__NOTOC__ was a Japanese samurai of the late

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

, who served as

karō were top-ranking samurai officials and advisors in service to the ''daimyōs'' of feudal Japan. Overview In the Edo period, the policy of ''sankin-kōtai'' (alternate attendance) required each ''daimyō'' to place a ''karō'' in Edo and anoth ...

of the

Satsuma Domain The , briefly known as the , was a domain (''han'') of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan during the Edo period from 1602 to 1871. The Satsuma Domain was based at Kagoshima Castle in Satsuma Province, the core of the modern city of Kagoshima, ...

. He was also known as .

Biography

Zusho was born in the Kagoshima castle town in 1776, the son of Satsuma samurai Kawasaki Motoaki. At age 12 he was adopted by Zusho Kiyonobu; at 22, he was sent to Edo as a tea assistant to the retired lord of Satsuma, Shimazu Shigehide. Shigehide recognized Zusho's talents, and gave him further responsibilities. He was later employed by the Satsuma lord, Shimazu Narioki, serving Narioki as messenger and city magistrate; he was also involved with Satsuma's illicit trade with the

Qing Empire The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...

and the west, via the

Ryukyu Islands The , also known as the or the , are a chain of Japanese islands that stretch southwest from Kyushu to Taiwan: the Ōsumi, Tokara, Amami, Okinawa, and Sakishima Islands (further divided into the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands), with Yonaguni ...

. In 1832, he was elevated to

status; six years later he formally received the rank of

. As karō, he was involved with finance, agriculture, and military reform. At the time, the Satsuma domain's debt totaled over 5 million

ryō The was a gold currency unit in the shakkanhō system in pre- Meiji Japan. It was eventually replaced with a system based on the ''yen''. Origins The ''ryō'' was originally a unit of weight from China, the ''tael.'' It came into use in Japan ...

. In order to address this problem, he began a program of administrative and agricultural reforms, and levied a no-interest loan on the merchants of Satsuma, to be repaid over the course of 250 years. This means that the domain had promised to repay the loan from then until 2085; however, with the breakup of the domains in 1872, the

Meiji government The was the government that was formed by politicians of the Satsuma Domain and Chōshū Domain in the 1860s. The Meiji government was the early government of the Empire of Japan. Politicians of the Meiji government were known as the Meiji o ...

declared this debt to be invalid. Zusho also increased the level of illicit trade taking place with the

, via the Ryukyu Islands. Zusho also put a monopoly system in place on the local sugar trade, and increased trade and production levels; by 1840, this had produced a 2,500,000

surplus for the Satsuma domain. However, Zusho soon became embroiled in the dispute over who would succeed Narioki: his eldest son Nariakira, or Nariakira's half-brother Hisamitsu. Narioki and Zusho's preference was Hisamitsu; Zusho was also worried that Nariakira, interested in western things as Shigehide had been, would ruin the domain's finances, which he had worked so hard to restore. Nariakira, aiming to remove his political enemies Narioki and Zusho from power, secretly revealed the illicit Ryukyu trade to the

rōjū The , usually translated as '' Elder'', was one of the highest-ranking government posts under the Tokugawa shogunate of Edo period Japan. The term refers either to individual Elders, or to the Council of Elders as a whole; under the first two ''sh� ...

Abe Masahiro was the chief senior councilor (''rōjū'') in the Tokugawa shogunate of the Bakumatsu period at the time of the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry on his mission to open Japan to the outside world. Abe was instrumental in the eventual signing o ...

. In 1848, while Zusho was in Edo, he was summoned by Abe for an inquiry into the secret trade. Soon after this trade was revealed, Zusho died suddenly in one of the Satsuma residences in Edo; he is believed to have either committed seppuku or taken poison, in order to protect Narioki from further endangerment. His age at death was 73. After Zusho's death, his family had its residence, income, and status confiscated by Nariakira. Zusho's grave is located at Fukushōji temple, in modern Kagoshima City.

Legacy

In the Bakumatsu period, the Satsuma domain was unlike most other domains in Japan, as it possessed large numbers of steam-driven warships and cannons. This is almost miraculous, given that only one generation previously, the domain was over 5 million ryō in debt; Satsuma's annual income barely exceeded 120,000 to 140,000 ryō. It is thanks to Zusho Hirosato's budget-balancing efforts that this level of military buildup was possible for Satsuma. A statue of Zusho now stands at Tenpōzan Park in

Kagoshima City , abbreviated to , is the capital city of Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. Located at the southwestern tip of the island of Kyushu, Kagoshima is the largest city in the prefecture by some margin. It has been nicknamed the "Naples of the Eastern wo ...

References

* Japanese Wiki article on Zusho

External links

"History of Zusho"
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zusho, Hirosato 1776 births 1849 deaths People from Satsuma Domain Karō Shimazu retainers

Biography

Legacy

References

Further reading

External links