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Updated: June 12, 2025
In power the Mito family thus ranked high among the Daimios. Among the scholars the Prince of Mito was popular. The prestige of his great ancestor, the compiler of Dai-Nihon-Shi, had not yet died out. The Prince of Mito was thus naturally looked up to by the scholars as the man of right principles and of noble ideas.
To serve the cause of the Emperor became the most essential duty to those with cultivated minds. The newer Chinese philosophy mightily influenced the historians, Rai Sanyo and those of the Mito school, whose works, now classic, really began the revolution of 1868.
It is perhaps still more remarkable to see the Mito clan, under many able and active chiefs, become the centre of the Kinno movement, which was to result in the overthrow of the Tokugawa family, of which it was itself a branch." A Medley of Pantheism. The philosophy of modern Confucianism is wholly pantheistic. There is in it no such thing or being as God.
Again, history says that Mitsukuni, daimyo of Mito, repaired to the Inaba mansion after the incident, and expressed to Masayasu's mother his condolences and his applause. Finally, after Masatoshi's death, his son was degraded in rank and removed to a greatly reduced estate. All these things are difficult to explain except on the supposition that the shogun himself was privy to the assassination.
"To rush into the thick of battle and to be slain in it," says a Prince of Mito, "is easy enough, and the merest churl is equal to the task; but," he continues, "it is true courage to live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die," and yet the Prince had not even heard of the name of Plato, who defines courage as "the knowledge of things that a man should fear and that he should not fear."
The natural conclusion followed: the military usurper must be overthrown and the rightful ruler recognized. This was the sum and substance of the political programme of the Imperialists. The first sound of the trumpet against the Shogunate rose from the learned hall of the Prince of Mito, Komon.
Matsudaira Sadanobu, son of Tayasu Munetake and grandson of Yoshimune, proved himself one of the most capable administrators Japan had hitherto produced. In 1788, he was appointed prime minister, assisted by a council of State comprising the heads of the three Tokugawa families of Mito, Kii, and Owari.
A shrewd, clever, and scheming old man, the Prince of Mito now became the defender of the cause of the Emperor and the mouthpiece of the conservative party. At the head of the Bakufu party was a man of iron and fertile resources, Ii Kamon No Kami. He was the Daimio of Hikone, a castled town and fief on Lake Biwa, in Mino. His revenue was small, being only three hundred and fifty thousand koku.
It is said that the recipient of this sarcastic gift conceived a suspicion of the Mito baron's sanity and sent a special envoy to examine his condition. In the sequel of this corrupt administration, this constant building of temples, and this profusion of costly ceremonials, the shogun's Government found itself seriously embarrassed for money.
Subsequently, after the deaths of Tadayoshi and Nobuyoshi, he assigned Owari to his sixth son, Yoshinao, and appointed his seventh son, Yorinobu, to the Kii fief, while to his eighth son, Yorifusa, Mito was given. From them the successor to the shogunate was chosen in the event of failure of issue in the direct line.
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