Who Was Tanaka Kawachinosuke?
The Meiji Emperor's Most Beloved Man, Tanaka Kawachinosuk

　In the late Edo period, only one of Emperor Komei's six children survived to adulthood: a boy (later the Meiji Emperor) born to Nakayama Yoshiko. At the Imperial Household at the time, court ladies were generally appointed for the education of Imperial Princes, but Kawachinosuke, who had been employed with the Nakayama family, personally took on Sachinomiya (the Meiji Emperor) and dedicated himself to the boy’s upbringing until Sachinomiya was 5 years of age. For instance, when the boy reached the age of discretion, instead of lullabies, Kawachinosuke gave him oral instruction on the Book of Filial Piety. It can be said that the pureness of Kawachinosuke's imperial spirit has its roots here.

　In the commotion in the closing days of the Tokugawa shogunate, while the movement to overthrow the shogunate was beginning to surge, the efforts of the Satsuma Domain toward "kobu gattai" (political coordination between the Imperial Court and the shogunate) were just starting to bear fruit. Attempts to convince imperial loyalists, mainly from the Satsuma Domain, to abandon their plans of overthrowing the shogunate were in vain, and the Teradaya Incident broke out. The tatami room of the Terada Inn was painted in blood. Having received imperial orders to placate the ronin, Shimazu Hisamitsu settled the turmoil as "internal discord." However, he had a predicament regarding the treatment of “those from outside the Satsuma Domain,” including Kawachinosuke and his son, as well as several others. Consequently, on the pretense of “taking them into Satsuma Domain custody,” the domain feigned a convoy to Kagoshima and sent them along the Seto Inland Sea. On board the ship, a scheme was executed in which the guards were not only made to commit murder, but also to dispose of the corpses in the sea and conceal the murders as having never happened. On May 1, 1862, the corpses of the father and son washed up on the Fukuda coast of Shodoshima Island in an atrocious state—their hands were bound behind their backs, they were in shackles, and they had been stabbed to death. Tanaka Kawachinosuke, who has been described as "the patriot who met the most wretched end in the history of the restoration," not only suffered a cruel death, but was erased from history.