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Aizuwakamatsu

■The White Tigers of Aizu-Wakamatsu

The Boshin War was a relatively brief civil war waged in 1868 and 1869 between forces loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate and those who wanted real political power returned to the Emperor. Sometimes described as a ‘bloodless revolution,’ the struggle actually mobilized well over 100,000 fighting men, of whom some three to four thousand lost their lives. One of the most pathetic (and romanticized) episodes of the war involved the suicides of 19 teenage samurai in the employ of the Lord of Aizu.

Sometime in March or April of 1868 several hundred young samurai, most of them sixteen or seventeen years old, were assembled as a reserve fighting force in anticipation of an invasion by Imperial forces. The reserve force was given the name Byakkotai, or White Tiger Brigade. Three similar forces were named after other figures from Chinese legend, but it’s the White Tigers who are remembered.
When the Emperor’s forces arrived in the town of Aizu-Wakamatsu, the Byakkotai were ordered to battle. With no experience of war, they left in high spirits, only to find that the Imperial troops had broken defense lines. The Aizu forces the Byakkotai were intended to support were in full flight. The Byakkotai quickly dropped back.

One small group, the Byakkotai’s Number 2 Fighting Unit, retreated to what they had hoped was a safe position. However, they soon realized that the streets below them were filling with enemy soldiers. They attempted to flee through a water tunnel that several of them knew from childhood, and though there was apparently some fighting, twenty of them managed to escape through the tunnel, some seriously wounded.

When they emerged in a clearing on Iimoriyama, a hill overlooking the city, many of the samurai residences were already in flames. The smoke and firelight enveloped Tsuruga-jo, the Daimyo’s castle. Believing that the castle itself was burning, the Unit’s leader recited some favorite lines of classical Chinese verse as a death poem. Then the boys drew swords and killed themselves. Their leader slashed his own throat, while others stabbed each other. Scattered about the clearing, the twenty samurai of the Byakkotai’s Number 2 Fighting Unit followed their Daimyo into death.

Only one of the boys survived. Sixteen-year old (he may have been only fourteen) Sadakichi Iinuma’s hand had been too injured for him to do the job properly, and some time later a local woman found him among the bodies of his comrades. It’s from him that we have the story, though it was several years before he overcame his shame sufficiently to tell it. No one is sure of the date that the tragedy took place, but the fighting continued for about a month before Katamori Matsudaira, the Daimyo of Aizu, surrendered. He lived into comfortable old age, and his castle, which the boys had thought was burning to the ground, stood for another six years before being razed by the Meiji government.

According to locals, when the bodies of the Byakkotai were found the Emperor’s forces ordered the people of Aizu-Wakamatsu to leave them untouched. Months later, they were secretly buried at a nearby temple. Later still they were move to the present site on Iimoriyama, where their gravestones were erected in 1890.
Rather than seeing them as a group of confused children who made an unspeakably awful mistake, many Japanese regard the 19 members of the Byakkotai who took their lives on Iimoriyama as heroes, embodying the honor and loyalty of the samurai moral code of Bushido. The boys had been bred from earliest childhood in this ethos, and it’s almost impossible to imagine them understanding any alternative but suicide. The school most of them had attended separated its pupils into groups of approximately ten boys each, with rivalries between groups encouraged and revenge for insults part of the curriculum. Each group had an appointed leader whose job was to ensure that his peers adhered to the code of honor, and to punish any lapses. Such punishment ranged from ostracism, including notifying the boy’s parents of his failings, to beatings, occasionally fatal. Iinuma, the lone survivor, had by some accounts received a letter during the war from his mother in which she wrote, "Do not withdraw, even under the fierce attack of the arrow. This is the code of Bushido." It’s unlikely, once they had mistakenly understood their lord’s castle to be burning, that the boys saw many options to choose from.

Whatever the realities inherent in that terrible moment on the hilltop, the young samurai have been made symbols of an ethic of strength, sacrifice and loyalty that many modern Japanese feel has been abandoned too easily. The graves of the Byakkotai’s Number 2 Fighting Unit are a huge tourist draw, with memorial services held in both spring and autumn during which local schoolboys reenact their last moments. In popular culture, they have been the subjects of countless songs and stories, appearing in comic books and on TV. In 1956 the Byakkotai Memorial Hall was built near their graves on the hill, and other monuments include 31 gravestones of other Byakkotai members, a monument commemorating the women and children who died in the Boshin War, and a prayer wheel to pacify the souls of the dead. It’s also of historical interest to note the two monuments celebrating the young samurai’s self-sacrifice presented by the governments of Italy and Germany, though the occupying Allied Forces altered the symbols of both of these after the Second World War.

>>Access
Fukushima Airport====(70 min. by car)====Byakkotai Memorial Hall
Aizuwakamatsu IC====(15 min. by car)====Byakkotai Memorial Hall
JR Aizuwakamatsu station====(5 min. by car or bus)====Byakkotai Memorial Hall

>>Open Hours
8:00 - 17:00 (April - November)
8:30 - 16:30 (December - March)

>>Holidays
No holidays

>>Fee
Adult: 400 yen, High school /junior high school student: 300 yen, Elementary school student: 200 yen　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　

-Matt Mangham

>> Hotels and Ryokans in Aizuwakamatsu Area