New Materials on the Shin Buddhist Priests of the Chōshū Clan at the End of the Edo Era: Focusing on the Activities of Kagawa Hōkō as a Local Intelligence Agent

The aim of this paper is to examine historical materials that show the political and military roles played by Buddhist priests during the civil war at the end of the Edo era, when the Tokugawa shogunate was opposed by various clans. They overthrew the old regime and ushered in the Meiji era, when the emperor reigned. During the Edo era when today’s Yamaguchi Prefecture was known as the Chōshū clan, Shin Buddhism priests belonging to temples in the clan’s territory set up a new school for monks to learn both liberal arts and French style martial arts to prevent Buddhism and temples, which were linked to the Tokugawa shogunate, from being destroyed. This study focuses on one of the priests involved in this movement, Kagawa Hōkō, and aims to clarify the reality of previously undocumented espionage activities using three historical documents. The third document is a transcript of an interview with the mother of a merchant in Osaka who was a supporter of the Chōshū clan’s espionage activities. It provides specific details about how the spies raised the funds they needed, how they communicated their information, and how they evaded the authorities by moving from one hiding place to another. There was also a monk, a spy mate of Hōkō, who abandoned his espionage duties and instead spent the money on sake and geisha. He ended up abducting a geisha and ran away, which led to Hōkō being imprisoned by both the shogunate’s Shinsengumi and the Chōshū clan on two separate occasions. After this, Hōkō and his comrades became responsible priests at the heart of the administration of the Shin Buddhism Hongwanji sect in the Meiji era, and he became the president of a university established by the sect, but in his twenties, he was involved in military activities like this. This is a new and interesting specific case that has previously been undocumented.