Sakamoto Ryoma
You'd have to be blind to miss the scowling features of Sakamoto Ryoma on posters and other memorabilia around Kochi. The city is immensely proud of this romantic figure who died young, but whose political ideas helped lay the groundwork for the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Born in 1835 to a half- samurai , half-farmer family, Sakamoto directly challenged the rigid class structure of the Shogunate years by leaving Kochi to start a trading company in Nagasaki ( samurai never normally dirtied their hands in business). In his travels around Japan, he gathered support for his pro-imperial views, eventually forcing the shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, to agree to give supreme power back to the emperor. But, one month later, on November 15, 1867, Salkamoto was assassinated in Kyoto. Although he was just 33 at the time, his writings included an enlightened plan for a new political system for Japan, aspects of which were later embraced by the Meiji government.
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