Okay, so this is a ways off, but what follows is an attempt to briefly outline for your enjoyment and edification what a hypothetical book by me on the Boshin War would look like.

First, it would follow Ishii Takashi's view that this was not one war, but three in one.

One side, the nascent Kyoto government, was consistent throughout. The other was not.

So we have the war from Kyoto to Edo against the former Shogunate, the war in Tohoku against the Northern Alliance, and the war in Ezo against the so-called Republic

Ōyama Kashiwa, whom I mentioned earlier, calls it "the Boshin campaign," which I think also has some utility.

I would also very sharply distinguish between the combatants fighting the Kyoto government. the Northern Alliance was not "pro-shogun," though it was allied with the former Shogunate's army

this is because of a thousand years of precedent of regional semi-autonomy. I wrote my dissertation on this. No, it doesn't matter what the tourist website you encountered told you, they're wrong.

You need to understand the Northern Fujiwara to understand the Tohoku alliance.

a longue duree perspective will likewise be necessary, because the outcome of this war, especially in the Tohoku region, was decided decades in advance, in part because of famine and depopulation.

they could never have won, not for lack of technology but because of the Tenpo Famine.

It will be brutal to write about the war, as writing about war necessarily is, because the so-called imperial army chose to exercise such brutality. They made it illegal for Aizu domain to bury its own dead, and thus so profoundly polluted the land that some Aizu survivors became Christian.

We will also need to appreciate the role of the foreign powers beyond what is normally spoken of in what English scholarship exists. the Northern Alliance petitioned the US for aid. the British were actively running guns to Satsuma. The French military mission was embedded in the Shogunate Army.

Women in combat, likewise, must be given attention, and no, I'm not simply speaking of Nakano Takeko.

Yamamoto Yae, for one, is right the hell there.

We will have to dismantle myths about the war, too, like the claim that the Tohoku alliance fought to restore the Shogun and hated guns.

But especially we will need to underline that Enomoto's government in Hakodate was. not. a. republic.

We will need to also underscore how this was significantly the samurai caste fighting itself, because there are petitions written by townsmen and farmers begging both sides to knock it the fuck off, at least long enough to bring the harvest in.

Finally, we will need to understand that the Boshin War, in a sense, didn't really end. Its survivors on all sides got tied up in different movements over the course of the Meiji era-- some were Saigo's men in the Seinan War, others were Itagaki's allies in the Freedom and Popular Rights Movement, and...

….until the 1920s, saying anything against the official imperialist line was in some cases punishable by ostracism and prison.

So, who broke through that silence? How did they do it?

We will have to give them their due. #JapaneseHistory #history #samurai