Chapter 3618
Chapter 3618
Chapter 3618
When the Kyushu coalition forces launched an offensive on the Kanmon Strait, Tokugawa Ietsugu had just arrived in Kyoto. It was not a pleasant journey for him as he was exhausted and traveled day and night, and was always worried about the situation in Kyoto.
Tokugawa Ietsugu has not received any news from the front line about the fierce battle thousands of miles away. His priority now is to deal with the increasingly fierce calls for the overthrow of the shogunate in Kyoto. With the shogunate army in a bad situation, once these unfavorable opinions spread and spread across the country, the situation may develop to an uncontrollable point.
Tokugawa Ietsugu's itinerary and purpose of returning to Kyoto were kept secret, so when he entered Kyoto, he did not use any ceremonial guards to parade through the city, but quietly took a car and went straight to Nijo Castle.
Nijo Castle is a castle built by Tokugawa Ieyasu in Kyoto. Its purpose is to provide a place for the Tokugawa clan members and his generals to rest when they visit Kyoto.
Since the distance between this place and the Kyoto Imperial Garden, the residence of the Japanese emperor, is less than two miles, Nijo Castle also has the function of monitoring the movements of the royal family. Once there is any disturbance in the Imperial Garden, the garrison troops in Nijo Castle can take corresponding actions at the first time.
Tokugawa Ietsugu did not go to see the Emperor of Japan first because he wanted to listen to the reports from his subordinates first to understand the latest local situation. All the people sent by the shogunate to Kyoto to be in charge of various tasks had arrived and were waiting for Tokugawa Ietsugu's inquiries.
In the short few days that Tokugawa Iematsu arrived in Kyoto, the local situation continued to deteriorate in a direction unfavorable to the shogunate.
The ronin warriors who had been operating scattered in the Kyoto area were now beginning to show signs of gathering together, often operating in groups of a dozen or twenty people.
These samurai wandered back and forth in the refugee camps in southern Kyoto, spreading all kinds of rumors about the shogunate. When the shogunate tried to arrest them, they encountered strong armed resistance, and once the enemy was defeated, they would immediately disperse and flee to the refugee camps to hide.
Because the reputation of the shogunate had been affected by rumors before, these refugees who fled to Kyoto generally lacked a good impression of the shogunate and were unwilling to cooperate with the shogunate's capture operations. Instead, they used various means to prevent the shogunate's people from entering the refugee camps to search.
The shogunate had limited samurai stationed in Kyoto, and those who were really capable of fighting had almost all been transferred to the Kyushu front to participate in the war in the past six months. Now most of the people left in Kyoto are old, weak, sick and disabled, and have no ability to carry out large-scale arrest operations.
Therefore, although the shogunate personnel stationed in Kyoto organized several capture operations, they did not gain any real results and instead lost several people in the operations.
Without exception, these failed operations were used as new propaganda materials by the ronin samurai, who claimed that the shogunate had been using false reports of victory to deceive the emperor and the people of the country, and that in order to prevent the rear from learning of the news of the defeat at the front, they tried to use arrests to silence them.
Such conspiracy theories are very popular in Kyoto today, because most of the refugees who fled here came from the Honshu side of the Kanmon Strait. If the shogunate army had not been defeated, how could the war have spread to these areas controlled by the shogunate? If the previous reports of victory were true, then the Kyushu rebels should have been annihilated, and the war should have ended long ago, right?
Although there are many loopholes in these statements, ordinary people are isolated from the news and have no other channels to verify the falsification, so they are more likely to listen to one side and believe it. Although the shogunate staff are also trying their best to clarify, the effect is not ideal, because there is really no evidence to prove the advantage of the shogunate army on the front line. Tokugawa Ietsugu was furious when he heard this. He didn't expect that there were so many villains in the rear who were disturbing the people while fighting hard on the front line. If he didn't come back in person, I'm afraid his house would be on fire soon.
"Who instructed these people to spread rumors in Kyoto? Have you found out?"
Hearing Tokugawa Ietsugu's harsh rebuke, the people who were reporting the situation lowered their heads even lower. The person in charge told Tokugawa Ietsugu that since no one had been caught yet, they could only infer from the known information that some of the ronin samurai should be from the Kyushu area.
Isn't this nonsense? Tokugawa Ietsugu was so angry that he wanted to kill someone, and felt that the people he left in Kyoto to do business were all a bunch of losers.
But now he had to do things in Kyoto, and Tokugawa Ietsugu didn't have many people available, so he had to rely on this group of people. He could only suppress his anger and ask the royal family how they reacted to the current situation in Kyoto.
Since Tokugawa Ieyasu established the shogunate in Edo in 1603, the Kyoto royal family has always been a puppet in the hands of the Tokugawa shogunate, but there is no guarantee that someone will have other ideas when the situation is unstable.
Tokugawa Ietsugu actually had some doubts about the role played by the royal family in the chaos in Kyoto, but the local leaders had not collected any concrete evidence. At most, they condoned these ronin to spread rumors in Kyoto, but at least they did not give them actual support on the surface.
Before obtaining concrete evidence, Tokugawa Ietsugu could not take any special measures against the royal family. After all, the current rumors outside are all supporting the royal family to regain power from the shogunate. If the shogunate takes any action, it will confirm these rumors and make public opinion even more unfavorable to the shogunate.
There is another piece of information that Tokugawa Ietsugu needs to know, which is the local forces that have recently come to Kyoto to contact the imperial family. Especially those daimyo who personally came to Kyoto to see the emperor, no matter what their purpose is, Tokugawa Ietsugu believes that they are worthy of death.
This time, the local person in charge finally did not let him down again and produced a detailed list of 29 local daimyo who had appeared in Kyoto in the past month. This did not include those daimyo who did not come in person but sent their trusted men to Kyoto.
What made Tokugawa Ietsugu alert was that the 29 local daimyo who visited Kyoto had all been to the Kyoto Imperial Garden and met the puppet emperor in the Imperial Palace.
This seems to be no problem. When a minister arrives in Kyoto, it is his duty and etiquette to meet the emperor. But the problem is that in the past, when a daimyo came to Kyoto to see the emperor, he would greet the shogunate first and then go to Kyoto Imperial Garden after getting permission. However, recently, few of the daimyo who appeared in Kyoto went to Nijo Castle to greet first, and directly ignored the existence of the shogunate.
There are 300 feudal domains in Japan, and less than 30 daimyo came, which doesn't seem to be a lot. And the list that Tokugawa Ietsugu got didn't include any names of powerful feudal daimyo. But he was worried that many people were secretly watching the attitude of the shogunate. If there was no response, more daimyo would probably come to Kyoto to contact the royal family.