Boshin War: Forged Imperial Banner, Gatling Guns and the Republic of Ezo

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After Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan's ports open in 1854, the unequal treaties stripped tariff autonomy and let Western merchants exploit a gold to silver ratio of about 3 to 1 against a global 15 to 1, draining gold and wrecking samurai rice stipends. The Satsuma and Choshu domains rallied around sonno joi, revere the emperor and expel the barbarians, until British warships shelled Kagoshima after the 1862 Namamugi Incident and a multinational fleet hit Shimonoseki. In late 1867 the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, returned authority to Emperor Meiji, but Saigo Takamori pushed the court to seize his lands, and in January 1868 Yoshinobu marched on Kyoto with 15,000 men.

At Toba-Fushimi about 5,000 imperial troops with Snider breech-loaders held the narrow roads, and on the second day Prince Arisugawa presented a brocade banner, secretly forged by loyalists, that branded Yoshinobu an enemy of the court. He fled to Edo by steamship, and Edo later surrendered. The Northern Coalition fought on at Aizu, and the naval commander Enomoto Takeaki sailed eight warships to Hokkaido with the French officer Jules Brunet and founded the Republic of Ezo, electing himself president by samurai vote. Hakodate fell in 1869.

• Some outgunned domains built wooden cannons from rope-bound tree trunks that burst after a few shots.
• Imperial officers wore wigs of bear hair: red for Tosa, white for Choshu, black for Satsuma.
• Women of the Joshitai, led by Nakano Takeko, charged imperial guns at Aizu with naginata.
• Teenage members of the White Tiger Corps saw smoke over Aizu, wrongly believed the castle had fallen, and killed themselves.
• At Miyako Bay, a Gatling gun aboard the ironclad Kotetsu, built in France for the Confederacy, shredded a samurai boarding party.