The Aburanokōji Incident: After Leaving the Shinsengumi

The relations among the imperial court, the shogunate and the domains were changing in Kyoto. In this setting, Goryō Eji was not simply another name for the Shinsengumi. The new group had a different duty and a separate place in the city.

Leaving the Shinsengumi involved more than changing lodgings. Itō and his companions were appointed to guard Emperor Kōmei’s mausoleum. The name of their new organization referred to that responsibility.

During the same year, the Shinsengumi strengthened its connection to the shogunate. People who had once served together were now attached to different organizations, with different bases and duties.

It would be misleading to picture two fixed camps whose positions never changed. Between the spring separation and the attacks later in the year, both the organizations and the political arrangements around them were in motion.

In the sixth month, the Goryō Eji came under Toda Tadayuki, the official responsible for imperial mausoleums. They established themselves at Gesshin’in, a subtemple of Kōdaiji. Kyoto City records that they displayed a sign identifying the headquarters of the imperial mausoleum guards.

Their association with this base also explains the name Kōdaiji Party. Using part of a temple as a headquarters did not mean that the guards had become a community of monks.

Their base was in eastern Kyoto. The stone marker now standing before Gesshin’in commemorates the site. Kyoto City dates its erection to 1968, about a century after the events discussed here.

That later stone cannot be treated as the same sign that Itō would have seen at his headquarters. It nevertheless provides a concrete point from which to consider where the group lived and the name under which it operated.

The political situation changed sharply in autumn. On the fourteenth day of the historical tenth month, Tokugawa Yoshinobu proposed returning governing power to the imperial court. The court accepted the proposal the following day.

This was Taisei Hōkan, the return of governing authority. Nijō Castle’s official history also explains that senior retainers of domains represented in Kyoto had been gathered for consultation before the proposal was made.

Acceptance of the proposal did not cause armed organizations to disappear that same day. The Aburanokōji Incident occurred afterward. Its place in the sequence matters when reading the political change.

The words “shogunate” and “imperial court” did not automatically determine the order that would prevail the next morning. In the Kyoto where the Shinsengumi and Goryō Eji were operating separately, the framework of government itself was changing.

Shimogyō Ward’s guide places the attack on Itō outside the gate of Honkōji, as he returned from a drinking gathering with Kondō Isami. Kaikōji’s history likewise describes an ambush on his return and his death at Aburanokōji.

The prefectural chronology identifies Shinsengumi members as the attackers. The established outline is that Itō was attacked and died. That outline can be stated without pretending to narrate the scene from inside it.

What words were exchanged during the gathering? What did Itō anticipate? From precisely where did the attackers emerge? The sources examined here do not allow those details to be presented as a continuous eyewitness account.

Knowing the outcome afterward does not mean Itō knew it in advance. The account therefore retains the distinction between what the institutional histories report and the thoughts, speech and movements that a dramatic retelling might supply.

The area around Honkōji is now introduced as the site associated with the deaths of Itō and his companions. At Kaikōji’s Goryō Eji burial ground, memorial stones bear the names of Mōnai Kenmotsu, Itō Kashitarō, Tōdō Heisuke and Hattori Saburōbei.

The place of an attack and the later burial ground where the dead were mourned are not identical. Walking through the city today may connect them as points within one story, but they have different relationships to the events.

Nor can the present landscape be taken as an unchanged view of the city on the night of the incident. A modern visit establishes what can be seen now; it does not by itself recover the arrangement of every historical building or stone.

Markers and graves convey both the event and the later work of remembering and mourning it. Following these places means tracing how memory was passed on, as well as identifying locations associated with the original incident.

Conflict in Kyoto continued after Aburanokōji. The Restoration of Imperial Rule in the historical twelfth month was followed by the Battle of Toba–Fushimi in the first month of the following year.

The separation of the Goryō Eji and the deaths of Itō and his companions occurred during this transition. Ending the account as a story of a powerful Shinsengumi defeating an outside enemy would obscure the choices of people who had previously belonged together.

In spring they left the organization; in summer they had a different duty and base; in autumn the government of the capital was changing. At the end of that sequence, even men who came to retrieve a companion’s body lost their lives.

Changes in affiliation can be traced, but all that these people carried with them cannot be compressed into a simple division between good and evil. Aburanokōji invites us to examine a rupture while retaining the fact that those divided had once been companions.