Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 598, Colme's World Part 5.

Kawai Kolme's diary tells us nothing about her experiences in the first few months of 1868,

or, as she would know it, the first year of the Meiji era.

Now, there's a few plausible explanations for why that might be the case.

Perhaps, given the unsettled nature of the times, news every day about breaks of violence,

assassination, the collapse of the government itself, she just didn't have the time or energy

to write.

Maybe she was too busy trying to ensure the Kauai household itself

had what was necessary to survive. Perhaps, given the economic situation and how unstable prices

were, she couldn't get her hands on paper and ink. I said in the very first episode of this series

that there is no reason to think that either Komeh herself or her great-grandson,

the one who actually edited her diaries for publication a century later, removed anything after the fact.

And that's true. There's no evidence of it, and I would not encourage anyone to rush to that

conclusion. But still, given the events of early 1868, here, I can't help but wonder a little

bit. In Kishu, as basically everywhere else, the new year brought a great deal of uncertainty.

Just a few months earlier, the last Tokugawa Shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, had announced his abdication in Kyoto and returned his

powers to the long irrelevant imperial court, now led by the boy emperor Meiji. However, that was not

the end of things. A faction of radicals at court wanted to punish Yoshinobu for the perceived sins of the

Tokugawa family, and for his part, Yoshinobu

may have been hoping to play along with things for a time with the new order and then reestablish

his power. Why things eventually did come to blows is perhaps not that important for us right

now. What matters is that they did. Yoshinobu ended up

...