Miscellaneous

On the Tsuboi River, next to Kumamoto Castle, is Takahashi Park, named for the former mayor of Kumamoto. Although it’s only a small park, it’s significant because of its memorial to five heroes of the 19th-century Meiji Restoration. The park also features a statue of Kato Kiyomasa and the bust of Tateki Tani. Let’s look at who some of these figures were in more detail. Sakamoto Ryoma One of the statues in the memorial to the Meiji Restoration heroes is Sakamoto Ryoma. A visionary, he opposed the Tokugawa Shogunate in favor of independence without feudalism. Although he began as a low-ranking samurai, he was later successful at negotiating an alliance between the rival Satsuma and Choshu feudal domains, which united to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate. Ryoma, however, was assassinated before he saw the results of his efforts in the Meiji Restoration that returned Japan to Imperial rule. Yokoi Shonan Another key figure in the Meiji Restoration was the samurai Yokoi Shonan — a political theorist, thinker, and scholar. Shonan wrote the treatise “Kokuze Sanron,” or the Three Major Problems of State Policy. In this treatise, he argued that Japan’s lack of a national religion put the country at a disadvantage…