened the road east for the imperial forces.

The battle also made the Boshin War a short and one-sided conflict rather than a long civil war. Within months the imperial army was in Edo, and the shogunate was finished as a governing institution. The victory of Satsuma and Chōshū men at Toba-Fushimi put those domains at the centre of the new Meiji government, and the era name was changed to Meiji (明治) that same year. The battle is remembered in Japanese art and letters: the printmaker Kobayashi Kiyochika, who was a young man at the time, later produced woodblock images of the Boshin War, and the shogunate loyalist Mishima Michitsune is among those associated with the conflict.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name is 鳥羽・伏見の戦い, read in kana as とば・ふしみのたたかい and romanised as Toba-Fushimi no Tatakai. The middle dot ・ separates the two place names, and the final の links them to the word for battle.

鳥 — read と (to) here. The character means "bird". It appears in the place name Toba, the district south of Kyoto where the first fighting broke out. On its own the kanji is also read tori.

羽 — read ば (ba) here. The character means "feather" or "wing". Combined with 鳥 it forms 鳥羽, "bird feather", the name of the Toba area. The same two characters also name the city of Toba in Mie Prefecture, so context decides which Toba is meant.

・ — a middle dot, used in Japanese to separate two proper nouns joined in a compound. It signals that 鳥羽 and 伏見 are two distinct places, not one four-character word.

伏 — read ふ (fu) here. The character means "to bow down", "to lie prostrate", or "to hide". It carries the sense of something lowered or concealed.

見 — read み (mi) here. The character means "to see" or "to look". Together, 伏見 (Fushimi) is the name of the ward and district in southern Kyoto where the battle's heaviest fighting took place.

の — read の (no). A possessive and linking particle, roughly "of". It joins the place names to the noun that follows.

戦 — read たたかい (tatakai) here. The character means "war", "battle" or "combat". Its Chinese-derived reading is sen, which appears in compounds such as 戦争 (sensō, "war"); the native Japanese reading tatakai is used when the character stands alone as a noun.

い — read い (i). The final kana of 戦い. It is not a kanji but the okurigana, the trailing kana that completes the verb-derived noun tatakai, "a battle" or "a fight".

Read as a whole, the name means "the Battle of Toba and Fushimi", named for the two neighbouring districts south of Kyoto where the four days of fighting took place.

Key Figures

Tokugawa Yoshinobu (徳川慶喜) was the fifteenth Tokugawa shogun and the commander of the shogunate side. He had surrendered political authority to the emperor in late 1867, then marched on Kyoto in January 1868 to contest the new government's terms. After the defeat at Toba-Fushimi he withdrew from Osaka to Edo.

Okita Sōji (沖田総司) was a captain of the Shinsengumi, the shogunate's special police force in Kyoto, and is associated with the shogunate side in the fighting. He was already gravely ill with tuberculosis during the Boshin War and died later in 1868.

Kobayashi Kiyochika (小林清親) was a Japanese artist who experienced the Boshin War as a young man and later became known for woodblock prints, including images of the conflict.

Mishima Michitsune (三島通庸) was a shogunate loyalist associated with the conflict, later a senior official in the Meiji government.