Sagara Sōzō

Who They Were

Sagara Sōzō (相楽総三, さがら そうぞう) was a samurai of the late Edo period, born in 1839 and killed on 26 March 1868. He is remembered as the leader of the 1st Unit of the Sekihōtai (赤報隊, せきほうたい), a body of political extremists raised in 1868 during the Boshin War (戊辰戦争, ぼしんせんそう), the civil war that ended the Tokugawa shogunate and restored imperial rule.

His real name was Kojima Shirō (小島四郎, こじま しろう). Sagara Sōzō was the name he used in the service of the imperial cause. He was born in Akasaka (赤坂, あかさか), an area of Edo, and died at Shimosuwa-shuku (下諏訪宿, しもすわしゅく), a post town on the Nakasendō road in Shinano Province, present-day Nagano Prefecture. He was twenty-nine years old.

Life and Career

Sagara was born in 1839, in the ninth year of the Tenpō era (天保, てんぽう). The Tenpō era was a period of famine, peasant uprisings and harsh reform within the Tokugawa shogunate, and Sagara grew up in the last decades of shogunal rule, when samurai of low rank and commoners alike were drawn into the political violence that preceded the Meiji Restoration.

By 1868 the shogunate had collapsed and a new imperial government, centred on the young Emperor Meiji, was at war with the forces loyal to the Tokugawa house. The new government needed to spread its authority quickly through the countryside, and it did so partly through irregular units raised outside the regular chain of command. The Sekihōtai was one such unit. It was formed in 1868, and Sagara led its 1st Unit.

The Sekihōtai's method was propaganda as much as fighting. Its members moved ahead of the main imperial army, announcing the new government's policies to villages that had not yet heard them. The most important of these announcements concerned taxation: the unit promised that the new regime would reduce or cancel the heavy annual land tax, the nengu (年貢, ねんぐ). This promise was made in the government's name but was not authorised by it.

When the promise could not be honoured, the villagers who had welcomed the Sekihōtai as tax relief turned against it, and the imperial government needed a scapegoat for a pledge it had never intended to keep. Sagara and his men were arrested. He was executed on 26 March 1868 at Shimosuwa-shuku, on the Nakasendō, the mountain road linking Edo with Kyoto. The unit he had led was disbanded.

Why They Matter

Sagara's death is one of the clearest early examples of a pattern that ran through the Meiji state: irregular forces and their leaders were used to do work the government could not openly do, and then discarded when the political cost of their actions became inconvenient. The Sekihōtai had served the imperial cause loyally. Its reward was the execution of its commander.

The tax promise that destroyed him was not a small matter. Rural resentment over the land tax became one of the central political questions of the Meiji period, and the government's refusal to honour the Sekihōtai's pledge was remembered in Shinano and neighbouring regions long after 1868. Sagara became, for later writers and local historians, a symbol of the ordinary men who made the Restoration possible and were then abandoned by it.

His career also shows how compressed the Boshin War was. Sagara was born in 1839, helped raise a paramilitary unit in 1868, and was dead within months of the unit's formation. The whole arc of his public life belongs to a single year.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 相楽総三, read in kana as さがら そうぞう, and romanised as Sagara Sōzō. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese. Each element breaks down as follows.

相 — read sa here. The character means "mutual", "together" or "each other". It appears in words such as 相談 (そうだん, sōdan, consultation) and 相手 (あいて, aite, partner).

楽 — read gara here, in combination with the preceding character. The character means "comfort", "ease" or "music", and is the same one used in 楽しい (たのしい, tanoshii, enjoyable) and 音楽 (おんがく, ongaku, music). Taken together, 相楽 as a surname is a single unit; the readings sa and gara belong to the name, not to the characters in isolation.

総 — read sō. The character means "whole", "entire" or "general", as in 総理大臣 (そうりだいじん, sōri daijin, prime minister) and 総計 (そうけい, sōkei, total). It is a common element in male given names.

三 — read zō here, by the name-reading zō. The character means "three", and is one of the most frequent closing elements in Japanese male names, where it often marks a birth order. Its ordinary numerical reading is san.

The full name therefore carries no hidden meaning as a sentence; like most Japanese names, it is a combination of a surname and a given name chosen for sound and auspicious association. The reading is irregular in the sense that 相楽 is not read with the characters' most common individual readings, which is typical of surnames. His original name, Kojima Shirō (小島四郎), uses 小 (こ, ko, small), 島 (じま, jima, island), 四 (し, shi, four) and 郎 (ろう, rō, a suffix for a young man or son).

Legacy

Sagara is remembered chiefly through the Sekihōtai. The unit's fate — raised in 1868, used to announce a tax cut, then broken when the promise was withdrawn — became one of the standard stories told about the Boshin War's underside, in contrast to the heroic narratives built around the war's winning generals.

His execution site at Shimosuwa-shuku, on the Nakasendō in what is now Nagano Prefecture, is the fixed point of his biography. He died there on 26 March 1868, at twenty-nine, having led the 1st Unit of the Sekihōtai for a matter of months.