5 - Mountain Demons from Mito: The Arrival of Civil War in Echizen in 1864

Summary

This chapter takes up the Tengu Insurrection of 1864–1865 to consider how the Japanese people reacted to the threat of civil war in the years before the Meiji Restoration. It focuses on a small domain, Ōno in Echizen province, to highlight the reactions of domain leaders and subjects to the intrusion of the Mito rebels - loyalist samurai who tried to rid the country of foreigners after the opening of ports. Before their defeat, the Mito rebels marched through several smaller domains that refrained from confronting them due to a lack of military training and resources. Although its leadership had been an early adopter of Western learning and weaponry, the Ōno domain ended up bribing the rebels to make them bypass the domain’s castle town. The chapter details the profound fear of warfare among local commoners and even samurai. In this region far away from the treaty ports, educated commoners were well-informed of current events in other parts of Japan, yet also drew on the cultural memory of the sixteenth-century Warring States period to make sense of the fighting. The chapter emphasizes the open-endedness of thinking about war in Japan on the eve of the age of military conscription.