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Celestial Revolution | |||||||||||||
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1610-1618 | ||||||||||||
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Tovakizar | ||||||||||||
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[Source] |
The Celestial Revolution was a civil war and revolution in the current territory of the Celestial Hegemony. An era of crisis culminated in a simultaneous revolt of rural peasantry, animated by a radical, heterodox, millenarian strain of Christianity, and the urban population, motivated by nationalism and liberalism in an echo of the Morivaine Revolution. It is the formative event of the history of Taihei Tengoku.
The war lasted five and a half years, ended the shogunate, and devastated the country. Approximately one million people died in the conflict, one-fifteenth of Taihei Tengoku's prewar population. Fighting featured a combination of traditional methods and new techniques. Many new weapons of industrial warfare, such as breech-loaded rifles, artillery, and steam-powered warships were sent by foreign powers to both sides of the conflict. Trench warfare also made an appearance on both sides, both as means of defense and offense. The conflict also featured extensive war journalism and use of photography, both of which proved crucial in influencing political opinion of the war.
Origins[edit | edit source]
Arkhan Vissari and the God Worshippers[edit | edit source]
Christian missionaries, after being banned from the country for 150 years, resume their work with the opening of the country. However, the missionaries initially faced hostility from Yamato society and Christian converts were few and confined to cosmopolitan districts in major cities. However, the Calvinist ministry in Yamato, started by Jean Guitton in 1831, enjoyed success in the countryside. Their fiery sermons were controversial but their vividly illustrated tracts and pamphlets were a sought-after souvenir.
Kou Shuzen was a member of the samurai class, and a low-ranking bureaucrat. Described as intelligent but asocial, his sinecure as the chief of a local gendarme was stripped in 1849 after peasant rebels were caught with weapons stolen from his armory. Having lost his social status and income, Kou suffered a nervous breakdown and experienced a series of visions. In the first, an aged figure complained that Kou would rather worship "devils" than worship him as a younger figure comforted him. In another, the Three Virtuous Kings were punished for their sins before repenting of their devil-worship, at which point they ascended to heaven. Two more figures joined them later. One extolled him to be frank and outspoken, and the other told him that the return of the "king of kings" was near, before commanding him to follow the example as revealed in the writings. Hatred of "devil worship" and Kou initially discounted his visions, until two years later he realized he had kept some tracts he had confiscated from an itinerant minister several weeks before he was fired. Consulting the pamphlets, Kou realized that God and Mikhael Issus had spoken to him. When he was able to procure a Bible, he realized the other two figures were Jeremiah and Elijah. His calling was to be both the Jeremiah and Elijah for his age, to reveal the sins of Yamato society and to warm of the Second Coming and the imminent return of the Messiah.
Kou came out of his epiphany a new man, and his relatives noted a sense of confidence and purpose that he did not possess before. Kou then came into contact with a minister, and converted to Christianity in 1851. As an ethnic Yamato and a samurai to boot, he was an effective missionary and converted many. However, the ministry soon became suspicious of Kou's rapid rise and his heterodox beliefs. Kou left the church in 1852 to found the God Worshipping Society (神礼会, Jinreikai) to spread his millenarian message independently. He burned his Shinto and Solongoor texts and smashed their statues, and as a gesture of his commitment to the cause, had a paired set of two massive Daiwatō called the "Devil Slaying Swords" (魔殺刀).
March 15 Incident[edit | edit source]
Four years after his split with the Calvinist mission in Nara, Kou's God Worshipping Society had grown to dwarf every other Christian ministry in Yamato. Some 10 to 30,000 followers subscribed to his heterodoxy and Kou regularly held massive sermons to crowds of believers and non-believers over a thousand strong. After a huge service in Yachiyo in January 1856, the shogunate banned missionary work in the country and declared the God Worshipping Society illegal. The shogunate levied a force of around 3,000 troops, mostly irregulars, to take Kou, dead or alive, at his family manor outside Nara.
On March 15, 1856, the contingent met an equal number of armed God Worshippers twenty miles from Kou's residence at the Kogawa-bashi bridge. An armed standoff turned into an open battle when a God Worshipper fired, killing a footman. In a short but bloody clash, many of the millenarians were killed but broke and routed the column of bakufu troops. While inexperienced, the God Worshippers displayed a rabid fanaticism that shocked the troops used to dealing with peasant mobs. Some of the bakufu soldiers even surrendered to the rebels and converted on the spot, most notably the samurai Saionji Kozuke, second-in-command of the shogunate forces and later East King.
Course of the War[edit | edit source]
Initial stages[edit | edit source]
The victory at the Kogawa-bashi was a political coup for the God Worshippers. While rioting and rebellion were common in the era, they were all handily defeated by the shogunate's army. To defeat the shogunate in open combat meant the millenarians were far stronger than any ordinary peasant revolt. The radical Christians still independent of the God Worshippers declared their support for the cause, triggering a cascade which drew in the vast majority of Yamato Christians under the God Worshippers' banner. Kou Shuzen appointed himself Heavenly King, Lord of Ten Thousand Years, and appointed subordinates as Kings of the four cardinal directions. The God Worshippers spread out over the countryside, and over a hundred villages had pledged allegiance to them by the fall harvest.
News of the disaster at the bridge shocked the bakufu court, and the shogun prepared for civil war. The shogun, Yayoi Yoshimitsu, believed that the error lay in underestimating Kou's followers and therefore mobilized the central government's forces and invoked feudal obligations on every samurai domain. A second, much larger expedition to Kou's manor swept aside the token resistance and burnt down the residence, and and overland route to Nara re-established. However, the shogun did not realize the activities of the National Protection Alliance. Although most of the shogunate's armies were loyal, the NPA thoroughly controlled the units they did infiltrate. Shokai Sei, commander of the Nara coastal forts and a founding NPA member, pushed his fellow officers to join the revolt. Using their contacts with the Revive Enlightenment Society, he convinced the urban garrisons of Hoten and Takao to declare against the shogun, as well as the samurai domain of Tosa. With parts of Nara and the entire cities of Hoten and Takao in rebellion, the liberals declared the formation of a New Triple Alliance on October 10, 1856. Sei offered the God Worshippers an alliance, which they accepted. Sei was thus proclaimed the Wing King, Lord of Eight Thousand Years.
Siege warfare and stalemate[edit | edit source]
After the initial skirmishes of 1856, the war became a series of sieges punctuated by punitive expeditions out into the undefended areas between fortresses. Shogunate forces surrounded Hoten and Takao, but the initial assaults against the defenders failed with heavy casualties. The bakufu's navy set up a blockade of the port of Takao, while the survivors attempted to invest both cities. The Wing King's army, retreating from Nara in good order, broke the siege of Hoten, and combined with the East King's army moved south to the coast to relieve Takao. Fighting waned over the winter but resumed in full force in the following spring, as God Worshipper forces broke out into the countryside to take Nara and break the partial investment of their cities. This offensive failed as the shogun had constructed "islands" of mutually supporting earthworks and concentric trenches to defend the villages between castles, drawing out minor sieges for weeks. The rebels retreated, and created their own network of strongholds.
1857 ended without any serious gains for either side. 1858 would be much the same. The rebels introduced mining, either to breach fortifications or to scuttle them if they fell. These damaged trench systems would become harder to defend against a relief force or counterattack. Bakufu offensives succeeded in cutting off Hoten once more in March, but rebel armies broke through the cordon and pillaged the countryside, seizing the first rice harvest. The rebels stayed on the defensive, husbanding their forces, while the shogunate made repeated assaults to permanently close the Hoten-Takao road. Rice shortages and intense fighting caused many civilian deaths. The winter saw starvation on both sides of the conflict, which was especially severe in the blockaded areas of the rebellion.
Siege of Ooarai[edit | edit source]
In the spring of 1859, the rebels moved to once again besiege Nara, in a final ploy to gain the initiative. Shokai Sei's army invested the resort town of Ooarai, located between Takao and Hoten on the coast. Its capture would afford the rebels a harbor of their own to take in smugglers and launch commerce raiders, and would force the shogunate to choose between maintaining the close blockade of Takao or defending the supply ships to and from Nara. Equipped with powerful siege guns, Sei initially planned to bombard Ooarai into submission in order to rejoin the main effort at Nara as soon as possible. However, spies inside the city revealed a foreign delegation from Moravia trapped inside. Sei changed his plans, sending the artillery away and allowing shipments of grain past the cordon. Instead, the walls were gradually mined over the course of a month and the defenders were compelled to surrender with few casualties.
Sei took the chief diplomat, Vojtech Kastravec, into his audience, where he convinced him of the rebel cause. In a series of accounts published in major Alisnan newspapers, Kastravec gave detailed, if one-sided, account of the events of the war, supported by a small retinue of photographers. The war columns proved immensely popular with the Moravian and wider Alisnan public, who were enamored by the idea of Christian rebels fighting against a heathen tyranny. The Moravian Empire also saw an opportunity to create a friendly state to counter Questarian holdings in Wilassia. Where previously a limited set of foreign sympathizers and smugglers supplied the rebellion, massive popular subscriptions sent large shipments of much-needed grain and certain churches would collect donations to buy arms for the God Worshippers, all aided by royal sanction.
Capture of Nara[edit | edit source]
The newly invigorated rebellion easily fended off the desperate attempts by the shogunate to relieve Nara. The shogunate navy, faced with the choice between maintaining the blockade or escorting its convoys, attempted to do both and succeeded at neither. The two naval engagements of the war were fought during this time. One was the sinking of the war junk Date by a spar torpedo boat. The other was the incursion of the ex-Moravian paddle-wheel steam frigate Layman Preacher into the blockade squadron at Takao. Although over twenty years old at the time, Layman Preacher's iron armor made it invulnerable to the junks' culverin gunfire. Its shell guns destroyed the blockading squadron and the shogunate navy retreated to port for the rest of the war.
Supply shipments to Nara tapered off over the summer, as the small rebel navy took its toll on the unescorted cargo ships. The arrival of a pair of columbiads in September cut the city off by sea. Its granaries gradually dwindled until food stores became inadequate to prevent starvation in the winter. Rebel bombardment breached the eastern fortifications of the city on October 1st, followed by two more in the following week. Despite this, the city refused to surrender. Fierce street fighting between loyalists and various rebels (including dissidents still inside the city) lasted for another month, before God Worshippers entered the Old City and subdued the last pockets of resistance on the evening of November 10th, 1859. The following morning, Kou Shuzen was proclaimed Heavenly King, Lord of Ten Thousand Years, in the Diamond Hall of the Palace of Eighteen Treasures. This ceremony is commemorated as Eleven-Eleven Day, the national day of Taihei Tengoku.
Northern Expedition[edit | edit source]
The fighting once again subsided for the winter, mostly due to the exhaustion of the rebels after the Nara offensive. The shogunate forces abandoned Yachiyo and retreated north for a final stand at the castles of Chitose and Tenma. The newly formed Heavenly Realm consolidated its control over the southern half of the country, re-establishing an organized local authority and curbing the banditry that arose with the collapse of bakufu authority. The armies of the rebels were re-organized into the National Protection Army with Shokai Sei at the helm, a picked force of mostly former Triple Alliance troops with Alisnan training and weapons. After the lunar new year of 1860, the Taihei forces struck north from Nara. The shogunate was ill-prepared for another offensive so soon after the Nara campaign in the middle of winter. Tenma capitulated without a fight and Chitose fell in less than a week, with Yoshimitsu escaping to a lifelong exile in Guurdalai.