YES, kids, it's that time, the wonderful time of week called #FridayNightHistory, and this week, we're talking about Hijikata Toshizo, @ChilledComics' ancestor who was executive officer of #Shinsengumi and was a self-made samurai.

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Okay. So. First things first, we have to talk about caste. The caste system (mibun seido 身分制度) was the system by which Japanese society was divided in the Edo period (1600-1868). Warriors at the top, then farmers, artisans, and finally merchants at the bottom.

There's also the untouchables below the bottom the Emperor above the top. This system is a way by which the Shogunate maintained control on Japanese society.

As a rule, there really wasn't class mobility between the classes.

But.

BUT.

There was. And as time went on, there got to be more and more exceptions.

Today's story is about one of those exceptions, and what it says about the system as a whole.

Now, within the warrior caste, there were the people who had clan affiliation of some kind, and there were the rest, who were ronin-- masterless samurai. Someone who wasn't samurai could buy their way into samurai rank, either as ronin or as a vassal.

This would involve buying a certificate of some kind, along with the swords and other accoutrements, if you wanted to become a vassal. Fiefs that were strapped for cash did this as a way of raising funds.

Thing is, as a vassal, you owe responsibilities, so it's not as attractive as just getting the perk of swords and a surname. Besides, if you were in a position to buy all that, you probably had relatives who could support you, so why go to the bother of getting an actual *job*?

But there's other places, like the area just west of modern Tokyo, where the lines blur more easily.

So that brings us to Hijikata Toshizo.

So the lines blur between castes especially at the higher levels of one and the bottom end of another. This is especially the case with high ranking peasants-- they have attributes that make them quasi-samurai.

This is the case with Hijikata Toshizo-- his family was a wealthy peasant family, and had a surname (Hijikata), and peasants didn't normally have surnames.

Now, Hijikata had a long and illustrious career, and I'm not gonna simply recite it here. Basically, it comes down to this.

Hijikata Toshizo was a skilled practitioner of the martial arts, became a paramilitary leader in Kyoto as executive officer (2nd in command) of Shinsengumi, and then fought in the Boshin War, dying at the war's end in 1869, in Hokkaido.

If you've seen movies or TV shows or anime about Shinsengumi, or played games about it, or read novels with it, you've probably seen different depictions of him.

(my favorite is the one in Golden Kamuy!)

You can read all that elsewhere.

What I want to focus on is how he shows us the fluid points at the boundaries of (a) the diferent castes and (b) different statuses within the warrior caste.

So thanks to his birth in a peasant family of means, and his reputation as a swordsman in the Tennen Rishin school, his becoming a de facto samurai-- swords, name, status thanks to Shinsengumi's operational oversight by the Aizu clan-- was actually surprisingly smooth.

Of course, this was not without its rocky points, and Shinsengumi struggled to be taken seriously by people who were born to warrior status-- one group of Shogunate vassals even formed their own rival group as a reaction to it (Sasaki Tadasaburo's unit, the Mimawarigumi)

For many Shinsengumi troopers, the situation was similar-- but for others who didn't come from some kind of financial privilege or didn't have dojo connections, the act of joining Shinsengumi was how they made themselves warriors.

Later in the 1860s, Hijikata and the rest of Shinsengumi had another shift in status, when the Tokugawa Shogunate officially made them stipended vassals. In 1868, Hijikata very nearly became a feudal lord, a daimyo.

Orders were cut, and had Shinsengumi taken Kai Province ahead of the Imperial Army, he would've had a decently sized domain to call his own.

Think about that. Toyotomi Hideyoshi is famous for having been born a peasant and then rising to daimyo, but that was the 16th century and this is the 1860s.

The point I'm trying to make is that those hard lines between castes were blurry, and by the last decade of the Edo period, they got even blurrier-- and if someone was in the right place, they could have a meteoric rise, as did Hijikata and his comrades.

#FridayNightHistory is a labor of love, brought to Twitter by readers like you. Become a patron here http://bit.ly/2lVqvv2 , or send 1-time donation here: http://bit.ly/2lQfdZ8 　
Your support and generosity keep me going and rock my world.

I'm Nyri and this has been a meteoric #FridayNightHistory! Thank you Twitter, and good night!

Now, questions?

/thread

btw, go follow @ChilledComics, especially if you want to follow someone whose art is fantastic and gorgeous.

SOURCES
* Kikuchi Akira et. al., Shinsengumi Nisshi
*Kikuchi Akira, ed. Hijikata Toshizo, Okita Soji zenshokanshu.
*Ōishi Manabu, Shinsengumi: Saigo no bushi no jitsuzō
*Sasaki Suguru, Boshin sensō: haisha no Meiji-ishin.